The Highwire with Del Bigtree - POLYFACE FARM THE TRUTH ABOUT BIOSUSTAINABILITY

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

In the face of unprecedented attacks from the industrial farming complex, Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm has exposed the truth about biosustainable farming. Del dives in for a day working on the non-industrial, self-sustaining farm and ranch as Joel Salatin, one of the premier experts on Biodynamic farming, explains how he turned a third generation family property into one of the most environmentally friendly working farms in the U.S.#JoelSalatin #PolyFaceFarm #BioDynamicFarmingBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Please welcome Joel Salatin. He's a hero of mine and a hero of a lot of us on the food team. He's a farmer, lecturer, and author. He's a self-acclaimed, Christian libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic farmer. Salatin raises livestock using holistic methods of animal husbandry on his farm in Virginia. Van of the farm, the superhero of the soil, the future of our food, the servant of the salad, the man of the meat. We live on a farm. that has four generations living on it.

It's quite dramatic, it's quite amazing, and we grow our own food. I feel like we just live in this nest of abundance. According to the USDA, this is unsanitary because it's open to the air. They tried to close us down. It's one of the biggest showdowns we had. Those of us that are out in the trenches,

it's not a friendly world out there. You know, our neighbors think we're bioterrorists because we don't vaccinate our cows. The environmentalists don't get us, because, you know, we're actually, we call ourselves environmentalists, but we're actually farming. I thought farming destroyed the environment. The most common question that I get asked, and probably many of you, by naysayers, is, oh, that all sounds real nice, but can we really feed the world?

And if every farm in North America would do this in fewer than 10 years, we would sequester all the carbon that's been emitted since the beginning of the industrial age. That's how fast this can work. The pandemic is the best marketing strategy we've ever seen. We're having the best season we've ever had. It's the industrial mega system that's cracking. As we have pulled away from handling food, from domestic culinary arts,

we have become profoundly ignorant about food. So what happens is this profound lack of knowledge about food, Lack of culinary domestic arts has moved our culture into fearing food. The food safety people. I call them the food police, who for the first time in human history have told a culture that you know it's perfectly safe to eat mountain dew, twinkies and cocoa puffs. But that raw milk, compost grown tomatoes and Aunt Matilda's pickles, now that's deadly. are not afraid to work with the landscape.

We come with healing hands and come alongside this creation, as a co-laborer, as a helper, as a salve, see, to redeem that broken landscape and atone for all the depredations that our ancestors have done. Well, Joel is just an amazing, brilliant mind. I have been so blessed to get to spend many hours with him and dinners around the country as he's been sharing his information and I've been sharing mine.

But I really wanted to take the opportunity because I kept hearing about this farm he had. So I wanted to go and roll up my sleeves and really get into what I believe is the future of farming. And in many ways, it's the past. It's bringing those two things together. When I see these stories in the Netherlands, when I see this attack upon farmers, when they're saying it's farmers that are poisoning our earth, farmers are responsible for global warming, literally the back bow. of humanity the original job of feeding us these people have been here since the

dawn of man and I refuse to believe that the food substances the eggs and the milk and the meat and the bread that's what's bad for us the things that have been in every culture around the planet let's outlaw them and start eating synthetic meat meats and things made in laboratories it can't possibly be right there is a better way I want to warn you you that in this trip, I did it all. I got my hands dirty. It was a very hard day. And at the end of this piece, I will end up slaughtering a turkey. Some of the turkeys that you could even buy for Thanksgiving, we're going to tell you how to do that. But for those of you that have kids,

and maybe you want to hide from them where their food actually comes from. I'm warning you now. You have the first probably three quarters of this discussion. But in the end, that is going to be a part of it because it's part of farming. And we should all know where our food comes from. And, boy, you should be praying your food comes from somewhere as beautiful as Polly face farms There, everybody. How you all doing? My wire. This is the farmer in Adele. That's right.

Official. We're really thrilled to have him here today, and he's going to jump in a little bit and work with us some. So this is everyone. This is our group. It's a Monday. It's a new day, and it's exciting to be here and have you here. We're really thankful. Good.

Good. and Justin are broilers, they're ready to go with you. Okay. And so they're ready to roll and then you go do Eggmobile. Yeah, I'll do Eggmobile. So I'll go ahead and take the tractor up with us. Okay, sounds good. All right, sounds good.

Sounds good. Sounds good. See you guys up there. Ready? Yeah. Okay, still move some chickens. All right. I got to move all these shelters.

So the deal is, stick it under here and you kind of step and you just use this, slip, slip it right under like that. And then you go around here, take out the feeder we're just going to pull it pull it forward and the chickens just walk on the ground

away from yesterday's manure they get their betting change new salad bar every day take that up and just stick stick it in the bottom of that yep there you go yep yep okay that's good

that's good yeah you don't want to go too fast either just go go nice and nice and gently so they can move on yep you're doing good you're doing good you're doing good I got two more to go you just move some 150 chickens well done that's good Joel Saladin it is such an honor pleasure to be here with you polyface farms have visited several times I've been wanting to get the crew out here to just check out this incredible idea this futuristic, yes, yet

retrospective approach towards farming. Yeah, well, it's great to have you. What a blessing, and I'm thrilled that you're here, thank. Well, look, you know, I have a bunch of questions, actually. You and I run to each other on different speaking engagements, and, you know,

you cover a lot of issues about, you know, the farming that you're doing. A lot of farmers are out there, ranchers are starting to, you know, shift their thinking on how they're approaching farming. And I guess, at the whole Part of it really is a conversation, I think, that's really driving attention to what you're doing, which is the environment, right? Global warming. And as we're hearing this attack really on ranching farm, we've got to end all beef production.

Right. And because it's just creating CO2, all of this. I just find it astounding that the heart of America, especially the cowboy, the ranch, what establishes what we have here, that this is the country that's going to get rid of all of that to save. to save the earth. What is just your general thought of the global fire? My first thought is that, boy, only a country as rich and luxurious as ours could sit around and actually talk about whether you should eat a chicken or not. Right.

You know, our ancestors, if you could trap it, shoot it, catch it, debt, you know, whatever. then you lived another day. Right. And so only in a fat, wealthy, luxuriant culture like ours, do we have the luxury of sitting around and saying, I wonder if we should eat a chicken or a pig or a squirrel or a rabbit or a cow. So it's an amazing illustration of how disconnected we are,

how mentally, spiritually, emotionally, how disconnected we are from our ecological umbilical that we can actually think that we can levitate to some place where we're not totally dependent on this ecological womb on this umbilical that we have you know i love going to williamsburg in jamestown my favorite part of james town is not actually the jamestown part it's the palatan village next to it and you go there and you see these this lattice work with with you know like buffalo hides spread over you know these little the little houses, and they hung all their food up into latticework, and, of course, it got smoked. You know, they had a fire and smoke.

So you imagine lying there with your beloved, you're looking up here into this lattice work of hanging, you know, squash and venison and this stuff. And you're that, whatever, that intimate with not only the abundance. And so you're thankful to the creator for provision. Thank you, all right. But at the same time, this is it. You know, there's no Walmart. There's no Sam's Club.

