American Thought Leaders - America’s Beef Shortage Explained | Joel Salatin

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

Centralized agriculture insists that strict federal oversight is essential for food safety and market stability. Joel Salatin, co-owner of Polyface Farms, argues that a close look at soaring beef prices, local meat production, and farm economics reveals regulatory hurdles that destroy small slaughterhouses and distort true free-market prices.Salatin addresses why high beef prices persist, noting recent droughts, aging farmers, the length of the cattle cycle, and the closing of Mexico’s borders. Far from opposing market efficiency, he argues that resilient, local production would respond more accurately to market fluctuations and supply shortages.In this interview, Salatin answers critical questions: How do massive corn and soybean subsidies skew beef prices and drive small cattle operations out of business? What do USDA inspection exemptions like the Prime Act reveal about intrastate commerce and food safety? And why is nature’s model of scaling through duplication far more effective than industrial centralization?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Today, we have four companies controlling 85% of the meat market. These big companies have ensured that the regulatory climate is prejudicial to small operators and not larger ones. Joel Salatin is co-owner of Polyface Farms, a regenerative farm in Virginia. He is author of over a dozen books on sustainable agriculture, local food networks, and homesteading. So I'm suggesting let the market speak and let the people that are in the people that are in, that market respond to market forces. Every time the government steps in and puts their finger on this side of the scale, it skews everything else. In this episode, we unpack, to use Joel Salatin's words, the government's war on cows. Why is beef so expensive? What legislation

could help small cattle farmers? And what is the polyface farm's method for local, ethical, and resilient meat production? If we're going to preserve farmers and if we're going to preserve market options in the marketplace. What we desperately need is the ability of farmers to be able to value add this product and for consumers to be able to buy from their neighbors without wrapping it in a two million dollar federal inspected facility. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Jania Kellick. Come on in. One of my favorite stores. Yeah. So you know how much I love the the ground beef. I'm gonna get a bunch of that for sure like these singles. Yep. I think I'm gonna get ten of these.

Right, there we go. Bought worse garlic, yeah. And one more thing. What's that gonna be? A beef roast? But this I'd have to cook like in a like... Yeah, a slow cooker, or an instant pot. I mean this is one of the favorite pieces is I have around. Let's grab this one. I love it. Perfect. today. Joel Salatin, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Thank you. It's a privilege and an honor to be with you. I love being at Polyface.

I mean, I just come just to sit at this table, cameras or no cameras and have some of your amazing food. So we're in this bizarre situation when it comes to beef. It's expensive to the point where there's an executive order saying we're going to make an exemption for imports to lower. the price of beef. So explain to me why this is. Why are we short of beef? Yeah. Yeah. Well, why is it expensive? I mean, okay, you're already answering the question, right? Well, there's several reasons. So this doesn't just, this didn't just happen. It started about five

or six years ago in the tremendous droughts in the in the southern tier of the U.S. Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma. That southern tier of the U.S., back in the 2020, 2021 were drought devastated. Well, cows are herbivores. They eat grass. If you don't have rain, you don't have grass. And grass is, you know, you can make hay,

but it's way too bulky and expensive to transport long distances. It's not as concentrated as corn or soybeans or something like that or gold. So transport becomes difficult. So what happened is a lot of these ranchers and farmers just liquidated. They didn't have feed. I well remember I was in Mississippi doing a conference in, I think it was 2021 and met several farmers there. And I mean, it's horrible.

they had actually lost cows that the ground had cracked open so far that cows were stepping in it and breaking their legs. Then they'd have to put the cow down because you can't, you know, you can't put a splint on a cow leg. And, I mean, it was just horrible. So that started this liquidation. Then, as if to add insult to injury, we have the, the aging farmer and the average livestock farmer is about 65 years old. The average American farmer is about 60, but you know, you can do cows pretty gently into old age.

