The Joe Rogan Experience - #1478 - Joel Salatin

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

Joel Salatin is an American farmer, lecturer, and author whose books include Folks, This Ain’t Normal, You Can Farm and Salad Bar Beef. His latest book, co-authored with Dr. Sina McCullough, Beyond Labels: A Doctor and a Farmer Conquer Food Confusion One Bite at a Time is available for preorder now.

Good to see you again, sir. Good to be here. Thank you. Thanks for coming back, man. I really appreciate it. This is a perfect time to talk to someone like you about our food. We're in a very strange crisis now, and you just keep hearing time and time again in the news how much ranchers and farmers and people are really suffering right now and how much folks who don't have anything to do with that are now forcing – they're being forced to understand the importance of the food supply chain and ranchers and farmers

and all the stuff that we've taken for granted for quite a long time now. Well, they sure have. And what's interesting about it is the juxtaposition between the – I'll just call it the industrial – the more commercial industrial food sector versus the sector that I'm in, which is a local centric, you know, direct sale branded product, you know, directly from the farm. The pandemic is the best marketing strategy we've ever seen. We're having the best season we've ever had. a strategy we've ever seen. We're having the best season we've ever had. And the same thing was with farmers around the country as I talked to them. Everyone that's like us that did not go into the

supermarket system, basically, that's selling in their community and they're in their region, regionally, directly off the farm, having the best year we've ever had. It is the industrial mega system that's cracking. And so for the first time, we're hearing talk of, well, maybe we need to add resiliency to efficiency. And so, yeah, the system that's cracking, there's plenty of food. I mean, there's plenty of food on farms being produced. But of course, as you know, milk is being dumped, pigs are being euthanized. The problem is not at the farm level. The problem is in the chain of custody between the farmer and the consumer consumer and primarily in the large-scale processing situation.

Yeah, these large meat processing places, they've been hit hard by the coronavirus. They have been. In the United States, the only places right now where every day thousands of people come together in crowded conditions are these big meat processing plants. I mean, the offices are closed. The theaters are closed. The convention centers are closed. And so the only place where people are coming shoulder to shoulder, thousands every day are in these mega processing facilities. Teresa and I, my wife, actually co-own a very small abattoir, slaughterhouse, community slaughterhouse. We have 20 employees.

The difference in the vulnerability, in the exposure and risk factor between our little 20-person facility where we do, you know, maybe 50 to 70 beeves a week, 100 hogs, versus these mega plants that have, you know. When you say beeves? Beeves. What is that? Beef. Oh, beefs. Yeah. Well, I thought you said beeves. Well, there's no such word as beefs.

It's beavs. B-E-E-V-E-S. Oh, okay. That is what you're saying. Okay. Beavs. Beavs. Have you heard that before, Jamie?

No. Okay. So the plural of beef is not beefs. It's beavs. Oh, interesting. All right. I always thought that beef was just the meat. Yeah.

I never thought. I would have assumed you would say cows. Well, as a farmer, cows are females who have had calves. So it's a very – as opposed to steers, who would be – or bulls, which would be intact males, steers non-intact. So as a farmer, all this nomenclature is real – Yes, normal for you. It's real. Like a theologian teases out, you know, Presbyterians and Methodists, and we just say, well, they're Protestants.

So, you know, we do. We do. It's a small facility. And, you know, it's been in business for, I don't know, what, 60 years or so. We've only co-owned it now for a little bit less than 10 years. But the difference, because we do stuff by hand, workstations, you know, these stainless steel work tables are what, you know, six, seven, eight feet wide, three feet to four feet deep. And each one is a workstation.

And you've got three guys out on the kill floor. You've got two guys out in the cryovac room. You've got four guys in the boning room. You've got a guy over here running the sausage stuffer or the grinder. it's inherently small scale spread out completely different environment than when you're having you know 3 000 people in a cool damp environment uh from and i don't want to get into a rabbit trail discussion but but frankly in these these great, great big plants, most of the workers are generally not Americans. They're coming from other countries looking for the American dream. And so they're living in crowded conditions because they're trying to save every penny to send home to get, you know, uncle and aunt and other family members here from Ethiopia, Somalia, you know, wherever it is. and other family members here from Ethiopia, Somalia, you know, wherever it is.

And so they're living in a house that we would live for in a house. They're living, you know, 20, and they're eating poorly. They're in a stressful—they're often separated from their family. There's just a lot of stress in their lives. And so then you throw these big processing facilities, they're not eating well. And it's just an incubator. I mean, if you wanted to create an incubator for a virus, there wouldn't be a better place. Whereas small facilities are inherently, the workers are spread out. They tend to come from the community. They tend to be career craft people rather than just, you know, make this cut, Mac.

The average poultry processing plant in our area, they say that every job can be learned in 20 minutes. So whereas at our plant, we cross, you know, we cross do, you know, we cut meat a while, then we go pack a while, then you're on the cut floor, and then you're, you know, you're doing different things. So it's a real different environment. And so these big plants are very vulnerable. And that's why the recalls come from there. The, you know, the microbials come from there. I mean, an average fast food hamburger has pieces of 600 animals in it. Wow.

When you get a hamburger from us, it's one animal. So just the sheer, whatever, mixing. So for sure, we don't know a lot about this virus. I mean, we're learning every day. And, you know, you've got to kind of take a little bit, a grain of salt, too. But one of the things we're certainly learning is that there's an advantage, that there is a density factor, a an urban-rural, you know, spreading out, the whole social distancing spreading out thing seems to be a valuable thing. And so if we take that into the food system, wouldn't it be an amazing thing if instead

of having 150 to 200 mega processing facilities doing 98% of the nation's meat, if instead that were 200,000 small-scale, community-based, ecologically nested facilities all around the countryside, that would be an incredibly resilient system. It sounds like a much better system. As you were talking before about your relationship with your customers, it's a direct-to farm. I mean, that's really ideal, right? Cut out the middle person. You cut out the confusion of whether or not the animals are ethically raised or ethically slaughtered.

What are the conditions they're living under? I mean, you're polyface farms, right? So that whole video that you have that I've seen that explains the way you do regenerative farming and you let these animals live the way these animals are supposed to live. They're not confined to cages. They're roaming around. They're eating natural foods. And you get a better product. You get a healthier product.

And you get a better relationship with both the animals and the people that you sell this food to. Well, sure. And ultimately, what we're looking for is a habitat that allows each life form, whether it's a plant or an animal, to fully express, we call it expressing the pigness of the pig or the chickeness of the chicken. You could say the tomato-ness of the tomato, you know, and creating a habitat that allows that life to express its, you know, its phenotypical and physiological distinctiveness. In humans, we would call this self-affirmation, you know,

the Tom-ness of Tom, the Joe-ness of Joe. Right. It's that affirmation. And and one of the things that we're seeing as a result, as we move into the kind of the social consequences of this whole pandemic is a is what there's there's a new phrase called the screen new deal where everything is going to AI. We're going to you know, we're dehumanizing. And so at a very time when people need to be personally affirmed, they're being denied their, you know, their their their social humanity element. I mean, you can't even see whether a person's smiling or frowning. Yeah. Yeah, that's the worst part about this other than the tragedies. The worst part about this is that people aren't getting hugged. People are scared to shake hands.

Everyone's separated from everybody. It's just very strange. It is. It is. It's just very strange. It is. It is. And, you know, our personal energy that we get from each other, you know, like you, I'm sure I've done numerous Zoom things lately more than ever.

Zoom conferences, Zoom phone conferences, different things. And there's just not the energy. There's just not – you just don't get the energy that you get when you're right in front of each other. Yeah. Absolutely. I feel the same way about podcasts. And, you know, Jamie, I screwed up. I forgot the nurse. We started early.

Yeah, you want to take a pause and stop. Can we? I mean, yeah, yeah. Okay. We want to give you a coronavirus test. Okay. You down with that? That's fine.

All right. We'll pause right here. Okay. So we did you a little test. Okay. You down with that? That's fine. All right, we'll pause right here. Okay. So we did you a little test and found out you have not had it. You didn't fight it off. Bummer. But the doctor did explain to us that there's primary immune system and there's secondary immune system.

Your primary immune system, most likely, if you've been in contact with it, and his has. You know, the doctor has been around many, many people that have had it. But your primary immune system, if you're healthy, he was saying fights it off. Your secondary immune system is if you have had the infection and your body has developed those antibodies, it's your second line of defense. So most likely your first line of defense, since you have been in contact with people that have had it, your first line of defense beat it. Well, that's cool. Yeah. Well, I work on it.

Yeah, we were talking about that. And I said, please save this because it's so crazy. You drink. Explain what you do to strengthen your immune system. So in this whole thing, like you, I've been screaming, let's talk about the immune system. I've been screaming, let's talk about the immune system. So I literally have not been sick a day basically in 20 years. I mean, not the flu, not a cold, not – I mean, just nothing. And I'm 63.

So I'm not saying that arrogantly or proudly. I'm saying it gratefully that I think there are things that we can do to really build up our immune system. One of the things that I do that kind of makes all my staff laugh is that I routinely bend down with the cows and drink the water out of the cow tank. I don't drink it when it's pond water, although I've drunk pond water. But when it's like well water, when it's fairly clean water, I get down. Of course, you know, the cows are dripping saliva and stuff in it, you know, and I just drink right out of it just like a cow. And I'm serious. You know, I believe that it builds your microbiome.

You know, I want all those bugs, all that diversity. We live in the most amazing microscopic soup. I mean, it's just, it's a soup. If you could take an electromagnetic photograph of the air, of where we are, I mean, the very, I mean, our skin is exuding stuff. The very – I mean our skin is exuding stuff. Our noses, our clothes, everything, it would look like the cloud over pig pen in the Peanuts comic strip. I mean that's literally what we're living in. And all of this life, viruses, bacteria, microorganisms, all of this life is literally having a conversation. Hey, I'd like to hook on to you in a symbiotic relationship. Hey, man, I'm a parasite.

I'm going to take you down. It's like a parasite. I'm going to take you down. You know, it's like a drama. It's like a play that's going on inside of us, outside of us. And the thought that we can somehow, whatever, you know, isolate ourselves and extract ourselves from this magnificent life conversation that's going on in us, on our skin, our clothes, our hair, our eyes, it's just silly. And it's part of how our immune system works. You know, our immune system actually, I need your bugs. My immune system needs your bugs.

Your immune system needs my bugs. My immune system needs your bugs. Your immune system needs my bugs. And so now, does that mean we all run into the nursing homes, you know, and take vulnerable? No, no, no. There, I mean, there are certainly people that are very vulnerable. So we want to be careful there. All right. I get that. But for the rest of us that are generally healthy, going about our daily stuff, I mean, goodness, worry affects your cortisol limits almost more than anything. Worry. You know, I got on a plane yesterday to come out here. And thanks for the nice business class ticket, by the way. You're welcome. And the lady sitting in front of me, so we're in business class. I'm sitting, so there's four, there's an aisle and there's two seats on either side. And so I sit down.

