RFK Jr. The Defender - August 01, 2022


Food and Farming Solutions with Joel Salatin


Episode Stats

Length

44 minutes

Words per Minute

157.55583

Word Count

7,048

Sentence Count

497

Misogynist Sentences

11

Hate Speech Sentences

6


Summary

Joel Salatin and his family own the Polyface Farm in Virginia s Shenandoah Valley, which has been the subject of over a dozen documentaries and numerous media reports. The Farm was the good guy in Michael Pollan s iconic film, "Omnivore's Dilemma," and the subsequent award-winning documentary, "Food Inc." Joel is the author of 15 books spanning ecological agriculture, how-to, and culture, and writes numerous magazine columns. He is editor of Stockman Grass Farmer, the world s premier pastured livestock trade magazine. He founded the Farm Host Group, which offers numerous tours and educational programs, and operates a formal farm apprenticeship program. Joel has a very optimistic view of life, and gives us some reason for hope and a time in which we are in a time where we are facing a food shortage. In this episode, Joel talks about the importance of resiliency in the agricultural system, and how it can help us survive in times of drought, pest problems, and other natural disasters. This episode was produced and edited by Robert Kiyosaki. Additional audio mixing and mastering was done by Matthew Boll. We do not own the rights to any of the music used in this episode. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts. We are listening to it on your favorite streaming platform. Thank you so much for all the support you've shown us, and we really appreciate it. We really appreciate the support we've gotten over the past few years. We look forward to hearing back from all of our listeners. Thank you for all of your support. - Robert F. Ford, Sr. and I'm looking forward to getting back to the rest of the podcasting world. Thanks, Thank you, Myself, and I'll see you in the next episode, next week, and so much more. XO, Thank You, Myles, - Rachel, ETC - ETC - Thank You - Alyssa, Sarah, R. M. & K. S. B. & G. E. & J. P. -- M. M., R. B., E.A. & D. E., S. A. D. & B. S., P. P., A. S, G. R. & A. B, E. R., J. B & S. & P. S etc.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, my guest today is Joel Saladin.
00:00:02.000 Joel and his family own the Polyface Farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, which has been the subject of over a dozen documentaries and numerous media reports.
00:00:14.000 The farm was the good guy in Michael Pollan's iconic film, Omnivore's Dilemma, and the subsequent award-winning documentary, Food, Inc.
00:00:24.000 He is the author of 15 books spanning ecological agriculture, How to and culture.
00:00:31.000 He writes numerous magazine columns and is editor of Stockman Grass Farmer, the world's premier pastured livestock trade magazine.
00:00:41.000 Polyface Farm serves more than 8,000 families and ships nationwide to clients who want pastured non-GMO meat and poultry, beef, pork, chicken, turkey, rabbit, and lamb.
00:00:54.000 The Farm Host Gatherings offers numerous tours and educational venues and operates a formal farm apprenticeship program.
00:01:03.000 I'm really happy to have you here, Joel.
00:01:05.000 Thank you for joining us.
00:01:07.000 Oh, thank you, Robert F. I just can't imagine anybody I'd rather talk to right now than you.
00:01:13.000 You know, a lot of the people I have on here tend to depress my listeners, but you have a very, very kind of an optimistic view of life.
00:01:22.000 I'd say an optimistic approach to life.
00:01:24.000 So give us some reason for hope and a time.
00:01:27.000 You know, President Biden had, I think, really shocked a lot of the country by saying that we were likely to face food shortages.
00:01:36.000 Because of the Russian embargo of the Ukraine.
00:01:41.000 So I think people are starting to think more seriously about their food and, you know, tell us what your reaction is.
00:01:48.000 Well, my reaction is that I'm very excited that for the first time in my life, and I'm 65, and so I've been on this podium, if you will, for a long, long time, and have been accused of being a food snob, an elitist.
00:02:04.000 I've had commissioners of agriculture say, if we farm like Salatin, we just have to decide which half of the world to die because everybody would starve and all this.
00:02:17.000 And what's fascinating to me is for the first time in my life, we've got this national conversation happening where we're actually talking about resiliency and not efficiency.
00:02:27.000 And look, I want to be as efficient as anybody is as anybody.
00:02:31.000 But if first you don't have resiliency, you don't have anything to be efficient about if you don't first have resiliency.
00:02:38.000 And so here we are on our farm.
00:02:41.000 Let me just clarify this, because resiliency is a term of art in farming that some of our listeners might not know about.
00:02:50.000 That is the capacity to produce food, even...
00:02:57.000 Under stressful circumstances like wars, droughts, famines, etc.
00:03:02.000 Right, right.
00:03:03.000 Any kind of shocking, shocking occurrence.
00:03:08.000 Yeah, so think of resiliency as forgiveness in the system, if you will.
00:03:13.000 Obviously, you're well aware of resiliency in immune systems.
00:03:17.000 You know, we want to build resilient immune systems.
00:03:19.000 Anyway, so here we are.
00:03:20.000 know, we're watching these media reports about ammonium fertilizer going up 400% shortages and things like this.
00:03:28.000 And the fact of the matter is our farm doesn't buy any chemical fertilizer.
00:03:32.000 We don't buy any of that stuff because we are running on biology and biology trumps the chemicals every day.
00:03:41.000 And so the earthworms don't need chemical fertilizer.
00:03:45.000 They don't need petroleum.
00:03:47.000 They need solar energy converted by chlorophyll and photosynthesis into sugars that the soil biology uses.
00:03:55.000 And so there's this whole community.
