American Thought Leaders - No Chemicals, No Vaccines, No Subsidies: Inside Joel Salatin’s Farming Revolution

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

Joel Salatin is one of America’s most revered regenerative farmers. At Polyface Farms, he avoids synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and vaccines. He doesn’t take any government subsidies. And he’s been a major source of inspiration for many seeking to build farms of their own with symbiotic, sustainable ecosystems—ones that enrich rather than deplete the soil.For decades, he’s been fighting government overregulation of small food producers.Salatin is featured in multiple documentaries and is the author of 17 books, including “Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front” and “Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times

We use compost, not chemicals. We don't vaccinate. We don't medicate. We move the animals around. They get salivary. They have an immune system. In this episode, I sit down with Joel Saliton, popularly known as the Lunatic Farmer. He's the owner of Polyface Farm, an author of 17 books, including Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, War Stories from the Local Food Front. The last 24 months, the U.S. has killed 166 million chickens. The great majority of them have not been sick. There is zero efficacy for this mass slaughter of the healthy birds. We dive into alternative solutions to bird flu and Joel Salatin's innovative approaches to farming.

I can remember very well as a child, we never heard the phrase, food allergy, celiac disease, gluten intolerance, or Listeria, Fisteria, Campylobacter, E.coli, Salmonella. And I would suggest that that is nature's lexicon on its knees begging us, enough, please. The question is, are we willing to listen? This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Are we willing to listen? This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. You may have noticed it's Shen Yun season again, but I wanted to tell you a little bit personally about why I love this show and go see it every year. Aside from being beautiful, it's actually a homegrown American dream success story. All things from traditional China were under attack during the Cultural

Revolution and have kind of really remained that way since. Traditional Chinese dance was almost destroyed, but parts of it actually survived. So what the Shen Yun people did is in upstate New York, they brought together the people that actually remembered what it was all about and kind of rekindled it, put it back together, re-birthed it in upstate New York. They started with one company in 2006. Today, there's eight of them touring the world. A million people see it every year. Just think about that. In under 20 years, pulling your boots up, no government funding, and they brought back traditional Chinese dance to the world. The tagline is China before communism. Something speaks very deeply to

me personally. The Chinese Communist Party has been trying to destroy this group, prevent them from performing all these years. And over the last year, the New York Times has even been going after Shen Yun, using a lot of the same talking points that the Chinese Communist Party has been using. And with these increased attacks, I particularly feel motivated personally to invite you to see Shen Yun and actually see for yourself what it's all about, how amazing it is, how inspiring it is. So to find out where Shen Yun is performing near you, check out Showtimes at ShenYun.com.

They're still performing at Lincoln Center in New York City as we speak until April 12th. You can use the code JAN25 to get theater ticketing fees waived. Again, that's JAN25. I can't stress how highly I appreciate this show and how much I think you will love it. Joel Salatin, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. Joel, so why are egg prices so high? Give me the rundown. Well, the egg prices are high because in the last 24 months, the U.S. has killed 166 million chickens.

Most of them have been egg layers. There have been a few meat chickens and a few turkeys, but basically it's been egg layers in the last 24 months. Maybe a million of them have been sick. The great majority of them have not been sick. And we don't even know if they were sick and got better, or if their immune system was better and they just didn't get sick, or if they would have eventually gotten sick. We don't even ask those kinds of questions because our policy is a stamp out policy.

If there's one chicken in a flock, every chicken dies, even the ones, the survivors. And there's not been a single flock in the world that has had a 100% sickness rate. Even the worst flocks have only gone to 90%. So 10% have been survivors. As a farmer and somebody who cares about genetic adaptation, the worst thing you ever want to do when you have a sickness is kill the survivors. You want to breed them so that you eventually get better immunological function. So we've done reporting on this. Obviously, I think it was on the front page of our national edition last week. And the response was, you know, that there's a regret in doing the culling,

but there just isn't a better policy. I mean, that's what we've heard. So there are numerous alternatives surfacing. Hypoclorus is one, CDS is one, there are some homeopathic remedies, but the USDA refuses to study any of these because they're completely beholden to the pharmaceutical companies. And this whole thing has made me question just how much power do the pharmaceutical companies have when there are efficacious alternatives that can't even see the light of day? Maybe just start by explaining what these alternatives are.

These are antimicrobials, antivirals. They're used primarily in slaughterhouses for you know if you're organic certified you don't want to use chlorine and real you know toxic um uh antimicrobials these have become darlings in that. This stuff you can drink it I mean we're back to a very similar uh similar narrative as COVID you know when ivermectin hydroxychloroquine were demonized. And we're seeing the same thing with this bird flu. There are other things. And interestingly, virtually all the medical doctors who were censored and deplatformed,

who dared to question Dr. Fauci during COVID, are all in agreement, as far as I know, everyone I've seen, they're all in agreement that we shouldn't be killing the survivors. You know, we should be cultivating those and breeding those. There's a kind of a bird flu working group that's been convened in kind of high levels, and I'm part of that working group. And one of the things that I've brought to that group is not only let's not kill the survivors, which everybody's pretty much in agreement on,

but the other thing is to allow the owner of the chickens to determine the remedy. Right now, if government agents discover bird flu on your premises, even one chicken among 100,000, all the birds are, they kind of go out of your hands, you know. And in fact, in our regulatory environment, they talk about my chickens being part of the national flock, or my cows being part of the national herd. This is new terminology in the last 20 years that now permeates our government documents as opposed to the farmers chickens, the farmers cows, or the ranchers

cows. Now we have this kind of collectivist socialistic lingo permeating the documents. And so what I've suggested is, how about we allow the owner of the chicken to determine the remedy? OK, all right, so I've got a bird or birds with bird flu. Maybe I want to ride it out, because a lot of flocks, there's one or two, but then it doesn't go any farther. It just doesn't go any farther. So there are examples of that happening. Absolutely, absolutely, yeah, yeah.

