The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #479 - Joel Salatin

00:00:02.000 Hello, my friends.

00:00:04.000 This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is sponsored by Stamps.com.

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00:06:07.000 We would all like to get all of our nutrients from food if and whenever possible.

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00:09:15.000 Joel Salatin is here, and we're going to talk to him, and we're going to learn some shit. 0.97

00:09:19.000 Hit the button. 0.98

00:09:22.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:09:24.000 Train by day.

00:09:25.000 Joe Rogan Podcast by night.

00:09:27.000 All day.

00:09:29.000 A sure sign, sir, that we live in a mad, mad world is when a person has sane ideas and he comes across as a revolutionary.

00:09:37.000 And I have Joel Salatin, for folks who don't know, he is an American farmer, a lecturer, you're an author.

00:09:44.000 And your approach to farming is so natural and so normal and so, in my opinion, non-controversial.

00:09:56.000 It's quite fascinating that in this day and age, with this mad, mad world of factory farming and pumping these animals full of hormones and chemicals and antibiotics, that your approach has sort of revolutionized a lot of the ideas that people have about farming.

00:10:17.000 I think it's a real sign that there's something wrong with us.

00:10:22.000 When I watch your methods and I've seen your videos and I've heard you talk on it, it seems like no nonsense, it seems like it seems normal, it seems like common sense, it seems like old knowledge, but yet you're looked at as some sort of a wild man out there. 0.97

00:10:41.000 A lunatic! 0.99

00:10:43.000 You're a lunatic, you're nice to your animals. 1.00

00:10:46.000 Yeah, we are. 1.00

00:10:47.000 I mean, you know, people say, oh, you're just so clever, you know, how do you come up with this?

00:10:51.000 And my response is that this is not new, you know.

00:10:57.000 I mean, take just for example, you know, our culture, I mean, our experts, you know, our U.S. duh, and our U.S. duh, our experts.

00:11:08.000 USDA. Yeah.

00:11:10.000 You know, they don't think that animals are supposed to move.

00:11:13.000 I mean...

00:11:15.000 But animals are supposed to move.

00:11:17.000 I mean, that's like a fundamental natural pattern.

00:11:21.000 And so if you posit, oh, animals are supposed to move?

00:11:25.000 Well, then a whole series of things happen, you know, from control mechanisms, shelter, water delivery systems, all sorts of things happen to happen if you just posit something as intuitively simple as, on our farm,

00:11:41.000 animals are going to move.

00:11:43.000 It's amazing.

00:11:45.000 So, you know, if animals are going to move, you have to keep them home.

00:11:49.000 You have to be able to move them, you know, in the right place at the right time.

00:11:52.000 So then you have to have portable control mechanisms.

00:11:56.000 Or you got to keep them, you know, comfortable.

00:11:58.000 So then you have portable shade mechanisms.

00:12:02.000 And you got to give them water.

00:12:04.000 So we've got to be able to have portable water.

00:12:07.000 And so all these things necessarily flow from just something as basic as Animals move.

00:12:16.000 I find it fascinating.

00:12:17.000 It is fascinating because most people have, they've gone the opposite way with it.

00:12:22.000 What they've said is, we don't want animals to move, so let's contain them.

00:12:26.000 Right.

00:12:27.000 I mean, so the industrial system is predicated on, you know, we lock all these animals up in a confinement facility, you know, 15,000 chickens in a house, Nine laying hens in a 16 by 22 inch cubicle.

00:12:43.000 I mean, there's not enough room even to sit down.

00:12:48.000 Cattle in feedlots. 0.99

00:12:49.000 Pigs in confinement houses.

00:12:52.000 And we do the same thing kind of in our plants.

00:12:54.000 I mean, the next thing then is, in nature, there are no monocultures.

00:13:01.000 There are no monospecies.

00:13:03.000 Anywhere you go in nature, No matter where you hike, there's going to be at least two species.

00:13:08.000 You're going to encounter multiple things.

00:13:11.000 In fact, you're going to encounter animals and plants in proximity.

00:13:16.000 Amazing!

00:13:18.000 It's not going to be fields of animal-less wheat or fields of animal-less strawberries.

00:13:25.000 And then over here, the animals confined in a little itty-bitty building.

00:13:31.000 Stinking up the neighborhood.

00:13:33.000 Instead, in nature, these things are actually proximate, and they're actually symbiotic.

00:13:38.000 I mean, they actually have a lot of synergistic functions to each other.

00:13:42.000 I found it fascinating that when you raise your pigs, you call them wood-finished, forest-finished pigs?

00:13:52.000 Yeah, we call them...

00:13:55.000 You know, pasture-finished or acorn glens.

00:13:59.000 We call them glens, you know, for the old leprechauns, you know, lurking in the woods and in the forest.

00:14:06.000 It just has a nice ring to it.

00:14:09.000 But, yeah, we use electric fence.

00:14:12.000 In other words, this is not, you know, Luddite.

00:14:16.000 This is not anti-technology stuff. 0.98

00:14:20.000 What we're doing is using pigs. 0.96

00:14:23.000 All pigs have four-wheel drive and they like to disturb places.

00:14:29.000 I mean, you know, they have a great big plow on the end of their face called a nose.

00:14:34.000 And so all we're doing is taking the way buffalo and fire and predators used to move across the landscape with periodic disturbance.

00:14:48.000 We don't have buffalo anymore.

00:14:49.000 We don't have the fire.

00:14:50.000 We don't even have the wolves much.

00:14:52.000 And so how do we create this disturbance?

00:14:56.000 This is a very important ecological principle that living organisms have to be disturbed in order to have succession to another level, whether it's The pain that comes from exercise.

00:15:16.000 If you want to be physically fit, you got to disturb your body.

00:15:22.000 You got to get up off a couch potato.

00:15:24.000 And ecology is the same way.

00:15:25.000 It needs to be disturbed.

00:15:27.000 And so actually the ecology is used to having a lot of disturbance factors on it.

00:15:33.000 Disturbance and then rest.

00:15:34.000 Disturbance and then rest.

00:15:36.000 And so we use high-tech electric fencing to be able to move these pigs around in these forest glens from one little section to another in a kind of rapid rotation so that we have very intense disturbance and then a long period of rest.

00:15:54.000 Intense disturbance, and what that does is the pigs then go in and they till, they eat bugs that would affect the trees, they root out starchy, weedy species, things like that, and eat a lot of goodies.

00:16:10.000 They get fresh air, they get exercise, sunshine, and are able to fully express their pigness.

00:16:17.000 And what you end up with then is an incredibly nutrient-dense product as opposed to a white meat flabby product like out of the industry.

00:16:28.000 And the other thing is that you now have a whole new bunch of species that have germinated and sprouted in this disturbed environment, this disturbed soil, and you actually...

00:16:43.000 You actually capture more solar energy than you would with just leaves and sterile forest bottom.

00:16:50.000 So the actual product, the pig itself, would be more like a wild pig then?

00:16:54.000 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:16:55.000 In fact, we supply about 50 restaurants and we've had chefs do displacement tests where they'll get like industry pork and our pork and using their very Carefully calibrated scales,

00:17:11.000 they can make two blocks of meat that are exactly the same weight, put them in a pan of water, measure the displacement, and our pork displaces less water per pound than the industrial pork.

00:17:28.000 What does that mean?

00:17:29.000 Well, what it means is that the tissue is stronger.

00:17:34.000 In other words, there is more weight per cubic inch.

00:17:40.000 Which means it's better formed.

00:17:43.000 Why would that do this?

00:17:45.000 We call that muscle tone.

00:17:47.000 Oh, I see.

00:17:48.000 I see.

00:17:48.000 So they're denser.

00:17:49.000 Fat and flab, if we could say.

00:17:54.000 Flab is a lot more volume per pound.

00:18:00.000 Oh, I see.

00:18:01.000 If you jump in a swimming pool and you're really muscle toned, sometimes you have trouble floating.

00:18:06.000 Mm-hmm.

00:18:08.000 But if you're a fat person, you can float in that water like a blimp all day. 0.70

00:18:14.000 It just works fine.

00:18:16.000 So density, muscle tone and density, Can be measured with a displacement test.

00:18:24.000 That's fascinating.

00:18:25.000 So this much more nutrient-dense...

00:18:28.000 Absolutely.

00:18:29.000 Is it preferred by these chefs flavor-wise?

00:18:33.000 Absolutely.

