In this episode, my guest is Joel Saladin, who is part of the family that owns Polyface Farms in Virginia s Shenandoah Valley. The farm was highlighted in the New York Times bestseller, "Omnivore's Dilemma" and the award-winning documentary, "Food Inc." The farm uses no chemicals and raises pasture livestock including beef, pork, poultry, turkey, lamb, and rabbit which is directly marketed in the region and shipped nationwide. He is the author of 16 books and is a sought-after conference speaker on divergent agricultural business and food integrity topics. He also is the editor of the Stockman Grass Farmer and writes columns in numerous publications. Joel is the founder of Polyface Farm, a company that sells its products direct to consumers and also through a network of distributors across the U.S. and around the world. I'm really, really happy to talk to him. It's an honor and privilege to have him on the show and it's a pleasure to share his story with all of you. I hope you enjoy listening to this episode and that it inspires you to pursue your own personal and professional growth in your own pursuit of becoming a better version of who you are and what you want to become. Thank you so much for listening and supporting the show! Cheers, EJ & Jon. - The EJ Team - Jon & Mike & Sarah, Sarah, Caitlyn, Sarah, and the EJ Crew Sarah and Sarah, Rachel, Jon & Rachel, Michael, Chris, Amy, David, Michael, David, and Dan, Evan, and the rest of the crew at the Food Inc Podcast, - and of course, Alex, Jonathan, . Jon, , & Ben, John, & Sarah Mike, Brian, etc., , and Thanks to Jon, Ben, Dan, Paul, Jake, Ben, Mike, , , Sam, Jack, Andrew, Adam, Sam, and , etc., and all of the guys at the Farmhouse Farmhouse, and so much more! - Thank you for listening to the show, Jon, and all the love you all of your support and support, so much of the work you all can be heard on the podcast, thank you, thank you for all the support, etc.
00:00:01.000Today, my guest is Joel Saladin, who is part of the family that owns Polyphase Farms in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.
00:00:08.000The farm highlighted in the New York Times bestseller, Omnivore's Dilemma and the award-winning documentary, Food, Inc.
00:00:15.000The farm uses no chemicals and raises pasture livestock, including beef, pork, poultry, turkey, lamb, and rabbit, which is directly marketed in the region and shipped nationwide.
00:01:53.000We had some chickens in the big garden.
00:01:55.000But his father had been a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming magazine in the mid-1940s when it first came out.
00:02:05.000So he got this ecology kit, compost, and all that from his dad.
00:02:10.000So we came here, you know, how do you make a living on this small farm?
00:02:13.000And all the advice was, you know, buy chemicals, borrow more money, plant corn, build silos, graze the woodlot, you know, those kinds of things.
00:02:21.000And we knew that that wasn't correct ecologically.
00:02:24.000But more importantly, he understood that it was incorrect economically.
00:02:27.000You know, you couldn't chemicalize your way into prosperity.
00:02:32.000You know, you had natural equity your way into prosperity.
00:02:37.000And so we started looking around and saying, well, what are patterns in nature?
00:02:56.000What builds soil is decomposing carbon.
00:02:59.000And, you know, so starting with those kind of things, we just started developing.
00:03:04.000I came back to the farm full-time September 24, 1982, and it has just, you know, it's not gone fast, but it's just been nice and steady up to where today we're servicing.
00:03:17.000It takes about 22 of us to actually, you know, run the farm and do the things that we're doing.
00:03:24.000And then you market through what kind of distributors?
00:03:28.000Yeah, so our brand is Polyface Farm, and we sell here at the farm.
00:03:34.000We have about 35 urban drop points within four hours of the farm, so that gets us to Keswick, Maryland, D.C., Annapolis, and then down to Williamsburg, Virginia Beach, and of course, Northern Virginia is the lion's share in Richmond.
00:04:14.000A drive-up window, you know, in your restaurant.
00:04:17.000So fast food, fast food did real well.
00:04:20.000And I think you've actually pointed this out, that the COVID, the 2020, was the largest transfer of wealth in the restaurant industry, you know, from white tablecloth mom and pop's Sit-down restaurants to fast food restaurants.
00:04:35.000It transferred that entire, you know, restaurant equity to the, you know, to the great big franchises, as opposed to, you know, embedded small kind of chef-owned and smaller white tablecloth places, the kind of places that we serviced.