You know, this is it. And so both the, you know, the recognition of provision balanced with the dependency. That's a good sense. So I think a lot of this has just come because we're so well-provision. vision in this country that you know it makes you it makes you squirrely into thinking you know i remember you know when you say that i remember back in high school in boulder colorado which is like you know an environmental mecca liberal progressive thinking there's a lot of loved about it i don't want to put it all down but we had a we had an exchange student that was in from norway that was with us the

whole year. And remember coming to the end of the year, like I had like a social studies class or something with him. And the teacher asked him, what did you really find interesting about America? And he said, I think the thing I find the most interesting is that it appears that most of the people that I've met in this country actually believe that that chicken and beef are delivered in cellophane. That you really are under this impression that this is how it comes to you on earth. Like you don't look in the eyes of your animals. Right. You're not involved with your animals and there's just this detachment to, and he's like, and I see all these discussions about vegetarian meat and all this, but all of it's disconnected. I don't, where are your

grain fields? Where are your, he's like, I just don't see any interconnection with your food supply. Yeah. And I just thought, we were all like, what's he talking about? You know what I mean? I kind of laughed like, yeah, yeah, celebrating. But the more and more I think about it, We've been so detached from our natural symbiosis or experience with our environment and our animals. Yeah, our tactile, visceral interconnection with it, that the notion, that the whole notion of seasons and cycles. I mean, I was reading a report that was just saying that with food shortages, Walmart might be out of strawberries for two weeks in February. And I'm thinking, I have strawberries for two days of February.

No. Middle winter? Where are my strawberries? We only eat strawberries like two months a year in the spring. That's when they're in, you know. And so we eat a bunch of strawberries. And then later the raspberries come in. And then later the blackberries come in.

And then I was speaking at this really high class private school in Atlanta, a bunch of middle. I had 300 middle schoolers, you know, so this is seventh, eighth grade. And I asked the whole, I asked them, I said, All right, I'm just ask you a question. Can anybody give me three vegetables that you have to, that you have to wait to plant after frost? That if frost hits them, they die.

Nothing. You know, complete, complete silence. Finally, you know, this one guy here raised, corn. I said, yeah, good, good, all right. And then another girl, you know, she raised her hand on peppers. Okay. Somebody else then finally, you know, raise their hand, tomatoes. But this was a long, it was a long tease, you know, to get the response.

I said, maybe I asked the wrong question. How about let's flip it around. What can you plant that can handle frost? You know, that's okay to handle frost. Same three, they probably all had home gardens, right? And, you know, cabbage, broccoli, you know, lettuce. Good. I said, so, you know, this took, this took like over five minutes.

You know, in an assembly, that's a long part of your speech, you know, when you burn up that much time. I said, all right, well, maybe I ask you a wrong question again. Let me ask another one. How many of you can name all three of the Kardashian girls? And the whole place just erupted in Pan of town. And so I let everything, it took five minutes to get them all calm down. I said, now, let me ask you something.

Which question do you think is more important to know the answer to? Yeah. You know, and they all just got really, because they got it. They got it in a heartbeat like that. And I think that that speaks of where we are in our culture, that this idea that, well, I'm not, I'm not going to, I'm not going to eat. me, you know, I'm, as if I've evolved to some new, new, evolved to some new spiritual plane of sacredness, you know, that I'm not going to, no, actually, it's a devolution

to a regressive place of disconnection. In order for something to live, something has to give its life for it. There's nothing more profound in that than a compost pile. You know, a compost pile, stuff that was living. It dies. Microbes eat it all up and microbes eat microbes and they digest it all. So you got life, death, decomposition, and then regeneration. That feeds the soil life to grow a new bunch of life. And so this life, death, decomposition, regeneration, life death, decomposition, That is such a foundational element of our understanding of our place and our role in this whole ecological system. And we just don't, we don't participate in that. We don't participate. I've thought, I mean, even when I was an environmentalist, I mean, I still am on, it's hard to say that word, right?

Sure. I want clean air. I want clean water. I want clean foods. I'm wise. I don't believe in being enslaved around some carbon tax space to you know, whatever that. But I remember thinking that it's really this question of whether humans are natural, like are a part of nature. There seems to be this progression throughout time where we saw ourselves in the animal world. And then at some point, I think religion actually had a big part to do with it. Like, well, if we're creating the image in likeness of God, then we're separate from the rest of the natural world.

It seemed dangerous to me. And I think we're getting to the end of that where we are totally, we see, we do not see ourselves as a part of the natural world. And ironically, the environmentalist that they will argue that we're not paying attention to ecology and this is Mother Earth and all of this, yet are the same ones that don't want me eating meat, don't want me connecting with the animals, don't want, they want everything happening in a chemical lab somewhere. Right. And they're separating me even further out. Like there's a real, you know, which is why I don't even use the word environmentalist anymore. It's totally crazy and bonkers and confused. Well, that's why, you know, I created a moniker for myself,

Christian libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist lunatic. It just to have fun with the box, you know, that you don't box me in. Not one of these words fully explains you. No, no, that's right. That's right. It's a good one. You know, and so to that, to that respect, I think that as we have moved through that that disconnective phase, it has thrown gasoline on the reality that we have done a lot of abuse

agriculturally. I mean, the history of the human experience is generally not one of good earth stewardship. Every civilization grew in fertility, used up its fertility, basically exploited it for short-term gain. You know, Sir Albert Howard said, temptation of every civilization to take what nature spent a thousand years creating and turn it into cash. If you're an intentional thinking person, you do have this, I want to repent in sackcloth and ashes for all that my ancestors have done. Right. Because you look at, you know, I mean, we, we have, you know, infertile frogs, three-legged salamanders, a dead zone the size of Rhode Island and the Gulf of Mexico. You know, I get that.

So let's repent. Okay. I get it. But what's the response to that? Is the response that, oh, well, well, I can't touch nature. You know, we call, I call it environmentalism by abandonment. Or is it, okay, well, let's roll up our sleeves and say, okay, we damaged it, we hurt it. Now can we use our mechanical ability, opposing thumbs, and our intellectual capacity,

and can we become healers instead of herders, armors? And so that's what we've tried to bring here to the farm is, can we take agriculture and invert all this historical abuse, abuse and disrespect, that we've foisted upon our womb? And can we nurture it? And agriculturally, this whole thing is expressed, I think, in mainland agriculture as nature is a reluctant partner. You know, I have to, I have to get it in a half Nelson. I've got to make you grow me soybeans or corn. I'm going to make you. Well, I think even further than that, I think nature is a bitch.

I mean, that's what we say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We are under attack by nature. Yeah, exactly. There's not, there's nothing close to a balance. Yeah. We are simply at war with nature. I mean, a lot of this stuff that I've got to make you.

With vaccines and we're not going to get into all that. But the whole space that I live in, it is literally medicine at, it describes itself as at war with nature. We're in a war with nature, and one day we're going to win, and anybody that's injured by us moving too fast and putting out drugs or vaccines, they're dangerous. They literally, if you really drill down with them, we'll say, it's a casualty of the war we're in.

We're at a war with nature, and that's an accepted casualty. So very much the same. Externalized costs are just part of collateral damage. Whereas I view nature as a benevolent lover that simply wants to be caressed in the right places. So I'm asking, how do we correct? this this is not a scarce place it's an abundant place it wants to give back way more than we can ever imagine but but we have we have to respect it we have to honor it and we and we have to ask what is right for you just let's just take

a step by step so your parents bought this beautiful farm back in 1960s 61 I I was four. And was their goal to, were they organic farmers? Yes. I mean, was that, I mean, was that? Yes. So my dad was an accountant, a business administration. And his father, my grandfather, was a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening

and Farming Magazine in 1948 when it came out. He always had a big compost pile and a lot of people don't realize that post-World War II, there There was a real tug of war in this country whether we would go biological or chemical. Are we going to go biological or chemical? And so the countries are at a real tug of war. But World War II, it killed a lot of farm boys. And so here were farmers waiting for their sons to come back and they came back, didn't come back or came back maimed.