00:18:34.000 I mean, that's why they get it.

00:18:36.000 And the result is that you actually get more nutrition per pound because it's denser.

00:18:46.000 I smoked a wild ham for the first time this past weekend, and it was fascinating how much different it tasted than a regular ham.

00:18:56.000 So your hams would be similar to that.

00:19:00.000 Right, that's right.

00:19:01.000 Darker meat.

00:19:01.000 Darker, yeah.

00:19:02.000 You know, when the industry says pork, you know, remember they had the campaign for, what, 10 years, pork the other white meat?

00:19:08.000 I think now it's...

00:19:11.000 They abandoned that slogan.

00:19:13.000 Now it's something like, you know, get with it or something like that.

00:19:18.000 Be inspired.

00:19:19.000 Be inspired by an animal that lives in a box.

00:19:23.000 How crazy is that?

00:19:26.000 Yeah, so, you know, my father-in-law, he's in his 80s now, and, you know, they used to raise hogs on their farm.

00:19:32.000 And it's interesting, they built there, they had a kind of a shed shelter where the pigs would go in and eat, like, soured milk and whey and leftovers from, they had milked about 20 cows, and so there'd always be leftovers.

00:19:46.000 And the pigs would go in there. 0.98

00:19:47.000 Well, they actually built it with the sill Two feet above the ground so the pigs had to jump up in there and that exercise made their hams taste way better and it increased oxygen flow to their hams so the meat was rose-colored rather than white.

00:20:06.000 And that rose color indicates iron, hemoglobin iron.

00:20:11.000 So the exercise of jumping in and the extra...

00:20:15.000 I collect old ag books.

00:20:19.000 Anything before 1950 is pretty good.

00:20:21.000 After that, it all went to pot.

00:20:24.000 And...

00:20:25.000 If you read any old 1910, 1920, 1900 swine book, the first thing it'll say is, exercise, exercise, because the pork responds to that oxygenation.

00:20:41.000 Of the blood and makes the meat a deep, rich color, which indicates iron.

00:20:48.000 That is so fascinating.

00:20:50.000 So this white meat, this pork the other white, what a crazy ad campaign that is then.

00:20:54.000 Of course it is. 0.97

00:20:55.000 It's based entirely on ignorance.

00:20:58.000 Sure it is.

00:21:00.000 Yes, it is.

00:21:01.000 I mean, the same thing as, you know, our chickens are vegetarians.

00:21:04.000 Right. 0.99

00:21:04.000 That's ridiculous. 0.99

00:21:06.000 Birds are omnivores. 0.99

00:21:07.000 Yeah.

00:21:07.000 I mean, whoever saw a robin refused a worm.

00:21:11.000 You know, I mean, birds are omnivores.

00:21:13.000 So this whole idea of, you know, vegetarian-fed chickens is just...

00:21:17.000 Those would be sick chickens. 1.00

00:21:19.000 Yeah, it makes, you know, pale, nutrient deficient eggs.

00:21:24.000 Yeah, there's a big difference in the color of the eggs.

00:21:27.000 I have chickens.

00:21:28.000 I have 13 chickens in my yard.

00:21:30.000 And my wife and I have been doing that for the past year and a half now.

00:21:36.000 And it's amazing how much better the eggs taste.

00:21:38.000 It's amazing how much darker the yolk is.

00:21:41.000 It's like a dark orange.

00:21:43.000 And, you know, we have a big yard and we keep them in.

00:21:46.000 We have a huge house built that's bigger than this studio, bigger than this room at least.

00:21:50.000 And the chickens all live in there.

00:21:52.000 They have plenty of room to run around.

00:21:53.000 Taj Mahal chicken house.

00:21:55.000 It's a big chicken house.

00:21:56.000 And then we open the door and let them roam around the yard and, you know, pick up bugs and worms and all that stuff.

00:22:04.000 And express their chickenness.

00:22:05.000 That's a good way to put it.

00:22:08.000 In our country right now, in the industrial foods, I call it the industrial corporate U.S. duh fraternity.

00:22:21.000 They don't view life as fundamentally biological.

00:22:24.000 They view life as fundamentally mechanical.

00:22:27.000 That's the big difference between the industrial food perspective and what I'll call a more craft-oriented food perspective.

00:22:37.000 Is food fundamentally biological or is it mechanical?

00:22:42.000 And they don't ask.

00:22:43.000 I've never seen a research project that starts with an umbrella supposition Let's define what makes a happy chicken or a happy pig.

00:22:54.000 It's all about how do we grow them faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper, as if they're just inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly Hubris can imagine to manipulate them.

00:23:08.000 And I would suggest that a culture that views its food, its plant, and its animals from that kind of mechanistic, manipulative standpoint That's a very good point.

00:23:32.000 That's my favorite question.

00:23:35.000 Can we feed the world?

00:23:36.000 Because ultimately, all of this is an exercise in feel-goodness, warm fuzziness, unless it actually does translate to feeding the world.

00:23:46.000 So let's take that and interrupt me any time.

00:23:50.000 First of all, for the first time in human history, we're producing twice as much human edible food as we need on the planet.

00:23:58.000 Twice as much?

00:23:59.000 Half of all human edible food never gets eaten by a human.

00:24:04.000 That's the first time that's ever happened.

00:24:06.000 Wow.

00:24:07.000 Which means that if you or I could click our fingers today and suddenly double the Earth's food production, not a single other person would get a meal.

00:24:20.000 People go hungry not because there's not enough food, but because of food.

00:24:26.000 Demographic problems, infrastructure problems, there's not a road, cultural issues like in inner cities that have been taken over by drugs, mayhem, and...

00:24:41.000 Gangs.

00:24:41.000 Businesses don't want to go there.

00:24:43.000 You know, people with integrity food don't want to go there.

00:24:46.000 And so there's a tremendous amount of waste.

00:24:51.000 I mean, I was talking to a guy that just was at a green bean factory in Zimbabwe.

00:24:56.000 They were exporting to Europe, and they were taking in five tons a day and only shipping two tons.

00:25:00.000 I said, what happened to those three tons?

00:25:02.000 Well, they're crooked.

00:25:03.000 They're too long.

00:25:04.000 They're too short.

00:25:05.000 They've got a little black spot, you know.

00:25:08.000 And...

00:25:09.000 So we're wasting a lot of food.

00:25:13.000 Secondly, there is a tremendous amount of land that's not being used because we have a fundamentally segregated food system, not an integrated food system.

00:25:25.000 So we produce the food over here, and we eat it over here, we feed it over here, we have the manure over here.

00:25:34.000 The old integrated system is no longer...

00:25:38.000 There are 35 million acres of lawn in the U.S. and 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses.

00:25:47.000 That's 71 million acres.

00:25:49.000 That's enough to feed the entire U.S. without a single farm or ranch.

00:25:53.000 Wow.

00:25:54.000 So this food that's going bad, so if we're making twice as much food as people need, is it a matter of the food deteriorating too quickly to get to people or it's never going to get to people?

00:26:08.000 It's never going to get to people.

00:26:10.000 You know, go by the back door of any supermarket produce department and you will see, you know, dumpsters full.

00:26:19.000 of spoiled stuff.

00:26:21.000 One of the reasons, I mean there are numerous reasons.

00:26:23.000 There are residue problems, for example, you know, a dairy that accidentally dumps some antibiotic, for example, and then it taints a whole tractor trailer load of milk.

00:26:34.000 That's common.

00:26:35.000 That's common.

00:26:38.000 You have cosmetic issues.

00:26:41.000 You know, a piece of fruit that has one little blemish.

00:26:45.000 Throw away.

00:26:48.000 The long warehousing and chain of custody between field and fork, that creates spoilage issues.

00:26:58.000 And so, you know, there are just a lot of factors in the system that don't do it, that spoil food.

00:27:05.000 That being said, we can absolutely grow a lot more food than we do.

00:27:12.000 People are enamored.

00:27:13.000 You know, they see, you know, six combines running side by side down through a Kansas wheat field and Wow, look at that!

00:27:20.000 Or they see a great big 500-acre fumigated strawberry field in California.

00:27:26.000 Wow, look at all that production!

00:27:28.000 But the fact is that even a very rudimentary, almost poorly done backyard garden...

00:27:37.000 Is more productive per square yard than the most industrial, sophisticated, technologically advanced, monospeciated industrial farm.

00:27:47.000 That's the truth.

