The Plain Values Podcast EP #46 – Dawn and Carson on Faith, Food, Regulation, and Resilience

Dawn Combs:
You tell them that we’re coming for them and if they… You heard her say this. We can shut them down at any time. You make sure that they’re aware that we’re coming.

Carson Combs:
So that was our first interaction with the Department of Agriculture.

Dawn Combs:
I said, so let me get this straight. You want me to make my products less safe for my customers than what I’m doing now in order to comply and there was silence and then everything went wrong from then. I took all of my formulas that I was making in honey and started into sodas because my son decided he didn’t want to use his allergy honey anymore and I needed him to take it.

Marlin Miller:
Dawn, when you look at all of the areas of life that are seemingly under attack, education, agriculture, our food systems, which is kind of the same thing, right? The family, our churches or the church, I should really say the church. When you look at all of those things, what concerns you the most or what takes up the most brainwave?

Dawn Combs:
I am most concerned and focused on the fact that believers are working really hard on soul and their spirituality, but they aren’t aware of the body and they aren’t aware that we are designed just like plants uptake nutrition and they make their cells up with what they can get out of the ground. Are designed to make ourselves up of what we eat. We were designed to eat what God created and instead if you’re consuming what God created, then you’re making yourself up of God. You are God’s creation. My concern is that our world, all people are instead choosing to make up their cells of things that are made by man and in many instances they’re made by man as a copy and we know there’s somebody else that copies God’s creation. We’re choosing to make ourselves up of that created or manmade created instead of God’s created.
And for instance, the hydrogenated oils, it actually changes the cell structure. When we are making our bodies up of something that is manmade instead of God made, we are actually becoming of the world instead of just in the world. And there’s a stiffening just with hydrogenated oils, there’s a stiffening of the cell wall because our body doesn’t know any different and it tries to make itself up of this fake stuff. Creates a stiffening.

Marlin Miller:
That is like a physical manifestation of the spiritual truth.

Dawn Combs:
And if you look through the Bible, you will repeatedly see God talk about us as being stiff necked hardhearted.

Marlin Miller:
Oh my word.

Dawn Combs:
Hydrogenated oils will contribute to hardening of the arteries. We know that it stiffens the cells. So we are literally taking the things that God is calling out as what separates us. We are literally making ourselves up of those things that will take us away from God. For me, that means because I believe that our bodies are designed to take in the created food, the created remedies, and then we are like bells and we resonate. We are energy, but we resonate with the energy of God. Again, you can look throughout scripture. There are vibrations and songs of God. We are designed to be able to vibrate when we hear God, when we see God, when we see God’s creation. And my fear is that Christians are making theirselves up of this new body. We are creating something that is not of God and we cannot resonate.
And I worry that we won’t be able to hear his voice. It’s not a salvation issue. It’s an ability to be able to hear God when he calls and he’s the good shepherd. We know his voice we’re supposed to follow.

Marlin Miller:
Pause for a second.

Dawn Combs:
That’s my fear.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. That opens unbelievable. There’s a whole bunch of cans of worms that are being cracked open in my head right now. First on the list, could it be in your opinions that what you just said could be part of… In the Book of Revelation, John talks a lot about the deceiving of the people. If you take that to the obvious next step or the next conclusion, if we as believers lose our ability to receive and hear and resonate, we would seemingly be easier to deceive, right?

Dawn Combs:
We’re very easy to deceive, but worse, I think that if I take this out, and of course this is my own theory and it’s well, maybe it’s not my own theory. I’ve been asking a lot recently for God to tell me what it is that he wants me to drive at. And this is where it’s distilling everything that I’ve been doing over the past 20 years down to this really salient point is that we do talk about revelation. I think there’s that image of that good shepherd that walks into the communal sheep pen and can just say, “Hey sheep.” And the sheep that belonged to him just go, “Oh, that’s him. I’m going to follow.” We are told that when he comes again, you’ll know it. If you’re a believer, you’ll know it. And I kind of see us sitting in the sheep pen amongst all the sheep.
If I can’t hear him because I’ve made myselves up of fake, if I can’t hear him, then what happens when he comes calling?

Marlin Miller:
Do you have sheep on your farm?

Dawn Combs:
We did. We

Marlin Miller:
Used to, yeah.

Dawn Combs:
At one point we did.

Marlin Miller:
We have 10 or 11 ewes and we have 10 or 11 lambs right now. It is about the third or fourth year of us having a flock. And that reality is not lost on this goofball. I did not know what it meant when the Bible’s talking about the sheep and the shepherd and he-

Dawn Combs:
He goes through the gate. The gatekeeper recognizes him, but all he has to do is go in and there’s thousands of sheep and some of them belong to this guy and some of them belong to that guy. And he just says something.

