RFK Jr. The Defender - Small Farms Healthy Food with Joel Salatin Farmer VIDEO

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 Today, my guest is Joel Saladin, who is part of the family that owns Polyphase Farms in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.

00:00:10.000 The farm highlighted in the New York Times bestseller Omnivore's Dilemma and the award-winning documentary Food, Inc.

00:00:18.000 The farm uses no chemicals and raises pasture livestock, including beef, pork, poultry, turkey, lamb, and rabbit.

00:00:28.000 Which is directly marketed in the region and shipped nationwide.

00:00:33.000 He is the author of 16 books.

00:00:36.000 Joel Saladin is a sought-after conference speaker on divergent agricultural business and food integrity topics.

00:00:45.000 He is the editor of the Stockman Grass Farmer, and he writes columns in numerous publications.

00:00:53.000 Welcome to the show.

00:00:54.000 I'm really, really happy to talk to you.

00:00:57.000 Thank you.

00:00:58.000 It's really an honor and privilege to be with you, always.

00:01:00.000 So tell us a little bit about your farm and where that sits in the national grid of organic agriculture.

00:01:13.000 Yeah, so we're in Virginia, Shenandoah Valley.

00:01:18.000 Our family came here in 1961, and mom and dad never made a living from the farm.

00:01:24.000 They worked off farm.

00:01:27.000 Dad was an accountant, mom was a school teacher, and that paid the mortgage.

00:01:31.000 So by the time I'm getting into teenage years, I loved the farm.

00:01:35.000 I got my first chickens when I was 10 years old, had a little laying chicken business.

00:01:41.000 But Dad was very innovative, and I'm at the stage of my life where I realize now, the older I get, the smarter Dad was.

00:01:55.000 Some of us get to that point.

00:01:58.000 I'm hoping my kids get to that point pretty soon.

00:02:01.000 Yeah, wouldn't that be great?

00:02:03.000 Yes.

00:02:06.000 So, he was, this was in the 60s and 70s, and we basically had a glorified homestead experimental farm.

00:02:15.000 We milked a couple cows.

00:02:16.000 We, you know, had some chickens in the big garden.

00:02:19.000 But he was totally, his father had been a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine in the mid-1940s when it first came out.

00:02:28.000 So, he got this ecology kit, compost, and all that from his dad.

00:02:33.000 So we came here, you know, how do you make a living on this small farm?

00:02:37.000 And all the advice was, you know, buy chemicals, borrow more money, plant corn, build silos, graze the woodlot, you know, those kinds of things.

00:02:46.000 And we knew that that wasn't correct ecologically.

00:02:50.000 But more importantly, he understood that it was incorrect economically.

00:02:54.000 You know, we couldn't We're good to go.

00:03:14.000 Animals move.

00:03:15.000 They don't stay in buildings.

00:03:17.000 They don't stay in places.

00:03:18.000 There's a lot of diversity.

00:03:20.000 So you don't see single species things.

00:03:23.000 Carbon doesn't move very far.

00:03:26.000 What builds soil is decomposing carbon.

00:03:30.000 And, you know, so starting with those kind of things, we just started developing.

00:03:35.000 And...

00:03:37.000 I came back to the farm full-time September 24, 1982, and it's not gone fast, but it's just been nice and steady up to where today we're servicing.

00:03:50.000 It takes about 22 of us to actually run the farm and do the things that we're doing.

00:03:58.000 And then you market through what kind of distributors?

00:04:03.000 Yeah, so our brand is Polyface Farm, and we sell here at the farm.

00:04:08.000 We have about 35 urban drop points within four hours of the farm, so that gets us to, you know, Caswick, Maryland, D.C., Annapolis, and then down to, you know, Williamsburg, Virginia Beach.

00:04:25.000 And of course, Northern Virginia is the lion's share, Richmond.

00:04:30.000 And then we ship nationwide as well.

00:04:32.000 We also service some institutions.

00:04:34.000 Of course, you know, we lost almost all of our restaurants.

00:04:38.000 We were servicing, I don't know what, 50 restaurants in 2020 and lost all of them.

00:04:43.000 They're not coming back into business.

00:04:46.000 If you didn't have a drive-up window in 2020, you were in trouble.

