From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Building A Homestead for Beginners

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Year after year, it seems more Americans are fleeing the hustle and bustle of major cities for the space and serenity only rural living can provide. As Sean and Rachel lean more into farm life themselves (with bees, tomato plants, and chickens in tow), they're taking a look back at their conversation with farmer, lecturer, and author Joel Salatin, who discusses the recent boom in people leaving cities to live on homesteads, what people can do if they are interested in farming, and why he believes farm-based communities are the future of the country. aFollow Sean & Rachel on X: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Breaking news happens anywhere, anytime. Police have warned the protesters repeatedly, get back. CBC News brings the story to you as it happens. Hundreds of wildfires are burning. Be the first to know what's going on and what that means for you and for Canadians. This situation has changed very quickly. Helping make sense of the world when it matters most. Stay in the know. CBC News.

Hey everyone, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I'm Sean Duffy along with my co-host for the podcast, my partner in life and my wife, Rachel. I'm both Duffy. So Sean, we're at the kitchen table, but we've been dreaming about being... At the farm table. At the farm table. We're dreaming of a farm. And you got the chance through your show, The Bottom Line on Fox Business at 6 p.m. Eastern every day. You got a chance to go to a homesteaders conference and you came home with so much information.

You make butter now ever since the conference. I make butter every hour. He made applesauce and canned it. He almost burned the house down making candles. He's inspired. he almost burned the house down making candles. He's inspired. And one of the people that inspired him was a farmer. And he's an author. He's a lector. He was there. Sean got a chance to talk to him and sort of get all kinds of information. But we're going to get more. And that is Joel Salatin. Joel, welcome to the kitchen table. Thank you. It's a delight to be with you at

your kitchen table. Yes. Oh, it's so great. So why don't we just start like right from the kitchen table. Thank you. It's a delight to be with you at your kitchen stable. Yes. Oh, it's so great. So why don't we just start like right from the get go? Because a lot of people are feeling this call with all the cornyness going on in the world, things they feel like they can't control. They want to go back to nature. They want to go back to food that they actually recognize and growing it and not being dependent

on big food and big pharma and all these things that are trying to control our lives. And they talk about going back and getting pharma. I know more people in New York City that are buying properties in Tennessee, in Arkansas, in Georgia. So let's start from the get go. What does it mean to homestead? Well, what it means is that you start to take personal responsibility for very foundational aspects of your life. And we have been told for a long time, you don't need to worry about, you know, cooking.

You don't need to worry about a pantry. Just let, you know, let Hot Pock pockets and lunchables take care of you. Gross. And you'll be okay. And what we've learned here in the last couple of years is that true freedom, true liberty comes from participating in the fundamental elements of life. You don't become free by abandoning the most basic elements of life. Oh, my God. I just love the way you said that.

It's exactly what I'm thinking. And I've never said, but yeah. You know, we came out and saw you as well as Dagan, my co-host. And you're the first person we talked to at the Homestead. And it was so inspiring. And Rachel mentioned, I came back and made applesauce because you said, I love applesauce. I eat applesauce every single day. But I don't have apple trees.

So I went to love apples in New Jersey where we live. So we went and picked apples. We went to a farm. We picked apples on my birthday. I paid out of my wazoo to pick these apples. But I made applesauce. And it actually, it tastes great. Nothing added.

But again, you always talk about getting back to your food source and uh and you talk about the pandemic and what the pandemic when they went to the grocery store and all of a sudden the shelves weren't still left with all the food in accoutrements that people were used to that people became afraid and concerned because without a grocery store they don't know how to do anything. And you wrote a book called Homestead Tsunami, which you gave me. I started to read, I think, on Chapter 8, Chapter 9. Talk about the Homestead Tsunami and what COVID had to do with people rethinking the order of their lives.

Yeah. So what happened was when you have a black swan event like that, for the first time, people went to the grocery store and shelves were empty. And then they started reading about, you know, millions of chickens being incinerated because they couldn't get processed. You know, hundreds of thousands of pigs being incinerated because they couldn't be processed. And we began to realize that this efficient, supposedly efficient chain of custody that we'd had in our food system was actually very, very fragile. And, I mean, during 2020, 2 million, you ready for this? 2 million backyard flocks of chicken started in the United States.

backyard flocks of chicken started in the United States. You know, in August of 2020, the number one Google recipe on the Google charts was how to make sourdough mother, sourdough bread. People were making sourdough bread. Yeah. Yeah. And so what happened was, as people realized that their dependency on a, you know, on a long chain of custody in their food system and a very, I would say, a very opaque chain of custody in their food system. Nobody knows what goes on behind those, you know, if you're looking at any of the Gallup polls right now, every single major American institution from the government to schools to, you know, hospitals to everything, it is the level of trust in all those things is dropping. And so what I hear, what I hear people saying or asking for is, show me how to disentangle. How can I disentangle from the system? And it's not just, you know, some old, you know, mad dash to whatever, you know, to do to self-reliance. It's a new level of a lack of faith, if you will, a lack of faith in these old institutions that we've had.