And so livestock farmers tend to be a little bit older. And there comes a point in your life when if you can get out, you don't want to get back in, you know, you're ready to, you know, go do other things, like sit on the beach and or visit the grandkids. Then we had the rise of the whole protein movement. Keto, paleo, carnivore. These are huge movements. They do conferences.

I've been to meatstock in Tennessee. I mean, the thing is wild. 1,200 screaming people that have never eaten, you know, carbohydrates for 20 years. And then most recently, the screw worm that came in from Mexico, and so they shut down the border with Mexico. Well, that shut down a million, that shut down a million head of beef, which is generally considered about 5% of the beef slaughtered in America originates in Mexico. And it comes in to American feed lots. So you have this perfect storm of things happening.

You have the aging farmer that doesn't want to start or expand or start up. You've got the drought and you've got Mexico border closed. And the cattle cycle is a long cycle. You know, cow has a calf. If you're going to expand your herd, cow has a calf. It's got to be a heifer calf. That's a female. And then, you know, in a year you can breed it.

In a year, she births. In another two years, you can butcher it. You know, you're in this long, it's not like chickens. You know, you have hatch an egg. Eight weeks you've got a chicken, you know, you can butcher a chicken. No, no, it's a long cycle. And so when you get into a difficult situation, you can't just snap your fingers and get out of it. And so one of the things that's happening right now, even as high as the beef price is right now,

it has not kept up with the increase in labor, land costs, input costs, equipment costs, building costs. The price of beef right now has not even kept up with all those other costs. From the perspective of the farmer. From the perspective of the farmer. Right. So we, let's just, do we really need beef? You know, all these people are saying, hey, well, you know, this is, it takes a long time.

It's cost intensive. Let's keep the energy in the, you know, in the ground, maybe chickens will work. How do you respond? Oh, well, the beautiful thing about the herbivore, is that it doesn't require tillage to grow it. Mm. Tillage or, you know, or chemical herbicides to kill the grass or what, you know, the point is, if you're going to raise omnivores, chickens, turkeys, pigs, if you're going to raise

omnivores, they can't live on perennials. They require annuals. annuals. Annuals are things that you have to, one of them, annuals are things that you have to plant all the time. Watermelon, squash, you know, you think of your garden vegetables. Wheat, corn, soybeans, those are annuals. You plant a seed, you get a crop that year. Perennials are like your lawn, okay? You know, you plant it one time and it lasts forever. And so, so nature doesn't actually have very many annuals. It's mainly perennials because nobody's around to to till the sod and plant the seeds, all right?

There are annuals, but there aren't that many of them. And so here we are, in my view, if you really want to cut to the chase on our current beef problem, the problem is the subsidies to corn and soybeans. Half of the soybeans America produces are exported. We don't even use them. almost half the corn we produce goes into ethanol. We don't even eat it. Even animals don't even eat it.

And half the alfalfa Americans produce on these big center pivot irrigation systems goes to Japan and Saudi Arabia to feed racehorses. I don't know what the percentage is. I don't know if it's 30%, 40%, but it is a huge percentage of American agriculture is not in the food business. That's striking to the average person. I thought farmers produce food. food. No, most of them, a lot of them don't produce food. And so here we have this, this,

you know, most recent $12 billion bailout to the soybean farmers who supposedly the average soybean farmer lost $100 an acre last year in 2025 growing soybeans. And instead of, instead of having to face the reality, you know, the world doesn't need my soybeans. What, what normally happens in the marketplace if you overproduce? Well, the price. Well, the price. price goes down and then you say, well, either I'm not going to produce as much or I'm going to produce something else. Where is there a need? And you move around to wherever the market is needed. No, the soybean farmers have this idea that I'm a soybean farmer, by golly, and I'm important. I'm an important person because I grow soybeans and the taxpayers should make sure that I can grow soybeans.