And. Where, like, I hadn't heard of that, so you know. Well, there's everything from, you know, from 5% to 90%, so maybe I wanna ride it out, you know. I'll take the risk, and you don't have to pay me for the dead birds, I'll take the response, I'll take the loss. Maybe I want to try one of these other kind of alternative

antimicrobial, antiviral. You put them in the drinking water, OK? Maybe I want to try that. Maybe I want to do a homeopathic remedy, something else. But let the owner of the chicken determine what to do. There is zero efficacy for this mass slaughter of the healthy birds. There is zero efficacy for this mass slaughter of the healthy birds. There is zero efficacy. Here's the thing, Dr. Zach Bush talks about this a lot. All beings in nature, from viruses to microbes to chickens to

humans, all beings in trees, all beings in nature are adapting. I mean we're not machines, we're not, you know, a car doesn't adapt. Hot day, cold day, flu, thunderstorm, car doesn't adapt. It just, you know, it's a hunk of metal that sits there. Whereas living things do adapt. We know that from epigenetics and DNA. We know that we adapt. And I mean that's why you know Eskimos can handle so much colder than a person in the tropics you know they go to the Eskimos and freeze to death and the Eskimos come to the tropics to the equator and you know are hot. So we do we do adapt and nature adapts and so this

idea of killing all the surviving birds it deprives our chickens of being able to adapt to the virus. In other words, the virus is trying to get stronger. It wants to, it's a predator, it wants to kill, let's say. And the chicken, well, it wants to survive. And so you have this tension. This is the way all things are. You have these tensions and

Both of them are trying to adapt if we if we kill the surviving chickens We've now deprived our poultry from their genetic adaptivity to the To the virus and so all we hear all the time from the industry is, well, you know, the virus is mutating. Oh, it's a mutating virus. Well, chickens mutate too. So allowing nature to to adapt and be malleable like it is to me makes a lot

more sense in letting the dynamic order and the spontaneity of adaptation of living beings to express itself. How many chickens do you have? So we have about 4,000 layers which are the most vulnerable based on statistics and then you know we'll have at any one time we'll have somewhere around four or five thousand meat chickens as well. So this is not a backyard operation, but it's not a Tyson either. We call ourselves a toddler.

We're bigger than backyard, but a lot smaller than the industry. The other thing is that that many of these, the tests that the government agents are using is the PCR test, which is dubious at best, but is being used at 45 cycles. So think about these cycles as being like a magnifying, a 10th grade biology, and you could rotate your little microscope you know 50 power 100 power so that's what these cycles are and Massachusetts Department of Agriculture is the first state to come out to to publicly question impune the 45 cycle deal they say 30 cycles is the max if you go over 30 then you can you can literally find go over 30, then you can literally find

bird flu, detritus, you can find it in your hair, you know, your underwear, on your spoon, you can find it in a feather, you can find it anywhere that you really want to find it. Tell me more about your farm, and clearly there must be some pigs on the farm as well, given your tie. Yeah, there are, we have pigs. So our farm is in Virginia Shenandoah Valley, and we're in pastured livestock.

So what that means is rather than being in a confinement house, our animals are on pasture. So we have grass-finished beef. We have pigurator pork. That means they're able to aerate and do things. We have pastured chickens, lamb, rabbit, duck, and turkey. And everything is on pasture and moves, moves, you know, daily or almost daily from, you know, pasture to pasture.

And this keeps them sanitary, it lets them eat green material, some salad, and gives them a clean, new place to lounge. So they get their bedding changed every day. And it's completely different than a confinement, what we call a confinement factory house, where the animals don't get fresh air, they don't get sunshine, and they're confined in a psychologically stressful, emotional, deprive situation. And they never get green material.

They never get grass. Chicken never gets bugs. A chicken can't scratch. We believe very strongly that a pig should be able to express its pigness. We want to respect the pigness of the pig, the chickenness of the chicken, because that is the ethical moral foundation on which we hang respecting and honoring the Tomness of Tom and the Mariness of Mary.

It's how we respect and honor the least of these. It creates an ethical framework on which we respect and honor the citizenry. A culture that doesn't ask how to make happy pigs will very soon not ask how to make happy children, happy adults. Why did they call you a lunatic? Well I took on that mantra years and years ago because I was getting so much heat from the conventional agriculture system. You know, we use compost, not chemicals. We don't vaccinate. We don't medicate.

We again, we move the animals around. They get salivary, they have an immune system. And so I was getting so much heat from the you know conventional system I mean I was called a bioterrorist I've been called you know typhoid Mary a starvation advocate because we all know that if we quit using chemicals you know we'd all half of us would die there wouldn't be enough food and so after one particularly whatever aggressive phone call I hung up, I remember I was sitting there and I said, well, I can either be depressed and frustrated about this or hey, let's have

fun with it, let's embrace it. Sure, I'm a lunatic, let's have fun with it. And I just grabbed that mantra and it stuck and now I realize that that was a stroke of genius because if you Google lunatic farmer there is not another lunatic farmer on the planet. It's pretty cool to come up with a moniker that nobody else uses and nobody else has ever come up with. So I have fun with it. Of course. Of course I'm a lunatic. And it allows you to enjoy the tension rather than whatever, you know, feel angry, vengeful or upset about it. You know, as you're discussing this, I can't help but think of your book, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal. Right.