00:27:48.000 Why is that?

00:28:05.000 So that instead of growing one species, if you reduce the production of one species and grow two species on the same area, you get like 120% of your production.

00:28:20.000 So for example, we have pastured livestock, so we run the cows across the pasture.

00:28:26.000 We run the egg mobiles behind them.

00:28:29.000 The egg mobiles have chickens that Scratch through the cow patties and eat now the newly exposed grasshoppers and crickets that the cows exposed by eating the grass. 0.69

00:28:40.000 And then we run broiler chickens, meat chickens, over that same ground.

00:28:45.000 We run turkeys over that same ground.

00:28:47.000 And so all of those animals, they're not on the same square foot at the same time, but they go like...

00:28:58.000 Different waves of production across the landscape.

00:29:04.000 And so, whereas the normal farm would have only one of those species confined in a little tiny building, we have an acre being used all throughout the year with a lot of different kinds of species going across.

00:29:20.000 Suddenly you don't have the pathogens because the pathogens are confused because, you know, The cow pathogen hatches out next to a chicken pathogen and they're toxic to each other.

00:29:35.000 So they have a war and they fight and they die.

00:29:39.000 They cancel each other out.

00:29:40.000 Yeah.

00:29:41.000 Which is really what's supposed to happen in nature.

00:29:43.000 Absolutely.

00:29:44.000 And so the kind of diversity you see on the Serengeti in Africa, at a waterhole in Zimbabwe, whatever.

00:29:55.000 I mean, those kinds of diversities...

00:29:58.000 A, they protect the animals from their own pathogens because almost all pathogens are species specific.

00:30:05.000 So if you put multiple diversity together, it acts as a dead end. 0.97

00:30:13.000 But secondly, those animals occupy different spaces.

00:30:18.000 You've got herbivores, omnivores, carnivores.

00:30:22.000 They're all occupying the same space and so a given area That's a permaculture concept, if you're familiar with permaculture.

00:30:32.000 It can stack synergistic, multiple species and enterprise on a single land base.

00:30:40.000 Brian, pull up Polyface Farms.

00:30:42.000 There's a video, a fascinating video, so the folks at home can get a sense of what he's talking about when he's saying eggmobiles.

00:30:50.000 You've designed this sort of chicken house that moves around.

00:30:54.000 It's on like sleds?

00:30:56.000 It's all wheels.

00:30:57.000 And you pull it around, and so the chickens will be in one spot, and then you move it to another spot.

00:31:03.000 And in doing so, you allow the land to get moved around.

00:31:10.000 That's right.

00:31:11.000 Rather than having a stationary structure where we're carrying everything in and carrying everything out and there's a toxicity buildup with the animals being confined to one spot all the time, instead you are actually allowing the animals to move to mimic kind of their migratory pattern on a domestic scale.

00:31:34.000 All we're doing is we're cutting out the natural template.

00:31:39.000 And laying it down on a domestic production model, say, how can we duplicate this pattern on a domestic model?

00:31:48.000 That's what we're doing.

00:31:50.000 And in doing so in such a large scale...

00:31:55.000 Can this be duplicated?

00:31:57.000 Like the factory farming systems that are so rightly criticized in this country, which we find to be abhorrent.

00:32:03.000 When you look at these videos of these chickens living stacked next to each other, it's horrific stuff.

00:32:09.000 It is.

00:32:10.000 What is it that's beneficial about those factory farms that keeps them from doing something like this?

00:32:16.000 Well, what you have to understand is that those factory farms externalize a lot of their costs.

00:32:22.000 So there's collateral damage, that collateral damage in terms of water pollution, fecal particulate in the air.

00:32:31.000 One of the biggest ones right now is C. diff and MRSA, you know, these antibiotic-resistant high-pass staph infections in hospitals that people are getting.

00:32:47.000 And now, of course, we're seeing an exponential growth in autism.

00:32:53.000 There's a link there to, for example, genetically modified organisms.

00:32:57.000 That might be another discussion.

00:32:58.000 But what I'm getting at is that the collateral damage...

00:33:03.000 Of the industrial food system, including the nutrient deficiency, the fact that the omega-6s and omega-3s are way out of whack.

00:33:10.000 So the fats, instead of reducing cholesterol, instead of being beneficial, are negative.

00:33:17.000 There are huge nutrient deficiencies.

00:33:22.000 I mean, riboflavin.

00:33:23.000 The eggs in your backyard chickens are probably in the area of a thousand micrograms per egg.

00:33:29.000 You know what the official USDA nutrient analysis for eggs is?

00:33:33.000 Only 48 micrograms per egg.

00:33:36.000 I'm sorry, not riboflavin.

00:33:40.000 Folic acid, that's folic acid.

00:33:42.000 Grass-finished beef, 300% more riboflavin.

00:33:47.000 Riboflavin, of course, is what helps us to keep calm and not fly off the handle.

00:33:51.000 It's the nerve.

00:33:53.000 Riboflavin is the nerve one.

00:33:55.000 You know, why are people raging and going crazy and, you know, shooting people in schools and stuff?

00:34:01.000 We're deficient of riboflavin.

00:34:02.000 So, you know, when people say, oh, it doesn't make any difference.

00:34:06.000 Food is food is food.

00:34:08.000 That's not true.

00:34:09.000 I mean, there's a huge difference in this food.

00:34:13.000 Vegetables the same way, whether they're grown in mineral-dense, biologically active soil compared to hydroponic or just what we call IV soil, where the soil is just inert material to hold up a root,

00:34:29.000 and we basically IV chemical fertilizers into that soil to grow a plant. 0.83

00:34:35.000 So there are...

00:34:36.000 There are significant differences in the nutritional element.

00:34:41.000 So this is all collateral damage.

00:34:43.000 And the slinky effect between cause and effect takes a while.

00:34:49.000 I mean, take DDT. DDT, it took 14 years from its initial use until 14 years later it was definitively discovered.

00:34:57.000 Oh, that's why we have three-legged salamanders, infertile frogs, and dead zones.

00:35:05.000 And eagles' eggs won't hatch.

00:35:07.000 Those cause and effects took a while to materialize because nature's pretty resilient.

00:35:15.000 You can beat yourself up for a while and still come out kicking for a while.

00:35:22.000 And I'm sure there's probably also financial factors that were resisting the conclusions.

00:35:26.000 Well, exactly.

00:35:28.000 All of that collateral damage is deferred expense.

00:35:33.000 Whether it's obesity, health care, pollution cleanup, Superfund sites, soil loss, aquifer depletion, desertification,

00:35:50.000 these are all deferred damages because in our country we don't have an accounting system to measure Our only accounting system is cash, gross domestic product, today's output.

00:36:06.000 We don't have a way to measure these other elements.

00:36:12.000 I'll give you one example.

00:36:14.000 Let's take earthworms. 1.00

00:36:16.000 Let's agree that earthworms are pretty important.

00:36:20.000 Well, who presents a business plan today to an investor?

00:36:27.000 And the investor says, hey, I kind of like this business plan.

00:36:31.000 I think this is a good idea.

00:36:33.000 Can I be your partner?

00:36:34.000 We're going to be millionaires on this business.

00:36:38.000 But before I sign my investment strategy, I've got one question for you. 0.81

00:36:43.000 I'm from the South, so you've got to have a big hog. 0.70

00:36:48.000 But I've got to ask you one question.

00:36:51.000 What's this business going to do to the earthworms in our community?

00:36:56.000 Nobody asks that.

00:36:58.000 And yet, fundamentally, the mycorrhizae, the earthworms, the azobacter bacteria, the mycelium, the hydra, they actually, this invisible community of beings, Actually supports all of life,

00:37:17.000 what we see.

00:37:18.000 Every visible thing that we see is supported by an invisible universe of microscopic bacteria and beings in us, around us, in the soil.

00:37:28.000 They're cousins.

00:37:28.000 And now we know they talk to each other.

00:37:31.000 So, in a sense, what we're getting with factory farming is one small unit in the environment extracting money at the expense of Of all these other factors and these extraneous costs...

00:37:46.000 Aren't factored in.

00:37:47.000 That's correct.

00:37:48.000 Because they don't have to be.

00:37:49.000 They don't have to be.

00:37:51.000 Our system is not set up for accounting those other things.

00:37:55.000 That's fascinating.

00:37:56.000 So if it was done correctly, if it was all done your way, although it would be more expensive, those external expenses wouldn't exist.