And they're not looking at the, you know, at the, at the, at the, the, the, the, the, the, flush of soybeans in the world market. In fact, China has a 2030 target to eliminate dependency on, on imports. They have historically purchased over 25% of the American soybean crop. Now, Trump just strong-armed the Chinese and got them to take some last year, you know, after they got mad about the tariffs and said, we're not going to take any more, you know, American soybeans. Trump was able to talk them into taking some.

But this problem is not going away. And bailing out the soybean farmers and the corn farmers, bailing them out with U.S. taxpayer subsidies, just because we want to honor our farmers is ridiculous. What we need is beef. And so I actually did a very in-depth economic analysis because I do this kind of thing. I don't grow crops, but I grow animals. So I know I have a good sense of what it costs

to put in a livestock operation. You know, what if we have a thousand acres of Nebraska soybeans and we convert that to grass, to grow cows? That thousand acres, my hypothetical thousand acres, cost $300,000 to convert it from soybeans to grass. That's fencing, waterline, seeds for grass, okay? That's exactly what it costs, annually to grow soybeans.

So here you have a $300,000. Now you know, that's not just pocket change, but think about to grow 1,000 acres of soybeans, it's going to cost me $300,000 of annual expense to put that crop in and harvest it. I can do a once in a century $300,000 investment and return it to perennial prairie polyculture with herbivores. cows, not bison, but cows, they work fine, under intensive good grazing management, and suddenly, in my analysis, instead of losing $100 an acre, you make $1,000 an acre. But why doesn't anybody want to do that?

Well, A, well, with cows, I've got to be there. I can't just plant it and go to Bermuda. Number two, there's no subsidy or crop. insurance. So if they fail, I don't get a check. Soybeans, they fail, I get a check. But the economic and ecological, and I would even suggest the emotional incentives are all there. I mean, let me tell you, you can walk out in your wheat field, you know, it's nice. Or your soybean field, yeah, they can brush your knees, but they don't, you go out with your cows and they lean into you and they respond to you, you know, there's an emotional aspect

to the livestock element, too, that I would argue. But, you know, the biggest, the biggest enemy right now, keeping beef prices high, in my view, is the subsidies to the corn and soybean farmers that are letting them live with, you know, with rose-colored glasses thinking, we don't need to look at the market. So it skews the market. You are arguing massively. Yes. Yes.

Imagine. Imagine half a dozen soybean farmers sitting, and I know I'm hitting on soybean farmers and I'm sorry. And I don't hate them, but I. But I really don't like bad farming and I don't like my taxes, which I've earned, going to stupidity. Okay? And so can you imagine six soybean farmers, they're sitting around, and they say, you know, we really like electricians. Electricians are important for our country.

We should make sure we have electricians. Now, there's a project going on up the road here that's a big construction project. that takes 20 electric, they're going to take 20, use 20 electricians. But let's go up there and demand that they use 30 electricians because we like electricians and we need electricians and I know it only takes 20 to do this project, but we think you should do 30 because electricians are important.

No soybean farmer would say that. No, if the project only takes 20, you know, you're gonna take, and our taxes certainly aren't gonna help you pay for another one, two or three, extras just to have an extra electricians. That's the way they're looking at the soybeans. They're looking at themselves. And they're saying, I'm a soybean farmer, you know,

and the world should honor me and respect me. And it doesn't need me. It doesn't need me. But I'm an important person, and I like soybeans, and I want to grow soybeans, and you should make sure that I grow soybeans. This is the mentality. Well, two thoughts. One is, you know, in effect, the government is saying,

we need soybeans by, you know, by providing the money, right? And in effect, that's the skewing that you're talking about. The other part, though, is that if I may, right? I mean, you're a beef farmer and you think beef farmers are important. I do, but we don't get a dime of subsidy. We don't get any, we don't get any insurance. And you're not asking, the other part is though you're not asking for it either. No, I'm not asking for it.