00:06:07.000People meet each other, and they become little fellowship hubs of people who care about food, care about the environment, care about livestock care, and the kind of issues that we care about.
00:06:20.000And it's wonderful to be able to service them and have them meet each other and build these little tribes, if you will, that understand these, that share these values.
00:07:43.000We're Polly Face, so we took Polly Hen and made a nice little wooden thing and we'd take her so customers could come and meet this chicken.
00:07:52.000We had people that weren't even customers coming three or four blocks walking Come see the chicken.
00:08:57.000But farmer's markets, they're almost more social gatherings than actual transfer of food.
00:09:04.000You don't see people at a farmer's market typically buying a half a beef and buying a bushel of green beans.
00:09:12.000They're participating in the local food scene, but it's It's one hand only because the other hand's carrying Fifi, the coiffed poodle dog, and we're all there to kind of meet each other and slap each other on the back for being wonderful people participating in the local food system.
00:09:28.000And so we tried numerous farmer's markets, and we were just never pleased with the investment of time and energy and realized, what if we just...
00:09:37.000Use the power of the internet, and this is going back now, goodness, 20-some years.
00:09:43.000What if we use that, communicate directly with our people, and just pre-buy, so they're pre-buy, so we're not going speculating, and we can service them right where they live, and they can see us, we can see them, and we can actually electronically aggregate stuff.
00:10:04.000It took off and it enabled us to put way more on the truck, to get way more for our time, and everything was sold before we pulled out of the driveway.
00:10:16.000So we didn't have to come home and unpack a bunch of stuff that didn't sell.
00:10:22.000And there are now numerous farms around the country that have taken this kind of urban drop point idea and adapted it.
00:10:30.000And it's just one of the many Many opportunities that have come to us largely due to internet and the cheap cost of communication now that we didn't have 50 years ago.
00:10:45.000You know, I used to be good friends with Bill Nyman, who started Nyman Ranch, and his wife, Nicolette, She was an attorney for me that I hired, and I brought her into the hog litigation, and she met Bill through that and ended up marrying her.
00:11:03.000Their model was very interesting because they aggregated farmers from all over the country who were doing grass-fed beef and pasture-raised beef.
00:11:13.000And pork, and I think chickens as well.
00:11:17.000Maybe other poultry, but they would then go certify these farms, look at their operations, make sure that they were compliant with these standards, and then they market them nationwide.
00:11:29.000So you can go to restaurants all over the country and get diamond pork, diamond beef, and it's, you know, delicious food.
00:11:36.000It tastes completely different than, you know, the Walmart pork.
00:11:40.000I'm not sure how they're doing right now.
00:11:43.000I know they had some reorganizations along the way, but is there anybody who's now aggregating what you're doing and doing it nationally?
00:11:54.000Yeah, well, you know, the whole logistics of distribution has completely changed over the last, goodness, just 10 or 15 years because the software that UPS and FedEx and these folks use makes it so much more efficient.
00:12:12.000So, you know, it used to be that in order to distribute, it was very, very expensive.
00:12:19.000For a small-scale operation, but now we're plugged directly into UPS, and the truck comes every Tuesday afternoon and every Wednesday afternoon, and it goes right on the truck.
00:12:47.000We stole some ideas from other people and did some of our own and started doing it.
00:12:53.000We can now ship eggs Into New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, cheaper than they can get them at farmers market.
00:13:04.000Because when you have the level of corruption, regulation, high taxes, defund the police, all the things that are crumbling these cities, it makes business very difficult.
00:13:23.000And as a result, places like where we are, out here in the Shenandoah Valley, where we're low taxes, low crime, great work ethic, we can now compete like we never could have before as these big metropolitan areas begin to move into dysfunctionality, you know, from a logistical, political standpoint.
00:14:00.000We're creating opportunities in niches that we never would have even conceived of just even 10 years ago.
00:14:06.000Let's talk about another segue into another topic that I have a lot of interest in, which are the bureaucratic impediments and costs on quality food production, how essentially the USDA,
00:14:22.000the FDA, and these other Regulatory agencies are making war on healthy food and organic food and raising the cost so much of all food in this country and giving us the lowest quality food and all the food that's been corralled through these industrial mazes so that only the worst food is actually reaching the American public at its high cost.
