The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1478 - Joel Salatin

00:00:01.000 Good to see you again, sir.

00:00:03.000 Good to be here.

00:00:03.000 Thank you.

00:00:04.000 Thanks for coming back, man.

00:00:05.000 I really appreciate it.

00:00:05.000 This is a perfect time to talk to someone like you about our food.

00:00:11.000 We're in a very strange crisis now, and you just keep hearing time and time again in the news how much ranchers and farmers and people are really suffering right now, and how much Folks who don't have anything to do with that are now being forced to understand the importance of the food supply chain and ranchers and farmers and all the stuff that we've taken for granted for quite a long time now.

00:00:35.000 Well, they sure have.

00:00:37.000 And what's interesting about it is the juxtaposition between the, I'll just call it the industrial, the more, you know, a commercial industrial food sector versus the sector that I'm in, which is a local-centric, you know,

00:00:53.000 direct sale branded product, you know, directly from the farm.

00:00:57.000 The pandemic is the best marketing strategy we've ever seen.

00:01:01.000 We're having the best season we've ever had.

00:01:06.000 And the same thing was with farmers around the country as I talked to them.

00:01:10.000 Everyone that's like us, that did not go into the supermarket system basically, that's selling in their community, in their region, regionally, directly off the farm, having the best year we've ever had.

00:01:25.000 It is the...

00:01:28.000 It's the industrial megasystem that's cracking.

00:01:33.000 And so for the first time, we're hearing talk of, well, maybe we need to add resiliency to efficiency.

00:01:43.000 And so...

00:01:45.000 So yeah, the system that's cracking, there's plenty of food.

00:01:49.000 I mean, there's plenty of food on farms being produced.

00:01:52.000 But of course, as you know, milk is being dumped, pigs are being euthanized.

00:01:56.000 The problem is not at the farm level.

00:01:58.000 The problem is in the chain of custody between the farmer and the consumer, and primarily in the large-scale processing situation.

00:02:10.000 Yeah, these large meat processing places, they've been hit hard by the coronavirus.

00:02:16.000 They have been.

00:02:17.000 I mean, if you think about it right now, Joe, probably in the United States, the only places right now where every day thousands of people come together in crowded conditions,

00:02:33.000 Are these big meat processing plants?

00:02:35.000 I mean, the offices are closed.

00:02:37.000 The theaters are closed.

00:02:38.000 The convention centers are closed.

00:02:40.000 And so the only place where people are coming shoulder to shoulder, thousands every day, are in these mega processing facilities.

00:02:49.000 Teresa and I, my wife, actually co-own a very small abattoir, a slaughterhouse, a community slaughterhouse.

00:02:56.000 We have 20 employees.

00:02:59.000 And the difference in the vulnerability, in the exposure and risk factor between our little 20-person facility where we do, you know, maybe 50 to 70 beeves a week,

00:03:15.000 100 hogs, Versus these mega plants that have... 0.99

00:03:18.000 When you say beeves?

00:03:19.000 Beeves.

00:03:20.000 What is that?

00:03:20.000 Beef.

00:03:22.000 Oh, beefs.

00:03:23.000 Yeah.

00:03:23.000 Well, I thought you said beeves.

00:03:24.000 Well, there's no such word as beefs.

00:03:27.000 It's beeves.

00:03:28.000 B-E-E-V-E-S. Oh, okay. 1.00

00:03:30.000 That is what you're saying.

00:03:31.000 Okay.

00:03:32.000 Beeves.

00:03:33.000 Beeves.

00:03:33.000 Have you heard that before, Jamie?

00:03:34.000 No.

00:03:35.000 Okay.

00:03:35.000 So the plural of beef is not beefs.

00:03:38.000 It's beeves.

00:03:39.000 Oh, interesting.

00:03:40.000 I always thought that beef was just the meat.

00:03:43.000 Yeah.

00:03:43.000 I never thought...

00:03:44.000 I would have assumed you would say cows.

00:03:46.000 Yeah.

00:03:47.000 Well, as a farmer, cows are females who have had calves.

00:03:53.000 So it's a very – as opposed to steers, who would be – or bulls, which would be intact males, steers, non-intact.

00:03:59.000 So as a farmer, all this nomenclature is real, you know, it's – Yes, normal for you.

00:04:04.000 It's real – like a theologian teases out, you know, Presbyterians and Methodists, and we just say, well, they're Protestants, you know.

00:04:13.000 So – So, you know, we do.

00:04:18.000 We do.

00:04:19.000 It's a small facility.

00:04:21.000 And, you know, it's been in business for, I don't know, what, 60 years or so.

00:04:26.000 We've only co-owned it now for a little bit less than 10 years.

00:04:30.000 But the difference, because we do stuff by hand, workstations, you know, these stainless steel work tables are, what, you know, six, seven, eight feet?

00:04:42.000 Wide, three feet to four feet deep.

00:04:45.000 And each one is a workstation.

00:04:47.000 And you've got three guys out on the kill floor.

00:04:50.000 You've got two guys out in the cryovac room.

00:04:53.000 You've got four guys in the boning room.

00:04:55.000 You've got a guy over here running the sausage stuffer or the grinder.

00:05:01.000 It's inherently small-scale, spread out.

00:05:07.000 Completely different environment than when you're having 3,000 people in a cool, damp environment from—and I don't want to get into a rabbit trail discussion,

00:05:22.000 but frankly, in these great, great big plants, most of the workers— Are generally not Americans.

00:05:28.000 They're coming from other countries looking for the American dream. 0.98

00:05:32.000 And so they're living in crowded conditions because they're trying to save every penny to send home to get uncle and aunt and other family members here from Ethiopia, Somalia, wherever it is.

00:05:44.000 And so they're living in a house that we would live for in a house.

00:05:50.000 They're living 20. And they're eating poorly.

00:05:54.000 They're in a stressful...

00:05:56.000 They're often separated from their family.

00:05:59.000 There's just a lot of stress in their lives and...

00:06:04.000 And so then you throw these big processing facilities, they're not eating well, and it's just an incubator.

00:06:13.000 I mean, if you wanted to create an incubator for a virus, there wouldn't be a better place.

00:06:17.000 Whereas small facilities are inherently, the workers are spread out, they tend to come from the community, they tend to be career craft people rather than just, you know, make this cut, Mac.

00:06:31.000 The average poultry processing plant in our area, they say that every job can be learned in 20 minutes.

00:06:40.000 Whereas at our plant, we cross-do.

00:06:45.000 We cut meat a while, and then we go pack a while, and you're on the cut floor, and then you're doing different things.

00:06:53.000 It's a real different environment.

00:06:54.000 And so these big plants are very vulnerable.

00:06:58.000 And that's why the recalls come from there.

00:07:00.000 You know, the microbials come from there.

00:07:02.000 I mean, an average fast food hamburger has pieces of 600 animals in it.

00:07:10.000 Wow.

00:07:11.000 When you get a hamburger from us, it's one animal, you know.

00:07:16.000 So just the sheer, whatever, mixing, you know.

00:07:21.000 So, you know, for sure, we don't know a lot about this virus.

00:07:25.000 I mean, we're learning every day.

00:07:26.000 And, you know, you've got to kind of take a little bit, a grain of salt, too.

00:07:33.000 But one of the things we're certainly learning is that there's an advantage, that there is a density factor, a people density factor, like an urban, rural, you know, spreading out.

00:07:45.000 The whole social distancing spreading out thing is...

00:07:50.000 It seems to be a valuable thing.

00:07:52.000 And so if we take that into the food system, wouldn't it be an amazing thing if instead of having 150 to 200 mega processing facilities doing 98% of the nation's meat, if instead that were 200,000 Small-scale,

00:08:13.000 community-based, ecologically nested facilities, you know, all around the countryside, that would be an incredibly resilient system.

00:08:26.000 It sounds like a much better system like as you were talking before about your relationship with your customers It's a direct to farm.

00:08:33.000 I mean that's really ideal right cut out the middle person There's you cut out the confusion whether or not the animals are ethically raised or ethically slaughtered like what are the conditions they're living under I mean your poly face farms right so that that whole video that you have that I've seen that explains The way you do regenerative farming and you let these animals live the way these animals are supposed to live.

00:08:56.000 They're not confined to cages.

00:08:57.000 They're roaming around.

00:08:58.000 They're eating natural foods.

00:09:00.000 And you get a better product, you get a healthier product, and you get a better relationship with both the animals and the people that you sell this food to.

00:09:10.000 Well, sure.

00:09:11.000 And ultimately, what we're looking for is a habitat that allows each life form, whether it's a plant or an animal, to fully express – we call it expressing the pigness of the pig or the chickeness of the chicken.

00:09:24.000 You could say the tomato-ness of the tomato.

00:09:27.000 And creating a habitat that allows that life – That life to express its phenotypical and physiological distinctiveness.

00:09:40.000 In humans, we would call this self-affirmation, you know, the Tom-ness of Tom, the Joe-ness of Joe, right?

00:09:47.000 It's that affirmation.

00:09:51.000 And one of the things that we're seeing as a result, as we move into the kind of the social consequences of this whole pandemic, is there's a new phrase called the Screen New Deal,

00:10:08.000 where everything is going to AI, we're dehumanizing.

00:10:13.000 And so at a very time when people need to be personally affirmed, they're being denied their You know, their social humanity element.

00:10:25.000 I mean, you can't even see whether a person's smiling or frowning.

00:10:28.000 Yeah.

00:10:29.000 Yeah, that's the worst part about this other than the tragedies.

00:10:33.000 The worst part about this is that, like, people aren't getting hugged.

00:10:36.000 People are scared to shake hands.

00:10:38.000 Everyone's separated from everybody.

00:10:40.000 It's just very strange.

00:10:42.000 It is.

00:10:43.000 It is.

00:10:43.000 And, you know, our personal energy that we get from each other.

00:10:50.000 You know, like you, I'm sure I've done numerous Zoom things lately, more than ever.

00:10:57.000 Zoom conferences, Zoom phone conferences, different things.

00:11:01.000 And There's just not the energy.

00:11:06.000 You just don't get the energy that you get when you're right in front of each other.

00:11:10.000 Yeah.

00:11:10.000 Absolutely.

00:11:10.000 I feel the same way about podcasts.

00:11:12.000 And, you know, Jamie, I screwed up.

00:11:13.000 I forgot the nurse. 0.88

00:11:14.000 We started early.

00:11:16.000 Yeah, you want to pause and stop?

00:11:17.000 Can we?

00:11:18.000 I mean, yeah, yeah.

00:11:18.000 Okay.

00:11:19.000 We want to give you a coronavirus test.

00:11:22.000 Okay.

00:11:22.000 You down with that?

00:11:23.000 That's fine.

00:11:23.000 All right.

00:11:23.000 We'll pause right here.

00:11:25.000 Okay.

00:11:25.000 So we did you a little test and found out you have not had it.

00:11:30.000 He didn't fight it off.

00:11:31.000 Bummer.

00:11:31.000 But the doctor did explain to us that there's primary immune system and there's secondary immune system.

00:11:35.000 Your primary immune system, most likely, if you've been in contact with it, and his has.

00:11:40.000 The doctor has been around many, many people that have had it.

00:11:43.000 But your primary immune system, if you're healthy, he was saying, fights it off.

00:11:47.000 Your secondary immune system is if you have had the infection and your body has developed those antibodies, it's your second line of defense.

00:11:56.000 So, most likely your first line of defense, since you have been in contact with people that have had it, your first line of defense beat it.

00:12:03.000 Well, that's cool.

00:12:04.000 Yeah.

00:12:04.000 Well, I work on it.

00:12:06.000 Yeah, we were talking about that, and I said, please save this.

00:12:11.000 Because it's so crazy.

00:12:13.000 Explain what you do to strengthen your immune system.

00:12:17.000 In this whole thing, like you, I've been screaming, let's talk about the immune system.

00:12:24.000 I literally have not been sick A day, basically, in 20 years.

00:12:30.000 I mean, not the flu, not a cold, not, I mean, just nothing.

00:12:34.000 And I'm 63. So I'm not saying that arrogantly or proudly.

00:12:39.000 I'm saying it gratefully that I think there are things that we can do to really build up our immune system.

00:12:46.000 One of the things that I do that kind of makes all my staff laugh is that I routinely bend down with the cows and drink water out of the cow tank.

00:12:57.000 I don't drink it when it's pond water, although I've drunk pond water.

00:13:02.000 But when it's fairly clean water, I get down.

00:13:07.000 Of course, the cows are dripping saliva and stuff in it, and I just drink right out of it just like a cow.

00:13:12.000 And I'm serious.

00:13:14.000 I believe that that It builds your microbiome.

00:13:20.000 I want all those bugs, all that diversity.

00:13:23.000 We live in the most amazing microscopic soup.

00:13:30.000 It's a soup.

00:13:32.000 If you could take an electromagnetic photograph of the air, of where we are, our skin is exuding stuff. 0.99

00:13:45.000 You know, our noses are Clothes, everything, it would look like the cloud over Pigpen in the Peanuts comic strip, you know?

00:13:58.000 I mean, that's literally what we're living in.

00:14:00.000 And all of this life, all of, you know, viruses, bacteria, microorganisms, all of this life is literally having a conversation,

00:14:16.000 right?

00:14:16.000 Hey, you know, I'd like to hook on to you in a symbiotic relationship.

00:14:20.000 Hey, man, I'm a parasite. 1.00

00:14:21.000 I'm going to take you down. 0.99

00:14:22.000 You know...

00:14:24.000 It's like a drama, it's like a play that's going on inside of us, outside of us, and the thought that we can somehow, whatever, you know, isolate ourselves and extract ourselves from this magnificent life conversation that's going on in us,

00:14:45.000 on our skin, our clothes, our hair, our eyes.

00:14:53.000 It's just silly and it's part of how our immune system works.

00:14:57.000 Our immune system actually – I need your bugs.

00:15:01.000 My immune system needs your bugs.

00:15:03.000 Your immune system needs my bugs.

00:15:06.000 And so – now, does that mean we all run into the nursing homes and take vulnerable – no, no, no.

00:15:15.000 I mean, there are certainly people that are very vulnerable, so we want to be careful there.

00:15:20.000 I get that.

00:15:22.000 But for the rest of us that are generally healthy, going about our daily stuff, I mean, goodness, worry affects your cortisol limits almost more than anything.

00:15:37.000 Worry.

00:15:37.000 You know, I got on a plane yesterday to come out here.

00:15:41.000 And thanks for the nice business class ticket, by the way.

00:15:44.000 You're welcome.

00:15:44.000 And the lady's sitting in front of me.

00:15:49.000 So we're in business class.

00:15:50.000 I'm sitting.

00:15:52.000 So there's an aisle and there's two seats on either side.

00:15:57.000 And so I sit down.

00:15:58.000 There's nobody next to me.