Carson Combs:
Well, and we were talking about that yesterday. It’s like, okay, if you read the Bible kind of at a superficial level, I always assumed, well, it’s like, yeah, I’ve got sheep. And it’s like, yeah, if I go out in the pen and I open the gate and I call to him, yeah they’re going to recognize me. But then Don was looking at it. And researching. So it’s like all the sheep from the entire community was like in a pen. And so you would walk through the gate as a shepherd and out of everybody’s sheep, you would call your own.

Dawn Combs:
And if you’ve

Carson Combs:
Ever changed – I never realized that. If you’ve ever changed sheep.

Dawn Combs:
No. Oh,

Marlin Miller:
It does not work.

Carson Combs:
No. You

Dawn Combs:
Can’t run through a pen of thousands of sheep and separate out your own the

Carson Combs:
Way that either. Yeah. So that was brand new. She had done research and it’s like, well, that puts a whole nother spin on the meaning. I ask odd questions. Well, now it makes absolute sense because it’s like you hear that and it’s like, well, of course I’ll open the pen and I go in and our sheep are in there and you get that. But that’s completely different. And so as she continues to do research, it’s really interesting once you dive into the details and the history and it’s like, oh, that has a completely different meaning of the way it’s ever been portrayed through church to me. For

Dawn Combs:
Me, all of this, how we’re raising food and what we’re putting in our bodies. I hear so many Christians saying, “Well, this isn’t my final home, so it doesn’t matter.” But God built this temple to reside in. I mean, it really mattered how Moses designed to which exactly where it’s supposed to be and how tall the candle stand was. It was very specific. So I don’t think God now is like, “Ah, it doesn’t matter where I reside. Whatever.” He was clearly really specific then. He’s still really specific now. And we throw it away, but our light cannot shine out. Light is a resonance. Our light cannot shine out properly when ourselves are not aligned with creation. When our cells are aligned with convenience, it matters. It matters how we’re able to carry out what we’re asked to do when we’re exhausted and sick.

Marlin Miller:
This episode is brought to you by our friends at Azure Standard. Lisa and I just recently signed up finally and we are loving it. Non – GMO, organic. It is all that you can ask for. Go to azurestandard.com and tell them plain values sent you. You can use the code HL15 for a healthy little discount. Thanks guys. You and I just got done talking about the city and urbanization and all that stuff. When I step back with what you just said, Dawn, it brings this whole other level of importance to a garden and having a little bit of ground with which to cultivate life in the soil.

Dawn Combs:
I believe that’s what the promised land was about. It was about I’m going to bring you into land. It wasn’t necessarily that special then. I’m going to bring you into land and you’re going to have relationship with it that will model just like the head of household models how God’s love comes down. It will model the relationship that I have created for you to have with my creation so that you can be healthy and live out my purpose.

Marlin Miller:
So the reality of a garden of Eden, just because we sinned and get expelled from the garden, the physical truths of the garden would not have been exclusive to the garden.

Dawn Combs:
I still think we have the ability to walk with God now. It’s different. He was present. He was there. There wasn’t the need. There wasn’t a separation that we had created. But I believe that we can walk with God today when we align ourselves, when we are making ourself up of his creation. And I mean, I experience this all the time. The more I have changed my cellular makeup because I need to fix my body back to its original fertile purpose, the more I have changed that the more I hear, the more I can walk out and be in tune with Holy Spirit. The more I can…
For me, I call about your instinct, your inner voice, your common sense. I believe common sense is a Christian construct actually. It’s a whole other wormhole. I think it allows me to hear better and then it allows me to walk God’s purpose. I don’t think that a Christian that is eating genetically modified foods and even shooting up with medication that’s changing the DNA is God’s design. We are literally redesigning in man’s image instead of God’s. But I don’t think that God can’t save you. You can’t have salvation in that situation because obviously we know that God’s bigger than that and that there is grace. But the person who is making themself up in man’s image versus the person that is making themselves in God’s image, I think they have different potential for walking this earth and sharing Christ’s light and fulfilling the purpose that’s late on their life.
There’s two different paths there and God wants for us to be in this path.

Marlin Miller:
Wow. Yeah, that’s really good. Let’s back up all the way to soda farm. Let’s talk about the roots. You said that the farm is 20 years old. How long are you guys married?

Carson Combs:
22. I’ll have to do the math in our head. 23.

Dawn Combs:
Are we 23? That’s 2002, right?

Marlin Miller:
Yeah.

Dawn Combs:
Okay. What’s your

Marlin Miller:
Anniversary?

Dawn Combs:
November.

Marlin Miller:
November. Okay. Lisa and I got married in June of 2002. Same year. So yeah, we’re having our 24th anniversary in June, so you probably would be as well.

Dawn Combs:
We’ve been married a while.

Marlin Miller:
When you said that you moved along the Big Darby, I’m assuming that’s a river.