There's nobody next to me. I'm next to the window. A lady in front of me is on the aisle. So she's a little bit diagonal for me in front. A guy sits across from her on the aisle, on the opposing aisle. And she asked him to move over to the window. And I'm just watching this play out. Of course, I'm trying to, you know, keep my glasses from fogging up with my mask in my face, you know. And I'm thinking, she's worried.

She's fearful. What have we done to ourselves as a culture that every single person we come in contact with might be my killer? I mean, that's a horrible – and so what does that do to our cortisol? Boom. And suddenly our immune system is, whatever, compromised because we're living in this fear all the time. I think one of the things that you said, though, when you said most of us that are healthy, I think that's not really true. I think most of us are not healthy.

And I think that's one of the things we're finding out from this crisis. Yes. Is that when you talk about protecting vulnerable people, there's a lot of us that are vulnerable. Maybe not you or me. Right. But a large number of people that are overweight, that eat poor food, and that don't take care of themselves. And those people are particularly vulnerable. And so they're right to be afraid but they're

wrong to think that this the only way to solve this is to make sure that you stay away from everybody the way to solve this is to stop eating shit and become a healthy person it's while you're alive there's always a there's a moment a chance to be healthier while you're alive if you're alive and you're not terribly ill and dying there you could start drinking water stop drinking soda moment, a chance to be healthier while you're alive. If you're alive and you're not terribly ill and dying, you could start drinking water, stop drinking soda, stop eating chips, start eating fruits and vegetables, start eating lean meats, healthy foods, not even lean meats. Eat a good ribeye steak.

Pastured meats. Yeah. Pastured meats. Eat food. Yeah, you're right. Well, you know, whenever I watch a newscast and watch the daily coronavirus briefing from the White House, right? And you've got all these experts standing around. And everybody's standing there waiting for this magic vaccine. And, of course, you know, the CDC gets $4.6 billion a year selling vaccines.

They have, whatever, 20 patent vaccines. And so really the CDC is a very vested interest in trying to develop a vaccine. There's a lot of money in sickness. There's a lot of money in sickness. And so we didn't get this coronavirus because of a lack of vaccine. We got this coronavirus because something in this beautiful life bath that I described was out of whack. That now, you know, we can start discussing where it possibly came from. I think right now that's conjecture. I mean, I think we do know that it came out of Wuhan, but just how, I mean, we're not sure. But the fact is that there was an imbalance in life. We've learned to say words that when I was a child, did you ever hear the term salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, food allergy even?

I mean, how many kids in elementary school did you know that had food allergies? None. None. Nobody. You have a birthday party. Mom isn't having to email. We didn't even have email back then. But mom isn't calling all the other mothers saying, well, now, what can your child eat? And what can your little Mary have? And, you know, oh, we better not have any peanuts.

And, I mean, that didn't exist. And what's happened, the way I look at this is that humanity, that we as collective humanity, we've essentially taken this beautiful, benevolent earth, this benevolent sustainer, partner, mentor, abundant provider, and taken this partner to the boxing ring. taken this partner to the boxing ring, and instead of caressing this abundant, wonderful partner-provider, we've pummeled it and pummeled it. We've pulled the water out of its aquifers. We've destroyed its soil. We've put a dead zone the size of the Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico. of the Rhode Island and the Gulf of Mexico. We've used antibiotics in animals and made MRSA and C. diff and superbugs. And so nature has been gently, gently begging for relief as we've essentially put our foot

on her neck, right? And she's saying, E. coli, salmonella, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, right? And including diabetes and all these other things. And we simply don't listen and continue to pummel. And eventually, when our benevolent nest, whatever, is KO'd, we find out, oops, maybe we should have paid attention. Yeah, and I think a real parallel is when you were talking about these large-scale meat processing plants are a perfect sort of petri dish for viruses to grow. So are factory farms. So are these farms where you're stuffing pigs next to each other. You're doing all this unnatural stuff, right?

It's unnatural for people to be stuffed into a warehouse right next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, working all day. to each other, shoulder to shoulder, working all day. It's unnatural for them to be stuffed into these homes, shoulder to shoulder, with bad food and all the things that you would need to keep your body healthy and strong. The same can be said about these factory farm situations. One thing that I find so attractive about the way you run your farm

is that there's no weirdness in watching these animals during the day. They seem like animals just doing normal stuff. If you see a chicken wandering around just pecking at the grass, it looks normal. See a chicken in a cage getting fed out of a little cup or something, it looks all kinds of fucked up, right? It doesn't feel right. No, that's why we have the phrase respecting the pigness of the pig and the chickenness

of the chicken. And we know that these diseases are all coming from these places. I mean there's a ton of agricultural diseases that are based from these factory farm situations where these animals live in these really horrific conditions. And then the bacteria jump. Look, I mean, look, if you ate in your toilet every day, would you like to eat your toilet every day? Right. That's how they eat. They're breathing in their fecal particulate matter, which is, you know, putting lesions in their tender respiratory membranes, making lesions there.

And so when you have those kinds of conditions and they're not getting exercise, they're not getting fresh air. And so, I mean, they're not getting salad. They're not getting any vitamin D from the sunshine. And so what happens is you get an extremely concentrated host facility for pathogenicity. That's what happens you get a very concentrated host facility because there's always a host they're close to each other the pathogen doesn't have to say wow boy i wonder if i can make it that you know that half mile over to another no you know they're always right there and so you're right it's like it's like an incubator and so you know if we wanted to you know, if we wanted to sit

down, look, if we wanted to sit down and say, let's say we had a James Bond conspiratist, you know, and said, we're going to form a committee and make a pathogen-friendly farm. You know, the old James Bond nemesis, right? And so we form a committee and say, how can we make a pathogen friendly farm? Well, we would have only one species. We'd crowd it up. We'd take out the oxygen, the fresh air, the sunshine. We'd give it a minimalistic diet. What I've just described is modern, efficient industrial factory farming. You couldn't design a better system for conductivity of pathogenicity. Now, here's the big question. Is it possible to feed all of Los Angeles using your methods? Can you feed big urban areas using these regenerative methods? Sure. Absolutely. So two things to realize is the

bottleneck in the food system right now, the reason the supermarket is low on meat, is not because there aren't animals in the field. It's because of the processing. It's not the trucking. It's not the production. It's not even the store shelf. It's the processing. So it's the processing that's the bottleneck. And so my vision is that – so we get two questions. First of all, let's deal with the production. With the production, absolutely, if we spread out the production, if we did, for example, if we took all the confinement chicken houses and put those chickens on pasture, no problem. It doesn't take any more land to grow the feed for a chicken on pasture than it does in a confinement house. Don't you get a lot more loss, though, due to raptors and things along those lines? No, no, no. We put them in little protected shelters. Then we move them every day

across the pasture. Well, yeah, you can get losses from raptors, but we use guard geese. There are guard dogs, guard llamas. There's all sorts of guard animals. There's really cool. And there's a lot of research being done to jam the radar of, you know, eagles and stuff there. I mean. Really? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They jam the radar? I didn't even know they had radar. Well, that's figurative.

Right. What are they using when an eagle? It's just not just their vision's insanely good, right? Eagles in particular. It really is. It really is. And so, for example, I know one guy that's – it's not ready to sell yet, but he claims to have had great success putting reflective Coke can bottoms on like a traffic cone, hanging it out with his chickens, and that splays the sun rays all out and messes up the eyesight of the eagles and the hawks. They can't zero in. Yeah. In fact, this was exactly one of the defensive measures the U.S. Navy used and still uses for incoming missiles. They have a cannon that blows out pieces of aluminum foil, basically, like graffiti, aluminum foil graffiti out into the air, and it jams the whatever, the honing devices of a missile.

The Hawks are the same way. What I'm getting at is that there are, we don't lose very much. We protect them greatly. There are a lot of things that you can do to, you know, to mitigate that kind of pressure. But the fact is, the industry loses tons of birds, too, in a flood, in a heat wave, in a whatever. And so the idea that these birds in this big confinement house are actually protected from malady is simply not true. And then there are going to be much more of them are going to get sick. Sure. They might have losses in that sick. Sure, sure. And they might have losses in that way.

Sure, sure. So can we produce the food this way? Absolutely. Now, one of the things that it would require is many more people on farms. So, you know, I've thought a lot about, obviously, as unemployment has skyrocketed through this. obviously as unemployment has skyrocketed through this. Right now, sitting here, it's hard for us to imagine what it'll take to bring, you know, to fill football stadiums again, to fill Caribbean cruises, to fill theaters,

you know, music venues, you know, whatever. Boxing matches. I mean, right now, it's hard to conceive what it'll take. People are so terrified. It's hard to appreciate how much of this is going to come back, the hospitality industry and all that. So what's going to happen? So where are the jobs? What are people going to do? And I would suggest that one of the things that people can do is that we can have a lot of these smaller

plants and we have way more people actually growing food, participating in food production personally. Is food going to be more expensive? Maybe so. But you get to be healthy, and we have a healthy planet. And what's that worth? How much more do you think it would cost? I mean, just give a rough percentage. If you're thinking about food production right now, with the current situation, there's a lot of automation, right? A lot of these factory farms, they don't require too many people to be working there. Sure, sure.

You would require much more people. You'd have to manage these animals. You'd have to do it sort of along the lines of the way that you do. How many more people do you think would be involved in a large-scale farm? Well, lots of people. I don't have a number there. But I can tell you that food prices might go up to what they were 30 years ago. And also, would it be fair to say that food prices might go to where they should be?

Like a cheeseburger really shouldn't be 99 cents. No, no, absolutely. As you're very familiar with the argument of the externalized costs. They don't get captured. What's the cost? Right now, 50% of the cases of diarrhea in the U.S. are caused by foodborne bacteria. Well, what's a case of diarrhea worth? If you start putting dollars on these externalized costs, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the fact that we have, you know, hundreds of square miles that don't grow shrimp anymore, you know, because it's toxic from the runoff from the Mississippi, from chemical farming. So there's a lot of these externalized costs. And not only that, but if this actually became normative, the new way, the new orthodoxy, there would be definitely economies of scale that we don't have

right now. I mean, I'll just give you one example that probably nobody would think of. So we pay workman's compensation at our farm. So how do you determine the exposure level, the risk factor of a poultry worker? I mean, think about if you have a Tyson chicken farm and you hire an employee to be in the chicken house, think about his workman's comp risk. I mean, there's fecal particulate all day long that he's breathing. You've got augers, You've got augers, chains, feed bins, electrical connections, dust. I mean, it's a very – it's a high-risk situation. For us, a poultry worker goes out in the field and moves some chickens in a field. There's no fecal particulate.

