Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #304 Get Involved In Your Food Supply w/ Joel Salatin

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

Thank you all for supporting me in this endeavor! I got another bucketlist guest on in Joel Salatin. We chopped it up for a solid hour and he was on fire, sadly as things in the age of online podcasts goes, we lost part of it to the ethers. The remainder is still a banger and we left it open to another convo down the line.  In this one we talk a lot about getting your children involved in whatever your process of agriculture looks like and affirming them through deeds, not words. Joel gives some of his basic starting points for folks that live anywhere from a cramped apartment to, like I have in Austin, a 1/10th of an acre. Basically get involved and bring your tribe with you. Enjoy this one and share far and wide. Love yall   ORGANIFI GIVEAWAY Keep those reviews coming in! Please drop a dope review and include your IG/Twitter handle and we’ll get together for some Organifi even faster moving forward.   Connect with Joel: Website: Polyface Farms  Instagram: @polyfacefarm    Show Notes: Counter Culture Farms   Sponsors: Ancestral Hunting School To learn many skills of survival and ancestral tradition, head over to ancestralhuntingschool.com, punch in “KKP” at checkout for 10% off! Lucy Go to lucy.co and use codeword “KKP” at Checkout to get 20% off the best nicotine gum in the game, or check out their lozenge. Cured Nutrition has a wide variety of stellar, naturally sourced, products. They’re chock full of adaptogens and cannabinoids to optimize your meatsuit. You can get 20% off by heading over to www.curednutrition.com/KKP  using code “KKP” HVMN - Ketone IQ This is legit jetfuel for your brain. Whether you’re fat adapted or not, this will work. Get 20% off by heading to hvmn.com/kkp  discount is automatically applied at checkout.  To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle: Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

Welcome back to the show, everybody. Today's guest is a bucket list guest of mine, Joel Salatin. Joel has been on the Joe Rogan Experience, I think at least twice, not three times. He was the featured guy in Food, Inc. way back in the day, one of the first instrumental films in reaffirming everything that I had learned from Paul check and how to eat, move and be healthy. And the old VHS flatten your abs forever video, which as many of you know, was the, the bait on the hook that got me into this stuff.

Joel has been a pioneer for regenerative agriculture. He has been outspoken on many of the issues around our food sovereignty and just a great educator. He was, I finally got to meet him face to face at the recent, the recent force of nature event out at Rome ranch. What good shall I do? And he was one of the keynote speakers alongside my good buddy, Daniel Firth Griffith, who was recently on the podcast as well. I got to listen to Joel speak for an hour and then another hour and a half in his closing talk on the same day. Both of those were absolutely incredible. And if I could have just recorded those lectures and released them, I would have.

Obviously not my content, but just incredible. And so we really dive into some of that. We did have some technical issues. So my apologies for that. This show gets cut short. Using Zencaster online, it doesn't always go perfect. It's a lot better than Zoom and other things

but we hadn't finished uploading all of the backup data. So he just chops off and so if you make it to the end of this thing and you're like, what the fuck just happened? Where's the rest of the podcast? That's, that's it. So, uh, okay. Uh, there's many ways you can support this podcast. First and foremost, uh, share it with a friend. This podcast is fucking awesome. I can assure you we got 40 minutes of this out of, out of 60. The last 20

were great, uh, but we will run it back eventually. And the first 40 are just as great. The first 40, you're going to cover, we cover quite a bit of ground, quite a few topics, and quite a lot of important and really fun, good stuff on ways in which we can all

participate in better food systems. So share it with a friend. Leave us a five-star rating all year long. Organifi is hooking someone up and it's the best one. It's the best reviewer. It's not, it's not a guessing game. It's not random. Whoever leaves the best five-star review on one or two ways, the show's helped you out in life. Uh, leave your Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook handle, and we'll be sure to get out that award-winning prize from the award-winning company Organifi. They're phenomenal.

Also support our sponsors. These guys are handpicked. They're incredible. And I've got a new one today, AncestralHuntingSchool.com. These guys are awesome. You can use code KKP at checkout for 10% off. Hey, y'all. As you know, I'm a vocal advocate for making time to reconnect to nature to experience all the benefits of recharging through time away from the trappings of our modern lives. I've learned a ton from the numerous hunting

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and a half talk. And then I went to dinner and I answered more questions for an hour. And that was all because I had HVM and ketones fueling my brain the entire fucking day. Check it out. HVM dot com slash KKP. Without further ado, my brother, Joel Salatin. All right, we're running it back we had a little little tech blip there which uh you know we're getting getting quite juicy um yeah i'm not even sure the thread i was going off of so so my my apologies for that i i finished i finished talking about um uh about the the hubris and the humility that comes from, you know, from actually immersing in nature and growing things. It's not a game, it's for all the marbles. And that's a valuable thing to come into life with, to understand life's not a marionette that I just move strings around.