Dawn Combs:
It’s a protected federal creek. It’s a

Carson Combs:
National and state sandic river that runs through Union County and Madison. Well, Big Darby Creek. Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
The Big Darby Creek. Okay.

Carson Combs:
Yeah. So it’s a watershed that’s protected on the west side of Columbus and it goes through Madison County to the south.

Marlin Miller:
Do you guys have 10 acres or 100 acres? Three

Carson Combs:
And a half. No, we have three and a half. Three and a half. So it’s kind of a micro farm.

Marlin Miller:
Wow. Okay. And tell me again what all you guys produce.

Carson Combs:
So we started out doing – We

Dawn Combs:
Started out as Mockingbird Meadows.

Carson Combs:
Yeah. So we’ve had to change our name over the years.

Dawn Combs:
And I started at farmer’s markets with honey.

Carson Combs:
Honey.

Dawn Combs:
Okay. Yeah.

Carson Combs:
We were beekeepers and –

Dawn Combs:
Bubble bath. And

Carson Combs:
We did some specialty herbs. Yeah. So we made some of the kind of typical farmer’s market things with that. But our key thing that we were doing differently was doing infused honeys. So taking the herbs, solar infusing it so we had different flavors of honey that were sort of medicinal because they were pulling the properties, the herbs in.

Dawn Combs:
It was all during… Our business has arced with my infertility because as I was creating things that we needed to rebalance our bodies, I offered them out to our customers. And so that started to change what we offered. And then as we had the children, then what we needed for them started adding in. We started with infused honeys and then I did a luxuries, which is something that is in my book Sweet Remini. Both of those are in Sweet Remedies. I’m known for using honey for medicine.

Carson Combs:
So we started out doing the infused honeys and in 2008, if you’re familiar with the organization called Slow Food. I’ve heard of it. It’s an international organization with chapters all over the country, but they basically are all about traditional foods and housing – And field to table.

Dawn Combs:
Yeah. Field to table. Alice Waters was instrumental in starting it. Yeah.

Carson Combs:
So in 2008, the Columbus chapter picked us and Jenny’s ice cream to represent Ohio in San Francisco. Wow. We

Dawn Combs:
Were the best of the good, clean and fair products out of Ohio. Hold

Marlin Miller:
On. Hold on. You were chosen with Jenny’s ice cream?

Dawn Combs:
Yep.

Carson Combs:
Yeah. So we went to San Francisco to the conference out there and we sampled our money. We were

Dawn Combs:
Written about in the Washington Post and the New York Times. And Jenny – That’s a

Marlin Miller:
Big stinking deal.

Dawn Combs:
It was a big stinking deal. Sorry. And
Jenny was ready. She has a very different… Well, she has a very different philosophy than we do about life, period. But she had a very different philosophy about kids being part of what you’re doing as a business. And I definitely departed from her in that she thought that they needed to go to nanny’s and stay out of your business. And I thought that they needed to grow up inside the business and be the reason for the business. And so she was ready to take off. She became Jenny’s ice cream. And we kind of went home after that and had babies. And that was a detour. The first detour in this business.

Marlin Miller:
I was going to ask, but I kind of knew the answer to that.

Dawn Combs:
Yeah. Yeah. And after that, I mean, we’ve been all over the place. The problem is that the things that I say are not popular in the mainstream world. The things that I have been given to say are truth and truth isn’t maybe so comfortable and beloved.

Marlin Miller:
What is truth?

Dawn Combs:
I have gotten into… I carry a lot of weight that I have brought my family into a lot of trouble because of the deal that I made with God to get the kids was that if he said, “Pack your bags and go to Washington State, you’re going to stand on a stage and tell people not to take over-the-counter pain medicine. Then you’re going to go do that. ” And I just stood on stage and opened my mouth and what came out was what came out. And that willingness, I can’t go back on it. I’m not going to return the kids. I want them here and I already got my end of the bargain. So it has dragged us into a lot of… And for Carson who likes to follow the rules and not be in trouble, having the government come down on us almost constantly for more than a decade probably has been the hardest thing.
You just never dreamed that you were going to get dragged into that.

Carson Combs:
No, but I learned over time it’s like, okay, if God’s telling her something that she has to do, it’s like, okay, let’s do it. At first, I would kind of set up roadblocks. It’s like, “Well, we shouldn’t do it because of this or that. ” And yeah, I eventually learned the lesson. It’s like, okay, if you’re hearing the voice, it’s like, let’s just do it. It’s like, I’m not going to question it. It’s the right thing to do. And that was a huge change for me because I’m all about staying in the box and following the rules and over time that’s kind of gone away. Yeah.

Dawn Combs:
But when you ask God for your partner, you told me the prayer that you prayed. What was it, my dear?

Carson Combs:
You’re going to put me on the

Dawn Combs:
Spot. Are you going to

Carson Combs:
Say

Dawn Combs:
Wrong?