There's no dust. There's no fecal particulate. There's no dust. There's no, you know, there's no augers. There's no whatever, spinning fans, vent shafts. You know, there's none of this. only externalized cost, but it is unrecognized savings that we offer that can't be captured in a square peg in a round hole. I see what you're saying. Yeah. The overall big picture of health for you, health for the food. How much is that worth?

Yeah. Right. That's interesting that we're not really taking into consideration these secondary costs that come about from doing it the wrong way. Yeah. We're not. We're not. I mean, there's a lot of those.

Much of our increased cost has nothing to do with actual production cost. It's the non-scalable regulatory overheads. And this, of course, is why we don't have more community small-scale abattoirs around the country. It's not because there's not a demand for them. It's not because there's not a demand for them. It's because the paperwork, the HACCP plans, hazardous analysis critical control point plans, and the paperwork to be able to launch a business like this are so high, both time and money are so high, that it's very difficult to launch a small business because you can't spread the overhead of capitalization over –

Is there a solution for that? Well, there are a couple solutions. Certainly one that's being championed right now by Congressman Thomas Massey called the Prime Act. He's had it in for five years, and amazingly, it's kind of just floundered for five years. All of a sudden, in the last two months, he's got 18 new co-sponsors because of this. And what the Prime Act would do, it would allow uninspected, custom-processed meat in- state to be sold by the piece. That's not legal right now. Right now, the only way that you can sell a T-bone, if you want to buy a T-bone steak for me, the only way for you to get it is for me to go to a federal inspected slaughterhouse,

get the animal processed, packaged under inspection, and put in for you. get the animal processed, packaged under inspection, and put in for you. Custom houses are where if you want to buy a half a beef, a quarter beef, all right, and it goes in with your name on that quarter and they're custom processing it for me, yeah, then I can buy it. And what Congressman Massey is saying with the Prime Act is, why should we discriminate and only allow people to tap into the lower cost and lower overheads of the custom processing facility to only those people who can afford to buy a quarter of beef at a time? That's very poverty discriminatory.

Let's open that up so that people can buy it by the piece. We're not going to ship an interstate. We're not going to sell it at Walmart. Okay. But if you and I as neighbors want to do business together, and I'm using a powerful phrasing here, as consenting adults, if we want to exercise freedom of choice and participate in a consensual relationship of commerce, why should that be a bureaucrat's business between two consenting neighbors? Right. what you're saying is is long but is the the regulatory process in place to make sure that people are using the proper sanitation methods making sure that the animals are healthy making sure that all these things are in place so that unscrupulous characters don't take advantage of the system and then screw over the consumer and then the consumer gets sick like this is like best case scenario for the regulation right that it's there to protect us. Well, that's, that's the, that's the assumption. Yes. And I would simply ask

that at some point when you have a very close, transparent relationship, one-on-one, you don't, you don't have, you know, truckers and warehouses and big slaughterhouses and supermarkets, blah, blah, blah, in between us. There is a lot of protection in that relational transaction that beats all the paperwork you can amass on the industrial scale. We recognize scale in a lot of things in life. For example, in Virginia, where I'm from, if you want to do daycare, let's say you want to do a work-at-home deal, you want to do a side gig and keep children, you can keep up to three in your home without subjecting yourself to the licensing and compliance of daycare regulations,

because they know if all you're going to do is keep three in your homes, those parents, you're going to have a close relationship with them. This is not a daycare center. All right. The same thing is true with elder care. My wife's grandmother spent her last year in a lady's home who is allowed to keep three people as elder care. She was an RN. She wanted to not have to go to the hospital every day and started a side gig in her home. She cooked for them.

She took care of them, three of them in her home. Does this vary state by state? It does vary state by state. of where it's reasonable to appreciate that a different relationship at scale can create its own safety in that particular thing. Can you keep 100 in your home without a license? No. But three, if you're only going to keep three, you're probably going to see them. You're probably going to have a direct relationship with each of their caregivers, their people that are signing off for them. It's a different relationship. that there needs to be someplace, a point at which we can opt to do business with each other without a bureaucrat involved.

Let me ask you this. If you wanted to slaughter a cow and then you wanted to give some of the meat away to your neighbor, would you have to bring it to some sort of a facility? Perfectly legal. Perfectly legal. Perfectly legal. So this is not a – yeah, if this were all about safety, you wouldn't be able to do that. So the important thing to realize is that the prohibition here is not on the – in fact, our neighbor can even buy it legally. Oh, really?

I just can't sell it. So the prohibition is only on one. If you can't sell it, how are they going to buy it legally. Oh, really? I just can't sell it. So the prohibition is only on one. If you can't sell it, how are they going to buy it? Black market. So if I did this under the radar, okay, so I butcher a chicken in my backyard and the neighbor comes over and buys it from me, okay? It's legal for him. It's legal for him to buy it.

It's not legal for me to sell it. it from me. It's legal for him. It's legal for him to buy it. It's not legal for me to sell it. But everything else in society that we've determined is a hazardous, a controlled substance, a hazardous substance, the prohibition is both on seller and buyer. Right. And I don't want to go down that rabbit hole either of I'm a pretty libertarian, you know,

drug, let it all go. and, you know, drug, let it all go. But without regard to that, the prohibitions are equal on even possession. If you want to have a ton of cocaine in your house, even if you just want it over there in a corner on a pallet, yeah, I've got a ton of cocaine here. What's wrong with that? You can't have that. All right. Right. But when it comes to food products, the prohibitions are only on one side and they don't include if you give it away.

So if it was really dangerous, you shouldn't be able to buy it. You shouldn't be able to possess it and you shouldn't be able to give it away. I see what you're saying, kind of. But the difference is, first of all, cocaine is illegal, beef's not illegal. And second of all, the idea is you're trying to protect the consumer, right? And I think that they have exceptions for these small situations where you're the farmer and maybe this guy's growing tomatoes

and you trade him some filet mignon for some tomatoes and you have a good deal there. That makes sense. I think it's more reasonable that they step back and let that happen. But it is odd that they can buy unregulated beef, but you can't sell unregulated beef. So it's like, how'd you get that beef? I bought it. Is it regulated? No.

All right. They don't even go, who's the criminal selling you the beef? Yeah. That's very strange. Yeah, yeah. So the farmer's the one that's liable. The buyer, the customer is not. But the same thing is true.

I mean, let's appreciate, too, for example, wildlife. I mean, right now you can go out and during hunting season and you can shoot a deer and you don't have to worry about temperature. You don't have to worry about any inspections, nothing. Or a wild pig, right? A squirrel, you can bring that home and there's no inspection, no nothing over that. And you can dress that yourself. I mean, butcher it, package it, whatever. Feed it to your children. You can have a block party, invite all your block and feed everybody with that food. That's perfectly legal.

But to do a chicken or a pig or a cow on your own and sell that, what is it about selling something that suddenly turns it from benign to hazardous? Well, I think it's just protection for the consumer. And I think it's also like it'd be fine if it was a small neighborhood where you knew the farmer and you had a great relationship with them. But they're talking about doing things at scale. When you're talking about selling food to a large city, you can't really just hope the guy did a good job. That's the argument for regulation.

The argument for regulation is when things scale up, when you need someone to step in and protect the consumers. Because if there is one bad actor who's not taking care of it, he has the potential of sickening thousands of people. Right, which is the argument, exactly the argument, for decentralizing and de-amalgamating as opposed to centralizing and amalgamating. Is it a land issue, though? Like if you wanted to – the factory farms that I've seen in videos where they have these pigs,

they're stuffed next to each other in this large warehouse. And the same with the chickens. Right. How much space would you need to have the same amount of chickens and the same amount of pigs if you let them free range? All right. Here's my point. What you don't see in those videos is you don't see the hundreds of acres growing corn and soybeans to feed them in that house. The industry wants you to think that this is some sort of an island where, boy, look, we're cranking this out of this house.

They're not showing you the tractor trailers bringing in the grain and hauling out the manure and the square miles of fields to spread the manure. They're not showing you how dependent that is on this massive land base. and hauling out the manure and the square miles of fields to spread the manure. Okay. They're not showing you how dependent that is on this massive land base. And so, so on in the pastured model, the decentralized pastured model, instead of having 15,000, I mean, our farm, we're going to raise like 45,000 chickens this summer. We're not, we're not backyard by any means, but guess what? raised like 45,000 chickens this summer. We're not backyard by any means. But guess what? Those are in 275 bird shelters that are moved every day across pastures. It doesn't take one more acre to produce the feed or handle the manure, whether the chicken is outside or inside.

The difference is when you come and see our operation, you see all the land. When you see the factory farm, you don't see any of the land. But isn't it possible that these factory farms are set up where the farms where the animals are raised are completely separate? It's a separate business from the farms where the soybeans and the corn are raised. Oh, yeah. Well, ours is too. And it's not. Oh, yeah. Well, ours is too. It's not on the same property.

No, ours is too. We buy our grain from neighbors. Absolutely. But if they had to grow these animals and grow that food, would they have enough land to do everything together in the same farm? There's no need to do it on the same farm. I'm a big believer in mutual interdependence, not complete independence. We don't have any intention to grow our own grain. We don't have the soils for it. We don't have the equipment for it. We don't have the skill set for it. So we buy from neighbors who do GMO

free, non-genetically modified, GMO free grain. And we give them more than they would on a commodity scale. And so they love us because we're giving them more per bushel, and they have a nice secure buyer, and they're local, they're close. You know, we're not getting it from, you know, foreign countries, and it's all close. So what happens is in the kind of situation I'm describing, instead of having a fundamentally segregated food system, you have a fundamentally integrated food system. I see what you're saying.

That's what happens. Strong relationship with the people growing that grain. So, for example, I mean, you started the discussion with, you know, is there enough land to feed Los Angeles? And we could discuss whether Los Angeles should be as big as it is. I mean, that's a valid discussion. It's a very valid discussion. But we can go there.

But first, let me just say that if California, for example, did not export, I don't know what the percentage is, but it's huge. You know, almonds all over the world. If California is centered on feeding California, there's absolutely enough here to feed California. Okay? I mean, Iowa. Iowa imports 90%. Iowa is probably the most fertile place in the world.

And they only eat, only 10% of the food consumed in Iowa is grown in Iowa and processed in Iowa. That's pretty crazy. It is crazy. Hawaii, only 5 percent. Ninety-five percent comes from off – Hawaii, I mean, they've got ranches. They've got – I mean, why would you have to import stuff if you can grow pineapples and macapples and, you know, macadamia nuts in your backyard. Come on, you know. So there's a huge disconnect.