00:16:00.000 I'm next to the window.

00:16:02.000 A lady in front of me is on the aisle. 1.00

00:16:05.000 So she's a little bit diagonal for me in front. 0.99

00:16:09.000 A guy sits...

00:16:10.000 I crossed from her on the aisle, on the opposing aisle, and she asked him to move over to the window.

00:16:19.000 And I'm just watching this play out.

00:16:22.000 Of course, I'm trying to keep my glasses from fogging up with my mask in my face.

00:16:27.000 And I'm thinking, she's worried.

00:16:31.000 She's fearful.

00:16:32.000 What have we done to ourselves as a culture that every single person we come in contact with is a Might be my killer.

00:16:41.000 I mean, that's a horrible – and so what does that do to our cortisol?

00:16:45.000 Boom, you know.

00:16:46.000 And suddenly our immune system is – whatever – compromised because we're living in this fear all the time.

00:16:54.000 I think one of the things that you said, though, when you said most of us that are healthy, I think that's not really true.

00:17:00.000 I think most of us are not healthy.

00:17:02.000 And I think that's one of the things we're finding out from this crisis.

00:17:05.000 Is that when you talk about protecting vulnerable people, there's a lot of us that are vulnerable.

00:17:11.000 Maybe not you or me, but a large number of people that are overweight, that eat poor food, and that don't take care of themselves, and those people are particularly vulnerable.

00:17:22.000 And so they're right to be afraid, but they're wrong to think that the only way to solve this is to make sure that you stay away from everybody. 0.99

00:17:31.000 The way to solve this is to stop eating shit and become a healthy person. 0.99

00:17:37.000 While you're alive, there's always a moment, a chance to be healthier. 0.99

00:17:42.000 While you're alive.

00:17:43.000 If you're alive and you're not terribly ill and dying, you could start drinking water, stop drinking soda, stop eating chips, start eating fruits and vegetables, start eating lean meats, healthy foods.

00:17:55.000 Not even lean meats.

00:17:56.000 Eat a good ribeye steak.

00:17:58.000 Pastured meats.

00:18:00.000 Pastured meats.

00:18:00.000 Eat food.

00:18:01.000 Yeah, you're right.

00:18:02.000 Well, you know...

00:18:03.000 Whenever I watch a newscast and watch the daily, like, you know, coronavirus briefing from the White House, right?

00:18:10.000 And you've got all these experts standing around, and everybody's standing there waiting for this magic vaccine.

00:18:17.000 And, of course, you know, the CDC gets $4.6 billion a year selling vaccines.

00:18:23.000 They have, whatever, 20 patent vaccines.

00:18:26.000 And so, really, the CDC is a very vested interest in trying to develop a vaccine.

00:18:33.000 There's a lot of money in sickness.

00:18:35.000 There's a lot of money in sickness.

00:18:37.000 And so, you know, we didn't get this coronavirus because of a lack of vaccine.

00:18:46.000 We got this coronavirus because something in this beautiful life bath that I described was out of whack.

00:18:59.000 Now, you know, we can...

00:19:03.000 Start discussing where it possibly came from.

00:19:05.000 I think right now that's conjecture.

00:19:07.000 I mean, I think we do know that it came out of Wuhan, but just how?

00:19:11.000 I mean, we're not sure.

00:19:13.000 But the fact is...

00:19:15.000 That there was an imbalance in life.

00:19:17.000 And just like in our lifetime, Joe, we've learned to say words that when I was a child, did you ever hear the term, you know, salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, food allergy even?

00:19:34.000 I mean, how many kids in elementary school did you know that had food allergies?

00:19:38.000 None.

00:19:39.000 Nobody.

00:19:39.000 You have a birthday party?

00:19:42.000 Mom isn't having to email—we didn't even have email back then—but mom isn't calling all the other mothers saying, well, now, what can your child eat and what can your little Mary have?

00:19:52.000 And, you know, oh, we better not have any peanuts.

00:19:54.000 I mean, that didn't exist.

00:19:56.000 And what's happened—the way I look at this is that humanity, that we as collective humanity, we've essentially taken this beautiful, benevolent earth, this benevolent A sustainer,

00:20:14.000 partner, mentor, abundant provider, and taking this partner to the boxing ring, and instead of caressing This abundant, wonderful partner provider,

00:20:31.000 we've pummeled it and pummeled it.

00:20:33.000 We've pulled the water out of its aquifers.

00:20:36.000 We've destroyed its soil.

00:20:38.000 We've put a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico.

00:20:44.000 We've used antibiotics in animals and made MRSA and C. diff and superbugs.

00:20:49.000 And so nature has been gently, gently Begging for relief as we've essentially put our foot on her neck, right?

00:21:01.000 And she's saying, E. coli, salmonella, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, right?

00:21:11.000 Including diabetes and all these other things.

00:21:15.000 And we simply don't listen and continue to pummel and eventually...

00:21:21.000 Eventually, when our benevolent nest, whatever, you know, is KO'd, we find out, oops, maybe we should have paid attention.

00:21:37.000 Yeah, and I think a real parallel is when you were talking about these large-scale meat processing plants are a perfect sort of petri dish for viruses to grow so...

00:21:49.000 Our factory farms.

00:21:51.000 So are these farms where you're stuffing pigs next to each other.

00:21:54.000 You're doing all this unnatural stuff, right?

00:21:56.000 It's unnatural for people to be stuffed into a warehouse right next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, working all day.

00:22:02.000 It's unnatural for them to be stuffed into these homes, shoulder to shoulder, with bad food and all the things that you would need to keep your body healthy and strong.

00:22:11.000 The same can be said about these factory farm situations.

00:22:14.000 One thing that I find so attractive about the way you run your farm is that there's no weirdness in watching these animals during the day.

00:22:22.000 They seem like animals just doing normal stuff.

00:22:25.000 If you see a chicken wandering around just pecking at the grass, Looks normal. 0.98

00:22:29.000 See a chicken in a cage getting fed out of a little cup or something, it looks all kinds of fucked up, right? 0.97

00:22:36.000 It doesn't feel right. 0.98

00:22:38.000 We have the phrase, respecting the pigness of the pig and the chickenness of the chicken.

00:22:45.000 And we know that these diseases are all coming from these places.

00:22:48.000 I mean, there's a ton of agricultural diseases.

00:22:51.000 You know, that are based from these factory farm situations where these animals live in these really horrific conditions and then the bacteria jump and...

00:22:59.000 Look, I mean, they're...

00:23:01.000 Look, if you ate in your toilet every...

00:23:03.000 Would you like to eat in your toilet every day?

00:23:06.000 That's how they eat.

00:23:07.000 They're breathing in their fecal particulate matter, which is, you know, putting lesions in their tender respiratory membranes, making lesions there.

00:23:20.000 And so when you have those kinds of conditions – and they're not getting exercise.

00:23:24.000 They're not getting fresh air.

00:23:26.000 And so – I mean they're not getting salad.

00:23:31.000 They're not getting any vitamin D from the sunshine.

00:23:35.000 And so what happens is you get an extremely concentrated host – We're good to go.

00:23:49.000 We're good to go.

00:24:08.000 Let's say we had a James Bond conspiratist, you know, and said, we're going to form a committee and make a pathogen-friendly farm.

00:24:18.000 You know, the old James Bond nemesis, right?

00:24:22.000 And so we form a committee and say, how can we make a pathogen-friendly farm?

00:24:26.000 Well, we would have only one species.

00:24:28.000 We'd crowd it up.

00:24:29.000 We'd take out the oxygen, the fresh air, the sunshine.

00:24:33.000 We'd give it a minimalistic diet.

00:24:37.000 What I've just described is modern, efficient industrial factory farming.

00:24:42.000 You couldn't design a better system for conductivity of pathogenicity.

00:24:49.000 Now, here's the big question.

00:24:51.000 Is it possible to feed all of Los Angeles using your methods?

00:24:57.000 Can you feed big urban areas using these regenerative methods?

00:25:02.000 Sure.

00:25:02.000 Absolutely.

00:25:03.000 So two things to realize is the bottleneck in the food system right now, the reason the supermarket is low on meat is not because there aren't animals in the field.

00:25:14.000 It's because of the processing.

00:25:17.000 It's not the trucking.

00:25:18.000 It's not the production.

00:25:20.000 It's not even the store shelf.

00:25:23.000 It's the processing.

00:25:24.000 So it's the processing that's the bottleneck.

00:25:27.000 And so my vision is that – so we get two questions.

00:25:35.000 First of all, let's deal with the production.

00:25:36.000 With the production, absolutely, if we spread out the production, if we did, for example, if we took all the confinement chicken houses and put those chickens on pasture – No problem.

00:25:52.000 It doesn't take any more land to grow the feed for a chicken on pasture than it does in a confinement house.

00:26:01.000 Don't you get a lot more lost, though, due to raptors and things along those lines?

00:26:05.000 No, no.

00:26:06.000 We put them in little protected shelters.

00:26:11.000 Then we move them every day across the pasture.

00:26:13.000 Well, yeah, you can get losses from raptors, but we use guard geese.

00:26:17.000 There are guard dogs, guard llamas.

00:26:20.000 There's all sorts of guard animals.

00:26:22.000 There's really cool – and there's a lot of research being done to jam the radar of eagles and stuff.

00:26:30.000 Really?

00:26:31.000 Oh, yeah.

00:26:32.000 They jam the radar?

00:26:33.000 I didn't even know they had radar.

00:26:35.000 Well, that's figurative.

00:26:37.000 Right.

00:26:37.000 What are they using when an eagle – it's just not just – their vision is insanely good, right?

00:26:41.000 Yeah.

00:26:42.000 Eagles in particular.

00:26:43.000 It really is.

00:26:44.000 And so, for example, I know one guy that's – it's not ready to sell yet, but he claims to have had great success putting reflective Coke can bottoms on like a traffic cone.

00:27:12.000 We're good to go.

00:27:23.000 And still uses for incoming missiles.

00:27:26.000 They have a cannon that blows out pieces of aluminum foil, basically, like graffiti, aluminum foil graffiti out into the air, and it jams the whatever, you know, the honing devices of a missile.

00:27:42.000 The Hawks are the same way.

00:27:44.000 What I'm getting at is that there are – we don't lose very much.

00:27:48.000 We protect them greatly.

00:27:52.000 There are a lot of things that you can do to mitigate that kind of pressure.

00:27:57.000 But the fact is, the industry loses tons of birds, too, in a flood, in a heat wave, in a whatever.

00:28:06.000 And so the idea that these birds in this big confinement house are actually protected from malady This is simply not true.

00:28:20.000 And then there are going to be much more of them are going to get sick.

00:28:23.000 Sure, sure.

00:28:24.000 They might have losses in that way.

00:28:26.000 Sure, sure.

00:28:27.000 So can we produce the food this way?

00:28:30.000 Absolutely.

00:28:31.000 Now, one of the things that it would require is many more people on farms.

00:28:37.000 So, you know, I've thought a lot about, obviously, as unemployment has skyrocketed through this, Right now, sitting here, it's hard for us to imagine what it'll take to fill football stadiums again,

00:28:55.000 to fill Caribbean cruises, to fill theaters, music venues, whatever, boxing matches.

00:29:07.000 Right now, it's hard to conceive what it'll take.

00:29:11.000 People are so terrified.

00:29:13.000 It's hard to...

00:29:16.000 Appreciate how much of this is going to come back, the hospitality industry and all that.

00:29:20.000 So what's going to happen?

00:29:21.000 So where are the jobs?

00:29:23.000 What are people going to do?

00:29:24.000 And I would suggest that one of the things that people can do is that we can have a lot of these smaller plants and we have way more people actually growing food, participating in food production personally.

00:29:40.000 Is food going to be more expensive?

00:29:41.000 Maybe so.

00:29:44.000 You get to be healthy, and we have a healthy planet, and what's that worth?

00:29:50.000 How much more do you think it would cost?

00:29:52.000 I mean, I'll just give a rough percentage.

00:29:55.000 If you're thinking about food production right now, with the current situation, there's a lot of automation, right?

00:30:00.000 A lot of these factory farms, they don't require too many people to be working there.

00:30:02.000 Sure, sure.

00:30:03.000 You would require much more people.

00:30:05.000 You'd have to manage these animals.

00:30:07.000 You'd have to do it sort of along the lines of the way that you do.

00:30:09.000 How many more people do you think would be involved in a large-scale farm? 0.97

00:30:13.000 Well, a lot.

00:30:14.000 Lots of people.

00:30:16.000 I don't have a number there, but I can tell you that food prices might go up to what they were 30 years ago.

00:30:26.000 And also, would it be fair to say that food prices might go to where they should be?

00:30:32.000 Like, a cheeseburger really shouldn't be 99 cents.

00:30:35.000 No, no, absolutely.

00:30:37.000 As you're very familiar with the argument of the externalized costs, they don't get captured.

00:30:43.000 What's the cost?

00:30:44.000 Right now, 50% of the cases of diarrhea in the U.S. are caused by foodborne bacteria.

00:30:50.000 Well, what's a case of diarrhea worth?

00:30:53.000 Right.

00:30:54.000 Yeah, that's a good point.

00:30:56.000 If you start putting dollars on these externalized costs, you know, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the fact that we have, you know, hundreds of square miles that don't grow shrimp anymore, you know, because it's toxic from the runoff from the Mississippi, from chemical farming.

00:31:12.000 So there's a lot of these externalized costs.

00:31:16.000 And not only that, but if this actually became normative, The new way, the new orthodoxy, there would be definitely economies of scale that we don't have right now.

00:31:30.000 I mean, I'll just give you one example that probably nobody would think of.

00:31:33.000 So we pay workman's compensation at our farm.

00:31:37.000 So how do you determine the exposure level, the risk factor of a poultry worker?

00:31:42.000 I mean, think about if you have a Tyson chicken farm and you hire an employee to be in the chicken house, Think about his workman's comp risk.

00:31:55.000 I mean, there's fecal particulate all day long that he's breathing.

00:31:59.000 You've got augers, chains, feed bins, electrical connections, dust.

00:32:06.000 I mean, it's a very high-risk situation.

00:32:11.000 For us, a poultry worker goes out in the field and Move some chickens in a field.

00:32:19.000 There's no fecal particulate.

00:32:21.000 There's no dust.

00:32:22.000 There's no augers. 1.00

00:32:26.000 There's no spinning fans, vent shafts.

00:32:32.000 There's none of this.

00:32:33.000 And so part of the cost, the reason that our chicken is more expensive than what's in the store, is not only externalized cost, but it is unrecognized cost.

00:32:46.000 Unrecognized savings that we offer that can't be captured in a Square peg in a round hole.

00:32:57.000 I see what you're saying.

00:32:58.000 Yeah.

00:32:58.000 The overall big picture of health for you, health for the food, how much is that worth?

00:33:05.000 Yeah.