Yeah. And that made me think of, you know, millennials as this kind of wide ranging group, but the general complaint is this idea of expectations, that things should be handed to me. And maybe it's a woo-woo thought or whatever the hell it is. And obviously, it's a stereotype because it's not inclusive of everybody that falls within that age category. But if you look at an antidote, instead of just pointing our finger at what the problem is, which seems to be par for the course right now, this is wrong, this is wrong, instead of saying what's right. If we look at what's right, that very well could be the remedy, right? When we're looking at providing for oneself, everything that it takes to go in, even if it is, I mean, one of the things that was brilliant, one of the many things that you've said that was just brilliant on Rogan's podcast was if everybody had a few chickens in their backyard, that would lower the carbon

footprint tremendously because we wouldn't waste food anymore, right? And that would be recycling that carbon footprint back into the earth. We'd be fertilizing our ground, even if it is just grass or trees and nothing would go to waste, right? We wouldn't be burning off in some landfill somewhere and just having three chickens, you know, alone, like we raised, we, we got our chickens out at the farm, uh, started with 40 of them. We're down to 35, but, um, we raised them in our backyard here in Austin, Texas. And they were in our living room in a trough and I'd bring them outside with my wife every single morning. We'd put them in the chicken rung so they could grow up outdoors. And every evening when the sun was setting, I'd bring them back in with a fresh, fresh pile of, uh, of, uh, pine shavings. And

they'd go in and then at six weeks old, I wanted them to know my kids. We got a two-year-old and a seven-year-old at the time and our little dog. So I, because we're not, we haven't built our house yet on the land that we participate in. Um, I didn't want them to not know us. And so now they know us. But like that little bit was such an awesome thing, not just for me, because it was extra work. Like every morning and every day, I'd have my regular work schedule and all the other things to do. And I had to tend these chickens who were going to die if it wasn't for me and my wife taking care of them. And the kids got to participate in that at a very young age, something I, you know, other than walking the dog, like there's like one job for a city kid, walk and feed the dog.

That's your first role and responsibility outside of making your own bed. But when you think about, um, you know, uh, a group that big and, and, you know, we were adding, we're adding a hundred chicks and 20 ducks and three geese this summer. So I'm really excited for that. We're building out a nice big coop and, you know, that's a lot of work. And, and, you know, something that made me think of one thing that I really loved at your talk is you were talking about, you know, giving kids jobs, you get them out there and they got to go on the egg collection. If we're in our, in our high point laying a hundred plus eggs a day day that's a lot of eggs

to to grab you know that's not something that that's adding a lot especially to the adults and the guys that are actually you know doing the heavy labor of the land and things like that but what a perfect job for the kids what a perfect job what a way easy way to get paid to get them involved to get them finding out because they're not always laying in these perfect little beds we make for them they're finding their favorite tree and their favorite little nook on the ground and their favorite little hole where they can, they can go out and lay their eggs. And there might be 20 eggs there, you know, that adds up pretty quick for them. Yeah. Yeah, it does. And, and to get, to get chill, I mean, there's a, there's a certain, um, uh, whatever, a reward there from,

from your, uh, you know, from your care, your, your caretaking gives you a reward. And, um, and so, you know, one of the best things that a, that a life like that can do for a child is just, um, after affirmation of who they are as a person. Uh, you know, a lot of kids grow up now, unfortunately, I think not knowing who they are because they've never been, they've never discovered it through real, through real life experience, their real life. So, so, you know, you gather, you're gathering eggs. I mean, that's a wonderful, it's a wonderful child thing. You know, are you careful? Are you not? Do I tend to be reckless? You know, am I cracking these eggs? Am I keeping the nest

boxes clean? Am I being diligent about finding all of them? Am I leaving a few? Tomorrow when I go out, oh, I missed two nests yesterday. Oh my, that's, you know, that's not, that's a little bit negligent, you know? And so all of that character development, when we're successful at doing something meaningful, it all brings us an affirmation of our personhood. And, you know, you don't affirm somebody just telling them, oh, you're a good boy or you're a good girl. No, they've got to do something to deserve you're a good boy, you're a good girl. I mean, that's how you affirm, that you affirm through deeds. I mean, and of course, when we get older, what's the second, you know, you ask a person's name. Next question is, what do you do, right? I mean, we're known by what we do.