And so you have. So what happens is the empty store shelves make people afraid and they begin to run. And, you know, running away when you're fearful and you're running away, that's a good thing. But eventually you can't run away forever. and you're running away, that's a good thing. But eventually, you can't run away forever. You have to stop running, and you have to stop and embrace and start a new place. And that's what the homesteading movement is, that people running away in fear have now realized, I can't run away forever. I have to stop somewhere, and I have to put down roots, and that's what's happening.

And people are putting down roots. They're starting to plant apple trees and have a milk cow and have a grinding mill, you know, in their kitchen. And starting to abandon Netflix in favor of finding a farmer and getting a direct source. I mean, we don't raise enough apples for ourselves. You know, we go to an orchard and we get apples and we make our own applesauce. We don't produce everything ourselves, but we put a lot of attention on finding provenance and sources nearby that don't require Russian chemical fertilizer, that don't require great big centralized processing facilities. You know, an obvious question is, would the food system have had as big a shock

if instead of the United States being supplied by 300 mega processing facility funnels coming down with our food supply, if instead we'd been supplied by 300,000 small local neighborhood, you know, abattoirs and canneries and that sort of, and sourdough makers, you know, would we have had as big a shock? When you have, you know, rocky shoals and choppy, you know, seas, you want to be not in an aircraft carrier. You want to be in a speedboat so you can navigate a rocky shore. And when we have dysfunction in our system, what you want is a lot of decentralization,

democratization within the system so that the vehicles are not so big and they can, you know, and they're a lot more resilient. Resilience is now replacing efficiency. So I think I mean, there's so many things exploding in my head as I'm listening to you. I think one, that COVID happened and people who were healthy survived it better. people who were healthy survived it better. And that a lot of the food that we're getting through these processors that you talk about, that this opaque system of making bread that we don't even know what it is in there in the end, that this stuff isn't making us healthy. But there's another thing happening. You feel out of control in that situation that you talked about, but a lot of people forgot how to do these things.

These were things our grandmothers knew how to do. And we stopped knowing how to do it. So I think, you know, Sean has said this year after he met with you and everybody at the homestand conference, he said this year he didn't he didn't wait until New Year's to have the resolution. By the way, he started as soon as he came home. wait until new year's to have the resolution by the way he started as soon as he came home he said this is going to be my year and our family's year of learning how to do stuff and i didn't say actually stop i used a different word yeah he did yeah he said he wanted to do and it's like this is the stuff that you know our grandmothers knew how to can our grandmothers knew how to you know make bread our grandmothers knew how to can our grandmothers knew how to make bread. Our grandmothers knew how to plant a garden, you know, in the backyard and can vegetable.

So it's also about reviving these skills and this sense of resourcefulness that really was all really was the American spirit in so many ways. Right. Yeah, it sure it sure was. In fact, if you want a nice little soundbite i would suggest this the new 401k plan the new 401k plan is living in community with people who know how to grow things fix things and build oh my gosh oh my gosh that is the soundbite of the show exactly and by the way i love it i'm writing it down i look at our a 401k and i'm like the best thing we can invest in is a farm yes and we talked actually that's what we're talking about because you mentioned joel's self-reliance but i do think self-reliance equals freedom um if you can rely on yourself and your family and your neighbors and your friends and you're self-contained and

and you're more resilient as opposed to efficient, which you talk a lot about, which I find really interesting, the resilience of a food system as opposed to the efficiency of a food system, which is centralized, really important. But I want to go to your philosophy of farming. You mentioned chemicals coming from Russia. You don't use chemicals. I don't believe you use any GMO seeds.