00:33:06.000 Right.

00:33:06.000 That's interesting that we're not really taking into consideration these secondary costs that come about from doing it the wrong way.

00:33:12.000 Yeah.

00:33:13.000 We're not.

00:33:14.000 I mean, there's a lot of those...

00:33:19.000 Much of our increased cost has nothing to do with actual production cost.

00:33:26.000 It's the non-scalable regulatory overheads And this, of course, is why we don't have more community small-scale abattoirs around the country.

00:33:40.000 It's not because there's not a demand for them.

00:33:42.000 It's because the paperwork, the HACCP plans, hazardous analysis critical control point plans, and the paperwork to be able to launch Is

00:34:13.000 there a solution for that?

00:34:15.000 Well, there are a couple solutions.

00:34:18.000 Certainly one that's being championed right now by Congressman Thomas Massey called the Prime Act.

00:34:25.000 He's had it in for five years, and amazingly, it's kind of just floundered for five years.

00:34:31.000 All of a sudden, in the last two months, he's got 18 new co-sponsors because of this.

00:34:36.000 And what the Prime Act would do, it would allow uninspected, custom-processed meat In-state to be sold by the piece.

00:34:48.000 That's not legal right now.

00:34:50.000 Right now, the only way that you can sell a T-bone, if you want to buy a T-bone steak for me, the only way for you to get it is for me to go to a federal-inspected slaughterhouse, get the animal processed, packaged under inspection, and put in for you.

00:35:06.000 Custom houses are where if you want to buy a half a beef, a quarter beef, all right, and it goes in with your name on that quarter and they're custom processing it for me, yeah, then I can buy it.

00:35:19.000 And what Congressman Massey is saying with the Prime Act is, Why should we discriminate and only allow people to tap into the lower cost and lower overheads of the custom processing facility to only those people who can afford to buy a quarter of beef at a time?

00:35:38.000 That's very poverty discriminatory.

00:35:41.000 Let's open that up so that people can buy it by the piece.

00:35:45.000 We're not going to ship it interstate.

00:35:46.000 We're not going to sell it at Walmart.

00:35:48.000 Okay, there's...

00:35:49.000 But if you and I as neighbors...

00:35:53.000 If we want to do business together, and I'm using a powerful phrasing here, as consenting adults, if we want to exercise freedom of choice and participate in a consensual relationship of commerce,

00:36:10.000 why should that be a bureaucrat's business between two consenting neighbors?

00:36:19.000 Right.

00:36:19.000 So what you're saying is long, but is the regulatory process in place to make sure that people are using the proper sanitation methods, making sure that the animals are healthy, making sure that all these things are in place so that unscrupulous characters don't take advantage of the system and then screw over the consumer and the consumer gets sick?

00:36:40.000 This is like best case scenario for the regulation, right?

00:36:43.000 That it's there to protect us.

00:36:45.000 Well, that's the assumption, yes.

00:36:49.000 And I would simply ask that at some point, when you have a very close, transparent relationship one-on-one, you don't have truckers and warehouses and big slaughterhouses and supermarkets,

00:37:06.000 blah, blah, blah, in between us, there is We're good to go.

00:37:37.000 You can keep up to three in your home without subjecting yourself to the licensing and compliance of daycare regulations because they know if all you're going to do is keep three in your homes, those parents, you're going to have a close relationship with them.

00:37:50.000 This is not a daycare center.

00:37:54.000 The same thing is true with elder care.

00:37:56.000 My wife's grandmother spent her last year in a lady's home who is allowed to keep three people as elder care. 1.00

00:38:03.000 She was an RN. She wanted to not have to go to the hospital every day and started a side gig in her home.

00:38:11.000 She cooked four of them, she took care of them, three of them in her home.

00:38:14.000 Does this vary state by state?

00:38:15.000 It does vary state by state.

00:38:17.000 I'm just giving you an example of where it's reasonable to appreciate that a different relationship at scale can create its own safety.

00:38:34.000 In that particular thing.

00:38:35.000 Can you keep a hundred in your home without a license?

00:38:38.000 No.

00:38:39.000 But three, if you're only going to keep three, you're probably going to see them.

00:38:45.000 You're probably going to have a direct relationship with each of their caregivers, their people that are signing off for them.

00:38:53.000 It's a different relationship.

00:38:55.000 And so all I would say is that from the safety issue That there needs to be some place, a point at which we can opt to do business with each other without a bureaucrat involved.

00:39:12.000 Let me ask you this.

00:39:13.000 If you wanted to slaughter a cow and then you wanted to give some of the meat away to your neighbor, would you have to bring it to some sort of a facility?

00:39:23.000 Perfectly legal.

00:39:24.000 Perfectly legal.

00:39:25.000 So this is not a...

00:39:26.000 Yeah, if this were all about safety...

00:39:29.000 Right.

00:39:30.000 You wouldn't be able to do that.

00:39:32.000 So the important thing to realize is that the prohibition here is not on the – in fact, our neighbor can even buy it legally.

00:39:42.000 Oh, really?

00:39:43.000 I just can't sell it.

00:39:44.000 So the prohibition is only on one.

00:39:46.000 If you can't sell it, how are they going to buy it?

00:39:48.000 Black market.

00:39:50.000 So if I did this under the radar, okay, so I butcher a chicken in my backyard and the neighbor comes over and buys it from me, okay?

00:40:01.000 It's legal for him.

00:40:01.000 It's legal for him to buy it.

00:40:03.000 It's not legal for me to sell it.

00:40:05.000 But everything else in society that we've determined is a hazardous – a controlled substance, a hazardous substance, the prohibition is both on seller and buyer.

00:40:14.000 Right.

00:40:15.000 And I don't want to go down that rabbit hole either of I'm a pretty libertarian drug, let it all go.

00:40:23.000 But without regard to that, the prohibitions are equal on even possession.

00:40:30.000 If you want to have a ton of cocaine in your house, Even if you just went over there in a corner on a pallet, yeah, I've got a ton of cocaine here, what's wrong with that?

00:40:43.000 You can't have that, all right?

00:40:45.000 But when it comes to food products, the prohibitions are only on one side, and they don't include if you give it away.

00:40:54.000 So if it was really dangerous, you shouldn't be able to buy it, you shouldn't be able to possess it, and you shouldn't be able to give it away.

00:41:02.000 I see what you're saying, kind of.

00:41:04.000 But the difference is, first of all, cocaine is illegal.

00:41:07.000 Beef's not illegal.

00:41:08.000 And second of all, the idea is you're trying to protect the consumer.

00:41:13.000 And I think that they have exceptions for these small situations where you're the farmer and maybe this guy's growing tomatoes and you trade him some filet mignon for some tomatoes.

00:41:24.000 Sure.

00:41:24.000 You have a good deal there.

00:41:25.000 That makes sense.

00:41:27.000 I think it's more reasonable that they step back and let that happen.

00:41:31.000 But it is odd that they can buy unregulated beef, but you can't sell unregulated beef.

00:41:37.000 So it's like, how'd you get that beef?

00:41:38.000 I bought it.

00:41:39.000 Is it regulated?

00:41:40.000 No.

00:41:40.000 All right.

00:41:42.000 They don't even go, who's the criminal selling you this beef?

00:41:46.000 That's very strange.

00:41:48.000 So the farmer's the one that's liable.

00:41:52.000 The buyer, the customer is not.

00:41:55.000 But the same thing is true.

00:41:58.000 Let's appreciate too, for example, wildlife.

00:42:01.000 I mean, right now you can go out during hunting season and you can shoot a deer and you don't have to worry about temperature.

00:42:10.000 You don't have to worry about any inspections.

00:42:12.000 Nothing.

00:42:13.000 Or a wild pig, right?

00:42:15.000 A squirrel.

00:42:16.000 You can bring that home and there's no inspection, no nothing over that.

00:42:22.000 And you can dress that yourself.

00:42:25.000 I mean, you know, butcher it, package it, whatever.

00:42:27.000 Feed it to your children.

00:42:28.000 You can have a block party, invite all your block and feed everybody with that food.

00:42:33.000 That's perfectly legal.

00:42:36.000 But to do a chicken...

00:42:38.000 Or a pig?

00:42:39.000 Or a cow?

00:42:42.000 On your own and sell that, what is it about selling something that suddenly turns it from benign to hazardous?

00:42:52.000 Well, I think it's just protection for the consumer.

00:42:54.000 And I think it's also like it'd be fine if it was a small neighborhood where you knew the farmer and you had a great relationship with them.

00:43:02.000 But they're talking about doing things at scale when you're talking about selling food to, you know, a large city.

00:43:08.000 You can't really just hope the guy did a good job.

00:43:12.000 That's the argument for regulation.

00:43:14.000 The argument for regulation is when things scale up, when you need someone to step in and protect the consumers, because if there is one bad actor who's not taking care of it, he has the potential of sickening thousands of people.

00:43:25.000 Right, which is exactly the argument for decentralizing And de-amalgamating as opposed to centralizing and amalgamating.

00:43:36.000 Is it a land issue though?

00:43:39.000 The factory farms that I've seen in videos where they have these pigs, they're stuffed next to each other in this large warehouse and the same with the chickens.

00:43:48.000 How much space would you need to have the same amount of chickens and the same amount of pigs if you let them free range? 0.89

00:43:55.000 Here's my point.

00:43:57.000 What you don't see in those videos is you don't see The hundreds of acres growing corn and soybeans To feed them in that house.

00:44:07.000 The industry wants you to think that this is some sort of an island.

00:44:13.000 Boy, we're cranking this out of this house.

00:44:16.000 They're not showing you the tractor trailers bringing in the grain and hauling out the manure and the square miles of fields to spread the manure.

00:44:25.000 They're not showing you how dependent that is on this massive land base.

00:44:29.000 And so in the pastured model, the decentralized pastured model, Instead of having 15,000—I mean, our farm, we're going to raise like 45,000 chickens this summer.

00:44:41.000 We're not backyard by any means.

00:44:44.000 But guess what?

00:44:45.000 Those are in 275-bird shelters that are moved every day across pastures.

00:44:54.000 It doesn't take one more acre to produce the feed or handle the manure, whether the chicken is outside or inside.

00:45:04.000 The difference is when you come and see our operation, you see all the land.

00:45:08.000 When you see the factory farm, You don't see any of the land.

00:45:13.000 But isn't it possible that these factory farms are set up where the farms where the animals are raised are completely separate?

00:45:20.000 It's a separate business from the farms where the soybeans and the corn are raised and it's not on the same property.

00:45:25.000 No, ours is too.

00:45:26.000 We buy our grain from neighbors.

00:45:29.000 Absolutely.

00:45:29.000 But if they had to grow these animals and grow that food, would they have enough land to do everything together in the same farm?

00:45:38.000 There's no need to do it on the same farm.

00:45:40.000 I'm a big believer in mutual interdependence, not complete independence.

00:45:45.000 We don't have any intention to grow our own grain.

00:45:47.000 We don't have the soils for it.

00:45:49.000 We don't have the equipment for it.

00:45:50.000 We don't have the skill set for it.

00:45:52.000 So we buy from neighbors who do GMO-free, non-genetically modified, GMO-free grain, and we give them I think?

00:46:21.000 In the kind of situation I'm describing, instead of having a fundamentally segregated food system, you have a fundamentally integrated food system.

00:46:31.000 I see what you're saying.

00:46:31.000 That's what happens.

00:46:32.000 Strong relationship with people growing that grain.

00:46:34.000 So for example, I mean you started the discussion with can Los Angeles – is there enough land to feed Los Angeles?

00:46:41.000 And we could discuss whether Los Angeles should be as big as it is.

00:46:45.000 I mean, that's a valid discussion.

00:46:46.000 It's a very valid discussion.

00:46:47.000 But we can go there.

00:46:50.000 But first, let me just say that if California, for example, did not export – I don't know what the percentage is, but it's huge.

00:46:59.000 You know, almonds all over the world.

00:47:03.000 If California is centered on feeding California – There's absolutely enough here to feed California.

00:47:09.000 Okay?

00:47:10.000 I mean, Iowa.

00:47:12.000 Iowa imports 90%.

00:47:15.000 Iowa is probably the most fertile place in the world.

00:47:20.000 And they only eat...

00:47:22.000 Only 10% of the food consumed in Iowa is grown in Iowa and processed in Iowa.

00:47:29.000 That's pretty crazy.

00:47:30.000 It is crazy.

00:47:31.000 Hawaii, only 5%.

00:47:33.000 95% comes from...

00:47:36.000 Hawaii, I mean, they've got ranches.

00:47:38.000 I mean, why would you have to import stuff if you can grow pineapples and macadamia nuts in your backyard?

00:47:46.000 Come on, you know.

00:47:49.000 So there's a huge disconnect.

00:47:56.000 And this is one of the reasons that we're having this, I think, this blowback from nature is that instead of having a fundamentally integrated system, I mean, think of how in Switzerland, you know, they take the cows up to the mountain pastures,

00:48:11.000 they milk, and the milk flows down and they make cheese up there.

00:48:16.000 The whey from the cheese goes into the The pigs eat the whey, and so instead of transporting milk to a centralized cheese maker and pigs to a centralized processor,

00:48:32.000 they're actually making the cheese on site.

00:48:35.000 So all they've got to actually transport is cheese and pork.

00:48:42.000 So they slaughter, you know, contiguous nearby, not on the same farm necessarily, but nearby.

00:48:49.000 So you don't have all this transportation.

00:48:51.000 What you have is a fundamentally decentralized, we could even say democratized, could we say food distancing, that creates resiliency in the system.

00:49:05.000 So instead of being tied to these 100 or 150 mega processing facilities, We're decentralized throughout the land base.

00:49:16.000 How much more money do you think it would cost for food?

00:49:19.000 We kind of touched on this earlier, but if you're dealing with this more natural-based system and it's more complex, it's going to require more people, and it's going to require complete restructuring of the system that's currently in place.

00:49:32.000 Sure it would.

00:49:34.000 I think...

00:49:35.000 I don't have a figure for science, but I think in general it would be probably double what you'd pay at Costco.

00:49:44.000 Double?

00:49:45.000 Yeah, that's an issue for a lot of folks.

00:49:47.000 But now think about this.

00:49:49.000 Think about this.

00:49:54.000 Oh, man, where do you start with this?

00:49:58.000 First of all, You're going to offer a lot of jobs.

00:50:02.000 There are a lot of people that are going to be looking for jobs right now.

00:50:04.000 So this offers a lot of job opportunities.

00:50:08.000 Number two, it's much more healing on the land.

00:50:12.000 Number three, you don't have all the pathogenicity.

00:50:17.000 You don't have to use drugs, antibiotics.

00:50:20.000 I mean, our meat doesn't do drugs.

00:50:22.000 Our dinner doesn't do drugs.