Right. It sounds like this, when you were in the throes of this, you got your moniker. That is also lunacy. If you think about the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins' recent five-point plan to deal with bird flu, one of those points is to completely shut down or restrict visitors on farms. Well, we believe very strongly that people should be able to go visit their food. I mean look, if you've got to put on a hazmat suit and walk through sheep dip to go visit your food, you might not want to eat it. And so we have a very open-door policy. We want city people to come and

see how we raise chickens, how we do pigs, how we do cows. So this kind of new aggressive position that nobody can come and visit a farm and every vehicle has to be sprayed off with disinfectant has to be sprayed off with disinfectant going in and sprayed off with disinfectant going out and this is quite discomforting to a place like ours that has built our brand and our reputation on transparency. If there's one thing we need in our food and farm sector and our agriculture it's not more opaqueness and hiding behind spray trucks and antimicrobials. It's it's transparency letting people come and see you know how chickens are raised and see what's going on. I would suggest that if we if we had more transparency maybe we'd have better farming. So one of our staff is a big fan of the Jeremy

Clarkson show. And she mentioned to me actually that he's been inspired by you apparently. Just tell me a bit about your relationship. Well, I've been at this a long time. And I'm just grateful and blown away by the number of people I run into now around the world who have read my, I mean I've been, I've written 16 books, number 17 is coming out this year and I've been doing this a long time. I mean the first, my first little pastor poultry manual came out in 1991. It's hard to believe that it's been way over 30 years since that first manual came out on how to have a small-scale, profitable,

pastured meat chicken enterprise, broilers. I travel the world and speak at conferences. The tribe, if I may use the term, the tribe that is in this space when I say this space I mean the space that says let's not use chemicals. Let's not use Pharmaceuticals, let's race animals and plants in a more natural order That that group of people is fairly small.

It's a small tribe. And so what happens when you start down that path, you know, you run into people, the same kind of people. And so I know that my writing and my columns and my speaking have gone whatever, far beyond what I could imagine. And I'm just thrilled. I have just so many testimonial letters. You know, I was able to quit my town job and come back to the farm full time, thanks to your teaching, your models. And that's really gratifying. Yeah. When you were describing how you farm, I understand that you're doing regenerative agriculture, right?

And they're moving. These animals are moving. And that motion is actually they leave something for the others and so on and so forth. That's this whole project. Tell me a little bit about regenerative agriculture, because apparently Jeremy Clarkson has actually started regenerative on his apparently Jeremy Clarkson has actually started regenerative

on his farm now as well. So I've been in this space long enough to have watched the natural farming, sustainable farming, organic farming, now it's regenerative farming. So about every 10 years the old buzzword wears out and there's got to be a new one. So again, I get to be the lunatic. So when people say, what kind of farming do you do? I like to kind of rattle the cage and say profitable, profitable. Well, that's a new concept, profitable farming, without any government subsidies, by the way.

And so I have fun with it. But the basic concept is that you're studying creation's pattern and order and trying to duplicate that on a domestic scale. So I'll just give you an example. So on our farm, you know, we're asking, well, what do we notice when we look at animals in nature? Well, they move. They're not confined in houses, in little cubicles with their tails cut off and all

this. No, no, no, they actually move. So just the idea of moving animals, that choreography, if you will. I mean, think about the Serengeti. What you see is movement. The animals aren't sedentary. That's one of the things that separates them from plants. They move around.

And so as soon as you say, well, animals move, oh, well, okay, now we need to be able to provide shelter for them that's portable. We need to provide shelter for them that's portable, we need to provide water to them that's portable, feed that's portable, and control, you know, because Starbucks doesn't want our cows down on their parking lot, okay, so we gotta keep them home. And so you have these things that are a natural,

you know, a natural outgrowth of a simple phrase, animals move. And so our farms, whatever, creativity and innovations that we've done from, you know, egg mobiles and gobbledygos and, you know, and all the things that we've done have not come because we sat around in a room and, you know and had a focus group on how could we be different? Rather it comes from a very strategic understanding animals move, so how do we duplicate that migratory, that movement choreography and what are the symbiotic relationships. For example, in nature, you know, the wildebeest or the Cape buffalo don't get grubicides and parasiticides. Well, how do they stay healthy? Birds, birds follow them. Birds, you know, the egret on the rhino's nose, they pick out the little

bugs and things and they scratch through the dung and spread that out so the sun can solarize it and it covers more ground. And so we follow our cow herd with egg mobiles, portable chicken houses. The chickens then scratch through the cow patties, eat out the fly larvae, disinfect it for the cows the next time they come through and you have this very natural cycle.

So while the average farm is shooting their cows up with grubicides and parasiticides, we simply collect thousands of dollars' worth of eggs as a byproduct of our pasture sanitation program. And so that's the way we duplicate these systems. I mean, that's fascinating. Yeah, I can give you a couple more. Let's take the cow. That's the way we duplicate these systems. That's fascinating. Yeah, I can give you a couple more.

Let's take the cows. I mean, cows are herbivores. But you've got to realize that for, oh, 20 years maybe, our agriculture experts took farmers like me to free steak dinners to teach us this new way of growing cows where we grind up dead cows and we cook it and then we feed that back to our cows in their feed lots. And I looked at this as well as other people that agree, that think like I do, and we looked around and we said, well, where on the planet do herbivores eat carrion? They don't.

They're herbivores. They're plant eaters. They don't eat meat. And so our farm, as well as others like us, didn't buy into that narrative while the rest of the world did. And 30 years after that, we had bovine spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow. I didn't know that mad cow would happen in 30 years, but I knew that this was chaos. It was not ordered.

