The Joe Rogan Experience - #479 - Joel Salatin

Episode Date: April 1, 2014

Joel Salatin is an American farmer, lecturer, and author whose books include "Folks, This Ain't Normal" "You Can Farm" and "Salad Bar Beef"

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! A sure sign, sir, that we live in a mad, mad world, is when a person has sane ideas and he comes across as a revolutionary. And I have Joel Salatin, for folks who don't know, he is an American farmer, a lecturer, you're an author. for folks who don't know, he is an American farmer, a lecturer, you're an author, and your approach to farming is so natural and so normal and so, in my opinion, non-controversial that it's quite fascinating that in this day and age with this mad, mad world of factory farming and pumping these animals full of hormones and chemicals

and antibiotics that your approach has sort of revolutionized a lot of the ideas that people have about farming. I think it's a real sign that there's something wrong with us. When I watch your methods and I've seen your videos and I've heard you talk on it, it seems like no nonsense. It seems normal. It seems like common sense. It seems like old knowledge, but yet you're looked at as some sort of a wild man out there. A lunatic. You're a lunatic. You're nice to your animals. Yeah, we are. I mean, you know, people say, oh, you're just so clever. You know, how do you come up with this? And

my response is that this is not new. You know, I mean, I mean, take, take, take just for example, you know, our culture, right? I mean, our, our experts, you know, our U.S. duh, You know, our culture, I mean, our experts, you know, our U.S. duh and our U.S. duh, our experts. USDA. Yeah. You know, they don't think that animals are supposed to move. I mean, but animals are supposed to move. I mean, that's like that's like a fundamental natural pattern. And so if you posit, oh, animals are supposed to move, well, then a whole series of things happen from control mechanisms, shelter, water delivery systems, all sorts of things happen to happen if you just posit something as intuitively simple as on our farm, animals are going to move. It's amazing. So, you know, if animals are going to

move, you have to keep them home. You have to be able to move them, you know, in the right place at the right time. So then you have to have portable control mechanisms or you got to keep them, you know, comfortable. So then you have portable shade mechanisms and you got to give them water so we've got to be able to have portable water and um and so all these things necessarily flow from just something as basic as animals move find it fascinating it is fascinating because most people have they've they've gone the opposite way with it what they've said is uh we don't want animals to move, so let's contain them. Right. I mean, so the industrial system is predicated on, you know, we lock all these animals up in a confinement facility.

You know, 15,000 chickens in a house, you know, nine laying hens in a 16 by 22 inch cubicle. I mean, there's not enough room even to sit down. Cattle in feedlots, pigs in confinement houses. And we do the same thing kind of in our plants. I mean, the next thing then is in nature, there are no monocultures. There are no monospecies. Anywhere you go in nature, no matter where you'd hike,

there's going to be at least two species. You're going to encounter multiple things. In fact, you're going to encounter animals and plants in proximity. Amazing. It's not going to be fields of animal-less wheat or fields of animal-less strawberries. And then over here, the animals can find in a little itty-bitty building, stinking up the neighborhood. Instead, in nature, these things are actually proximate and they're actually symbiotic. I mean, they actually have a lot of synergistic functions to each other. I found it fascinating that when you raise your pigs, you call them wood-finished, forest-finished pigs? Yeah. We call them pasture-finished or acorn glens. We call them glens for the old leprechauns, you know, lurking in the woods and in the forest.

It just has a nice ring to it. But, yeah, we use electric fence. In other words, this is not, you know, Luddite. This is not anti-technology stuff. What we're doing is using pigs. All pigs have four-wheel drive. And they like to disturb places. They have a great big plow on the end of their face called a nose.

All we're doing is taking the way buffalo and fire and predators used to move across the landscape with, you know, with periodic disturbance. We don't have buffalo anymore. We don't have the fire. We don't even have the wolves much. And so how do we create this disturbance? You know, this is a very important ecological principle that living organisms have to be disturbed in order to have succession to another level. Whether it's the pain that comes from exercise. If you want to be physically fit, you've got to disturb your body. You've got to get up off a couch potato. And ecology is the same way.

It needs to be disturbed. And so, you know, actually the ecology is used to having a lot of, you know, disturbance factors on it, disturbance and then rest, disturbance and then rest. And so we use high-tech electric fencing to be able to move these pigs around in these forest glens from one little section to another in a kind of rapid rotation so that we have very intense disturbance and then a long period of rest. Intense disturbance, a long period of rest. And what that does is the pigs then go in and they till, they eat bugs that would affect the trees, they root out starchy, weedy, you know, species, things like that. And eat a lot of goodies. You know, they get fresh air, they get exercise, sunshine,

and are able to fully express their pigness. And what you end up with then is an incredibly nutrient-dense product, as opposed to a white meat flabby product like out of the industry. And the other thing is that you now have a whole new bunch of species that have germinated and sprouted in this disturbed environment, this disturbed soil, and you actually capture more solar energy than you would with just leaves and sterile forest bottom. So the actual product, the pig itself, would be more like a wild pig then? Yeah, that's exactly right. In fact, we supply about 50 restaurants, and we've had chefs do displacement tests where they'll get like industry pork and our pork, and using their very carefully calibrated scales, they can make two blocks of meat that are exactly the same weight,

put them in a pan of water, measure the displacement, and our pork displaces less water per pound than the industrial pork. What does that mean? Well, what it means is that the tissue is stronger. In other words, there is more weight per cubic inch, which means it's better formed. Why would that do it? We call that muscle tone. Oh, I see. I see.

So they're denser. Fat and flab, if we could say, flab is a lot more volume per pound. Oh, I see. If you jump in a swimming pool and you're, you know, really muscle toned, sometimes you have trouble floating. But if you're a, you know, fat person, you know, you can float in that water like a blimp all day. You know, it just works fine. And so, you know, density, muscle tone and density can be measured with a displacement test. That's fascinating.

So this much more nutrient dense. Absolutely. Is it preferred by these chefs flavor wise? Absolutely. I mean, that's why they get it. And the result is that you actually get more nutrition per pound because it's denser. I smoked a wild ham for the first time this past weekend. And it was fascinating how much different it tasted than a regular ham.

So your hams would be similar to that. Right, that's right. Darker meat. Darker, yeah. You know, when the industry says pork, you know, remember they had the campaign for, what, 10 years? Pork the other white meat? I think now it's, what's the new, they abandoned that slogan. Now it's something like, you know, get with it or something like that.

Be inspired. Be inspired. Be inspired by an animal that lives in a box. How what? Yeah, so. How crazy is that? Yeah. So, you know, my father-in-law, he's in his 80s now, and, you know, they used to raise hogs on their farm.

And it's interesting, they built their, they had a kind of a shed shelter where the pigs would go in and eat, like, soured milk and whey and leftovers from, they milked about 20 cows, and so there'd always be leftovers. And the pigs would go in there. Well, they actually built it with the sill two feet above the ground, so the pigs had to jump up in there, and that exercise made their hams taste way better, and it increased oxygen flow to their hams, so the meat was rose-colored rather than white. And that rose color indicates iron, hemoglobin, iron. So the exercise of jumping in and the extra, I collect old ag books. Anything before 1950 is pretty good. After that, it all went to pot.

1950 is pretty good. After that, it all went to pot. And so if you read any like old 1910, 1920, 1900 swine book, the first thing it'll say is exercise, exercise. Because the pork responds to that oxygenation of the blood and makes the meat a deep, rich color, which indicates iron. That is so fascinating. So this white meat, this pork the other way, what a crazy ad campaign that is then. Of course it is. It's based entirely on ignorance. Sure it is.

Yes, it is. I mean, the same thing as our chickens are vegetarians. Right. That's ridiculous. Birds are omnivores. Yeah. I mean, whoever saw a robin refused a worm. You know, I mean, birds are omnivores.

So this whole idea of, you know, vegetarian-fed chickens is just. Those would be sick chickens. Yeah. It makes, you know, pale, nutrient-deficient eggs. Yeah. There's a big difference in the color of the eggs. I have chickens. I have 13 chickens in my yard. And my wife and I have been doing that for the past year and a half now. And it's amazing how much better the eggs taste. It's amazing how much

darker the yolk is. It's like a dark orange. And, you know, we have a big yard and we keep them and we have a huge house built that's bigger than the studio, bigger than this room at least. And the chickens all live in there. They have plenty of room to run around. Taj Mahal chicken house. It's a big chicken house. And we open the door and let them roam around the yard and, you know, pick up bugs and worms and all that stuff.

And express their chicken-ness. That's a good way to put it. You know, in our country right now, in the industrial foods, I call it the industrial corporate U.S. dove fraternity, they don't view life as fundamentally biological. They view life as fundamentally biological. They view life as fundamentally mechanical. That's the big difference between the industrial food perspective and what I'll call a, a more, um, a craft oriented food perspective is, uh, is, is food fundamentally biological or is it

mechanical? And they don't ask. I mean, I've never seen a research project that starts with an umbrella supposition. Let's define what makes a happy chicken or a happy pig. You know, it's all about how do we grow them faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper, and as if they're just inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated, however cleverly hubris can imagine to manipulate them. And I would suggest that a culture that views its food, its plant, and animals from that kind of mechanistic manipulative standpoint will view its people the same way and other cultures the same way. That's a very good point. Both points. Yeah,

way and other cultures the same way. That's a very good point. Both points. Yeah, that's a very good point. Do you think that your style of farming, is that possible on a large scale? That's my favorite question. Can we feed the world? Because ultimately, all of this is just a bunch of, is an exercise in feel goodness, warm fuzziness, unless it actually does translate to feeding the world. So let's take that and interrupt me anytime. First of all, for the first time in human history, we're producing twice as much human edible food as we need on the planet. Twice as much? Half of all human edible food never gets eaten by a human. That's the first time that's ever happened, which means that if you or I could click our fingers today and suddenly double the earth's

food production, not a single other person would get a meal. People go hungry not because there's not enough food, but because of demographic problems, infrastructure problems. There's not a road. Cultural issues like in inner cities that have been taken over by drugs, mayhem, and gangs. Businesses don't want to go there. People with integrity food don't want to go there. People with integrity food don't want to go there. And so there's a tremendous amount of waste. I mean, I was talking to a guy that just was at a green bean factory in Zimbabwe. They were exporting to Europe and they were taking

in five tons a day and only shipping two tons. I said, what happened to those three tons? Well, they're crooked. They're too long. They're too short. They've got a little black spot. And so we're wasting a lot of food. Secondly, there is a tremendous amount of land that's not being used because we have a fundamentally segregated food system, not an integrated food system. So we produce the food over here, and we eat it over here, we feed it over here, we have the manure over here. The old integrated system is no longer. There are 35 million acres of lawn in the U.S. and 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses. That's 71 million acres. That's enough to feed the entire U.S. without a single farm or ranch.

Wow. So this food that's going bad, so if we're making twice as much food as people need, is it a matter of the food deteriorating too quickly to get to people, or it's never going to get to people? It's never going to get to people. Go by the back door of any supermarket produce department, and you will see dumpsters full of spoiled stuff. One of the reasons, I mean, there are numerous reasons. There are residue problems, for example, a dairy that accidentally dumps some antibiotic, for example, and then it taints a whole tractor trailer load of milk. That's common. That's common. You have cosmetic issues. issues. You know, a piece of fruit that has one little blemish, throw away. The long, you know,

the long warehousing and chain of custody between, you know, between field and fork, that creates spoilage issues. And so, you know, there are just a lot of factors in the system that don't do it, that spoil food. That being said, we can absolutely grow a lot more food than we do. People are enamored. They see six combines running side by side down through a Kansas wheat field and say, wow, look at that. Or they see a great big 500-acre fumigated strawberry field in California. You know, wow, look at all that production. But the fact is that even a very rudimentary, almost poorly done backyard garden is more productive per square yard than the most industrial, sophisticated,

technologically advanced, monospeciated industrial farm. That's the truth. Why is that? Why is that? It's because when you diversify, when you have a diversified cornucopia of plants and animals in proximity, you actually have a synergistic effect so that instead of growing one species, if you reduce the production of one species and grow two species on the same area, you get like 120% of your production.