I mean, and this is one of the reasons that we're having this, I think, this blowback from nature is that instead of having a fundamentally integrated system, I mean, think of how in Switzerland, you know, they take the cows up to the mountain pastures, they milk, and the milk flows down, and they make cheese up there. The whey from the cheese goes into the pigs. The pigs eat the whey. And so instead of transporting milk to a centralized cheesemaker and pigs to a centralized processor, they're actually making the cheese on site. So all they've got to actually transport is cheese and pork. So they slaughter contiguous nearby, not on the same farm necessarily,

but nearby. So you don't have all this transportation. What you have is a fundamentally decentralized, we could even say democratized, could we say food distance, food distancing, that creates resiliency in the system. So instead of being tied to these 100 or 150 mega processing facilities, we're decentralized throughout the land base. How much more money do you think it would cost for food? We kind of touched on this earlier, but if you're dealing with this more natural-based system and it's more complex, it's going to require more people. And it's going to require complete restructuring of the system that's currently in place. Sure it would.

I think I don't have a figure for – I'm not a scientist. You think food would be 10% more? Well, I think in general it would be probably double what you'd pay at Costco. Double? Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's an issue for a lot of folks. But now think about this. Think about this.

Oh, man, where do you start with this? First of all, you're going to offer a lot of jobs. There are a lot of people that are going to be looking for jobs right now. So this offers a lot of jobs. There are a lot of people that are going to be looking for jobs right now. So this offers a lot of job opportunities. Number two, it's much more healing on the land. Number three, you don't have all the pathogenicity. You don't have to use drugs, antibiotics. I mean, our meat doesn't do drugs.

Our dinner doesn't do drugs. People don't realize that two-thirds of the drugs used in the country aren't in people. They're in animals. OK, so you don't have those issues. There are a lot of issues that you that you don't have. And those those add up in the big picture. So I always tell people our food is the cheapest aggregate food there is. We just put all the costs in.

All our costs are in. And so we're not asking taxpayers, society, the planet, we're not asking them to pick up the tab for cheating, for cutting corners. And that's what Costco is. And what's interesting is that 40 years ago, right now today, 9% of the average person's income, 9% is spent on food. That's our average in our country. 40 years ago, it was 18. 40 years ago, 9% of our personal income was spent on health care.

Today, that's 18%. Oh, interesting. Isn't that interesting how those have inverted? Yeah, very interesting. Those have inverted in roughly 40 years. Ever since the U.S., duh, call it the U.S., duh, created the food pyramid and put Twinkies and Cocoa Puffs on the bottom as a foundational. You can track the diabetes. You can track obesity.

You can track all of these things right through from that time. That's an interesting way to look at costs, right? Like we're only looking at the cost of the meat. We're not looking at the cost for your health, the cost of health care. When you see steak at Costco, it's insanely cheap. It almost doesn't – it's almost obscene. It's like how is a steak that cheap? Like what are you doing?

Like how is it possible? You know? Yeah. Well, it's – you know, there are all sorts of special, you know, whatever, fraternal negotiated things to make that happen. And the fact is that you don't have to watch the news very much to know that farm suicide is spiking. You know, there are implications. I mean, the whole – the domino effect of dysfunction. the domino effect of dysfunction. There's a reason why rural America has a bigger opioid problem than urban America. You know, the pandemic has been primarily an urban situation,

but the opioid crisis has been primarily a rural situation. Why? Because folks feel disaffirmed. I mean, one of the biggest things that this virus has brought out, they say that the crisis never makes a trend. It simply accelerates or brings into focus a trend that was already there. And one of the trends that's been happening in this country now for 20 years is a bifurcation of access between rural and urban to the Internet. Like on our farm, you know, we still have hours of the day where we can't get cell phone service. We can't get Internet service. Somebody comes to the store and we can't run their credit card because the Wi-Fi is down. It's very, very slow, very problem. We can't do Skype. We barely can do Zoom. When I do Zoom calls, it kicks me off about three times every hour. Right now, that sounds like a magic place that you live.

Because that's the thing that people are having a hard time with is digital detoxing. Right. I understand that. They've got too much of it in their lives. I get that. But when you're running a business or you're trying to do schoolwork from home, so what's happening is we're now getting a very accelerated urban-rural divide of opportunity because rural, we don't that this access to broadband Internet, especially now as we start working from home and as we have people there, there are lots of people. I'm sure you probably know some that are saying, I'm getting out of the city and I ain't going back. York City, all the movie companies in New York, their warehouses are stuck full of people who called them and said, I fled the city from the coronavirus. I want you to clean out my apartment,

put it in a warehouse, and I'll tell you where to send it when I get myself situated. I mean, that's a phenomenon that's already happening. Well, where are those people going to go? I mean, ideally, we would actually spread out and create a more spread out population on the landscape. Well, people are realizing the hazards of living on top of each other like that, not just because of virus and the things spread like wildfire through the population, but also when you have to get out. If something goes down and you've got to get out of there and you realize, like, I don't even have a car. Right. Like, what am I going to do, carry my bed on my back? Like, what are you going to do?

Yeah. And people realize, like, hey, maybe this isn't the best idea to live like this. And then when they look at the prospects of New York City going back to normal like what it was five months ago, boy, that's a long road. You might be two years from now before it's like that again. Right. That's right. And it might not happen at all. This is the other thing.

I was watching this documentary on the construction of viruses, this piece, and they were talking about when they give an 18-month window for creating a vaccine for this virus. They're like, but maybe not. Right. Yeah, they're like, maybe they don't come up with one that's effective. That's possible, too. We've been 40 years with the flu. We still don't have a flu vaccine.

What is the flu shot, then? The flu shot? Well, that's supposedly to help the flu, but there's's how many strains of it and they never hit the right strain i mean the actual the actual efficacy of the flu shot has not been has not been determined it is a vaccine though correct it is it is i had dr peter hotez on who is a an expert in vaccines and infectious diseases and tropical diseases and one of the things that he was saying that if you get the flu shot, even if it's not for the correct strain, there's still enough pieces of this that will protect you from getting really bad sickness from the flu strain, even if it's the wrong strain.

That's one opinion. You don't agree with that? No, I don't agree with that opinion. But you're out there drinking with cows and shit. Absolutely. Yeah, I do. agree with that opinion. But you're out there drinking with cows and shit. Absolutely. Yeah, I do.

When this all broke, we sent a letter out to our customers saying, hey, come to the farm, take off your shoes, walk barefoot through the pasture. We've got a nice big compost pile. Stick your hands in the compost pile. Feed your microbiome. Did anybody take you up

on that offer? Oh, yeah. You had a bunch of freaks out there walking barefoot. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's great. Sticking their hand in poop. Yeah. Yeah.

It's great. It's great. And so- Did you check on them, see if they're okay a couple weeks later? I don't think anybody's gotten sick from it. It's a check. But, yeah. But I think that, in general, we need to be asking as a nation.

I mean, I'm still waiting for when they do the daily briefs up there in the White House. I'm still waiting for somebody up there, anybody, somebody to step to the microphone and say, look, folks, let's talk about immunity. Let's talk about how you build immunity. And the fact that we're in the middle of this and we've still got the Coke trucks running up and down the road. And look, I like a Coke, you know, once a year, twice a year. But there's a big difference between doing that and three times a day. What are we eating? Are we eating, you know eating comfort food, taco chips? Look, I like chocolate,

but enough is enough. And are we in our kitchens? Are we actually getting good food? Are we hydrating? Most of us are dehydrated because the water tastes bad. Well, let's make sure we each drink half a gallon a day. Let's start there. How about sleep? Are you getting, you know, eight and a half hours a night? Or are you staying up watching Netflix because you're depressed, eating, you know, chips and drinking soda because you're depressed

and you're getting six hours of sleep? All of that builds up. Hey, how about have you forgiven everybody? You know, resentment, resentment eats you. I mean, it eats you up, resentment, you know, vengeance, resentment. Guilt. Guilt, yes, guilt. Whatever you stole, give it back.

Yeah, yeah. And if you've got a bad situation with somebody – Call them up. Apologize. You fucked up. Yeah, be the first. Be the first. Yeah, exactly. Let it go.

Let it go. Let it go. And I just think that those simple like six or seven immune – get exercise. Go get outside. Run around in the sun, all right? Those kinds of things, if we – I mean Michelle Obama had the Let's Move campaign. It was a great campaign. She was right on, OK?

I'm not trying to be political. I'm just – she was right on. I'm not trying to be political. She was right. Now, my driver that picked me up from the airport last night, he said, this is my first job for a month. He said, this is my first job for a month. And he said, all I've been doing is inside the house watching Netflix. Well, that's not going to build your immune system. He needs to get out and go stick his hand in poop. Don't you think that?

I mean, I don't know if this is true, but I would imagine that the immune system is like your cardiovascular system. It needs a workout. It does, and many people believe this. In fact, there's an entire school of thought, this hyperallergenic thing, where a lot of the allergies we have today are because we're so sterile. I mean, this was part of the kind of unspoken part of the book Guns, Germs, and Steel. You know, that was a fascinating book. And it talked about the ascendancy of the Europeans who kept livestock in their house. And that's why they were immune to smallpox and all these things that were devastating to the other people that didn't have nearby livestock. And so we want our customers to come out and pet a calf, go in the brooder and pick up a chick and hold a chicken. And we think that that's really, really, that's not just, that's not just whatever, nostalgic.

I would be interested to see what's going to, I'm sorry, but what's going to happen when people do go back to normal life with these compromised immune systems from being inside all the time, whether or not just regular common cold kicks in on a larger scale. Well, there are medical doctors. I can't give you names right now, but I'm like you. I'm sleuthing all this different material. different material. And I can tell you there are numerous medical doctors who are saying that as we come out of this, we're going to see a spate of exactly colds, flu, different things, because we haven't been exercising our immune systems in this soup. And in fact, Governor Cuomo was, it was interesting, his reaction the other day when he got the report, the data now, there's more data coming out every day. whatever, positives to the virus than the people who sheltered across the demographic,

including frontline hospital workers, which, you know, you look at that and you say, well, you know, the people who were sheltering, they were dwelling on it. I mean, they were watching news all day. If you watch the media all day, you are scared to death, okay? And rightly so. That's what you're feeding your mind. But if you're working and you're building and you're creating and you're doing your things, sure, you might think about the virus once in a while. But I mean literally in my day, I don't think about it but a few minutes a day.

It's only when I come in and turn on the news or look at podcasts that I'm besieged with – I'm interested in it. But I'm out there busy, and there's something that happens I, psychosomatically when you just consume, when your mind is consumed every day with fear. Yeah, for sure. Well, the media has played into it. And also people are hearing terrible stories about emergency rooms, particularly in New York City and places where it's stuffed full of people. And the hospitals are overrun. The ICUs are overrun.

Thank goodness that that has sort of calmed down, even in New York City. Cuomo basically said today that they're back to where they were when the pandemic exploded. So it's nice that they've sort of leveled that out. But what's going to happen when you just let people out again? Are they going to start getting sick like crazy again? I mean, is it going to be another spread? There's a real worry about that and And we're worried that during this time, we haven't been encouraging people to build up their immune system. We have been encouraging them to exercise.