00:16:10.000It's about the cost of compliance, the overheads, the infrastructure requirements, the compliance paperwork requirements create such an overhead that when you don't have as many pounds of beef or pounds of pork or chicken or whatever to pass under that licensure overhead, the price becomes prohibitive.
00:16:33.000And so what happens is farmers like us get accused of being, oh, you're a bunch of elitists.
00:16:39.000You know, you've got this high-priced stuff.
00:16:41.000Well, I can tell you most of our high-pricing has nothing to do with actual production costs.
00:16:48.000It's actually trying to squeeze our 300 beef a year through a filter that is built for production.
00:17:37.000If you visit Williamsburg, I know you've been to Williamsburg many times, The thing that strikes you about Williams, which strikes me, is the amount of industry and value-added activity that's happening in the backyards and in the fields of those little farms or those little demonstration places.
00:17:56.000I mean, they've got candle makers, spoke makers, you know, leather works, casket makers, spinners, weavers, all of the industry was being done on location.
00:18:08.000The butcher baker and candlestick maker were on location.
00:18:11.000And today, what's happened is the Industrial Revolution made the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker so big that nobody wanted it near them because it was ugly and smelled bad and dirty and all that.
00:18:25.000So they wanted them put out here, but then when they got out here and nobody could see them...
00:18:31.000They wanted government oversight to see behind that razor wire and the guard fence and say, what's going on behind that razor wire?
00:18:40.000Because when people can't see, they want the security of a government agent behind them to see.
00:18:47.000What's happened now is Is that with the internet, we have now democratized the ability to get information.
00:18:59.000And just, I'm sure like you, if 40 years ago somebody had said, you know, in about 10 years, Millions of people all over the planet are going to jump into cars with people that don't even have a chauffeur's license and ask the guy to take them someplace.
00:19:14.000And it's all going to work because if you're a bad passenger, they'll dock you and you won't get a ride.
00:19:20.000And if they're a bad driver, you'll dock them and they won't get any business.
00:19:24.000And so the internet created, that's called the uberization, it created, it literally enabled on a global scale, the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker, and the village knowledge that wrapped around these embedded artisans, and the ability to be duplicated on a very large, grand scale.
00:19:48.000But food, which was the last portion to join the Industrial Revolution, will be the last to exit.
00:19:56.000We now have the capability to Uberize our food system, to break it down, to democratize it, to create an egalitarian marketplace for entrepreneurial small-scale brands and local food systems.
00:20:09.000We've never been able to do that as now with Uberization, Airbnb, those kinds of things.
00:20:16.000We have this amazing bureaucracy you're so eloquent to talk about that's trying to preserve the taxicab, that's trying to preserve the chauffeur service and not allow an Uberization of our food system.
00:20:29.000Years ago, I think it was in the late 90s or early 2000s, I forget which, but I did a big campaign in Poland because Poland had this extraordinary organic agricultural system.
00:20:43.000When it was a communist country, they didn't have money to buy chemicals.
00:20:48.000You had a lot of small farms that were self-sufficient.
00:20:52.000And they were, you know, the farms were very diverse.
00:20:55.000They'd have a cow, they'd have a horse, a couple of cows, a couple of horses.
00:21:32.000It was just farmers doing what they'd been doing for...
00:21:35.00010,000 years, you know, killing their own beef.
00:21:38.000And of course, back in the old days, there was, you know, a premium on hygiene, because if you were known for selling bad stuff that made people sick, you'd be out of business.
00:21:49.000So that was the safety regulation, really.
00:21:54.000And then Smithfield wanted to come in and take over hog production in Poland.
00:21:59.000Oh, it bribed a I offered a bribe to a state official called Andre Leper, who then turned them in.
00:22:08.000He told me that the second guy in command of Smithfield offered him a million-dollar bribe, and the bribe was to pass legislation, which they did end up passing, although Leper refused to do it.
00:22:19.000But it was legislation that said you could not operate.
00:22:23.000Smithfield had come in and bought the old Soviet slaughterhouses, which were huge.
00:22:29.000They were like the state-owned operation, and then it was modernizing them.
00:22:35.000It sponsored a law, which was then passed, that said that you could not operate a slaughterhouse in Poland unless you had laser-automated faucets in your bathrooms.
00:22:47.000And those are the kind of faucets you see, you know, if you go into an airport bathroom and you don't have to touch anything, you can just wave your hand under the faucet.
00:22:57.000Of course, none of these local abattoirs could afford that.