00:38:07.000 In the big scheme of things, the actual...

00:38:13.000 The actual cost of food would actually be cheaper because you wouldn't have the collateral damage.

00:38:20.000 I mean, just take one example in our lifetime, mad cow disease.

00:38:25.000 I mean, realize for 30 years, the European and the American expert credential, you know, PhD academic community took farmers like me to free steak dinners to teach us this new scientific method of feeding dead cows to cows.

00:38:44.000 And our farm was branded barbarian, Luddite, anti-progressive, you know, science haters because we didn't buy into that model.

00:38:56.000 The reason we didn't buy into it was not because we were anti-science or anti-innovation or anything like that.

00:39:01.000 It's because I looked around the earth and, you know, I couldn't find an herbivore that eats carrion.

00:39:07.000 You know, I couldn't find it.

00:39:08.000 And so we said, well, there must be a reason.

00:39:13.000 And here, 30 years later, suddenly there's this big global collective, oops, maybe we shouldn't oughta done that!

00:39:21.000 You know, as the whole scientific community realized, you know, what had happened.

00:39:26.000 And so I just think that we have to appreciate that we are, in Western culture, you know, we're a product of, you know, Greco-Roman, Western reductionist, compartmentalized, fragmentized, systematized, individualized,

00:39:42.000 democratized, parts-oriented, disconnected thinking.

00:39:47.000 And there's an equally appropriate mindset from the East, which is we're all connected, we're all relatives, it's about wholes, it's about us, not just me.

00:39:57.000 And that brings us an ethical framework as a protection over amoral innovation.

00:40:08.000 You know, we're so clever, we can innovate things that we can't spiritually, morally, ethically, or physically metabolize.

00:40:17.000 And so what happens is we innovate these things and then spend two generations trying to remediate the collateral damage that our innovations did.

00:40:28.000 And if we would just embrace that there should be a moral, ethical, natural pattern...

00:40:38.000 That restricts, that constrains our innovation, then our innovation could actually be kept on an earth massaging track instead of an earth conquistador track.

00:40:51.000 So you used to literally get courted to feed dead cows to cows?

00:40:57.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:40:58.000 Free seminars come out and they've got sponsors, the local agribusiness community and the The industrial complex would buy dinner.

00:41:14.000 Sure, and you go hear these couple PhDs from the taxpayer-funded research universities.

00:41:20.000 What was their motivation?

00:41:22.000 I don't understand why they would...

00:41:23.000 Faster, bigger, cheaper, fatter.

00:41:26.000 It's cheap.

00:41:29.000 It's cheap protein.

00:41:32.000 Cheap food.

00:41:34.000 But the idea of making your cows cannibals. 0.98

00:41:37.000 Well, yeah.

00:41:38.000 Well, the industry still feeds, you know, chicken manure.

00:41:41.000 I mean, well, we're still feeding in this country right now as we sit here, we're still feeding chicken feathers, manure, and chicken carcasses to chicken.

00:41:48.000 They're doing it, you know, right in our neighborhood.

00:41:51.000 So that's still being done.

00:41:52.000 So we're still feeding, but at least it's not cows.

00:41:56.000 All right.

00:41:56.000 At least it's not cows.

00:41:57.000 But yeah, it's completely absurd.

00:41:59.000 Yeah.

00:41:59.000 Why is it better to do it with chickens than cows?

00:42:01.000 Well, supposedly it's not the same kind of tissue.

00:42:05.000 Oh, okay.

00:42:06.000 So at least it's one species removed.

00:42:09.000 So you have a little bit of wiggle room for the rogue prions that create the bovine spongiform encephalopathy. 0.99

00:42:16.000 And that's the same disease that these cows get and mad cow disease that cannibals get, like in New Guinea, these neurological diseases where they can't move right and start shaking. 0.55

00:42:25.000 Yeah, it's these rogue prions, yeah.

00:42:27.000 It punches holes in your brain.

00:42:29.000 Yeah, it's a pretty...

00:42:31.000 It's a pretty bad way to go.

00:42:33.000 Yeah, it seems pretty dark.

00:42:35.000 When did factory farming start?

00:42:37.000 Like what we consider today factory farming.

00:42:41.000 When did all that start?

00:42:41.000 Yeah, well, it's a great question.

00:42:43.000 It really started in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

00:42:48.000 A lot of things had to come together.

00:42:50.000 And of course, Michael Pollan in his, I think, Omnivore's Dilemma examines this pretty nicely.

00:42:57.000 But to point out that Or Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation.

00:43:02.000 You know, that was a blockbuster, you know, when it came out.

00:43:04.000 And a lot of factors had to be in place.

00:43:08.000 One was we had to have cheap energy.

00:43:10.000 Because prior to...

00:43:11.000 In order to have a factory farm, you have to have cheap transportation in order to bring...

00:43:17.000 In order to concentrate that many beings in one place and feed them and remove their excrement. 0.88

00:43:25.000 You have to have cheap transportation.

00:43:27.000 Cheap transportation...

00:43:29.000 Requires cheap energy.

00:43:31.000 You know, when everything was draft power, you know, mules and horses and oxen, you simply couldn't amalgamate that many things.

00:43:39.000 Whether it was animals or shoes or metal, you couldn't amalgamate that much material in that In one place.

00:43:51.000 So every manufacturing facility, whether it was a farm or other manufacturing, had to nest within the carrying capacity of its ecological womb, if you will.

00:44:05.000 There was a limit.

00:44:08.000 How far can we cart stuff in and how far can we cart stuff out?

00:44:11.000 There was a limit to that until we had cheap energy and cheap transportation.

00:44:15.000 So that really, you know, catapulted this.

00:44:18.000 Then the next thing we had to have, we had to have pipeable water.

00:44:22.000 We had to have, so that meant plastic piping.

00:44:24.000 We had to have very cheap piping.

00:44:26.000 I mean, until then it was all cast iron pipe.

00:44:28.000 You know, in the 1800s it was...

00:44:30.000 You know, you took a piece of wood and took an auger and bored it out, you know, and pasted little pipes together.

00:44:38.000 So, you know, we had to have plastic.

00:44:40.000 So plastic had to be developed, which of course required petroleum.

00:44:44.000 So petroleum was really a catalyst.

00:44:46.000 And then finally, in order to keep that many animals alive in one spot, required antibiotics.

00:44:52.000 Because the fecal particulate, the The fecal dust cloud, you know, that they live in, that they ingest, is very abrasive to the very tender mucous respiratory membranes.

00:45:05.000 All the cilia and those very, you know, you look at them under a microscope and it's like going into a Steven Spielberg set, you know, it's just amazing.

00:45:16.000 Well, those very tender mucous membranes It gets sandpapered by this fecal particulate, this abrasive air, and they bleed then.

00:45:29.000 And this is how salmonella and some of these things get into the actual tissue, even into the eggs.

00:45:38.000 Remember the Wisconsin farm with the salmonella?

00:45:41.000 It actually gets into the oviduct because now the body's toxic tissue It's filters, it's strainers, have been overridden by this direct hemorrhaging of the tender mucous membranes that gets right into the bloodstream.

00:46:02.000 So that's how it jumps those regular strainers. 0.80

00:46:10.000 And so the antibiotics were necessary to try to, in order to keep the animals in such an unsterile, unhealthy environment, to keep them alive.

00:46:22.000 I don't know whether you've watched just lately what's happened with pigs.

00:46:27.000 It's been all over the newspapers and Wall Street Journal even.

00:46:31.000 When you see pig futures hit Wall Street Journal, you know something's going on.

00:46:35.000 And I think it was in January and part of February, they almost doubled.

00:46:40.000 What's the problem?

00:46:41.000 Starting April 1 last year, just April 1 last year, so we're literally 12 months into this, exactly 12 months.

00:46:49.000 The industry started losing one in four piggies, industry-wide, to a viral diarrhea. 0.92

00:46:57.000 Now my joke is, if there's one thing worse than diarrhea, it's got to be viral diarrhea. 0.96

00:47:04.000 But anyway, this is attacking the industrial pigs. 0.91

00:47:11.000 We're not seeing it out in the countryside in pastured pigs and our sort of things.

00:47:15.000 But it's making pork futures skyrocket.

00:47:20.000 The industry is on its heels.

00:47:22.000 They're desperate to find a cure.

00:47:25.000 Of course, finding a cure would mean changing their model.