It did not comport with any pattern that you could see in nature. And so for me, that was enough. But we have this Jurassic Park mentality in our agriculture elite circles. If you remember the movie Jurassic Park and the scientist is euphoric over what he's created with these dinosaurs and their eating cars and people, mayhem and destroying the planet.

And the journalist, who's of course the alter ego in the movie, gets in the face of the scientist and says, but sir, just because we can, should we? That's a pregnant question. And that should be asked at every technological advance, advance that we make make because we're really smart. We're made in the image of God. We've got these big brains. My dad used to say, we're so smart we can overrun our headlights. In other words, we can invent things that we can't spiritually, emotionally, or physically

metabolize. We invent this thing and then we spend two generations trying to figure out how to handle what we invented. The DDT, the monosodium glutamate, the hydrogenated vegetable oil. It would behoove us to come at this gently and not like a bunch of swashbuckling, you know, conquistadors walking into sacred ground. I mean, you know, we've only cataloged and named 10 percent of the microorganisms in soil. Think about that. Only 10 percent. 90 percent, we don't know what they do, we don't know their name, we don't know their function.

And yet we come to the soil and said, hey, we'll just put some intravenous synthetic nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, and voila. You know, we'll have food. And suddenly, our food is a quarter as nutritious as it was 100 years ago. Our broccoli's less nutritious. Our carrot's less nutritious.

And we can find these animals in these factory houses and suddenly we have this new lexicon. I can remember very well as a child we never heard the phrase food allergy. We never heard the phrase, you know, celiac disease or gluten intolerance or Listeria, Fisteria, Campylobacter, E. coli, Salmonella. We never heard those words and I would suggest that that lexicon, that new lexicon is nature's lexicon on its knees begging us enough, please.

You know, you've disrespected if you've abused us enough. And the question is, are we willing to listen to nature's voice? I think it's incontrovertible that the advent of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and so forth spurred this revolution in food production that fed a lot more people. You would agree with that, right? No, that's not true. It was essentially cheap energy, petroleum that allowed us to plant closer. But the actual plant development and the synthetic fertilizer was unnecessary if we had cared for our soil like we should have, but we did not. I did an interesting speech one time on would Thomas Jefferson have had a Tyson Chicken House?

And he certainly would have because the four pillars of the industrial agriculture system were very much in vogue with Thomas Jefferson. Annuals, rather than perennials, annuals were the holy grail, you know, grain production, that gave us something to export. Soil fertility had to come from offsite. You couldn't generate it on site, it had to come from offsite. And then you had, you know, the idea of cheap labor. Of course, they had slave labor today. A lot of our cheapest labor in the country is labor on farms, farm labor. And so what you had there, you had the development of those pillars of our current industrial food system. But the fact is that the gift of Sir Albert Howard who gave us scientific aerobic composting

over his career from 1920 to 1940, if we had had a Manhattan project for compost, not only would we have fed the world, we would have done it without three-legged salamanders, infertile frogs, and a dead zone the size of Rhode Island and the Gulf of Mexico. I guess it's the Gulf of America now, isn't it? Because of the runoff of fertilizer, that's what you're saying, right? Yeah, yeah. Because people didn't, farmers didn't take care of their soil, and they were plowing steep hillsides,

weren't caring about erosion, and certainly weren't running a carbon-centric cycle. And so all those things caught up with us in the dust bowl and all the devastation of the Depression era and pre-1940. And so it wasn't that we needed chemical fertilizer or Norman Borlaug to develop a shorter wheat variety. The problem was that we were not farming well for a very, very long time.

So this is, as Alan Savery, a godfather of holistic management says, agriculture has been destroying land a lot longer than chemicals have been around. I mean, you can look historically at the great empire, Greek, Roman. They start with fertile soils, and they end with infertile soils.

And people knew. There were people. There were clarion calls in ancient days. And one of the best is the Chinese, you know, farmers of 20 centuries, you know, where the Chinese actually did human manure recycling. They made on the highways, they had little potties and they would actually adorn them with flowers to a come use my you know use my to get the fertility back onto the fields and so that's one reason why

China was able to beat many of the other civilizations for a long time I mean they kinda lost the race in the last you know half century but but up until then they were holding their own quite well, as opposed to a lot of other civilizations, because of the commitment to recycling all human and animal manure and using the biomass correctly. That's fascinating. It's something I didn't know about China.

So this is something I'm going to be looking at more extensively after after our interview. There's a book book titled Farmers of 40 Centuries and it kind of documents. That's where I'm getting this from up until you know about 1930 or so. or so, the multifunctional rice paddy with ducks, rice, and arugula. And so arugula around the edge gave the people greens and then the ducks ate the snails that ate the rice and so the ducks laid eggs and made meat from the snails that affected the rice which then their manure made the rice grow better and made meat from the snails that affected the rice, which then their manure made the rice grow better, and the rice fed the snails to feed the ducks. I mean, these were beautiful antiquity systems that were very symbiotic and functional. I mean, it should give us all pause to realize that 500 years ago, North America produced

more food than it does today. How do you measure that, Ethan? So you measure it by the amount of bodies that were eating food. And so it wasn't all eaten by people, although we now know by guns, germs, and steel, and 1491, 1492, there's been a lot of archaeological, anthropological work done to demonstrate that 500 years ago, Nebraska and Kansas, which are, you know, low populations today, but those two states 500 years ago had as many people in them as they do today. So you know, 90% of the North American population, the indigenous population, died between 1492 and 1600 when Jamestown was founded, 90% of