00:23:02.000Oh, in one fell swoop, Smithfield put every one of its competitors out of business by requiring a piece of technology that none of them needed and nobody could afford except for Smithfield.
00:23:36.000Keeping little farmers out of business and this colonial model and strip mining and commoditizing our natural resources, our farmland and everything else, it's really distressing.
00:23:51.000What you've just described has happened over and over and over here.
00:23:56.000Probably one of the biggest epiphanies I ever had was several years ago when Congressman Dennis Kucinich, you may have known him, He was my campaign manager until a couple of months ago.
00:24:07.000Okay, well, in California, they had that abattoir where that downer cow, they had undercover animal welfare folks that videoed this downer cow, you know, that they prodded and hit with fire hoses and stuff to get her up so she'd stand up and get to the knock box.
00:24:22.000And it ended up, you know, closing down the plant, and it was a big deal.
00:24:26.000And Congressman Kucinich convened a congressional hearing on...
00:24:30.000What are we going to do about this slaughter problem in the U.S., the handling of these animals in these slaughterhouses?
00:24:37.000And I wasn't friends with him at the time, but I was friends with one of the other congressmen who was on the committee, or his legislative aide, and he asked me to come and be one of the 12, whatever, testifiers at the hearing.
00:24:51.000And so I went up, and the first guy, the first guy who spent the first, goodness, he hogged 20% of the whole time was the head of Food Safety Inspection Service, the commissioner of the Food Safety Inspection Service.
00:25:07.000And I could not believe, here's the punchline, I could not believe my ears when he said, he was reporting how efficient they were and all this stuff.
00:25:19.000And he said, our inspectors are now being able to handle Way more pounds of beef, way more pounds of animal across the line than they ever had because we've put so many of the small abattoirs out of business that the pounds per hour per inspector are showing how efficient we are.
00:26:31.000It's just how many pounds can we shove through this plant in a day?
00:26:34.000Both from the corporate and the inspector level.
00:26:37.000Both of them are after the same goal is, how many pounds can we shove through in a day?
00:26:42.000And that then makes it very difficult for a small plant.
00:26:45.000You could feel the prejudice against a small, oh, I've got to go down there and see these slow people, you know, that aren't generating the material.
00:26:53.000And it's an overriding prejudice within the entire industry.
00:26:58.000I mean, I remember looking at data back then, and I don't know if I could put my finger on it now, but the levels of fecal coliform in the large plants were much, much higher than what you were seeing in the small plants because the industrialization of the process and the emphasis on line speed It was ending up with actually a lower quality product in terms of safety.
00:27:26.000But of course, you have fewer inspectors.
00:27:29.000You can look at a lot more material, a lot more commodity coming through with a single inspector.
00:27:34.000And if that is the target outcome, how many pounds you can get per inspector hour, Of course, you're going to shut down every small farmer in the country, every small abattoir.
00:27:45.000And the whole point of USDA, when it was started, was to preserve small farmers and food quality.
00:27:52.000Those things are now the targets of, you know, of these industrial war machine that is putting out of business all the small farmers, and they don't produce food anymore.
00:28:10.000You know, we now learn that in 2020 that it has built-in fragility to it.
00:28:16.000The longer your food chain, The longer it is between farm and plate, the more vulnerable it is to geopolitical shocks, to economic shocks, to whatever, climate shocks, any kinds of things.
00:28:29.000And so, you know, Putin invades Ukraine, fertilizer jumps 400%, and all the farmers are on national media crying, you know, oh, what are we going to do?
00:28:40.000At our farm, it was not even a bobble because we don't buy any of that stuff.
00:28:45.000And so if we want a secure, safe, stable food system, the less we are tangled up and dependent in these long supply chains, marketing chains, They appear to be efficient, but they're actually very vulnerable and fragile to things that are outside of our control.
00:29:06.000And so bringing these things to where we scale not by centralization, but by duplication.
00:29:18.000Do you think we would have had as big a, whatever, a food hiccup if instead of our country being supplied by 300 mega processing facilities, those funnels, instead if we had been supplied by 300,000 50 employee community-minded neighborhood abattoirs and canneries and processors,
00:29:41.000it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that if we had had The 300,000 rather than the 300 that we would have been able to handle those shocks far, far better.
00:29:52.000Yeah, I mean, that's a really beautiful vision for our future.