We've just been feeding them fear. Yes, that's right. It's been a feeling of fear. And so, you know, interestingly, I've just, I've got a book that's actually – we'll have in hand in whatever, 10 days, a new book coming out. I've written with a nutritionist biochemist, Dr. Sina McCullough. And the title of the book is Beyond Labels. And it's a doctor and a farmer lead you to a place of food empowerment. When you stand in front of a bunch of labels and you see everything from organic certified to fair trade to natural, they're very confusing they're very and p what happens is when you have when you're faced with so much uh choice of of label information you tend to just shut down you get paralyzed you say ah forget it you know it's too complicated it's too it's too difficult. And so so we've written this book.

She from this chemistry standpoint, me from a farmer standpoint, trying to cut through this. And so people can be empowered to actually to actually make food decisions that will. And we talk a lot about immunity, feeding your microbiome, to build that up so that you have a diversified enough, exercised enough immune system that think about if that occupied your mind, how am I going to develop a robust immune system? Just think about dwelling on that as opposed to, oh, no, am I going to get it? Am I going to get it? Right. I don't think we've scratched the surface as to what thinking I'm going to build my immune system. Let's go get them.

Okay, let's just the mind-body connection, what that does to your body to suddenly get a burst of hope as opposed to a constant diet of despair. It has to have a big factor. I mean, that kind of stress plays a big factor with people's immune systems all the time. If people are stressed out, they always get sick. It's real, real common. It just makes sense. And I think this kind of fear, particularly, I mean, the way I was experiencing it, when

the lockdown was first ordered and everyone was at the supermarket, no one was wearing masks yet, but everyone was stockpiling food. And we were nervous. We were real nervous because we didn't know what this was going to be like. And we were also, I was nervous particularly because I feel like the information we were getting out of China was not correct. And I was worried that when you see those videos of them spraying disinfectant on houses and buildings, it's like, maybe this is way worse than we think it is. And it's going to hit America really hard because we've been lied to by the Chinese. There was a lot of fear.

So I remember lying in bed at night and like testing my breath. Like maybe I have it now. Maybe it's going to get worse. You know, there's a lot of that. It was a lot of that. I didn't sleep real good at all for maybe the first few days of lockdown until I sort of calmed down and realized, well, I'm not going anywhere. I can't get it. And then I got tested. I'm like, okay, well,

this is nice to know that I don't have it currently. Maybe if I just keep doing what I'm doing, I won't get it. But then I'd have days where half the day I'd think, this is all bullshit. What we need to do is tell people how to strengthen their immune system. And then you read some crazy story about some new inflammatory syndrome they're finding on, you know, some patients where, you know, their feet are swelling up. Yeah. Blue toes and all this. Yeah. And then you get scared again. Yeah. I'm totally with you. And I think that that brings up the issue of how our society now views death. I read an interesting article just in the last couple of days about how as we have left, it used to be when we were kids, we used the term somebody dropped dead. Remember that? You know, they just dropped dead. Good old days. Well, today we don't say they dropped dead. We say apparently medicine failed them or the hospital.

It's like it's like instead of just people. Yeah, we do drop dead. Instead, every death is some sort of a failure of our techno-sophisticated cryogenic system that's supposed to keep everybody beautiful and – Trevor Burrus Perfect forever. George Smith Perfect forever. And the fact is – and I think that's an advantage of on the farm where we are. I mean we see death every day. I mean, we know that things – and in fact, death makes room. I mean, a compost pile is death and life. I mean, you've got microbes eating stuff that was living, and then that makes new life.

And, of course, my family knows that when I go, they're supposed to put me in a compost pile. Really? Yeah, yeah, put me in a compost pile. Is that legal, though? Don't they have to cremate you or something stupid? I think they have to at least put me in the ground or something. But that's my joke. I don't even think they're allowed to just put you in the ground.

I think they have to pump you up with chemicals first. No, no, no. My dad, nothing. Really? Nothing. Nope. In the ground, ground that was it did you have to sign paperwork saying that you didn't kill your dad or anything

because you know what no no um what we did have to get was a special use permit for a family graveyard oh so we've got we've got 10 we've got uh permission for 10 spots so we're good for a graveyard, you don't have to use formaldehyde? No, nothing. Everywhere else you do, though, correct? You either cremate or use formaldehyde. And I think they use formaldehyde before they cremate. Well, there are now, burgeoning around the country, there are natural cemeteries. Really?

Yeah. And there are specially permitted cemeteries where nothing is used. The problem with that is they can't exhume anybody, right? They can't exhume your bones, I guess. The bones would stay for a good while. We know the bones last a long time. But my thing is that, look, I don't want a bunch of people to die, but the fact is that death is transformative, and I don't want to get all too mystical and spiritual, but whatever your spiritual tradition is,

mine happens to be Judeo-Christian ethics, so I think there is an afterlife, but even if there's nothing, even if you say, well, I'm dead and there's no spirit and I'm gone, even so, that makes room for tomorrow's babies. It makes room for new ideas, new things. I mean, you can't have life without the regenerative capacity of death. And the foundation of ecology is life, death, decomposition, regeneration. Life, death, regeneration might look like something else. But that's our digestion. It's compost.

It's compost. It's everything. And when we get sterilized and move away from that, I think we lose the beauty of the transformative capacity of that part of life. of that part of life. Yeah, I think it speaks to what you were talking about earlier, that they look at death as some sort of a failure instead of just a part of the natural cycle. I was reading about one of the, you know, they try to find new ways that the coronavirus looks terrible in articles. And one thing they were saying was it takes between two and 10 years off the life expectancy of the average person who gets it. I'm like, okay, well, how did you come to that conclusion? Well, they came to that conclusion because they looked at old people who got it that might have possibly lived seven, eight years, five years more, and they just started doing these random calculations based on how old people normally die.

But then the problem with that is if you look at the overall numbers, the average age that people die from coronavirus is actually older than the average age people die, which is like, well, what are you saying that? It's taking years off some people's lives, but everything does. If you fall down, it takes years off your life if you're old, right? You die from falling. Should we stop all falling? If you get sick, it takes years.

If you eat too much sugar. Yes. Well, that's a big one, right? And that's one that's killing people at almost the same numbers as the coronavirus was at the peak. I remember there was like a graph. The coronavirus has passed heart attacks. But wait a minute.

How many goddamn heart attacks are there? Is there something we can do about heart attacks? Forget about that now. This is a pandemic. I mean, cigarettes, no one even touched with a 10-foot pole because cigarettes is killing people at four and five times the rate coronavirus was. And no one was saying anything of it because

it's an elective thing. You're allowed to do it. It's a freedom. People enjoy it. You're grown adults here. But stay home. Stay home and wear a mask and don't touch anything and stay home and you're going to lose your job. But stay home because you're not really a grown adult. You're a grown adult. I'll let you smoke cigarettes at home.

How about that? You feel better? Yeah. Well, I think a couple of things. One is that our country has never told people, when we talk about personal self-worth and your own personal affirmation in a climate of fear and worry, the worst thing you can do is tell lots of people, you're not important. You're not essential. You know what you've been doing all your life, what you do every day? It's not essential.

What a faster way to whatever, deaffirm a person than to tell them you're not essential. I mean, I just think it's horrible. And now we have the data. And again, these data points, we've all become, I think, through this more wary of statisticians. But one that I just saw again this week was that every percent increase in unemployment equals 30,000 deaths in our country annually. Every 1% unemployment, suicide, depression, whatever. That's a really important statistic. Yeah, it is.

So we've gone now from that white hot 3.5% unemployment to now what, 18.5? That's 15%. I'm frankly actually amazed that we're at only 18% right now. But I think that's only because a lot of people have been furloughed and are not unemployed. So, you know, if all those people go back to work that have been furloughed, you know, restaurants and things like that, it'll be okay. But anyway, we've increased in the last 60 days 15% in unemployment. If that 30,000 figure is actually actually correct that's an additional 450 000

people a year you know uh dying from from external ramifications of of being uh unwanted and this is in line with what you said earlier about costs, right? Right. Like you're talking about the cost of food, and then look at the cost of health care. When the cost of food is higher and food is higher quality, look at that, the cost of health where it drops in an equal number. Right. And I think this is along those lines. We're looking at death through the coronavirus, but we're saying, oh, you're putting dollars over lives.

You're saying the economy is more important than people's lives. No, we're saying you need a nuanced perspective because if you ignore the economy, it actually costs lives. And it costs a staggering number of lives and in a horrible way. Suicide, drug addiction, depression. Right. And if I may go a little, just one other little thread on this whole thing, again, thinking about, well, how can we employ all the people? If our discretionary spending, if this is going to make people more careful about discretionary spending, you know, flying to Paris, going on a Caribbean cruise, going to the Sandals. You know how cheap those Caribbean cruises are?

Jamie and I have been going over this. It's basically cheaper than being homeless. You could be on a cruise for like five to seven nights for $105 with all you can eat. Wow. Where are you going to get that kind of food? That's right. You're not going to. If I was a homeless person, I would just get me a constant string of cruise ship rides.

You've got to figure $5,000 a year. A little bit more than $5,000 a year you live like a king. You get your own little spot. See, they,000 a year. You live like a king. Wow. You get your own little spot. See, they want you to pay for booze, I think. We're pretty sure that's what it is, right?

That's where they make their money? Yeah. Oh, that's where they make their money. Ridiculous, cheap board. Kind of like gas stations make their money on jerky and soft drinks inside. Sure, yeah. They don't make their money on gas. But anyway, so one of the things that we're key on because our fertility program is carbon. That's what feeds the soil, carbon, right?

Not 10, 10, 10 chemical fertilizer, carbon. And so at our – Do you use fertilizers at all? No, no, we don't. That's amazing. We don't. So just manure and natural fertilizer. But we have a big industrial chipper. You'd love this machine.

I mean, it's the ultimate, you know, boy toy. It's a 120 horsepower diesel engine that can chip 19 inch. You can take a 40 foot tree and just huck it in there and it just whoa whoa I've seen those online that scares the shit out of me remember Fargo that's our fertilizer factory so carbon

so we integrate forest with open land and we integrate the carbon from the forest. So we cut junk trees, dead trees, crooked trees, weak trees and thin the forest. And that enables the good trees, the healthy trees to grow more vigorously, better, reduces fire potential because, you know, you're thinning it out, taking out all the dead stuff. And that then becomes our carbon base for bedding the animals for, you know, and for all the composting that we do. And we do, you know, mountains and mountains of compost. composting that we do, and we do, you know, mountains and mountains of compost. Where I'm going with this is, when we talk about costs, right now, how much is our country spending

fighting wildfires? And how much are we losing fighting all these fires? I mean, we're in California, right? I mean, looklike like they were before the Europeans came. The Native Americans kept them going with fire, but there was mega fauna here, mega fauna. And so we graze through, we convert a lot of it into, you know, silvopasture, widely spaced trees that are growing unimpeded with, with grazing animals underneath so that there's no fire damage, there's no buildup of fuel. And suddenly we're producing our own food and we're eliminating the danger of wildfire with technology called chainsaws and chippers, and that carbon becomes the fertility for the vineyards and the agricultural lands. It feeds the soil, so now we have earthworms instead of hard soil.