Carson Combs:
I will, as soon as you remind

Dawn Combs:
Me. Okay. He prayed for somebody to take him out of his box.

Carson Combs:
Really? Yeah, actually I did. I got exactly what I

Dawn Combs:
Asked for. And God said, “I got the perfect ones. She’s going to really destroy your box.”

Carson Combs:
But there were years of me fighting it. So the whole time we were building the farm, I was constantly fighting her. It’s like, “No, I don’t want to do that. No, we shouldn’t do that. ” There’s always excuses. And so I was probably the biggest roadblock was – I’m sure

Dawn Combs:
There was a purpose.

Carson Combs:
Learning to not think about everything that could go wrong at every point and to

Dawn Combs:
Try

Carson Combs:
To avoid everything.

Dawn Combs:
Little did you know it was all going to go really wrong.

Carson Combs:
Yeah. So that was a lot of stress on my part for nothing.

Dawn Combs:
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. Let’s talk about things going south on the farm. This episode is being brought to you by my friends at Kentucky Lumber. Recently, I had a chance to sit down with Derek and his wife, Lisa and their whole family. And let me tell you, they are wonderful. They have stepped into some of the hardest situations with fostering and adoption. If you care about the least of these and the kids that are coming out of really hard places and you want to buy from a family who gets it and cares about those kids, they are living on the front lines of some of the most unimaginable situations that I’ve come across in years from siding to trim to flooring. They have it all. You can find them at drywallhaters.com. Did that begin with the lockdowns in 2020? No.

Dawn Combs:
No,

Marlin Miller:
It

Carson Combs:
Was long before that. No. So starting out, we were doing farmer’s markets and we were doing the infused honeys and we read the Ohio Revised Code and honey was exempt. So it’s like, “Oh, we’re making a honey product. We’re
Good.” And at one of our farmer’s markets, I think it was Clintonville, an inspector showed up and they had just put out this article on the West Coast of how unregulated and crazy Wild West farmer’s markets were becoming. And so the Department of Agriculture started busting people. So we had beekeeper friends who were doing creamed honey for like 20 years and now they were getting busted and couldn’t sell it. So we were actually, it was Dawn who was at the Clintonville market with the kids and they came up to her table and shut her down. And so it’s like, no, you have to have a commercial kitchen to do this product.

Dawn Combs:
But we did have a commercial kitchen because we assumed that this was going to happen one day. Yeah. We figured at some point – We were already making our stuff in a commercial kitchen on the property.

Marlin Miller:
For that exact market? Yeah,

Dawn Combs:
For anything. For all of our products. For our products. We’ve always made all of our products in a commerci kitchen.

Carson Combs:
Yeah. You just weren’t licensed. I’m sorry. Exactly. You just weren’t licensed. Because it wasn’t necessary. So we set it up as much as we could to what would be commercial standard. And so when she got shut down, we immediately called up the ODA and we’re just like, “Okay, what do we need to have in a commercial kitchen?”

Dawn Combs:
And this is where I first got us

Carson Combs:
Into big trouble. And that’s the first mistake was

Dawn Combs:
Asking

Carson Combs:
Them for help.

Dawn Combs:
Because they started telling me that, “Well, you’re harvesting herbs. You need to put those in bleach water before you put them in honey.” And I said, “So let me get this straight.” And I said this on the phone and you’re going to know immediately what the mistake was. I said, “So let me get this straight. You want me to make my products less safe for my customers than what I’m doing now

Marlin Miller:
In

Dawn Combs:
Order to comply.” And there was silence and then everything went wrong from then.

Carson Combs:
So they never expected that we were actually going to have a commercial kitchen. They though they had

Dawn Combs:
Closed us down. We were country bumpkins. They were ready to throw us under the bus, but they found an operation that was run like a top.

Carson Combs:
So it was an issue of, well, we can give you… I think it was Tuesdays. “We can give you an inspection on Thursday, but if you don’t do that, it’s like you’re going to have to wait a month.” We took the

Dawn Combs:
Thursday inspection done. It’s

Carson Combs:
Already set up. And so throughout that time period, we were trying to figure out, okay, where in writing, what are your requirements for what you need? Because we’re just like, “Okay, we want to comply. We’ll do whatever. And we wanted to make sure we had everything for the inspection.” Well, they could not tell us specifically what was supposed to be in the commercial kitchen.

Marlin Miller:
Because they knew you already had it.

Carson Combs:
Well, no, because there is no place that it’ written. It was just not written down. And it’s one of those magical things of you have to have a commercial kitchen, but we’re not going to tell you what all the parts and pieces are. And so the inspector came out that Thursday and he was really nice. He looked over the kitchen. He’s like, “Yeah, looks like you’ve got everything here.” And then he went outside our barn in the kitchen and we could hear him on the phone. He

Dawn Combs:
Was – No, he had his phone as high as it would go and it was on speaker and then he stood next to us to have

Carson Combs:
This conversation with the supervisor. We were standing in the opening of the barn and he was just outside. And so he was talking to the head of the safety division.