And so, you know, my concern is if we don't do anything, if we don't allow our kids and our young people to do anything meaningful and participatory in the adult world because, you know, child labor or because, you know, we think that it'll jaundice them. I mean, we do, we, we have this a lot with, um, cause, cause we, we slaughter a lot of animals here. We're in livestock. So we butcher a lot of animals and, and, uh, um, you know, people come out to the farm and we're out here, you know, dressing chickens and, oh, I'm all concerned about my, you know, my, my three-year-old, you know, seeing this. And actually, I think it's good for a kid to understand that life comes from death. Something has to die in order for there to be life, whether it's a compost pile and bugs

eating bugs to regenerate, to make new life, or whether it's, you know, dressing a chicken so that, you know, we've got meat to eat. That's an important thing to understand. And also to understand the chicken doesn't come back to life either, you know. So maybe you better be careful about picking up a gun and shooting somebody because, you know, there's real blood. There's real blood. There's real death. And so this becomes almost like an immune, I don't want to use the word vaccine, but, but, but, but almost a vaccine, a builder for kids, you know, to, to impress upon them, uh, the cycles of life, the gravity of life, the, um, the, the economies of life. And, uh,

and you know, that's a, that's a, those are valuable lessons to, to come to adulthood. Yeah, absolutely. I was thinking back, cause you were mentioning that my first job was working at Burger King from 14 to 16 years old. My dad made me get a summer job and I was pissed and I was making a 4.25 an hour, which was minimum wage in California at the time. And it moved up quite a bit. I think it finished at like six, 6.15 or something like that by the time I got out of there. But, you know, having a, a

shitty job to put it plainly was something that was, it did me a lot of good. And at the same time I was putting poison in my body, whereas, you know, like my kids are going to have jobs that at times might feel shitty, might feel like a hard work, but there's going to be so much more that they gain from that experience because of the fact that they do get to learn all these little lessons that, that kind of flow in between, you know, they, they're going to get, uh, you know, all the, the, the little things that you're not quite going to see. Like if I, if I overcook a burger patty or something there, no one's going to notice. But if I let an egg fall and the chickens get to it and they say, well, that tastes good. That's a problem. Now we got to lay some ceramic eggs out to make sure they don't crack open all their eggs and eat them all

before we get to them. Right. There's, there's lots of little lessons like that, that can help a child when we're, you know, thinking of fine motor skills, gross motor skills and nuance, right. Which is, which has left the building nuances gone. When we think about social media and the conversations or arguments people get into, uh, gone. When we think about social media and the conversations or arguments people get into, for some reason, we think it's black and white and nuance has just left the table. But all of these little activities that we get to participate in help bring that back. They bring back the richness and the fullness of life, which is largely missing in a daily modern lifestyle. Yes. Yeah, it is. As you said,

you know, the, about the only chore that a city kid gets is walk the dog or take out the trash and, and it's not very nuanced, but on the home, on the homestead, there's all sorts of nuances. You know, is, is that, is, is that you about ready to lamb or not, you know? And so you're watching the, watching the you and, and seeing how close she is to lambing. And then when she does lamb, you have that. Is the animal happy? Is the tomato plant happy? I mean, what does this thing need? need. And so understanding those kinds of needs and that kind of, you know, service is, again,

the most important thing in life is to feel needed. That's the most important thing in life is to feel needed. I mean, if you do any studies of like elder care and, you know, old age, the biggest problem that elderly people have is feeling needed. And as soon as they don't feel needed, then purpose goes away and, you know, boom, downhill they go. And so, you know, our society has built a culture around children not being needed. I mean, when I was a kid, you know, you had to chop firewood and help with the canning and milk the cow and churn the butter. And, you know, there was all this stuff and you were needed and that needfulness created in you. You were accomplishing things

and you were accomplishing things, not just being the top points getter on Game of Thrones. You were accomplishing meaningful things, things that other people depended on you for life. And so all of those skills, all of those philosophies are nurtured in a homestead familial background that's highly life foundational participatory rather than exclusionary. And that's a good thing. Yeah. And I wanted to just jump back for a second on the death piece, because I think that's something that Food Inc. did such a brilliant job of portraying was like your T-bone steak that's in a nice wrapper at Safeway or Kroger's or, or HEB. It didn't start that way, right? There was this whole process to get this