We don't have erosion because our organic matter is up. On our farm, using these principles, we've gone from 1% organic matter to over 8% organic matter in the soil. And every 1% holds another 20,000 gallons of water per acre. Whoa. Whoa. So, in our 60 years of being there in the Sheno at Polyface, we have gone from 1% to over 8%. Let's just say that's seven clicks. Seven times 20 is 140,000 gallons of water per acre now that we can hold that we couldn't hold before. And it's because of the grazing, the perennials, and the composting that's building up the organic matter in the soil. That could be done in California. When you start talking about holding water, it's not just about how much rainfall are we getting, it's how much are we actually holding in the sponge to reduce, you know, flooding and runoff and things like that.

So it sounds like your method could keep from the situation they find with some farms of the rotting topsoil where they have to constantly supplement. Right. But how would you how do you grow enough corn. Like if you want to have those monocrop agricultural fields where you see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of acres of corn, just corn, or just soybeans, or just alfalfa, whatever it is. Like if you want to do those monocrop things, how are you going to re-fertilize the soil in the same manner with that large a scale? You don't have them.

You don't have those monocrop agricultural situations. There's... Now, corn's an amazing plant, so are soybeans. You don't have them. You don't have those monocrop agricultural situations. Now, corn is an amazing plant, so are soybeans. So all I'm saying is that right now our corn crop in the U.S., what is it, 30% goes to alcohol for fuel? Well, that takes more energy than the fuel we get. So ethanol, you mean? Ethanol, yeah. We don't need that.

Ethanol is a byproduct of what we used to think that we needed ethanol because we thought we were running out of oil. Exactly, because we were running out of gas. Right. Right. So that's not necessary. Okay? Thank you, fracking. Yeah. That's not good either, though.

No. So we don't need to grow that corn. Well, you know, come on electric vehicles and that. I mean, that all that's changing the landscape a lot. But isn't a lot of it for agriculture? Well, yeah. So so so then the next is to feed to feed cattle. So another huge percentage, like 20 percent, goes to feed cattle.

And then another huge percent goes to hogs and chickens, of course. But one of the problems with the hogs and chickens is that they are not integrated with the food system. So right now, 50%, almost 50%, it's arguable, you know, what statistician, again, figures lie and liars figure, but somewhere between 40% and 50% of human edible food on the planet is never eaten by a human. It spoils, it's thrown away, and 75% of everything that goes in the landfills is biodegradable. So when you start matching up the waste, the waste streams and the losses in our food system and our waste streams, what happens is very quickly you start seeing that it's the segregated, it's this single species, single crop, single segregated notion where it's not related, it's not symbiotic, it's not synergistic, that actually creates the problem. A city in Belgium, this was articulated in Pat Foreman's wonderful book, the title is

City Chicks, and she's talking about urban chickens. A city in Belgium offered three chickens per household to anybody that wanted a chicken. And they had 2,000 families raise their hands, says, yeah, we'll take three chickens. So they got 6,000 chickens, distributed them through this city. And in the first month, it dropped 100 tons of food waste to the landfill. What? And so not only did they eliminate the landfill waste, all these people now suddenly had chickens.

And Pat's done all the math on this and shows that if one in three households had enough chickens to eat your kitchen scraps, there would not be an egg industry in the United States. It would be completely nonessential. Really? So that's the power of integration. That's the power of proximate, of actual putting stuff close to each other.

So they wouldn't have an egg industry because everyone would be growing their own eggs. Yeah, everybody would have their own eggs. Wow. Yeah, yeah. And the landfill would get way, way less material. And so then the chickens don't need the corn from the cornfields. So the fields can be turned back into prairie to feed herbivores, which now would be cows, not bison.

But that's our herbivore of value. And so now you're at perennials instead of annuals. And perennials instead of annuals, perennials put energy in the soil. Annuals extract energy from the soil. So now suddenly you're producing, instead of producing an annual fertilized with petroleum to feed beef for somebody else. Instead, you're not growing the corn. You don't need the tractor.

You don't need the petroleum. The cows fertilize it themselves, and the perennial builds the soil like it did with the bison, and you have the beef, instead of coming out of a feedlot, it's coming off the prairie like the bison did. And suddenly you're building soils that are losing soil and your production doesn't change one iota. It doesn't take any more land to produce the beef with what I've described than what it does with corn. Doesn't take any more land.

Okay. So you're essentially saying that they have to convert to not just growing corn. That's right. They're going to have to do a different kind of farming. That's right. That's right. Corn is, I mean, that kind of monocrop, monospeciated thing is a complete, I mean, we started the interview talking about standing on nature on her neck, you know, standing on nature on her neck, you know, that is a quintessential example of standing on nature's neck. And, you know, the reason our farm was so deteriorated when we came to it was because we're in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. And, you know, that was the breadbasket of the Confederacy during the Civil War, if you know your history. And essentially the war was finally won when they burned all the crops in the Shenandoah Valley. And during that time, the valley lost somewhere between three and five feet of soil during that time period.

So the soils are worn out and then we got the westward expansion and it all moved to Ohio and Indiana and then finally the Dakotas and kept heading west. So this head west, head west young man, head west, was partly because our agriculture

destroyed the soils. And if we don't start using our agriculture to build soils, we have a lot more to worry about than a COVID-19 deal. A lot more to worry about. If we don't figure out a way to produce food abundantly and grow soil while we're doing it, the pandemic is going to be the least of our concerns. There's a thing that keeps getting repeated, and it's that we only have 60 more seasons left in our topsoil. This is a thing that gets repeated almost as if there's no solution to this, that because we have to feed so many people, we're doomed.

And what you're saying is, no, we just can't do it this way because this way is unsustainable. It's unnatural to begin with. That's exactly right. So we have to fundamentally change. We have to use our carbon, our biomass strategically, which includes food scraps, by the way. Use everything strategically. You can't just throw stuff away. It shouldn't be.

This is sunlight that's supposed to be decomposed. I mean, the fact that landfills get green environmental awards for poking methane tubes in the landfill and running the excavation equipment on the methane from the decomposing material in a landfill, it's – Shouldn't be in there. No, it's unconscionable. What we need to do is hook up. We need hookups. We need to where the waste streams like they move right into the use streams and you have circles, not linear thinking.

And, I mean, just another one, for example, is ponds. A lot of people don't realize that before the Europeans came to North America, North America was 8% water. Today we're less than 1%. I mean, surface area. Think about the United States being 80% water, including— Eight percent, right? Eight percent.

I'm sorry, 8%. Eight percent water. I mean, think about that in Utah, Nevada, New Mexico. All right? Where did all that water come from? Beavers. Massive, massive beaver populations. I mean, there were 200 million beavers.

And we now know archaeologically digging up skeletons, some of them were as big as a Volkswagen car. Really? These were big, big. The megafauna, the megafauna is incredible. I mean, it's the same as the wombats in Australia. You know, now these wombats are like, you know, 80 pounds or little, you know, cute little wombats. Well, they know by digging up skeletons, they used to have nine foot wombats in Australia. Nine foot wombats. Well, they know by digging up skeletons, they used to have nine-foot wombats in Australia. Nine-foot wombats.

So when we look at the megafauna that was here, the fact is that the planet used to have more animal weight on it than it does today with all the animals, all the factory farms, and all the people. So it's not people and animals that are messing up the planet. It's the human management of the ecosystem that's messing up. The abundance here is through the roof. So imagine if we, and this is what we've been doing on our farm, is every time we get a

few extra dollars, we build another pond. Now, we're not beavers, but we have excavation equipment that we can go in and build ponds so that when we have a flood and everything is flooding, we're actually trapping a lot of that, not all of it, but trapping a lot of it up on high ground permaculture style that we can then dispense for irrigation in a dry time so that we never pump from an aquifer. That's the commons. When you pump from an aquifer, you're depleting the commons. But if you're reducing flooding and using that in a drought to keep vegetation growing when there's so much sunlight, then you're actually increasing the commons. And we believe very strongly that as a result of our farming,

we should not be depleting the commons. We should be increasing the commons. As a result of that, there should be more soil, more water, more breathable air, more wildlife, more pollinators, more... There's also been a false narrative that attributes most of our greenhouse gases or a significant percentage of our greenhouse gases coming from cows and cow agriculture. And one of the things that they found through using satellite imaging and when they were trying to detect methane, they're finding it's landfills.

and when they're trying to detect methane, they're finding it's landfills. These landfills are a huge, huge problem in terms of greenhouse gases. Yeah. That the total wrong way of approaching it, the way you were saying, burying this biological material in the ground instead of using it as compost is actually not just counterproductive, but it's actually detrimental. Yes. It's not the wrong way to do it but it's actually detrimental. Yes. It's not the wrong way to do it because it doesn't serve the soil. It actually fucks up the air.

It's not a zero. It's a negative. It's a negative. Yeah. With the same amount of biological material. It's just managed incorrectly, which is really crazy when you stop and think about it. Sure it is. If all the biomass that we have – what's the word? Non-leveraged or thrown away – if all the biomass we've thrown away in the last 100 years, if it had instead been leveraged for soil building, feeding chickens, I mean, whatever.

Today, we would not have all that methane. And today, we would have soils that would be a lot richer and we would have better earthworm populations. We'd have a tremendous amount of soil, maintained soil abundant fertility. of soil, maintain soil abundant fertility. And so the beautiful thing is that this is not that difficult to bring back. I mean, I've been preaching this message, you know, all my life. And it's exciting to now suddenly have people stepping back and realize, wow, you know, we just kind of put a pause button and there are now, you know,

dolphins in Venice again. There's, you know, in Shanghai, you can see across the street, you know. Right. How about L.A.? Yeah, L.A. Amazing. I mean, amazing pictures. Amazing pictures. So when people say, let's get back to normal, look, I don't want the tragedy that we're having, but I also don't want to go back to normal,

because normal was this foot on nature's neck saying, you know, we're going to. So that's where you start saying, well, you know, what does the future look? What could a future look like? where you start saying, well, you know, what does the future look, what could a future look like? And that's where we start talking about decentralization, integration, you know, integrating all of our streams and... Large-scale change. Oh, very large, very, very, very disruptive, very disruptive. But everybody has a job. Everybody has a new thing. I mean, my thing about the carbon economy, of course, we're there in that hardwood region of Virginia, near the Blue Ridge Parkway, Shenandoah National Park, all that stuff.