Dawn Combs:
For Ohio.

Carson Combs:
And she was just yelling at him. It’s like, “So you didn’t find this or this? There’s no way they can have this. ” And he’s like, “Yeah.” It’s like they’ve got everything that they need. She

Dawn Combs:
Ended the call with, “I guess you have to give them the license, but you tell them that we’re coming for them.” You heard her say this. “We can shut them down at any time. You make sure that they’re aware that we’re coming.”

Carson Combs:
So that was our first interaction with the Department of Agriculture.

Marlin Miller:
And your box is just blown to smithereens.

Dawn Combs:
In

Marlin Miller:
Your mind, you’re thinking, “Oh my goodness, what have we done?”

Carson Combs:
Yeah, exactly. Because I’m a rules follower. It’s like, “What are you talking about? We’re trying to follow the rules here.”

Dawn Combs:
And I’m a rules follower too to an extent. I don’t like things that don’t make sense and that kind of thing.

Marlin Miller:
I got to go back. On the phone you said, “Let me get this right. I’m going to make it less safe for my customers.” I’m

Dawn Combs:
Going to make it dangerous. My customers aren’t wanting to eat bleach. Thank you very much. And in fact, they’re probably going to not buy for me if they find out that I’m doing that, but that’s what they expected anybody that was doing what we do. All right.

Marlin Miller:
So that’s the foray. That’s the entry point into the wonderful world of regulation.

Dawn Combs:
Yes. We’ve talked at one point and you cannot go through all of them, but he’s cataloged more. I tend to like, oh my gosh, this is… And then my instant is, “Okay, God’s got this. It’s going to be fine. I don’t need to… ” And then I just… And it’s gone and I keep going and he catalogs it. So where I see the big ones where the federal government came after us and we were violating the law during COVID, I see those things and I remember those things vividly. But he remembers all the times that they’ve come after us and I just don’t… It’s just gone. I get it. I don’t need it.

Marlin Miller:
I get it.

Dawn Combs:
But it has been, unfortunately, I say things.

Carson Combs:
So we went through all of that, got our commercial kitchen, kept on doing what we were doing because now we were okay. And then after all of that, then the beekeeping, whatever you want to call it, the group at the state house that was lobbying for beekeepers, they ended up changing the regulations so that infused honey was exact after we’d done all that. But by that time, it’s like there were so many beekeepers doing infused honey now at the markets. Of course, we changed to a new product line.

Dawn Combs:
Yeah. Which was sodas. And that was again, because of the kids. I took all of my formulas that I was making in honey and started into sodas because my son decided he didn’t want to use his allergy honey anymore and I needed him to take it. I knew that if I could make a soda that had real food in it, didn’t have the genetically modified stuff, didn’t have fake sugar and was actually life giving instead of taking away, I would have something that my son would never fight me. And true to form, he now knows his own body. He chooses when he’s getting sneezy and he goes and he gets himself a green apple soda and I never know about it. And that’s where we were hoping to get with the sodas. And that ties back to my whole fear about what we put in our bodies.

Carson Combs:
Well, as a little Kids, we basically trained them and they were raised up knowing that if you have an issue, you go out and you get whatever jar of honey goes with that, get a spoonful. And so they would basically take care of it themselves.

Marlin Miller:
It’s like a self-medicating thing.

Dawn Combs:
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Wow. Okay. Can we talk about the lockdowns?

Dawn Combs:
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Sure. How did it begin for

Dawn Combs:
You guys? We moved to a shop in town. So we went from just being mail order and farmer’s markets and we actually opened up a storefront. The kids wanted to do that. Because

Carson Combs:
We were on the road for years with her as an author speaking all over the country and we were traveling and we were kind of tired. I mean, it’s exhausting to do that.

Dawn Combs:
That’s

Carson Combs:
So funny

Dawn Combs:
Because what came next was not relaxing.

Carson Combs:
No. And so we came home after an event and we were sitting out on a patio at a restaurant in the downtown and we were talking to the kids and we just asked, it’s like, “What do you guys want to do? ” And they basically said, “Well, we want to open a shop.” It’s like, okay. So we literally finished our meal and we got up and we walked around the downtown to see what storefronts were open. And there was this old building that looked like it had been abandoned for years and the door was open. It’s like God always opens the door. So we walked through it and yeah, it was just dilapidated. And we ended up knowing the owner. Sorry, I’m hitting the table. But we ended up knowing the owner and yeah, we ended up renovating the space and opening it up on a shoestring budget, which I don’t know how we made that happen, but –

Dawn Combs:
We were making sodas that give to you. So sodas that are functional and it was an old soda shop sort of model with things that were functional. And when the lockdown hit, we have supplements because I was making tinctures and salves and all the things from the old Mockingbird Meadows, which we had to let go. At one point we had to let the government, I don’t even remember why, but we had to let the government feel like they destroyed that name before we moved on to soda P-H-A-R-M.