And Sir Albert Howard had written by that time in an agricultural testament, which for the first time created the scientific recipe for aerobic compost, which is carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, water, and microbes in a certain ratio, all right? And that's what he, and he presented that to the world in 1943, which is, you know, kind of considered the foundation of biological, nonchemical, nonchemical agriculture. And, but the world was, of course, preoccupied in 1943. And, and we didn't have, we didn't have the carbon-based infrastructure to metabolize a carbon, a decomposition, biologically founded fertility program at that time. We didn't have tractors with front-end loaders. We didn't have black plastic pipe to deliver water to a compost pile and keep the

moisture right. We didn't have chainsaws. Chain saws were not really perfected until 1957. And so like any innovation, Sir Albert Howard, gift to the world of the scientific recipe for compost in 1943 could not be leveraged because there was not technologies yes we didn't have yeah we didn't have exactly the infrastructure to be able to leverage it and it took about 20 years for the chainsaw chippers black plastic pipe PTO powered manure spreaders the on-farm carbon kind of component to come together and And in that 20 years, of course, I mean, think about it.

You know, you're a 50-year-old farmer waiting for your sons to come back from the war. They don't come back. You've been shoveling, shoveling, shoveling, shoveling, shoveling, shoveling, shoveling, all your life. And somebody comes to you with a bag of 10, 10, 10, 10. You don't need to shovel anymore, Farmer John. What's 10-10-10-10-N-PK chemical fertilizer? Okay. A bag of, which was left.

Yeah, which was left over from, you know, you make bombs out of N-PK, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. Okay. That's what you make bombs out of. So World War I, World War II, financed the refining, the distribution, the bagging, the marketing. You know, it financed this entire NPK chemical industry. It was almost like when the world restarted post-World War II and somebody shot the gun, the chemical had a head start.

It's just been funded by wars. Sure, it has nothing to do now. There's no war. We're going to do with all this stuff. Let's start pouring it on the ground and charging farmers for it. like Van Danes Shiva says, she says, we're still wearing the bombs of World War II in our kitchens. That's exactly what we're doing. And so you're a 50-year-old farmer waiting for his sons to come back for war and somebody offers you this little back. You don't have to shovel

anymore, Farmer John. You just put this on and everything's fine. Be gentle on old grandpa. That's what I'm saying. You know, us in the same city, maybe we would have done the same thing. But then in 20 years, now there's no excuse. But by that time, the chemical industry had taken over the land grant universities. They'd taken over the USDA. I called the U.S. Duh. They'd taken over all this. And we had this whole idea of TV dinners, Velveeta cheese, convenience foods, simulac, infamil, don't breastfeed, you know.

And so we had this early love affair with convenience, technology, you know. Which also ironically took the woman that was raising the kids and raised the family put her to work. Yeah. If we're going to have TV dinners where your meals have already been made, mom doesn't have to do it, the kid's on Simulac, you don't have to breastfeed. But during that time, the whole food industry moved to convenience and shelf stability. The more shelf stable you make something, the less it'll rot. Right. Well, if it won't rot, it won't digest.

And so we got Velvita cheese. You know, if you can squeeze cheese on your table and walk away from it for a year and it doesn't mold and doesn't do anything, it probably won't digest in your body, right? Real cheese, put it on the table, walk away. Two days it's fuzzy. Three days it sprouts legs and walks off the table, right? I mean, real cheese. So this whole idea of convenience coupled with shelf stable and long shelf life.

You know, tomatoes, tomatoes, the ones in the store, they're not cultivars selected for nutrition, taste. It's all about, can it bounce around in the back of a truck? a thousand miles from California to South Dakota, you know. Utterly flavorless. It's like cardboard. It's like cardboard. It is.

It's like cardboard. Nothing to do it. That's right. That's right. Supposedly, this is the original tropical tomato cultivar from Peru, which all of our domestic tomatoes come from are called current tomatoes. They are out of this world delicious. Oh, man.

They literally just explode in your mouth. What time of year do they start growing in here? as soon as the chickens come out. And as soon as the chickens... They're all summary of this... Uh-huh. Of course, you know, we never pick them all. Right.

And the seeds fall on the ground. The chickens are in here in the winter. And they, of course, incorporate everything into the ground. And so when the chickens come out in the spring, we just, we clean out the compote, the bedding under the chickens. But there's still plenty of seeds left, as you can see. In the seed bank, they just come back. And this has been coming back just for 25 years.

years, never replanted. Aren't you afraid of eating these without washing them or dipping them in chlorine or... No. No? No? The average American has not had real food like this. Yeah, I've never tasted to me like that, I swear. Yeah. Well, as we started here on the farm and saw, you know, what we were dealing with, dad having this this environmental mystique as an accountant and thinking about the business, he real philosophically that the chemical approach was a treadmill. It was like a drug addiction. He called it a drug addiction.

And this is before drugs were a big deal. This is in the 1960s. He said, you can't run fast enough to chemically buy your way into fertility faster than the indebtedness to keep buying the fertility. Well, man, think about where we are today when a farmer thinks that his, or her fertility is dependent on something outside the farm when suddenly fertilizer jumps two, three, four times and suddenly, you know, all the farmers are, oh no, you know, I just like we're seeing all around the world, which is why I was so excited to get to talk to you

about this. And we've had side conversations, you know, we've had the rancher Shad on our show talking to us about how there was this, you know, here in America, they were told that we just can't get nitrogen because the war in the Ukraine is not coming here. I'm starting to question that whether we're just getting a different story because in other countries, the Netherlands, I mean, there are tractors blocking highways now because of the nitrogen reduction being demanded

by whatever environmental regulations that the government's passing. Sri Lanka is, you know, storming capitals at this point because they thought they were on the road supposedly to reducing this nitrogen level fertilizers, trying to get to a more environmentally friendly, sustainable, organic, all these things. things and yet the world seems to be falling apart our food supply is disappearing right and as you're saying whether the government mandates it on you or if it's true it just doesn't come because

that's coming from a different country farmers are finding themselves like the the energy situation the UK where and in Europe where they're about to have no heating through the winter farmers right have got no ability to afford to make the food that we're planning on eating next season well both of those countries are dramatic illustrations of how nuanced this whole discussion is. Sri Lanka,

they had an economic problem and so they didn't want to buy the nitrogen anymore. They jumped off the cliff overnight. Well, biology... So their politicians said, they said, let's make it sound like we're being organic, but we ours were being cheap because we can't afford it. Exactly, exactly.

Interesting. Exactly. So they didn't do it because they wanted to be organic. They did it because they ran out of money. And so the thing to remember is that biology, if you're going to run a biological system, the biological time clock cannot be speeded up but so fast. You know, if you, you've got a wound on your hand. I do indeed. You cut your finger. Okay. You could want that to heal, you know, as fast as you could possibly want it to, but it's going to heal on its own time. And so So Sri Lanka, could they do this? Absolutely.