the Native American population died. And that's why it seemed like a big open, you know, a big open manifest destiny. It seemed like that. But that was just, that had just happened in the last century. So there were one to two hundred million bison, there were two million wolves, each eating twenty pounds of meat a day. There were birds, passenger pigeons, Audubon recorded in his diary said, you know, I couldn't see the sun for three days because the flock of birds,

you know, blocked out the sun. That's before Tyson and Cargill and, you know, factory chicken houses. There were 200 million beavers, 200 million beavers, and they ate as many vegetables, because they're herbivores, they ate as much vegetable material as all the humans in North America today. And so it's hard for us to just, and I haven't even talked about elk and deer, bear, I mean the Lewis and Clark expedition, they said they said they could not go one mile without encountering a bear. Bears have big appetites. You know, they eat a lot of stuff. So, you know, imagine, you know, every square mile having a couple of bears. I mean, that's a lot of food.

And so, you know, we need to just kind of, I think, back down from our notion that our human cleverness has somehow, you know, outfoxed the provision of nature. I think that's important to appreciate and to come to this gently and humbly and realize that our heads and our hands that have exploited, and I would even use the word raped, that have exploited and I would even use the word raped, our resource base, can now heal it. We can now heal it.

And that's what we've done at our farm. We came in 1961. I was just four. Dad and mom got the farm. It was nothing but a gullied rock pile. We had big areas, a quarter, half an acre that were just nothing but rock where, you know, three to five feet of topsoil had washed off over, you know, 100 years, 150 years of plowing.

And, you know, when Governor Spotswood of Virginia in about 1740, he had these buddies. He called them the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, and he was concerned about some Germans and stuff coming into the Shenandoah Valley behind the Blue Ridge Mountains, and so he was afraid the British were gonna lose that at the time.

At the time, Virginia went all the way to the Mississippi River, because we didn't know what was out there. And so he sent these buddies, Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, out to the valley to scope it out. They spent about not quite two weeks and they wrote that everywhere they rode they could take the grass and tie it

in a knot above the horse's saddle. It was a magnificent silvo pasture maintained by the Native Americans with fire, strategic fire. And so we, you know, when the Europeans came in and began settling that with the plow and inverted that deep, that huge vegetative canopy, protective canopy over the soil, the Europeans who came from a more temperate area where there was more rainfall and the rain fell gently, you know, Great Britain, misty, on misty, moisty morning when foggy was the weather, alright, and so you had a more temperate environment which is gentler on the soil.

Where we are in Virginia and much of the mid-Atlantic region in the U.S., where, you know, rain comes in the summer in thunderstorms, you know, an inch in 30 minutes and pounds. And so you want this, you know, you want this vegetative cover to protect the soil. But anyway, it washed off. Well, today, today, here we are 65 years later, and those solid rock areas now have, you know, 12 to 14 to 16 inches of soil on them that have happened in my lifetime. That's how dramatic the healing can be. This is not a lost cause.

This is not a lost cause. And that's the ultimate hope of our day. The term stewardship of the land comes to mind. Yes. Right. And that's interesting. You did say we comes to mind. Yes. Right. And it's interesting, you did say we have to be more humble. I was thinking about that, that there can be a kind of hubris with our incredible technological prowess. And just because you know how to do something doesn't mean you should do something, the combination of that, and that there is some things to be learned from the traditional ways.

Not only are you into changing things in terms of how farming is done, but in terms of how people deal with food, just that very idea. I mean, you're the author of the Food Emancipation Proclamation, or you're the primary evangelist. Tell me about this. What does that even mean? Since the Food Safety Inspection Service was put in by Teddy Roosevelt in 1908, after 1906's Upton Sinclair book, The Jungle, which exposed the abuses in the Chicago butchering

slaughterhouses. Since we've had the FSIS, there's been an incremental move by government regulatory agents to criminalize and prohibit direct neighbor-to-neighbor food commerce. All right? So, let me give you an example. prohibit direct neighbor to neighbor food commerce. All right. So let me give you an example. So we have a lady in our church. We all call her Aunt Grace.

We love this lady. She's got a big garden, some chickens, and she loves cooking. And so at every church potluck, she brings a chicken pot pie. It's the first thing gone at every buffet. And we all love her to death. Well next week we've got visitors coming. Some family coming. They're coming for two or three days. Well we're busy. We don't have time to cook some special food for them. So we want to go to Aunt Grace to have to see would you cook a couple of these pot pies that we love so dearly.

We'll pay you 20 bucks or whatever you say. A piece, by the way, she just became a widow, she just lost her husband. So she's kind of looking for, you know, some things to, you know, keep her occupied, purpose in new life, and monetize this love of domestic culinary arts, okay? And so we go to her, and would you make us a couple pot pies so we got food for these guests that are coming because we're too busy to make it for them. We go to church together, we've been in our house together, she's babysat our kids. No, that's illegal. It's illegal for her to make a pot pie for us, to feed our guests.

Now, that's wrong. We should be able to engage in a freedom of choice as consenting adults transaction with Aunt Grace without a government agent in between that. Now, I'm not suggesting that she should be free to, know whatever you know sell them to Sri Lanka or put them in Walmart or Costco okay but I am suggesting that neighbor to neighbor friend to friend we should be able to engage in a in a consensual and I'm using powerful words because because because it's important to understand in our country right

now we love freedom of choice. We have choice in the bathroom, choice in the bedroom, choice in the womb, but no choice in the kitchen. And people say, well, I go to Walmart, look at all the choice I have. Yeah, but that's a very narrow funnel. All that food comes through an industrial funnel with a bureaucrat oversight that doesn't allow for the kind of localized, customized, non-MSG ingredients. Right now, for example, we shoot several deer every year, deer season.