00:04:51.000 If you didn't have a what?

00:04:54.000 A drive-up window in your restaurant.

00:04:58.000 So fast food...

00:04:59.000 Fast food did real well.

00:05:01.000 And I think you've actually pointed this out, that the COVID, the 2020, was the largest transfer of wealth in the restaurant industry from white tablecloth mom and pops sit-down restaurants to fast food restaurants.

00:05:18.000 It transferred that entire restaurant equity to the great big...

00:05:26.000 As opposed to, you know, embedded small kind of chef-owned and smaller white tablecloth places, the kind of places that we serviced.

00:05:37.000 And so, yeah, that was a big deal.

00:05:42.000 But the farm now, you know, we have this production, but we also do a lot of...

00:05:55.000 We have the Lunatic Learning Center.

00:06:01.000 We do a lot of farm tours and gatherings and things for folks to come and see.

00:06:10.000 We know there are two ways to get people on board.

00:06:14.000 See it and eat it.

00:06:16.000 And if you can see it and eat it, that's even better.

00:06:19.000 And so that's been a key part of our whole program.

00:06:23.000 What do you mean by drop points?

00:06:25.000 Are those like farmers markets?

00:06:27.000 No, they're not.

00:06:28.000 They're individual homes.

00:06:30.000 We call them hostess homes.

00:06:32.000 I think we have one host and all the rest of them are hostesses. 0.98

00:06:36.000 You know, women buy all the food in the country. 1.00

00:06:39.000 Men don't. 0.98

00:06:39.000 And we're pleased with that, okay? 0.98

00:06:43.000 So these are serviced monthly.

00:06:47.000 People order online, and we go in directly from the farm and service.

00:06:53.000 So it's a la carte.

00:06:55.000 There's not a subscription.

00:06:57.000 It's not a...

00:06:58.000 A volume-centric thing.

00:07:01.000 But you buy online and we deliver the orders directly to you.

00:07:06.000 And these become little fellowship hubs.

00:07:09.000 These become...

00:07:12.000 People 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.

00:07:27.000 And 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 issues.

00:07:39.000 Share these values.

00:07:41.000 It's really wonderful.

00:07:42.000 I still don't understand how it works.

00:07:45.000 Are they little mini distributorships in there?

00:07:51.000 No, we're working directly with them.

00:07:54.000 So what it is, is they order online and we're going to be in, let's say, whatever, Leesburg, Virginia on Tuesday.

00:08:02.000 So we go every month on a schedule and people order and we Compile their orders here and bring them up and they meet us at that host home, at that rendezvous place.

00:08:16.000 They meet us there.

00:08:18.000 So obviously we have to be in places that are conducive to, you know, to 30 or 40 people showing up in a one hour period.

00:08:28.000 You know, to pick up their food.

00:08:30.000 But it allows us direct contact with our customer.

00:08:37.000 That way, they get to see us, we get to see them.

00:08:39.000 And they get to meet each other and, you know, share notes.

00:08:45.000 And so it's a, you know, it's a...

00:08:48.000 We do everything possible to try to create a familial operation.

00:08:52.000 You can't believe how much people yearn for a connection like this.

00:09:00.000 Last year, we began taking a hen, a laying hen.

00:09:06.000 We called her Polly Hen. 0.80

00:09:08.000 We're Polly Face, so we took Polly Hen and made a nice little wooden thing, and we'd take her. 1.00

00:09:15.000 And so customers could come and meet this chicken.

00:09:19.000 And we had people that weren't even customers coming three or four blocks walking Come see the chicken.

00:09:27.000 It's in town.

00:09:28.000 It's in the city.

00:09:28.000 Come see the chicken.

00:09:29.000 It was crazy.

00:09:31.000 We could not imagine just the sheer...

00:09:34.000 One lady kept pulling her son out of school. 1.00

00:09:37.000 He was in third grade.

00:09:38.000 And every month when we came, she'd pull him out of school early so he could come and pet the chicken.

00:09:45.000 And it was just a huge connective thing.

00:09:49.000 Yeah.

00:09:49.000 Those are the kinds of things that we're doing, in addition to, obviously, really good food, to stimulate the whole story, family, fellowship, connection thing to the food and the farm.