But it takes some time. It takes some time to get the biology awakened up after the chemical has destroyed it. In the Netherlands, the Dutch used to, they had colonies all over the world. And they still leverage those, you know, Paraguay, Uruguay, all that. And so the Netherlands still has these legacy

relationships that they bring in all this grain from around the world. and of course everything is almost almost everything in the Netherlands all the animals are inside now they're not as big as our barns here in the U.S., but they're still all inside. The point is they're bringing in so much animal feedstock that they're overriding their their womb's carrying capacity for the waste product. In fact, the last time I was there, they were dehydrating the manure so the grain came from Uruguay, then they dehydrated the manure, put it in the same boat, and sent it back to

Uruguay for fertilizer. That's not a sustainable system. Think about this. All of the great fertile soils on the planet were not built with chemical fertilizer. They were not built with giant deer tractors. They were not built with shipping nitrogen, all right? How were they built? They were built with decomposing organic matter, most of them under prairies, the bison, the wildebeests on the Serengeti, the mega fauna of the outer Mongolia, I mean go around the planet, the deep soils all were under prairies with herbivores being chased by prey. There was movement. There were rest periods, exercise periods, there were disturbance periods, and fire. And natives used fire. And so what is nature's

template? How does nature build soil? And we were like, Well, number one, we got to reduce tillage. We got to reduce plowing. Because plowing, it takes the clothing off the soil, all right, and exposes the soil to nakedness, and then you get all this erosion. And then, you know, animals, animals move. And so we started moving the cows around. Well, guess what? Can we supplement? Can we supplement the carbon? So then we dialed back to, you know, composting, which is basically just a clever human way to stimulate, to facilitate natural decomposition, but we just collect the ingredients, put them together, and what would normally take two years now takes nine months, for example.

That's basically what composting is. Instead of buying fertilized, we bought a big industrial chipper, and we began doing this large-scale composting, and so now, you know, our first soil samples were, you know, 1% organic matter. today we're over 8% organic matter. And guess what? At 4% organic matter, there is a freestanding microbe in the soil called an azotobacter bacteria that at 4% organic matter,

it comes out of dormancy, becomes active, and it will pull out 100 pounds of nitrogen per acre per year out of the atmosphere. Wow. But it only kicks in at 4%. There are very few agricultural soils in the U.S. today that are 4%. Naturally, most of them were in the 8 to 10% range. So six to, you know, if there's sandy, it, you know, might be lower.

But that's an example of how when you create, when you change that biological ecosystem, the habitat, the habitat. You know, in us it's called the microbiome, all right? Out here, it's called the ecosystem, all right? But when you massage that to full functionality, you start getting symbiosis and synergism, not hurdles. So you're caressing Mother Nature versus fighting. I'll give you another example. This is a great one too. They say the cows, you know, they're burping and they're farting and they're going to destroy the planet.

Because, again, a freestanding microbe in the soil called methanotrophic bacteria. Methanotrophic bacteria. Now, the first part of that, methane. Methane atrophic bacteria. So this is a freestanding microbe that grabs methane and pulls it into the soil. It does not live under corn,

does not live under soybeans. It does not live under wheat, rye, or barley or sugar cane, or any of the crops the USDA subsidizes and insurers. It lives under perennial polycultures, perennial prairie-type polycultures,

healthy pastures, not overgrazed pastures, healthy pastures. It doesn't live under asphalt, doesn't live in feedlots, but under healthy pasture, these microbes will reach out and they will metabolize the amount of methane generated by 1,000 cows per acre. Wow. No way is ever going to have 1,000 cows on an acre. Right. Okay. But those are the kinds of things that, you know, cowspiracy and what the health, and these other documentaries that want everybody to turn into a vegan,

they don't analyze these. They don't go to the positive things that built the soil in the first place. Our soils were not built with 10-10-10. They were not built with Russian fertilizer. They were not built with John Deere tractors. They were built with animal movement and all these amazing microbes that were synergistic to what was going on terrestrial. and moving them.

So we said, well, what about the animals? Will the animals, you know, in nature, the animals move? They're not in a stationary house. They actually have legs. Just before, when you get into them, I know you know Zach Bush, and one of the fascinating things that when I interviewed him, we were talking about global warming, CO2, and, you know, he laid out numbers.

The ocean is absorbing so much CO2. Right. And, you know, green trees and plants are, He says, but the greatest absorption of CO2 is the soil. Yes. And we've killed the soil all over the planet. The lungs of our planet that can take that in and transform it. The stomach of our planet is dead.

The lungs of the planet is the soil. Yes, trees, yes, that. But you don't get trees respirating if you don't have the microbiome and the mycelium and the soil doing its work. And so what happened in the 1970s when we started to poison, the microbiome of the soil systems and create dirt on a scale that is now, again, back then, unbelievable. But the current estimates are that 97% of the arable farmland in the world has now been depleted or severely depleted, which means 97% of the lungs of the Earth are now in its end stage of emphysema. There is no surface area left.

The carbon is supposed to be in the soil, and all over the planet, agriculture has taken this rich endowment that was bequeathed to us of carbon, organic matter. I mean, they're not identical, but they're kissing cousins, okay? That nature bequeathed this, and we have burned it out with tillage, with chemical fertilizers, with monocultures. And monocultures, that mean just farming the same thing over and over again? Yeah, yeah, it's fields of one thing as opposed to multiple things. You know, native prairie in the U.S., an acre had up to 40, 50 different plants in it, varieties of plants.

It wasn't just soybeans or corn or wheat or whatever. And so, you know, that needs to be done very, very judiciously. And when you begin developing this organic matter, what happens is all this latent bacteria, all these microbes, all this biology, earthworms, earthworms don't eat 10, 10, 10 chemical fertilizer. They eat vegetation. They eat decaying material. And so we started moving the animals around, adding the compost and all that. And guess what?

Now these big saucer-shaped rock areas that I remember as a kid, they've all got 12 inches of soil on them. 12 inches of soil. Now, it's not three feet like it was, you know, 500 years ago. But it's there. So, yeah, so if you, if you come out here, just, just look at the, you know, look at the density. All right. And so you see, see, these are all earthworm castings.

Look at that. Yeah, yeah, those mounds. Yeah, see, that's. So that's brand new soil that just got built. But you can see that the entire, see the, look, look, there. There's a big hole. There's a big wormhole right there. Look at that big hole.

That's a... Yeah. And so, you know, so when it rains hard, that rain just pours right down that hole and you don't get runoff. Yeah. That's where this organic matter is. You get more organic matter holds more and more water. Look at the thickness of this, you know, the thickness of the vegetation.

Trust me, no raindrop, no raindrop hits that soil. You know, by the time it hits this, it actually shatters into just a fog by the time it gets down to the soil. And this whole mound here is a casting, that whole, that whole mound there. And it's dry right now, you know. But anyway, as a culture, we're brain damaged on grass. Because only grass people think, you think lawn, football field, soccer field, golf course. They're not thinking this kind of volume. Right.

There's a lot of biomass here. A lot of biomass. In fact, we had so little soil when Dad started with the electric fence, we didn't have enough soil to hold up electric fence stakes. Wow. And it doesn't take much soil to hold up an electric fence stake. So he poured concrete, went to town, got old junk car tires, poured concrete in it, pushed a half inch pipe down.