I'm not asking for it. I'm suggesting, you know, let the, market, let the market speak and let the people that are in that market respond to market forces. That's all I'm asking. And every time the government steps in and puts their, you know, puts their finger on this side of the scale, it inherently apes and manipulates what the market would just do, you know, Adam Smith's, you know, invisible hand. Invisible Hand of the market. It moves things. It moves people out of surpluses, it moves people into innovation, it just does that. It doesn't require, you know,

government intervention. And if we, you know, if, if beef prices go down, then eventually it'll, you know, if too many people come in, eventually it'll drop enough that then some people will get out. And, and, and I've watched that in my lifetime. I've, you know, historically, there's been about a 10-year beef cycle. If you look back to like 1860 when they started, measuring these things. It's about a 10 year, 10 to 12 year fluctuation. It's a long cycle. And this one is aberrant. And I think it's because the confluence of the aging farmer, and then you have the issue of young people not getting in into farming. That's another whole discussion. When young people can't get in, old people can't get out. And so we have

We have, you know, land costs, we have, you know, introductory costs, things like that of getting in. But, you know, there are lots of ways to get in. I mean, we just had a conference here at the farm last weekend, actually, launching young farmers. We had eight that were, the slogan was, I was 20, I was 20 years old, no land, no money, and I'm full-time farming at 40 without government help. And eight of them told their stories, and it was fantastic. So you can still bootstrap, but you don't, you know, you don't have to own land.

You, you can, you can rent right now 47% of America's farmland, 47% is leased. That means whoever's managing that land doesn't own it. 47% that's close to half, close to half. And that's indicative of the aging farmer that, that, that, that can. get out because young people can't get in and so you know what we've done here is I think provide provide entrance ramps that actually work that young people can bootstrap their way in generally it doesn't involve buying land buying where I am right now on that issue is that land ownership is is now more and more

toward people who have money and want to keep it as an economic development defense, I've got money, I don't want to lose it. So I buy land as an economic defense. Land management is for economic offense. I don't, I'm not rich. I don't have enough to buy land, but I can manage it and as an offensive economic model. And that's what we promote here is an economic offense

to be able to actually make a live. having earned money by managing a farm and we do it very differently than you know conventional thinking but it works and the crazy thing is as you've told me if i i'm raising beef or some other animal i can't actually sell that to my neighbor next door like there's actually laws that prevent that there needs to be some big uh kind of a government expensive government inspection that happens before. And it really started in 1906 when Upton Sinclair wrote the jungle and exposed the corruption and the animal abuse and filth in the Chicago meatpacking industry. But it progressed until 1967, 68, the Wholesome Foods Act, that really shut things down. At that time, you know,

our county had a dozen small abattoir, small slaughterhouse operations. Many of them, were located on farms and it was just a farmer who enjoyed doing this or somebody in his family enjoyed doing this and they would just do it kind of for the community. But this has all been shut down. You can't sell meat. You can sell a live animal. You can sell a live animal and process it, but you can't sell like a cut, you know, a T-bone steak, a ribby, a pound of ground beef from an animal from any beef, pork, lamb, goat, unless is processed under federal inspection. So this has come in over the states.

Numerous states have tried to do workarounds and things. The most recent one is in New Hampshire. And the legislature actually passed a bill saying in the state of New Hampshire, we're going to allow neighbor to neighbor, you know, meat sales and the governor vetoed it. And so they had an override session, but they couldn't get the votes to override. But the whole goal of that legislation in August of 2026 was actually to force the federal government into court to go to the Supreme Court and determine that intrastate meat commerce is not covered by the constitution that's not a constitutional uh uh

proclivity of the of the federal government and so now that it you know didn't pass course that's not going to happen but it'll come back they'll be back next year and they'll be loaded you know uh loaded to go but um this this is what all of the you know numerous states Wyoming and Utah and uh Indiana Maine have these wonderful cottage food laws, you know, for neighbor-to-neighbor commerce that allows a person to take food and turn it into convenience food, processed food, without onerous government inspection. You can do it in your kitchen. The problem comes in the meat. The meat has to be, and dairy, but primarily meat has to be