nice, perfectly cut piece of meat. And the sooner kids come to understand that the better. One of the first initiations I gave my son was we actually headed out to Rome ranch, uh, in Fredericksburg. And I had them on my lap at, at, at 20 yards sitting in front of this bison that got shot. And we got to go and pray and love on that animal in its final moments while its body was still warm and put tobacco on the ground and thank it for all of the nourishment it was going to give to us. My daughter was in my wife's womb and she was being fed that bison. That grew her initial printout of what her body was going to look like and how it was going to be nourished through all the time,

one of the most important times of her life for growth and imprinting on the genetic on-off switches of what she was going to take, which traits. And that's such an important piece for people to understand. The death component of all this is one, I think in large part, if you look at like how a COVID scenario could happen, first and foremost, as you said, we've outsourced our health. You know, I don't have to worry about this.

This guy's going to fix me in the white lab coat. I don't have to take care of my body. I can let somebody else take care of that when a problem comes up. And then this, you know, at the same time, we have this deep loss of connection to death. We don't witness people dying anymore. We don't hold them in our home through the last stages. We ship them off to hospice or we take them to the hospital and we're not allowed in until the final moments. And then, you know, they take their last breath. If we're lucky, we get to be a part of that. Most people, especially during 2020, that was, we were

divorced from that experience and we've been divorced from that experience for so long that I think it's, it's, it's high time that we've reintroduced that. And the best way to reintroduce that is through a deeper connection to our food, to understand this is how things, this is how things come to be. Things come to be through life, death, that cycle, right? And I'm feeding everything on the land. I'm feeding through death and fecal matter, right? I'm feeding it through the end products are coming back out. And that's the thing that's building the next set of what's going to come through nutritionally in all levels. That's right. It's life, life, death, decomposition, regeneration, life, death,

decomposition, regeneration. I mean death, decomposition, regeneration. I mean, think about a compost pile is as good a thing. I mean, our own digestive process is a good thing. And so this whole idea that we can sterilize a life, as you said, the whole death, the human death aspect in our culture is you don't see it, you don't participate in it, you don't do anything. And we don't, we don't do it. We don't do it with, you know, plants, we don't do it with animals. So the average person grows up never having encountered the magic of regeneration. And, and, and, and that's a shame because then you can easily, you see the negative, you see the, you know, the death and the problem, but you don't see the resurrection on the other end.

And to deny that, to deny that life, yes, on the farm we have death, but we also have calves being born. We've got little chicks coming. We've got lambs being born. You know, you have eggs being laid. You've got, you know, tomatoes coming on blossoms. Yes, we have dead tomato plants in the fall, but then we have new tomato plants in the spring that make new tomatoes. And that engenders an ultimate hopeful view to the future as opposed to, well, all I see is negative

and the sky is falling, the sky is falling. And so you get to participate in this dynamic, which is really cool. Talk a little bit about what you think, what would be your recommendation for people who still feel on the fence and are in cities and maybe they don't have enough stockpiled financially to just up and purchase a small plot? You know, what would your recommendation be for people like that? You know, and this is akin to, you know, the comment you made on Rogan's about just keeping three chickens in your backyard. I thought that was fantastic. Yeah, yeah. So the question is, yeah, so what can you do? And the truth is that even if you don't have any land, even if you're in a, goodness, an apartment or a condominium, you know, you can, in no more than the footprint of an entertainment center, you can have three chickens.

And you can feed your kitchen scraps to the chickens. You can have, and then you can have eggs. You could have a vermicomposting kit. You know, they're only the size of about a little bigger than a shoe box under your sink. And you could feed your kitchen scraps to worms and the worm castings to, you know, to some vegetables or flowers. You can have on the patio, you can have a hanging, they now make these wonderful PVC tubes with pockets in them. and you can have an herb garden hanging on your porch, you know, a vertical herb garden. You know, there are so many things that you can do.

People feel like, well, in order to do this, you know, I've got to have a certain amount of land, I've got to have all this. No, no, no, you don't. You can miniaturize all this stuff. And urban gardening, urban farming now has gotten to a very sophisticated place. And in fact, in my book, Polyface Micro, I talk about how to have chickens and rabbits in a Manhattan apartment. You know, you can do this on your own. Rabbits are real quiet. Chickens tend to be a little noisier. And so you can grow a lot of this yourself. And so I would encourage folks that are kind of on the fence and wondering about their next step is dip your toe in that water. You know, even if you're growing something under LED lights, all right?