And the federal forests are atrocious. I mean, dead trees. The fuel buildup is just ridiculous. buildup is just ridiculous. Wouldn't it be cool if mommy or daddy could come home and their six year old says, you know, what did you do today? And mommy and daddy are able to say, well, we stewarded, you know, five acres up on Jack Mountain and kept it from having a fuel load to burn and took that biomass so that a farmer could feed his earthworms so there'd be soil for your future. There'll be abundance and soil for your future. I mean, what an affirming, sacred, righteous vocation that would be.

And it would affirm people who want to work outside and have calluses and blisters on their hands. You know, we've spent a couple generations marginalizing what we call blue collar people. And one of the big issues right now as we go to an AI, you know, a techno future is what do we do with people that like to work outside with their hands and sweat? You know, the Michael Rowe, you know, the dirty jobs. is one of many pathways to actually envisioning a future where thousands and thousands of people would be employed in healing ministries so that we'd be caressing our nest. So many times the idea in agriculture and the farming community is that nature is a reluctant partner, that we've got to get them in a wrestling hole.

We've got to dominate and conquistador. We're going to make you. We're going to push you. When actually nature is a benevolent lover that just wants to be caressed. And we haven't put attention on caressing in the right places for a long time. Isn't it also that when you say the word we, God, there's so many of us and so many people are already invested in doing these jobs that are actually counterproductive for nature.

Right. Like these people that run these monocrop farms for soybeans or what have you. Sure. Like, boy, that's a battleship that's going to be difficult to turn around. It is. But the power – so you say, well, where do you start? Well, you start at your dinner plate. And that's why at our farm, our little moniker on our little, you know, our little cooler bags is healing the land one bite at a time. We want our people to know that what's on your plate, when it's multiplied a billion times, you know, that actually creates the legacy, the legacy ecology you're leaving for your grandchildren.

That somehow, that has to be made. And people have to understand that. And I think that the wake-up call, the shock, the jar, the emotional jarring of this pandemic, I mean, we're seeing for the first time people who never would have darkened our door or asked us for anything. They're asking us. And that's why, you know, that's why I see. And I wrote this book beyond labels. And we started this a year ago.

We had no idea that it would launch in the middle of this. But we realized this is a timely thing. We're having I mean, we're having people call me. Can I go buy land near you that you'll manage? So I have a bunker, you know, when things go wonky. I mean, for the for the first time, I've never heard this before, but it's happening around the country. People like us, we're getting calls. How can I get on your first class list? How can I get on your business class? In other words, for the first time in our history, we've been in business now for half a century.

We were in it before organic was cool. We were one of those early, very early. And for 30 years, we were the only game in town. That was fun. All right. And 20 years ago, things as people started, you know, awareness and farmers markets and wall, you know, all this. And so so now we're not by any means the game that game in town.

But so for the first time in half a century, we're actually rationing. We don't have enough. We've got way more demand. I did a post the other day. You know, the pandemic is the best marketing strategy for you guys, for us, for us. OK. And so we're just, you know, we're rationing here. And so now our people are getting scared. And so there are farmers like us that are actually talking about starting kind of an insurance premium.

You want to get on our business class list, so you always have a seat, pay us $500 a year premium, and you're our top 10 percenter. So they'll give you money so that they would have definite access to food first. Definite access for food first. Wow. Yeah, yeah. How much could you scale up your business? Oh, it has limits, but our ability to scale is only based on personnel, how many people, and land base.

We've got to have enough land base to scale, and we need a bigger team. But no, I mean, our principles – but see, we don't scale – let me explain it this way. There's a guy. There's a guy, David Schaefer, and he does a cool thing. As you know, our country is now a repository for shipping containers, metal shipping containers. We've got millions of them. You can buy them cheap, scrap metal, because China makes everything, ships it here, and we don't ship anything back but microchips. So they don't take very many shipping containers.

So we're building up these mountains of shipping containers. We're building up these mountains of shipping containers. So this guy has figured out how to take a shipping container and simply refurbish it into a small inspectable poultry processing, mobile poultry processing facility. So I can call him and for $100,000, he'll customize it to what I want, put a chassis under it, drive it to my place, put it on four pillars. It's not even a building, so no building permit required. Put it on four pillars, and I've got a little federal inspected processing facility that I can do, you know, 150,000 chickens a year. Okay? So for me, when you say, how do you scale up? For me, it's not, well, if we hit 150 and overrun the ability of this little facility, it's called Platinabox, P-I-B.

And his blog is thinking inside the box because his thing is planting a box. So instead of if we had sales for over 150,000 chickens, well, then you don't expand this and make it bigger. You duplicate it. So your expansion is by duplication, not by concentration and scale on site. Then what happens? There's a sweet spot here. There's a sweet spot. not by concentration and scale on site. Then what happens? There's a sweet spot here.

There's a sweet spot. If you don't overrun your ecology, so we're going to set this thing, you set this thing on a farm, so the acreage is enough to handle the processing water and you compost all the guts on site. Now you don't have to run a sewage treatment plant. You don't have to truck your guts to a rendering plant. They become fertilizer on site called this fertigation.

And it's a sweet spot that the industry doesn't have. And so there's no reason why we can't produce a million chickens, and you just have eight of these scattered, you know, five miles apart, six miles apart. And once you get them processed and they're in a bag, you can put them in a tractor trailer and ship them anywhere. Okay? That's not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is integrating the processing with the production. That not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is integrating the processing with the production.

That's the bottleneck right now in our in our fragile system. And so if we can if we can do an integrative approach and and have a democratized, decentralized approach, then suddenly we have an ecological, humane, people-friendly, community-friendly, nutrient-friendly system. Has anybody ever come to you and said, hey, our community is kind of screwed up. We don't have a good food source here. Would you help us establish something like this? Yeah, I've been – Have you designed these things for folks? Not for a whole community like this. It sounds like that would be a great thing, though.

Yeah. Especially now when we're realizing that it's difficult when the food supply chain goes down or something goes wrong and it's difficult to get food to people. Wouldn't it be great to have – I've always said this, that it would be great if you had like the neighborhood had neighborhood had, like, one large plot of land, and everyone in the neighborhood lived off that plot of land. Sure. Instead of, like, have a little mini Central Park in every neighborhood. Right. Right. You're talking my language.

I mean, the idea of – I mean, you're familiar with urban agriculture. I mean, we have food deserts, right? Food deserts is a big, big problem. But a lot of times food deserts are in pretty run-down parts of the city that have vacant lots. And there's a lot of productive capacity in these places. One of the interesting ones I was on was in St. Louis. I was one of the interesting ones I was on was in St. Louis. And these three young couples had come together and they had they had purchased an old it was an old crack house that the city bulldozed.

So there's this vacant lot. It was, you know, half an acre. It wasn't very big. Half an acre. And these three couples, they got apartments nearby, like within, you know, two minutes walk. And it was in a pretty rundown area of the city, rundown neighborhood. And they just started farming in this half acre and told all the neighbors, bring us your food scraps. They got some chickens. They started making compost. They put up a little greenhouse. They put up a little greenhouse. They put up a kitchen and very, very simple. Poor boy bootstrap, you know, nothing. And they quickly became a whole community of whatever place for kids to come because kids were mesmerized by the chickens. They had a worm bed,

the plants growing, they cooked stuff. And I was there, you know, I was there with them for a couple of hours and here come, here, here come kids down the sidewalk, you know, pulling a little red wagon with food scraps in it. And, and feeding the worm beds. And it's fantastic. They were feeding like, you know, 30 families out of this old crack house foundation. That's amazing. And it was just wonderful. And they were doing it as a gift to the inner city, you know, as a gift to the inner city. But I asked them, I said, so how much of St. Louis' food could be produced this way? They said, if you take out the dairy and the beef,

the big mega stuff, St. Louis could feed its entire city within the city limits this way. Wow. And that's true in Detroit. It's true in Baltimore. It might not be true in L.A., but here's the thing. We don't have to solve every single person's problem to start solving some. And our problem is so many times I start down this path and somebody starts throwing at me

the most extreme situation. And you know what? I don't somebody starts throwing at me the most extreme situation. And you know what? I don't have all the answers for the most extreme situation. You know, the single mom of four minority in a food desert in whatever. OK, I don't have the answer to every single situation, but I'm looking at suburbia. I'm looking at incredible things that people are doing and opportunities. And if we just did what we know – I ran into a lady in Edmonton, Alberta. Yeah, thank you. And she was 50, single lady, living in a fifth-floor condominium, just wanted to farm in the worst way. She had no money, no land, nothing.

And she just had this epiphany one day. She said, I know I have one friend that has a backyard. She went to this friend with a backyard. She said, would you mind if I grew up like a 10 foot by 10 foot garden in your backyard? I just want to grow something. Friend said, sure, sure, sure. So she gave her a little 10 by 10 plot, started a garden. Well, the lady's neighbor saw the garden and she said, do you think your friend would put a garden in my backyard? And lady said, well, no, I'll ask. Well, sure. I met this lady 18 months after this initial conversation with her friend. She was farming 18 backyards, had a part-time employee, was a full-time farmer.

All of her tools were on the side of her bicycle. She bicycled from spot to spot to spot with all of her tools. And she started a business called on borrowed ground and growing food so the thing is is there creativity is there opportunity oh it's up the wazoo if we would become as interested in this as we are the latest dysfunction in the kardashians or or you know, you know what I'm saying? The latest, whatever.

And it's not that we don't have time for it. Not that we don't have money for it. If, if there's one really positive thing to come out of this pandemic, I hope that it's a restructuring of what's valuable in life. And if we can, if we can even grab a 30% bump in that value trajectory, it will have been the best thing that ever happened to us.

That's a large bump. But yeah, if we can restructure what's valuable to us, it's very important. And as you were talking about earlier, these essential businesses, what is essential and not essential? It's so arbitrary and strange, and this is something that politicians really aren't supposed to have the power to dictate what we can and can't do in that way. And they're not doing it in a smart way. Like here's a perfect example. Liquor stores are an essential business. You know what's not an essential business? Alcoholics Anonymous.

So Alcoholics Anonymous is not allowed to have their meetings, but liquor stores are open because they're essential. That is ass-backwards thinking. That doesn't make any sense. Absolutely. I mean, yeah, and in Virginia, I mean, yeah, we've got ours in Virginia as well. You know, they open the liquor stores and close the churches. Yeah, that's another one.

They open Walmart and close the farmer's market. I mean, it's... It's asinine.. I mean, it's asinine. It is. It's absolutely asinine. And I would even argue that they don't have the constitutional authority to do that. Most would. Most would examine it. That would be my argument.

But boy, fear, you know, fear spawns things that we can't even imagine. What is it like where you are in Virginia? Are restaurants open? No. No. No. So on May 15th, we entered what's called Phase 1. And so churches are allowed to meet again.