00:29:56.000I mean, that's what I'd like to do as president, which is to get us food security back in this country where we're, you know, we have a decentralized supply, where there's diverse sources, where they're community-based, where it's small business people,
00:30:12.000where money being used by consumers to purchase food is going as directly as possible to the farmer rather than, you know, to all these Multinational intermediaries and fertilizer companies and oil refineries and chemical companies, etc.
00:30:30.000And, you know, let's keep it here in the United States and use what we've got.
00:30:35.000So how we get there, you know, from a policy standpoint, there's one side of this issue that says, well, we need to fight the, do the antitrust stuff.
00:30:44.000You know, we got to break up these big companies, break up their policies.
00:31:11.000But what I can't compete with is when suddenly...
00:31:16.000My two cows have to go in through a facility that is determined and arbitrated by Iowa beef packers that's doing 5,000 animals a day.
00:31:27.000I can't compete at that level and I don't need to.
00:31:31.000Because two cows are different than 5,000.
00:31:34.000Like, if I'm making meals in my kitchen, it's just easier to maintain cleanliness if I'm making 10 meals a day than if I'm making 1,000 meals a day.
00:31:47.000And so this scale really does, on many levels, it has bearing on the actual democratization of food.
00:32:01.000Yeah, I mean, the other part of that policy directive is to eliminate the subsidies because industrial food production is almost always driven by subsidies.
00:32:15.000And when you have subsidies, you get market distortions and you lose all the efficiencies.
00:32:22.000And you lose the dynamic, the hidden finger of the market and the accountability of the market.
00:32:30.000You artificially manipulate the market in one direction or another instead of just letting the market stand on its own.
00:32:38.000I have no trouble competing with Tyson, Cargill, whatever.
00:32:47.000One of the beauties of the internet is that my website can look exactly...
00:32:52.000Nobody can tell that I'm a couple million dollar business and Walmart is a multi-billion dollar business when you look at a website.
00:32:59.000A website is like the ultimate democratized facade for access.
00:33:05.000We can compete very well at this level, but we can't compete when a bureaucrat comes in and puts his finger on the scale and says, you know, we're going to push it this way.
00:33:15.000And then, you know, those big industrial facilities, one of the subsidies they get is their capacity to pollute the environment, to create huge amounts of waste.
00:33:26.000Concentrated animal feed operations and then not properly dispose it, whereas a farmer like you will take that waste, recycle it, use the manure, maybe have 300 hogs on a half a section of property, and if you raise the corn, the hogs eat the corn, the manure goes back into the field, and there's roughly a closed loop.
00:33:48.000But if you have 10,000 hogs on that 320 acres, half section, and you try to spread that manure on the ground, most of it's going to go off in the rain, and it's going to end up in the water supply, the aquifer.
00:34:04.000It's going to turn the soils over, nitrify the soils, and it's going to kill the animals that graze on it.
00:34:14.000You know, but that's a subsidy for them.
00:34:19.000And, of course, Michael Pollan has written eloquently about this.
00:34:22.000He says what we've done is we have broken apart, we have segregated We have segregated our beautiful, relational, balanced, relational, you know, ecological umbilical, and we've turned blessings into a curse.
00:34:37.000You know, nature loves, loves digested material, you know, manure and urine, you know, that's what built the Great Plains.
00:34:44.000The fertile plains of America were built with animals and that decomposition.
00:34:50.000But when you concentrate things and you overrun your ecological umbilical, then suddenly you've turned a blessing into a curse and you segregate rather than integrate the different components.
00:35:03.000So we grow the feed over here, we grow the chickens over here, we process them over here, we sell them over there.
00:35:08.000And none of this is then integrated or related with each other.
00:35:15.000And so we view life as fundamentally a factory in the front door, out the back door, as opposed to a biological system.
00:35:23.000The difference between food and other things and copper widgets and PVC pipe is that food is a biological thing and biological things are not just mechanical.
00:35:35.000They have a totally different dimension.
00:35:57.000Nature is that spontaneous, dynamic thinking, conversing, relational kind of thing that you don't get from your car engine or, you know, a light socket.
00:36:18.000I was in Mississippi last fall talking to farmers that were actually having their cows, they were stepping into the cracks in the ground, the ground cracks that opened up so wide, cows were stepping in them and breaking their legs and the farmers were having to put their cows down because they were They were losing these cows.