We can take these deer up. There's an Amish Mennonite outfit near us. And we can take that deer up, add some little bit of pork to it and they can make, it is the best summer sausage, I mean I could live on this, I could just live on this the rest of my life. Best summer sausage in the world but they can't do one pound of beef because it's illegal. They can do a million pounds of venison, because that's not in commerce.

But because beef is a commercial product, they can't do beef. So what we have right now, we have many people that are wanting clean food, safe food, stable, secure food from their neighbors and can't get it because of prohibitive regulatory infrastructure and paperwork requirements. We have farmers desperate to be able to get a retail dollar, you know, to stay in business, they can't sell it.

And we have a rural-urban divide that desperately needs the connectivity of direct food commerce to occur. And so the idea of a food emancipation proclamation to be able to unfetter, unshackle, and de-enslave our food system to this federal, bureaucratic, regulatory intervention so that you and I can engage in a transaction voluntarily to choose our fuel for our microbiome so we can choose our fuel to go shoot, pray, and preach. I mean, those are guaranteed to us in the Bill of Rights, but what good is it to have the freedom to go shoot, pray, preach, and assemble if I can't choose my body's fuel to give me the energy to go, you know, do these things.

And so, food, the ability to transact a food interaction without a bureaucrat involved is I think it's foundational to solving multiple threads. The rural economy, entrepreneurial agriculture, food choice, food stability, all those things happen when we de-enslave. See, in 1906 when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, seven companies controlled 50 percent of America's meat supply. Today, four companies control 85 percent. That's how much centralization and concentration there is in the food industry, which we saw manifested in 2020 when store shelves went empty.

I mean, just think about it. If we had had 300,000 neighborhood community processing facilities, you know, abattoirs functioning instead of 3,000 mega facilities, would we have had as big a hiccup in 2020? Of course not. Another element of this in our country, hazardous substances are controlled on all levels. The buyer, the seller, and the user. In other words, I can't use fentanyl, I can't use methamphetamine, prescription drugs, I can't buy them, I can't sell them, I can't use them without a prescription. So you have this pretty broad umbrella over these hazardous things.

But in food, it's only on the seller. I can give you raw milk. I can give you homemade charcuterie, bologna, and my chicken pot pie. She could give these to me. And I can feed them to my children. In fact, I can even buy them if she's willing to be a criminal and sell them. So there's no prohibition on on buying it. There's no prohibition on using it and no prohibition on feeding it to my children. The only prohibition is on selling it. So if it's really that hazardous, if raw milk is really that

hazardous, if Aunt Grace's pot pie is really that hazardous, she shouldn't be able to give it away, I shouldn't be able to eat it, and I certainly shouldn't be able to feed it to my children. This shows the great hypocrisy, the inconsistency of these food, I call it food police, that they're only taking the prohibitory side against the seller and not any other user. So is it really dangerous? No, it's not dangerous. This is about regulating market access. It's not about protecting people. It's about regulating market access.

You know, something just struck me here, just thinking back to talking about the egg prices and the mass culling of chickens. Perhaps the philosophy is that we're doing this just to be extra safe. We're doing this to be extra safe. We're just on the off chance that the pot pie might be problematic or whatever it is that that that's being sold, we're gonna make sure that doesn't

happen and or on the off chance that the all these chickens will die and you know, it's going to spread we're going to call all the chickens. Is that I don't know if that's would be the smartest way to think about things, but that strikes to me as a comment. It's fair, and you're exactly encapsulating the attitude, the mentality of, I would say, the people who would disagree with we're eating is safe. I mean, this is the maha movement, all right? The whole maha movement. I mean, 70, whatever, 75% of all the food Americans eat now is ultra processed, which

by definition means you can't make it in your kitchen and you can't pronounce the ingredients. In 1940, America consumed one million pounds of monosodium glutamate, a known carcinogen. Today we're consuming 300 million pounds of monosodium glutamate, all with the blessing of the food police. And so this is Robert F. Kennedy's mantra. The U.S. allows 10,000 food additives, the European Union only allows 400. And so I would beg to suggest that the government sanctioned American food.

I mean, look, the track record is horrendous. The government told us to quit eating butter and eat hydrogenated vegetable oil. For how many decades? The government gave us a food pyramid in 1979 that put Cheerios and Twinkies on the bottom as foundational. Makes no distinction between. Well, or just to be fair, or just grains and carbohydrates and so forth.

Yes, but they absolutely did not use their bully pulpit like they could have to differentiate the nutritional differences between the calories of a Cheerio versus a whole sourdough grain bread, for example. If we want to be as charitable as we can be, we'll say that was a gross oversight, okay? We won't say there was a nefarious agenda, we will just say it was a gross oversight. But the thing I'm suggesting is that while the food safety aspect is the quick pushback of many people, I would suggest that

America right now has probably the most unsafe food in the world because of, we've got MRSA and C. diff which are directly a result of subtherapeutic antibiotic use in the animal industry. I mean right now with all the drugs that are used in this country still way more than half of them are used in livestock. The question is who's drugging your dinner? And so we have these other issues. Here's the real crux of the question though. Are you willing to let me try? Are you willing to let me experiment?