00:50:24.000 People don't realize that two-thirds of the drugs used in the country aren't in people.

00:50:28.000 They're in animals.

00:50:30.000 So you don't have those issues.

00:50:32.000 There are a lot of issues that you don't have, and those add up in the big picture.

00:50:38.000 So I always tell people our food is the cheapest aggregate Food there is, we just put all the costs in.

00:50:46.000 All our costs are in, okay?

00:50:49.000 And so we're not asking taxpayers, society, the planet, we're not asking them to pick up the tab for cheating, for cutting corners.

00:50:59.000 And that's what Costco is.

00:51:00.000 And what's interesting is that 40 years ago, right now today, 9% Of the average person's income, 9% is spent on food.

00:51:13.000 That's our average in our country.

00:51:15.000 Forty years ago, it was 18. Forty years ago, 9% of our personal income was spent on healthcare.

00:51:24.000 Today that's 18%.

00:51:26.000 Oh, interesting.

00:51:27.000 Isn't that interesting how those have inverted?

00:51:29.000 Yeah, very interesting.

00:51:30.000 Those have inverted in roughly 40 years.

00:51:32.000 Ever since the U.S. duh, called the U.S. duh, created the food pyramid and put Twinkies and Cocoa Puffs on the bottom as a foundational.

00:51:43.000 You can track the diabetes.

00:51:45.000 You can track obesity.

00:51:47.000 You can track all of these things right through from that time.

00:51:51.000 That's an interesting way to look at costs, right?

00:51:56.000 We're only looking at the cost of the meat.

00:51:58.000 We're not looking at the cost for your health, the cost of health care.

00:52:03.000 When you see steak at Costco, it's insanely cheap.

00:52:06.000 It's almost obscene.

00:52:08.000 It's like, how is a steak that cheap?

00:52:10.000 What are you doing?

00:52:11.000 How is it possible?

00:52:16.000 You know, there are all sorts of special, you know, whatever, fraternal negotiated things to make that happen.

00:52:25.000 And the fact is that you don't have to watch the news very much to know that farm suicide is spiking.

00:52:34.000 You know, there are implications.

00:52:37.000 I mean, the whole...

00:52:42.000 The domino effect of dysfunction.

00:52:45.000 There's a reason why rural America has a bigger opioid problem than urban America.

00:52:52.000 The pandemic has been primarily an urban situation, but the opioid crisis has been primarily a rural situation.

00:52:59.000 Why?

00:52:59.000 Because folks feel disaffirmed.

00:53:04.000 I mean, one of the biggest One of the biggest things that this virus has brought out, you know, they say that the crisis never makes, it never makes a trend.

00:53:14.000 It simply accelerates or brings into focus a trend that was already there.

00:53:20.000 And one of the trends that's been happening in this country now for 20 years is a bifurcation of access between rural and urban to the internet.

00:53:30.000 Like on our farm, you know, We still have hours of the day where we can't get cell phone service.

00:53:41.000 We can't get internet service.

00:53:42.000 Somebody comes to the store and we can't run their credit card because the Wi-Fi is down.

00:53:48.000 It's very, very slow.

00:53:50.000 We can't do Skype.

00:53:52.000 We barely can do Zoom.

00:53:53.000 When I do Zoom calls, it kicks me off about three times every hour.

00:53:57.000 Right now that sounds like a magic place that you live.

00:54:01.000 Because that's the thing that people are having a hard time with, is digital detoxing.

00:54:06.000 Right.

00:54:06.000 I understand that.

00:54:07.000 Too much of it in their lives.

00:54:08.000 I get that.

00:54:10.000 But when you're running a business, or you're trying to do schoolwork from home, so what's happening is we're now getting a very accelerated urban-rural divide of opportunity because rural,

00:54:34.000 we don't have this access.

00:54:36.000 And I'm not asking for big government programs, but I am telling you that this access to broadband internet, especially now as we start Working from home.

00:54:53.000 And as we have people there, there are lots of people, I'm sure you probably know some, that are saying, I'm getting out of the city and I ain't going back.

00:54:59.000 I mean, right now, New York City, all the movie companies in New York, their warehouses are stuck full of people who called them and said, I fled the city from the coronavirus.

00:55:10.000 I want you to clean out my apartment, put it in a warehouse, and I'll tell you where to send it when I get myself situated.

00:55:16.000 I mean, that's a phenomenon that's already happening.

00:55:20.000 Well, where are those people going to go?

00:55:22.000 I mean, ideally, we would actually spread out and create a more, you know, spread out population on the landscape.

00:55:33.000 Well, people are realizing the hazards of living on top of each other like that, not just because of virus and the things spread like wildfire through the population, but also when you have to get out.

00:55:45.000 If something goes down and you got to get out of there and you realize, like, I don't even have a car.

00:55:50.000 What am I going to do?

00:55:51.000 Carry my bed on my back?

00:55:53.000 What are you going to do?

00:55:54.000 And people realize, like, hey, maybe this isn't the best idea to live like this.

00:55:58.000 And then when they look at the prospects of New York City going back to normal like what it was five months ago, boy, that's a long road.

00:56:05.000 You might be two years from now before it's like that again.

00:56:08.000 Right.

00:56:08.000 That's right.

00:56:09.000 And it might not happen at all.

00:56:10.000 This is the other thing.

00:56:11.000 I was watching this documentary on the construction of viruses, this piece, and they were talking about when they give an 18-month window for creating a vaccine for this virus.

00:56:26.000 They're like, but maybe not!

00:56:29.000 Right.

00:56:29.000 Yeah, they're like, maybe they don't come up with one that's effective.

00:56:32.000 That's possible, too.

00:56:34.000 We've been 40 years with the flu.

00:56:36.000 Still don't have a flu vaccine.

00:56:39.000 What is the flu shot, then?

00:56:40.000 The flu shot?

00:56:41.000 Well, that's supposedly to help the flu, but there's how many strains of it, and they never hit the right strain.

00:56:46.000 I mean, the actual efficacy of the flu shot?

00:56:50.000 Has not been determined.

00:56:52.000 It is a vaccine though, correct?

00:56:54.000 Yeah, it is.

00:56:54.000 It is.

00:56:55.000 I had Dr. Peter Hotez on, who is an expert in vaccines and infectious diseases and tropical diseases.

00:57:01.000 And one of the things that he was saying that if you get the flu shot, even if it's not for the correct strain, there's still enough pieces of this that will protect you from getting really bad sickness from the flu strain, even if it's the wrong strain.

00:57:17.000 That's one opinion.

00:57:18.000 You don't agree with that?

00:57:19.000 No, I don't agree with that opinion. 1.00

00:57:21.000 But you're out there drinking with cows and shit. 1.00

00:57:23.000 Absolutely. 1.00

00:57:24.000 Yeah, I do.

00:57:25.000 When this all broke, we sent a letter out to our customers saying, hey, come to the farm.

00:57:32.000 Take off your shoes.

00:57:33.000 Walk barefoot through the pasture.

00:57:34.000 We've got a nice big compost pile.

00:57:36.000 Stick your hands in a compost pile.

00:57:38.000 Feed your microbiome.

00:57:41.000 Did anybody take you up on that offer?

00:57:43.000 Oh, yeah.

00:57:44.000 So you had a bunch of freaks out there walking barefoot, sticking their hand in poo. 0.99

00:57:47.000 Yeah, it's great.

00:57:49.000 It's great.

00:57:51.000 Did you check on them, see if they're okay a couple weeks later?

00:57:54.000 I don't think anybody's gotten sick from it.

00:57:58.000 You should check.

00:58:05.000 We need to be asking as a nation—I mean, I'm still waiting for when they do the daily briefs up there in the White House—I'm still waiting for somebody up there, anybody, somebody, to step to the microphone and say, look, folks— Let's talk about immunity.

00:58:23.000 Let's talk about how you build immunity.

00:58:26.000 And the fact that we're in the middle of this and we've still got the coke trucks running up and down the road.

00:58:31.000 And look, I like a coke, you know, once a year, twice a year.

00:58:36.000 But there's a big difference between doing that and three times a day.

00:58:42.000 What are we eating?

00:58:44.000 Are we eating, you know, comfort food, taco chips?

00:58:47.000 Look, I like chocolate, but enough is enough, you know.

00:58:51.000 And are we in our kitchens?

00:58:53.000 Are we actually getting good food?

00:58:56.000 Are we hydrating?

00:58:58.000 Most of us are dehydrated because the water tastes bad.

00:59:02.000 Well, let's make sure we each drink half a gallon a day. 0.97

00:59:05.000 Let's start there.

00:59:06.000 How about sleep?

00:59:08.000 Are you getting, you know, eight and a half hours a night?

00:59:11.000 Or are you staying up watching Netflix because you're depressed?

00:59:16.000 Eating chips and drinking soda because you're depressed and you're getting six hours of sleep.

00:59:22.000 All of that builds up.

00:59:23.000 Hey, how about have you forgiven everybody?

00:59:30.000 Resentment.

00:59:31.000 Resentment eats you.

00:59:32.000 I mean, it eats you up.

00:59:34.000 Resentment.

00:59:35.000 Vengeance.

00:59:37.000 Resentment.

00:59:41.000 Guilt?

00:59:41.000 Guilt.

00:59:42.000 Yes, guilt.

00:59:44.000 Whatever you stole, give it back.

00:59:47.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:59:48.000 And if you've got a bad situation with somebody...

00:59:52.000 Call them up.

00:59:53.000 Apologize. 0.99

00:59:54.000 You fucked up. 0.91

00:59:55.000 Yeah, be the first. 1.00

00:59:56.000 Be the first.

00:59:57.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:59:58.000 Let it go.

00:59:59.000 Let it go.

01:00:00.000 And I just think that those simple, like, you know, six or seven Immune – get exercise. 0.98

01:00:07.000 Go – get outside.

01:00:08.000 Run around in the sun, all right?

01:00:13.000 Those kinds of things – if we – I mean, you know, Michelle Obama had the Let's Move campaign.

01:00:19.000 It was a great campaign.

01:00:20.000 She was right on, OK? And I'm not trying to be political.

01:00:24.000 I'm just – she was right.

01:00:26.000 And now – I mean – My driver that picked me up from the airport last night.

01:00:34.000 He said, this is my first job for a month.

01:00:43.000 And he said, all I've been doing is inside the house watching Netflix.

01:00:48.000 Well, that's not going to build your immune system. 0.68

01:00:53.000 He needs to get out and Go stick his hand in poo.

01:00:58.000 I mean, I don't know if this is true, but I would imagine that the immune system is like your cardiovascular system.

01:01:03.000 It needs a workout.

01:01:04.000 It does.

01:01:05.000 And many people believe this.

01:01:07.000 In fact, there's an entire school of thought.

01:01:12.000 You know, this hyperallergenic thing where a lot of the allergies we have today are because we're so sterile.

01:01:21.000 I mean, this was part of the kind of unspoken part of the book Guns, Germs, and Steel.

01:01:28.000 You know, that was a fascinating book, and it talked about the ascendancy of the Europeans who kept livestock in their house, and that's why they We're immune to smallpox and all these things that were devastating to the other people that didn't have nearby livestock.

01:01:43.000 And so we want our customers to come out and pet a calf, go in the brooder and pick up a chick and hold a chicken.

01:01:51.000 And we think that that's really, really...

01:01:54.000 That's not just...

01:01:59.000 I would be interested to see what's going to happen when people do go back to normal life with these compromised immune systems from being inside all the time, whether or not just regular common cold kicks in on a larger scale.

01:02:14.000 Well, there are medical doctors.

01:02:15.000 I can't give you names right now, but I'm like you.

01:02:18.000 I'm sleuthing all this different material.

01:02:21.000 And I can tell you there are numerous medical doctors who are saying that as we come out of this, we're going to see a spate of exactly colds, flu, different things, because we haven't been exercising our immune systems in this soup.

01:02:37.000 And in fact, Governor Cuomo was...

01:02:42.000 It was interesting, his reaction the other day when he got the report, the data now, there's, you know, more data is coming out every day.

01:02:47.000 And one of the reports that just came out last week was that in New York, the people who continued working actually had less, less, whatever, positives to the virus than the people who sheltered across the demographic,

01:03:09.000 including frontline hospital workers.

01:03:12.000 Which, you know, you look at that and you say, well, you know, the people who were sheltering, they were dwelling on it.

01:03:21.000 I mean, they were watching news all day.

01:03:24.000 If you watch the media all day, you are scared to death, okay?

01:03:29.000 And rightly so.

01:03:30.000 That's what you're feeding your mind.

01:03:32.000 But if you're working and you're building and you're creating and you're doing your things, sure, you might think about the virus once in a while.

01:03:40.000 But, I mean, literally...

01:03:42.000 In my day, I don't think about it but a few minutes a day.

01:03:48.000 It's only when I come in and turn on the news or look at podcasts that I'm interested in it.

01:03:56.000 But I'm out there busy.

01:03:58.000 And there's something that happens, I think, psychosomatically when your mind is consumed every day with...

01:04:10.000 With fear.

01:04:11.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:04:12.000 Well, the media's played into it, and also people are hearing terrible stories about emergency rooms, particularly in New York City and places where it's stuffed full of people, and the hospitals are overrun, the ICUs are overrun.

01:04:25.000 Thank goodness that that has sort of calmed down, even in New York City.

01:04:29.000 Cuomo basically said today that they're back to where they were when the pandemic exploded, so...

01:04:35.000 It's nice that they've sort of leveled that out, but what's going to happen when you just let people out again?

01:04:40.000 Are they going to start getting sick like crazy again?

01:04:42.000 I mean, is it going to be another spread?

01:04:44.000 There's a real worry about that, and we're worried that during this time, we haven't been encouraging people to build up their immune system.

01:04:51.000 We have been encouraging them to exercise.

01:04:53.000 We've just been feeding them fear.

01:04:55.000 Yes, that's right.

01:04:56.000 It's been a feeling of fear.

01:04:58.000 And so, you know, interestingly, I've got a book that's actually, we'll have in hand in whatever, 10 days, a new book coming out I've written with a nutritionist biochemist, Dr. Sina McCullough.

01:05:15.000 And the title of the book is Beyond Labels.

01:05:19.000 And it's a doctor and a farmer Lead you to a place of food empowerment.

01:05:27.000 You know, when you stand in front of a bunch of labels and you see everything from organic certified to fair trade to, you know, natural, they're very confusing.

01:05:43.000 And what happens is when you're faced with So much choice of label information, you tend to just shut down.

01:05:57.000 You get paralyzed.

01:05:57.000 You say, Forget it.

01:06:00.000 It's too complicated.

01:06:01.000 It's too difficult.

01:06:03.000 And so we've written this book.

01:06:07.000 She, from this chemistry standpoint, me from a farmer's standpoint, trying to cut through this.

01:06:12.000 And so people can be empowered to actually make food decisions.