00:03:57.000 There's this community of beings.
00:03:59.000 You know, the actinomycetes and mycelium, they have all sorts of interesting names.
00:04:03.000 And it's in the soil, you know, and there's this entire trade of commerce going on in the soil as these things are being traded around.
00:04:11.000 The very idea that in order to have soil fertility, you need to import things from 2,000 miles away that are mined, that just doesn't make any sense.
00:04:24.000 Farmers like us have proven that it doesn't make any sense.
00:04:28.000 We're very excited that these huge increases we're seeing.
00:04:32.000 Another one is in the big processing plants.
00:04:34.000 The big processing plants with COVID, they've been decimated with Quarantine and all sorts of, you know, protocol restrictions.
00:04:41.000 And those of us that use very small local abattoirs, that's a nice way to say a slaughterhouse, you know, a butcher shop, when you use a very small one, you don't have, you know, 5,000 people crowded under one roof with no sunlight and on a dark, damp situation.
00:04:59.000 And so even in the processing of We're seeing a resilience from regionally based, smaller scale kind of operations.
00:05:09.000 And so the shortages that we're seeing are primarily all at large scale, at big scale, and big scale in today's vulnerabilities, in today's new fragilities.
00:05:23.000 Scale, which has always been touted as being the answer to everything, is now being seen as a liability, not an asset.
00:05:31.000 And so those of us that are running speedboats instead of aircraft carriers, we can navigate the shoals and the disturbing waters that we're in right now globally.
00:05:41.000 We can navigate those much more efficiently.
00:05:45.000 The other day, a lady came into our farm store here, and we've always been a higher price than in the store because all of our costs are internalized rather than externalized.
00:05:55.000 And so a lady was in and she was shocked.
00:05:57.000 She looked at the meat counter, said, wow, your sirloin steaks are $9 a pound at Costco.
00:06:02.000 They're $16 a pound.
00:06:04.000 I don't go to Costco, so I didn't know what the prices were at Costco.
00:06:08.000 And it just floored me.
00:06:09.000 This was the first time in my life that our prices have been substantially lower than what was in the supermarket.
00:06:15.000 And the fact is, we do buy some diesel and we're seeing some price increases, but we're not seeing anything like the price increases that the great big commercial, orthodox, conventional, industrial companies Folks are seeing.
00:06:30.000 And so, for the first time in my life, I think that the biological view, the ecological authenticity, is actually going to show up at the real-time price tag and not have to be touted as an altruistic, well, we're not giving anybody diarrhea, we're not polluting any streams, and we've always thrown those things into it.
00:06:51.000 Maybe we don't have to now.
00:06:52.000 It's just going to be real-time competitiveness.
00:06:55.000 Because of all these inputs, these chemical inputs, the chemical herbicides, the pesticides, the fertilizers that, you know, are now the baseline of American agriculture, almost all of them are petroleum-based.
00:07:11.000 Yes, all of them.
00:07:12.000 The herbicides, the pesticides, all of them are petroleum-based.
00:07:15.000 Ammonium nitrate is petroleum-based.
00:07:17.000 And yet, we know that through very managed, intensive composting, a true carbon economy, where we integrate biomass as our key fertility program, Those kinds of things allow us to be in situ or localize our whole input chain of custody, and it's really remarkable.
00:07:41.000 The Rodale Institute, there's a guy in Australia named Colin Seiss who invented a system called pasture cropping, where it's a no-till, no chemical, no fertilizer.
00:07:51.000 He grows grain.
00:07:52.000 He's got 2,000 farmers in Australia running this.
00:07:55.000 It's now jumped to here.
00:07:57.000 Rodale in Emmaus, Pennsylvania is promoting something very similar.
00:08:02.000 The guy in Australia uses livestock.
00:08:04.000 The Rodale uses crimper shredders.
00:08:06.000 They're not identical.
00:08:07.000 But the whole thing is essentially using on location, strategically grown and managed carbon with a no-till, no-fertilizer system to actually feed the soil biology so you don't have to use any chemicals.
00:08:23.000 All of these systems, all these protocols, have struggled and struggled and struggled against cheap petroleum, cheap chemicals, and been I laughed at, poo-pooed by the land-grant colleges.
00:08:35.000 And suddenly now, I just got an email today from a big commercial farmer in Kansas.
00:08:40.000 He says, we can't do this anymore.
00:08:42.000 Can you tell us how to do this without all these inputs?
00:08:45.000 And so I have never been more excited about the possibilities of actually moving, maybe even globally, but certainly in the U.S., moving us to a new appreciation of soil biology, soil development, and And where we love earthworms more than we do chemicals.
00:09:04.000 The fact is there's a huge amount of inertia in the system that will prevent all those people who are west of the Appalachian and east of the Rocky Mountains, all those miles and miles of corn.
00:09:18.000 I mean, how do they ever convert?
00:09:21.000 Do any of them ever convert?
00:09:23.000 Can they convert?
00:09:25.000 Yeah, some certainly do convert.
00:09:28.000 And can they convert?
00:09:29.000 Absolutely, they can convert.
00:09:31.000 But normally, it takes major business, economic, cultural upheaval for conversion.
00:09:37.000 You know that.
00:09:38.000 People don't make changes until they get hit in the head.
00:09:44.000 And so the same thing will be true here.
00:09:47.000 And of course, what's really one of the biggest cultural problems with this is that the average farmer is now 60 years old and 60-year-olds tend to not like to make changes as much as 20-year-olds.
00:10:01.000 And so we have that militating against us at the very time when we need...