Carson Combs:
Yeah. So we thought that because we were opening an old fashioned soda shop, we thought PHRM soda farm would be – Like a pharmacy. Would be catchy.

Dawn Combs:
But what happened is they put us on a list of pharmacies and then they wanted to treat us like we were trying to say we were a pharmacy.

Carson Combs:
So when you go out online and you look up businesses and they’re categorized, like the yellow pages and all of that, somewhere along the line they put us in the pharmacy category and we didn’t know it. Because of the spelling, because of the name. And you were unaware. Right.

Dawn Combs:
We couldn’t do anything. You can’t do anything about it, right? It’s the internet.

Carson Combs:
Yeah. So to this day we get advertisements for drugs. We’re an actual medicinal pharmacy, advertising prescription drugs.

Marlin Miller:
Which that’s beautiful. That’s what you’re all about.

Carson Combs:
Exactly.

Dawn Combs:
Sorry. The problem with our business has always been, just to be frank, me. If you make products in this country and you follow the rules, they can’t really go after you. But if you make products and you also happen to be an author, then your voice is dangerous. And especially since I’ve been out advocating for people taking responsibility, taking their own responsibility for their health, being their own advocate, working on eating real food and solving problems with natural remedies, that was very dangerous. When COVID hit, we were being asked to demand that people do all of the things, the masking and the standing apart and all of that. And it was against everything that we believed because we believe in bodily autonomy. I believe God was real clear about free will. And so I believe that really strongly that everybody has to have free will.
And so we weren’t comfortable. The big lesson here was that we had been not hiding our faith, but we weren’t forward with our faith. I thought we needed to be welcoming to everybody. I wanted everybody to access this. And so I thought that you don’t be confrontational and you don’t share who you are upfront. And if people asked, we were

Carson Combs:
Open. We were hiding our

Dawn Combs:
Light.

Carson Combs:
But

Dawn Combs:
We were under a bushel because we

Carson Combs:
Thought

Dawn Combs:
It was less controversial.

Carson Combs:
We were in herbal circles, which were clearly

Dawn Combs:
Leaning

Carson Combs:
The other direction.

Dawn Combs:
I ran in a lot of the pagan circles and that’s another whole conversation. But I was holding back so we could attract the most people. And what we learned through this was I wasn’t going to demand people do this in my space. And so I did a video and I came out to our customers and I said, look, this is who we are. This is who we follow. This is who we believe in. This is where we stand. And I can’t do the things we can’t as a family do the things that we’re being asked to do. So here it is. We are either going to continue in this vein and your customers, you, our customers will say that’s fine with you and you’ll come and you’re going to support that or we’re closing because we cannot take the other path of doing something that we don’t believe in to stay open.
And overwhelmingly our customers responded and said, you do you. You stick with this. And so we never closed. People could wear… I mean, if they wanted to wear masks, they were welcome to do that. It wasn’t our say.

Marlin Miller:
You didn’t take a hard stance either way from what I’m gathering. You didn’t say you cannot wear a mask in here.

Dawn Combs:
I didn’t say, no.

Marlin Miller:
You didn’t say anything. No, no. You just said you are free to do whatever you are comfortable with.

Dawn Combs:
And in fact, a lot of folks came in with masks and sat at the counter and thanked us because we didn’t ostracize them. And we had a line. We stand here. And that means sometimes we do like, I don’t agree with it, but it’s your body. Now on the other side, we also were making supplements. And on every supplement bottle it says, I’m required by law when I make that to say this product does not diagnose, treat, cure, prevent. Any

Carson Combs:
Disease.

Dawn Combs:
And if I’m advertising that or explaining it, because I’d already got into a lot of trouble with my voice, they were really clear with me that I wasn’t allowed to tell them what it does, how to use it or how much to use in their body because I wasn’t allowed to tell somebody what to do medically with their body. Then they were saying I had to tell people to use a medical device. And I said, sorry, I already follow a law that says I’m legally not allowed to do that because I have all these products on the wall. And that’s where I stood. I just said, it’s illegal for me to tell you to wear a mask.

Marlin Miller:
Seems to me all you did is expose the hypocrisy,

Dawn Combs:
Which isn’t popular.

Marlin Miller:
Well, this whole time, this whole time, Dawn, I’m sitting here and I’m marveling at the astounding hypocrisy during that time of the people that shout from the rooftops that it’s my body. I can do whatever I want with a child inside me. And then they turn it around and now they’re demanding that everybody else does.