inspected, has to be legal. Meat has three things. You can have it custom processed. That is, I have a steer and I take a it to a butcher and say, you know, would you kill this slaughter, it, fabricate, put it in a package. That's called custom process. In other words, I'm asking for a custom work to be done. I mean, for example, if you want to remodel your kitchen, you'd have somebody come in and custom remodel your kitchen. So in this respect, the custom work, I'm taking an animal to a professional saying, I want

you to get this animal, you know, edible for me, okay? That's custom. Now, the loophole that many farmers have used is that they'll sell an animal live. In fact, they can even sell it to four, even up to eight individuals. And those names go on that animal. This, you know, steer number 32 is owned by Jane, Mike, Bill, Amy. Okay. All right.

And that can go under this custom, this custom. exemption because it was it is technically not selling meat it's selling a live animal anyone can sell a live animal to anyone anywhere without without any inspection and so that's the loophole that many small farmers have used for a long long time but a lot of people don't want to get a quarter or a half they don't have a freezer for it they don't have enough money for it at one time and so they want two pounds of ground beef they want three rib-eye steaks. They want, all right, and they want a rump roast. And so this loophole is,

um, is onerous in that the quantities a person has to buy are, you know, a minimum of $1,000. So this creates a very narrow customer base. So that is why Congressman Thomas Massey, ever since he went to Congress has been trying to get what he calls the Prime Act. And the Prime Act would allow a state that if a state wants to allow custom processed meat to be sold by the cut, by the piece, that it's a state prerogative. We want to do this. And the federal says, we'll step aside then. We'll let you do this.

Intrastate, not interstate, but entrust. Right. And, you know, it still has not passed, but it is gradually gaining strength. You see, the problem is that the money in food is actually not in production. Today's farmer only gets 5.8 cents of the retail dollar. That means 94.2 cents. It's like a cattle farmer or beef, a beef farmer. Now, fortunately, beef is higher than that.

But you know, you've probably heard, well, there's more money in the cardboard of the Wheaties box than there is to the farmer that grew the wheat to make the Wheaties. And that's primarily true. So, you know, the average, you know, the average, The average spread, the average take of what we call the farm gate value of food is 5.8%. Just imagine this, Jan. That means we can have a national policy tomorrow. From now on we're not going to pay farmers anything.

They just work for free. It would only change the price of food 5.8%. That's amazing. So where does it all go? And 80 years ago, it was 40. It was 40 cents. Where does it all go? It goes to the processors, the distributors, the marketers, the marketers, lest anybody think

that it's evil corporations that have done this to us. No. The American people have moved from primarily domestic culinary arts, you know, fixing stuff from scratch, to now 75% of what we eat as a nation, is a country. is prepared, preserved, and packaged outside the home. It's convenience food. And so that carries not only a hefty price tag, but the more that's done to food after it leaves the farm gate,

before it enters the consumer's plate, the more money is involved in that, in what's called value adding, in value adding that product. And so if we're going to preserve farmers, and if we're going to preserve market options in the marketplace, what we desperately need is the ability of farmers to be able to value-ad-ad this product and for consumers to be able to buy from their neighbors, you know, without wrapping it in a $2 million federal inspected facility.

This is the problem. And over the century, the number of processors has dropped, drop, drop, drop. I mean, in 1906, people were accusing the meat industry of being an oligarchy. And at that time, seven companies controlled 50% of the meat supply. Seven controlled 50%. That was considered an oligarchy. Today, we have four companies controlling 85% of the meat market. And we say that's, you know, free enterprise.