00:10:07.000 Creativity, innovation, and the ability, enough emotional and mental energy to pivot.
00:10:14.000 The lion's share of our farmland is owned and operated by people that are older and don't have the capacity, the bandwidth, To make those kind of pivots like you would when you're, you know, 28, 29, and 30.
00:10:29.000 And so, you know, that's one of our biggest issues.
00:10:32.000 So, you know, they will ask for relief, they will ask for government payments, they will ask for all sorts of things.
00:10:37.000 But I can tell you that unless they're in complete financial upside down, people are making this transition.
00:10:45.000 You can move to an ecological system, whether it's going to grass, which is what we advocate, going to a pasture-based system.
00:10:55.000 We don't need feedlots.
00:10:57.000 Ruminants aren't supposed to eat grain.
00:10:59.000 They're four-legged sauerkraut vats.
00:11:01.000 They're supposed to eat biomass and ferment it in their fermentation tanks.
00:11:06.000 And so we don't feed any grain to our animals.
00:11:09.000 So when you see these, oh, we're not going to have any wheat.
00:11:12.000 We're going to run out of grain and all this stuff.
00:11:13.000 We say, well, we don't use very much.
00:11:16.000 And when it comes to omnivores like poultry and pork, which are omnivores and do need grain, those, if we didn't feed grain to cows and dairy cows and all that, we would have plenty left over for the omnivores.
00:11:30.000 And as far as chickens go, if one out of three households in America had enough chickens to eat their kitchen scraps, there would not be any egg industry in the entire country.
00:11:42.000 You know, we, a city, a village in Belgium, in Belgium, over in Europe, Pat Foreman talked about this in her wonderful book, City Chicks.
00:11:51.000 It's a clever title, City Chicks.
00:11:53.000 It's about backyard chickens, you know, in the city.
00:11:55.000 And this town in Belgium offered their families, they said, if anybody wants three chickens, we'll buy you chickens and you can have them for your, you know, to take care of your kitchen scraps, your food scraps.
00:12:07.000 And 2,000 families put up their hands and said, yeah, we'll take those.
00:12:11.000 So they bought 6,000 chickens, dispersed them, three apiece to 2,000 households.
00:12:16.000 And in one month, their landfill Their landfill tonnage dropped by 100 tons in one month just because of the chickens eating all the food scraps that didn't go into the landfill.
00:12:28.000 I mean, what we have right now, Robert, is a segregated food system.
00:12:33.000 It's extremely segregated.
00:12:35.000 We get the fertilizer over.
00:12:37.000 We grow the grain over here.
00:12:39.000 We grow the cows over here.
00:12:40.000 We do the chickens over here.
00:12:42.000 We process them over here.
00:12:43.000 We sell them over here.
00:12:44.000 I mean, the average morsel of food in America travels 1,500 miles.
00:12:49.000 The average morsel of food on your plate has seen more of America than the farmer that grows it.
00:12:54.000 And what we need is an integrated, not a segregated system.
00:12:59.000 And I know these are powerful words, but words need to be powerful to evoke understanding.
00:13:06.000 And so what we want is an integrated system so that we have proximity to these different cycles.
00:13:16.000 There's no reason to...
00:13:18.000 Right now, 40% of all human edible food does not get eaten on the planet by humans.
00:13:27.000 That's the first time that's ever happened in human history.
00:13:29.000 We throw away more food today than we've ever thrown away in human history.
00:13:33.000 Why?
00:13:34.000 Because sell-by dates run out.
00:13:36.000 Because somebody hits up a box with a forklift in a warehouse.
00:13:40.000 Somebody didn't watch the temperature on the temp control and check the box.
00:13:44.000 And so the HACCP plan says you got to throw it out.
00:13:46.000 The amount of wastage in a segregated, bifurcated food system staggers the imagination.
00:13:55.000 And so When we move to a more regional, I could use the word local, but let's just think regional.
00:14:03.000 When we move to a more regional focused system, then those chains of custody shorten and the fragility shortens and you actually build way more resiliency and less dependency that is then stymied by far off events and far off things.
00:14:23.000 I mean, another force of inertia are the federal subsidies.
00:14:30.000 And then if people do your kind of farming, are they still reliant on federal payments?
00:14:38.000 Yeah, well, I don't agree with any subsidies at all.
00:14:41.000 I would like to see the whole program abolished.
00:14:45.000 You know, when people say free markets have gotten us where we are, no.
00:14:48.000 We We haven't had free markets for a long time.
00:14:51.000 Abraham Lincoln started the USDA. I call it the USDA. So we've had government meddling in agriculture for a long, long time.
00:15:00.000 So don't talk to me about free markets.
00:15:03.000 We haven't even been there for 150 years.
00:15:06.000 And so, yes, there is a whole, just like all, you know, whatever, bureaucratic, federalized systems, there is an entire mega panoply of programs and things to maintain the status quo and make sure nobody changes. there is an entire mega panoply of programs and things Because, yeah, you're exactly right.
00:15:28.000 You're pointing up, you know, when people ask me, well, what you say makes sense, but how in the world, why don't people do this?
00:15:35.000 It makes so much sense.
00:15:36.000 And it's because you hit the nail on the head.
00:15:40.000 If we actually went to an authentic, ecological, resilient approach, it would completely invert the power, prestige, profits of the entire food system.
00:15:58.000 And that's a great big ship to turn around.
00:16:00.000 And there's a lot of things that are inherent in the system to make sure that that can't turn around.
00:16:06.000 The system just is not sustainable, even from a soil standpoint.