you don't use chemicals. I don't believe you use any GMO seeds. You're like, you're going, you're going the natural way that probably our forefathers farmed a hundred years ago. Talk about the philosophy of what you do on your farm and why you do it. Yeah. So our, our philosophy is we look at, we look at, you know, how did, how did God set all this up? You know, how was it designed and how can we duplicate that on a personal level? How big is your farm? So we, we own 950 acres. So we're, we're, we're not really a homestead. Yeah. I, I say I I've, I've lived in both those worlds. When we came to the farm in 1961, my mom and dad bought, bought it in 1961. the farm in 1961. My mom and dad bought it in 1961. I was just four years old. And for the first 10 years, it was basically a glorified homestead. We milked a couple of cows. We raised a couple

of pigs. We had a big garden. We ate our own food, had our own firewood, that sort of thing. And when I came back to the farm full-time, September 24, 1982. That was my golden day in life. I was actually a newspaper reporter. So I'm a newsaholic, okay? And so I came back to the farm full-time September 24, 1982. And at that point, we actually tried to convert it from a homestead scale thing into an actual commercial place. And we did it. We were successful at doing that. So we look around at nature and say, well, how does nature do things? Well, you know, it doesn't confine animals in a building. They run out. And so we pasture our chickens. Cows don't eat grain and they don't eat dead chickens and chicken feathers. They eat grass. They're fermentation tanks, you know, of cellulitic structure.

And so we, you know, we grass finish our cows. They never go in a feedlot. They and, you know, how does nature create immunity? Well, it creates a habitat that's conducive to a good immune system. And so we don't vaccinate. We don't MRNA. We don't mRNA, we don't use any of that stuff. We don't use antibiotics. But what we do do is have an environment, a habitat for all of our animals that is conducive to a really, really great immune system, which

includes a habitat that allows the chicken to express its chicken-ness and the pig its pig-ness. I would suggest that a culture that fails to ask how to have happy pigs will also fail to ask how to have happy girls and boys and people. And so if we're going to create a respect for each other. It starts with those of us with the pig, with the chicken, with the tomato, respecting and honoring the tomato, the pigness of the pig. And they were not built for all of the pharmacology and the pesticides and the herbicides and the chemicals that we're giving them. And in fact, our bodies are not made for eating stuff that we can't pronounce.

We were not designed to eat stuff we can't pronounce. We're the first generation that routinely eats things that you can't make in your own kitchen. Here we are sitting around our kitchen table, and most Americans today are going to eat a lot of what they eat are going to be things that you can't even make in your own kitchen. We'll have more of this conversation after this. I'm Ben Domenech, Fox News contributor, editor at large of The Spectator and editor of the Transom dot com daily newsletter. I'm inviting you to join in-depth conversations every week on the Ben Domenech podcast. Listen and follow now at Fox News podcast dot com.

How did you know so far? I mean, so you did that and you were doing this in the 80s. I think a lot of what you're talking about, you know, the sort of farm to table, you know, trendy movement we see now and people understanding that, you know, Lunchables isn't real food. That seems like you figured that out a long time before most Americans did. By the way, I grew up in a household. My mom is European. My dad grew up sort of in a farmish type community in southern Arizona, Mexican American family. So, I mean, they were not the average American, but I remember in the eighties, you know, this thing called TV dinners. Even my parents were like, this is this really cool thing, TV dinners. And they heated it up and we thought it was a really special meal. And that trend went

away and we went back to eating normal, you know, good food. But so how did you figure this out? She was feeding us organic food back then. She was ahead of her time. She was like you ahead of your time. So how did you figure it out? That feeding us organic food back then she was ahead of her time she was like you ahead of your time so how did you figure it out that's so true about your mom yeah that's great so so my my grandfather uh out in indiana was a chart in in the night mid-1940s so this is just post-world war ii right there was a charter subscriber to Robert Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine and had a big compost pile. And a lot of people don't realize that right there post-World War II, there was a huge tension in the country, whether we would go chemical oriented or whether we would go, I'll just say compost oriented. So I have two alliteration, compost or chemicals, you know, and which way are we going to go? Because here, I mean, in this area of Virginia, in the 1950s, people still often were farming with horses still.

And so, you know, we didn't get rural electrification until what, you know, late 1950s. And so there was a real tension in the country at that time. And so my grandfather really embraced and Rodale, of course, with with the Rodale Institute in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, was that was the granddaddy of this move. But there were people like Louis Bromfield, Lady Eve Balfour. Eve Balfour. I mean, I have a whole, you know, a whole litany of the legacy people, the icons, you know, Sir Albert Howard, Ed Faulkner, who wrote Plowman's Folly in 1950. And think about that. In six months, he sold 500,000 copies of Plowman's Folly in 1950, a book that decried plowing, you know, and its erosive content. So dad grew up steeped in this ecological bent.

And dad was an economist. He was a tax accountant by trade. And so he pushed a sharp pencil. And he realized that the chemical approach is like a drug addiction. You've got to keep getting more potent stuff. It becomes more expensive. And it's like a drug addiction. You know, you've got to keep getting more potent stuff. It becomes more expensive. And it's like a drug addiction. And you've got to get off of that treadmill.