So, for example, we have pasture livestock, so we run the cows across the pasture. We run the egg mobiles behind them. The egg mobiles have chickens that scratch through the cow patties and eat now the newly exposed grasshoppers and crickets that the cows expose by eating the grass. And then we run broiler chickens, meat chickens, over that same ground. We run turkeys over that same ground. We run turkeys over that same ground. And so all of those animals, they're not on the same square foot at the same time, but they go like different waves of production across the landscape. of production across the landscape. And so, whereas the normal farm would have only one of those species confined in a little tiny building, we have an acre being used all throughout the year with a lot of different kinds of species going across.

Suddenly you don't have pathogens, suddenly you don't have the pathogens because the pathogens are confused because you know the cow the cow pathogen hatches out next to a chicken pathogen and or you know and they're toxic to each other and so they they have a war and they fight and they die they cancel each other out yeah which is really what's supposed to happen in nature absolutely absolutely and so, you know, the kind of diversity you see on the Serengeti in Africa, you know, at a waterhole in, you know, Zimbabwe, whatever, I mean, those kinds of diversities, A, they protect the animals from their own pathogens because almost all pathogens are species specific.

So if you put multiple diversity together, it acts as a dead end. But secondly, those animals occupy different spaces. You've got herbivores, omnivores, carnivores. They're all occupying the same space. And so a given area can stack, that's a permaculture concept, if you're familiar with permaculture, it can stack synergistic multiple species and enterprise on a single land base. Brian, pull up Polyface Farms. There's a video, a fascinating video, so you can, the folks at home can get a sense of what he's talking about when he's saying egg mobiles.

And you've designed this sort of chicken house that moves around. It's on like sleds? It's all wheels. And you pull it around, and so the chickens will be in one spot, and then you move it to another spot. And in doing so, you allow the land to get moved around. That's right. Rather than having a stationary structure where we're carrying everything in and carrying everything out, and there's a toxicity buildup with the animals being confined to one spot all the time. Instead, you are actually allowing the animals to move to mimic kind of their migratory pattern on a domestic scale. All we're doing is we're cutting out the natural template and laying it down on a domestic production model to say,

how can we duplicate this pattern on a domestic model? That's what we're doing. And in doing so in such a large scale, can this be duplicated? Like the factory farming systems that are so rightly criticized in this country, which we find to be abhorrent. When you look at these videos of these chickens living stacked next to each other, it's horrific stuff. It is. What is it that's beneficial about those factory farms that keeps them from doing something like this? Well, what you have to understand is that those factory farms externalize a lot of their costs.

So there's collateral damage, that collateral damage in terms of water pollution, fecal particulate in the air. One of the biggest ones right now is C. diff and MRSA, you know, these antibiotic resistant high pass staph infections in hospitals that people are getting. And now, of course, we're seeing an exponential growth in autism. There's a link there to, for example, genetically modified organisms. That might be another discussion. But what I'm getting at is that the collateral damage of the industrial food system, including the nutrient deficiency, the fact that the omega-6s and omega-3s are way out of whack. So the fats, instead of reducing cholesterol, instead of being beneficial, are negative. There are huge nutrient deficiencies. I mean, riboflavin. the eggs in your backyard chickens are probably in

the area of a thousand micrograms per egg. You know what the official USDA, you know, nutrient analysis for eggs is? Only 48 micrograms per eggs. I mean, and, you know, and I'm sorry, not riboflavin, folic acid, that's folic acid. Grass-finished beef, 300% more riboflavin. Riboflavin, of course, is what helps us to keep calm and not fly off the handle. It's the nerve. Riboflavin is the nerve one. Why are people raging and going crazy and shooting people in schools and stuff? Because we're deficient of riboflavin. So, you know, when people say, oh, it doesn't make any different, food is food is food, that's not true. I mean, there's a huge difference in this food. You know, vegetables the same way, whether they're grown in, you know, mineral-dense,

biologically active soil compared to hydroponic or just, you know, what we call compared to hydroponic or just, you know, what we call IV soil, you know, where the soil is just inert material to hold up a root. And we basically IV chemical fertilizers into that soil to grow a, you know, to grow a plant. So there are significant differences in the nutritional element. So this is all collateral damage. And the slinky effect between cause and effect takes a while. I mean, take DDT. DDT, it took 14 years from its initial use until 14 years later, it was definitively discovered, oh, that's why we have three-legged commanders, infertile frogs, and dead zones. And eagles' eggs won't hatch. You know, those cause and effects took a while to materialize because nature's pretty resilient. You know, you can beat yourself up for a while and, you know, still come out kicking for a while.

And I'm sure there's probably also financial factors that were resisting the conclusions. Well, exactly. All of that collateral damage is deferred expense. You know, whether it's obesity, health care, pollution cleanup, uh superfund sites you know soil loss aquifer depletion um desertification these are all deferred damages because in our country we don't have an accounting system to measure i mean our only accounting system is is um cash you know gross domestic product you know today's output. We don't have a way to measure these other elements. I mean, I'll give you one example. Let's take earthworms.

Let's agree that earthworms are pretty important. Well, you know, who presents a business plan today to an investor and the investor says, hey, I kind of like this business plan. I think this is a good idea. Can I be your partner? We're going to be millionaires on this business. But before I sign my investment strategy, I've got one question for you. I'm from the south, so you've got to have a big hog, okay? But I've got to ask you one question.

What's this business going to do to the earthworms in our community? Nobody asks that. And yet, fundamentally, the mycorrhizae, the earthworms, the azobacter bacteria, the mycelium, the hydra, you know, they actually, this invisible community of beings actually supports all of life, what we see. You know, every visible thing that we see is supported by an invisible universe of microscopic bacteria and beings in us, around us, you know, in the soil. They're cousins. And now we know they talk to each other. So in a sense, what we're getting with factory farming is one small unit in the environment extracting money at the expense of all these other factors and these extraneous costs aren't factored in. That's correct.

Because they don't have to be. They don't have to be. Our system is not set up for accounting those other things. That's fascinating. So if it was done correctly, if it was all done your way, although it would be more expensive, those external expenses wouldn't exist. In the big scheme of things, the actual cost of food would actually be cheaper because you wouldn't have the collateral damage.

I mean, just take one example in our lifetime, mad cow disease. I mean, just take one example in our lifetime, mad cow disease. I mean, realize for 30 years, the European and the American expert credentialed PhD academic community took farmers like me to free steak dinners to teach us this new scientific method of feeding dead cows to cows. And our farm was branded barbarian, Luddite, anti-progressive, science haters, because we didn't buy into that model. The reason we didn't buy into it was not because we were anti-science or anti-innovation or anything like that. It's because I looked around the earth and I couldn't find an herbivore that eats carrion. You know, I couldn't find it. And so we said, well, there must be a reason. And here, 30 years later, suddenly there's this big global collective, oops, maybe we shouldn't have done that, you know, as the whole scientific community realized, you know, what had happened.

And so I just think that we have to appreciate that we are in Western culture, you know, we're a product of, you know, Greco-Roman Western reductionist, compartmentalized, fragmentized, systematized, individualized, democratized, parts-oriented, disconnected thinking. And there's an equally appropriate mindset from the East, which is we're all connected, we're all relatives, we can innovate things that we can't spiritually, morally, ethically, or physically metabolize. And so what happens is we innovate these things and then spend, you know, two generations trying to remediate, you know, remediate the collateral damage that our innovations did. strains our innovation, then our innovation could actually be kept on an earth massaging track instead of an earth conquistador track. So you used to literally get courted to feed

dead cows to cows? Oh, absolutely. Free seminars come out and they've got sponsors, the local agribusiness community and the industrial complex would buy dinner. And sure, you go hear these couple PhDs from the taxpayer-funded research universities. What was their motivation? I don't understand why they would – Faster, bigger, cheaper, fatter. It's cheap. I mean, it's cheap protein. Cheap food.

But the idea of making your cows cannibals. Well, yeah. Well, the industry still feeds chicken manure. I mean, well, we're still feeding in this country right now as we sit here, we're still feeding chicken feathers, manure, and chicken carcasses to chicken. They're doing it, you know, right in our neighborhood. So that's still being done. So we're still feeding, but at least it's not cows. All right.

At least it's not cows. But, yeah, it's completely absurd. Why is it better to do it with chickens than cows? Well, supposedly it's not the same kind of tissue. Okay. You know, so it's at least it's one species removed you know so you have some you have a little bit of wiggle room for the for the rogue prions that create the bovine spongiform encephalopathy and that's the same disease that these cows get in mad cow disease that cannibals get in like in new guinea these neurological diseases where they can't move right. Yeah, it's these rhodoprions, yeah. It punches holes in your brain.

Yeah, it's a pretty bad way to go. Yeah, it seems pretty dark. When did factory farming start? What we consider today factory farming, when did all that start? Yeah, well, it's a great question. It really started in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. A lot of things had to come together. And of course, you know, Michael Pollan in his, I think, Omnivore's Dilemma examines this pretty nicely. But to point out that,

or Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, you know, that was a blockbuster, you know, when it came out. And a lot of factors had to be in place. One was we had to have cheap energy because prior to, in order to have a factory farm, you have to have cheap transportation in order to bring, in order to concentrate that many beings in one place and feed them and remove their excrement, beings in one place and feed them and remove their excrement, you have to have cheap transportation. Cheap transportation requires cheap energy. When everything was draft power, mules and horses and oxen, you simply couldn't amalgamate that many things, whether it was animals or shoes or metal. or shoes or metal, you couldn't amalgamate that much material in one place. So every manufacturing facility, whether it was a farm or other manufacturing, had to nest within the carrying capacity of its ecological womb, if you will. There was a limit. How far can we cart stuff in and how far can we cart stuff out? There was a limit to that

until we had cheap energy and cheap transportation. So that really, you know, catapulted this. Then the next thing we had to have, we had to have pipable water. We had to have, so that meant plastic piping. We had to have very cheap piping. I mean, until then it was all cast iron pipe. You know, in the 1800s it was, you know, you took a piece of wood and took an auger and bored it out, you know, and pasted little pipes together. So, you know, we had to have plastic. So plastic had to be developed, which of course required petroleum. So petroleum was really a catalyst. And then finally, in order to keep that many animals alive in one spot, required antibiotics. Because the fecal particulate, the fecal dust cloud, you know,

that they live in, that they ingest, is very abrasive to the very tender mucus respiratory membranes. All the cilia and those very, you know, you look at them under a microscope and it's like going into a Steven Spielberg set. You know, it's just amazing. Well, those very tender mucus membranes get sandpapered by this fecal particulate, this abrasive air, and they bleed then. And this is how salmonella and some of these things get into the actual tissue, even into the eggs. Remember the Wisconsin farm with the salmonella? It actually gets into the oviduct because now the old, the body's toxic hedges, you know, its filters, its strainers have been overridden by this, you know, by this direct hemorrhaging of the tender mucous membranes. It gets right into

the bloodstream. So that's how it jumps those regular strainers. And so the antibiotics were necessary to try to, in order to keep the animals in such an unsterile, unhealthy environment, to keep them alive. I don't know whether you've watched just lately what's happened with pigs. It's been all over the newspapers and Wall Street Journal even. You know, when you see pig futures hit Wall Street Journal, you know something's going on. And I think it was in, you know, January and part of February, they almost doubled. What's the problem? Starting April 1 last year, just April 1 last year, so we're literally 12 months into this, exactly 12 months, the industry started losing one in four piggies industry-wide to a viral diarrhea. Now, my joke is, you know, if there's one thing worse than diarrhea, it's got to be viral diarrhea. But anyway, this is attacking the

industrial pigs. We're not seeing it out in the countryside in pastured pigs and our sort of things. But it's making pork futures skyrocket. The industry is on its heels. They're desperate to find a cure. Of course, you know, finding a cure would mean changing their model. But of course, they're trying to find a technological cure, you know, some more potent concoction, all right, to knock this out in such an unhealthy environment. And so imagine that. I mean, nationwide of all the whatever, millions of pigs, one in four, 25% of all piggies right now being born in the U.S. are dying from viral diarrhea. That's incredible.