00:16:14.000 We're spending capital every year.
00:16:20.000 We're going into capital every single year in terms of spending our soil reserves.
00:16:26.000 Yes, our soil and our water.
00:16:28.000 Our aquifers, the big Ogallala aquifer, is dropping every year.
00:16:32.000 We have subsidence.
00:16:34.000 That's part of the problem that New Orleans has.
00:16:37.000 And so what we have right now is a We're on a trajectory.
00:16:42.000 You know, there's an old Chinese saying that if you keep going the way you're going, you're going to end up where you're headed.
00:16:47.000 And right now, every bushel of corn costs us a bushel and a half of soil.
00:16:53.000 We have a dead zone the size of Rhode Island and the Gulf of Mexico.
00:16:56.000 And certainly you're very aware of water riparian things.
00:17:00.000 And so, Robert, we have a culture, we have a country right now, as clever as we are, you know, we've got javelin missiles and stingers and, you know, we're hearing a lot about our capabilities, but we don't have the capability as a culture to put on our national balance sheet The liabilities that we're creating.
00:17:21.000 You know, Wendell Berry talks a lot about this, that what's wrong with us creates more gross domestic product than what's right with us.
00:17:28.000 I mean, if I go out here and I pollute the river next to me, the cost of cleanup doesn't come off of national GDP. It's a positive GDP because we had to hire somebody.
00:17:38.000 We had to burn fuel to get there, buy some trucks and equipment and things to go and clean it up.
00:17:44.000 We lose our teenagers.
00:17:46.000 We lose our kids.
00:17:46.000 We have to build a new juvenile detention center.
00:17:49.000 So guess what?
00:17:50.000 A juvenile detention center should be a negative gross domestic product.
00:17:54.000 But no, it's positive because we have to buy concrete, steel, hire employees.
00:17:58.000 And so if a culture cannot capture the actual negative liabilities of Of its system, then it's going to lie to itself every day.
00:18:11.000 And that's exactly what we do.
00:18:13.000 We create business plans.
00:18:15.000 When's the last time you ever heard of an entrepreneur going into a bank or with a business plan for a business loan?
00:18:21.000 And the banker says, well, Marianne, this is a wonderful business plan.
00:18:25.000 In fact, I think you're going to be a millionaire.
00:18:27.000 I wouldn't mind being your partner.
00:18:28.000 But before I loan you the money, I want to know what's this business going to do to the earthworms in our community?
00:18:38.000 Nobody asks that, right?
00:18:41.000 And yet, does anybody listening to our voice today think that earthworms are less important than Wall Street?
00:18:49.000 At the end of the day, we all know earthworms are more important than Wall Street, and yet they don't even rate.
00:18:55.000 But fortunately, the IRS hasn't figured out how to tax them yet, so on our farm, We have decaquintupled the number of earthworms in the half century we've been here.
00:19:05.000 I mean, they're all over.
00:19:06.000 We've got earthworm castings.
00:19:07.000 You can turn your ankle on our earthworm castings.
00:19:09.000 And the IRS doesn't tax them.
00:19:11.000 So that's true wealth.
00:19:13.000 That's real true wealth.
00:19:14.000 And we're glad that the IRS hasn't discovered it yet.
00:19:20.000 I had a friend who you may have run across, Bill Nyman.
00:19:24.000 Yes.
00:19:25.000 We're at Nyman Ranch for a long time, which was doing the same kind of thing that you did, but he ran into a lot of obstacles.
00:19:33.000 He was making really good food, and it was a very, very idealistic system with a lot of independent farmers who were being supported and given marketplaces across the country.
00:19:45.000 What are you doing different than them?
00:19:47.000 Doing different than Bill Nyman or doing different than the conventional?
00:19:51.000 Because you do the same kind of thing yourself, but you live from one form, right?
00:19:56.000 Yeah, so we're certainly not exactly like Nyman Ranch, but I know Bill and Nicolette, friends of mine, we've done things together.
00:20:04.000 Nicolette, who's Bill Nyman's wife.
00:20:07.000 Yes.
00:20:08.000 I was an attorney who worked for me for many years, suing all the industrial hog facilities.
00:20:15.000 We were suing Wendell Murphy and the Smithfield Foods and Tyson and all the big industrial meat production factories.
00:20:26.000 I knew you would know who Nicolette was.
00:20:28.000 Thank you for bringing everybody up to speed.
00:20:31.000 I call them a true power duo.
00:20:33.000 So what we do on our farm is everything is on pastures.
00:20:38.000 So this grass-finished beef, we move the cows every day to a fresh spot.
00:20:43.000 So the whole idea is to mimic nature's template.
00:20:47.000 Nature doesn't put chickens in confinement houses.
00:20:49.000 They don't put pigs on slatted floors over slurry pits.
00:20:53.000 Nature doesn't put cows in grain feedlots.
00:20:57.000 And so we're looking fundamentally at what is this natural template.
00:21:02.000 People have to understand that 500 years ago, North America produced more nutrition, more food than we do today, even with chemical fertilizer, John Deere tractors and agriculture subsidies.
00:21:14.000 Now, it wasn't all eaten by humans.
00:21:16.000 You know, there were 2 million wolves that needed 20 pounds of meat a day.
00:21:20.000 There were, you know, 100 million bison.
00:21:22.000 There were 200 million beavers that ate more.
00:21:26.000 They're herbivores.
00:21:27.000 Beavers are.
00:21:28.000 They don't eat meat.
00:21:29.000 And so these herbivores actually, I mean, these beavers 500 years ago actually ate more vegetables, more vegetable matter than all the humans in North America today.
00:21:39.000 So, you know, Audubon, Audubon sat under a tree in 1820, recorded in his diary, he said, I couldn't see the sun for three days because of the passenger pigeons that flew over.