And so, again, farmers as well as people have been told, you know, let Russia take care of your fertilizer. It's OK. It comes in a little bag. You spread it and it's OK. And then suddenly we have a black swan like Ukraine getting invaded. Suddenly it goes up 400 percent. And all the farmers are saying, hey, what's going on on our farm? It wasn't even a bobble on our farm. We don't buy the stuff. So it didn't affect us at all. Who really had the freedom? The freedom were people like us who still who still believed in compost and and decomposition. still believed in compost and decomposition, the carbon-nitrogen cycle, if you will, the carbon economy, and participated in it, the ones who said, oh, we can shortcut that and

just get this stuff in a bag, and that'll give us more time to watch the football game and go on Caribbean cruises, that'll give us freedom. Those folks, actually, that freedom was not freedom. It was enslavement. It was enslavement to foreign powers and geopolitical issues and that sort of thing. So that's kind of how we got here. So, Joel, obviously, you're not enslaved to the, you know, folks over in Russia and you're doing this all kind of self-contained, obviously, the leaders in farming and in government go, this guy's amazing. We got to follow him.

He's a patriot. Sean, that's what you call a baited question. I know he answered this question. No, listen, listen. As they say in France, au contraire, the actual response from the orthodoxy, from the establishment is, you know, we're called and we've had people call us this. I mean, I've been called to my face, a bioterrorist, a typhoid mary yeah yeah because because since we don't since we don't vaccinate and medicate our animals have to be sick and that sickness is going to make the neighbor's animals sick and they're going to lose their farm because i was so negligent i didn't use you know the pharmacological uh um your recipe and so and so uh we are we are not loved in the Orthodox community.

It's catching on, though. I mean, I think what you're doing is catching. By the way, your tomatoes probably taste better than the big farm tomatoes. Of course, that's true. Same with the meat. Same with the meat. Okay, so let's talk about how to, because I think, maybe before we get too high, too, I'm going to back up for just a

second let's talk about not just the the growth you talked about the 401 the new 401k is living in community with people who know how to do things I mean this is a transformative statement but there's a there's not it's not just about the food itself. There's a spiritual thing about this. Let's talk about that. What's the spiritual component when you live closer to your food source and in community like that with other people who are connected to God's, you know, nature? Yeah. So, yes, I appreciate you bringing that up because we live. Look, let's just let's just juxtapose it when when you live and listen i don't think cities are evil okay don't i mean don't even read any in into this um i'm i'm glad

i'm glad we have cities because that's where people can can get together and and brainstorm how to have a computer okay uh if it's a bit um and we maybe we could debate whether we should have computers or not but but my point is, I'm kind of glad we have them. I'd much rather type on a laptop than an Olivetti typewriter. But the point is, a lot of creativity comes out of the city. But the problem with the city is that you are completely surrounded by humanness, by things that humans have made. The asphalt, the traffic lights, the cars, the houses, everything is man-made. Whereas in a rural setting, you're surrounded by things that man didn't make, trees, cows, deer, wild turkeys, grass. And I think that it gives us a greater understanding of our dependency,

you know, as a culture now with all of our screen time and video games and all that stuff. I'm very concerned that we are becoming so hyped up on our own cleverness and technology that we actually believe we can levitate into some sort of a Star Trek future and eliminate our anchor to this ecological umbilical. And I would suggest that that moves us into a place of a lack of common sense, a lack of reality. And you can see politically, I don't know if the kitchen table gets very political or not, but you can see it, I don't know if the kitchen table gets very political or not,

but you can see it. Oh, it sure does here. You can see it in the blue-red divide. I mean, there's no question, but while the urban sector is very blue, the rural sector is very red. Well, what is the difference? Well, the difference is that out here in, I'll just say, in red country, we're surrounded by things that don't care if Democrats or Republicans are in the White House. You know, the cows are always happy to see us. The rain comes and goes. The snow comes and goes. Things happen. And so we know that there is a stability and there's a universe that we get to viscerally touch and participate in, something that's way bigger than ourselves. We're not the center of anything.

We are simply pilgrims through some great big cosmic thing that's happening outside of us in the city. It's easy. It's easy to think, look what we did. Look what I did. I'm surrounded by my own, you know, advancements and technology, and we can easily lose sense of things that are as basic as water and basic as air, human nature, and those kinds of things. And you go down, you know, this strange path of,

you know, everything from, you know, from socialism to victimization and entitlement, we understand here, if we don't plant the tomato, we don't eat the tomato. If we don't milk the cow, we don't get milk. And so there's a very personal responsibility that creates authenticity and integrity within the living sphere. It's humility. I think what you're talking about is humility. It creates humility.