Well, it's not free enterprise. It's actual capital, you know, capital cronyism. As these big companies have ensured that the regulatory climate is prejudicial to small operators and not larger ones. Talking about this prime act, right, which I understand is tucked into a farm bill that is just sort of never passing. but that's a whole whole different discussion but it's there it's there yeah yeah but it hasn't been taken out and it passed the house this could really open things up for selling beef right for like to to kind of reduce that weight if i right of me of the cost of beef tying some things together here is that right and and how and explain how that would work okay so i happen to co-own a small federal

inspected slaughterhouse up in Harrisonburg and and complying with the inspection requirements creating a has a has a plan hazardous analysis critical control point HACCP has a plan all that licensing it adds about 30 30 percent to the cost of processing and not only that but the HACCP plan in our plant where we do 50 beef a week is exactly the same at a Tyson plant that does 5,000 a day. So it costs us $600 what Tyson does for 150. And if I may jump into something just strikes me as you're saying this, right? On the one hand, if you were doing 5,000 a day, I think there's some real case to have that regulated at a high level because you can all sorts of

things can be kind of stuck through. But if you're doing 50, what is it? Did you say a week? A week. A week. You know, the basically, if you're doing something wrong, the people buying around are going to give you a piece of their mind and that'll be fixed pretty quick, right? So that's part of the difference. Scale, absolutely. Scale makes a difference. I mean, whether it's classroom size per teacher, whether it's keeping your kitchen clean versus, you know, jolly green giant green bean factory or an abattoir that's doing 5,000 a day versus, you know, 10 a day, all right? Yes, scale does, does have an effect here. The pushback, of course, in these things is always food safety.

So it's interesting that the, there have been people that under Freedom of Information Act have asked for the food safety inspection service, FSIS, federal food safety inspection service. for how many people, how many registrants have they had since 1968 that got sick or had a pathogen, had any problem with custom processed beef. So this is beef produced with no inspector. There's no inspector on site. There's nobody poking at the liver and looking inside or anything. And guess how many? Zero. Not 10, not 100, since 1968, zero, zero incidence of pathogens, recalls, sickness, or whatever

from custom. That affirms your point. These small outfits that do a few and not many, it's easier to keep them clean, and they don't have the protection of federal regulators to hide behind. What's the first thing that Whenever there's some, you know, recall, there's... I think lettuce recently? Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I'm thinking meat primarily. You know, whether it's, you know, rat pee in the peanut butter down in Georgia or, you know, a meat recall. The first thing, the CEO calls a press conference. He stands in front of those microphones with all those microphones and he says,

we have complied with all the government, you know, food safety regulations, okay? That's their first defense. A custom operator can't do that. It's their reputation. It's all on them. And so that personal responsibility, this is what I call Uberizing the food system. Okay. When you Uberize the food system by putting personal responsibility on the players,

both the consumer to find their producer and the processor, they don't want to have something bad coming out of their facility. They don't want to irritate one of their clients that brought them stuff. They don't want to irritate the possible consumer. So there's a real interconnected, relational, entwined intimacy in that transaction that doesn't exist when you go to Costco or Walmart and get it. And that's why you get zero. I mean, that's actually astonishing, right?

It is astonishing. It is astonishing. And so the whole food safety, oh, what are we going to do if, you know, is simply non-existent. It's like a canard, basically. That's what you're saying. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. Interesting. So if this legislation passes that allows this intra-state sale, you know, of cuts, right, let's say. That, that, Does that, it doesn't immediately open things up because basically people have to start up their businesses. But what, like, are people actually going to do that given the realities that you explained to me earlier? Yes. Congressman Thomas Massey told me, he said that he knows that within just weeks, if the Prime Act passed, that within weeks, he said, I have a list or something. He knows a thousand, a thousand community abattoirs would even. reopen or start new because you can open a custom house at a fraction of the cost of a

federal inspected facility. So there would be there would be ones who have closed, who have just gotten tired of owners regulations, and new ones that would be built that would start but a thousand. Now if those thousand did, you know, let's say they averaged 20 a week, that's 20,000 beef a week at 50 weeks, that's a million a year. That's a lot of beef. And somebody can say, oh, but you know, that's so small potatoes. Well, when Big Ag says scale, they're thinking consolidation, centralization, and concentration, you know, a bigger plant, a bigger cannery, a bigger, you know, it's bigger, it's bigger. But that's not the way nature scales. If If nature wants more oak, it doesn't make a great big oak tree, it makes acorns.