00:47:29.000 But of course, they're They're trying to find a technological cure, you know, some more potent concoction, all right, to knock this out in such an unhealthy environment.

00:47:41.000 And so imagine that.

00:47:43.000 I mean, nationwide of all the whatever millions of pigs, one in four, 25% of all piggies right now being born in the U.S. are dying. 0.67

00:47:53.000 From viral diarrhea. 0.57

00:47:54.000 That's incredible.

00:47:55.000 Yeah.

00:47:56.000 It's a big deal.

00:47:57.000 Big deal.

00:47:57.000 This environment that you're talking about, this pathogen-rich environment where the fetal particulates in the air, completely not natural.

00:48:06.000 In nature, they're in wide open fields and the air and the natural environment filters all this.

00:48:13.000 This is something that's completely been over the last, you know, less than 100 years.

00:48:18.000 It's very recent.

00:48:20.000 It's only in the last You know, 50 to 60 years.

00:48:23.000 Our rule of thumb is that good food production, good farming, good food production should be aesthetically and aromatically sensually romantic.

00:48:36.000 You know, I mean, look, if you've got to walk through sheep dip and put on a hazmat suit to go visit your food, you might not want to eat it.

00:48:44.000 Yeah.

00:48:46.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:48:48.000 Now, this idea of factory farming, this huge, large-scale thing where you're stuffing all these chickens into...

00:48:58.000 Could those farms be converted to a more holistic approach like you're prescribing?

00:49:07.000 That is such a great question, and...

00:49:12.000 I'll tell you the truth.

00:49:13.000 My heart goes out to farmers who have signed on the dotted line and been kind of taken in by this model.

00:49:23.000 But the fact is they are so anti-nature that I don't see a retrofit.

00:49:34.000 And that's one of the problems when you have capital-intensive infrastructure.

00:49:38.000 When you have single-designed or single-use capital-intensive infrastructure, even when it becomes a detriment to society to have that infrastructure, we still have to use it because we're economically and emotionally vested in it.

00:49:56.000 Our toys run our thinking.

00:50:00.000 I mean, look at...

00:50:03.000 Look at the health field.

00:50:05.000 I mean, we have to use our infrastructure because it's really expensive.

00:50:09.000 And so we've got to use this stuff.

00:50:11.000 And the same thing is true in farming now.

00:50:13.000 When you pour that much concrete and bend that much rebar, you feel compelled to use it.

00:50:22.000 So it's a real problem.

00:50:24.000 And I just don't see...

00:50:33.000 Really efficient ways of retrofitting a lot of these structures.

00:50:39.000 You know, they might make good miniature golf courses.

00:50:43.000 The smell, though.

00:50:46.000 God.

00:50:48.000 Yeah.

00:50:48.000 Well, I mean, just to give you an example of some things that can be done with a different model, one is, just to give you an example, one is that if you go to a composting bedding, In an operation,

00:51:05.000 you can ameliorate a lot of the problems.

00:51:09.000 The problem is that that takes a lot of carbon.

00:51:13.000 In order to have compost, you have to have a carbon-nitrogen ratio that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 to 35 to 1. All right?

00:51:24.000 CN. It's called the CN ratio.

00:51:27.000 And, of course, you have to have moisture, you have to have air, and you have to have microbes.

00:51:32.000 So there's five components to a compost pile.

00:51:34.000 But you have to have one other thing, and that is enough size to support an internal community of microbial beings.

00:51:42.000 They've got to have their TV shows, they've got to build their roads, have their schools, and have banks and politicians and stuff, too.

00:51:50.000 So it takes room for these microorganisms to build those communities. 0.74

00:51:57.000 You can't build a compost pile that's 12 inches by 12 inches by 12 inches.

00:52:01.000 Too small.

00:52:02.000 The smallest size is like a yard by a yard by a yard.

00:52:06.000 All right.

00:52:07.000 Well, the problem is that in most factory farming facilities, not only can you not even have any bedding in there, the animals are on slatted floors or virtually concrete.

00:52:26.000 There is no life, there is no community of beings, good community of beings.

00:52:34.000 In nature, a lot of people don't realize there are a lot more good bacteria than bad bacteria.

00:52:40.000 There really aren't that many bad bacteria.

00:52:42.000 In nature, if you're keeping score of things, there are actually a lot more good ones than bad ones when you come to this invisible world of little microbial beings.

00:52:54.000 And so the default position of nature is health.

00:53:03.000 We, in our culture right now, we've got things so out of whack that we just assume that the default position of nature is sickness.

00:53:12.000 You know, that nature's broken and I've got to fix it.

00:53:14.000 That's not true.

00:53:15.000 The default position of nature is wellness and health.

00:53:19.000 If there's sickness, then...

00:53:22.000 Then that indicates something out of whack.

00:53:25.000 There's a protocol that's been violated.

00:53:29.000 So, one of the ways to house animals, at least temporarily, in shelter is to have a living blanket.

00:53:44.000 I call it a carbonaceous diaper for them to live on that is deep enough and alive enough with all these microbes so that nematodes attack the pathogenic microbes so that in this sphere there's enough community of beings interacting in this war of good bugs and bad bugs.

00:54:07.000 The good bugs beat out the bad bugs.

00:54:09.000 That's the right position.

00:54:11.000 And that can be done.

00:54:12.000 We actually use that when we feed hay in the wintertime in our hay sheds.

00:54:16.000 We use it for the pigs in the winter when they're in housing.

00:54:19.000 For the brooder house where we start chicks, we have it where we can build up 24 inches of bedding. 0.99

00:54:26.000 In the hay shed with the cows, we can go four feet deep with this carbonaceous, living, composting bedding.

00:54:35.000 And that is a partial answer But the buildings that are currently designed can't handle a living compost medium for the animals to be on.

00:54:48.000 They're structurally not designed to handle that.

00:54:51.000 And so, you know, the retrofit becomes pretty tough.

00:54:56.000 That's fascinating.

00:54:57.000 So it's almost like they need to be destroyed and need to be started from scratch.

00:55:02.000 Yeah.

00:55:03.000 And the beautiful thing is, really, they don't need to be...

00:55:10.000 Replaced with very much, they just need to be abandoned.

00:55:14.000 You know, most great breakthroughs throughout history, breakthroughs, have been breakwiths, something.

00:55:24.000 You know, think about the breakthrough for, for example, compact discs.

00:55:28.000 You know, the Germans tried to do it for a long time, but they couldn't get past the long play disc model, you know? 0.94

00:55:39.000 We just can't do it.

00:55:41.000 And the Japanese, who didn't have a history of LP records like Germany did, they said, well, why does it have to be, you know, this size?

00:55:49.000 Let's make it smaller.

00:55:50.000 Boom! 0.99

00:55:51.000 The Japanese owned it.

00:55:53.000 You know, that whole market.

00:55:54.000 So it was a breakwith tradition.

00:55:57.000 And many innovations, many innovative things are breakwiths.

00:56:04.000 That's the key to the breakthrough.

00:56:06.000 There's a lot of people that don't realize that what we're dealing with when you're talking about a lot of the flus and a lot of the diseases that become pandemics that they start with livestock.

00:56:17.000 Avian flu, swine flu, some of the most horrific flus that we've experienced in the past hundred years have come as a direct result of this type of farming.

00:56:27.000 Yes, that's right.

00:56:28.000 The concentration of The total unnatural concentration and buildup of toxicity in these places is incredible.

00:56:42.000 And so what happens is that the industry uses concoctions from something as benign as chlorine all the way to stiffer stuff to try to sanitize, clean, wash down, all that stuff.

00:56:57.000 But all that does is open the door For the survivors, and every time a new concoction is developed, there are survivors.

00:57:11.000 And the survivors become more and more virulent so that, for example, when the industry says, oh, look, E. coli, it's been around forever, you know, get over it.

00:57:21.000 E. coli is part of a cow's digestion. 0.94

00:57:24.000 Well, that's true, but not the virulent strains that we're developing by feeding the Unnatural feeds and the drugs.

00:57:36.000 And so where those would normally be fairly benign in our highly acidic digestive system, they become more virulent and they survive in us instead of us killing them.

00:57:49.000 And that's this evolution of things.

00:57:51.000 I mean, you know, take Arkansas now where their farmers are now budgeting $70 per acre To hand machete superweeds that have morphed as a result of glyphosate,

00:58:10.000 Roundup, because of genetically modified organism, corn and soybeans being planted, it's created these survivor superweeds.