You understand your place in the universe. Yes. Yes. You're exactly right. When I think of people who homestead originally before I saw you, I'd go, I know those hippies, those, you know, Birkenstock wearing liberal, you know, long hair, dread, maybe maybe maybe a little extra smell yeah um that would be my thought of the homesteader and it after talking to you you were like actually that might have been true x number of decades ago but you've seen a lot more conservative minded people coming back to go i'm gonna i'm gonna try my hand at homesteading myself. Talk about the politics

of homesteading and who's actually doing it. Yeah, what a great point. So, you know, I've been at this a long, long time. And I remember in the early 80s, even in the 70s, when we started direct marketing and started getting a customer base and things for our meats and eggs and stuff. Almost all the visitors to the farm, I'm going to say probably 90 percent were exactly as you described, Sean. They're, you know, they're earth muffin, gay worshiping, tree hugging, Tommy Pinkos, you know, they're beaded, bearded, braless, hippie dropouts. Tommy Pinko's.

I love all of your adjectives. Go for it. And you know what? Then the homeschooling movement happened. The homeschooling movement was a cataclysmic shift because suddenly the people, the conservatives who had getting chill bumps, even talking about it, the conservatives who were the stalwarts of status quo of establishment suddenly began to say, you know, these revered establishment institutions, you know, the Fed, the public school system may not be our best friend. And suddenly there was a cataclysmic shift in our customer base and the people who visited the farm interested in things like, you know, compost and grass finished beef suddenly became about 50 50. You know, the liberals and the conservatives. And it was quite it was quite a shift. And I think that this

this homestead movement, if you will, was also, I mean, look, yeah, exactly. Look at the hippie movement of the 1970s, the active land movement. It was very much a liberal, you know, kind of socialistic commie deal. But then we have the homeschool movement. And what I saw was as conservatives dropped out of establishment norms and found satisfaction in homeschooling, for example, they started looking around, you know, look, when you opt out, when you go unorthodox and you find it soul satisfying, the next thing is what else have I been missing? And so they're going to chiropractors and acupuncturists and, you know, and you got a grain mill on the thing and, you know, you got raised beds, gardens and and suddenly you know and and canned goods and

they're getting you know uh uh get getting in touch with their local uh going down the farmer's market things like that and what happens is um this whole this whole kind of uh awareness awakening uh within the conservative community which was obviously part of Trump. OK, yeah. And I don't want to get too far down a rabbit hole here. But this was all part of it. And we have a great awakening, if you will, at the grassroots of our culture. Let me give you one really quick story. I was doing a chicken butchering demonstration down in Tennessee for a bunch

of people. What a practical lecture. I wish they taught this at Harvard. This is the kind of actual stuff our kids need to learn. Go ahead. So my partner in crime there, Dave Schaefer, who's the founder of Featherman Plucker, who is, you know, has small scale, you know, backyard chicken butchering equipment. He says what we need, we need to have as many little backyard chicken pluckers as we have lawnmowers. He says when we have that, we'll know we've really arrived somewhere. But anyway, we have 300, you know, people standing around to watch this chicken processing demonstration. you know, people standing around to watch this chicken processing demonstration. And he asked, and they're, you know, they're all late 30s, mid 40s, maybe some of them as old as 50. They've all got kids, you know, and they're anywhere from 5 to 10, 12, early teens. And he

asked the group, 300 of them, he said, how many of you, when you were 16, ever thought you'd ever be interested in butchering a chicken? And in that whole crowd of 300 people, two, two hands went up, only two people. Folks, we are in a homestead tsunami. There is an awareness of what's going on. There is a disenfranchisement economies to schools, to medical professions. And I'll tell you what, I don't know. I don't know where things are going in the culture. I don't have a good feeling about, I think we're in for some rough waters,

um, ahead, but, um, you know, if there's one thing and, and Rachel, you kind of alluded to it there early. If there's one thing that you don't want to be, if the, if the wheels fall off, if the wheels fall off, there's thing that you don't want to be, if the wheels fall off, if the wheels fall off, there's one thing you don't want to be. You don't want to be sick. You don't want to be the one lying in the bed back there. Hey, as y'all are leaving, can you take me with you? And this is all part of that. We want to be aware. We want to be situationally aware. We want to be army r Rangers. We want to be ready to handle what's coming down. That means we want to have some energy independency.

We want some food independency. We want to be able to go out in the backyard and know what to do with dandelion and chicory, herbs that grow everywhere that people poison in their yards because they're weeds, but they're actually have tremendous medicinal qualities. Plantain. I mean, I mean, we have this cornucopia of herbs and, and, and nobody uses them because they're dependent on, you know, the pharma, the, the, the pharmaceutical companies. And those are those old, those are those old, like, you know, when I was growing up, when there was a problem, my mom knew which herbs and which teas to give us. There was always, so I think Sean and I started because his mom was absolutely revolutionary.