00:10:06.000 Now, I mean, did you make this whole thing up as you were going along, or are there models for this happening elsewhere in the country?

00:10:15.000 Yeah, actually, I don't want to take too much credit, but we kind of conceived of this.

00:10:24.000 Here's the thing.

00:10:25.000 We were unhappy with what we saw at farmer's markets.

00:10:30.000 Now, I'm a friend of farmer's markets.

00:10:32.000 Don't read into this at all.

00:10:34.000 But farmer's markets, they're almost more social gatherings than actual transfer of food.

00:10:45.000 You don't see people at a farmer's market typically buying a half a beef and buying a bushel of green beans and buying little...

00:10:56.000 Whatever.

00:10:57.000 They're participating in the local food scene, but it's one hand only because the other hand's carrying Fifi, the coiffed oodle dog, and we're all there to kind of meet each other and slap each other on the back for being...

00:11:11.000 You know, wonderful people participating in the local food system.

00:11:15.000 And so we tried numerous farmers markets and we were just never pleased with the investment of time and energy and realized, well, what if we just use the power of the Internet And this is going back now, goodness, 20-some years.

00:11:37.000 What if we use that, communicate directly with our people and 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.

00:11:58.000 And it just took off.

00:11:59.000 It 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.

00:12:13.000 So we didn't have to come home and unpack a bunch of stuff that didn't sell.

00:12:17.000 It was all pre-sold.

00:12:19.000 And there are now numerous farms around the country that have taken this kind of urban drop point idea and adapted it, and it's just one of the many Whatever.

00:12:31.000 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.

00:12:48.000 Yeah, I know.

00:12:49.000 You know, I used to know very well, be good friends with Bill Nyman, who started Nyman Ranch, and his wife, Nicolette, was an attorney for me that I hired, and I brought her into the...

00:13:05.000 Hog litigation and she met Bill through that and now she's a farmer. 0.99

00:13:12.000 But their model was very interesting because they aggregated farmers from all over the country who were doing grass-fed beef and pasture-raised beef.

00:13:27.000 And pork, and I think chickens as well, maybe 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.

00:13:44.000 So you can go to restaurants all over the country and get Naiman pork, Naiman beef, and it's, you know, delicious food.

00:13:51.000 It tastes completely different than, you know, the Walmart pork.

00:13:56.000 I'm not sure how they're doing right now.

00:14:00.000 I know they had some reorganizations along the way, but is there anybody who's now kind of aggregating what you're doing and doing it nationally?

00:14:14.000 Yeah, well, what, you know, what the whole logistics of the whole logistics of distribution has completely changed over the last goodness, just 10 or 15 years, because the software, you know, that UPS and FedEx because the software, you know, that UPS and FedEx and these folks use makes it so much more efficient.

00:14:36.000 So, you know, it's not.

00:14:39.000 It used to be that in order to distribute, you know, it was very, very expensive for a small-scale operation.

00:14:49.000 But now, you know, we're plugged directly into UPS, and the truck comes every Tuesday afternoon and every Wednesday afternoon, and it goes right on the truck.

00:15:01.000 And what's happening...

00:15:03.000 You'll love this.

00:15:05.000 You'll love this. 0.59

00:15:06.000 What's happened now is if you had told me five years ago that we would ship eggs to whatever, Los Angeles, I'd have said you were crazy.

00:15:17.000 But we figured out how to do it.

00:15:21.000 We stole some ideas from other people and did some of our own and started doing it.

00:15:26.000 We can now ship eggs into New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles cheaper than they can get them at farmer's market.

00:15:38.000 Because 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.

00:15:53.000 You can't hire people, you can't protect your inventory.

00:15:58.000 And as a result, places like where we are out here in the Shenandoah Valley, where we're low taxes, low crime, a great work ethic.

00:16:13.000 We can now compete like we never could have before as these big metropolitan areas begin to move into dysfunctionality.

00:16:27.000 you know, from a logistical political standpoint.

00:16:30.000 And it's, I mean, part of me is...

00:16:34.000 It's heartbroken that things are that broken, which is one of the reasons that your running excites me so much.

00:16:42.000 But things have become that broken.

00:16:44.000 But it's just amazing that we're creating opportunities in niches that we never would have even conceived of just even 10 years ago.