And I've still got some of them around here. And my brother and I, we were little kids, you know, but he would pile these up on the tractor platform, drive real slow through the field. And the two of us, we could, we could, you know, kind of heave them off, you know, then go back and stick electric fence stakes in them, put up electric fence, move the cows around. When I think of ranching, I think of, I just, I see a giant hillside or valley with just cows speckled all across it. You don't do it that way. No. Contrast that with when you see a documentary on nature about the, you know, about the cows speckled all across it. the Serengeti, what strikes you about that, the migration of the Wildebeest? I would say right away, if wildebeests were spread out nicely across the giant valley,

they're going to be eaten by lions, hyenas, everybody left and right. Everything you think about it is they run from it, they run at it. And even when there's a lion attacks, you see they all attack as a giant pack herd altogether. That's right. Safety in numbers. That's right. Zebras, same thing. Zebras, you don't see a zebra over there and a zebra.

No, they're, why? Because the lion, when he looks at all those zebras, and it's a mob, he can't distinguish. If you've ever raised chickens and you have a couple of them get out, you can't catch two. You've got to concentrate on one to get it. They'll make a fool out of you, you know.

I'm going to catch these two at the same time. No, no, you'll never get them. So the mob is fuzzy, literally fuzzy, to the eyes of a predator. So the mob, the mob is the critical thing. We've got to mob them up. In nature, herbivores, they move, they mob and they mow they move they mob they mow okay mo you know grace yeah move mob moe so how can we duplicate

that with portable high tech high tech electric fencing a single little strand we can literally steer a herd of hundreds thousands across a landscape with the same precision as a zero-turn mower on a golf course Wow. Just steer them across. So we can get that mob, that mob effect, and we can move them. No, you can't eat this clover plant today. You get that tomorrow, thank you very much. You know, you can't have it today.

And we can literally move these around and they're mowing. They're not eating chicken manure and feathers and all this. This electric netting is really high tech. This is face-age stuff. We didn't have this even 50-50 years. 50 years ago, it's very, very new. Has a metallic thread woven through this poly. The verticals are just polyethylene, which is nothing.

But then the metal threads woven through the horizontals carry spark. And that spark keeps the animals in and it keeps predators out. And, you know, 150 feet of it only weighs about 12 pounds. One person can, you know, take it up and lay it back out in about 10 minutes. So when people say, oh, this is nice, this is the way Grandpa did it. No, Grandpa would give it his ITs for this kind of stuff. We are not anti-technology or Luddites, but we do want to use technology that enables us to handle the animals like they were in nature,

moving around on pasture, almost better than they could in nature. So, you know, the turkey flock, it's functioning just like a wild turkey flock. turkey flock in that it's moving. And so that increases the production per acre, increases the amount of biomass that's actually used, and it allows the animal to be in a habitat that mimics its very, very natural habitat as opposed to being locked up in a people-particulate building. When scientists started 40 years ago or whatever it was, you know, taking us to steak dinners to teach us this new way of feeding cows where we grind up dead cows, we feed it back to cows.

It could possibly go wrong. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We were all told, you know, and when our family didn't embrace it, we were, you know, what are you, Luddites, you hate science, you hate progress, yeah, yeah. No, we looked around the planet and says, where does an herbivore eat carry on? And we couldn't find it. We didn't know there would be bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

All we knew was there was not a natural template. People that maybe don't know what that means, like mad cow, really, it's the same disease you would get by cannibalism, right? Cannibals have the same thing. If you eat human beings, you can get weird in the head. Yeah, weird in the head, yeah. If you learn to say bovine spongiform encephalopathy, it makes you sound smarter. Sure does. I'll work on it.

Practice in front of a mirror first. So as we looked at this, we realized, okay, moving, mobbing, mowing. And so that's what we developed here. And we realize that 98% of the herbivores, of the livestock in the world, violates one of those, and some of them all three. You know, in a feedlot, a Tyson chicken house, they're not moving. Well, I guess they are mobbed up, but they're not getting the benefit of a mob. And they're certainly not mowing.

And so what we want to do is not violate. of those three, moving, mobbing, mowing. And we call this mob stocking herbivorous, solar conversion, lignified carbon sequestration, fertilization. That sounds intelligent too. Yeah, it does. I practiced it in front of a mirror so I can do it. But the combination of in situ carbon through composting,

the animal movement, the multi-speciation, we never planted a seed, Bill. We never planted a seed. And we haven't bought a bag of chemical fertilizer in 60 years. Wow. And today we went from the armpit of the community to arguably, well, you know, in Augusta County, the average cow days per acre is 80, a cow day. So an acre of pasture in Augusta County will support one cow for 80 days a year or 80 cows for one day.

All right. All right. Yeah. We're averaging 400 cow days per acre. Wow. Okay. Five times the county average. And I'm not saying that pridefully.

or bragging. I'm saying it humbly with tears in my eyes, realizing this is an abundant planet. This is not a place where the creator said, suck it up, kiddo, it's gonna be tough. Right. No, it's a place of exhilarating abundance and provision. And that's what we need to be after.

And so imagine if that guy would do it and that guy would do it and that guy, you know, we can't imagine the amount we, and guess what? as you hit, then we went from 1% now back then to now 8% organic matter. Well, then the azotabacter wakes up. Oh, now we get free nitrogen. The methanotrophic bacteria wakes up, you know, oh, okay, now we're, you know, now we're metabolizing the methane and all this works together, including the fact that one percent

increase in organic matter. Organic matter is spongy. Think about compost, right? It's like a sponge, right? One pound holds four pounds of water. It's real spongy. So every 1% increase in organic matter increases water holding capacity by 20,000 gallons per acre. Wow.

Per acre. Went from 1% to 8% to 8%. That's 7 clicks, 7% times 20,000 gallons, if you're quick with math. It's 140,000 gallons of water per acre today that we can hold that we couldn't half a century ago. That's remarkable. That's remarkable, which means going into a drought, things stay green longer. And if you get a rainstorm, flood, whatever, you get to hold a lot more water. I like to think of the soil, you know, people don't think of the soil.

Nobody takes their shower, getting ready to go to work in the morning, and thinks about the soil. But I do. And I like to think of the soil as a cathedral. about the most beautiful, magnificent cathedral you've ever seen. It's got all these little rooms, and it's got little vestibules up in the third and fourth chancery. And the microbes in the soil, the bacteria and all these beings at nine billion per double handful, they're slogging through, they're walking through these chambers. And they're making a trade here, and they're picking up here, and they're, you know, one's finding an enemy here and eating it. And the other one's, you know,

pooping it out in this chamber and it's just this amazing world of cathedrals and the more rooms you have the more space you have in that cathedral the better your soil is and that's what compost does compost brings the cathedral rooms to the soil aggregate the glomalin glomelon was only discovered like 30 years ago but that's this that's this glue this this aggregate it makes it makes good soil look like cottage cheese. That's what you're looking for. You don't want it to be a compressed clay, you know, hard thing. You want it to actually have structure.

And I like to call that, that's my soil cathedral. I just love the, I love the idea. So I have a question, Polly Face. How does that, where does that name come from? Well, so when we, when I came back to the farm and we wanted to, you know, have, create the business, we originally submitted inter- I wanted to be interface, riparian, forestal, and open land. Forestal water, open.

Y'all wanted the three great environments interface. Well, we submitted it to the State Corporation Commission, and there was already an interface in Virginia, and so we couldn't have that. So dad comes out, I'm milking a cow. We're milked a couple Guernsey's. And so I'm sitting there milking a cow. He says, SCC said we can't be an interface.