Dawn Combs:
That’s what you do in a society where your decisions or whatever your feelings are that day, instead of your decisions are based on a foundational principle, a guiding book, a savior. A moral truth. If you’re not there, then when you get up in the morning and you look at what your choices are for the day and analyze, “Ooh, does that fit? Does it not fit? Can’t do that. Can do that. ” Then you’re just all over the place and you contradict yourself all the time.

Marlin Miller:
So you point out that you’re already following law that says you can’t say anything. That ends up landing you in more hot water,

Dawn Combs:
Right?
I put out a post. I was getting a lot of phone calls because doctors weren’t seeing people that were really ill. And I was, by the grapevine, I was the person that people were calling and it got really… I have PTSD for sure from this time because of the people that needed me to help them save their husband or wife in the next room. And I was answering. They were getting to that desperate point because they didn’t know basics. They didn’t know that they have to get up and move because the CDC said, “Lay down in a back bedroom and have nobody bring you water and shut the door.” And people were doing that with their children and their elderly. And then I was having to deal with the fallout. And so I wrote a post that was like, “You have to move. Your lungs need exercise to get congestion up and this is what the mucus should look like.
And if it looks like this, you can do this. And if it looks like this, you can do this. And if it looks like this, go to the emergency room.” It was definitely balanced of like, “Go to the doctor.” It did not say anything against any of the shots or whatever, but they were using, I think it was one of the test pilots, they were using just an AI search across the internet for keywords. And because I had said at the beginning, “People are struggling with COVID. I want to make sure you guys know how to handle these issues at home.” And then yeah.

Carson Combs:
It flagged her posts.

Dawn Combs:
So I was actually labeled as, and I am on record with the federal government as a con artist and a fraud during the COVID epidemic. I did not have a trial. I didn’t have due process on it. But our president then told… I got a filing and they sent it to me in an email. It came from the COVID-19 task force and it was the FDA and the FTC together. And they said, “Upon this filing, you have 48 hours to cease and desist selling or speaking. And if you don’t, we will begin to seize and freeze your assets and go after your family and go after our kids.” And I ignored it for 24 hours. And at

Carson Combs:
First we though it was a phishing scale. A

Dawn Combs:
Fishing

Carson Combs:
Scale. And then I finally said, “Should we look at this? ” Because we didn’t open it because we thought it was something that – It’s an email. Malware. Yeah. It was very fishy because normally you get something in writing in the mail.

Marlin Miller:
That’s what I was thinking.

Dawn Combs:
It was real. And so we shut down our website and they didn’t stop there. Our president instructed the, is it the attorney general? Okay. He authorized the attorney general to go out to technology companies and de – platform and defund anybody that was saying something that they didn’t like. And that was me and our business. So it got to where I couldn’t send email. They were watching every email. One day I sat at my computer and watched all of my emails disappear off my computer.

Marlin Miller:
No.

Dawn Combs:
And then reappear. The things I could tell you that happened during this period would turn your hair white and you’d be like, “That’s crazy, Dawn. That stuff doesn’t really happen. Our government doesn’t

Carson Combs:
Do that. ” We had our credit card processor dump us. The web hosting platform could not fix the problems that we were having. So she was sending out for like six months, she was sending out emails to all of our members, all of our customers, and they wouldn’t get there.

Dawn Combs:
My IP for the farm was actually blacklisted. And to do this, you have to blacklist it. It’s a permanent all the way across the world’s servers that host the internet. So I was treated like somebody in the middle of Africa trying to defraud people from their pensions. Or

Marlin Miller:
A terrorist.

Carson Combs:
Yeah. So we went to Spectrum, our provider, and they’re like, “Oh, we’ll give you another router.” And that’ll give you a new IP. And that’ll generate a new IP address for you. So we did that and it reverted back to the old IP number. It’s hardwired to modification. And so they were basically, “Well, we’ve never seen that happen before.” So at that point –

Marlin Miller:
Spectrum itself didn’t know exactly how to fix it for you.

Dawn Combs:
Well, they couldn’t. The technicians at the store had never seen that and couldn’t do anything for us. But the technology companies were instructed to do this to people like us. So we actually – A small family farm.

Carson Combs:
Got another router and then we ended up –

Dawn Combs:
I got a VPN.

Carson Combs:
A VPN so that we could get

Dawn Combs:
Rounded.

Carson Combs:
Yeah.

Dawn Combs:
We had to stop selling. We formed a membership, which I still maintain, but it’s the family health steward now. We had to take everything that I had out on the internet for free and I had to put it behind a paywall to protect my family. And we did that literally in an afternoon. It was total trauma to form and split and get me away from the family.

Carson Combs:
So we sat down and basically torched our old website.

Dawn Combs:
The government was all inside of it. It didn’t work and they –

Carson Combs:
And so we took that information, separated it out, made basically the education website for her, pulled all of our products into what is now the soda farm website and relaunched under a new name. So we went from PHARM to FARM.