00:16:56.000 Let's talk about another segue into another topic that I have a lot of interest in.

00:17:04.000 Which are the bureaucratic impediments and costs on quality food production, how essentially the USDA, the 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,

00:17:33.000 you know, all the food that's I've been corralled through these industrial mazes so that only the worst food is actually reaching the American public at its high cost.

00:17:49.000 Talk about that.

00:17:50.000 Yeah, well, you're getting near and dear to my heart.

00:17:54.000 You know, I wrote a book, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, and describing our, whatever, battles to the regulatory agencies over the years.

00:18:08.000 And Notice I said everything I want to do is illegal.

00:18:11.000 I didn't say everything I do is illegal.

00:18:12.000 I said everything I want to do is illegal.

00:18:14.000 That's an important distinction.

00:18:16.000 But the thing to remember is that all the regulations are size prejudicial.

00:18:23.000 They're size prejudicial.

00:18:24.000 In other words, they're easier to comply with if you're large than if you're small.

00:18:31.000 For example, if I want to make charcuterie, I want to make charcuterie.

00:18:36.000 If to get licensed, if to get legal to sell it, I have to have a $5,000 24-7 thermocoupled thermometer.

00:18:48.000 Well, if I'm making a tractor-trailer load of charcuterie, that $5,000 thermometer is not a great big deal.

00:18:56.000 But if I'm making a five-gallon bucket or two five-gallon buckets on my farm or in my cottage industry, that's a game changer.

00:19:06.000 That keeps me from even starting into the business.

00:19:08.000 And so we have an incredible weighted cost because the paperwork and the compliance, this is not about safety.

00:19:23.000 It's not about food safety.

00:19:25.000 It'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.

00:19:52.000 And so what happens is farmers like us get accused of being, oh, you're a bunch of elitists.

00:19:58.000 You know, you've got this high-priced stuff.

00:20:00.000 Well, I can tell you most of our high-pricing has nothing to do with actual production costs.

00:20:07.000 It's actually trying to squeeze our, you know, our 300 beef a year through a filter that is built for 5,000 beef a day.

00:20:22.000 And that's the problem.

00:20:25.000 It's the scale prejudicial nature of these food requirements.

00:20:32.000 And the crazy thing about it is that we can give it away.

00:20:43.000 I can go butcher a pig in the backyard and give it to the neighbors and I'm a great American.

00:20:50.000 But if they give me a dollar for it, now I'm suddenly a criminal.

00:20:53.000 What is it about exchanging, taking a dollar for that, that suddenly turned me from a benevolent, charitable person into a criminal?

00:21:04.000 It has nothing to do with food safety.

00:21:08.000 It has to do with marked access.

00:21:11.000 If you visit Williamsburg, I know you've been to Williamsburg many times, The thing that strikes you about William, 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, those little demonstration places.

00:21:30.000 I mean, they've got candle makers, spoke makers, leather works, casket makers, spinners, weavers, all of the industry was being done On location.

00:21:47.000 The Butcher Baker and Candlestick Maker were on location.

00:21:51.000 And 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, you know, dirty and all that.

00:22:06.000 So they wanted them put out here.

00:22:10.000 But then when they got out here and nobody could see them, they wanted government oversight to see behind that razor wire and the guard fence and say, what's going on behind that razor wire?

00:22:22.000 Because when people can't see, they want the security of a government agent behind them to see.

00:22:30.000 Well, what's happened now is that with the internet, we have now democratized The ability to get information, I call it Uberized.

00:22:43.000 We've Uberized and 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, you know.

00:23:04.000 And it's all going to work because if you're a bad passenger, they'll dock you and you won't get a ride.

00:23:09.000 And if they're a bad driver, you'll dock them and they won't get any business.

00:23:13.000 And so the internet created, it'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 to be duplicated on a very large grand scale.

00:23:42.000 But food, which was the last portion to join the Industrial Revolution, will be the last to exit.

00:23:50.000 And so we 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.

00:24:08.000 We've never been able to do that as now with Uberization, Airbnb, those kinds of things, have this amazing bureaucracy you're so eloquent to talk about that's trying to preserve the taxi cab, that's trying to preserve the chauffeur service and not allow an Uberization of our food system.