You know, imagine, you know, a grow bin with LED lights. You could do microgreens, something, and just start looking at some of your own sufficiency. How can we do something for ourself? I mean, even if it's a quart jar of mung bean sprouts on the windowsill, okay? That's highly nutritious. Use your windowsill and jump with it. I mean, you go to Italy, you go to Cuba, and you actually see gardens, produce in gutters hanging on the edge of houses. So imagine a glorified Venetian blind,

a Venetian blind with trays in it full of carrots and beets and vegetables, and all that vegetation cools your house. So now you don't need an air conditioner anymore because the vegetation is going to cool your house down. You know, you can put a beehive on the roof and have honey. I mean, there's just so much that you can do with where you are. And I always tell people, blossom where you are with what you've got. And then as you develop the skill, the mastery, and the confidence to go forward, then if you want to take that next step, take that next step. And if you don't, that's okay too.

And beyond that, I would say, do everything you possibly can to defund, and I'm going to use defund in a positive way here, defund the bad guys. So if you don't like, you know, if you don't like genetically modified organisms, if you don't like herbicides, pesticides, chemicals, and, you know, a grass fed, you know, the whole feedlot, feedlot beef, concentrated animal feeding operations, whatever, then opt out, defund them. Whether you get on the internet and you find somebody, you know, to, then opt out, defund them. Whether you get on the internet and you find somebody to ship it to you, or whether you cancel your Netflix subscriptions

for a couple months, take that time and money and go visit your local food suppliers, but develop connections, develop direct connections with your supply chain so that you're not dependent on that Costco warehouse. Yeah, that's such an important piece. And it doesn't take a whole lot of work. It really can be just investing with what little time you have. That's really what I started with in my mom's backyard was, I'm going to plant my favorite fruit trees, just my favorites. I'm going to plant peach, palm, and we're just going to, I'm going to plant my favorite fruit trees, just my favorites. I'm

going to plant peach, palm, and, uh, and we're just going to, you know, I'm going to nourish them. I'll give them some, some, uh, the best, whatever, you know, organic compost I can get at the grocery store or at the local place. And we'll see how they do. And that was the small enough connection to want to, to feed and for me to want more, you know, and I think of things like that, there's, there's always that ability that the drawing power of nature to draw us back in, but it isn't, it isn't that complicated. People think like, oh, you know, you got to drive all the way out to this farm or that, you know, I brought my son out to Rome ranch several times.

We'd go out there. It's a 90 minute drive each direction, but they've got a river. They got the Peter and Alice river right there in their backyard. And we'd go swim in in between and make a day of it. And we'd pick up eggs there like a big box before we had chickens of 15 dozen eggs that lasts a long time. You know, even as much as we eat, that lasted a long time. There's a really cool, um, uh, raw Jersey dairy farm down in Schulenburg, Texas. It's 90 minutes away from us, but we found, uh, there's a couple of people that do delivery services to Austin. They charge two extra dollars a gallon. Cool. Take my money. You know, we'll go out there every now

and then just so we can see the cows and see the little calves being born in the spring. But outside of that, I'll pay the extra $2 a gallon just to have it delivered to me. So I don't have to worry about making the long trek every time I need to get milk. There's little ways in which, you know, we can foster true community together and true relationships. I've got a buddy in Bastrop about 30 minutes east, and he's doing meat birds and pigs. And those are the two things we don't have. We've got cows, we've got sheep, we've got egg layers. So we can trade and barter with each other and get the things that we want. I love his pork and I love his chicken. He's got great meat birds.

And that's a way where we can work together and provide. And at my farm, we've got his stuff available. And at his farm, he's got our stuff available. So nobody's got to make the extra legging, you know, getting down to Lockhart. Yeah, you're doing exactly. I mean, those are all the perfect threads. And you've just nailed every one of them. You know, do what you can.

So my kind of three-ingredient recipe for the city person is, first of all, get in your kitchen. You know, don't get convenience foods. You know, get unprocessed. Get a whole chicken. Don't even buy breasts. You know, you can get a whole chicken. We talk about pricing, pricing of good foods. I mean, right now, you can get one of our chickens.

It's cheaper per pound than boneless,less breast at, at, at HEB. Okay. Industrial or HEB. So, so, you know, convenience food, and boneless skinless breast is a convenience food. So, you know, get, get as, as close to the real, to the, to the unprocessed as you can save you a lot of money. So get in your kitchen, get some, you know, domestic culinary skills and start playing around with it. And you know what?