Dawn Combs:
And we also formed a church. Yeah.
For the education side of it. We are a 508C1A and we are organized as a church because at the end of the day, the food that I make, the syrups that I make… Well, this is now an LLC. We have gone back to public, but at the time, everything that we did from my voice to the products we put under the church while we were waiting for the trauma dust to settle. And because what I was making was to feed people with things that I wanted to build cells that were of God. And the voice that I had was what I believe I was being asked to say. And so I very truly believed that what I’m doing is a mission. And so we took advantage of that space. What I do is still protected under the church, but now the soda farm is out in the public again.

Carson Combs:
We basically brought all of the products back as flavors, took away any reference to anything.

Dawn Combs:
Well, we did that because we were still under attack
For a number of years. We’ve had some amazing ridiculous situations where Carson is on a phone. I’m sobbing with this investigator who lied to get in and is attacking and grilling me. And Carson is on the phone furiously driving home from work trying to get there to help me. These sorts of scenes have happened again and again because of what we do. They have since closed the case on us. Evidently there had been a case open that we didn’t know about for a very long time. They have since closed the case. They’ve realized that we’re really just like a mom and pop shop. We’re not making millions of dollars. In fact, we really do run it like a nonprofit. Unfortunately we need to do better at that. Yeah.

Carson Combs:
It’s been interesting. It’s like when you think of all of the issues going on in the world and it’s like, why are they spending so much time on us? We’re nothing. What we do is a blip in the picture. And it’s like, why would you put all that resource and effort toward what we’re doing at

Dawn Combs:
That scale? Well, because what it’s done is diluted our message, right? Because the people that found us as Mockingbird Meadows lost us and then we became Soda PHARM. And those people started listening to what I was saying and what we were putting out. And then we had to trash that and now we’re soda farm. And so what we’re being told to put out keeps getting obscured as we figure out how to protect it. And hopefully the people that find us now, we don’t go anywhere, but it’s made us unreliable and difficult to really get traction to get the message out.

Marlin Miller:
To find. I know that we’re on a bit of a timeline here. Let’s land the plane with two things. Where can people find you now?

Dawn Combs:
So Soda Farm is at sodafarm.com and that’s soda, S-O-D-A-F-A-R-M, like our shirts.com. And then we’ve had to completely separate me out. I’m not even, you can’t even see me in videos on Soda Farm. I’m over on the Family Health Herbalist. So Family Health Herbalist. Family Health Steward. Steward. I don’t even know.

Carson Combs:
We changed it so much, we can’t even keep track.

Dawn Combs:
Familyhealthsteward.com is where I am rebuilding everything that I once did.

Carson Combs:
So all of her writings, her membership, apprenticeship, program, all of the educational stuff is there.

Marlin Miller:
We’ve been publishing Plain Values for almost 13 years now. And about a year ago, the team and I decided to put together a compendium, a best of, if you will, of our favorite stories, the most impactful stories of all those years. And Invited is what we built out of those conversations. It is 194 and four pages and it is absolutely a thing of beauty. We do a monthly gathering here where we just simply open our doors. It’s called PorchTime. And the story of how PorchTime came to be and how our family was invited into that and how we are inviting you and every Tom, Dick and Harry, anybody who wants to come can come and hang out at PorchTime here at the office in Weinsburg. So it was such a natural fit to use the home of the founder of PorchTime and to call it Invited.
You can find it on plainvalues.com on the shop page and you can now consider yourself invited. So last question. How can we pray for you guys and your farm and your family?

Dawn Combs:
So I’m on sabbatical right now and I felt led to do that personally. And then I realized that our land needed that as well where I’m on it for a year. And once I got my shoulders down out of my ears for a few months, I turned around and I looked at the rest of them. We’ve hauled our children through all of this trauma too. And so praying for the piece of what it means to truly abide and that my children and me can learn the lessons that we’re being taught in this season and you learning in this season of how to rest. And we’ve trusted, we’ve had faith, but we’ve also gotten an awful lot of nervous system. And I want to let that go for all of us.

Carson Combs:
Yeah. We need to slow down and kind of actually experience life. We’ve been so busy and dealing with all of the things that have come along over the years that we’ve kind of lost track of what’s important. So really trying to slow down this year. Let the farm rest, let us rest, and hopefully the kids rest as well.

Marlin Miller:
Guys, thank you.

Dawn Combs:
Yeah, thanks for having

Carson Combs:
Us.

Marlin Miller:
Absolutely.

Carson Combs:
Thank you.

Marlin Miller:
We will keep going, I think. And I’m going to just throw a quick shout out to the Seeking Whole Health Conference. It’s going on right now and that’s obviously why you’re in town.

Dawn Combs:
I’m on an herbal panel next. So we are driving furiously back to throw me onto that panel.

Marlin Miller:
It’s going to be good. Guys, thank you.

Carson Combs:
Absolutely. Thank you very much.

Dawn Combs:
Thank you.