We should do a whole podcast on, on his mom in the eighties, just seventies and eighties, just ahead of her time, just like you. And my parents just sort of were old school in that way and and you know they never get over medicated us never you know went to to pharma uh pharmacological things as their first source of helping us they drink water um you know and things like that so dirt on yeah run some dirt on it so so we kind of and so our trajectory was you know when we first married, we were part of a co-op. Sean was like the only Republican. And we lived in this Libbo town and Ashland, Wisconsin. And Sean was on the board of the food co-op. I mean, the only Republican in there.

And we had tons of kids. So we were like big, big customers there. And then, you know, that was like we always kind of crunchy con. We called ourselves crunchy cons, right? We were crunchy conservatives, you know, kind like we always kind of kind of crunchy con we called ourselves crunchy cons right um we were crunchy conservatives you know kind of understood that the but then it was as you described you know you you described the home the homeschool movement but then came covid and that deep distrust and that's what really got us really on this trajectory, meeting you on all these things happen. And now we're on the path that we agree with you completely. We want to own a farm. Now you own 900 acres. I guess what I want

to, we don't, you just need five acres, I suppose, to, to, to do this, right? I mean, give somebody who's listening sort of, you know, what's the entry level how do you start how do you start what what do you need to be thinking about where should you put this farm um give us some if you were consulting a family like ours what would you say but 53 year old couple with nine kids youngest one with down syndrome only four years old from wisconsin but now they're in new jersey and they want to buy a farm as their 401k. Where would where do we go? How much do we need at a minimum in terms of land?

Just give us the give us the lowdown. Give us a skinny. Well, that's a that's a tall recipe here. But let me say that it starts. It starts in your mind. And the fact the fact that Sean left that hoa that homesteaders of america conference and went and and rachel and you you went out and you you picked some apples you brought them home and you made applesauce that's the homesteaders mentality and i even can the applesauce

here's the problem though joel so here's how i knew what sean was up to because he was on amazon started delivering uh tons of stuff so he's still independent jeff bezos but the stuff's here okay so no that that's that that's that's fair enough but where i'm going with this is that that you need to go ahead and start. I say you've got to do what you can with where you are to start down the mental path, the emotional mental path of disentanglement. And so there's a lot of things you can do in an urban sector. I mean, you can have a you can have a vermicomposting kit under your kitchen sink. Forget the garbage disposal. You know, do a vermicomposting. That's red wiggler worms, by the way.

And you can use that in, you know, your flower pots and things. You can hang herbal gardens. You can get these cool PVC hanging gardens with pockets built into them that you can grow all your fresh herbs on the patio, you know, hanging. You know, you can have a hive of bees. You can, I mean, in my book, Polyface Micro, I talk about how to have rabbits and chickens in a Manhattan apartment. You know, you can do this. Okay, okay, but I get that.

Okay, but I'm there mentally i'm there mentally now i want to go big but i can't go 900 acres right what's the minimum for you know a family and we want to live like with our we want to have enough land for our kids to kind of also eventually grow and live around us some a cow a couple a couple of pigs, chickens, a farm, a garden. Yeah. Well, you know, you're I mean, obviously, it depends on where you are. If you're in if you're in Nevada, it takes a lot more land than if you're in, you know, New York or Connecticut or Massachusetts, let's say just east of the Mississippi. But yeah, east of the Mississippi, generally, you know, somewhere in the five to ten acre area is plenty enough to have, you know, to grow a beef, to have a couple hogs, to have, you know, plenty of eggs and grow all of your chicken, have a few fruit trees,

all your garden produce, your raspberries, blackberries, grape arbor, you know, all that, you know, five to ten acres is plenty for that east of the Mississippi. Now, if you're out in arid country, it'd take a little more. We'll have more of this conversation after this. So, Joe, can I tell you what you mentioned bees? Right down the street from where you were at this homesteaders conference was a bee guy. I think his name is B as bee cap. He's out of Tennessee.

were at this homesteaders conference was a bee guy i think his name is bsb cap he's out of tennessee he was selling hives like a starter hive with the i don't know what we put in there to get a feral group of bees to come in in the spring but a week ago i bought a i bought a hive from him and he's coming and it's a small i didn't know about this i'm just learning about this right now there's so many weird things that come to my house now, Joel. I love it. The shipping was as much almost as the hive itself. I'm like, I'm going to try to catch bees this spring. And he was talking about honey.