Yeah. It's a big deal. Big deal. This environment that you're talking about, this pathogen-rich environment where the fetal particulates in the air are completely not natural. In nature, they're in wide open fields, and the air and the natural environment filters all this. This is something that's completely been over the last less than 100 years. It's very recent. It's only in the last 50 to 60 years. It's only in the last, you know, 50 to 60 years.

Our rule of thumb is that good food production, good farming, good food production should be aesthetically and aromatically sensually romantic. You know, I mean, look, if you've got to walk through sheep dip and put on a hazmat suit to go visit your food, you might not want to eat it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Now, this idea of factory farming, this huge, large-scale thing where you're stuffing all these chickens into, could those farms be converted to a more holistic approach like you're prescribing? That is such a great question. And I'll tell you the truth. My heart goes out to farmers who have signed on the dotted line and been kind of taken in by this model. But the fact is they are so anti-nature that I don't see a retrofit. And that's one of the problems when you have capital-intensive infrastructure, when you have single-designed or single-use capital-intensive infrastructure,

single designed or single use capital intensive infrastructure, even when it becomes a detriment to society to have that infrastructure, we still have to use it because we're economically and emotionally vested in it. You know, our toys run our thinking. I mean, look at the health field. I mean, you know, we have to use our infrastructure because it's really expensive. And so we've got to use this stuff. And the same thing is true in farming. Now, you know, when you pour that much concrete and bend that much rebar, uh, you know, you, you feel compelled to use it. So it's a, problem. And I just don't see really efficient ways of retrofitting a lot of these structures. They might make good miniature golf courses. The smell though. God. Yeah. Well, I mean, just to give you an example of some things that can be done with a different model. One is, just to give you

an example, one is that if you go to a composting bedding in an operation, you can ameliorate a lot of the problems. The problem is that that takes a lot of carbon. In order to have compost, you have to have a carbon-nitrogen ratio that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 to 35 to 1. All right. C-N. It's called the C-N ratio. And of course, you have to have moisture, you have to have air, and you have to have microbes. So there's five components to a compost pile. But you have to have one other thing, and that is enough size to support an internal community of microbial beings. They've got to have their TV shows. They've got to build their roads, have their schools, and have banks and politicians and stuff too.

So it takes room for these microorganisms to build those communities. You can't build a compost pile that's 12 inches by 12 inches by 12 inches. Too small. The smallest size is like a yard by a yard by a yard. All right. Well, the problem is that in most, you know, factory farming facilities, you can't, not only can you not even have any bedding in there, The animals are on slatted floors or virtually no concrete. There is no

life. There is no community of beings, good community of beings. In nature, a lot of people don't realize there are a lot more good bacteria than bad bacteria. There really aren't that many bad bacteria. In nature, if you're keeping score of things, there are actually a lot more good ones than bad ones when you come to this invisible, you know, world of little microbial beings. And so the default position, what I'm getting to is the default position of nature is health. We, in our culture right now, we've got things so out of whack that we just assume that the default position of nature is sickness. You know, that nature's broken and I've got to fix it. That's not true. The default position of nature is wellness and health. If there's sickness, then that indicates something out of whack.'s there's a man there's there's a

there's a protocol that's been violated so um one of the ways to house animals at least temporarily in shelter is to have a living a living um blanket i call it a carbonaceous diaper for them to live on that is deep enough and alive enough with all these microbes so that nematodes attack the pathogenic microbes. So that in this sphere, there's enough community of beings interacting in this war of good bugs and bad bugs. The good bugs beat out the bad bugs. That's the right position. And that can be done. We actually use that when we feed hay in the wintertime in our hay sheds. We use it for the pigs in the winter when they're in housing. For the brooder house where we start chicks, we have it where we can build up 24 inches of bedding. In the hay shed with the cows. We can go four feet deep with this carbonaceous

living composting, uh, bedding. And, um, and you know, and that is a partial answer, but the buildings that are currently designed can't handle a living compost medium for the animals to be on. They're structurally not designed to handle that. And so, you know, the retrofit becomes pretty tough. That's fascinating. So it's almost like they need to be destroyed and it needs to be started from scratch. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, uh, the beautiful thing is really they don't need to be replaced with very much. They just need to be abandoned. You know, most, you know, most, most, um, most great breakthroughs throughout history, breakthroughs have been break widths, something, you know, think about the breakthrough for, for example,

compact discs. The Germans tried to do it for a long time, but they couldn't get past the long play disc model. We just can't do it. And the Japanese, who didn't have a history of LP records like Germany did, they said, well, why does it have to be this size? Let's make it smaller. Boom. The Japanese own that whole market. So it was a break with tradition. And many innovations, many innovative things are break withs. That's the key to the breakthrough. There's a lot of people that don't realize that what we're dealing with when you're talking about a lot of the flus and a lot of the diseases that become pandemics, that they start with livestock.

Avian flu, swine flu, some of the most horrific flus that we've experienced in the past hundred years have come as a direct result of this type of farming. Yes, that's right. The concentration, the total unnatural concentration and buildup of toxicity in these places is incredible. And so what happens is that the industry uses concoctions, you know, from something as benign as chlorine all the way to, you know, stiffer stuff to try to sanitize, clean, wash down, all that stuff. But all that does is open the door for the survivors. is open the door for the survivors. And every time a new concoction is developed, there are survivors. And the survivors become more and more virulent.

So that, for example, when the industry says, oh, look, E. coli, it's been around forever. Get over it. E. coli is part of a cow's digestion. Well, that's true, but not the virulent strains that we're developing by feeding unnatural feeds and the drugs. And so where those would normally be fairly benign in our highly acidic digestive system, in our highly acidic digestive system, they become more virulent and they survive in us instead of us killing them. And that's this evolution of things. I mean, you know, take, you know, Arkansas now where their farmers are now budgeting $70 per acre to hand machete super weeds that have morphed as a result of glyphosate roundup because of genetically modified organism, corn and soybeans being planted. It's created these survivor super weeds because everything, whenever we try to sterilize or sanitize, there are survivors. And those survivors become tougher and tougher and tougher.

We are a bunch of dummies, aren't we? We really are. As the human race, we are just a bunch of silly dummies. There's an issue that is a big one with antibiotic soaps. A lot of people think it's real smart to wash with antibiotic soaps. But what they don't realize is that antibiotic soaps kill all the good flora on your skin as well. And it seems like that's really similar to what's going on here. Absolutely.

Your talk of the live bedding, what that is is nature's own way of dealing with the pathogens instead of pumping some chemicals into them. That's right. And there's nothing unnatural about it. In other words, you don't get virulent survivors. They're all on the equal creation playing field, if you will. And our responsibility then is simply to create a habitat that allows this battlefield to play out in its natural setting. Natural setting is the key because there is sort of a give and take, a place, a jigsaw puzzle piece place for all the various elements of a farm, of an ecosystem. And that's what you're addressing when you're,

that's what I found so incredibly fascinating about the idea of continuing to move these animals. And you have these very low voltage electric fences that are just enough. So they go up. I don't want to go near there. No one's getting hurt, but they're like. No, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's called a psychological barrier. It's essentially a car battery you use, right? So it's portable? Well, it's an energizer. I mean, it's a car battery powering an energizer. It has high voltage but no amperage.

So, you know, you get a lot of pain, but there's no danger because you're running like, you know, goodness, a 20th of an amp. Okay? I mean, there's no energy. But there's a lot of pressure uh and so um so yeah these systems again you know these are computer microchip systems so you know i think i think as we've talked about how did the factory farm develop i think perhaps you know rather than uh continue you can go wherever you want to with the questions, but I would like to point out to folks that as bad as that is and depressing and yeah, we're a bunch of

dummies and all that, my goodness, we have now innovated the most amazing infrastructure to be able for the first time in human history to caress our earth nest, our lover, if you will, more strategically and purposefully than we have ever been able to do it before. And the tech And the infrastructure is amazing. One is electric fencing. I mean, you can now, in a wheelbarrow full of material, you can now place hundreds of thousands of animals in a certain spot for a day and manage carefully their intersection with a given piece of nature.

That's unprecedented. We've never been able to do that before. And we can protect them. We can make them comfortable, not with stationary barns and big post you know, you have to cut down the whole forest to do this. But now with bandsaw technology, instead of, you know, the big old circular saws that removed a quarter of an inch per cut, now with a little Honda engine, you know, that saps all, that's, you know, just sips fuel and a one-tenth of an inch thick bandsaw, we can now mill tinker toy-like lath structure material to build very lightweight portable barns, portable shelters. So we use those on our farm. We have all these portable infrastructures for turkeys, chickens, cows, pigs, so that we can move a shade tree or a barn protective shelter with the animals,

with a four-wheeler, you know, a couple of guys pushing it along, okay? it along. Okay. This portable infrastructure then allows us to keep the animals controlled and comfortable. And with black pipe, black pipe, we can lay miles. What's black pipe? Black, a plastic pipe. Okay. We can now develop a pond or a spring and put that water in a nice clean you know delivery system like the plumbing in your house and deliver it miles so the animals aren't you know drinking out of their toilet they're not you know pooping and then drinking out of it and all that like you see no they're actually eating i mean i drink out of the cow troughs. I mean, that water is clean enough for me to drink. You drink out of that? Absolutely.

Oh, it builds up your immune system. Oh, how dare you. It builds up your immune system. Does it? Yeah. Do you ever get sick? You know, knock on wood, I haven't been sick for years. I don't remember the last time I was sick.

Wow. I mean, even with a cold. Really? Yeah, really. I mean, I take a lot of vitamin C every day. You know, ascorbic acid. I take my, you know, dopatropic for keep me, you know, from going crazy. What's dopatropic? It's a, it's an herb mix. It, you know, it's related to dopamine and stuff, but it's a, it's a calmer. It's a calmer. I travel so much now that in such an unnatural environment, you know, I was starting a couple of years ago, I was starting into a kind of a fight or flight subconscious, fight or flight thing where I would get,

I couldn't breathe, you know, on our airplane and stuff because it was, and, you know, I'd get all congested and all this. And I'd get all congested and all this. And I went to a quack, an alternative medical practitioner, that uses the kind of machines they use in Europe. When you go in the emergency room in Europe and you grab two probes and a little needle tells you everything that's wrong with you, it costs like pennies. That's how they can get along with government health care because they actually are smart about it. You know, one of these probes you hold on with your hands and they tell you what's wrong with you. Scientology. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's pretty cool.

Anyway, I mean, it's not endorsed by any medical work. Oh, absolutely. Listen. What's it called? I thought it was funny, too. I went for my first visit. I sat down. She said, somewhere in your background, you had a bladder issue, didn't you? I hadn't said a word. I mean, I'm 57, right? When I was, how old was I? Eight.

I had a malfunctioning kidney valve. A malfunctioning kidney valve almost died. I mean, this was a long time ago, right? They went in with surgery and repaired that valve. But what it was doing, it was letting my urine back up from my bladder back up into the kidney. It's a one-way check valve, okay? So, you know, your bladder is under pressure, right? And that urine is supposed to only go one direction, all right, into the bladder. Well, I had one malfunctioning valve that was letting, as the bladder filled up with pressure, it was, the balloon was pushing the urine back up into the kidney. Right. All right. So they went and repaired it. Anyway, in 10 minutes, her machine picked up that, which was, you know,

10 minutes, her machine picked up that, which was, you know, 50 year, a 50 year old, whatever, you know, bodily injury, you know, a problem. And, and boy, I, you know, I sat up and saluted at that point, you know, that, Ooh, that's, this is what's the machine called. I don't know what the machine's called. If, if, if I, if I knew more about it, then somebody would come after me and put me in jail.. Quack watch. Is that the same machine? It's right here. It says that that's one of the machines. There's different kinds of models of it, I'm guessing.

Yeah. This is Quack Watch, though. This is a website that's saying it's a quack. Well, I don't know if it's that machine or not. I don't want to tell you who she is because she'd probably get put in jail if you knew who she was. Really? Yeah. She'd get put in jail for that?