00:24:34.000 You know, years 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.

00:24:50.000 When it was a communist country, they didn't have money to buy chemicals.

00:24:55.000 And you had a lot of small farms that were self-sufficient.

00:25:00.000 And they were, you know, the farms were very diverse.

00:25:03.000 They'd have a cow, they'd have a horse, a couple of cows, a couple of horses.

00:25:09.000 They'd have a chicken coop. 0.94

00:25:10.000 A lot of them had pigeons, which they ate over there.

00:25:14.000 And then there were...

00:25:17.000 In every town, there were local abattoirs, which is, of course, a slaughterhouse, a little slaughterhouse where you could slaughter one hog a day or one...

00:25:28.000 And then they'd make this kielbasa, which was famous all over the world.

00:25:33.000 That's where Polish kielbasa comes from.

00:25:35.000 It comes from these...

00:25:37.000 4,000 little abattoirs that, you know, didn't have any safety regulations.

00:25:43.000 There was no, you know, it was just farmers doing what they'd been doing for 10,000 years, you know, killing their own beef.

00:25:53.000 And of course, back in the old days, there was a There was a premium on hygiene, because if you were known for selling bad stuff that made people sick, you'd be out of business.

00:26:07.000 So that was the safety regulation, really.

00:26:10.000 That's right.

00:26:11.000 And then Smithfield wanted to come in and take over hog production in Poland.

00:26:19.000 Oh, it bribed a...

00:26:21.000 I offered a bribe to a state official called Andre Leper, who then turned them in.

00:26:30.000 He told me that the second guy in command of Smithfield offered him a million-dollar bribe.

00:26:35.000 And the bribe was to pass legislation, which they did end up passing, although Leper refused to do it.

00:26:42.000 But it was legislation that said you could not operate.

00:26:47.000 Smithfield had come in and bought the old Soviet slaughterhouses, which were huge.

00:26:53.000 They were like the state-owned operation, and then it was modernizing them, but it passed a law simultaneously.

00:27:01.000 It 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.

00:27:14.000 And 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, you know, you can just wave your hand under the faucet.

00:27:25.000 Of course, none of these local abattoirs could afford that.

00:27:30.000 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.

00:27:44.000 Yes.

00:27:44.000 Oh, you know, it was a purposeful...

00:27:47.000 And then, of course, Smithfield was purchased by the Chinese. 1.00

00:27:51.000 It's now a Chinese company and it owns, I don't know, 30%, 40% of the hog production in our country.

00:27:57.000 And it's really a colonial model.

00:28:00.000 Yes.

00:28:01.000 You know, USDA now works for China.

00:28:04.000 Yes.

00:28:05.000 Keeping 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.

00:28:18.000 It is very distressing.

00:28:20.000 What you've just described has happened over and over and over here.

00:28:25.000 Probably one of the biggest epiphanies I ever had was...

00:28:30.000 It was several years ago when Congressman Dennis Kucinich, you may have known him.

00:28:35.000 He was my campaign manager until a couple of months ago.

00:28:38.000 Okay, well, you know, 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 and And it ended up, you know, closing down the plant and it was a big deal.

00:29:00.000 And Congressman Kucinich convened a congressional hearing on what are we going to do about this, you know, slaughter problem in the U.S., the handling of these animals in these slaughterhouses.

00:29:13.000 And and I was friends.

00:29:16.000 I wasn't friends with him at the time, but I was friends with one of the other congressmen who was on the committee and or his legislative aide.

00:29:25.000 And he asked me to come and be one of the twelve whatever testifiers at the hearing.

00:29:31.000 And so I went up and the first guy.

00:29:36.000 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.

00:29:49.000 And 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, and he said, We now,

00:30:05.000 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.

00:30:31.000 And I'm sitting there.

00:30:32.000 Yeah, I'm sitting there.

00:30:34.000 Do you have no shame?

00:30:36.000 I thought you were supposed to check on quality.

00:30:39.000 I didn't know that this was a race of efficiency.

00:30:43.000 But then it struck me.

00:30:44.000 Well, as you know, the revolving door is there.

00:30:48.000 They've all drunk the same Kool-Aid.

00:30:49.000 They're all in bed together.