And he's like, when you get honey from the store, oftentimes the bees were fed sugar water. And sugar water honey is different than the honey that you get from bees that actually go on flowers and buds and pollinate. That honey is really good for you and really nutritious. But the honey water honey, the sugar water honey, not the same thing. And I'm like, I've never heard of this before. And honey is so good for you, too. And a year later, you come back and you can harvest your honey. You might get stung a little bit, but you do your honey.

I'm like, this is great. We're going to go do honey as well. People can actually do that in an apartment as well, Joel. I don't recommend the bees. The bees in the apartment? Not on the balcony. Oh, sure. Yes.

On the balcony or on the roof, especially if you have a flat roof. But yeah, there are so many things that you can do on a tiny acreage. I just ran into a lady doing a presentation at a conference lately, and she showed me pictures of her backyard. She had a 900 square foot backyard. So that's not a lot. You know, that's that's like a 40, you know, 40 by 45 foot. Not very big. And she had she had six chickens, a little greenhouse, raised beds for her and she and her. feeding themselves off of this 900 square foot backyard. So she didn't have a lawn. The lawn was gone, okay? But she had this incredibly productive backyard garden set up. And so, you know, there are lots of things that you can do, even in the city. But yeah, I will tell you that the price of these five to 10 acre homestead, what we call little farmettes, is sky high right now because of the attractiveness of those very, very small acreages. You make a really good point. It's remarkable the cost of land through, they start going to West Virginia to Kentucky and Tennessee,

Arkansas, Missouri, sky high. But a place, land is, and I've looked at he spends time on Zillow a lot of time on Zillow but the issue is southern Virginia where you're at maybe a little further west it is

it's remarkable how how the price of land is far fairer, far more value it seems like, in southern Virginia. Am I wrong on that? Yeah, there are absolutely pockets all over the country where land is cheaper or more. In general, I like to see somebody buy land a little more expensive that's closer to a city than get a larger acreage way, way far away. Simply because, you know, near the city, you're nearer markets.

If you produce extra and you want to sell it, you're close to markets. You know, every trip for supplies doesn't cost you an arm and a leg and wool and everything else and so there there are advantages in uh in locating near an urban sector uh as opposed to going through you know clear out to the boonies uh and and so especially too if you you know if you like museums and art and uh culture uh you know what else joel because we we've been talking about like having enough land so we hope that our children will want to live near us and on that land you know and but if it's too far away from the city you know they're still young and we want them to be able to you know not feel like they're isolated out in the middle of nowhere.

I think all of this is beyond fast. By the way, the price also going up because the Chinese are buying the land and Bill Gates is buying farmland. Another reason why Americans, individual families should start buying land and making sure that it doesn't go into the hands of others. That's another reason. I just think this is that you have been at the forefront of a movement that I hope continues to grow, a movement that I think will disentangle us from, I think, some very evil oligarchical

forces that want to control us. And this is the way to have that freedom from people who want to control us. You talked about the cities. There's nothing wrong with cities, but it is much easier to control people when they're in a city and when they're dependent on these supply chains. I mean, I think that's why you are a threat in many ways. And soon, Sean and I will be a threat. We're going to be a threat. Yeah, well, you can rest assured. Well, I mean, I'll just say two things about that. One is that fortunately now with distribution logistics as efficient as they are, you know, if I may do a shameless plug for those, you know, wanting to know, well, can there be a difference? And we now, our farm, as of 2019, we began

shipping nationwide. We never would have even considered that 20 years ago. But the logistics of distribution, UPS, FedEx, those kind of things, has really become efficient to where right now, just to show you where we are, we can now ship eggs into New York City cheaper than you can buy them at farmers markets in New York City. Why? Because when you defund the police and you raise your taxes and you make such a difficulty for businesses to stay in business, the prices go up. And so here we are. We're in a very conservative, low tax, you know, low crime area. Cost of living is very low, cost of living is cheap. And we can now ship eggs to New York City from Virginia cheaper on your doorstep than you can buy them at your local farmer's market. Now, I'm not trying to try to diss the local farmer's

markets. I'm just saying that these political, you know, social political issues have consequences. And this is one of them. So that's one thing. The second thing, the second thing is that right now, the average American farmer is 60 years old. So in the next 15 years, half of all America's agriculture equity, that's land, buildings and equipment is going to change hands. Half of it. We've never seen anything like that in human history, except through conquest. Now, I'm not saying we're getting ready to be conquested. Maybe we are, maybe we aren't. But the point is that right at this time, this is a silver lining, right at this

time of need, we have an unprecedented opportunity for land to be available because farmers are aging out. Let's beat Bill Gates to it. Let's beat the Chinese to it. Let's own this with a new generation of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, entrepreneurial, self-starter, compost-growing, conservative, self-reliant people ready to steward this land into the next millennium. I am so excited. If you, and again, we're not just going to plug, Joel, your farm, but we're going to plug Amazon again.