00:58:20.000 Because whenever we try to sterilize or sanitize, there are survivors.

00:58:29.000 And those survivors become tougher and tougher and tougher. 0.94

00:58:32.000 We are a bunch of dummies, aren't we? 0.97

00:58:35.000 We really are. 1.00

00:58:36.000 As a human race, we are just a bunch of silly dummies. 0.99

00:58:39.000 There's an issue that is a big one with antibiotic soaps. 0.96

00:58:45.000 A lot of people think it's real smart to wash with antibiotic soaps, but what they don't realize is that antibiotic soaps kill all the good flora on your skin as well.

00:58:54.000 And it seems like that's really similar to what's going on here.

00:58:58.000 Absolutely.

00:58:58.000 Your talk of the live bedding.

00:59:01.000 What that is, is nature's own way of dealing with the pathogens instead of pumping some chemicals into them.

00:59:08.000 That's right.

00:59:09.000 And there's nothing unnatural about it.

00:59:11.000 In other words, you don't get virulent survivors.

00:59:14.000 They're all on the equal creation playing field, if you will.

00:59:20.000 And our responsibility then is simply to create a habitat That allows this battlefield to play out in its natural setting.

00:59:32.000 Natural setting is the key because there is sort of a give and take, a place, a jigsaw puzzle piece place for all the various elements of a farm, of an ecosystem.

00:59:44.000 And that's what you're addressing when you're...

00:59:46.000 That's what I found so incredibly fascinating about the idea of continuing to move these animals.

00:59:51.000 And you have these very low voltage electric fences that are just enough so they go, oh, I don't want to go near there.

00:59:57.000 No one's getting hurt, but they're like...

00:59:58.000 No, it's called a psychological barrier.

01:00:02.000 It's essentially a car battery you use, right?

01:00:04.000 Well, it's a car battery powering an energizer.

01:00:09.000 It has high voltage, but no amperage.

01:00:12.000 So, you know, you get a lot of pain, but there's no danger because you're running like, you know, goodness, you know...

01:00:21.000 A 20th of an amp, okay?

01:00:23.000 I mean, there's no energy, but there's a lot of pressure.

01:00:28.000 And so these systems, again, these are computer microchip systems.

01:00:33.000 So I think as we've talked about how did the factory farm develop, I think perhaps rather than continue, you can go wherever you want to with the questions, but I would like to point out To folks that as bad as that is and depressing and yeah,

01:00:53.000 we're a bunch of dummies and all that, my goodness, we have now innovated the most amazing infrastructure to be able for the first time in human history to caress our earth nest,

01:01:11.000 our lover if you will, more strategically than And purposefully than we have ever been able to do it before.

01:01:23.000 And the infrastructure is amazing.

01:01:26.000 One is electric fencing.

01:01:28.000 I mean, you can now, in a wheelbarrow full of material, you can now place hundreds of thousands of animals in a certain spot for a day.

01:01:42.000 And And manage carefully their intersection with a given piece of nature.

01:01:50.000 That's unprecedented.

01:01:51.000 We've never been able to do that before.

01:01:53.000 And we can protect them.

01:01:55.000 We can make them comfortable Not with stationary barns and, you know, big post and beam, you know, you have to cut down the whole forest to do this, but now with bandsaw technology, instead of, you know,

01:02:10.000 the big old circular saws that removed a quarter of an inch per cut, now with a little Honda engine, you know, that just sips fuel and a one-tenth of an inch thick We can now mill tinker toy-like lath structure material to build very lightweight portable barns,

01:02:37.000 portable shelters.

01:02:39.000 So we use those on our farm.

01:02:41.000 We have all these portable infrastructures for turkeys, chickens, cows, pigs, so that we can move a shade tree or a barn and Protective shelter with the animals, with a four-wheeler,

01:02:57.000 a couple of guys pushing it along.

01:03:01.000 This portable infrastructure then...

01:03:06.000 It allows us to keep the animals controlled and comfortable.

01:03:12.000 And with black pipe, black pipe, we can lay miles.

01:03:16.000 What's black pipe?

01:03:17.000 A plastic pipe.

01:03:19.000 We can now develop a pond or a spring and put that water in a nice, clean delivery system, like the plumbing in your house.

01:03:31.000 And deliver it miles so the animals aren't, you know, drinking out of their toilet.

01:03:36.000 They're not, you know, pooping and then drinking out of it and all that like you see.

01:03:40.000 No, they're actually eating.

01:03:41.000 I mean, I drink out of the cow troughs.

01:03:44.000 I mean, that water is clean enough for me to drink.

01:03:46.000 You drink out of that?

01:03:47.000 Absolutely.

01:03:48.000 Oh, it builds up your immune system.

01:03:51.000 Oh, how dare you?

01:03:52.000 It builds up your immune system.

01:03:54.000 Does it?

01:03:55.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:03:56.000 Do you ever get sick?

01:03:58.000 You know, knock on wood, I haven't been sick for years.

01:04:01.000 I don't remember the last time I was sick.

01:04:03.000 Wow.

01:04:03.000 I mean, even with a cold.

01:04:05.000 Really?

01:04:05.000 Yeah, really.

01:04:06.000 I mean, I take a lot of vitamin C every day.

01:04:09.000 You know, ascorbic acid.

01:04:10.000 I take my, you know, dopotropic for keep me, you know, from going crazy.

01:04:15.000 What's dopotropic?

01:04:17.000 It's an herb mix.

01:04:19.000 You know, it's related to dopamine and stuff, but it's a calmer.

01:04:26.000 I travel so much now that in such an unnatural environment, you know, I was starting a couple years ago, I was starting into a kind of a fight or flight subconscious, fight or flight thing where I would get, I couldn't breathe, you know, on an airplane and stuff because it was, and, you know,

01:04:41.000 I'd get all congested and all this.

01:04:43.000 And I went to a quack, an alternative medical practitioner, that uses the kind of machines they use in Europe.

01:04:52.000 When you go in the emergency room in Europe and you grab two probes and a little needle tells you everything that's wrong with you, it costs like pennies.

01:05:01.000 That's how they can get along with government health care because they actually are smart about it.

01:05:05.000 One of these probes you hold on with your hands and they tell you what's wrong with you?

01:05:08.000 Scientology.

01:05:09.000 Yeah, no, it's pretty cool.

01:05:11.000 Anyway, I mean, it's not endorsed by any medical...

01:05:13.000 Does it work?

01:05:14.000 Oh, absolutely.

01:05:16.000 Listen...

01:05:16.000 What's it called?

01:05:18.000 I thought it was funny, too.

01:05:19.000 I went for my first visit.

01:05:21.000 I sat down.

01:05:22.000 She said, somewhere in your background, you had a bladder issue, didn't you?

01:05:31.000 I hadn't said a word.

01:05:33.000 I mean, I'm 57, right?

01:05:35.000 When I was...

01:05:37.000 How old was I? Eight.

01:05:39.000 Eight.

01:05:40.000 I had a malfunctioning kidney valve.

01:05:44.000 A malfunctioning kidney valve almost died.

01:05:46.000 I mean, this was a long time ago, right?

01:05:48.000 They went in with surgery and repaired that valve.

01:05:51.000 But what it was doing, it was letting my urine...

01:05:54.000 Back up from my bladder, back up into the kidney.

01:05:56.000 It's a one-way check valve, okay?

01:05:58.000 So, you know, your bladder's under pressure, right?

01:06:00.000 Right.

01:06:01.000 And that urine is supposed to only go one direction, all right?

01:06:05.000 Into the bladder.

01:06:06.000 Well, I had one malfunctioning valve that was letting, as the bladder filled up with pressure, it was the balloon was pushing the urine back up into the kidney.

01:06:16.000 Right.

01:06:16.000 All right?

01:06:17.000 So they went in and repaired it.

01:06:18.000 Anyway, in 10 minutes, her machine picked up that Which was a 50-year-old bodily injury problem.

01:06:31.000 And boy, I sat up and saluted at that point.

01:06:35.000 What's the machine called?

01:06:38.000 I don't know what the machine's called.

01:06:40.000 If I knew more about it, then somebody would come after me and put me in jail.

01:06:44.000 Quack watch.

01:06:45.000 Is that the same machine?

01:06:47.000 It says that that's one of the machines.

01:06:50.000 There's different kinds of models of it, I'm guessing.