Yeah. I mean, you know, the AMA goes after people. My goodness, they go after raw milk producers and backyard chicken growers. That is a true story. That's a true fact. Going after raw milk producers. There's an orthodoxy that's really crazy today and of course you know we're heretics and the inquisition is very real yeah fooling patients with computerized magic eight balls i wonder if that's a same thing

i i i have no idea i i purposely try to not know all about it. The raw milk thing is a real craziness. Have you ever seen the – there was a story recently where they arrested people like with a SWAT team for selling raw milk. I mean they broke down doors and they had guns and they were wearing bulletproof vests and they were just there. This farm, just there. This is a farm. It's just milk. And then somehow or another, because we've made milk so toxic because of these environments that you're describing, that when you drink raw milk on a normal farm like your farm,

where the cows are very healthy, I mean, you could drink that raw milk, and it's actually easily digested. Your body digests it far more easy. And a lot of people that are even lactose intolerant don't have a problem with the raw milk. Right. And the milk from an industrial farm is toxic. I mean, it does have a lot of problems. A lot of people don't realize that the Mayo Clinic was built. back during the early time of the century when cows were eating brewery waste,

distiller's grains, because they were without refrigeration. They put the breweries and the cows together in these urban sectors, and they didn't understand bacteria and hygiene and sanitation and all that stuff. So the cows got brucellosis and all these things, pass it on to people. And Mayo Clinic started putting cows back on pasture and feeding raw milk to their patients during the time when people were getting sick from urban industrial, you know, swill fed cow milk. And that's how Mayo Clinic actually started. So that's a, yeah, I mean, raw milk is a wonderful material, but the cow has to be treated like a cow. You know, you have to respect her cowness as a cow. Respect their cowness. That's how you get, you don't get to all the milkness

of milk if you don't respect the cowness of the cow. And so what's happened is that the industry is so filthy and pathogen and toxic that – and people fear food because the average person is far more informed about the latest dysfunction in the Kardashian household than they are what's going to become flesh of their flesh and bone of their bones at 6 o'clock. I like how you pronounced it, Kardashians. That shows you really don't have a TV. I really like it. No, I don't. I don't. So whatever they are, whoever they are.

Exactly. I'm still asking. That butt, though. That butt. It's the butt. Yeah. That's all it is. It's all about. It's all you need.. That butt, though. That butt. It's the butt. Yeah. That's all it is. It's all you need.

Put a butt on TV and people will watch. So the point is, though, that people are so paranoid of food and ignorant about food that they fear food today. We have customers call us up, if I thaw a chicken in a sink, will it get salmonella? We have customers call us up, if I thaw a chicken in a sink, will it get salmonella? You know, I mean, there's a profound ignorance in our culture regarding food because we're disconnected from it. And so afraid people ask for security from the government. Well, the government says, well, let's see what should be our protocols. They go to the industry for the answers and concoct an orthodoxy that actually shuts out the antidote for the very problems they're trying to solve. The idea that the

government would have any solutions whatsoever to that is pretty ridiculous in the first place, because who would be the person that would be an expert on this? Would it be the industry that creates a lot of these problems? What we need is a guy like you working for the government. Oh, I wouldn't work for... If I got chosen to work for the government, whatever agency I was in charge of, I'd shut it down before Sunday. What would you do if like, let's say there's some catastrophic failure of our government and they just decide to quit and everybody just decides to go under and we need to figure out how to regulate farms. What could be done? What could be done at this point?

I mean, you're suggesting that the factory farms, there's no retrofit. They should be destroyed and you're better off building miniature golf courses over them. How would we be able to distribute food to a nation of hungry people? Is it possible to use your methods, the methods you use? Absolutely. How big is your farm in Virginia? Well, we own 550 acres, and we lease another nine farms, so we're running 2,000 acres. And we're producing a lot of food. In fact, you know, we surpass the county average

in production on pasture by about a threefold amount, which is pretty significant. So factory farms, given the same amount of space, produce less. Yeah. In fact, I mean, the thing that's important to realize when you look at a factory farm, when the industry shows this picture of this big, you know, chicken house or this big pig factory or hog or, you know, cow feed lot or, you know, a square mile of strawberries in California. What you have to understand is those systems are not standalone islands. those systems are not standalone islands. When they say, look at the efficiency, the small footprint, what they're not showing you are the square miles of subsidized grain or petroleum inputs, the land area that all that takes to sustain that little footprint, and then the land that it takes to assimilate all of the waste stream from that. So our system doesn't take one more square yard of production than the factory system.

The fact that we're doing stackable synergistic symbiotic multi-speciated enterprises, it's more productive. But when you look at what we're producing, even though, you know, at first glance, the uneducated might say, well, it takes a lot more land to produce them this way. Actually, you're seeing all the land. Just like when people say, well, it takes more people farming to do it your way. Yeah, but you know what? We don't have people fixing pollution areas. We don't have people burying people with C. diff and MRSA. We're not making people sick from salmonella and E. coli.

Are you with me? So in total, all we're doing is taking all the people that are currently trying to triage the collateral damage of cheap food. We're taking all those people and growing the food. the food and all those jobs are coming back to the farm instead of being in whatever costly remedial programs they are. So you are essentially a standalone system, whereas when you're seeing a factory farm, there's a lot of stuff you're not seeing that's required to make that thing run. That's exactly right. Now, we do buy grain for our omnivores, but we buy local GMO-free grain, no genetically modified organisms. And yes, the whole idea is to create a carbon centricity so that we're not shipping this stuff all over the place.

And when people say, oh, but a locality can't produce it. Cornell did a fascinating study several years ago of New York. They took every metropolitan city, you know, Ithaca, Syracuse, Buffalo, Albany, New York City. And they took all the cities of New York and said, could we produce the calories for these urban sectors? You know, how much land would it take? And what they found was that every urban sector could produce all of its calories within 30 miles. So even in New York, it could be standalone self-sufficient, except for New York City, which if they went into New Jersey, it became self-sufficient as well, because New York's right on the edge of the state. And so a fundamentally integrated system,

rather than a segregated system, becomes far more efficient in the scheme of things, becomes far more efficient than a segregated system with all this long-distance transportation. Because the ships are passing in the night. That's what's happening. system with all this long-distance transportation. Because the ships are passing in the night. That's what's happening. You know, Iowa produces all this food. Iowa only eats, only 5% of the food that's eaten in Iowa is grown in Iowa. What? And Iowa is the most fertile piece of land in the planet.

Why? Because they're not producing food. There's nothing to eat there. If you want to eat berries and apples and things, that has to be imported from somewhere else because the whole state's in corn and soybeans. This genetically modified thing is a real hot topic. It is. Genetically modified seems to me to be along the same lines of this factory farming idea Is that instead of looking at it in a comprehensive approach What you're doing is saying, well we got a problem, let's attack that problem with chemicals Yes, well it's fundamentally bridging

It's fundamentally overrunning a lot of natural barriers that are there in place to protect happening what is happening, which is a mishmash of genetic material. So you have a salmon that's partly a pepper plant, partly a tropical herb, and part pig. And you talk about, you mentioned allergies a little bit in the past. When we were kids, I didn't know anybody with a food allergy. We didn't even know the phrase. I never even heard the phrase. And now it's ubiquitous. even heard the phrase, okay? And now it's ubiquitous. What's happening is that we're getting all of this frankenfood. It's our internal bacteria. We've got three trillion

beings in our insides, and they're not capable of mutating and assimilating material as fast as our human brains can adulterate the food system. And so what happens is we're sending down there a bunch of foreign material. What's this? You know, I can just see them talking. Let's have a board meeting here to see what that, you know, GMO corn is. And so what happens is, you know, they can't assimilate it. And so the other thing about GMOs is that it is hard to contain, you know, by nature, it's promiscuous. So what you have here is a new life form. I mean, the only thing that people have been able to do before now is a mule, I mean, sorry, a donkey on a horse. It makes a mule, but a mule is sterile. It's almost like

God says, all right, you can do that, donkey on horse, but that's it. You're not going to go any more than that. This is not Mendel's peas. Mendel was peas on peas. He wasn't peas on tomatoes on pigs on monkeys. It was within specie. And so this is an assault on the sexual plumbing that nature has to maintain genetic purity. And it seems like the DDT issue hasn't been factored in as far as the long-term effects. That's right. Yeah. The feeding trials, all the feeding trials have only been like, you know, 60 days. Well, 60 days is nothing. Not only that, but if you're, you know, probably the, you know, world expert on this is Jeffrey Smith, who wrote Seeds of Deception and is the premier world GMO expert.

He points out that when Monsanto was doing feeding trials for FDA on, for example, GMO potatoes, they chose for the feeding trial geriatric rats. Well, geriatric rats are already completely formed. You're not going to see any big changes in those. In Scotland, when the scientists there duplicated those studies with juvenile rats, same feeding trials, same potatoes, same everything, all sorts of problems developed. Cognitive ability, brain fog, they couldn't go through a maze, organ development, kidney malfunction, fertility problems. I mean,

you name it, I had all these problems. So, you know, one of the problems with science is that it's very subjective. You can set up an experiment within your paradigm. You know, Teddy Roosevelt used to say, it's really hard to see, it's really hard to get a guy to see something when his paycheck believes, depends on seeing something else. That's a good way of putting it too. And I think that's exactly what's happened here, that you can set up, you know, experiments and constrict the parameters, whether it's length of time, type of subject, you name it. But you can set up the parameters of the experiment to skew the results, to not get a comprehensive

eclectic view. Like the geriatric rats. Like the geriatric rats. Yeah, that seems like dirty pool. That's a bad thing that they did. Yeah. And they're doing this just for profit. Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of money on the line, a lot of money on the line. So where are we going to go from here? How do we go from here? And so when you ask, well, what could you do? All right, we know this system's bad.

How do we really move over here? And there are several answers. I mean, one is go underground. Just start buying the good stuff. Guerrilla-type marketing. start buying the good stuff, guerrilla-type marketing. But I think the main one is that what we need is a food emancipation proclamation. We need a food emancipation proclamation to free the food system from the enslavement of bureaucratic orthodoxy so that consenting adults, and I'm choosing my words very carefully here, so that consenting adults, and I'm choosing my words very carefully here,

so that consenting adults could make a voluntary choice of food choice, the type that they want from the source that they want. And if we allowed however many in our society, 5%, 10%, 20%, whoever wanted to opt out of government-sanctioned orthodoxy and say, hmm, is there something better out here? Can I choose something different? If anybody who wanted to opt out of the current industrial government orthodoxy could do so, voluntary consenting adults here, we're talking about the right of private contract. If I want to come to your farm voluntarily, no extortion here, okay, voluntarily, look around, smell around, ask around, and I want what you're producing, I should be able to get it. When the government gets between my lips and my throat, I call that an invasion of privacy. And yes, I do also believe that we should

legalize all drugs, all of them. Because a government that can tell you you can't smoke dope can also tell you you can't drink raw milk or refuse to vaccinate your children or, you know, go down the line. The fact is that the orthodoxy is so convoluted now that it's perfectly safe and fine to feed your kids Coca-Cola, Mountain Dew, Count Chocula, Cheerios, and Pop-Tarts, but not homemade charcuterie, pickles, raw milk, and backyard butchered chickens. Isn't that crazy? It's absolutely crazy. And if we would free up, I mean, I travel a lot. I talk to thousands and thousands of farmers.

I just talked to 200 farmers up in San Jose this weekend, you know. And what's the limiting factor? Why is local food cheap? Why is our kind of food, I mean, cheap, more expensive than it has to be? Why are we perceived as elitist? Why isn't it more available? Why is it so hard to find integrity food? This is the issue.

And if we would free up those of us in the system that are ready to access our neighbors with quiche and noodles and charcuterie and, you know, name it, to free us up, it would completely invert the entire food system in a year. The entire food system, as you speak of, like when you're talking about the genetically modified organisms and you're talking about these companies that provide them, like Monsanto, there's a backlash against that now because of the information that's been released about the detrimental effects of them. And you're seeing like in Brazil, they won lawsuits. The farmers won massive lawsuits against Monsanto and these various GMO products that they've created. Say you're talking about Iowa and the fertility of the land in Iowa.