00:30:51.000 And so why is it surprising that in an industrial corporate fashion, Food, you know, processing paradigm would engender a similarly, you know, volume-based inspection paradigm.

00:31:10.000 And so both of them are patting themselves on the back because they've got so much more volume going through.

00:31:18.000 Nobody's caring about safety.

00:31:20.000 Nobody's caring about quality.

00:31:24.000 Oh boy, I lost him.

00:31:29.000 What's happened?

00:31:30.000 I went and asked security.

00:31:32.000 They were pulling bandwidth hard and they said they were going to stop.

00:31:35.000 Can you say that again?

00:31:36.000 Nobody cares about safety.

00:31:37.000 Nobody cares about quality.

00:31:39.000 Nobody cares about safety.

00:31:48.000 It's just how many pounds can we shove through this plant in a day?

00:31:52.000 Both from the corporate and the inspector level.

00:31:54.000 Both of them are after the same The same goal is how many pounds can we shove through in a day?

00:32:00.000 And that then makes it very difficult for a small plant.

00:32:04.000 You can 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.

00:32:13.000 And it's an overriding prejudice within the entire industry.

00:32:20.000 Yeah, I mean, I remember looking at data back then, and I don't know if I could put my...

00:32:26.000 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 Was ending up with actually a lower quality product in terms of

00:32:56.000 safety.

00:32:57.000 But of course, you have fewer inspectors.

00:33:01.000 You can look at a lot more material, a lot more commodity coming through with a single inspector.

00:33:05.000 And if that is...

00:33:07.000 The target outcome, how many pounds you can get per inspector hour.

00:33:12.000 Of course, you're going to shut down every small farmer in the country, every small abattoir.

00:33:17.000 And the whole point of USDA, when it was started, was to preserve small farmers and food quality.

00:33:25.000 Those things are now the targets of these industrial war machine that is putting out of business all the small farmers.

00:33:35.000 And they don't produce food anymore.

00:33:38.000 They produce commodities.

00:33:41.000 They produce filler for your stomach, but there's nothing in it that's good for you.

00:33:47.000 That's right.

00:33:48.000 And we now learned We now learn that in 2020 that it has built in fragility to it.

00:33:59.000 And so the 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.

00:34:21.000 And so, you know, so Putin invades Ukraine, fertilizer jumps 400%, and all the farmers are on national media crying, you know, oh, what are we going to do?

00:34:31.000 What are we going to do?

00:34:32.000 At our farm, it was not even a bobble because we don't buy any of that stuff.

00:34:38.000 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.

00:35:04.000 You know, bringing these things to where we scale, we scale not by centralization, but by duplication.

00:35:11.000 So that instead of having, listen, in 2020, do 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.

00:35:41.000 It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that if we had had the 300,000 rather than the 300,000, that we would have been able to handle those shocks far, far better.

00:35:54.000 Yeah, I mean, that's a really beautiful vision for our future.

00:35:58.000 I mean, that's, you know, 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,

00:36:14.000 where it's small business people, where You know, the money being spent, money being purchased, 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.

00:36:41.000 And, you know, let's keep it here in the United States and use what we've got.

00:36:48.000 So how we get there, you know, from a policy standpoint, you know, there's one side of this issue that says, well, we need to fight the, do the antitrust stuff.

00:37:05.000 You know, we got to break up these big companies, break up their, and I get that.

00:37:09.000 I understand that.

00:37:10.000 But I seldom see a monopoly that didn't get there with some sort of corrupt collusion with the regulatory agency.

00:37:21.000 And so if you actually preserve liberty and freedom and market access from an entrepreneurial standpoint, People like us can compete fine.

00:37:33.000 I don't have any problem competing.

00:37:35.000 But what I can't compete with is when suddenly my 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 I can't compete at that level, and I don't need to, because two cows are different than 5,000.

00:38:04.000 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.

00:38:16.000 It's a whole different thing.

00:38:18.000 So this scale really does, on many levels, it has...

00:38:26.000 It has bearing on the actual democratization of food access, both from a consumer standpoint and a producer standpoint.

00:38:37.000 Yeah, I mean, the other...

00:38:40.000 Part of that policy directive is to eliminate the subsidies because industrial food production is almost always driven by subsidies.