01:06:53.000 Yeah.

01:06:54.000 This is Quack Watch, though. 0.87

01:06:56.000 This is a website that's saying it's a quack.

01:07:01.000 Well, I don't know if it's that machine or not.

01:07:03.000 Yeah, I don't know if it's that machine or not either.

01:07:03.000 I don't want to tell you who she is because she'd probably get put in jail if you knew who she was.

01:07:07.000 Really?

01:07:08.000 Yeah.

01:07:08.000 She'd get put in jail for that?

01:07:15.000 My goodness, they go after raw milk producers and backyard chicken growers. 1.00

01:07:19.000 That is a true story.

01:07:21.000 That's a true fact.

01:07:25.000 There's an orthodoxy that's really crazy today.

01:07:28.000 And of course, you know, we're heretics.

01:07:31.000 And the Inquisition is very real.

01:07:33.000 Yeah, fooling patients with computerized magic eight balls.

01:07:37.000 I wonder if that's the same thing.

01:07:40.000 I have no idea.

01:07:42.000 I purposely try to not know all about it.

01:07:45.000 The raw milk thing is a real craziness.

01:07:48.000 Have you ever seen the – there was a story recently where they arrested people with a SWAT team for selling raw milk.

01:07:57.000 I mean, they broke down doors, and they had guns, and they were wearing bulletproof vests, and they're just there.

01:08:03.000 This is a farm.

01:08:05.000 Just milk.

01:08:05.000 And then somehow or another, because we've made milk so toxic because of these environments that you're describing, that you...

01:08:13.000 When you drink raw milk on a normal farm like your farm where the cows are very healthy, you could drink that raw milk and it's actually easily digested.

01:08:23.000 Your body digests it far more easy and a lot of people that are even lactose intolerant don't have a problem with the raw milk.

01:08:30.000 Right.

01:08:30.000 And the milk from an industrial farm is toxic.

01:08:33.000 I mean, it does have a lot of problems.

01:08:35.000 A lot of people don't realize that the Mayo Clinic was built.

01:08:39.000 I mean, it started back during the early time of the century when cows were eating brewery waste, distiller's grains, because they were without refrigeration.

01:08:53.000 They put the breweries and the cows together.

01:08:56.000 And in these urban sectors, they didn't understand bacteria and hygiene and sanitation and all that stuff.

01:09:01.000 So the cows got brucellosis and all these things, passed it on to people.

01:09:06.000 And Mayo Clinic started putting cows back on pasture and feeding raw milk to their patients during the time when people were getting sick from urban, industrial, swill-fed cow milk.

01:09:22.000 And that's how Mayo Clinic actually started.

01:09:24.000 So That's a...

01:09:27.000 Yeah, I mean, raw milk is a wonderful material, but the cow has to be treated like a cow.

01:09:34.000 You know, you have to respect her cowness as a cow. 1.00

01:09:37.000 Respect her cowness. 0.99

01:09:39.000 That's how you get...

01:09:40.000 You don't get all the milkness of milk if you don't respect the cowness of the cow.

01:09:44.000 Right.

01:09:45.000 And so what's happened is that the industry is so filthy and pathogen, you know, and toxic that...

01:09:55.000 And people fear food because the average person is fearful of food.

01:10:00.000 I mean, the average person is far more informed about the latest dysfunction in the Kardashian household than they are.

01:10:07.000 What's going to become flesh of their flesh and bone of their bones at 6 o'clock?

01:10:10.000 I like how you pronounce it.

01:10:12.000 Kardashians.

01:10:13.000 That show is you really don't have a TV. I really like it.

01:10:16.000 No, I don't.

01:10:17.000 I don't.

01:10:18.000 So, whatever they are, whoever they are.

01:10:21.000 Exactly.

01:10:21.000 I'm still asking.

01:10:23.000 That butt, though. 1.00

01:10:24.000 That butt. 1.00

01:10:25.000 It's the butt. 0.99

01:10:26.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:10:27.000 It's all it is.

01:10:27.000 It's all about...

01:10:28.000 It's all you need. 0.97

01:10:29.000 Put a butt on TV and people will watch. 0.96

01:10:31.000 So, the point is, though, that people are so paranoid of food and ignorant about food that they fear food today. 0.96

01:10:39.000 I mean, we have customers call us up...

01:10:42.000 If I thaw a chicken in a sink, will it get salmonella?

01:10:45.000 I mean, there's a profound ignorance in our culture regarding food because we're disconnected from it.

01:10:53.000 And so afraid people ask for security from the government.

01:10:57.000 Well, the government says, well, let's see, what should be our protocols?

01:11:01.000 They go to the industry for the answers and concoct an orthodoxy.

01:11:07.000 That actually shuts out the antidote for the very problems they're trying to solve.

01:11:11.000 The idea that the government would have any solutions whatsoever to that is pretty ridiculous in the first place, because who would be the person that would be an expert on this?

01:11:20.000 Would it be the industry that creates a lot of these problems?

01:11:24.000 What we need is a guy like you working for the government.

01:11:28.000 Oh, I wouldn't work for...

01:11:29.000 If I got chosen to work for the government, whatever agency I was in charge of, I'd shut it down before Sunday.

01:11:38.000 What would you do if, like, let's say there's some catastrophic failure of our government and they just decide to quit, and everybody just decides to go under, and we need to figure out how to regulate farms.

01:11:52.000 What could be done?

01:11:54.000 What could be done at this point?

01:11:55.000 I mean, you're suggesting that the factory farms, there's no retrofit, they should be destroyed, and you're better off building miniature golf courses over them.

01:12:05.000 How would we be able to distribute food to a nation of hungry people?

01:12:10.000 Is it possible to use your methods, the methods you use, and how big is your farm in Virginia?

01:12:15.000 Well, we own 550 acres, and we lease another nine farms, so we're running 2,000 acres.

01:12:21.000 And we're producing a lot of food.

01:12:25.000 In fact, we produce We surpassed the county average in production on pasture by about a threefold amount, which is pretty significant.

01:12:34.000 So factory farms, given the same amount of space, produce less.

01:12:38.000 Yeah.

01:12:39.000 In fact, the thing that's important to realize when you look at a factory farm, when the industry shows this picture of this big chicken house or this big pig factory or cow feed lot or a square mile of Strawberries in California.

01:12:58.000 What you have to understand is those systems are not stand-alone islands.

01:13:03.000 When they say, look at the efficiency, the small footprint, what they're not showing you are the square miles of subsidized grain or petroleum inputs, the land area that all that takes is To sustain that little footprint and then the land that it takes to assimilate all of the waste stream from that.

01:13:27.000 So our system doesn't take one more square yard of production than the factory system.

01:13:39.000 The fact that we're Doing, you know, stackable synergistic symbiotic multi-speciated enterprises, it's more productive.

01:13:49.000 But when you look at what we're producing, even though, you know, at first glance, the uneducated might say, well, it takes a lot more land to produce them this way.

01:14:00.000 Actually, you're seeing all the land.

01:14:03.000 Just like when people say, well, it takes more people farming to do it your way.

01:14:07.000 Yeah, but you know what?

01:14:10.000 We don't have people fixing pollution areas.

01:14:13.000 We don't have people burying people with C. diff and MRSA. We're not making People sick from salmonella and E. coli.

01:14:23.000 Are you with me?

01:14:24.000 So in total, all we're doing is taking all the people that are currently trying to triage the collateral damage of cheap food.

01:14:37.000 We're taking all those people and growing the food.

01:14:43.000 And all those jobs are coming back to the farm instead of being in...

01:14:50.000 In whatever costly remedial programs they are.

01:14:56.000 So you are essentially a standalone system, whereas when you're seeing a factory farm, there's a lot of stuff you're not seeing that's required to make that thing run.

01:15:04.000 That's exactly right.

01:15:05.000 Now, we do buy grain for our omnivores, but we buy local GMO-free grain, no genetically modified organisms.

01:15:12.000 And yes...

01:15:14.000 The whole idea is to create a carbon centricity so that we're not shipping this stuff all over the place.

01:15:23.000 And when people say, oh, but a locality can't produce it.

01:15:26.000 Cornell did a fascinating study several years ago of New York.

01:15:30.000 They took every metropolitan city, Ithaca, Syracuse, Buffalo, Albany, New York City, and they took all the cities of New York and said, Could we produce the calories for these urban sectors?

01:15:44.000 How much land would it take?