00:21:50.000 That was before confinement chicken houses.
00:21:53.000 Nobody was hauling grain to feed flocks of birds that blocked out the sun for three days.
00:21:57.000 The ecological abundance with the choreography, the choreography of symbiotic, multi-species, complex relationships is just beyond imagination almost for us to think about in our bifurcated, segregated commercial industrial complex relationships is just beyond imagination almost for us to think
00:22:16.000 And all of that manure and urine and skeletons and bodies and feathers, that was because it was dispersed and it was moved across the land, it was a blessing to the land, as opposed to today, all of that that is concentrated at a processing plant.
00:22:34.000 Concentrated at a production, concentrated animal feeding operation.
00:22:38.000 Instead of being a blessing, it becomes a curse on the land because it is way too much for our ecological womb to metabolize in that small, that tiny a space.
00:22:49.000 So nature has these wonderful symbiotic systems in place that we as commercial farmers, if we tap into them, the productivity is just amazing.
00:23:00.000 Unbelievable.
00:23:01.000 On our farm, for example, we're getting five times the production per acre of our county average.
00:23:07.000 Our county average averages 80 cow days per acre.
00:23:10.000 A cow day is what one cow will eat on a day.
00:23:13.000 So in our county, the average...
00:23:15.000 Acre will support 80 cows for one day a year or one cow for 80 days a year.
00:23:20.000 On our farm, we're averaging 400 cow days, and we haven't planted a seed or bought a bag of chemical fertilizer in 60 years.
00:23:28.000 And it was a gullied rock pile when we came in 1960.
00:23:31.000 It could only support 10 cows.
00:23:33.000 Today, it supports 100 cows.
00:23:35.000 I mean, I'm not bragging here.
00:23:37.000 I'm simply, I'm giving humble, humble, A humble recognition to infinitely beautiful creators' design that it's our responsibility to duplicate on a commercial scale.
00:23:50.000 So, for example, in nature, what sanitizes behind herbivores?
00:23:55.000 You know, the wildebeest on the Serengeti, the Cape Buffalo in Botswana.
00:24:00.000 The American bison on the American plain.
00:24:03.000 It was birds.
00:24:04.000 Birds followed them.
00:24:05.000 It was prairie chickens, turkeys.
00:24:07.000 It's the egret on the rhinoceros' nose.
00:24:09.000 It's these birds.
00:24:11.000 So we follow the cows with egg mobiles that are portable chicken houses.
00:24:15.000 The laying hens scatter out.
00:24:18.000 They peck through the fly larva in the cow patties, scratch the cow patties into the soil surface to disperse it and cover a lot more ground and act as a sanitizer.
00:24:27.000 So we don't use grubicides and parasiticides and all those things that taint the meat.
00:24:33.000 Instead, we use the birds, but we didn't invent it.
00:24:37.000 Nature invented it.
00:24:38.000 We're just mimicking what we see in nature.
00:24:41.000 We do large-scale composting.
00:24:44.000 So in the winter, when we're feeding hay, we feed on a, we call it a carbonaceous diaper.
00:24:49.000 We use wood chips.
00:24:50.000 So if all the trees being burned up because they're dying, because they got disease and stuff, if those were chipped and used as livestock bedding, for example, as a carbonaceous diaper, when the soil is dormant in the wintertime, we let this build up It builds up four feet deep.
00:25:08.000 We put corn in it.
00:25:09.000 The corn ferments because the cows tromp out the oxygen.
00:25:12.000 And then when the cows come out, when the grass begins to grow in the spring, we put pigs in there.
00:25:17.000 Pigs then seek the fermented corn.
00:25:19.000 That pays their salary.
00:25:20.000 And they turn it like a big egg beater, inject oxygen, and all of that carbonaceous diaper four feet deep becomes a big compost pile.
00:25:29.000 Then when the pigs are done, we spread it on the fields.
00:25:32.000 And so instead of using big compost turners and petroleum and equipment to do all that, we use pigs to do the turning.
00:25:39.000 And the beauty of the pigs doing the turning is it fully honors the pigness of the pig.
00:25:44.000 We're not asking the pig to do something the pig doesn't want to do.
00:25:47.000 They love to do this.
00:25:49.000 And we think having an ethical framework in which the pig can express its pigness is the ultimate ethical framework on which we build a culture that respects the Robertness of Robert and the Joelness of Joel and the Maryness of Mary.
00:26:04.000 If we don't respect the pigness of the pig, the least of these, how can we expect to respect the greater of these?
00:26:12.000 And as a result, what happens is, as a culture, We view pigs as just inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated, however cleverly hubris can imagine to manipulate them.
00:26:23.000 And I would suggest that that mechanistic view toward nature eventually comes down to a mechanistic view of control among the citizenry.
00:26:34.000 So it is respecting the pigness of the pig that creates a moral, ethical framework to respect you and I as humans, as people in the systems.
00:26:45.000 And so as we violate the pigness of the pig, the chickenness of the tomato-ness of the tomato, for that matter, as we violate those things with assaults of disrespect and chemicals and violence against them, it's no wonder that we soon begin to assault our own citizenry with tyranny and crazy protocols.
00:27:04.000 Yeah, it's interesting you say that.
00:27:06.000 I just did a blurb for a book for Vandana Chiba, who's one of my great heroes.
00:27:12.000 Yes, yes.
00:27:13.000 She's one of the great...
00:27:15.000 Oh, yes.
00:27:15.000 She's a beacon of light against GMO champions, eloquent champions against GMO crops and chemical agriculture, and one of her persistent themes...
00:27:27.000 Is the relationship between chemical agriculture and industrial agriculture and autocratic political systems, which ultimately commoditize humanity, commoditize landscapes, commoditize wildlife and domestic animals as well.