You don't have to be perfect the first time. So, well, what if I, you know, what if I burn it? What if I overcook it? Whatever. Well, what if you do? You know, we don't walk well first. We don't talk well first. We don't do anything well first.

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly first. You don't have to do it right all the time. You start doing it poorly. That's the way, that's the way we learn skills. And then the second thing is to, is to do something yourself, just to, just to, to touch viscerally the magic of life. Again, you know, whether it's a, you know, an earthworm kit or a, or a quart of mung beans on the windowsill, but something that you can participate in the magic of life. And then the third thing is to source your provenance from authentic places. And

fortunately today, there is a tremendous amount of opportunity in sourcing more than we had, you know, 20 years ago, for sure. There are more and more people coming and doing the very kind of collaborations you're talking about, Kyle. At our farm can get milk and cheese and pasta and chicken broth and, you know, honey and maple syrup. And I'm just trying to go down the, you know, the list of kombucha, ferments, kimchi. I mean, there's a ton of stuff that you can get here because we collaborate with other local farmers. And so we're seeing these collaborations develop

more and more to create kind of, you know, the one-stop shop. Now, I don't think we'll change your oil for you. And we're probably not going to sell diapers, but, but, you know, the, the, the one-stop shop food idea is definitely developing throughout the country on farms in local areas. And it's much more available than it, than it used to be. And, and if you can't find anything, you can get it on the internet. I mean, shameless plug, you know, we ship nationwide. We're glad to ship to anybody in the country.

And one of the, one of the most enjoyable, whatever, feedbacks we get is somebody who's living in the city. They, they get from us and they've never had this kind of food and they get it. And they, oh my goodness, I had no idea it could be this different. And then about three or four months later, you get this email from them. I'm sorry to have to leave you, but I've found it here locally and I'm going to shift to my local supplier and nothing makes us happier than when that happens. And so, so, you know, listen, if we're going to defund something, you know, let's, let's defund Monsanto. Let's defund Cargill. Let's, let's, if you want to defund something, let's pick something really worthwhile to defund. Like, you know, like, like,

you know, like Tyson. Yeah. Yeah. And exactly what you're talking about with the defunding is it's looking at the things that are wrong and then asking what's right. You know, you don't get stuck in the what's wrong and spend all your time online bitching about it. You find out what's right. And the closer you get to making that the closer to you literally and, and viscerally, you know, if it's, if it's right down the street, maybe it's not right down the street and you got to have it delivered, but somebody is willing to do that legwork to make a little bit of money. Um, but yeah, I was thinking about that, you know, that at that dairy farm, they've got some of the best honey I've ever had. And it's, it's 20 bucks for a Mason jar quart of it. And it's so good. It's

like, take my money. This is local. It's Texas. It's organic. It's done in the best way possible. And I'm happy to spend a little extra there to get the best possible product for myself and my kids. Yeah. There, there seems to be a number of great ways there, um, uh, to make, to make it simpler and to keep things convenient. Um, and I, you know, I know, you know, polyface as well as force of nature, they seem to be great bridges for people to get the highest quality food into their bodies while they start to engage in these practices and find places to go to not, you know, a lot of people will complain, well, I don't have that kind of dough saved to go in on a whole cow or something like that. I didn't, I didn't at Rome ranch. I split it with Taylor. You know, we went and have these on it. That's what I could afford, you know, and that was, that was enough to throw some, some goodies in the freezer and, and, uh, and,

and sustain us for a long time. Yeah, that's exactly right. And you know what? I've decided that the benchmark, people say, well, how do you know when you're talking to somebody that gets it? What's the really litmus test to somebody that gets it? I've decided the real litmus test

to somebody that gets it is are you eating leftovers? Because if you're eating leftovers, it means that you probably got unprocessed material, you fixed it yourself, and then you save the leftovers. Because if you're eating leftovers, it means that you probably got, you know, unprocessed material, you fixed it yourself, and then you save the leftovers. You know, the grocery stores now are full of single service everything. Leftovers also mean you probably ate it with your family. You didn't just get a single service thing, pop it in the microwave,

and then graze by yourself. Uh, you actually all sat down together and you, you enjoyed this meal together. And so, uh, so leftovers, uh, that's, that's a nice little, uh, you know, litmus test for our, for our listeners here, uh, to, to know, am I in the game or am I still sitting on the bleachers? Well, how many leftovers are you eating? Yeah, I like that. We have a leftovers night and it's nice because it's not, you know, leftovers the next morning where if we gorged or stuffed ourselves the night before, we don't have to go right back to it. But a few days later, then we'll get to see like this kind of the best of, you know, we