Right now, if my county or my city wanted to have a food and match the price of proclamation and just, let's try it. We can't even try it because the federal you know bureaucrats will come in quickly and and make it prohibited put people in jail. So you know we can't we can't even try it. I think that the very notion that Aunt Grace is less trustworthy than a federal government agency creates a philosophical situation in your head that people that I have a relationship with

and local business people somehow are less trustworthy than a nameless, faceless Washington bureaucrat. I just don't think that makes sense philosophically. Transparency wins opaqueness. It beats opaqueness every day. And not only that, but risk is subjective. I think people subject themselves to risk every day. I mean, drinking Coca-Cola, that's risky behavior. But you can drink, you know, it's perfectly fine to feed your child four cans of Coca-Cola a day, but one teaspoon of raw milk, you know, it's perfectly fine to feed your child, you know, four cans of Coca-Cola a day, but one teaspoon of raw milk, you know, that might kill them.

And so how we develop a culture in which we exercise decision-making muscle. See, I think discernment is like a muscle, discernment. How do we get people to be wise to make discerning decisions? Well, we give them the opportunity to make a decision and then live through the consequences of that decision. That's how we develop discernment muscles. And what's happened is, since every morsel of food has to have a government stamp on it, we have reduced nutritional discernment in the culture to a new nadir of ignorance because, oh, government says it's okay, it must be fine.

So I don't have to think about this anymore. You know, we send our kid to school, oh, I don't have to think about my kid's education, they're in school, that's just fine. And then suddenly, you know, COVID comes and the kids are home and we're looking over their shoulders and say, what? They're teaching that in school? And we have a Northern Virginia revolt, you know, that happened in 2020, the last gubernatorial election. And so giving people decision-making capacity by allowing the lunatic fringe freedom to bring creativity and innovation

to the culture is the very foundation of how you punch through status quo problems. Status quo problems never get solved from the status quo, from the top down. They always come percolating from the bottom up, from people whose livelihoods and relationships and equity are not tied in to keeping the status quo in place. That's how true innovation happens. I want to run a couple of things by you here. I'm going to sort of go my my team prepared these here. These are some quotes from from Jeremy Clarkson. I just want to tell you if you agree or disagree and you're welcome to comment. OK. Okay. Number one, I'm not a farmer. I'm a man who's been told what to do by a government that couldn't organize a piss up in a brewery.

I think he's pretty much on target there. Yes. Yes. Which is why I don't participate in any government programs, none. And I'm not trying to say this spitefully or mean, I don't hate. We're building a parallel universe. The universe that the USDA agenda has built is not the universe I want to live in. And I desperately need the freedom to build a parallel universe.

When Governor Tim Kaine was governor of Virginia, toward the end of his gubernatorial run, he wanted to come out and visit the farm. He's now a senator, Senator Tim Kaine. And he came out with his, you know, his big security detail. I put him on a hay wagon. Daniel, our son, drove the tractor and I sat with him so I could tell him what was going on. Wonderful, wonderful visit. And he's an environmentalist. I mean, and he totally got it. I mean, he bought into the whole thing. The chickens following the and the the cows moving from pastor to pastor

Every day and all the pollinators and the bird species we have all that. Yeah, he totally got it. We got done the tour He said so what can I do to help you and I said governor? your responsibility is the same as every single other elected official and that is to make sure that I have wiggle room to experiment and innovate and try in our culture. Your role in you've been elected so you're the majority I get it okay we might not agree on everything you're the majority that's fine but your responsibility as an elected official is to make sure that the minority view does not get squelched

because that's where the answers for today's problems come from they don't come from the majority view. Hey, they're in charge, they're ruling the roost, they're making the money, they're, you know, they're in power. The answers to society's problems always come from the minority view, which is why censorship, deplatforming, those kinds of things are so, are so devastating to a culture when new proposals, new protocols,

new ideas can't see the light of day. Fascinating. And of course, we keep hearing this mantra that the states are the laboratories of democracy. Yes. Even what you were describing, the local scale could also be applied as escapes. Perhaps the state could try. Yes. Maybe we could enact the Emancipation Proclamation in a smaller state and see what happens. Exactly. Then have something to work with.

Let me try another one. Number two, farming is just like driving around all day in a tractor, looking at things that aren't growing and swearing a lot. Oh, disagree completely. No, no, I'm sorry Jeremy. You know, you gotta eat some humus here. You know, no, on ours, I mean the the greatest joy i have people say

what drives you what really drives you you know what drives me is being able to step out of that back door every day step into this this object lesson of of god's abundant provision he could decide to take care of with angels or with cherubims or the power of his voice or whatever, but he's chosen me, my hands, my intellect as his hands and feet to caress, to massage, and to touch. And so I get to create as a steward a return on investment, an ROI for him to bring more soil, more pollinators, more water, more breathable air, more beauty than I started with. That's a privilege. All right.

Number three, you don't need skill to farm these days. You need a computer science degree to understand the sat nav on a tractor. Oh wow. Again I'm going to I'm going to. I realize he's a he's a he has a shock factor. But we don't use any computers on our tractors. I become like Wendell Berry. Wendell Berry says, in order to love, you have to know. And you can only know so much. And so in order to love the land, I have to know the land. You know, where the wet spots are, dry spots, where does the wind blow, where does it get dry,

what wants to grow grapes and what doesn't wanna grow grapes. And you can only know so much of that. And to allow an AI technician, I've lived long enough to watch AI really change. When I grew up, AI was artificial insemination. And then it became avian influenza, now it's artificial intelligence. So you've got to be AI.