01:06:20.000 And we talk a lot about immunity, feeding your microbiome, to build that up so that you have a diversified enough I've exercised enough immune system that you can withstand this.

01:06:34.000 And so I think that developing a robust immune system, think about if that occupied your mind, how am I going to develop a robust immune system?

01:06:51.000 Just think about Dwelling on that as opposed to, oh no, am I going to get it?

01:06:57.000 Am I going to get it?

01:06:59.000 I don't think we've scratched the surface as to what thinking, I'm going to build my immune system.

01:07:07.000 Let's go get them.

01:07:10.000 Just the mind-body connection, what that does to your body to suddenly get a burst of hope.

01:07:18.000 As opposed to a constant diet of despair.

01:07:22.000 It has to have a big factor.

01:07:24.000 I mean, that kind of stress plays a big factor with people's immune systems all the time.

01:07:28.000 If people are stressed out, they always get sick.

01:07:30.000 It's real, real common.

01:07:32.000 It just makes sense.

01:07:33.000 And I think this kind of fear, particularly, I mean, the way I was experiencing it, when the Lockdown was first ordered and everyone was at the supermarket.

01:07:42.000 No one was wearing masks yet, but everyone was stockpiling food.

01:07:46.000 And, you know, we were nervous.

01:07:48.000 We were real nervous because we didn't know what this was going to be like.

01:07:51.000 And we were also, I was nervous particularly because I feel like the information we were getting out of China was not correct.

01:07:57.000 And I was worried that when you see those videos of them spraying disinfectant on houses and buildings, it's like maybe this is way worse than we think it is and it's going to hit America really hard because we've been lied to by the Chinese. 1.00

01:08:09.000 There was a lot of fear.

01:08:10.000 So I remember lying in bed at night and like testing my breath like maybe I have it now.

01:08:16.000 Maybe it's going to get worse.

01:08:17.000 There was a lot of that.

01:08:18.000 There was a lot of that.

01:08:19.000 I didn't sleep real good at all for maybe the first few days of lockdown until I sort of calmed down and realized, well, I'm not going anywhere.

01:08:27.000 I can't get it.

01:08:28.000 And then I got tested.

01:08:30.000 I'm like, okay, well, this is nice to know that I don't have it currently.

01:08:34.000 Maybe if I just keep doing what I'm doing, I won't get it. 0.99

01:08:38.000 Then, you know, I'd have days where half the day I'd think, this is all bullshit. 0.81

01:08:43.000 What we need to do is tell people how to strengthen their immune system, and then you read some crazy story about some new inflammatory syndrome they're finding on, you know, some patients where, you know, their feet are swelling up. 0.90

01:08:54.000 Yeah, blue toes and all this.

01:08:56.000 Yeah.

01:08:57.000 And then you get scared again.

01:08:58.000 Yeah.

01:08:59.000 I'm totally with you.

01:09:00.000 And I think that that brings up the issue of how our society now views death.

01:09:06.000 I read an interesting article just in the last couple of days about how – as we have left – it used to be when we were kids, We use the term, somebody dropped dead.

01:09:21.000 Remember that?

01:09:21.000 You know, they just dropped dead.

01:09:23.000 Good old days.

01:09:24.000 Good old days.

01:09:24.000 All right.

01:09:25.000 Well, today, we don't say they dropped dead.

01:09:28.000 We say apparently medicine failed them or the hospital failed.

01:09:32.000 It's like instead of just people, yeah, we do drop dead.

01:09:37.000 Instead, every death is some sort of a failure of our techno-sophisticated cryogenic, you know, It's a system that's supposed to keep everybody, you know,

01:09:53.000 beautiful and perfect forever.

01:09:57.000 And the fact is – and I think that's an advantage of on the farm where we are.

01:10:02.000 I mean, we see death every day.

01:10:04.000 I mean, we know that things – and in fact, death makes room.

01:10:10.000 I mean, a compost pile.

01:10:13.000 It's death and life.

01:10:14.000 I mean it's – you've got microbes eating stuff that was living and then that makes new life.

01:10:20.000 And of course my family knows that when I go, they're supposed to put me in a compost pile.

01:10:26.000 Really?

01:10:27.000 Yeah.

01:10:27.000 Put me in a compost pile.

01:10:28.000 Is that legal though? 1.00

01:10:30.000 Don't they have to cremate you or something stupid? 1.00

01:10:32.000 I think they have to at least put me in the ground or something. 1.00

01:10:35.000 That's my joke.

01:10:36.000 I don't even think they're allowed to just put you in the ground.

01:10:38.000 I think they have to pump you up with chemicals first.

01:10:40.000 Oh, no, no.

01:10:41.000 My dad, my dad, nothing.

01:10:43.000 Really?

01:10:44.000 Nothing.

01:10:44.000 Nope.

01:10:44.000 In the ground, and that was it.

01:10:46.000 Nothing.

01:10:46.000 Did you have to sign paperwork saying that you didn't kill your dad or anything?

01:10:54.000 No, what we did have to get was a special use permit for a family graveyard.

01:11:00.000 So we've got permission for 10 spots.

01:11:03.000 So in a family graveyard, you don't have to use formaldehyde?

01:11:07.000 No, nothing.

01:11:08.000 Everywhere else you do though, correct?

01:11:10.000 You either cremate or use formaldehyde, and I think they use formaldehyde before they cremate.

01:11:15.000 Well, there are now burgeoning around the country.

01:11:18.000 There are natural cemeteries.

01:11:19.000 Really?

01:11:20.000 Yeah.

01:11:20.000 And there are specially permitted cemeteries where nothing is used.

01:11:27.000 The problem with that is they can't exhume anybody, right?

01:11:30.000 Exhume your bones, I guess.

01:11:32.000 The bones would stay for a good while.

01:11:34.000 We know the bones last a long time.

01:11:36.000 But my thing is that, look, I don't want a bunch of people to die, but the fact is that That death is transformative, and I don't want to get all too mystical and spiritual, but whatever your spiritual tradition is – mine happens to be Judeo-Christian ethics,

01:11:56.000 so I think there is an afterlife – but even if there's nothing, even if you say, well, I'm dead and there's no spirit and I'm gone, even so, that makes room For tomorrow's babies.

01:12:12.000 It makes room for new ideas, new things.

01:12:15.000 I mean, you can't have life without the regenerative capacity of death and the foundation of ecology.

01:12:30.000 Is life, death, decomposition, regeneration.

01:12:34.000 Regeneration might look like something else.

01:12:37.000 But that's our digestion.

01:12:41.000 It's compost.

01:12:43.000 It's everything.

01:12:44.000 And when we get sterilized and move away from that, I think we lose the beauty of the transformative capacity of that part of life.

01:13:03.000 Yeah, I think it speaks to what you were talking about earlier, that they look at death as some sort of a failure instead of just a part of the natural cycle.

01:13:10.000 I was reading about one of the, you know, they try to find new ways that the coronavirus looks terrible in articles.

01:13:17.000 And one thing they were saying was it takes between two and ten years off the life expectancy of the average person who gets it.

01:13:28.000 I'm like, okay, well, how did you come to that conclusion?

01:13:30.000 Well, they came to that conclusion because they looked at old people who got it that might have possibly lived, you know, seven, eight years, five years more, and they just started doing these random calculations based on how old people normally die.

01:13:45.000 But then the problem with that is if you look at the overall numbers, the average age that people die from coronavirus is actually older than the average age people die.

01:13:56.000 Which is like, well, what are you saying then?

01:13:59.000 It's taking years off some people's lives, but everything does.

01:14:02.000 If you fall down, it takes years off your life if you're old, right?

01:14:07.000 You die from falling.

01:14:08.000 Should we stop all falling?

01:14:10.000 If you get sick, it takes years.

01:14:12.000 If you eat too much sugar.

01:14:13.000 Yes.

01:14:14.000 Well, that's a big one, right?

01:14:15.000 And that's one that's killing people at almost the same numbers as the coronavirus was at the peak.

01:14:21.000 I remember there was like a graph, the coronavirus has passed heart attacks. 0.98

01:14:24.000 Like, but wait a minute, how many goddamn heart attacks are there? 0.97

01:14:28.000 Is there something we could do about heart attacks? 0.99

01:14:29.000 Forget about that now.

01:14:30.000 This is a pandemic.

01:14:32.000 I mean, cigarettes, no one even touched with a 10-foot pole because cigarettes was killing people at four and five times the rate coronavirus was.

01:14:40.000 And no one was saying anything of it because it's an elective thing.

01:14:42.000 You're allowed to do it.

01:14:43.000 It's a freedom.

01:14:44.000 People enjoy it.

01:14:45.000 You're grown adults here.

01:14:46.000 But stay home.

01:14:48.000 Stay home and wear a mask and don't touch anything.

01:14:50.000 And stay home and you're going to lose your job.

01:14:52.000 But stay home because you're not really a grown adult.

01:14:55.000 You're a grown adult.

01:14:55.000 I'll let you smoke cigarettes at home.

01:14:57.000 How about that?

01:14:57.000 You feel better?

01:14:58.000 And now...

01:14:59.000 Yeah, well, I think a couple of things.

01:15:03.000 One is that, you know, our country has never told people, when we talk about, you know, personal self-worth and your own personal affirmation in a climate of fear and worry, the worst thing you can do is tell lots of people,

01:15:19.000 you're not important, you're not essential.

01:15:24.000 Yeah, you know what you've been doing all your life, what you do every day?

01:15:27.000 No, it's not essential.

01:15:28.000 What a faster way to, whatever, deaffirm a person than to tell them you're not essential.

01:15:37.000 I mean, I just think it's horrible.

01:15:38.000 And now we have the data, and again, these data points, and we've all become, I think through this, more wary of statisticians.

01:15:48.000 Yes.

01:15:48.000 But one that I just saw again this week was that every percent increase in unemployment equals 30,000 deaths in our country annually.

01:15:59.000 Every 1% unemployment, suicide, depression, whatever.

01:16:04.000 That's a really important statistic.

01:16:05.000 Yeah, it is.

01:16:06.000 So we've gone now from that white-hot 3.5% unemployment to now, what, 18.5%?

01:16:14.000 That's 15%.

01:16:16.000 15%?

01:16:17.000 I'm frankly actually amazed that we're at only 18% right now.

01:16:22.000 But I think that's only because a lot of people have been furloughed and are not unemployed.

01:16:29.000 So, you know, if all those people go back to work that have been furloughed, you know, restaurants and things like that, it'll be okay.

01:16:36.000 But anyway, we've increased in the last 60 days 15% in unemployment.

01:16:41.000 If that 30,000 figure is actually correct, That's an additional 450,000 people a year dying from external ramifications of being killed.

01:17:00.000 Unwanted.

01:17:01.000 And this is in line with what you said earlier about costs, right?

01:17:06.000 Right.

01:17:07.000 Like you're talking about the cost of food, and then look at the cost of healthcare.

01:17:11.000 And when the cost of food is higher and food is higher quality, look at that.

01:17:15.000 The cost of health where it drops in an equal number.

01:17:18.000 Right.

01:17:18.000 And I think this is along those lines.

01:17:21.000 We're looking at death through the coronavirus, but We're saying, oh, you're putting dollars over lives.

01:17:29.000 You're saying the economy is more important than people's lives.

01:17:32.000 No, we're saying you need a nuanced perspective because if you ignore the economy, it actually costs lives, and it costs a staggering number of lives, and in a horrible way – suicide, drug addiction, depression.

01:17:46.000 Right.

01:17:46.000 And if I may go a little – just one other little Thread on this whole thing.

01:17:53.000 Again, thinking about, well, how can we employ all the people?

01:17:59.000 I mean, if our discretionary spending, if this is going to make people more careful about discretionary spending, you know, flying to Paris, going on a Caribbean cruise, going to the Sandals.

01:18:13.000 Do you know how cheap those Caribbean cruises are?

01:18:16.000 Jamie and I have been going over this.

01:18:18.000 It's basically cheaper than being homeless.

01:18:20.000 You could be on a cruise for like five to seven nights for 105 bucks with all you can eat.

01:18:28.000 Where are you going to get that kind of food?

01:18:30.000 You're not going to.

01:18:31.000 So if I was a homeless person, I would just get me a constant string of cruise ship rides.

01:18:38.000 You've got to figure, that's 5,000 bucks a year, right?

01:18:42.000 A little bit more than 5,000 bucks a year.

01:18:44.000 You live like a king.

01:18:45.000 Wow.

01:18:45.000 You get your own little spot.

01:18:47.000 See, they want you to pay for booze, I think.

01:18:49.000 We're pretty sure that's what it is, right?

01:18:51.000 That's where they make their money?

01:18:52.000 Yeah.

01:18:52.000 Oh, that's where they make their money.

01:18:53.000 Ridiculous, cheap board. 0.89

01:18:55.000 Kind of like gas stations make their money on jerky and soft drinks inside. 0.98

01:19:00.000 Sure, yeah.

01:19:01.000 They don't make their money on gas.

01:19:03.000 But anyway, so one of the things that we're key on because our fertility program is carbon. 0.98

01:19:12.000 I mean, that's what feeds the soil, carbon, right?

01:19:14.000 Not 10-10-10 chemical fertilizer, carbon.

01:19:17.000 Do you use fertilizers at all?

01:19:20.000 No, no, we don't.

01:19:21.000 That's amazing.

01:19:21.000 We don't.

01:19:22.000 So just manure and natural fertilizer?

01:19:25.000 But we have a big industrial chipper.

01:19:30.000 You'd love this machine.

01:19:32.000 I mean, it's the ultimate, you know, boy toy.

01:19:35.000 It's a 120-horsepower diesel engine that can chip 19-inch You can take a 40-foot tree and just huck it in there and it just...

01:19:46.000 I've seen those online. 0.55

01:19:48.000 That scares the shit out of me. 0.93

01:19:54.000 Remember Fargo? 0.86

01:19:56.000 That's our fertilizer factory.

01:19:59.000 So we integrate forest with open land.

01:20:04.000 And we integrate the carbon from the forest, so we cut junk trees, dead trees, crooked trees, weak trees, and thin the forest.

01:20:19.000 And that enables the good trees, the healthy trees, to grow more vigorously, better, reduces fire potential because you're thinning it out, taking out all the dead stuff.

01:20:32.000 And that then becomes our carbon base for bedding the animals and for all the composting that we do.

01:20:40.000 And we do mountains and mountains of compost.

01:20:43.000 Where I'm going with this is...

01:20:46.000 When we talk about costs, right now, how much is our country spending fighting wildfires?

01:20:52.000 And how much are we losing fighting all these fires?

01:20:55.000 We're in California, right?

01:20:57.000 I mean, look at the devastation that fires have caused.