Not that the government could have ever taken that away, but anyway, that's the narrative. Churches can meet again. We're still at the 10-person rule for gatherings. But a church, as long as they're at 50 percent capacity, they're okay. So that's up and running. Hairdressers are back to work. A lot of the personal hygiene, barbers, hairdressers, very small scale kind of things like that are back. But it's a slow, know it's a very very slow

process yeah it is in some places texas is pretty wide open texas restaurants hotels everything's back up phoenix is the same way yeah right right places are opening up comedy clubs again at half capacity right right so i mean we're having our, we canceled our first two farm tours. We do a, we do a, what we call the lunatic farm tour at the farm. A hundred people on hay wagons. Obviously we can't social distance on hay wagons. You can't get people. So we're having our first one May 30th. It sold out. Not a single person has complained. We've told them there won't be social distancing. You're on a hay wagon. If you're uncomfortable, then you can walk the tour.

And we don't drive fast. You know, we've got people on hay wagons. We're not, you know, we're not driving at road speed. So you can walk it if you want to. But our impression of the feedback we've gotten is just relief. Finally, I can go somewhere. I can be with people. I can, you know.

That's the plus side, right? We're going to appreciate what it's like to do stuff, to be able to go outside, to go to a restaurant, to go to a public gathering, have a picnic. Yes. That kind of stuff. Yes, I think all of our historically normal social interactions are going to be much sweeter than they have been in the past. Because we're social beings. We're not hermits. A few of us are hermits, but not very many.

Most of us like to see people. And if there's one time when you want to be together, it's in hard times. Who wants to go through hard times alone? And when I see these World War II vets dying alone because their family can't be around them, the guy, you know, he's dying. Who cares? You know, if son and daughter and grandkids want to come and be around him? Well, the fear is that they'll get it and they'll give it to someone else and someone else will wind up in terminal as well. I understand.

One of our problems is that we haven't done controls. You know, I wish there had been one state that said we're not going to do anything so that there could be one control. Right. But the problem is nobody's done a control so we so we really we really don't know well there's been places that have less restrictions than others and then also there's been countries that have less restrictions than others yeah so and you're getting it's it's really difficult to parse the information and right and get a straight answer straight answer on is this a good thing or a bad thing. Ultimately, over the course of time, particularly what you were talking about with the unemployment rate equaling 1%, equaling 30,000 lives over the course of a year.

I mean, we really don't know what that number is going to look like here, and it could be absolutely devastating. It is. I mean, we already know that suicides are up. Child abuse is up. Spousal abuse is up. We know that just from police reports. So, you know, that's serious. And there are so many demographics that we don't know. Like Sweden, for example, 55% of all households in Sweden are single, single person. They must be really are single, single person. They must be really unagreeable people.

That's crazy. 55%? Yeah, it's over 50%. Maybe they're just swingers or something like that. Yeah, in Italy, it's only, I think, 18 or 20%,

something like that. So there are a lot of multi-generational households in Italy. So Italy's a much older demographic and more people in a household. Probably a lot more smoking, too. Yes. Italy's, when I was there, it's ridiculous how much they smoke.

Same thing in Spain. Spain, a lot of smoking. And they got hit hard as well, right? Yes, they did. And you've got to imagine that's going to lead to a compromised immune system. Sure. So you've got to imagine that that's going to lead to a compromised immune system. Sure. So you've got all the people living together. You've got a large percentage of folks that are older.

And then you've got the cigarettes and the no exercise. The gyms that I found when I was in Italy, like, what in the fuck is this gym? Even a nice hotel would have this pathetic gym. Yeah, yeah. There's nobody working out over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's nobody working out over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. That's true.

So as we go forward with this thing, I look at this and say, well, let's at least wipe ourselves off and say, okay, what can I learn from this? What can we learn from this going forward? ourselves off and say, okay, what can I learn from this? What can we learn from this going forward? And culturally, obviously, we can learn, well, we need to decentralize and diversify our food processing system. I mean, for me, that's like number one. And then for the average consumer, though, I mean, that's a macro thing. But for the average consumer, what can you do to facilitate a secure food system and your own secure food system? And one is to simply start stockpiling more food. I mean, have more food in the house.

You don't have to go to the grocery store three times a week. Buy in bulk. Go to the farmer's market. Buy from a house. You don't have to go to the grocery store three times a week. Buy in bulk. Go to the farmer's market. Buy from a farmer. You can get 20-pound bags of oatmeal. You don't have to get a little cup full of Quaker oats. You can get rolled crimped oats by the 50-pound bag. It's pennies on the dollar. I mean, this is how you save money. You buy – and, I mean, we talk about price. Interestingly, our whole chicken price at Polyface is cheaper than boneless, skinless breast from Tyson at Walmart. So the way to save money is to get unprocessed.

That's how you eat well, okay? You know, the famous movie Food, Inc., the documentary Food, Inc. Wonderful movie, but they presented the same thing. Remember when that family went to the fast food place and they said they couldn't afford tomatoes? Well, a pound of our ground beef is cheaper than that burger, soft drink, and massive fries that he got. And there's probably more nutrition in a half a pound of our ground meat than that whole meal. But you can buy two pounds of our ground meat for the price of that whole meal. The fact is that junk food is not cheap. Junk food's expensive.

I mean, you start talking about nutrition. I mean, a Snickers bar. Snickers bar is twice as expensive per pound as our grass-finished, world-class ground beef. Okay? So when you start looking at these kinds of things, you start realizing, oh, okay. So really, I just need to adjust where my money's going and how I'm spending. So spend bulk by bulk, by unprocessed, get in your kitchen, yes, and develop a love for

domestic culinary arts, okay? And kitchens are a great place to teach your kids science, you know, fractions, a quarter teaspoon. Great place to teach your kids. So math, math, fractions and stuff. Science, you know, what happens when you put baking soda with vinegar and all this stuff. I mean, you know, kitchen's a great first learning place.

What you're saying is great on paper. The problem is people are addicted to eating terrible foods. Yeah. And it's a real issue, particularly with highly sweetened, highly processed foods that are the things they crave. And also their gut biome. You were talking about this doctor. What is his name?

Bush? Dr. Zach Bush. Zach Bush. Dr. Zach Bush. And that he's a biome expert. I'm glad we brought this up as well. Yeah, Dr. Zach Bush. And that he's a biome expert. I'm glad we brought this up as well. Yeah. Because that's an issue with people that have – their body's accustomed to eating this terrible food.

Their biome is accustomed to that terrible food. So it starts craving those Twinkies and chips. Oh, listen. The food processing scientists, they ain't dumb. No. They know. They know what our primitive hot buttons are. And, yeah, salty, sweetie. I mean, boy, they know exactly what it is. So, yeah, Dr. Zach Bush has been actually developing microbiome bolstering concoctions to try to diversify your microbiome.

You know, one of the things that farmers like me that direct market to people, one of our concerns, I mean, I don't talk a lot about it, but one of our concerns is that our food, for example, our chicken, we don't immerse it in chlorine. You know, so it actually has it's living food. And and sometimes people are so sterile in their microbiome that they actually have to eat a little bit of unprocessed real food a little bit at a time to build it up. I mean, the other morning I was out in the garden picking asparagus. And I had my knife and I was cutting it off. Of course, I love fresh.

I mean, fresh garden picked asparagus. I mean, there's nothing like a cool morning and a big old fat asparagus, you know, an inch thick. And I just eat it fresh. It's got some soil on it. Eat the soil, you know, an inch thick, and I just eat it fresh. It's got some soil on it. Eat the soil, you know. Grandma used to say you're supposed to eat a pound of dirt before you're 12, right? Remember? I mean, I had a different grandma.

Oh, man. But, you know, how do we develop immune systems in babies? We don't put them in a plastic-wrapped bubble. We put them around the floor, and the next thing we know, they're gnawing on the dog toy, and they've got a dust bunny in their mouth. This is how you build an immune system. And kids kind of know, or nature knows it at least. Nature knows that. I mean, Richard Louv writes about this in Nature Deficit Disorder, which is, of course, an iconic book about the importance of touching nature and breathing in nature. I mean, just the bacteria that exudes from vegetation and the ecology of plants.

Powerful thing, you know. We're told to wash things down as soon as you get them because they could have pesticides on them yeah you got to clean up all the garbage and terrible that's why you get coli from the spinach that's why you get food from people that don't use pesticides yeah um and and and you say well there's not enough of that produced well as you said, it would be wonderful if this broadcast went into every single household in the world, and tomorrow everybody said, we're going to do different. I think a lot of people are trying to do different because of this pandemic. I mean, I would imagine the number of gardens has grown up substantially.

Oh, yes. I know a lot of people have looked into hunting. Yes. I know that. And edible, you know, hunting edible wild things. What can I eat? You know, dandelions, lamb's quarters, mushrooms. Yep, yep, yep.

It's a wonderful thing. So, yes, this is really a good thing. And the whole, what we call the homestead arts, there's a big conference that happens every year in the east. They're hoping that they can still have it. It's in October. The Homesteaders of America Conference. And two weeks ago, they had 10,000 new email signups for their postings in one day. I mean, that gets your attention.

That's huge. And it's people that are looking on how to garden. I mean, the number of gardening questions just like – and seeds. I mean, seed companies are out. All the seed companies basically did like a three- or four-day moratorium this spring because they ran out. So this summer, what's going to be in short supply? Canning supplies are going to be short. Dehydrators, I'm sure, you know, produce dehydrators are going to be hard to get. In our area right now, you cannot get a freezer now until August. Everything's backordered clear till the middle of August. Everybody snarfed up the freezers to be able

to stockpile. So that was one of the things I was saying. How do we go forward? Well, you do more for yourself. And in our book, Beyond Labels, Sina and I end up, the last couple chapters are about moving to a place where you actually are producing some of your own food, a backyard flock of chickens, a little garden, a little herb garden. And we have the technology now, Mother Earth News Magazine. I mean, they've led this thing forever. And you go to a Mother Earth News Fair, and we were going to have the first one on a farm this year at our place,

respecting 10,000 people, and we had to cancel. It was in July. So it's rolled over now to next year. But there's every kind of like patio tube herb garden with little pockets in it, you know, and you grow all of your own herbs. Beehives on your house roof. There's so much. There's so much that you can do.

There's so much. There's so much that you can do. And so I encourage people to jump in and just caress the mystery of life. And it's good for your nutrition. It's good for your soul. It's good for your spirit. In a time where everybody's concerned about death, surround yourself with something that's growing. It's a great thing.

I think that's a great point and maybe a great way to end this. Joel, thank you very much. I really appreciate you, and I appreciate your message. And you really epitomize the best example of that sort of regenerative farming, and I really wish it would be more widespread. Thank you, Joe. Thank you. Well, with your help, it will be.

My pleasure. All right. Bye, everybody.