have some extra stuffed bell peppers. We've got some extra grilled chicken that we threw on the grill. We've got a number of other things that we can all just bring together. And then that's, that creates a newness to the meal where it's not like, Oh, I got to go back to the thing again. It's no, I have different flavor combinations, the different things going into my body because the combination has shifted. And if there is something we're not going to eat again, it's because our chickens are

going to eat it. They're going to gobble it up and go to town on it. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Ultimately there's never really any waste. Absolutely. We'll talk a little bit about, you know, the people that are looking to get land. One of the common complaints that I get is I couldn't do it on 118 acres or I watched Biggest Little Farm and they've got 200 acres. I couldn't do that or I couldn't do, you know, you guys make it so simple on your, you know, we're all

actually only, we're doing a lot of regeneration on the 100 plus, but we only have like a, we have a food forest and the chickens and kind of the birds all in this nine acres that's enclosed. And we're only using less than half of it. It's probably a three acre footprint that we're doing this on. One of the reasons was to bridge the gap for educational purposes so people could see and actually imagine the fact that you can scale this. You talked about micronizing what you're doing at Polyface Farms, but what are some advice

that you give for people that are saying, I can't do it as big as you, or how do I shrink it down? What do you think is the smallest footprint somebody could go off of and actually be productive and provide enough for themselves? Yeah, well, certainly, certainly producing your own food is the place to start because, because every, every dollar you don't have to spend at the supermarket is a dollar you can save yourself and you don't have to spend at the supermarket is a dollar you can save yourself, and you don't have to earn that dollar.

So a dollar you save is worth about $1.40 because you didn't have to earn it and pay taxes on it. So there's a real economic as well as environmental and nutritional aspect to growing something yourself. So take your grocery budget. What's the biggest bite? Start there with your biggest bite. Now, for a very small acreage, I'm a big believer in poultry, chickens, ducks, turkeys, that sort of thing, because you can do that on a very, very small footprint. You can do that 30 or 40. You can have a portable infrastructure. You can move them around your yard and you can do that on a very, very small scale and grow all of your own poultry. Rabbit is also very underappreciated. The pound for pound rabbits will produce more pounds of food per square foot than any other animal. And they're quiet. They don't mess up the neighborhood. They don't crow. They don't

make noise. And so they're very quiet. And their manure, by the way, rabbit manure, because they are herbivores, is not very hot. So it's perfect to, you don't even have to compost it. You can side dress your Swiss chard and spinach in your raised bed garden. So now we talk about garden. I mean, I'm a livestock guy, so I get that. But do the small stuff. Chickens, rabbits, ducks, even even quail, you know, that sort of thing. Get something small. And that can be done in extremely small footprints.

You know, 10 by 10, 10 by 12. You can start real small. And if you if you don't even have enough room to move them around, have a stationary. But if you have a stationary facility, always make sure you have a carbonaceous diaper. So, you know, at least 12 inches of carbon underneath them so they can stir it and you can basically have them living on a compost pile. That's really, you don't want bare dirt. Bare dirt, not good. All right. So it's okay to have a stationary place, but make sure you give them a nice big carbonaceous diaper to be on.

They can stir and they can make worms and good things for them. As far as the gardening is concerned, you know, I'm a big believer in raised beds, partly because it's so child-friendly. It's easy to tell this is garden and this is where you walk, you know. So raised beds are really, really good. And so then you become a fiend, you become a magnet for carbon in your community. So leaves, kitchen scraps, I mean, you can become the dumping spot for all of this, you know, lawn waste, whatever. Man, I mean, yes, theoretically, you can get too much carbon but practically you can't you just keep taking that carbon keep taking that carbon and and that's going to build your soil and you

can have your you know you have your little garden beds and a garden bed I mean literally a four by eight garden bed can grow a tremendous amount of stuff if you if you grow it through the you know through the season and you use season extension with some cloches in the winter and you stack it so you've got stuff up above, stuff underneath, shade tolerant things in the low, things that need a lot of sun up high, and you can get a lot of production out of a small space and throughout the season. You know, a solarium on the side of your house for winter production. We have one on ours, and you can grow stuff, you know, year-round in a little solarium, and you can get passive

heat to, you know, help you heat your house if you're, you know, in a colder place. So, there's a lot of symbiotic things in addition to just food, you know, that a, in a, in a colder place. So there's a lot of, of, uh, symbiotic, uh, things in addition to just food, you know, that, that as, as you build these, these microclimates and these season extenders, um, that they build additional, you know, additional benefits and niches into your living. That sounds great. If somebody has got, uh, an acre to five to 10 acres, what do you think would be their first thing after poultry? You know, when we're talking ruminants and things like that, they could work with, or maybe it's not, maybe those are too small.