If nature wants more milk, it doesn't make a great big cow. It makes calves. If nature wants more tomatoes, it doesn't make a great big tomato plant. It plants seeds and makes tomatoes. Nature scales by duplication. And so this whole notion of scale by consolidation, concentration, and centralization that we have in big industrial agriculture is a completely anti-nature philosophy. It's an anti-nature mentality that that doesn't appreciate the duplication of nature. Babies, seeds, goodness,

discipleship, mentorship. I mean, this is the way nature scales. It must be really expensive, relatively speaking for you to produce your beef here in this very unique regenerative way that you do and versus you know the factory farm we substitute management for subsidized corn and soybeans essentially so again you know when you look at when you look at cost comparisons we can produce it cheaper but it's it's not much because When the feedlot beef goes, it's getting subsidized corn, subsidized soybeans, and often questionable labor. We pay an extremely high salary here for our folks, and we don't import them from outside the U.S. We grow them here at home. And we want, so we have an extensive labor component. So what we have done is we have exchanged energy intensity, pharmaceutical intensity.

You know, our cows don't do drugs. We don't vaccine. We don't medicate. We don't any of those things. They, you know, they're eating grass. No plows, no seeds, no herbicides, no chemical fertilizer. You know, when Putin invaded Ukraine and fertilizer went up 400% in all the farms, oh, no, what are we going to do?

You know, fertilizer. It didn't affect us at all because we don't use any of it. And so, so interestingly, when that happened, our steaks, ribide, tenderloin, or, you know, pork chops from pork, our prices were lower than Costco. We had people coming in our farm store saying, how can this be? Well, it's because we are not, we are resilient. We are not subject to those yo-yoing ups and downs of socio-political, geopolitical, you know, economic stuff. And I'll give you an example. The average farm in America, 50% of their expenses are for diesel fuel.

Our percentage is 5%. Hmm. Okay? So diesel could double and we'd be okay. What we put our money in is people. So we exchange all of that pharmaceutical energy, you know, capital intensity, concrete fans, all that stuff. We exchange it for management, which is why we can't necessarily do it cheaper, but we can do it much more resiliently. And resilience is as important as short-term efficiency today.

It's the difference between efficiency today and long-term effectiveness. So bottom line is it's a bit more expensive, but it's a lot more durable. Is that the bottom line? Yeah, that's a good way to say it. We're not subject, we're not nearly a subject to the ups and downs, and we're certainly not asking Trump for bailouts. Well, and, you know, I think by many means. And so let's let's talk about this.

I mean, I'm biased here. I buy beef from you for a whole because I know how you make it and it's a quality issue. Right? It's not just that the animals are treated well. I know that. Unusually well because of this people component because of the philosophy. Explain to me why people on the carnivore diet that you go to these giant conferences, first of all, why they pick beef as their number one kind of protein. I know that. That's their kind of the main thing that these carnivore people eat is beef over everything else. And number two, from that kind of quality perspective, how the beef that would be grown here,

the cows, how that's, you know, better than what you get off the feed lot. So great, great questions. So I would like to, I know you love history. So let me go back a little bit in history to help us all realize that antiquity diets, diets of antiquity, the protein was primarily either herbivore or seafood. If you lived next to the ocean, next to a lake, you know, you fished, all right?

But if you lived away, then it was the herbivore, whether it was, you know, kangaroo, wildebeest, bison, llama, alpaca, goat, lamb, camel, Okay, you know, when you look at animals that have been eaten, historically, it hasn't been chicken and it hasn't been pork. Now, there have been chicken and pork around, okay? I mean, chicken kind of developed in the jungles and the tropics, and pigs came along, especially in Europe and Italy. But what was early on was both milk and meat from the herbivore.