What could possibly happen? Could all these farms that are set up to just specifically grow grains, and a lot of them grains that are specifically grown just to feed livestock? Or make alcohol. Is that what it is too? Well, yeah, corn, you know, all the alcohol, corn alcohol. That's what most of the farms. Well, a lot of it, you know. All right, but go ahead. Massive amounts of money are invested in these systems.

What could they do? I mean, what could be done to change all that? Could those farms be sort of turned around and brought to more of a comprehensive approach to farming like you're prescribing? What did the livery stables do when the automobile came? That's what we're talking about here. I mean, think about that transition. Think about the horse-drawn hackneys when the electric streetcar came. I mean, you're talking, that's the level of change here.

You're talking about massive societal change. There will be some losers. But you know what? Those guys have been making fun of me and calling me a bioterrorist and a lunatic and a backwash. You're a bioterrorist? Yeah, because our chickens commune with red-winged blackbirds and indigo buntings out in the field. And then those wild birds take our diseases to the science-based, environmentally controlled factory chicken houses and threaten the planet's food supply. All because we were so archaic and Neanderthal that we had our chickens running around in the pasture.

Has that really been argued? Absolutely. You've really had that, wow. Absolutely. That's hilarious. You barbarian, you let your chickens run loose. Absolutely. In fact, I had two federal veterinarians when the last time we had an avian flu outbreak

in Virginia back about 12 years ago. And they, by the way, they exterminated, landfilled 1,000 tractor-trailer loads of poultry, 1,000 tractor-trailer loads of poultry within just about a five-county area of me. Wow. All right. Did they then in turn feed that poultry back to other chickens after they killed it? No, no, that was not because that was avian flu. So they actually landfilled or incinerated. Wow.

Burned it up. But see, under our system, you don't have any of that stuff. So, I mean, a thousand tractor trailer loads is a lot of food. All right. Anyway, I had two vets there that were part of the extermination federal tax force. Both of them said that we are considered, I mean, they came to visit because they'd read about us. You know, we're here, you know, they came from Oklahoma or whatever. We'll go see this place.

And both of them said that we are considered a typhoid Mary in the community because, you know, we don't vaccinate, because we don't vaccinate, we don't medicate, and we don't do all the orthodoxy that the industry says you're supposed to do. That's the orthodoxy. And if you don't adhere to that, and of course then that orthodoxy drives insurance. How does a farmer sell his product? How does he get product liability insurance? The insurance company says, well, we won't underwrite you unless you use best agricultural practices.

Well, the insurance company doesn't know anything about agriculture. Where are they going to find out about what's best agricultural practices? They ring up the land grant university, which is the lackey of the industry. And they say, well, you need this protocol of vaccinations, this protocol of medications, this protocol of chlorine, this protocol of human. And if the farm doesn't do that, it's high risk. It's a high risk farm. You better not do it. And so right now, a lot of farmers like us are unable to get insurance because the underwriters won't insure risky farming, which goes against the orthodoxy of the system. Because the insurance executives play golf with the industrial ag executives, play golf with the bureaucracy executives.

It's all a big fraternity. It's not a conspiracy. It's a fraternity of ideas. And they've all drunk the kool-aid that is madness and it's incredibly frustrating because you're so transparent about your process and the benefits of your process when you're sitting out there in one of the videos that i watch you're sitting out there with these pigs these pigs are just hanging out there they come up to you like the pig got under your arm and you like put your arm on him.

He's like, hey, what's up? They're just rooting around. Anybody that wouldn't see the benefits of that, you have to be either, you have to have a financial vested interest in not seeing it, or you have to be insane. Yeah, you have to be insane. The best compliment I ever got was a young chef. Young chef came. He wanted to see the farm. He was starting to buy our stuff and really liked it.

He wanted to come out and see the pigs. So I took him up to the pigs. He says, you know, it was a young guy. He said, I have never, I've never seen a live pig. You know, he cuts them up and cooks them all the time, but he'd never been physically present with a live pig. And he just got really quiet. I just let him, you know, enjoy it for a little while. And the pigs were, you know, gnawing on his shoestrings and just there. And he finally said, you know, I don't know anything about raising pigs, but I think if I was a pig, this is the way I'd want to live. And I said, that's right. You know, it resonates in our soul. I mean, if you have a conscience at all, it resonates in your conscience. Yeah, here's your pigs up here on the screen.

I mean, these pigs are just chilling. Yeah. They're having a great time. They're not stuck in some disgusting pen where they're lumped in. I mean, there was a story recently of a farmer who they believe fell. They believe he may have had a heart attack. He's an older gentleman. Fell into a pen and was killed by the pigs.

Right. But I mean, that's, and everybody's like, oh, pigs are vicious. No, but it's the conditions that are vicious. These pigs aren't going to kill anybody. These pigs come right up to you and nuzzle with you, man. I've seen it. Well, they will kill you if you quit moving. They're omnivores, you know.

Oh, yeah, if you're dead. If you, man. I've seen it. They will kill you if you quit moving. They're omnivores, you know. Oh yeah. If you're dead. If you're dead. I tell kindergartners that want to go in and pet them, I said, absolutely. You're welcome to go in and pet them. Just keep wiggling. Just keep wiggling. That's hilarious. They'll eat your toes first and your fingers. And in an hour, they'll be to your spleen, you know? So keep moving. They are omnivores. Yeah. And they are survivors. They are omnivores. Yeah. And they are survivors. They are. They're very cool. That's one of the interesting things about pigs is this huge problem with feral, what we call feral hogs, because they're not a native species to North America and they don't really have any natural predators. Um, other than,

you know, coyotes, which have sort of taken them on and mountain lions and all the other animals that we have in North America. But the number one invasive species problem we have as far as like big animals is pigs. Well, there again, there again, the problem, it's a political problem. It's not an ecological problem. You know, in Europe, they have feral pigs, too. But it's not a problem. You know why?

Because you can go out and shoot a pig and sell it to a restaurant. You can sell it to a neighbor. They allow, you know, wild shot animals, deer and pigs to go into commerce. I think the worry about that though is from a sportsman's point of view that you're going to have people out there sniping and poaching deer and all the really precious wild animals and selling them to restaurants and there won't be any there for hunters? The thing is, nature has a way of balancing it out. And when there's an overpopulation, they're easy to get. And then once they get harder to get, then people get discouraged from hunting because they're too hard to get. I would be more in support of that for pigs than the other animals simply because pigs breed all year round. They'll have several litters a year of many, but whereas a deer will have one fawn, you know, and they'll have a fawn or two and they'll have them once a year.

Yeah, well, maybe you could control it with licenses. Just give people, you know, you can harvest so many a year or whatever. I mean, there's a lot of ways to skin the cat. The bottom line I'm getting to, though, is that when you prohibit a food source from entering commerce, you automatically have the government manipulating a supply and demand situation. And that's the reality. And so, you know, the people that are concerned about, and you go down some areas, I mean, yeah, the wild pig problem is a real, it's a real land abuse problem. Well, they're having them in suburban san jose san jose as people are having their lawns chewed up there was a big news story about it the other

day where they showed these pigs running across people's lawns in this normal suburban street they're chewing up their lawns they're resourceful and they're smart but you know picture the smartest supposedly one of the smartest animals there is. And they are, they're really smart. So if we would allow people to actually practice consenting adult voluntary commerce on some of these things, it would then incentivize innovation, entrepreneurship, incentivize, um, innovation, entrepreneurship, and the antidote to all of the depressing things we've talked about. And, and, um, and our side then would rise and the other side would have to adapt. They'd either have to down, I mean, there there's talk, for example, right now among the poultry industry of trying to go antibiotic-free in 10

years. And in order to do it, they're going to have to greatly drop the bird size in their houses. And I know that there's a lot of research going into building these living compost bedding situations in these houses. Even in the poultry industry? Yes, in the poultry industry, yeah. I mean, you know, Denmark, yeah, Denmark made the change. They outlawed factory pork houses years ago. They've been fine. They've gone to deep bedded, you know, houses, completely different situation. And it makes a completely different living environment. So, you know, you can make those changes. They're not insurmountable. And those changes, though, still are not where you're at.

Oh, no. You've got these animals moving around on this giant farm, and you move your electric fences from place to place. What's the method? Like, how do you get the animals to move? Like, you have them in one area for like a day? A day, yeah. How big is the area that you fence in? Well, I mean, let's take cows. I mean, we've gone as tight as 400 head on two acres for a day. I mean, that's pretty tight. That's pretty tight. An acre is a football field. Just for people trying to visualize what's an acre, it's roughly a football field.

So, you know, imagine 400 cows on two acres. I mean, that's pretty dense, all right? Yeah. But the beauty is that when you move them all the time like this, they get very docile. I mean, you know, they're routine, and you incentivize it because every day at 4 o'clock when you go out and call them, they're going to a new salad bar. If every day at 4 o'clock a certain call meant there's a bowl of ice cream for you, you'd get pretty used to that call as well. And is that what you do?

You call them? Yeah, we call them. We don't herd them. We call them. What's the call? Do you have a noise you make? Oh, get away! And so they hear that and they know it's a little dinner bell?

Yeah, it's like a dinner bell. Yeah. It's like a dinner bell. Yeah. And they just come right on. Wow. So then you set up this new, you put the stakes down, you set up this new area. The fence is totally portable. So you're essentially, I mean, envision a field like a ladder and the permanent, the edges of the field are the stringers of the ladder and the portable fences are the rungs. So the permanents are there all the time and we simply move the

rungs, you know, contract or expand the rungs based on how much grass there is, how many there are in the herd, you know, that sort of thing. So it's a very artistic, you know, there's a science, but there's also an art to it as we essentially give them one plate full a day. And you alternate animals in these areas. Yeah. So the cows go through first, then the egg mobiles come in after them. So after the cows are there, then you push the chicken house in there. You fence that in as well. No, that's not fenced. Those chickens can run anywhere they want to.

They just, they just hang around the egg mobile because that's where we're feeding water and nest boxes are. So you don't have to fence them. You don't have to fence them. They, they go out, you know, up to 200 yards and scavenge and scratch out cow patties. And when it starts getting dark, they come back in. And when it starts getting dark, they go back in. That's how we have it in our yard. We, we have, We leave the door open at night. And then at night, we shut the door. They know that chickens are – you're chicken? That's scared, right?

I mean, we use the word slang. You're chicken. You're scared. You're chicken. You're chicken. And so their instinct is to get somewhere secure for the night. They don't want to just sit out on the ground at night. somewhere secure for the night. They don't want to just sit out on the ground at night. So your coop or the egg mobile, that's a secure place and they naturally are drawn to that as dark starts

to go down. So for them, you don't have to worry about that. You just move this giant structure that you've created, which is very innovative. Is this your design, this structure? Yeah. See if you could pull up the egg mobile because because it's pretty interesting see if you could find the video of it it was in one of those uh what uh polyface that's what you call it polyface farm is one of those videos right um it's your design do you just figured out how to stack them in there in this sort of way well essentially it's essentially it's a it's a chicken house on wheels is what it is. And, uh, so, you know, where you, where you would normally make a chicken house, for example, yeah, there you go. Uh, where you normally make a chicken house, uh, stationary, this is simply

mounted on wheels on an axle or like a trailer. And you just hooked up with, to it with a tractor and, uh, the chickens are all inside and you can move it you know up the public road or to the far side of the field or whatever and there's the guard dog uh the guard dog's with them as well and the guard dog keeps coyotes away coyotes and hawks and um things that like drumsticks for dinner uh he keeps those away we lost a chicken we don't know what happened yeah i'm pretty sure it was a hawk yeah Something just scooped one up It just vanished No feathers, no nothing

Oh yeah, they do Wow, you got a lot of chickens, man Oh yeah, that's a lot of chickens That's a thousand chickens Now are those egg-laying chickens? Those are egg-layers And you have different chickens that are egg-laying chickens And different chickens that are meat chickens

That's right, it's like dairy and beef. Dairy cows grow, make a lot of milk. Beef cows grow bulkier. Same with chickens. Layers, they're genetically selected. Those breeds, they lay eggs, and they have a physique more like Kobe Bryant. And the meat chickens have a physique more like Emmett Smith. Okay, great.