And they'd say, you'd say like, start with 20 as a minimum. I'm not sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, so poultry is certainly my favorite to start with, but then, then, you know, then you can go to a sheep if you like, if you like lamb, you know, then you can go to a sheep, if you like, if you like lamb, you know, lamb, obviously sheep are much smaller. I mean, pork, pork can be done on a small scale. Again, if you have a big enough carbonaceous diaper, you don't want a stinky, smelly place.

So make sure that you have, you have a lot of carbon. Some old junk hay, moldy hay, junk you can throw in there that can absorb the urine and the manure, and they can turn it around. And you can actually grow pigs in a very small spot, but you've got to have carbon. You've got to keep funneling carbon in there to absorb the manure and the urine and give them something to play with. And then, of course, you know, the easiest thing to control is a cow. A beef, a steer or cow is the easiest thing to control, whether it's a milk cow or a steer that you're raising for beef. But that is the biggest animal and they do require the greatest amount of, um, of land. Uh, you know, uh, you know, one cow, uh, is equivalent to seven sheep.

So think about, you know, seven sheep equivalent to one cow and, and, uh, in the herbivore line. I haven't mentioned goats. Um, I'm, you know, if you, if you like goat meat, then, you know, great. But goats, goats have the highest, um, have the highest control need. Uh, they're, they're the most difficult to control. And, you know, they say if your, if your fence, if your fence won't hold water, it won't hold a goat. So, you know, you gotta, you gotta really think about, think about the goats. They're going to be the, the most difficult, uh, animal know, you gotta, you gotta really think about, think about the goats. They're

going to be the most difficult animal to, and, and they don't like, they want to graze above their shoulders instead of below their shoulders. And so if you have some decent grass and things, you probably don't want to go, uh, because they're going to get overfed. Then you're going to get hoof problems, uh, mastitis, prolapsed uterus, different things. And so goats are especially good for, you know, for brushy, weedy, difficult terrain. And so, yeah, I like the chickens to start and tur. Um, and rabbits. And then when you go up to the bigger animals, you know, um, uh, sheep are, are, uh, give you the greatest amount, give you more, uh, more food per acre than a cow, but they are harder to control because they take a little more

fencing. Yeah. I like that. We, we, we opted away from the goats initially. We had a, I got introduced from, from Taylor at Rome ranch to Austin Dillon, the regenerative renegade counterculture farms. I'll link to that in the show notes if anybody's looking to get some really good high-end goats or sheep in Texas. have any billies around because they'll find them and cram them into the middle of next week. You know, so he's like, you could just, you know, bring one in when you need to get the kids ready and get that next generation on the land and then rotate it out, either eat it or move it along, send it back. But ultimately it just made more sense to go with sheep for that reason. And the rams are pretty docile. We just rotate them all together. You know, Daniel Griffith talks about that. And he calls it a flirt.

The flock and the herd all stay in the same place. The livestock guardians guard them all just the same. And, you know, really we got mobile fencing, which makes it quite easy to move them along and regenerate the land with higher animal impact. I'll resource a couple of good books on that in the show notes if anybody's interested. But I think it takes more than you think in certain aspects, and it's less than you think in other aspects, because there's a rhythm to it that you can fall into, that rhythm of nature, the cycles of nature.

And as you pay attention to that, you start to learn from it. And then it becomes, as you step into flow with it, it's less of I'm controlling this thing and I'm just participating in it. Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's why you want to start small. Don't jump off the cliff. Start small and make sure that you can get stuff actually controlled before you get it because those nice docile cow that you bought from the guy down the road, when it comes off the trailer, it might end up in the next county in five minutes if you don't have a place to control it. Joel, that's flawless. A

great place to stop. We leave more room for another time. Maybe I'll get you on after your next book comes out. So I'd absolutely love that. You've been fantastic and I won't keep you any longer, but Joel, it's been a long time coming for me. You're one of my bucket list guests and I really appreciate your time, brother. Thank you, Kyle. It's been delightful to be with you. Blessings on you. And yes, till we cross again. Perfect. Take care. All right, Joel. Bye-bye. Bye.