00:36:36.000You know, the drought is real, and I don't want to get into a great big, you know, climate debate or anything like that, but all I'm going to say is droughts are real.
00:37:04.000I mean, they're looking for a bogeyman.
00:37:06.000And the ones that understand that it is the drought that's been incredibly deep throughout the whole South for the last two years, when you don't have drought, you don't have grass, you don't have grass, you don't have cows, the ones that have done it have basically...
00:37:20.000The tragedy is they throw up their hands and say, well, I'm just...
00:37:23.000A victim to climate and I can't do anything.
00:37:26.000But man, the beauty is that we can do something about those things.
00:37:32.000I mean, I've got a kind of a three-ingredient recipe.
00:37:38.000You know, back in the 1940s and 50s, post Dust Bowl, the old Soil Conservation Service used to partner with farmers to help cost share building ponds.
00:37:48.000They realized how important it was to hydrate the landscape.
00:37:52.000Now, the same USDA considers ponds to be a liability because they make landing spots for wildlife that bring diseases to concentrated animal feeding operations and CAFOs.
00:38:03.000So again, we've taken water that ought to be a wonderful asset and a blessing to a nation, and we've turned it into a demon.
00:38:12.000But 500 years ago, beavers had 8% of American landscape.
00:38:17.000It wasn't America then, but it was covered with beaver ponds.
00:38:24.000But when you cover, when you have that much water...
00:38:27.000Like the beaver ponds did, it creates base flow, it fills aquifers, it makes ambient temperatures easier, evapotranspiration, cloud formation.
00:38:37.000I mean, there's all sorts of beautiful things that happen.
00:38:39.000And so I suggest that the first thing we need to do is be on an aggressive pond building campaign.
00:38:45.000So that we eliminate flooding and have water to be able to irrigate.
00:38:50.000So we're not pulling water from streams and aquifers and things like that.
00:38:53.000So that as a result of us walking here, we are actually increasing the water commons, not decreasing the water commons.
00:39:02.000And so on our farm, we've built over 20 ponds over the years.
00:39:06.000We can now irrigate when the water shuts off and that ameliorates droughts.
00:39:11.000The second ingredient is organic matter.
00:39:14.000You know, one pound of organic matter holds four pounds of water.
00:39:21.000And of course, our modern agriculture system with chemical fertilizers that cannibalize out the organic matter, tillage that cannibalizes out the single crop production, all of those things reduce organic matter in the soil.
00:39:38.000On our farm, we've gone from 1% in 1961 to over 8% today.
00:39:43.000That 7% increase in organic matter, which means we can hold 140,000 gallons of water per acre today that we couldn't in 1961.
00:40:24.000By overgrazing and monocropping, any of that kind of thing, you get vegetation, especially with diversity, where you intermingle forests and pasture and perennials, and you create this abundance.
00:40:41.000A lot of people don't realize That 500 years ago, North America produced more food than we do today.
00:40:47.000So with all of our chemical fertilizers, John Deere tractors, and everything else, hybrid seeds, we are still not producing the food that was produced here 500 years ago.
00:41:12.000So it wasn't all eaten by people, but it was an abundance situation which should give us all in the farming business pause to realize that we have actually, in total, over the last 200 years of this nation, as great as this nation is, I love this country, but we have, in total, we have actually reduced Our ecological abundance, our total productive abundance, we reduced it rather than increased it.
00:41:39.000And I suggest that a mandate for tomorrow should be seeing what those workable patterns were and are And then facilitating them, participating with them on the landscape.
00:41:53.000So ponds, organic matter, and vegetation are the three ways to mitigate drought.
00:41:59.000And what I would like to see is as we all, you know, our heart breaks for the drought, But instead of just acting like, well, there's nothing I can do and it's out of my hands, let's meet it head on and let's realize, obviously, we can't completely change the weather, we can't eliminate everything, but there are a lot of things that we can do to mitigate, I would say, to bring forgiveness and redemptive capacity back into the landscape.
00:42:27.000We are not just inner bystanders here.
00:42:30.000We are active participants to either help or hurt, and that's where we need to be, so that as farmers, we provide oases of hope and help when society becomes hopeless and helpless.
00:42:45.000Joel Saladin, thank you so much for joining us today and for educating us about all these important subjects.
00:42:51.000And I hope to have you back on this show soon.