If you're going to eat it, you want an Emmett Smith. If you want to lay an egg, you want a Kobe Bryant. Gotcha. Kobe Bryant, your egg layer. He's called Kobe Bryant, your egg layer. He's called Kobe Bryant an egg layer. So it's essentially just the breed of chicken itself. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. I mean, hogs, I mean, sheep, some sheep are known especially for their wool. Like the marinos, they're known for their wool. Others are known more for their meat. Pigs, some pigs are known for their fat. You know, they were called lard hogs. Back in the day, we ate lard, you know, and, and so they would get real fat. Other pigs are known for the length of their loin, others for their maternal instincts, you know, big, big litters. So yeah, all these breeds have different characteristics. Do you only have hens or do you have roosters as well? We have roosters as well. The eggs are not all fertile. We don't have enough roosters to

fertilize all of them, but we do have enough roosters so that, you know, kids can watch them crow, and we can—I've had a lot of people say that our transcendentalists are— that if we actually come back as a different being, they really want to come back as a rooster at polyphase. Why? Well, because they've got about 200 hens per rooster. It seems like you'd get outrun. They would just start running you. They would tell you what to do. Yeah, they can get hen-pecked.

Yeah, hen-pecked. That's the other term. Chickens being scared and hen-pecked. Those are both real. And hen-pecks do pack, man. Oh, yeah, they do. There's some wild pigs in San Jose. You see this?

And they, oh, wow, look at that. Yeah. Yeah, he's getting food right there. Yep. Yeah. See this? And they, oh, wow, look at that. Yeah. Yeah, he's getting food right there. Yep. I mean, they have a real problem now. And it's just started to make its way up there. A lot of people don't associate California with wild pigs. What I was getting at was, do you breed your own chickens?

Do you? We have just started. We've just started. We haven't in the past. We've always gotten them from a hatchery. But what we've seen, you'd find this fascinating, I'm sure, what we've seen is in my lifetime, and I'm not that old, but I have watched the genetic viability of animals, of domestic livestock drop because of the props that we, the crutches that we use, antibiotics, hot feed, you know,

candy bar, I call it candy bar diets, you know, and unnatural feeding regimens. And so we have really seen the strength, just the viability of these farm animals plummet. just the viability of these farm animals plummet. So our son, Daniel, when he was eight, started with rabbits. Now, these are meat rabbits, not pet rabbits, but they're meat rabbits. Some friends had a couple does and a buck, and they couldn't take them to a new apartment where they were moving. So they said, you know, would you like these rabbits?

Well, he was eight, you know, eight years old is about the time to start an entrepreneur business, you know? And so he said, I mean, so I started with chickens when I was 10, so I was two years late, but he started his rabbits when he was eight. And so he said, yeah, I'll tell you, I wanted to raise some rabbits. So he did that. And if you read any like, you know, rabbit rearing book, it'll say, never give them grass, you know, don't give them that because they'll get diarrhea and die. And of course, that's exactly what we found. But what he did, he did what's called line breeding, which is kind of a wild breeding. And it took him five years to work through a lot of mortality and culling. But in five years, the rabbit started really getting strong, vibrant, big litters, healthy. Now, 24 years later, they're almost bulletproof.

And what we've seen in the genetic selection process over that time of not using any crutches and just letting it be kind of a, you know, a Darwinian selection process has made us now want to do that, duplicate that with our other animals. And so we started last year with our chickens taking our oldest, what we call survivor genetics, the oldest hens that are still laying, mating them to the roosters. And what we want to do is just keep taking the oldest hens, mating them to the roosters. So we eventually create a survivor genetic. In other words, that's the chicken that knew to hide when the hawk came. That's the chicken that knew to get under shelter when the rain came. That's the chicken that didn't get flu, that didn't get bug, that didn't have a prolapse

the first egg she did. I mean, I call it survivor genetics. We're doing that now with our cows. We're selecting our own bulls and breeding from our own bulls. And we're very excited about what this kind of wild line breeding type of thing can do if you knock out all the crutches. The problem is that it puts you crossways of the animal welfare crowd because they can't abide the idea that if I have a sick animal, I'm just going to let it die. Oh, you know, I mean, they've been Bambi-ided and Thumper-ided to death to where every dog and cat has to have a monogrammed L.L. Bean cushion in an air-conditioned anteroom. And that's the only way to care for animals. And the problem is that we're not going to get genetic strength if we don't let nature call out the weaklings.

That's the problem. And so we wouldn't have the vibrant rabbits that Daniel has if we had started at the beginning, oh, let's prop these up with antibiotics so the weak ones can survive. If everybody walks into the room wearing crutches, you don't know who can stand on their own two feet. It's only when you start knocking crutches out that you find out who can stand. It own two feet. Right. It's only when you start knocking crutches out that you find out who can stand. It's that anthropomorphizing. Yes, absolutely. Of animals that we wouldn't do that with people, of course.

No, we wouldn't do it with people. But these are animals and this is the natural world and this is why animals survive. And if you don't do that, they won't survive. Then you will have the weak ones breed and they'll develop all sorts of huge issues, which could be argued essentially that that's happening with people, but people have a lot of other things to offer. Our innovation, our creativity, and our ability to communicate and our thinking are what makes us uniquely human.

The animals, it's simply their body, their life, their existence, and the way they interact with nature. When you tamper with that, when you tamper with that, you're essentially pretending you're smarter than nature itself, and that's ridiculous. We can show real clearly by what you've said today about factory farming, about the development of these diseases, that we're not smarter than nature. We don't. And that we, there's no one could know everything. And there's not one person that's smart enough to be able to see the whole big picture. We need a lot of other eyes on this, and we need a lot of other thoughts on this. And when you start applying the same sort of compassion and that, that we rightly do to human beings, you start applying them to animals, you actually wind up screwing the animals over. Yeah, and you create artificial

fragility. You know, Sir Albert Howard, who, of course, you know, developed the scientific aerobic composting process, which in his book is still kind of the icon of the whole sustainable agriculture community. It was written in 1943, an agricultural testament. He says in there that when you use artificial manures in the soil, and that's what he called chemical fertilizers, artificial manures, it grows artificial plants, which make artificial animals, which then make artificial people who can only stay alive using artificials. That was in 1943. Wow.

Wasn't that prescient? Yeah, that guy was on the ball. That was when it was just coming out. Yeah. I mean, how long had factory farming even been around then? 20 years? Yeah, it was. We were just, I mean, that was 1943.

We were just really beginning to start using chemical fertilizers at that point. Now, when they have the issue with large scale agriculture, when they chew up all the minerals in the ground and they have to add minerals when they go over the topsoil of American farmlands, I mean, there was a paper that was written about it, I can't remember the year, but it was a long time ago. I mean, there was a paper that was written about it. I can't remember the year, but it was a long time ago. I believe it was in the 1940s about the mineral deficiencies of topsoil. What do they do about that now? And does that same issue still happen in a farm like yours? Well, yes, absolutely. I mean, mineral deficiency is a major problem in nature.

Yes, absolutely. I mean, mineral deficiency is a major problem in nature. Fortunately, nature has a mechanism to remedy it. Amazingly, it's on site. It doesn't need a bunch of stuff brought in. And the way nature remedies it is with an active decomposition cycle. The way it works is when organic matter decomposes in the soil, it gives off, it exudes carbon dioxide. All right. When things rot, they give off carbon dioxide. And so that carbon dioxide, as it percolates up through the pores in the soil, you know, the aggregates in the soil, if you look at the soil in an electron microscope, it really looks like a marsh. You know, there's all these little, you know, cavities and aggregates and moisture and all these, you know, slogging, weird looking, you know, bugs and cow looking things and,

you know, predators and herbivores. And it's an entire, you know, there are more living beings in a double handful of healthy soil than there are people on the face of the earth. That's how alive it is whoa yeah that's crazy yeah so so when that when that car when that carbon dioxide eases up through the through the the aggregates in this in this kind of marshy soil, it encounters H2O, water, all right, in those aggregates. And when the CO2 hits H2O, it makes carbonic acid. Now, carbonic acid, you know, if we took, if we said this is a rock right here, and we want to find out how much zinc, cobalt, molybdenum, you know, aluminum, whatever is in this rock. We could treat it with lots of reagents. We could use sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, you know, we could use lots of different acids.

Guess which one is the most efficient acid to use, carbonic acid. So nature, you know, so creation has this wonderful ability if there is carbon decomposing in the soil and moisture, that creates a carbonic acid to break out the minerals that are in the parent rock material in the soil. If I went outside the studio here and picked up a rock and brought it in and said, is that rock, does it contain the same minerals? I mean, is it the same thing as it was 2,000 years ago? You'd say, yes. I mean, that's the rock. I mean, it's, you know, there's not a big hole through it. You know, yeah, that's the way it was. And so we have plenty of parent mineral in, you know, out here. The problem is we don't have an active decomposition cycle.

How do you destroy a decomposition cycle? You do it when you don't feed this, when you don't have a carbon, a carbon centric system. And everything about modern farming is trying to get rid of carbon. We've, this is one of the things that we're looking at. Maybe if you've read the book, uh, wheat belly, um, about, you know, gluten and, and, uh, uh, those sorts of things is that it used to be, uh, when our grandpappies were, um, planting wheat, wheat would grow, um, you know, six feet tall. It was real, real tall. So that the, the grain to stem ratio was whatever what you know the ratio well the taller the wheat the taller the the stalk the less weight it can hold out there you know it wants to fall over you know because you go the skyscraper gets taller and taller right

and so in genetic in genetic breeding and selection, what we've done in the last 50 years is selected shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter cultivars down to where it's a very short stem. And that ratio has fundamentally changed, which also affects the enzymes and the nutrient components of those seed heads. But we can combine it faster and we can grow a bigger head on a smaller plant. But guess what we also did? We also deprived the soil of the carbon that the straw and the stalk would produce from a given amount of grain. That deprived the soil of the carbon injection that was supposed to come when we took the grain head off.

And now we don't have that carbon decomposition cycle. Wow. And so the solution to that in the industrial way is just pour bags. Add minerals. Yeah, yeah. Add minerals. Mine minerals somewhere else and add them. But all that can be done in-house.

It can absolutely all be done in-house. The wheat issue is a big one with Americans today. Everyone wants to be gluten-free, and I'm guilty of it too. I stopped eating gluten recently, and I found that almost immediately, like I felt more, uh, I felt less bloated after a meal, if that's a good term, less sedated after a meal. I just, I didn't feel so tired. And, uh, what I started reading about it, I read that when wheat had been changed to, uh, to change the size of it, to make it more hearty. It also became more difficult to digest. Yes, absolutely.

Is it possible to get that old wheat back? Absolutely. There are people doing it right now. I mean, Washington State, the old red rife heritage varieties, absolutely. They're available. You can buy them. Yeah. So how do you get bread that's made out of that?

They're available. You can buy them. Yeah. So how do you get bread that's made out of that? Well, you can have your own flour mill if you want to buy it by the bag. That sounds like a pain in the ass. Well, you know, that's where modern times are really exciting because we now have techno-glitzy gadgets in our kitchens. When people ask me, you know, what's the most important thing a person can do to advance the integrity food movement? My first answer is get in your kitchen.

And I'm not talking about hoop skirts, hearth cooking, washboards, you know, barefoot pregnant in the kitchen. I'm talking about embracing technoglitzy gadgetry that we have today. The kitchens we have today are not grandma's kitchens. We've got two faucets with running water. One's hot, one's cold. We've got ovens. We've got refrigeration. We've got stainless steel.

We've got Cuisinarts. We've got blenders and cool little mills know, mills and flour mills and stuff. And so, you know, when we buy, we buy 25 pounds of wheat of, you know, flour at a time, and you can absolutely get it, you know, as bulk, and you can use this gadgetry and grind it up and, you know, bake your own bread in a computerized bread maker. Wow. Grandma never had it so well. It's never been easier to actually eat well than today, ever.

That's interesting. That's so true. Well, if you have the money, right? That's the big knock on organic food, you know, that most people don't have the money to go to Whole Foods or Erewhon. Let me address the money. The way to address the money is to eat whole foods, not processed foods. I'm sure you're familiar with the movie Food, Inc.