Why? Well, because the herbivore didn't require tillage, didn't require grain production. Think, I mean, if you look at Thomas Jefferson's farm book, if we had the same spread of prices today as Thomas Jefferson had in his day, corn and wheat would be $30 a bushel instead of, you know, $359 or, you know, $4 or $5. Well, as soon as grain becomes expensive, the omnivore becomes expensive, the chicken and the pork, because they can't just live on grass. And so the diets of antiquity were either seafood or herbivore because that's what didn't require planting grains. Grain has been the holy grail of civilization because it was always expensive. The idea of cheap grain that we've enjoyed in the last century in this country,

is because we've had cheap energy, mechanics, and we've come to a land that had legacy soil built from herbivores and perennials for millennia, that we are still exploiting today. That was such a huge resource bank account that we still haven't depleted at all. We're trying. Well, and some technological innovation, to be fair.

Oh, absolutely. I said equipment, equipment and cheap energy. Absolutely. All that has enabled us to, for the first time in human history. I mean, literally, which is a blip in geopolitical time to have cheap grain. It's never been possible in human history, but now we have it. And so, the carnivore diet is going back to an antiquity. what they're saying is we are far closer to our ancestors of 5,000 years ago.

Metabolically. Metabolically. Then we are to Spock in Star Trek, drinking, you know, some sort of little, you know, artificial lab synthesized nutrients. And so that's why the herbivore features so strongly in this is because it is the, it is The herbivore is the nutrient dense component of all these diets of antiquity. Now, what's interesting is, so what's the difference between one steak

and another steak depending on how it's raised. So the bio nutrient food association founded by Dan Kittridge up in Massachusetts has now spent almost a decade looking at nutrients in various foods. And what they're trying to do is come up with a handheld wand using light that you could wand over food

and it would give you green light, yellow light, red light, you know, with different relative amounts of like 150 nutrients, okay? The first one they did was I think carrots. And they found that in order to get the nutrition of the best carrot, you would have to eat like 50 of the poorest carrot. So it's a massive range that we don't expect basically. You couldn't tell it by looking at them.

And in fact, it was so far different they thought something was wrong with their machinery. So they did broccoli. Let's try broccoli. Same thing. A 50-fold difference. So the next one they did was beef. And they've done, I don't know, 500 samples of beef. and again, huge, you know, huge differences.

But here's the interesting thing. Out of all their data, they asked the question, what is the single most consistent litmus test for whether this steak is better than this steak? I mean, nutritionally, nutritionally. Had nothing to do with breed? You know, all the breeds, oh, Angus is better, Shorthorn is better.

You know, they all had nothing to do with breed, nothing to do with climate, nothing to do with age. The only consistent factor in making this steak more nutritional than this steak was how many different plants did the animal eat? And so on our farm, we haven't planted a seed in 65 years. I mean, we haven't planted a seed. We let grow whatever's going to grow. We love to see these variety of plants in our fields.

and the cows will, they will select, like they're at a sworgas board, they will select different things at different times of the year, and in different, every plant has a palatibility moment, and then it maybe gets too mature. And so we move the cows every day to a fresh, what we call a salad bar, which indicates this variety that they get, and they get to choose that salad bar in what we call, mob stocking herbivorous solar conversion, lignified carbon, sequestration, fertilization.

That's farming, basically. Yeah. Okay. Listen, this has been a wonderful conversation. I can't wait to eat some of your beef. A quick final thought as we finish. Generally, all the things that we find frustrating, people step up. and solve, fix those, fix those issues.

And they fix them sooner when the government doesn't pick the winners. And people are actually able to exercise their freedom of choice as voluntary, you know, participants in the great drama of life to be able to bring to whatever the frustration is, their own innovation, their own ideas, and their own free thoughts. That's the way they get solved. Well, Joel Salatin, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. It's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Joel Salatin me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.

I'm your host, Jania Kellek.