I'm sitting there, oh man. I said, well, if we can't be interface, Interface, let's be mini face, polyface, you know, mini face. And we both liked it, it stuck and so we became the farm of many faces. You know, we envisioned a place where there were a lot of people, people faces, polyface environments, many environments, many species, multiple enterprises, you know, that we envisioned that we would not just grow cows or chickens, we'd grow a lot of different kinds of things, different enterprises.

So that whole poly thing just fit, so polyface. One of the things I've liked is, you know, when I was visiting your farm, you said my animals work for me. They work the limb. They're my tools. That's right. That's right. Yeah, so I'll give you an example.

So we're moving the cows every day. You know, we'll put 200 on an acre and a half for a day. So every day, sometimes between about 3.30 and 5.30, we move them. So they're very used to it. You can see them. Just lined up, they're ready to go. They know what's going on, and they'll just come right through here. Come on, sweetie pies.

Come on, honeypots. Yeah. Come on, gals. Go, go, go, whew. Come on, gals. Come on, gals. Come on, gals. Come on, gals.

I don't even know if I've ever really seen cows really run. You look happy. I mean, they definitely like. Yeah. They dance. They sure do. So you just take one down, you move a little. over and then then they'll go the down the hill next next day realize we just

built these a couple days ago okay they're not here in other words because you don't need to you don't need to your whole farm you just do the area you're moving to what do you tend to do like one week ahead of time or well it depends normally there's three wires so they were in here this is called the front fence that keeps them from going there that one's called the back fence It keeps them from going back where they were. And that one's called the check fence. That if they happen to go through the front fence, you've got another check fence to keep them from going to Timbuktu.

Right. So what we would normally do, now that I've moved them, we roll that one up, move it to the new check fence. Got it. And so you're using free wires to keep it all in check. So they'll be... One day. One day. So they were here for one day.

One day. And when is the next time they will come on to this piece right here that we're on today? It all depends on how much growth we get. If we get a bunch of rain this week with that hurricane coming up and it stays warm through October, we'll probably come back on again before, you know, sometime in early winter. Okay. If we don't, we'll probably get on here into early spring. In a typical year, we would hit one spot maybe four times in a season, maybe up to five.

And all the time it's producing more and more organic matter as it goes. Yeah, yeah. Well, what follows herbivores in nature? Birds, the egret on the rhino's nose and the birds behind the Cape Buffalo, you know, ever see her get buffalo all these birds that follow them? And so we follow the cows with the eggmobiles. And so about four or five days behind the cows, here comes the egg mobiles. And the chickens then, they scratched through the cow patties and eat the fly larva,

spread the cow patties out. So instead of a big, you know, with a cow pie here, that cow pie now covers this much. They're digging and scratch. Exactly. Exactly. They spread it. And so they sanitize. And, of course, the cows have now exposed crickets and grasshoppers and all that stuff, worms.

By taking the grass down. Yep, by taking off the cover. So the chickens are there, they're chasing down all these bugs. And so the chickens act as a biological pasture sanitizer behind the cows. So we don't have to use parasiticides, grubicides, wormers. So there's a symbiosis, and the chickens lay eggs. So not only do the chickens do all this work for us, but then they cream it with laying eggs. Let's move the Eggmobile.

All right. We're taking these way over there where the cows are. Good morning, birdies. And how many chickens we got in this? There's about 150 in each one. If the paddocks are real small, I move them every second day because they can cover a couple of paddocks at once. But if the paddocks are big, then I move them every day because they can't cover the whole

paddock at once. So it's all about how big the cow paddock was and whether they can cover it all in one day or two day. One of the things that we don't have here on our farm is ticks. A lot of farm, you know, they think, oh, ticks, ticks, we don't have ticks. They eat all the ticks. So there's a lot of, you know, symbiotic health going on that you don't really think about or see. Another one that we do is in the wintertime when we're feeding hay.

And hay, for those that don't know, you know, hay is simply solar dried grass. Think of it as raisins are to grapes. Hay is to grass. Okay. It's just dehydrated grass. All right. So in wintertime, you know, we got snow. The grass isn't growing.

Everything's done. So we feed hay. So the thing is, a cow is dropping 50 pounds of goodies out her back end every day. 50 pounds. So how do we metabolize it? So we feed under an awning and we use wood chips and just. just carbon to make a carbonaceous diaper under those cows that then molecularly bonds. Carbon, carbon wants to bond to stuff.

Carbon filters, carbon filtration, charcoal, right? It's all carbon. Carbon is like the Alka-Seltzer. It's the buffer of the planet. So we bond that molecularly in this big sponge. The cows, of course, they're tromping out the oxygen. And so it's anaerobic, fermenting, and it gets deeper and deeper. And as we build it, we add corn to it.

The corn then ferments, the cows, of course, they mix it all up and tromp it in. So in the spring, this might be, it might be four feet deep in the spring, okay? The cows come out, start grazing, grass starts to grow. So that's what you're doing. This is during the winter while you're thinking of the winter. They're under an awning. Yeah, yeah. It's a little bit different than the process in the summer.

Yes, very different, very different. Yeah. Now, they can walk outside. They've got a little place they can exercise. But basically, we want their winter manure and urine to not go on hibernating microbes. Right. When the winter's cold, the microbes, all these microbes I've described, the earthworms, they kind of go to sleep.

Everything's resting for this, whatever, you know, 90 days, roughly. And so we don't want to put a bunch of stuff on that, organic or inorganic, because it can't metabolize it very well. Okay. And you get soil damage with pugging because the ground's soft and, you know, they're chomping it up. So this is how we feed them and control their manure and urine, and it just builds up deep. So the cows go out, spring comes, grass starts to grow, and we put in pigs. A lot of your listeners, I know, are familiar with large-scale composting, and they're thinking of these Windrow compost piles, right?

You know, you've got these big compost turners and make this compost. Because what we need to do is convert that from anaerobic without oxygen. to aerobic compost because anaerobic and aerobic are like salt water and fresh water if I put anaerobic material on the soil it actually kills the aerobic microbes in the top six inches okay all right yeah so I want aerobic microbes I want like to go to like here I want aerobic microbes so I've got to convert this from anaerobic to aerobic material well most of the time people you know you'd make these windrow compost clout

it out. Tractors and probably. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You pointed that out at Abby Rockefeller's farm. Yes, yes. Okay. So instead, we use pigs. Okay. We put the pigs in. The pigs then seek the fermented corn that we've been putting in through the winter. And in seeking the corn, that pays their salary to turn it like a big egg beater, oxygenate it. We call them pig erators. Pig erators. Pig erators. and they convert that whole stack, that carbonaceous diaper, from anaerobic to aerobic compost, and then we spread that on the fields, and that's our fertility program.