01:21:00.000 Imagine if we had thousands of people with chippers thinning the forest Turning them into almost park-like, 0.84

01:21:17.000 like they were before the Europeans came, the Native Americans kept them going with fire, but there was megafauna here, megafauna. 0.89

01:21:25.000 And so we graze through, we convert a lot of it into silvopasture, widely spaced trees that are growing unimpeded with grazing animals underneath so that there's no fire damage, there's no buildup of fuel.

01:21:41.000 And suddenly we're producing our own food and we're eliminating the danger of wildfire with technology called chainsaws and chippers and that carbon becomes the fertility for the vineyards and the agricultural lands.

01:21:57.000 It feeds the soil, so now we have earthworms instead of hard soil.

01:22:01.000 We don't have erosion because our organic matter is up.

01:22:04.000 On our farm, using these principles, we've gone from 1% organic matter to over 8% organic matter in the soil, and every 1% holds another 20,000 gallons of water per acre.

01:22:20.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:22:21.000 So, so...

01:22:25.000 So, in our 60 years of being there at Polyphase, We have gone from 1% to over 8%.

01:22:35.000 Let's just say that's 7 clicks.

01:22:37.000 7 times 20 is 140,000 gallons of water per acre now that we can hold that we couldn't hold before.

01:22:45.000 And it's because of the grazing, the perennials, and the composting that's building up the organic matter in the soil.

01:22:54.000 That could be done in California.

01:22:55.000 When you start talking about holding water, it's not just about How much rainfall are we getting?

01:23:02.000 It's how much are we actually holding in the sponge to reduce flooding and runoff and things like that.

01:23:08.000 So it sounds like your method could keep from the situation they find with some farms with the roting topsoil where they have to constantly supplement.

01:23:17.000 Right.

01:23:17.000 But how do you grow enough corn?

01:23:21.000 Like if you want to have like those monocrop agricultural fields where you see Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of acres of corn, just corn, or just soybeans, or just alfalfa, whatever it is.

01:23:32.000 Like, if you want to do those monocrop things, how are you going to re-fertilize the soil in the same manner with that large scale?

01:23:40.000 You don't have them.

01:23:41.000 You don't have those monocrop agricultural situations.

01:23:45.000 Corn is an amazing plant, so are soybeans.

01:23:49.000 All I'm saying is that right now our corn crop in the U.S., what is it, 30% goes to alcohol for fuel?

01:23:57.000 Well, that takes more energy than the fuel we get.

01:24:01.000 So ethanol, you mean?

01:24:03.000 Ethanol, yeah.

01:24:03.000 We don't need that.

01:24:05.000 Ethanol is a byproduct of what we used to think that we needed ethanol because we thought we were running out of oil.

01:24:15.000 That's not necessary, okay?

01:24:18.000 Thank you, fracking.

01:24:19.000 Yeah.

01:24:20.000 That's not good either, though.

01:24:22.000 No.

01:24:22.000 So we don't need to grow that corn.

01:24:24.000 Well, you know, come on electric vehicles and that, I mean, that's changing the landscape a lot.

01:24:32.000 But isn't a lot of it for agriculture?

01:24:34.000 Well, yeah.

01:24:35.000 So then the next is to feed cattle.

01:24:39.000 So another huge percentage, like 20%, goes to feed cattle.

01:24:44.000 And then another huge percent goes to hogs and chickens, of course.

01:24:48.000 But one of the problems with the hogs and chickens is that they are not integrated with the food system.

01:24:54.000 So right now, 50 percent, almost 50 percent, it's arguable, you know, what statistician, again, figures lie and liars figure, but somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of human edible food on the planet is never eaten by a human.

01:25:13.000 It spoils, it's thrown away, and 75% of everything that goes in the landfills is biodegradable.

01:25:21.000 So when you start matching up the waste, the waste streams and the losses in our food system and our waste streams, what happens is very quickly you start seeing that it's the segregated, it's this single species,

01:25:38.000 single crop, single segregated notion Where it's not related, it's not symbiotic, it's not synergistic, that actually creates the problem.

01:25:51.000 A city in Belgium, this was articulated in Pat Foreman's wonderful book, the title is City Chicks, and she's talking about urban chickens.

01:25:59.000 A city in Belgium offered three chickens per household to anybody that wanted a chicken.

01:26:07.000 And they had 2,000 families raised their hands and said, yeah, we'll take three chickens.

01:26:11.000 So they got 6,000 chickens, distributed them through this city.

01:26:15.000 And in the first month, it dropped 100 tons of food waste to the landfill.

01:26:22.000 What?

01:26:23.000 And so not only did they eliminate the landfill waste, all these people now suddenly had chickens.

01:26:29.000 And Pat's done all the math on this and shows that if one in three households had enough chickens to eat your kitchen scraps, there would not be an egg industry in the United States.

01:26:41.000 It would be completely non-essential.

01:26:44.000 Really?

01:26:45.000 So that's the power of integration.

01:26:48.000 That's the power of proximate, of actual putting stuff close to each other.

01:26:55.000 So they wouldn't have an egg industry because everyone would be growing their own eggs. 0.99

01:26:58.000 Yeah, everybody would have their own eggs.

01:26:59.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:27:01.000 And the landfill would get way, way less material.

01:27:06.000 And so then the chickens don't need the corn from the cornfields, so the fields can be turned back into prairie to feed herbivores, which now would be cows, not bison.

01:27:19.000 But that's our herbivore of value.

01:27:22.000 And so now you're at perennials instead of annuals, and perennials instead of annuals, perennials put energy in the soil, annuals extract energy from the soil.

01:27:33.000 So now suddenly you're producing, instead of producing an annual fertilized with petroleum to feed beef for somebody else, instead You're not growing the corn,

01:27:50.000 you don't need the tractor, you don't need the petroleum, the cows fertilize it themselves, and the perennial builds the soil like it did with the bison, and you have the beef, instead of coming out of a feedlot, it's coming off the prairie,

01:28:06.000 Like the bison did.

01:28:07.000 And suddenly you're building soils that are losing soil and your production doesn't change one iota.

01:28:13.000 It doesn't take any more land to produce the beef with what I've described than what it does with corn.

01:28:19.000 It doesn't take any more land.

01:28:21.000 Okay, so you're essentially saying that they have to convert to not just growing corn.

01:28:27.000 That's right.

01:28:27.000 They're going to have to do a different kind of farming.

01:28:29.000 That's right.

01:28:30.000 Corn is – I mean, that kind of monocrop, monospeciated thing is a complete – I mean, we started the interview talking about standing on nature on her neck, you know.

01:28:43.000 That is a quintessential example.

01:28:48.000 of standing on nature's neck.

01:28:50.000 And the reason our farm was so deteriorated when we came to it was because we're in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, and that was the breadbasket of the Confederacy during the Civil War, if you know your history.

01:29:03.000 And essentially the war was finally won when they burned all the crops in the Shenandoah Valley.

01:29:10.000 And during that time, The valley lost somewhere between three and five feet of soil during that time period.

01:29:23.000 So the soils are worn out and then we got the westward expansion and it all moved to Ohio and Indiana and then finally the Dakotas and, you know, kept heading west.

01:29:31.000 So this head west, young man head west, was partly because our agriculture destroyed the soils.

01:29:39.000 And if we don't start using our agriculture to build soils, We have a lot more to worry about than a COVID-19 deal.

01:29:50.000 A lot more to worry about.

01:29:52.000 If we don't figure out a way to produce food abundantly and grow soil while we're doing it, The pandemic is going to be the least of our concerns.

01:30:03.000 There's a thing that keeps getting repeated, and it's that we only have 60 more seasons left in our topsoil.

01:30:10.000 This is a thing that gets repeated almost as if there's no solution to this, that because we have to feed so many people, we're doomed.

01:30:18.000 And what you're saying is, no, we just can't do it this way because this way is unsustainable and it's unnatural to begin with.

01:30:26.000 That's exactly right.

01:30:27.000 So we have to fundamentally change.

01:30:29.000 We have to use our carbon, our biomass strategically, which includes food scraps, by the way.

01:30:39.000 Use everything strategically.

01:30:40.000 You can't just throw stuff away.

01:30:42.000 This is sunlight.

01:30:47.000 I mean, the fact that landfills get green environmental awards for poking methane tubes in the landfill and running the excavation equipment on the methane from the decomposing material in a landfill It shouldn't be in there.

01:31:07.000 No, it's unconscionable.

01:31:08.000 What we need to do is hook up.

01:31:11.000 We need hook ups. 1.00

01:31:12.000 We need to where the waste streams like they move right into the use streams and you have circles, not linear thinking.

01:31:25.000 And, I mean, just another one, for example, is ponds.

01:31:29.000 A lot of people don't realize that before the Europeans came to North America, North America was 8% water.

01:31:35.000 Today, we're less than 1%.

01:31:37.000 I mean, surface area.

01:31:40.000 Think about the United States being 80% water, including...

01:31:43.000 8%, right?

01:31:44.000 I'm sorry, 8%.

01:31:45.000 8% water.

01:31:47.000 I mean, think about that in Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, all right?

01:31:52.000 Where did all that water come from?

01:31:55.000 Beavers.

01:31:57.000 Massive, massive beaver populations.

01:31:59.000 I mean, there were 200 million beavers.

01:32:02.000 And we now know, archaeologically, digging up skeletons, some of them were as big as a Volkswagen car.

01:32:09.000 Really?

01:32:10.000 These were big, big.

01:32:11.000 The megafauna, the megafauna is incredible.

01:32:15.000 I mean, it's the same as the wombats in Australia.

01:32:18.000 You know, now these wombats are like, you know, 80 pounds or little, you know, cute little wombats.

01:32:21.000 Well, they know by digging up skeletons, they used to have nine-foot wombats in Australia.

01:32:27.000 Nine foot wombats!

01:32:28.000 So when we look at the megafauna that was here, you know, the fact is that the planet used to have more animal weight on it than it does today with all the animals, all the factory farms, and all the people.

01:32:42.000 So it's not people and animals that are messing up the planet.

01:32:48.000 It's the human management of the ecosystem that's messing up.

01:32:52.000 The abundance here is through the roof.

01:32:55.000 So imagine if we, and this is what we've been doing on our farm, is every time we get a few extra dollars, we build another pond.

01:33:05.000 Now, we're not beavers, but we have excavation equipment that we can go in and build ponds.

01:33:13.000 So that when we have a flood and everything is flooding, we're actually trapping a lot of that, not all of it, but trapping a lot of it up on high ground permaculture style that we can then dispense for irrigation in a dry time so that...

01:33:29.000 We never pump from an aquifer.

01:33:31.000 That's the commons.

01:33:32.000 When you pump from an aquifer, you're depleting the commons.

01:33:35.000 But if you're reducing flooding and using that in a drought to keep vegetation growing when there's so much sunlight, then you're actually increasing the commons.

01:33:45.000 And we believe very strongly that as a result of our farming, We should not be depleting the commons.

01:33:52.000 We should be increasing the commons.

01:33:54.000 As a result, there should be more soil, more water, more breathable air, more wildlife, more pollinators, more...

01:34:01.000 There's also been a false narrative that attributes most of our greenhouse gases or a significant number, a significant percentage of our greenhouse gases coming from cows.

01:34:13.000 And Cal agriculture.

01:34:15.000 And one of the things that they found through using satellite imaging and trying to detect methane, they're finding it's landfills.

01:34:25.000 These landfills are a huge, huge problem in terms of greenhouse gases.

01:34:30.000 The total wrong way of approaching it, the way you were saying...

01:34:35.000 Burying this biological material in the ground instead of using it as compost is actually not just counterproductive, but it's actually detrimental.

01:34:45.000 It's not the wrong way to do it because it doesn't serve the soil.

01:34:49.000 It actually fucks up the air.

01:34:51.000 It's not a zero.

01:34:52.000 It's a negative.

01:34:53.000 It's a negative, but with the same amount of biological material.

01:34:57.000 It's just managed incorrectly, which is really crazy when you stop and think about it.

01:35:01.000 Sure it is.

01:35:02.000 If all the biomass that we have, what's the word, non-leveraged or thrown away, if all the biomass we've thrown away in the last hundred years, if it had instead been leveraged for Soil building,

01:35:21.000 feeding chickens, I mean, whatever.

01:35:25.000 Today, we would not have all that methane, and today, we would have soils that would be a lot richer, and we would have better earthworm populations.

01:35:37.000 We'd have a tremendous amount of soil, maintained soil-abundant fertility.

01:35:46.000 So the beautiful thing is that this is not that difficult to bring back.

01:35:52.000 I mean, I've been preaching this message, you know, all my life, and it's exciting to now suddenly have people stepping back and realize, wow, you know, we just kind of put a pause button and there are now – Dolphins in Venice again.

01:36:08.000 In Shanghai, you can see across the street.

01:36:11.000 How about L.A.? Yeah, L.A. I mean, amazing pictures.

01:36:15.000 Amazing pictures.

01:36:16.000 So when people say, let's get back to normal, look, I don't want the tragedy that we're having, but I also don't want to go back To normal,

01:36:34.000 because normal was this foot on nature's neck saying, you know, we're going to...

01:36:38.000 So that's where you start saying, well, you know, what does the future look...

01:36:42.000 What could a future look like?

01:36:44.000 And that's where we start talking about decentralization, integration, you know, integrating all of our streams and...

01:36:52.000 Large-scale change.

01:36:54.000 Really large-scale change.

01:36:56.000 Very large-scale.

01:36:56.000 Very disruptive.

01:36:58.000 Very disruptive.

01:37:00.000 But...

01:37:01.000 Everybody has a job.

01:37:02.000 Everybody has a new thing.

01:37:04.000 I mean, my thing about the carbon economy, of course, you know, we're there in that hardwood region of Virginia, you know, near the Blue Ridge Parkway, Shenandoah National Park, all that stuff.

01:37:13.000 And the federal forests are atrocious.

01:37:17.000 I mean, dead trees.

01:37:18.000 The fuel buildup is just ridiculous.

01:37:23.000 Wouldn't it be cool if mommy or daddy could come home and their six year old says, you know, what did you do today?

01:37:30.000 And mommy and daddy are able to say, well, we stewarded You know, five acres up on Jack Mountain and kept it from having a fuel load to burn and took that biomass so that a farmer could feed his earthworms so there'd be soil for your future.

01:37:55.000 There'll be abundance and soil for your future.

01:37:58.000 I mean, what an affirming, sacred, righteous Vocation that would be.

01:38:05.000 And it would affirm people who want to work outside and have calluses and blisters on their hands.

01:38:11.000 You know, we've spent a couple generations marginalizing what we call blue-collar people.

01:38:20.000 And one of the big issues right now as we go to an AI, you know, a techno future, is what do we do with people that I'm suggesting that a carbon economy is one of many pathways to actually envisioning a future where thousands and

01:38:50.000 thousands of people would be employed in healing ministries so that we'd be caressing our nest You know, so many times the idea in agriculture and the farming community is that nature is a reluctant partner,

01:39:08.000 that we've got to, you know, we've got to get them in a wrestling hole.