00:27:43.000 Yes.
00:27:44.000 Well, one of the beauties of the approach that I'm bringing to the discussion here and that we bring, one of the beauties of this approach is that it is fundamentally personalized.
00:27:55.000 It's something that we can do.
00:27:57.000 We can do compost.
00:27:58.000 We can't make 10-10-10 chemical fertilizer.
00:28:01.000 We can't make ammonium nitrate.
00:28:03.000 Just like we can't make Impossible Burgers and Beyond Beef, and we can't do bioengineered food, but we can grow a garden.
00:28:11.000 We can grow real tomatoes.
00:28:13.000 We can have a milk cow and milker in the backyard, and all she needs is sunlight and grass, and we have milk.
00:28:20.000 So this notion of industrial, engineered, whatever you want to call a Star Trek food system, ultimately is the most disempowering.
00:28:31.000 It's the most disempowering system because it makes it makes all of us dependent on techno glitzy, capital intensive, centralized systems as opposed to decentralized systems.
00:28:46.000 democratized, egalitarian, broad-based systems that spread the knowledge, the wherewithal, the ability, the capital, spreads it out across the landscape so that we can all participate in it as participants.
00:29:01.000 So I'm curious about one small footnote, which is I've had chickens my whole life, and I'm wondering how you safeguard your flocks against predators, not just like hawks and eagles and owls and foxes and raccoons, but also rats.
00:29:18.000 Oh yeah, rats.
00:29:20.000 Rats when they're tiny, when they're little chicks.
00:29:22.000 In our history, trust me, the number one predator in our whole history of life is rats.
00:29:29.000 And so several things.
00:29:31.000 One is we are big believers in a concrete floor in a chick brooder.
00:29:36.000 So rats can't get in it.
00:29:37.000 You know, a dirt floor, they can always somehow figure out how to get in.
00:29:41.000 We do always enjoy some feral cats.
00:29:44.000 When feral cats run around, we keep them.
00:29:46.000 You know, we like them.
00:29:47.000 And the other thing is to make sure that all of your, around your chick brooder and your building stuff is real clean.
00:29:54.000 You want it mowed clean.
00:29:55.000 You don't want like piles of Wood and you want to have it kind of clean around so rats don't have a good place to lounge.
00:30:03.000 Now, all that being said, we use guard geese.
00:30:05.000 We have guard dogs.
00:30:07.000 Guard geese are amazing.
00:30:09.000 I've watched geese chase off hawks.
00:30:11.000 It's amazing.
00:30:12.000 They're awake all the time.
00:30:14.000 I actually recommend people to, if you have a small flock, to actually have a portable shelter and just keep them secure all the time in a portable shelter.
00:30:24.000 Our broiler chickens, we raise tens of thousands of broiler chickens on pasture.
00:30:29.000 In little 10 foot by 12 foot by 2 foot tall, floorless little shelters that we move every day across the field.
00:30:37.000 One person with our little dolly can move 4,500 chickens in 60 minutes without starting an engine and no petroleum.
00:30:44.000 And in 60 years, we've only had one hawk take one of those chickens because they're completely enclosed.
00:30:54.000 So they're protected from weather.
00:30:55.000 They're protected from predators.
00:30:56.000 And the final thing I'll say about predators is that we do a lot of things on our farm to encourage wildlife zones.
00:31:04.000 So we fence out riparian and forestal areas and make literally wildlife runs through the farm So that there are healthy amounts of moles and voles and chipmunks and squirrels to feed the carnivorous predators.
00:31:19.000 A lot of times a predator issue is because there's an imbalance.
00:31:23.000 And in suburbia, in suburban America, there's more imbalance than you can imagine.
00:31:29.000 So by having these actual wildlife corridors, it actually stimulates...
00:31:35.000 You know, a healthy balance.
00:31:37.000 And so we don't just try to annihilate predators.
00:31:40.000 If we have one that is not satisfied with the plate that we've offered them, then that one gets taken out.
00:31:49.000 We don't try to do a blanket annihilation.
00:31:52.000 How about, let me ask you one other question on the same line.
00:31:55.000 Have you ever had problems with the weasels?
00:31:57.000 Because the weasels...
00:31:59.000 Yeah.
00:31:59.000 To me, the most destructive one, because they get in the chicken house and kill every single chicken in the house in one night.
00:32:07.000 Yeah, they do.
00:32:08.000 And they're actually, you can tell it's a weasel because there's almost, all they have are two marks in the neck where they've actually just sucked the blood.
00:32:17.000 They're bloodsuckers, the weasels are.
00:32:19.000 So, yes, name me any.
00:32:22.000 We've had everything from bears to foxes to raccoons, skunks, everything.
00:32:27.000 But you know what?
00:32:28.000 We haven't had any avian influenza.
00:32:30.000 We haven't had any of the big diseases that the industry has.
00:32:36.000 Why?
00:32:37.000 Because our chickens are immune.
00:32:38.000 So, yes, do we deal with predators?
00:32:40.000 Yes, predators are an issue for us.
00:32:43.000 There are a lot of things that we do to ameliorate that.
00:32:46.000 But when I look at these great big confinement houses of Tyson and Purdue and Pilgrim's Pride and stuff, I'm so thankful that we don't have the problems that they have.
00:32:56.000 I mean, when they have problems, they have big problems.
00:33:00.000 I mean, E. coli, salmonella, different things.
00:33:03.000 We actually submitted our chickens to a biology test several years ago for salmonella.
00:33:09.000 And our chickens, they cultured it on a petri dish.
00:33:13.000 And the store-bought chickens that had as many as 40 chlorine baths to sanitize them measured colony forming units per milliliter to the second permutation.