Wow. We move them about every five to 12 days. They were just there. They're here now. You can see the new grass right up here. You can see how it's come back. So these paddocks up here looked exactly like this one, 50 days ago and they've just been moving progressively through these paddocks. Like, for example,

we come over here. This looked just like that a week ago and that looked just like this 50 days ago. That's what's cool. And you notice we're here among 50 hogs and there's no smell, no odors. They're getting a half acre paddock about every five to 12 days. So you get heavy impaction in rest. heavy impaction and rest. All the grass that you see, we didn't plant. It just came naturally as part of the seed bank that was in the soil that has now been awakened by the pigs disturbing it. We call it ecological exercise. The disturbance from the pigs has awakened that latent seed bank to sprout and come on up under now these new saplings and new trees that are that are sprouting up in the, in the area. Everything has a purpose. And so it's all... So again, it's not guys in there shoveling. No, not. No. No. Diesel blowing. You got cows laying it. Pigs go in. They do all that work for you. Yeah, they do all that work, you know. And they're in hog heaven. They love this. And it fully honors and respects the pigness of the pig. The pig now is not just pork chops and bacon. The pig is a

co-laborer, a team player. It's, you know, we got a thing here going. As part of this great land healing ministry, the pig is a team player. And it completely changes that emotional relationship that we have with, you know, with what we're doing. And it fully honors the distinctiveness, the physiological distinctiveness of the pig. You know, in our country, we don't ask how to make, how to make happy pigs. All we ask is, you know, how do we grow on faster, fat, or bigger, cheaper, you know, as if it's just a mechanical something or other, right? And I would suggest that a culture that never asks how to make a happy pig or how to respect and honor the pigness of the pig

will soon come to where it doesn't ask, how do we make happy people, how do we respect and honor the distinctiveness of Tom and Mary and Jane? Yeah. So that whole cultural, ethical framework of individual liberty and freedom and expression and choice, is wrapped up in, do we honor that in the least of these to create a foundation? So we honor it in the greatest of these.

Well, and then I think you could go to all sorts of spiritual teachings too. If the pig is not feeling loved, if that is not the energy that it's in, whatever stressors, however that affects its body, affects our bodies as we take that in and we just forward a cycle of pain, anger, frustration, and all of those things. Yes. In fact, one of the most interesting things we've learned over the decades we've been in this is that all of our meats, poultry, pork, beef, cooks about 15 to 20 percent faster than anything in the store. And the only thing that we can figure out is to why, because we work with a lot of chefs, a lot of world-class chefs, you know, different people. And the only thing that we can figure out why is because our animals aren't stress. and they don't spend a lifetime secreting adrenaline.

What happens when your body kicks in, you've got adrenaline? Everything tightens up. Yeah, it tightens up, right? And so our animals, because they're not spending a lifetime stressed, they're just relaxed. And as Michael Pollan said, they just have one bad day. And I would suggest for the folks that suddenly think, oh, you know, there he went. He was a murderer, you know, and I've been accused.

No, no, no, no. No, no. No, think about this. How we create, we already established in an order for something to live, something has to die. And we know now that plants communicate, mycelium communicates, fungi communicates. Listen, this isn't just sentient beings. It's all sentient. It's all sentient. It's responding. It's dynamic. It's spontaneous. It's all that. So animals living a sacred life or part of a sacred system that then they pass on?

Yes. And so it's how it's how we've honored the life during the life that creates sacredness in that in that final offering. As Joel Salatin put it best, our animals here have a beautiful life, a wonderful life, and one bad day. And frankly, this bad day is just a couple of minutes for these birds as they are taken through this process. So beautiful, though, to see these gorgeous birds at the end. This is where our food is coming from, at least if we're eating right and we're going to the right places for our food.

Because these are what we call table birds. So it's one for the table, right? It's pretty. And so it's got to be, you've got one chance to impress the in-laws, right? So you've got to make sure that the birds are pristine. Let me see if I can grab one of these. Let's see. They're pretty good-sized birds, right?

They are. There's a lot to them. Okay. All right. Okay. Yeah. Pull down. That's great.

Harder, harder. Yep, more, more. One. Yep. Nice. And then push. More. Yeah, watch your hand.

It takes about two minutes for them to bleed out. Okay. Then we're going to pull them out of the cone and set them over here. Okay. So you're going to go ahead and grab the next one. The next one's ready. Okay. So now grab a bird.

We're going to put it up here in the scaldor. Okay. So grab by the leg. Yeah, just grab it by the leg. Yep. Put the one in the top. Yep. And then I'm going to start it.

And we're going to put it in the back. So we got one on each side. So this is a scalder. It's got a 145 degree water and it's loosening the feathers by agitating the bird so that the water penetrates by the follicle. Okay. And with the soap it cuts through the oil so that you've got it now. So the feathers are all loosening up now. So really when you grab this like they just pull out.

So now just grab this bird and toss it on in there. It's a little damp so be careful. All right, you can grab that one? Yep. Good. So what they're doing is they're bouncing around with each other and rubbing up against those little fingers and that's what's pulling the feathers out and they're so gentle like you can leave the bird in there for a long time and it doesn't hurt the skin got it look that it's amazing yeah that's a game changer right i'll bet that's a game changer because you just imagine

like the old days you can't get feathers yeah look at that that looks a little more like thanksgiving right sure it does i think a lot of people when these days we're so used to seeing the the the farming visuals the giant dirt field with thousands of cows living in squalor and sun beating down on them nothing green anywhere nothing natural about this existence at all PETA's done a pretty good job of right going in with cameras but showing just these horrible conditions to be raised in animals and cages that can't move their lives all of these things right and so you know I think that that also has led to an ability to sort of I just don't want to have any part of that.

Right. Right. Absolutely. Now, I think there's a lot of farmers that are really in many ways doing those practices because that's how they're being told this has to be done. This is the only way I can make money. Right. You know, we've got Monsanto when it comes to chemicals on all the plants. Yeah.

And then you have, you know, Tyson and these chicken, these giant monolithic companies that basically turn these farmers into corporate farmers. When we look at this world and it seems like we're at a, we're at an impact moment here, where once again, where at one point the conversation was, do we go organic, do we go with biological matter or do we go in this chemical direction, we are at a critical mass moment where something's going to have to change. I mean, I think we can all agree how we're doing this. We really do have problems in this earth.

Is it possible to change course of? right now in your mind. Could you go onto a, you know, a modern rancher's farm? Could you go into that deep dirt field? Can you step in there and say, believe me, you will actually make money if you do this my way? Yeah. Well, the answer is yes.

The answer is yes. In fact, I would say it's the only way long term to do it. Now, now the orthodox conventional mind right now, the chemical mind, still thinks that we're gonna be able to trick nature, that we're gonna be able to trick nature, that we're gonna be able to trick, And, you know, with artificial intelligence and smart farming and... Robotic bees.

Precision farming. Yeah, robot. Yeah, exactly. And so this idea of somebody sitting in a console, you know, a thousand miles away that knows exactly what my acre needs, you know, is just, it's just, it doesn't work. And so the beauty of these big principles, you know, perennial. animals move carbon economy in situ fertility what's that word you said that twice in situ that means that means it's here nature doesn't move carbon very far think about it

you know a leaf falls off a tree yeah the wind blows it but it doesn't blow it a thousand miles right an herbivore comes along a bird eats a seed and it flies up on a tree digest the seed poops all of that that carbon cycling happens all On site, you know, fairly close, you know, maybe a mile or two, all right? It's not, it's not a global trade thing, you know, it's a property being able to acquire its own fertility from carbon on site in situ, on site, is a revolutionary concept. You mean, I don't have to go to the store. I don't have to get to call the ammonia truck, the fertilizer truck. I don't have to call Vladimir Putin and say, deliver me.

As you go down that path, you realize how revolutionary this is. In fact, I would say this. I would say that if the United States took all the money it currently spends on chemical fertilizer and fighting fires, that's $5 billion, and took all that money and concentrated it on biomass carbon development. Not only would we grow all of our own food, we would build soil and have the happiest, fattest earthworms of any country in the world. And one other thing that it would do is

it would create sacred, noble, affirming work for thousands and thousands of people who have been marginalized in our techno-sophisticated white-collar culture. This is what Michael Rowe is all about, right? Dirty jobs. And we have, as a culture, culture, dist, I guess, is the hip word, but we have marginalized.