But I don't want to, whatever, subcontract if you will, the decision making on my farm, where I'm going, what I'm going to do. I don't want to create that decision making power over to somebody who doesn't know my land and who doesn't love my land. I guess on that note, if you grow it yourself and sell it yourself, you cut out the middle man and the middle man's the one who buggers everything up. I couldn't agree more. That's exactly right. We have watched in since about 1940, the average amount that a farmer got from the retail dollar in about 1940 was almost 50%. In other words, when a consumer bought a dozen eggs or a pound

of radishes or whatever, roughly half of the retail dollar went to the farmer. Today, depending on what you read, it's somewhere between 8 and 11% and trending down, down, down. And so this is why the Food Emancipation Proclamation is so important because it allows a farmer to be not only the producer but the processor, marketer and distributor and get those middleman dollars and actually not get on this scale treadmill where we've got to grow bigger and bigger and bigger and faster and faster and faster all the time to outrun the diminishing margin return on commodity wholesale pricing. Just a quick question. I see sometimes these roadside pay your own stands outside

farms, right? Are you telling me those are illegal? No, they're not illegal if they're selling produce. So you can sell squash and cabbages. But as soon as you get into dairy, poultry, meat, everything changes. OK, another one. Everyone bangs on out,

regenerative farming as if it's some hippie magic, but it's actually just hard graft with extra mud. Yeah, he's in the ballpark there. I would generally agree with that. Yeah, people say, well, your kind of farming takes more people on the farm. Yes, it does. You know what it doesn't take? It doesn't take any drugs. It doesn't take any DEQ officials cleaning up poison

rivers. It doesn't take any doctors dealing with the 50% diarrhea cases caused by foodborne bacteria. I mean, I can go on, but we'll stop with the diarrhea. But my point there is that while this puts more people on the farm, it doesn't require a lot of the externalized costs that de-peopling the farm creates to pick up the slack that's created by not loving your land and loving your food and loving your customer. OK. And this one's kind of a gift because it's a lot of what we've been talking about this whole time.

But I love the quote. I'd love to sell my spuds direct to people but the government's decided that's too dangerous. Apparently a potato is a weapon of mass destruction. Yeah. He's on he's on he's on target there. Now in America you can sell spuds. You can sell potatoes without a government license but you can't mash them. And you can sell a watermelon but you can't slice it because it is a manufactured product. And if it's a manufactured product then it comes under food safety regulations. So there have been a lot of, in the U.S. there's been a lot of farmers markets blow ups where people you know grow like you know honeydew melons or musk melons, watermelons and want to you know give them as samples. Let people come by and taste this, get a little sliver. And health department you know said no you can't give samples because as soon as you cut into it, now it's a culinary product and not, you know...

I do that all the time at farmers markets. I get samples. You're telling me that's illegal? Well, see, it all depends on who the inspector happens to be. See, that's why a blanket food emancipation proclamation would just eliminate that. No, we can interact, you know, know here without anybody so there's a lot of subjectivity I mean you know how big the bureaucracy is and so what you have you you have some that are amenable and You have some that are a Little bit tyrannical and it runs the whole gamut. So you as a farmer. Let me give you an example and it runs the whole gamut. So you as a farmer, let me give you an example. About 20 years ago, so we serviced a bunch of restaurants

in Charlottesville, Virginia, and about 20 years ago, one of our chefs called us and he was in a panic. He said, the health department was just here and they threw out all your eggs. They said they were illegal. I said, really? He said, yeah. And of course, we serviced like, you know,

20 restaurants in Charlottesville. If they're illegal there, they're going to be illegal everywhere. So I said, give me the name of the lady or the inspector and the code violation. So he got her card, he gave me the name and number and the code violation, the alleged code violation. And so I hung up with him. I immediately called Pete Kennedy at Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which is like a home school legal defense fund for

direct market farmers like us. And Pete answered the phone. I said, hey Pete, here's what happened. He said, give me the name. So I gave him the name, gave him the violation. Within 24 hours, we had an apology from the health department, you're right, we were wrong, this was a new inspector, overstepped her bounds, everything's fine. How long do you think it would have taken me to get that as a stupid farmer from the bureaucracy? It took an attorney, you know, light talking to light, an attorney talking to, you know, attorney to make that happen. Fortunately, I was a member of Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, and, you know, they covered

me, they blanketed me on that. But those are the kind of things that happen because the codes are, you know, they're thousands of pages written in legalese. That's why we have so many attorneys, right, to decipher all this stuff. And it's not objective, it's not empirical, it's not just, well, anybody can understand this. No. Is it off green or a little off gray or a little bit chartreuse?

These things are very subjective. And so all of us farmers out here trying to serve our patron base every day we're dealing with this plethora of regulatory intervention that varies greatly from one locale, one state, one jurisdiction to another. And literally from one personality to another. OK, well, I mean, this has been an unbelievable conversation. I've learned a ton. I'm kind of curious. At this point, let's say someone wants to learn more about what we now call regenerative agriculture

or wants to learn about the Emancipation Proclamation or wants to enact some of this activity approach locally or at a state level. Where do they go? How do they find out more? Well, unfortunately, there's not really a national clearinghouse coalition, but it is an evolving thing.

I mean, there's Westin A. Price Foundation, which is not a farm organization per se, but it is a fraternity that's definitely outside, it's nurturing this entire food choice, food freedom idea. There's of course the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund. In Virginia we have the Virginia Independent Consumers and Farmers Association. And we run a semi-annual now,

since 2020, Rogue Food Conference, and where we showcase people who have legally circumvented a lot of this stuff, and very innovative, very innovative ideas. And so we're trying to showcase that. So, of course you can come to our website, Polyface Farms, and you can keep up with me and where I'm going, my writing and things like that.

And that'll put you as much into the lunatic fringe as you might want to be for now. Well, Joel Salaton, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. It's been a delight to be here. Thank you all for joining Joel Salatin and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.