00:33:24.000 And I've already told you more than I understand.
00:33:27.000 And ours measured 3,600 on the store-bought, 133 on ours.
00:33:31.000 So we were 25 times cleaner.
00:33:33.000 And we don't use any chlorine at all.
00:33:35.000 One of the reasons is because In these big confinement factory houses, the chickens are breathing in fecal particulate all day.
00:33:44.000 Every day, they're breathing in fecal particulate.
00:33:46.000 It goes in their respiratory membranes.
00:33:48.000 It's like sandpaper against their respiratory tracts.
00:33:51.000 It makes abrasions in their mucous membranes, and it actually penetrates so that they go to the processor with their feathers, their arteries, their guts, their meat is completely satiated in this fecal particulate.
00:34:04.000 But out here in the pasture, there is no fecal particulate, and so they actually come in clean.
00:34:10.000 These are all things that the industry, they're paranoid about all sorts of things that we just...
00:34:18.000 They're just not issues here.
00:34:20.000 They're just not issues.
00:34:21.000 And it's very exciting to see those kind of things happen.
00:34:26.000 And it's exciting to see people step up to this.
00:34:29.000 I think one of the things that this whole COVID thing did is that I don't think I've ever seen a more engaged and acute crisis.
00:34:37.000 Interest right now in immunology and health.
00:34:41.000 How do I guard against disease?
00:34:43.000 And the best way is to have a vibrant immune system.
00:34:47.000 Well, how do you build a vibrant immune system?
00:34:49.000 Well, first of all, you don't drink Coke every day, and you don't eat junk food all the time, and you eat From scratch, you actually get in your kitchen.
00:35:02.000 You know, yeah, you discover the kitchen.
00:35:03.000 I've always said how you know a person that really gets it in the food system is do you eat leftovers?
00:35:09.000 Because if you eat leftovers, it means you probably cook as a family and you ate as a family.
00:35:13.000 Half of the stuff that's sold in the supermarket is sold in single serving containers.
00:35:17.000 You know, we become grazers through life as opposed to, you know, communal indulgent provenance.
00:35:23.000 So here we are.
00:35:24.000 You don't eat the junk food.
00:35:26.000 You eat good food and you exercise 20 minutes a day, work up a sweat, get 20 minutes of sunshine a day, get that vitamin D in, you know, get eight hours of sleep.
00:35:35.000 And I'm giving you a recipe for immune system.
00:35:38.000 Drink a half a gallon of water a day.
00:35:39.000 Everybody's dehydrated.
00:35:41.000 And stop watching the news.
00:35:43.000 Maybe watch an hour of news a week, but watch five hours of comedy and laugh yourself silly.
00:35:48.000 Laughter does good like a medicine.
00:35:50.000 Do some good laughing.
00:35:51.000 And then I always like to say, make a list of all the people that you hate and forgive them because that kind of stress just eats you up and it weakens you.
00:36:02.000 Anyway, that's kind of my little recipe.
00:36:07.000 I don't know how far you are from Smithfield, Virginia, probably an hour's drive or something.
00:36:13.000 Yeah, it's just a couple hours.
00:36:15.000 But I started working on this issue in the 90s, and I think it was around the mid-80s.
00:36:23.000 There was a North Carolina Senator Wendell Murphy Looked at what these billionaires, Bo Pilgrim, John Tyson, had done to the chicken industry.
00:36:36.000 And they had put a million or two million chicken farmers out of business.
00:36:41.000 And they were raising chickens in battery cages, a million chickens in a single plant.
00:36:47.000 And they made themselves billionaires, put everybody out of business, and they started creating these slaughterhouses with line speeds that were going so fast that the chickens were just contaminating each other, not only in the chicken house, but in the processing facility.
00:37:05.000 Murphy looked at that and said, I can do the same thing with hogs.
00:37:09.000 Right.
00:37:10.000 He passed 26 laws in North Carolina that made it virtually impossible, gave huge subsidies to the industrial hog farming.
00:37:18.000 Yes.
00:37:19.000 And made it almost impossible to sue an industrial hog farm, no matter how much they disrupt your life.
00:37:25.000 Right.
00:37:26.000 And then he left the Senate and he went into that business and he created these facilities called Murphy, you know, Murphy 3000s.
00:37:35.000 Mm-hmm.
00:37:35.000 And within a few years, it was at that time, there were 28,000 independent hog farmers in North Carolina.
00:37:44.000 By the time I started working on this, about six or eight years later, there was 2,200 farms, hog farms, factories, and 80% of them owned or contracted with Smithfield, with one company now owned by the Chinese.
00:38:02.000 Yes.
00:38:03.000 Which controls now the landscape, the American landscapes.
00:38:06.000 Thomas Jefferson said, you know, American democracy is based on the proliferation of independent yeoman farmers, you know, on small plots.
00:38:17.000 Yeah.
00:38:17.000 And we now have our landscapes being agricultural food production being controlled by these huge facilities.
00:38:24.000 And as you know, a hog produces 10 times the amount of feces by weight as a human being.
00:38:32.000 So if you have a hog farm with 30,000 men in it, it's producing the same amount of crap as a city of 300,000 people.
00:38:40.000 And they take that and they dump it on the fields.
00:38:44.000 Yep.
00:38:45.000 It poisons the grass.
00:38:46.000 The only thing they can grow is Bermuda grass, and if the cows eat it, the cow's going to die from nitrogen poisoning.
00:38:53.000 They're really making our landscapes toxic.
00:38:56.000 They're destroying our democracy at the same time.
00:38:59.000 They're giving us food that is poisoned.
00:39:03.000 Yeah.
00:39:03.000 That is right.
00:39:04.000 So the answer, and this is where I tend, on the political spectrum, I tend toward the libertarian spectrum.
00:39:11.000 And I say, quit buying it.