If you go to Amazon and put in Joel's name, you'll put books. I only have one. I have the one that you get more. Homestead Tsunami, which has been fantastic. You bring us through a lot of your family history and what you do on the farm. Before we go, one last, because we have kids. You bring us through a lot of your family history and what you do on the farm. Before we go, one last, because we have kids. And you mentioned this briefly, but you talked about flicks, maybe versus fireflies,

and kind of what it means for kids to grow up on the farm. What it means for a family that works together, that has campfires and nature. How do you think your life on the farm is different than a family sitting in the city? Yeah, wow. That's very near and dear to my heart. Yeah, it is. It's very near and dear to my heart because, listen, if you look at teenage adolescent problems today, I'm not a psychiatrist, but every time I come in contact with anyone who's in psychology, psychiatry,

school, school guidance counselors, we are in an epidemic of youth dysfunction. And most of it surrounds a general identity of self-worth. I don't know who I am. I don't know what my purpose is. And I don't know if I'm valuable. I don't know if I'm needful. Every school shooting, every one of these guys who's gone in and done a school shooting, they all felt bullied. They didn't feel worthwhile. They didn't feel valued. They didn't feel affirmed and confirmed. And listen, there is nothing that brings self-worth. So here's my total, you know, farm farmer, commonsensical view. Self-worth comes from successfully accomplishing meaningful tasks. Self-worth comes from successfully accomplishing meaningful tasks. Every one of those words is important. And the problem is that we have so abandoned our young people to the basement with video games and screen time. They grow up then in an environment where they don't know how to do anything. They don't know how to cut a board.

They don't know how to build a chicken coop. They don't know how to grow a tomato plant. They don't know how to build a chicken coop. They don't know how to grow a tomato plant. So they come into this adolescent world not having a self-worth and self-identity of having been successfully accomplishing any meaningful tasks. And so a homestead and a farmstead setting where kids are gathering eggs, butchering chickens, weeding the tomatoes, running the food mill to make tomato juice and can it, cutting off the corn to freeze corn and can corn for the winter. When that is part and parcel of the family life, you have young people growing up with an identity, a self-worth, a purpose,

because they have viscerally participated in accomplishing meaningful tasks. And that's where you get self-worth. And I think that if we are going to save the young people of our country, we need to get out of this idea that they're too fragile to break. We got to hover over them and protect them from every little possible thing. And we need to let them go out and play with the frogs, the salamanders, weed the green beans, learn some skills so they know, hey, I am needed. The family needs me. The table needs me.

And I can contribute something. And I have self-worth. I have an identity. And that will set our young people on a better trajectory than they are. Joel, you are a national treasure. And you are hitting in just that little bit there basically what ails our country. And I'm super moved. I'm more motivated than ever to live your life. Maybe on a smaller scale, definitely on a smaller scale.

But it's such an important conversation. I promise you, Joel, so many of our of our listeners are having the same thoughts Sean and I are having. I think COVID put it in overdrive. Absolutely. And I'm inspired. And Joel, as we close the podcast, I want to thank you for your generous with your information and your philosophy. You shared on your own podcast, which is Beyond Labels. You share at conferences. You share it in books.

I think it's really wonderful and giving that you're like, I'm going to help inspire people, help educate people. If they want to do this, all the benefits. But you kind of need a godfather of someone out there willing to share knowledge. And you've done that. And you've done it with us today. And you do it, I think, probably every day of your life is you share the love of the farm. And as Rachel said, you're a national treasure.

I want to thank you for joining us at our kitchen table today. Maybe the next time we'll join you, we'll be at our farm. I hope so. God will. But again, thank you for being such an inspiration. Thank you. And you know, you're welcome to come down here if you want to take a little, as say in australia a wee donner down to virginia uh come on down and we'll we'll be glad to have you at our kitchen table too we're gonna take you up

on that no we are thank you selton poly piece farm thank you for being with us we appreciate it thanks so much listen ad free with a fox news podcast plus subscription on apple podcast and amazon prime members can listen to the show ad-free on the Amazon Music app. The Fox News Rundown. A contrast of perspectives you won't hear anywhere else. Your daily dose of news twice a day. Featuring insight from top newsmakers, reporters, and Fox News contributors. Listen and subscribe now by going to foxnewspodcast.com.