And, of course, you know, it's a powerful movie, very profound. But there's a real weakness in that movie where that, you know, that family that goes to Burger King and they buy that, you know, they buy a Whopper or whatever they get and they buy, it looks like a 200 ounce soft drink, but whatever it is, it's a big one, and French fries. And then they say they can't afford to buy produce, vegetables. The fact is that meal, I don't eat at Burger King, but anyway, they're all the same. That meal costs no more than two whole pounds of our polyface grass-fattened, grass-finished, world-class ground beef. And there's more nutrition in half a pound of my ground beef than there is in that entire meal, fast food meal.

So when somebody says they can't afford it, the first thing I do is I want to grab them and say, okay, let's go to your house. And here's what we're not going to find. We're not going to find any fast food boxes or fast food receipts. We're not going to find soda, alcohol, tobacco, coffee, widescreen TVs. We're not going to find $100 designer jeans with holes already in the knees. We're not going to find Netflix, People Magazine, name your thing. Lottery tickets, that's a big one. You show me the house that doesn't have any of those things. And then let's talk about price. Talk about what you actually can't afford. Talk about what you get. What are your actual priorities? Because my position is we choose even 95% of poor people still have most of those things. We choose what we're willing to buy. You can buy wheat by the bushel.

You can make $800 worth of bread from a $6 bushel of wheat. What it means is you have to participate in the food system. Our problem is not that it's not available or we can't get it or we don't know what to do. Our problem is that we want convenience. We don we can't get it or we don't know what to do. Our problem is that we want convenience. We don't want to have to think. We don't want to have to plan ahead. We don't have to want to plan menus. We want to just, you know, convenient spontaneity.

And you cannot have an integrity economic sector of anything, automobiles, food, clothes, entertainment. You cannot have an integrity economic sector of anything when you so profoundly abdicate personal participation in that economic sector. But it is more expensive when you go to a supermarket and you buy organic vegetables. Oh yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. But they're better. And some folks feel like they are better. Yeah. Are they better scientifically? Well, let me say this. I don't want to get, you know, crossways of every, well, I guess I might as well. I might as well get crossways of everything out there.

In my view, you know, we should just not eat from the supermarket. Don't eat from a supermarket? No. Where do you get your food? Oh, you get it from farmer's market. You get it from a community-supported agriculture, a food-buying club, a metropolitan food club. You could go to farms, buy bulk. I mean, the way to deal with the price is buy it unprocessed and buy volume, which means that you have to recreate your domestic larder. You know, we don't even use that word anymore, larder.

Who's ever heard that word? But that's where all the food was 80 years ago. If I came to LA and said, where's the food in LA? It's not in a warehouse. It would be in individual larders in houses. barters in houses. And so when you buy in bulk and you buy unprocessed and you put your sweat equity into preparing, processing, preserving, and packaging, then you can actually save money over the processed counterpart. That's incredible. In other words, you can get top of the line, local, the best stuff in the world

that's cheaper than the processed stuff in the supermarket. I went to the green markets in New York City, arguably the most expensive farmer's market in the country. I asked my hostess, I said, would you do something for me? Could you take me to the vendor with the most expensive potato in America? So she, oh, I know exactly who we need to go to. She went down the stalls there and there was a vendor there that had about 20 varieties of potatoes. They were beautiful.

He had them in little, little, you know, box cubbies, you know, in this beautiful wooden slanted display. There were red ones and yellow ones and green ones and blue ones and all this. So I looked through the boxes and I found the most expensive one. It was a little heirloom Peruvian blue fingerling potato for $2 a pound. That's expensive for a potato. But you know where most potatoes potatoes how most places were being sold in new york city four dollars a pound as potato chips we've got cuisinarts we've got slicers dicers and fry babies

you can get the most expensive potato in america and it's half the price of potato chips. But potato chips is not food. I mean, it is, but it's not. I mean, it's a snack, and people buy it for convenience. If you get a real honest-to-goodness potato and slice it yourself and fry it in lard in a fry baby, that is food. It is food. But what I'm saying is most people, when they get it, they get it as a snack, and they don't have the time.

When someone buys a bag of chips, they're not going to go to the store and get a potato and slice it. In this modern world that we live in, I'm saying. I know. In this modern world. So we should essentially go direct to farmers and go to farmer's markets whenever possible and you save a ton of money. Save a ton of money.

Mother Earth News, this issue actually has a um a big spreadsheet where they did exactly that they have a whole bunch of items that they bought you know at the supermarket at the farmer's market and and i guess csa's or something anyway it is profound the savings going direct to farmers uh can. It's amazing. And buying volume and taking the middleman out of it. That's the thing. Is it possible with your methods and the way that you're describing farming and what you've done with your farm, is it possible to feed this entire country that way? Oh, no question. Not only is it possible, it's actually the only regenerative way to do it. Because when you break apart the feed from the animal from the manureistic blessings, when you break them apart, the whole thing floats on a counterfeit. And a fragile house of cards that depends on clever pharmaceuticals staying one mutation ahead of the mutating bugs to function. is sort of a beautiful small business model for creating a very ethical farm and raising animals

in a very nice way but it's impractical when you're talking about feeding a nation of 300 million people but when but you're saying that not just the fact that you factor in when you farm your way, the lack of sort of invisible costs that you get with factory farming, the lack of all the other factors that you have to bring in, like chemicals and antibiotics and all these different things that are just unnecessary completely. But the actual volume of food. The actual volume of food. Absolutely. The actual volume of food is absolutely. The actual volume of food is more in symbiotic places. And our kind of farming with portable infrastructure allows you to use nooks and crannies that currently aren't being used. Let me give you an example. Let's take

pigs as an example. We run pigs in the woods, and they eat acorns and bugs and weeds and things like that through the woods. And they actually eat the bugs that would attack the trees in the woods. The trees are healthier. The fact is that we have millions and millions of acres of unused land. There's not one reason for a single confinement hog facility in the entire country. If we used our national forests, our Bureau of Land Management, you know, Pinon Pine in Colorado, if we used Mesquite in Texas, you know, Appalachian hardwoods in the mid-Atlantic and south, every place has millions of acres where these pigs could be run. And you simply vacate the houses. So the truth is we are not beginning to leverage. We're not beginning to leverage the resource base that we have. So what you're talking about is the resources that are

untouched. Yes. So the factory farm system that we have, the amount of food that they produce, in order to produce that same amount of food, we would have to use more land. We would have to use more areas that we're not using now. We would have to... Yeah, but it would be good land use. It's not harmful land use. I understand, but that land is most likely either owned by the state, national wildlife... Oh, that's a problem too. Well, yeah. And then the other problem would be, where would the profit be? Who would profit then? If you're talking about national forests and you're talking about a private company that grows agricultural, grows farm animals in these natural forests, who would be able to decide who gets to use their animals in this? Right. Well,

when Governor Tim Kaine came to visit our farm toward the end of his gubernatorial time in Virginia, he really got it. I mean, we went, did all this, saw all this, and he totally bought into it. He said, so, what can I do? What's the next step? I said, well, Governor, let's have a meeting next week at the Governor's Mansion and iron out a lease arrangement where Polyface can run pigs in the state forests and keep all the trees from dying. And, of course, he smiled. He knew cerebrally that I was exactly right, because the Appalachian hardwood forests are dying. And they're dying due to lack of disturbance,

lack of disturbance in their ecosystem. We don't have the buffalo, we don't have the fires anymore. So they're dying due to lack of disturbance. So we can absolutely bring those forests back to disturbance. So we can absolutely bring those forests back to vibrancy. Right now, they're just sterile. They're just sitting there. So they could be disturbed by these pigs. And so his understanding of ecology absolutely mandated that he get his head around this idea. But, of course, he grinned and laughed, and we both realized, I mean, can you imagine what the radical environmental groups would do if you said we're going to start leasing some of the state parks so people can grow pigs in them?

I mean, it would be, well, I mean, it's unspeakable. Well, let's just forget about their arguments against environmental groups or PETA or anybody who might have an argument against it. If you had a clean slate and if it was your job, you could design the whole agricultural system of this country to feed America based on your principles. Oh, easy. No question. But we would have to use a lot of the land that's currently state land or national forests or... Do you know that right now the U.S. has 700 registered dead zones, riparian dead zones? One is the size of New Jersey and the Gulf of Mexico. Those dead zones are collateral. They are now inhospitable to life. I mean, that's the definition of a dead zone. They were once productive areas, you know, fisheries and amphibians, you know, productive areas that are now inhospitable to life,

they are a direct result of overrunning our nest's ability to handle our mechanistic creativity. And so the fact is that in North Carolina, which leads the state in hog production, if you didn't have a hurricane every two years to flush all the manure lagoons out to the ocean, North Carolina would now be buried in hog manure. That's the truth. And so fortunately, fortunately, you know, we get a hurricane every couple of years to flush North Carolina like a big toilet so it doesn't, you know, choke on its own waste. Wow. So, so, you know,

so the idea of whose land are we using here? Let's talk to the displaced shrimp fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico and talk about displacement. Let's talk about land use. Are you with me? land use issue, our system actually would eliminate all of this dead zone, all of this inhospitable, the desertification, all the collateral damage. We would actually have far more productive land than we do today because we're toxifying a very small part and that toxic stream is killing a bunch of other land. Why don't we just be honest and say, let's use it all in a healing fashion and we won't have any dead zones and it'll all be progressively healing. That sounds like a better alternative to me. So the only way to have

these healthy environments, these healthy growing environments is to have sort of a symbiotic relationship with all the various different types of animals and the various different types of plants. Is it possible to have acres and acres of things like corn and wheat without animals roaming free and still have some sort of a healthy environment? I mean, can you grow a thousand acres of corn in a healthy way without having animals in that environment? Probably the short answer is no, but that doesn't mean you can't grow grain. I mean, there are now, in Australia, Colin Cease there, who has vented a term called pasture cropping, has developed infrastructure

and protocols for where you grow grain in perennial pasture without much tillage. So you don't till the blanket, you don't till the vegetative blanket of the soil. Instead, you use livestock as a pruner to prepare and even temporarily weaken the perennial grass, plant right into it the annuals, you know, barley, wheat, rye, whatever, and it grows, beats out the grass. The grass stays subordinated in the shadow so that when the grain dries down, you harvest the grain and you've already got a nice, you know, a regrowth of green material underneath without ever actually destroying the sod. And that's being, there are now 2000 farmers in Australia doing this. It's jumping now to the US. it's a real hot technology and it works. So, you know, there are a lot of pieces to this.

First of all, if you quit feeding herbivores grain, you tremendously reduce the amount of grain that has to be produced. Then you go to perennials. That's a very good point. That's a very, very good point. Then you go to a perennial. And at the top of the program, we talked about these principles of nature. One is animals move. Another is that nature likes perennials. Nature has very few annuals, actually. Nature thrives on perennials. So a productive regenerative food system should be concentrated on perennials, not annuals. So describe to people that don't know what the difference between those are.

Well, a perennial is a plant you don't have to plant every year. An annual is a plant you have to plant annually, okay, every year. So grains, squash plants, you know, your garden vegetables, those are annuals. Blackberries are perennials. You know, you plant them once, you know, your garden vegetables, those are annuals. Blackberries are perennials. You know, you plant them once, you know, trees are perennials. Vines, bushes, grasses, okay, those are all perennials. And so that is the basis of nature's ecology is perennials, not annuals. Realize that our ag policy in the United States is to subsidize not perennials, but annuals, six of them, wheat, corn, soybeans, cotton, sugar, and rice. All of those are annuals.

So our official ag incentivization is to incentivize the very thing that destroys soil. That's hilarious. It's also hilarious that we insist on feeding animals grains just to get them fatter. Right. And that fat being an unhealthy fat, I'm amazed every time I go to a nice restaurant and they try to offer me that Kobe beef stuff. Oh, yeah. I'm like, will you get away from me with that sick cow? That thing is sick. Oh, it's so, it's wonderfully marbled. No, yeah. I'm like, will you get away from me with that sick cow? That thing is sick.