01:39:11.000 We've got to dominate and conquist the door. 0.74

01:39:13.000 We're going to make you, you know, we're going to push you.

01:39:15.000 When actually, nature is a benevolent lover that just wants to be caressed.

01:39:21.000 And we haven't And we haven't put attention on caressing in the right places for a long time.

01:39:28.000 Isn't it also that when you say the word we, God, there's so many of us and so many people are already invested in doing these jobs that are actually counterproductive for nature.

01:39:38.000 Right.

01:39:39.000 Like these people that run these monocrop farms for soybeans or what have you.

01:39:44.000 Sure.

01:39:44.000 Like, boy, that's a battleship that's going to be difficult to turn around.

01:39:48.000 It is.

01:39:49.000 But the power – so you say, well, where do you start?

01:39:52.000 Well, you start at your dinner plate.

01:39:56.000 And that's why at our farm, our little moniker on our little cooler bags is healing the land one bite at a time.

01:40:06.000 We want our people to know that what's on your plate – When it's multiplied a billion times, you know, that actually creates the legacy, the legacy ecology you're leaving for your grandchildren.

01:40:26.000 That somehow that has to be made, and people have to understand that.

01:40:32.000 And I think that the wake-up call, the shock, the jar, the emotional jarring of this pandemic, I mean, We're seeing for the first time people who never would have darkened our door or asked us for anything They're asking us.

01:40:52.000 And that's why, you know, that's why C and I wrote this book, Beyond Labels.

01:40:56.000 And we started this a year ago.

01:40:58.000 We had no idea that it would launch in the middle of this.

01:41:02.000 But we realized, hey, this is a timely thing.

01:41:05.000 I mean, we're having people call me, can I go buy land near you that you'll manage so I have a bunker?

01:41:12.000 You know, when things go wonky, I mean, for the first time, I've never heard this before, but it's happening around the country.

01:41:21.000 People like us, we're getting calls.

01:41:23.000 How can I get on your first class list?

01:41:25.000 How can I get on your business class?

01:41:27.000 In other words, for the first time in our history, we've been in business now for, you know, half a century.

01:41:33.000 We were in it before organic was cool.

01:41:35.000 You know, we were one of those early, you know, very, very early.

01:41:38.000 And for, you know, for 30 years, we were the only game in town.

01:41:42.000 That was fun.

01:41:43.000 All right.

01:41:43.000 And 20 years ago, things as people started, you know, awareness and farmers markets and, you know, all this.

01:41:50.000 And so now we're not by any means the game in town.

01:41:54.000 But so for the first time in half a century, we're actually rationing.

01:41:58.000 We don't have enough.

01:42:00.000 We've got way more demand.

01:42:02.000 I did a post the other day, you know, the pandemic is the best marketing strategy we've ever had.

01:42:09.000 For you guys.

01:42:10.000 For us.

01:42:10.000 For us, okay?

01:42:11.000 And so we're just, you know, we're rationing here.

01:42:15.000 And so now our people are getting scared.

01:42:18.000 And so there are farmers like us that are actually talking about starting kind of an insurance premium.

01:42:24.000 You want to get on our business class list, so you always have a seat.

01:42:29.000 Pay us $500 a year in premium, and you're our top 10 percenter.

01:42:34.000 So they'll give you money so that they would have definite access to food first.

01:42:40.000 Definite access for food first.

01:42:42.000 How much could you scale up your business?

01:42:46.000 Oh, it has limits, but our ability to scale is only based on...

01:42:55.000 Personnel, you know, how many people, and land base.

01:42:59.000 We've got to have enough land base to scale, and we need a bigger team.

01:43:07.000 But no, I mean, our principles...

01:43:09.000 But see, we don't scale...

01:43:11.000 Let me explain it this way.

01:43:13.000 There's a guy.

01:43:14.000 There's a guy, David Schaefer, and he does a cool thing.

01:43:20.000 As you know, our country is now a repository for shipping containers, you know, metal shipping containers.

01:43:26.000 We've got millions of them.

01:43:27.000 You can buy them cheap, scrap metal.

01:43:30.000 Because China makes everything, ships it here, and we don't ship anything back but, you know, microchips.

01:43:36.000 So they don't take very many shipping containers.

01:43:39.000 So we're building up these mountains of shipping containers.

01:43:43.000 So this guy has figured out how to take a shipping container and simply refurbish it into a small, inspectable, mobile poultry processing facility.

01:43:55.000 So I can call him, and for $100,000, he'll customize it to what I want, put a chassis under it, drive it to my place, put it on four pillars.

01:44:06.000 It's not even a building, so no building permit required.

01:44:10.000 Put it on four pillars.

01:44:12.000 And I've got a little federal inspected processing facility that I can do, you know, 150,000 chickens a year.

01:44:18.000 Okay?

01:44:22.000 So, for me, when you say, how do you scale up?

01:44:26.000 For me, it's not...

01:44:29.000 Well, if we hit 150 and overrun the ability of this little facility, it's called Plant in a Box, P-I-B. And his blog is thinking inside the box because his thing is Plant in a Box.

01:44:47.000 So instead of if we had sales for over 150,000 chickens, well then...

01:44:53.000 You don't expand this and make it bigger.

01:44:56.000 You duplicate it.

01:44:58.000 So your expansion is by duplication, not by concentration and scale on site.

01:45:04.000 Then what happens?

01:45:05.000 There's a sweet spot here.

01:45:06.000 There's a sweet spot.

01:45:07.000 If you don't overrun your ecology, so we're going to set this thing on a farm.

01:45:18.000 The acreage is enough to handle the processing water, and you compost all the guts on site.

01:45:25.000 Now, you don't have to run a sewage treatment plant.

01:45:28.000 You don't have to truck your guts to a rendering plant.

01:45:32.000 They become fertilizer on site, called this fertigation, and it's a sweet spot That the industry doesn't have.

01:45:42.000 And so there's no reason why we can't produce a million chickens and you just have eight of these scattered, you know, five miles apart, six miles apart.

01:45:53.000 And once you get them processed and they're in a bag, you can put them in a tractor trailer and ship them anywhere, okay?

01:46:01.000 That's not the bottleneck.

01:46:03.000 The bottleneck is integrating the processing with the production.

01:46:07.000 That's the bottleneck right now in our fragile system.

01:46:11.000 And so if we can do an integrative approach and have a democratized, decentralized approach, then suddenly we have an ecological, humane, people-friendly, community-friendly,

01:46:28.000 Nutrient-friendly system.

01:46:29.000 Has anybody ever come to you and said, hey, our community is kind of screwed up.

01:46:34.000 We don't have a good food source here.

01:46:35.000 Would you help us establish something like this?

01:46:39.000 Yeah, I've been...

01:46:41.000 Have you designed these things for folks?

01:46:44.000 Not, I mean, not for a whole community like this.

01:46:47.000 It sounds like that would be a great thing though.

01:46:50.000 Yeah.

01:46:50.000 Especially now when we're realizing that it's difficult when the food supply chain goes down or something goes wrong and it's difficult to get food to people.

01:46:58.000 Wouldn't it be great to have, I've always said this, that it would be great if you had like the neighborhood had like one large plot of land and everyone in the neighborhood lived off that plot of land.

01:47:10.000 Sure.

01:47:10.000 Instead of like have a little mini central park in every neighborhood.

01:47:14.000 Right.

01:47:14.000 Right, right.

01:47:15.000 You're talking my language.

01:47:17.000 I mean, the idea of – I mean, you're familiar with urban agriculture.

01:47:24.000 I mean, we have food deserts, right?

01:47:26.000 Food deserts is a big, big problem.

01:47:28.000 But a lot of times, food deserts are in pretty rundown parts of the city that have vacant lots.

01:47:35.000 And there's a lot of productive capacity in these places.

01:47:40.000 One of the interesting ones I was on was in St. Louis.

01:47:43.000 And these three young couples had come together and they had purchased an old – it was an old crack house that the city bulldozed.

01:47:54.000 So there's this vacant lot.

01:47:55.000 It was half an acre.

01:47:57.000 It wasn't very big.

01:47:58.000 Half an acre.

01:47:59.000 And these three couples – They got apartments nearby, like within, you know, two minutes walk.

01:48:07.000 And it was in a pretty rundown area of the city, rundown neighborhood.

01:48:11.000 And they just started farming in this half acre and told all the neighbors, bring us your food scraps.

01:48:19.000 They got some chickens.

01:48:20.000 They started making compost.

01:48:22.000 They put up a little greenhouse.

01:48:24.000 They put up a kitchen.

01:48:25.000 And very, very simple, poor boy, bootstrap, you know, nothing.

01:48:30.000 And they quickly became a whole community, whatever, place for kids to come because kids were mesmerized by the chickens,

01:48:47.000 they had a worm bed, the plants growing, they cooked stuff.

01:48:52.000 And I was there, you know, I was there with them for a couple of hours and here come kids down the sidewalk, you know, pulling a little red wagon with food scraps in it.

01:49:02.000 And they're feeding the worm beds.

01:49:04.000 And it's fantastic.

01:49:06.000 They were feeding like, you know, 30 families out of this...

01:49:13.000 That's amazing.

01:49:14.000 And it was just wonderful.

01:49:16.000 They were doing it as a gift to the inner city.

01:49:22.000 But I asked them, I said, so how much of St. Louis's food could be produced this way?

01:49:28.000 They said, if you take out the dairy and the beef, the big mega stuff, St. Louis could feed its entire city within the city limits this way.

01:49:41.000 And that's true in Detroit.

01:49:43.000 It's true in Baltimore.

01:49:46.000 It might not be true in LA, but here's the thing.

01:49:51.000 We don't have to solve every single person's problem to start solving some.

01:49:58.000 And our problem is so many times I start down this path and somebody starts throwing at me the most extreme situation.

01:50:06.000 And you know what?

01:50:07.000 I don't have all the answers for the most extreme situation.

01:50:10.000 You know, the single mom of four, minority, in a food desert, in whatever, okay?

01:50:16.000 I don't have the answer to every single situation.

01:50:20.000 But I'm looking at suburbia.

01:50:22.000 I'm looking at incredible things that people are doing and opportunities.

01:50:28.000 And if we just did what we know – I ran into a lady in Edmonton, British – Alberta. 0.95

01:50:39.000 Yeah, thank you.

01:50:40.000 And she was 50, single lady, living in a fifth floor – Condominium.

01:50:47.000 Just wanted to farm in the worst way.

01:50:49.000 She had no money, no land, nothing. 0.98

01:50:53.000 And she just had this epiphany one day.

01:50:55.000 She said, I know I have one friend that has a backyard.

01:50:58.000 She went to this friend with a backyard.

01:51:00.000 She said, Would you mind if I grew up like a 10 foot by 10 foot garden in your backyard?

01:51:06.000 I just want to grow something.

01:51:08.000 Friend said, sure, sure, sure.

01:51:09.000 So she gave her a little 10 by 10 plot, started a garden.

01:51:13.000 Well, the lady's neighbor saw the garden and she said, do you think your friend would put a garden in my backyard?

01:51:19.000 And the lady said, well, no, I'll ask. 0.87

01:51:21.000 Well, sure.

01:51:23.000 I met this lady 18 months after this initial conversation with her friend.

01:51:28.000 She was farming 18 backyards, had a part-time employee, was a full-time farmer.

01:51:36.000 All of her tools were on the side of her bicycle.

01:51:39.000 She bicycled from spot to spot to spot with all of her tools, and she started a business called On Borrowed Ground.

01:51:48.000 And growing food.

01:51:50.000 So the thing is, is there creativity?

01:51:53.000 Is there opportunity?

01:51:54.000 Oh, it's up the wazoo.

01:51:57.000 If we would become as interested in this as we are the latest dysfunction in the Kardashians.

01:52:02.000 Or, you know, the latest whatever.

01:52:06.000 And it's not that we don't have time for it.

01:52:09.000 Not that we don't have money for it.

01:52:12.000 If there's one really positive thing to come out of this pandemic, I hope, It's a restructuring of what's valuable in life.

01:52:32.000 It will have been the best thing that ever happened to us.

01:52:34.000 That's a large bump.

01:52:35.000 But yeah, if we can restructure what's valuable to us, it's very important.

01:52:40.000 And as you were talking about earlier, these essential businesses, what is essential and not essential?

01:52:46.000 It's so arbitrary and strange, and this is something that politicians really aren't supposed to have the power to dictate what we can and can't do in that way.

01:52:53.000 And they're not doing it in a smart way.

01:52:55.000 Like, here's a perfect example.

01:52:57.000 Liquor stores are an essential business.

01:52:59.000 You know what's not an essential business?

01:53:01.000 Alcoholics Anonymous.

01:53:02.000 So Alcoholics Anonymous are not allowed to have their meetings, but liquor stores are open because they're essential.

01:53:08.000 That is ass-backwards thinking.

01:53:10.000 That doesn't make any sense. 0.98

01:53:12.000 Absolutely.

01:53:13.000 I mean, yeah, and in Virginia, I mean, yeah, we've got ours in Virginia as well.

01:53:16.000 You know, they open the liquor stores and close the churches.

01:53:19.000 Yeah, that's another one.

01:53:20.000 They open Walmart and close the farmer's market. 0.99

01:53:23.000 I mean, It's asinine. 0.99

01:53:26.000 It is. 0.99

01:53:26.000 It's absolutely asinine. 0.99

01:53:28.000 And I would even argue that they don't have the constitutional authority to do that. 0.98

01:53:34.000 Most would.

01:53:35.000 Most would examine it.

01:53:37.000 That would be my argument.

01:53:38.000 But boy, fear, you know, fear...

01:53:43.000 Fear spawns things that we can't even imagine.

01:53:47.000 What is it like where you are in Virginia?

01:53:49.000 Are restaurants open?

01:53:51.000 No.

01:53:51.000 So on May 15th, we entered what's called phase one.

01:53:58.000 And so churches are allowed to meet again.

01:54:04.000 Not that the government could have ever taken that away, but anyway, that's the narrative.

01:54:11.000 Churches can meet again.

01:54:12.000 We're still at the 10-person rule for gatherings, but a church, as long as they're at 50% capacity, they're okay.

01:54:24.000 So that's up and running.

01:54:27.000 Hairdressers are back to work.

01:54:28.000 A lot of the personal hygiene, barbers, hairdressers, You know, very small-scale kind of things like that are back.

01:54:43.000 But it's a slow, you know, it's a very, very slow process.

01:54:47.000 Yeah, it is.

01:54:47.000 In some places, Texas is pretty wide open.

01:54:49.000 Texas has restaurants, hotels, everything's back up.

01:54:53.000 Phoenix is the same way.

01:54:56.000 Right, right.