00:39:13.000 Everybody quit buying it.
00:39:14.000 You're familiar with the great American smoke-out, you know, where nobody smokes for a day.
00:39:18.000 To try to, you know, get the tobacco companies.
00:39:20.000 Why don't we have a great American junk food out?
00:39:23.000 And if nobody went to McDonald's or Hardee's or Burger King or Taco Bell for one week, just one week, imagine, those outfits would be brought to their knees.
00:39:34.000 You don't need a law.
00:39:35.000 You don't need a regulation.
00:39:36.000 You don't need a bureaucracy.
00:39:37.000 You don't need an agency.
00:39:39.000 You don't...
00:39:40.000 I'm being very trying to...
00:39:42.000 We don't even need an attorney.
00:39:44.000 You know, you just need to stop buying it and just don't buy it.
00:39:47.000 And people don't realize that I think that what we have, yes, you gave this beautiful litany of what's the problem, but that developed, yes, was there collusion with the fratter side, with the U.S. duh and the Congress and the, yes, all of that's true.
00:40:07.000 But the other part is also true that somebody bought it.
00:40:11.000 Somebody decided this cheap food is the way to go and that lets me go to all the soccer games and I can go on the Caribbean cruises and I don't have to think about and I can eat non-intentionally so I can be intentional every place else.
00:40:26.000 And I'm suggesting that there are lots of things in life that we need to be less intentional about, where we need to be more intentional about our food.
00:40:38.000 Because one of our little slogans here at the farm is, That we're healing the landscape one bite at a time.
00:40:45.000 Our point is that when you look at your plate, I like to encourage people to squint.
00:40:51.000 There's a Native American named Tom Brown.
00:40:53.000 He wrote all the tracker books.
00:40:55.000 Maybe you're familiar with that.
00:40:56.000 And he has this technique of, it was a Native American technique of squinting the eyes to kind of see things that nobody else would see.
00:41:04.000 And I encourage people to do that in your plate of food.
00:41:08.000 Look through it.
00:41:09.000 What do you see on the other side?
00:41:10.000 On the other side of that is not cellophane and styrofoam at a supermarket.
00:41:15.000 What's on the other side is a landscape.
00:41:18.000 And is that what you're eating?
00:41:20.000 Does that represent a landscape that builds soil, that increases the commons, that hydrates the landscape?
00:41:28.000 That populates the countryside with loving caretakers, stewards, who get up every morning embracing the awesome responsibility and privilege of being able to be participants as caressers of our ecological umbilical.
00:41:46.000 We can do this.
00:41:47.000 There's no law that says we can't.
00:41:49.000 All we have to do is have the will and recognize that what's on our plate is actually creating the landscape our grandchildren will inherit.
00:41:56.000 It's as simple as that.
00:41:58.000 And what we have today is the culmination of trillions and trillions and trillions of decisions that people have been making.
00:42:05.000 Your parents, my parents, our ancestors have brought us to this place.
00:42:09.000 And the world we're going to have in 50 years is also going to be a physical manifestation of trillions and trillions of decisions that we make between now and then.
00:42:20.000 And so I just encourage people to take this seriously and realize that every decision You know, there's that old saying about the two dogs and the little boy asks his grandfather which dog will thrive, and the grandfather says, the dog that you feed.
00:42:38.000 If we want a different world, we have to feed a different world.
00:42:41.000 I guess that pun is perfectly intended.
00:42:43.000 We do have to feed a different kind of world if we're going to have a different kind of world.
00:42:48.000 Yeah, one of the dogs is the good dog, the other dog is the bad dog.
00:42:52.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:42:53.000 The grandfather says, feed the good dog.
00:42:56.000 Yeah, yeah, that's right.
00:42:58.000 That's right.
00:42:59.000 That's the one that will thrive.
00:43:02.000 How do people purchase good food from Polyface Farms?
00:43:10.000 Well, we do ship nationwide.
00:43:12.000 All you've got to do is jump on our website, Polyface Farms.
00:43:16.000 If you just Google in P-O-L-Y, it'll probably pop right up.
00:43:20.000 We ship out every Tuesday, and we're glad to service people.
00:43:24.000 But beyond that, we hope that maybe you start there because it's easy, because you heard it here, and you want to do that.
00:43:31.000 We're grateful.
00:43:32.000 We're honored for that.
00:43:32.000 But at the end of the day, what we really want, we don't franchise.
00:43:36.000 We're not trying to build an empire.
00:43:38.000 What we're trying to do is facilitate a movement of authentic, accountable, integrity, transparent farms.
00:43:47.000 And Anyone is welcome to come and visit us, 24-7-365.
00:43:52.000 We have a complete open door policy.
00:43:54.000 There are no trespassing signs here.
00:43:56.000 If you go to any industrial farm, there's no trespassing signs all over the place.
00:44:01.000 Here, we welcome anyone to come at any time.
00:44:04.000 That's our commitment to transparency.
00:44:06.000 And so we're glad to serve anyone.
00:44:08.000 Well, we have a website, polyfacefarms.com.
00:44:12.000 Is our website, P-O-L-Y-F-A-C-E-F-A-R-M-S, polyfacefarms.com.
00:44:17.000 Yeah, we've been in, I don't know, a dozen documentaries.
00:44:20.000 I mean, there's one called Polyfaces, but Food, Inc., Fresh, Farmageddon, American Meat.
00:44:26.000 I can't even think of all of them.
00:44:28.000 We've been in numerous documentaries.
00:44:30.000 We're also glad to encourage you to patronize whoever your regional producers are and encourage them as well.
00:44:39.000 Thank you very much.
00:44:40.000 Thanks for joining us, Joel Saladin, Polyface Farms.
00:44:44.000 Thank you.