Oh, it's so, it's wonderfully marbled. No, that thing's dying. Yeah. That thing's barely alive when you shoot it. Yeah, that's right. The liver's probably swollen up. So the point is that if we quit feeding herbivores grain, we would grow way less. Then if we take the omnivores, the pigs and the chickens, and integrate them as salvagers,

like, listen, if every kitchen had enough chickens to eat its kitchen scraps, I mean, you know, like get rid of the pet dog and put in two chickens, right? Okay. If every kitchen had enough chickens to eat the kitchen scraps, there would not be an egg industry in the U.S. Not one. Okay. This was the role of chickens. What we do instead is we send our kitchen waste down the disposal or out in the garbage. It goes to the landfill and the whole ecosystem is deprived of the of the biomass that's supposed to compost or digest and feed the next cycle of life the problem is it's really tough to keep two chickens in an apartment they don't take any more room than an aquarium than an aquarium or a gerbil two chickens yeah well they got to run the whole idea. They have to wander around and pack grass. They don't need a lot of room.

I mean, if you had them three feet by two feet, it would be fine for two chickens. Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But what about foraging and all that good stuff to keep them healthy? Yeah. Just build your box, your container, so that they can get to about 12 inches of compost underneath them.

You just throw your scraps in there, and then the compost feeds your little pot garden. I mean, whatever kind of pot garden you have. Container gardens. You mean containers. Containers, yeah. But I'm happy with pot gardens, too. Take that whichever way you want to do it. All right?

Anyway, that becomes your fertilizer for your house. And what you do then is you turn your house, instead of an ecological liability, your house becomes an integrated part of an ecosystem asset. of an ecosystem asset. Well, it seems that in that sense that giant cities like New York, where people are stacked on top of each other, they essentially are factory farming humans. Yeah, that's right. That's right. They are. But there are a lot of these cool ways now that we can do that.

Anyway, if you take the pig and the chicken and you use them as their salvage operation, then you cut even more grain. So you take off the herbivore grain, you take off the chicken grain and the pig grain, suddenly you don't have much grain use. And when you don't need very much grain, you don't have to plow very much. you don't have to plow very much, then you can go back to a perennially based system and you can go back to the historic rotations where several years of perennials built the fertility for the one or two years of annual extraction. Okay, now you're on to a regenerating and actual healing soil building system. So what you're prescribing or describing, in fact, is the way that our culture should have been engineered in the first place. But a lot of what we have here is sort of the momentum of the past that we have to deal with. the momentum of the past that we have to deal with, the momentum of this factory farm establishment that was set up that's been providing us with food for decades upon decades, almost a century now.

Yeah. And you have to understand in context, don't be too hard on the ancestors, because what happened was it got easier to grow grain and feed it. That came earlier than electric fence and scientific composting systems. So it was the electric fence that allowed us to suddenly free these animals from supposedly efficient confinement programs and grain feeding programs. It was the, I mean, George Washington at Mount Vernon, he always complained about the pigs. He was a very meticulous record keeper. And he always complained about the pigs because he could never get them all in at once.

You know, because he just ran through the woods and they had their babies and you know you kind of well it's hog killing time it's fall you know let's get what we can and they they'd get what they and they could never get them all so he never really knew you know for a meticulous record keeper this was a nightmare right you know he never could count all of his stock and um but but that's the way pigs were used. Pigs were just kind of, they were salvagers. They were kind of nook and cranny operators. They weren't fenced in.

No, they weren't fenced in because there was no fence that would keep them in. How in the world can you ever fence a pig in with a physical structure? I mean, this is before metal wire. The only fence they had were like ricks of, you've seen them around museums and stuff, little, you know, chestnut rail fences. Well, a pig would tear that apart in a hurry. So what they did, they farmed, they had an agriculture that was primarily exclusionary rather than inclusionary. that was primarily exclusionary rather than inclusionary. So instead of having, I mean, Thomas Jefferson wrote about this at Monticello in his farm book.

He had several slave boys that their job was to keep the livestock out of the gardens. So the idea was that the livestock basically, you know, ran free, maybe with a herder or something. Or, you know, there were some maybe, maybe with a herder or something, or, you know, there were some fields, but not that many. And then what you did is you protected your, you know, your, your garden, you protected your berries and your, you know, your really high value stuff. You protected that physically or with a fence, some sort of a barricade because you simply couldn't afford to fence all the animals and control them. So it became a lot easier to grow animals faster with grain than it did with controlled grazing because you couldn't control the grazing. So now the technology of electric fencing and composting has enabled us to bring the perennial pasture-based model

onto a par with the grain model. And the beauty of that is that the pasture-based non-tillage model is a soil-building engine as opposed to tillage, which is a soil-destroying engine. And so all of this has to be viewed in context. You have to appreciate, I tell people, don't crucify grandpa. He was trying to do what he did, but there's no excuse today for continuing grandpa's situation because we've got things that grandpa would have given his eye teeth to have today. Yeah, I think as we were saying before, we're on the momentum of this past that was set up that also probably couldn't possibly have anticipated

The amount of population growth that we have today That's very possible When you look at our future as a country and feeding us Do you have hope? Do you think that people are coming around? People are certainly more aware where their food comes from now than ever before Do you see changes on the horizon? I sure do

And I'm a pretty incorrigible optimist overall. I don't think, though, that the changes will be gentle. You have to understand, if what I've described in this program became normal, it would completely invert the power, position, prestige, and profit of the entire food and farming industry. That's a big ship to turn around. And they're not going to go gently into the night. And so that's why we're seeing the backlash of the SWAT teams coming in, raiding people's freezers, private food clubs. We're seeing an increasing backlash. The Food Safety Modernization Act, you know, proposed that, you know, you basically couldn't use compost to fertilize vegetables. We can't have animals and produce on the same farm.

You know, we're going to outlaw outdoor flocks of 3,000 chickens or more. I mean, there's a huge pushback from that orthodoxy. And generally, you know, if you study collapse or guns and germs or 1493 or whatever, what you find is that major societal change generally doesn't happen. People don't just wake up and say, I think I want a different society. It usually follows some major thing. And I mean, the transition from draft power to automobile was incredibly disturbing in America. And I think that if the industry – let me give you one more little story. I spoke last week.

I'm getting ready to go to the Netherlands and do a week of seminars in the Netherlands. week of seminars in the Netherlands. I spoke to one of their top ag journalists this week, did an interview by phone, and he said that the previous week he had just interviewed the CEO of Syngenta, which is the European counterpart of Armand Santo. And several years ago, they adopted a plan, a target that they would increase productivity in grains, the grains that they were working on, by 20% by 2020. 20% by 2020 has a nice ring to it. Well, there are several years into that plan, he said for the last 15 years, it's been totally flat. Nothing we can do, nothing we can invent, nothing we can do has been able to change grain production at all for the last 15 years.

What we're seeing is what Joel Arthur Barker said when he wrote the book Paradigms 40 years ago, introduced the word to the world. He said, one of the axioms of paradigms is that just when they appear to have achieved perfection, they're on the brink of collapse. And the industrial food system has promised disease-free, famine-free, you know, paradise. And now with GMOs, and there are a lot of people that are really pumped up on their hubris who have bought into this notion that we're going to go into some paradise nirvana, to this notion that we're going to go into some paradise nirvana only to find out, oops, GMOs are causing spontaneous abortions and infertility. Oops. Is that true? I mean,

where has that been established? Don Huber. I mean, have him on your show. Don Huber, he's a professor and emeritus from Purdue University. And he's showing the direct relationship between, or have Jeffrey Smith on, but the direct relationship between glyphosate, which is Roundup, which is the herbicide that's now doubled in use since GMOs came out. That was the number one thing. And there are absolutely, in the last year, see, we're in our 15th year with GMOs. Remember, it took 14 years to establish the DDT relationship with, you know, infertile frogs and eggs that wouldn't hatch. We're now 15 years. Last year, there were something like 74 studies around the world impugning not only the claims, but showing harmful side effects,

collateral damage of GMOs. The idea that GMOs are actually more productive is pretty much universally debunked now. They simply have not shown a productivity increase. And so what I'm getting at is that the industry has continued to peg the future on this thing and present this kind of, you know, argument, this face that all is well, man, we're getting ready to perfect everything. It's going to be, you know, it's going to be a new day in the morning, right? And suddenly we see all these studies. We see these direct sign causal links, collateral damage. We see, you know, one in four pigs right now in the industry, you know, is dying from a viral, uh, we see these things,

we see, you know, uh, uh, listeria, campylobacter, um, uh, salmonella, E. coli, all these new Latin squiggly words, you know, food pathogens, autism on the increase. My take is that we are just about ready for nature to say, you know, you've, you have bet, you have taken enough shortcuts. Now I'm going to bat. And, and, and it follows Barker's idea that all paradigms at the point of perfection are on the brink of collapse. When they're presented as perfect, that's when they're on the brink of collapse. I hope people are listening to you. I know people on the podcast are listening to you,

but I hope people out there in the world of agriculture are listening to you. I know there's a lot of blowback against you, but I hope people are taking into consideration all these things that you're saying because there's so much logic to your words and there's so much wisdom and so much research done that it's a very puzzling situation for someone like me who knows very little about it other than talking to you and reading and watching documentaries. It's a very strange time. watching documentaries it's it's a very strange time it is indeed and and that's why i encourage people to um you know to take their recreation entertainment budget of time and time and money and and start to uh participate in the food system go visit a couple of farmers you know

every single community is surrounded by really integrity farmers now. They're everywhere. They're everywhere. There is not a community in the country that is devoid of really high-quality integrity food. Many of them are wanting to farm full-time, you know, and they need like 10 more customers or 20 more customers to tip them over so they don't have to commute to town with their town job to support their farm addiction. I implore urban people, you know, go to one less movie, go to one less whatever, you know, opera, whatever. But invest in this integrity food idea and you will hear farmers say the same things I'm saying.

They'll use, you know, and you'll be able to see it with your eyes. You'll be able to taste, see, touch. You will sensually connect with your ecological umbilical and that's a good place to be i love the term integrity food too that's a there really is a great term yeah i love that you throw that around and i i think what you're offering uh as far as advice is fantastic encourage people to go to these farmers markets connect to these people that are growing food in this way. And I think people are most certainly more aware now

than ever of where their food is coming from. The term organic, I mean, never even heard that a couple of decades ago when it comes to food. It just didn't exist. Nobody talked about it. Nobody talked about GMOs. Nobody talked about anything. The 14 plus years that we have had GMOs have been this massive series of debates and denials. But I think people are more aware of it than ever before, and I think a lot of it is because of people like you. So thank you very much, and thanks for coming on here. It was a really interesting conversation. I really, really enjoyed it, and I really appreciate all of your knowledge and the fact that you express it with so much passion.

It was really fun. Thank you. It's been a privilege to be with you. Please. It's been an honor to be with you. Please. It's been an honor. Joel Salatin, please follow him on Twitter, ladies and gentlemen. He is the author of, give your books out. What are the names of your books? Well, there's nine of them right now.

But the ones that people need to know about would be The Folks This Ain't Normal, as well well as the sheer ecstasy of being a lunatic farmer. Perhaps my favorite is everything I want to do is illegal. Holy cows and hog heaven. You can farm, the entrepreneur's guide to start and succeed in your farming enterprise. The latest one is fields of farmers, mentoring,oring, Interning, Partnering, and Germinating Tomorrow's Farmers. So yeah, there's good stuff there. Beautiful. Joel Salatin, ladies and gentlemen, J-O-E-L-S-A-L-A-T-I-N on Twitter. Thank you very much, sir. Thanks also to our sponsors. Thanks to Lumosity.com. Go to Lumosity.com forward slash Joe. Click the start training button and get your learn on, folks. Thanks also to Stamps.com.

Go to Stamps.com, enter in the code word JRE, and get your $110 bonus offer, which includes a digital scale and up to $55 of free postage. Thanks also to Onnit.com. Go to O-N-N-I-T, use the code word ROGAN, and save 10% off any and all supplements. Thursday night, I will be at the Fillmore, the Jackie Gleason Theater, with Tony Hinchcliffe in Miami Beach. Miami Beach? Miami, somewhere in Miami.

Miami, Florida. I don't know exactly where it is. But JoeRogan.net. Go there. Find all the dates. And I'll see you guys soon. Much love.