01:54:57.000 Places are opening up comedy clubs again at half capacity.

01:55:01.000 Right, right.

01:55:02.000 So, I mean, we canceled our first two farm tours.

01:55:06.000 We do what we call the Lunatic Farm Tour at the farm.

01:55:11.000 100 people on hay wagons.

01:55:12.000 Obviously, we can't social distance on hay wagons.

01:55:14.000 You can't get people.

01:55:15.000 So we're having our first one May 30th.

01:55:18.000 It sold out.

01:55:20.000 Not a single person has complained.

01:55:22.000 We've told them there won't be social distancing.

01:55:24.000 You're on a hay wagon.

01:55:25.000 If you're uncomfortable, then you can walk the tour.

01:55:29.000 And we don't drive fast.

01:55:30.000 You know, we've got people on hay wagons.

01:55:32.000 We're not driving at road speed.

01:55:34.000 So you can walk it if you want to.

01:55:37.000 But our impression of the feedback we've gotten is just...

01:55:42.000 Oh, relief.

01:55:44.000 Finally, I can go somewhere.

01:55:45.000 I can be with people.

01:55:48.000 That's the plus side, right?

01:55:49.000 We're going to appreciate what it's like to do stuff, to be able to go outside, to go to a restaurant, to go to a public gathering, have a picnic, that kind of stuff.

01:55:59.000 Yes, yes.

01:56:00.000 I think all of our...

01:56:02.000 of our historically normal social interactions are going to be much sweeter than they have been in the past, because we're social beings.

01:56:12.000 We're not hermits.

01:56:13.000 A few of us are hermits, but not very many.

01:56:15.000 Most of us like to see people.

01:56:19.000 And if there's one time when you want to be together, it's in hard times.

01:56:24.000 Who wants to go through hard times alone?

01:56:26.000 And when I see these World War II vets dying Alone, because their family can't be around them, the guy, you know, he's dying.

01:56:39.000 Who cares?

01:56:41.000 You know, if son and daughter and grandkids want to come and be around him.

01:56:46.000 I just...

01:56:47.000 Well, the fear is that they'll get it, and they'll give it to someone else, and then someone else will wind up in terminal as well.

01:56:53.000 I understand.

01:56:53.000 One of our problems is that we haven't done controls.

01:56:58.000 I wish there had been one state that said, we're not going to do anything, so that there could be one control.

01:57:04.000 Right.

01:57:05.000 But the problem is nobody's done a control, so we really don't know.

01:57:10.000 Well, there's been places that have less restrictions than others, and then also there's been countries that have less restrictions than others.

01:57:17.000 Sweden.

01:57:18.000 Yeah.

01:57:18.000 And it's really difficult to parse the information and get a straight answer on is this a good thing or a bad thing.

01:57:27.000 Ultimately, over the course of time, particularly what you were talking about with the unemployment rate equaling You know, 1% equaling 30,000 lives over the course of a year.

01:57:35.000 I mean, we really don't know what that number is going to look like here.

01:57:39.000 And it could be absolutely devastating.

01:57:41.000 It is.

01:57:42.000 I mean, we already know that, you know, suicides are up.

01:57:45.000 Child abuse is up.

01:57:46.000 Spousal abuse is up.

01:57:48.000 We know that just from police reports.

01:57:50.000 So, you know, that's serious.

01:57:51.000 And there are so many demographics that we don't know.

01:57:54.000 Like Sweden, for example, 55% of all households in Sweden are single.

01:58:02.000 They must be really unagreeable people.

01:58:06.000 That's crazy.

01:58:07.000 55%?

01:58:08.000 Yeah, it's over 50%.

01:58:09.000 In Italy, it's only, I think, 18 or 20%, something like that.

01:58:18.000 So there are a lot of multi-generational households in Italy.

01:58:23.000 So Italy is a much older demographic.

01:58:29.000 And more people in a household than in Sweden.

01:58:31.000 Probably a lot more smoking, too.

01:58:33.000 Yes.

01:58:34.000 When I was there, it's ridiculous how much they smoke.

01:58:37.000 Same thing in Spain.

01:58:38.000 Spain, a lot of smoking in Spain.

01:58:40.000 And they got hit hard as well, right?

01:58:41.000 Yes, they did.

01:58:41.000 And you've got to imagine that that's going to lead to a compromised immune system.

01:58:45.000 Sure.

01:58:45.000 So you've got all the people living together.

01:58:47.000 You've got a large percentage of folks that are older.

01:58:50.000 And then you've got the cigarettes and no exercise. 0.98

01:58:54.000 The gyms that I found when I was in Italy, like, what in the fuck is this gym? 0.99

01:58:59.000 Even a nice hotel with this pathetic gym. 0.99

01:59:02.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.93

01:59:03.000 There's nobody working out over there.

01:59:04.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:59:06.000 That's true.

01:59:07.000 That's true.

01:59:08.000 So as we go forward with this thing, I... I look at this and say, well, let's at least wipe ourselves off and say, okay, what can I learn from this?

01:59:22.000 What can we learn from this going forward?

01:59:25.000 And culturally, obviously, we can learn – well, we need to decentralize and diversify our food processing system.

01:59:36.000 I mean, for me, that's like number one.

01:59:41.000 And then for the average consumer, though, I mean, that's a macro thing.

01:59:45.000 But for the average consumer, what can you do to facilitate a secure food system and your own secure food system?

01:59:53.000 And one is to simply start stockpiling more food.

01:59:59.000 I mean, have more food in the house.

02:00:01.000 You don't have to go to the grocery store three times a week.

02:00:04.000 Buy in bulk.

02:00:05.000 Go to the farmer's market.

02:00:07.000 Buy from a farmer.

02:00:08.000 You can get...

02:00:10.000 20-pound bags of oatmeal.

02:00:12.000 You don't have to get a little cup full of Quaker oats.

02:00:17.000 You can get rolled crimped oats by the 50-pound bag.

02:00:21.000 It's pennies on the dollar.

02:00:24.000 I mean, this is how you save money.

02:00:26.000 When we talk about price, interestingly, our whole chicken price at Polyface is cheaper than boneless, skinless breasts from Tyson at Walmart.

02:00:39.000 So the way to save money is to get unprocessed.

02:00:43.000 That's how you eat well, okay?

02:00:46.000 You know the famous movie Food Inc., the documentary Food Inc., wonderful movie, but they presented the same thing.

02:00:54.000 Remember when that family went to the fast food place and they said they couldn't afford tomatoes?

02:01:00.000 A pound of our ground beef is cheaper than that burger, soft drink, and massive fries that he got.

02:01:09.000 And there's probably more nutrition in a half a pound of our ground meat than that whole meal.

02:01:15.000 But you can buy two pounds of our ground meat for the price of that whole meal.

02:01:19.000 The fact is that junk food is not cheap.

02:01:22.000 Junk food's expensive.

02:01:24.000 I mean, you start talking about nutrition.

02:01:26.000 I mean, a Snickers bar.

02:01:28.000 Snickers bar is twice as expensive per pound as our grass-finished, world-class ground beef.

02:01:38.000 So when you start looking at these kinds of things, you start realizing, oh, okay, so really I just need to adjust where my money's going and how I'm spending.

02:01:48.000 So spend bulk by bulk, by unprocessed, get in your kitchen, yes, and develop a A love for domestic culinary arts, okay?

02:02:05.000 And kitchens are a great place to teach your kids science, you know, fractions, a quarter teaspoon, a great place to teach your kids.

02:02:12.000 So math, math, fractions and stuff.

02:02:15.000 Science, you know, what happens when you put baking soda with vinegar and all this stuff.

02:02:19.000 I mean, you know, kitchen's a great first learning place.

02:02:22.000 What you're saying is great on paper.

02:02:24.000 The problem is people are addicted to eating terrible foods.

02:02:26.000 Yeah.

02:02:27.000 And it's a real issue, particularly with highly sweetened, highly processed foods that are the things they crave.

02:02:34.000 And also their gut biome.

02:02:35.000 You were talking about this doctor, what is him, Bush?

02:02:39.000 Dr. Zach Bush.

02:02:40.000 Zach Bush.

02:02:40.000 Yeah, Dr. Zach Bush.

02:02:41.000 And that he's a biome expert.

02:02:44.000 I'm glad we brought this up as well.

02:02:45.000 Yeah.

02:02:46.000 Because that's an issue with people that their body is accustomed to eating this terrible food.

02:02:50.000 Their biome is accustomed to that terrible food.

02:02:52.000 So it starts craving those Twinkies and chips. 0.88

02:02:56.000 Oh listen, the food processing scientists, they ain't dumb.

02:03:02.000 They know what our primitive You know, hot buttons are.

02:03:10.000 And yeah, salty, sweetie.

02:03:13.000 I mean, boy, they know exactly what it is.

02:03:16.000 So yeah, so Dr. Zach Bush has been actually developing microbiome bolstering concoctions to try to diversify your microbiome.

02:03:26.000 You know, one of the things that farmers like me that direct market to people One of our concerns, I mean, I don't talk a lot about it, but one of our concerns is that our food, for example, our chicken, we don't immerse it in chlorine,

02:03:41.000 you know, so it actually has – it's living food.

02:03:48.000 And sometimes people are so sterile in their microbiome That they actually have to eat a little bit of real food a little bit at a time to build it up.

02:04:04.000 I mean, the other morning I was out in the garden picking asparagus.

02:04:09.000 And I had my knife and I was cutting it off.

02:04:12.000 Of course, I love fresh.

02:04:13.000 I mean, fresh garden picked.

02:04:15.000 I mean, there's nothing like a cool morning and a big old fat asparagus, you know, an inch thick.

02:04:21.000 And I just eat it fresh.

02:04:23.000 It's got some soil on it.

02:04:24.000 Eat the soil, you know.

02:04:27.000 Grandma used to say you're supposed to eat a pound of dirt before you're 12, right?

02:04:31.000 Remember?

02:04:32.000 I mean...

02:04:34.000 I had a different grandma.

02:04:36.000 Oh, man.

02:04:38.000 But, you know, how do we develop immune systems in babies?

02:04:43.000 We don't put them in plastic wrap bubble.

02:04:45.000 We put them around on the floor and the next thing we know they're You know, gnawing on the dog toy, and they've got a dust bunny in their mouth, right?

02:04:54.000 This is how you build an immune system.

02:04:57.000 And kids kind of know, or nature knows it, at least.

02:04:59.000 Nature knows that.

02:05:00.000 I mean, Richard Louv writes about this in Nature Deficit Disorder, which is, of course, an iconic book about the importance of touching nature and breathing in nature.

02:05:12.000 I mean, just the bacteria that exudes from vegetation and The ecology of plants.

02:05:21.000 Powerful thing.

02:05:23.000 We're told to wash things down as soon as you get them because they could have pesticides on them.

02:05:28.000 You've got to clean up all the garbage.

02:05:30.000 People get E. coli from the spinach.

02:05:33.000 That's why you get food from people that don't use pesticides.

02:05:36.000 And you say, well, there's not enough of that produced.

02:05:39.000 Well, as you said, It would be wonderful if this broadcast went into every single household in the world and tomorrow everybody Said, we're going to do different.

02:05:54.000 I think a lot of people are trying to do different because of this pandemic.

02:05:57.000 I mean, I would imagine the number of gardens has grown up substantially.

02:06:00.000 Oh, yes.

02:06:00.000 I know a lot of people have looked into hunting.

02:06:02.000 Yes.

02:06:03.000 I know that.

02:06:04.000 And edible, you know, hunting edible wild things.

02:06:08.000 What can I eat?

02:06:09.000 You know, dandelions, lamb's quarters, mushrooms.

02:06:12.000 Yep, yep, yep.

02:06:13.000 It's a wonderful thing.

02:06:14.000 So, yes, this is really a good thing.

02:06:17.000 And the whole...

02:06:19.000 What we call the Homestead Arts.

02:06:20.000 There's a big conference that happens every year in the East.

02:06:24.000 They're hoping that they can still have it.

02:06:26.000 It's in October.

02:06:27.000 The Homesteaders of America Conference.

02:06:29.000 And two weeks ago, they had 10,000 new email sign-ups for their postings.

02:06:38.000 In one day.

02:06:40.000 I mean...

02:06:41.000 That gets your attention.

02:06:42.000 That's huge.

02:06:44.000 And it's people that are looking on how to garden.

02:06:49.000 I mean, the number of gardening questions, just like And seeds.

02:06:55.000 I mean, seed companies are out.

02:06:56.000 All the seed companies basically did like a three- or four-day moratorium this spring, you know, because it ran out.

02:07:01.000 So this summer, what's going to be in short supply?

02:07:04.000 Canning supplies are going to be short.

02:07:07.000 Dehydrators, I'm sure, you know, produce dehydrators are going to be hard to get.

02:07:11.000 In our area right now, you cannot get a freezer now until August.

02:07:16.000 Everything's backordered clear until the middle of August.

02:07:19.000 Everybody snarfed up the freezers to be able to stockpile.

02:07:22.000 So that was one of the things I was saying, you know, how do we go forward?

02:07:25.000 Well, you do more for yourself.

02:07:29.000 And in our book, Beyond Labels, Sina and I end up, the last couple chapters are about moving to a place where you actually are Producing some of your own food, a backyard flock of chickens, a little, you know, garden, a little herb garden,

02:07:45.000 you know.

02:07:46.000 And we have the technology now.

02:07:47.000 Mother Earth News Magazine, I mean, they've led this thing forever.

02:07:54.000 And you go to a Mother Earth News Fair...

02:07:57.000 And we were going to have the first one on a farm this year at our place, respecting 10,000 people, and we had to cancel.

02:08:04.000 It was in July.

02:08:05.000 So it's rolled over now to next year.

02:08:07.000 But there's every kind of patio tube herb garden with little pockets in it, and you grow all of your own herbs.

02:08:16.000 Beehives on your house roof.

02:08:19.000 There's so much.

02:08:21.000 There's so much that you can do.

02:08:23.000 And so I encourage people to jump in and just caress the mystery of life.

02:08:32.000 And it's good for your nutrition.

02:08:34.000 It's good for your soul.

02:08:35.000 It's good for your spirit.

02:08:36.000 In a time where everybody's concerned about death, surround yourself with something that's growing.

02:08:42.000 It's a great thing.

02:08:44.000 I think that's a great point and maybe a great way to end this.

02:08:48.000 Joel, thank you very much.

02:08:49.000 I really appreciate you, and I appreciate your message, and you really epitomize the best example of that sort of regenerative farming, and I really wish it'd be more widespread.

02:09:02.000 Thank you, Joe.

02:09:03.000 Thank you.

02:09:03.000 Well, with your help, it will be.

02:09:05.000 My pleasure.

02:09:06.000 All right.

02:09:06.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 21, 2020

Joe Rogan Experience #1478 - Joel Salatin

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Transcript