00:38:53.000 And when you have subsidies, you get market distortions and you lose all the efficiencies.

00:39:00.000 Right, right.

00:39:01.000 And you...

00:39:04.000 And you lose the dynamic, the hidden finger of the market, and the accountability of the market.

00:39:14.000 You artificially manipulate the market in one direction or another, instead of just letting the market I have no trouble competing with Tyson, Cargill, whatever.

00:39:28.000 I can message what I want to message.

00:39:30.000 They message what they message.

00:39:32.000 One of the beauties of the internet is that my website can look exactly...

00:39:38.000 Nobody can tell that I'm a...

00:39:41.000 I'm a couple million dollar business and Walmart is a multi-billion dollar business.

00:39:46.000 When you look at a website, a website is like the, you know, the ultimate, you know, democratized facade, you know, for access.

00:39:55.000 And so we 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.

00:40:10.000 And then, you know, those big industrial facilities, one of the substances they get is their capacity to pollute the environment, to create huge amounts of waste and concentrated animal feed operations and then not properly dispose of it,

00:40:26.000 whereas a farmer like you will take that waste, recycle it, use the manure, maybe have 300 hogs on a On a half a section of property and, you know, they raise the corn, the hogs eat the corn, the manure goes back into the field.

00:40:47.000 And there's roughly a closed loop.

00:40:49.000 But if you have 10,000 hogs on that You know, 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, you know, it's going to end up in the water supply, the aquifer.

00:41:06.000 It's going to turn the soils over, nitrify the soils, and it's going to kill the animals that graze on it. 0.79

00:41:18.000 You know, but that's a subsidy for them.

00:41:20.000 Yeah, absolutely it is.

00:41:23.000 And, of course, Michael Pollan has written eloquently about this.

00:41:27.000 He says what we've done is we have broken apart, we have segregated, we have segregated our beautiful relational balance, relational balance.

00:41:40.000 You know, ecological, umbilical, and we've turned blessings into a curse.

00:41:44.000 You know, nature loves Love's digested material, you know, manure and urine, you know, that's what built the Great Plains. 0.97

00:41:53.000 The fertile plains of America were built with animals and that decomposition.

00:42:00.000 But when you concentrate things and you overrun your ecological umbilical, then suddenly, you know, you've turned a blessing into a curse.

00:42:10.000 And you segregate rather than integrate the different components.

00:42:15.000 So we grow the feed over here, we grow the chickens over here, we process them over here, we sell them over there, and none of this is then...

00:42:26.000 You know, integrated or related with each other, and so we view life as fundamentally a factory, you know, in the front door, out the back door, as opposed to a biological system.

00:42:39.000 The difference between food and other things, you know, copper widgets and PVC pipe, is that food is a biological thing, and biological things are not just mechanical.

00:42:51.000 They have a totally different dimension.

00:42:56.000 And, you know, they need rest, they're spontaneous, they actually think, you know, they respond, they're sentient, all these things, you know, that a brake lining or a, you know, A wheel bearing in a car doesn't.

00:43:16.000 Nature is like that.

00:43:18.000 Nature is that spontaneous, dynamic thinking, conversing, relational kind of thing that you don't get from your car engine or a light socket.

00:43:32.000 One last subject and I'll let you go.

00:43:36.000 Talk about the drought and the panhandle and the cow shortage.

00:43:41.000 Yeah, so the drought is a big deal.

00:43:44.000 I 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 losing these cows.

00:44:03.000 And so, you 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.

00:44:14.000 They happen routinely.

00:44:15.000 I mean, here on our farm, we figure, you know, four out of five years, we're going to have a drought at some time in the year.

00:44:22.000 And so the problem that I see in the news organizations that are covering this is some are trying to find a bogeyman.

00:44:32.000 You know, they're saying it's, you know...

00:44:37.000 Cheap imports.

00:44:38.000 It might be cell-cultured meat.

00:44:41.000 They're trying to make us eat bugs. 0.93

00:44:42.000 I mean, they're looking for a bogeyman.

00:44:45.000 And the ones that understand that it is the drought that's been incredibly deep throughout the whole South for the last two years.

00:44:54.000 When you don't have drought, you don't have grass, you don't have grass, you don't have cows.