We have not honored people that want to have calluses and splinters in their hands. 40% business books will tell you, 40% of today's modern population, 40% wants to get dirty. They like to get into soil, handle wire, be tactile about life. And so the carbon economy that I'm just trying, so I sharpening my own mower blade. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right.

That's right. That's right. So that kind of, that kind of desire to be, to be a visceral participant in this is not affirmed. You know, my last meeting with the school guidance counselor, right? You're going over your curriculum, all right. And I'm a rising senior. I'm in the National Honor Society. You know, I'm, and she says, what do you really want to do?

I said, I want to be a farmer. Well, I thought I was going to have to call 911, you know. I mean, she went to cardiac arrest. Oh, what? Waste all those brains. Waste all that talent. Waste it, right. Waste it, right.

And so imagine if we had thousands and thousands and thousands of adults who could come home and their little Johnny or Mary or whatever says, well mommy daddy what did you do today and they get to tell them we we turned carbon into chips to make compost to build soil so that you're going to have a better planet to live on than we gave you now if that isn't sacred if that isn't honoring i don't know what is you know and so we need that kind of social affirmation of these margins of society of people that we've got this this idea in our elitist structure that the only thing worth doing is fighting the expressway on your way to a Dilbert cubicle to punch numbers into cyberspace for you know a global multinational

corporations they were the biggest drug users in the world right yeah they're miserable absolutely miserable they are miserable and i love my office yeah i like your office too yeah so so the you You know, the truth is, the truth is that if we had had a Manhattan project for compost, not only would we have fed the world, we would have done it without three-legged salamanders, infertile frogs, and a dead zone the size of Rhode Island and the Gulf of Mexico. That's the truth. That's the truth. And we can bring that back quickly, quickly.

It takes a will to do it, and it takes eaters eating with intentionality. Farmers aren't going to make this change just altruistically. Right. They're going to need to be pushed. Now, as you mentioned, there are factors, the cost of fertilizer. These external factors are starting to come in on them. There's a great time for you to be around because people are needing options. Look, I think about this.

When I, you know, I don't go to Walmart often, but I happen to go into Walmart. And you see like an entire organic food section. Walmart doesn't do that. Walmart doesn't go out of its way unless it becomes lucrative. When I think that there are Walmart shoppers, they're looking for organic food, that's a phenomenal shift in consciousness. It is. It's happening over, of course, if I would say two decades. Right, right. And the next step is to not shop at Walmart.

Right, well, sure, right, right. And, you know, know, your farmer, you know, shorten your chain of custody. Yeah. And, I mean, we're certainly seeing, and one of the neat things that's happened technologically. in the last goodness, 10 years, really, is this just explosion of logistical efficiency. The fact that home distribution, of course, it got a shot in the arm with COVID with contactless retail, but the technology with which you can now ship, I mean, 20 years ago, we could have never shipped meat or chicken across the country.

Well, while we're there, you do, because there's a lot of people sitting watching right now thinking I'd love to try that Polyface Farm chicken that we're going to have in the fine dining restaurant this evening. How do people get to your? Our website's PolyfaceFarms.com. We ship every Tuesday and it'll all be on the website. So I can get the happy cows and happy's chicken and that meat served to make me happy. You sure can.

Let me ask this question. We were starting to see more and more home gardening, home, you know, like trying to homestead more and more. Are there, do some of these principles you're talking about work in that smaller space too? Absolutely. All these principles work, they're completely scalable. The scale up, scale down.

And so, you know, your garden, yes, the key to your garden is organic matter, you know. So look around the neighborhood. When the city's picking up leaves in the fall, beat them to it, get your neighbor's leaves, drag them over, you know, be a fiend on, on. on organic matter. Find that carbon at organic matter and feed your soil.

You know, backyard chickens. I mean, I wrote a book, I've written a bunch of books, but one, the last one is Polyface Micro, which is we take all this stuff and scale it down. I even have a chapter on there how to have chickens and rabbits in a Manhattan apartment without any smell. And so this, that's, that, this integration, we need to integrate rather than segregate. Our food system is segregated. And historically, it was always integrated.

We couldn't afford that kind of waste. It was too precious. It was too expensive. You couldn't waste that much. Today we just waste food like, you know, 40% of all human edible food on the planet is wasted. 40%. And that's never happened in human history.

Why? Warehousing, sell-by dates, blemish fetishes, cultures, and a segregated system. So there are so many things that we can do. It doesn't take more knowledge, it doesn't take more research, it doesn't take a government agency. Do you have hope in all this work you were doing from a child on this farm, seeing, obviously, you've proven the concept your family has, it's absolutely stunning. I know a lot of people reading your books. Do you feel like there's a move in this direction?

Yes, absolutely. There is, you know, a crisis. The Japanese picture of word for crisis is the same one as opportunity. In Japanese, crisis and opportunity are the same symbol. And I think that crisis does indeed create opportunity. And right now there is a homestead tsunami going on in a country right now. I mean, it is going on. It is everywhere. And I'm excited to see it.

And at the same time, farmers are being pulled. push to the wall with inflation, food costs, supply chain issues and all that. And so, you know, I don't wish ill on anybody. I really don't. I don't even wish ill on Monsanto. Now, I wish they weren't in business, but I don't wish ill on them. I think they're well intended. I think they're wrong, but I think they're well intended.

So I'm willing to, you know, honor that. But having been in the ashes all my life subjected to the corner to suddenly, be asked to do so many media and podcast things about how do you build soil without the Russians. I mean, I feel like Cinderella, I've been invited to the ball, you know. You go back to that school counselor, like, what do you do with your love? That's right. That's right. That's right.

That's right. It's a tsunami. And so, yeah, I don't wish you all anybody, but in a lot of ways, I am grateful for the crisis. because the crisis is bringing people to a new place of question, a new place of search and seeking, and it's in seeking that we find those answers. Amen. Joel, thank you so much. Thank you, Del.

All right, let's have a blessing, and we'll get on through the line. All right, our Lord, thank you for the day. Thank you for giving us safety today as we worked, and thank you for giving us important mission and vision to do. Thank you for the wonderful meal. We thank you in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.

I started as a steward in 2020, and there was an apprentice in 2021, and then this is my first year as full-time staff. The community built around this farm in particular is amazing. A team is definitely a blessing. You get to wake up every day, and I have people that I can count on. I love the work here. It makes me come alive. We are very people-focused. and the people are just as important to the farm as the animals are.

I've always wanted a farm since I was a child. That's why I worked at a kind of conventional ag farm. Just seeing how Duell had turned poor land into something so beautiful and healthy. I wanted to learn from the best. I'd like to take what I've learned here to help grow that into a business, which could hopefully sustain me and possibly a family one day. Everybody's just wanting good quality food that's not being. marketed to them in a deceitful way and that's really refreshing that I'm not the only

one out there that feels that way. So it's been pretty special to be a part of that community and get to know like-minded people. All right everybody I just want to take an opportunity on behalf of the Highwire to thank all of you. You're really leading the way. I mean it's brilliant that farming and being a part of nature is becoming so important again in this moment where people are waking up to, you know, being in more communion with the nature and the way that we're doing things. And Joel, just want to thank you so much for sharing your beautiful experience here with us today. And thank you all for your hard work. It's really spectacular.