00:45:00.000 The ones that have done it have basically, the tragedy is they throw up their hands and say, well, I'm just a victim to climate and I can't do anything.

00:45:08.000 But man, the beauty is that we can do something about those things.

00:45:15.000 I mean, I've got a kind of a three-ingredient recipe.

00:45:18.000 The first ingredient is ponds.

00:45:20.000 You 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.

00:45:32.000 They realized how important it was to hydrate the landscape.

00:45:35.000 Now, 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.

00:45:47.000 So we've taken, again, we've taken...

00:45:49.000 Water that ought to be a wonderful asset and a blessing to a nation, and we've turned it into a demon.

00:45:58.000 But 500 years ago, beavers had 8% of American landscape.

00:46:04.000 It wasn't America then, but it was covered with beaver ponds.

00:46:07.000 8% today were less than 4% water.

00:46:10.000 But when you cover, when you have that much water, Like the beaver ponds did, it creates base flow, it fills aquifers, it makes ambient temperatures easier, evapotranspiration, cloud formation.

00:46:24.000 I mean, there's all sorts of beautiful things that happen.

00:46:26.000 And so I suggest that the first thing we need to do is be on an aggressive pond building campaign so that we eliminate flooding.

00:46:36.000 And have water to be able to irrigate.

00:46:38.000 So we're not pulling water from streams and aquifers and things like that.

00:46:41.000 So that as a result of us walking here, we are actually increasing the water commons, not decreasing the water commons.

00:46:50.000 And so on our farm, we've built over 20 ponds over the years.

00:46:54.000 We can now irrigate when the water shuts off.

00:46:58.000 And that ameliorates droughts.

00:47:01.000 The second ingredient is...

00:47:04.000 It's organic matter.

00:47:06.000 You know, one pound of organic matter holds four pounds of water.

00:47:09.000 That's the sponginess of the soil.

00:47:12.000 And, 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.

00:47:32.000 On our farm, we've gone from 1% in 1961 to over 8% today.

00:47:37.000 That 7% increase in organic matter, which means we can hold 140,000 gallons of water per acre today that we couldn't in 1961.

00:47:45.000 I'm not saying that to brag.

00:47:47.000 I'm saying this is doable.

00:47:48.000 This is not...

00:47:50.000 This is not unattainable.

00:47:51.000 We can roll up our sleeves and we can wade into this.

00:47:55.000 We don't have to just...

00:47:56.000 We should momentarily repent in sackcloth and ashes for all the damage we've done.

00:48:03.000 Let's do that.

00:48:04.000 But then let's stand up and dust ourselves off and say, okay, this head and these hands that have hurt can also heal.

00:48:10.000 And let's jump on that.

00:48:13.000 So organic matter.

00:48:14.000 And then the third is simply vegetation.

00:48:16.000 We need more vegetation.

00:48:19.000 And you don't get vegetation by 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.

00:48:45.000 A lot of people don't realize that 500 years ago, North America produced more food than we do today.

00:48:52.000 So 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.

00:49:01.000 Now, it wasn't all eaten by people.

00:49:03.000 You know, there were 100 million bison.

00:49:05.000 There were 2 million wolves that needed 20 pounds of meat a day.

00:49:08.000 There were...

00:49:09.000 You know, there were bears.

00:49:11.000 I mean, Lewis and Clark Expedition said every mile they went, they encountered a bear.

00:49:16.000 That's a lot of bears, okay?

00:49:18.000 And so 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...

00:49:31.000 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.

00:49:45.000 We reduced it rather than increased it.

00:49:47.000 And 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.

00:50:02.000 So ponds, organic matter, and vegetation are the three ways to mitigate drought.

00:50:09.000 And 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.

00:50:24.000 Let's meet it head on and let's realize, obviously, we can't completely change the weather.

00:50:33.000 We can't eliminate everything.

00:50:35.000 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.

00:50:48.000 We are not just...

00:50:50.000 Inner bystanders here.

00:50:51.000 We 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.

00:51:09.000 Joel Saladin, thank you so much for joining us today and for educating us about all these important subjects.

00:51:15.000 And I hope to have you back on this show soon.

RFK Jr. The Defender - November 16, 2024

Small Farms Healthy Food with Joel Salatin Farmer VIDEO

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