01:15:46.000 And what they found was that every urban sector could produce all of its calories within 30 miles.

01:15:54.000 So even in New York, it could be stand-alone self-sufficient, except for New York City, which if they went into New Jersey, it became self-sufficient as well, because New York's right on the edge of the state.

01:16:08.000 And so a fundamentally integrated system rather than a segregated system becomes far more efficient.

01:16:17.000 In the scheme of things, it becomes far more efficient than a segregated system with all this long-distance transportation.

01:16:24.000 Because the ships are passing in the night.

01:16:27.000 That's what's happening.

01:16:28.000 Iowa produces all this food.

01:16:31.000 Iowa only eats.

01:16:32.000 Only 5% of the food that's eaten in Iowa is grown in Iowa.

01:16:36.000 What?

01:16:38.000 And Iowa is the most fertile piece of land in the planet.

01:16:43.000 Why?

01:16:44.000 Because they're They're not producing food.

01:16:48.000 There's nothing to eat there.

01:16:49.000 If you want to eat berries and apples and things, that has to be imported from somewhere else because the whole state's in corn and soybeans.

01:16:57.000 This genetically modified thing is a real hot topic.

01:17:00.000 It is.

01:17:01.000 Genetically modified seems to me to be along the same lines of this factory farming idea.

01:17:08.000 Instead of looking at it in a comprehensive approach, what you're doing is saying, well, we've got a problem.

01:17:14.000 Let's attack that problem with chemicals.

01:17:15.000 Yeah.

01:17:16.000 Yes, well, it's fundamentally bridging.

01:17:19.000 It's fundamentally overrunning a lot of natural barriers that are there in place to protect happening what is happening, which is a mishmash of genetic material.

01:17:39.000 So you have a salmon that's partly a pepper plant, partly a tropical herb, and partly Pig! 0.99

01:17:47.000 Okay?

01:17:48.000 And you talk about...

01:17:50.000 You mentioned allergies a little bit in the past.

01:17:54.000 When we were kids, I didn't know anybody with a food allergy.

01:17:58.000 We didn't even know the phrase.

01:17:59.000 I never even heard the phrase.

01:18:01.000 Okay?

01:18:02.000 And now it's ubiquitous.

01:18:05.000 What's happening is that we're getting all of this frankenfood.

01:18:11.000 It's...

01:18:13.000 Our internal bacteria, we've got three trillion beings in our insides, and they're not capable of mutating and assimilating material as fast as our human brains can adulterate the food system.

01:18:33.000 And so what happens is we're sending down there a bunch of foreign material.

01:18:40.000 What's this?

01:18:41.000 I can just see them talking.

01:18:42.000 Let's have a board meeting here to see what that GMO corn is.

01:18:46.000 And so what happens is they can't assimilate it.

01:18:49.000 And so the other thing about GMOs is that it is hard to contain.

01:18:55.000 By nature, it's promiscuous.

01:18:58.000 So what you have here is a new life form. 0.54

01:19:02.000 I mean, the only thing that people have been able to do before now is a donkey on a horse.

01:19:11.000 It makes a mule.

01:19:13.000 But a mule is sterile.

01:19:15.000 It's almost like God says, alright, you can do that, donkey on horse, but that's it.

01:19:20.000 You're not going to go any more than that.

01:19:22.000 This is not Mendel's peas.

01:19:24.000 Mendel was peas on peas.

01:19:26.000 He wasn't peas on tomatoes on pigs on monkeys.

01:19:29.000 It was within species.

01:19:32.000 And so this is an assault on the sexual plumbing that nature has to maintain genetic purity.

01:19:46.000 And it seems like the DDT issue hasn't been factored in as far as the long-term effects.

01:19:53.000 That's right.

01:19:53.000 Yeah.

01:19:54.000 The feeding trials, all the feeding trials have only been like, you know, 60 days.

01:19:58.000 Well, 60 days is...

01:20:00.000 Not only that, but probably the world expert on this is Jeffrey Smith, who wrote Seeds of Deception and is the premier world GMO expert.

01:20:10.000 He points out that when Monsanto was doing feeding trials for FDA on, for example, GMO potatoes, they chose for the feeding trial geriatric rats.

01:20:24.000 Well, geriatric rats are already completely formed.

01:20:27.000 You're not going to see any big changes in those.

01:20:29.000 In Scotland, when the scientists there duplicated those studies with juvenile rats...

01:20:38.000 Same feeding trials, same potatoes, same everything.

01:20:42.000 All sorts of problems developed.

01:20:44.000 Cognitive ability, brain fog, they couldn't go through a maze, organ development, kidney malfunction, fertility problems.

01:20:54.000 I mean, you name it, I had all these problems.

01:20:56.000 So, you know, one of the problems with science is that it's very subjective.

01:21:03.000 You can set up an experiment within your paradigm.

01:21:07.000 Teddy Roosevelt used to say, it's really hard to get a guy to see something when his paycheck depends on seeing something else.

01:21:16.000 That's a good way of putting it, too.

01:21:25.000 And constrict the parameters, whether it's length of time, type of subject, you name it.

01:21:32.000 But you can set up the parameters of the experiment To skew the results, to not get a comprehensive, eclectic view.

01:21:41.000 Like the geriatric rats. 0.86

01:21:42.000 Like the geriatric rats. 0.99

01:21:43.000 Yeah, that seems like dirty pool. 0.97

01:21:45.000 That's a bad thing that they did.

01:21:48.000 And they're doing this just for profit.

01:21:51.000 Absolutely.

01:21:52.000 I mean, there's a lot of money on the line.

01:21:54.000 A lot of money on the line.

01:21:58.000 And...

01:22:00.000 So where are we going to go from here?

01:22:02.000 How do we go from here?

01:22:04.000 And so when you ask, well, what could you do?

01:22:08.000 All right, we know this system's bad.

01:22:10.000 How do we really move over here?

01:22:14.000 And there are several answers.

01:22:17.000 I mean, one is go underground.

01:22:19.000 Just start buying the good stuff.

01:22:23.000 Guerrilla-type marketing.

01:22:25.000 But I think the main one is...

01:22:28.000 What we need is a food emancipation proclamation. 0.95

01:22:33.000 We need a food emancipation proclamation to free the food system from the enslavement of bureaucratic orthodoxy.

01:22:42.000 So that consenting adults, and I'm choosing my words very carefully here, so that consenting adults could make a voluntary choice of food choice, the type that they want, From the source that they want.

01:22:59.000 And if we allowed however many in our society, 5%, 10%, 20%, whoever wanted to opt out of government-sanctioned orthodoxy and say,

01:23:16.000 hmm, is there something better out here?

01:23:20.000 Can I choose something different?

01:23:21.000 If anybody who wanted to opt out Of the current industrial government orthodoxy could do so.

01:23:32.000 Voluntary consenting adults here.

01:23:35.000 We're talking about the right of private contract.

01:23:38.000 If I want to come to your farm voluntarily, no extortion here, voluntarily, look around, smell around, ask around, and I want what you're producing...

01:23:49.000 I should be able to get it.

01:23:51.000 When the government gets between my lips and my throat, I call that an invasion of privacy.

01:23:56.000 And yes, I do also believe that we should legalize all drugs.

01:24:01.000 All of them.

01:24:02.000 Because a government that can tell you you can't smoke dope can also tell you you can't drink raw milk or refuse to vaccinate your children or go down the line.

01:24:13.000 The fact is...

01:24:16.000 That the orthodoxy is so convoluted now that it's perfectly safe and fine to feed your kids Coca-Cola, Mountain Dew, Count Chocula, Cheerios, and Pop-Tarts, but not homemade charcuterie,

01:24:34.000 pickles, raw milk, And backyard butchered chickens.

01:24:38.000 Isn't that crazy?

01:24:39.000 It's absolutely crazy.

01:24:41.000 And if we would free up, I mean, I travel a lot, I talk to thousands and thousands of farmers.

01:24:47.000 I just talked to 200 farmers up in San Jose this weekend, you know.

01:24:51.000 And what's the limiting factor?

01:24:53.000 Why is local food cheap?

01:24:55.000 Why is our kind of food, I mean cheap, more expensive than it has to be?

01:25:00.000 Why are we perceived as elitist?

01:25:02.000 Why isn't it more available?

01:25:04.000 Why is it so hard to find integrity food?

01:25:07.000 This is the issue.

01:25:08.000 And if we would free up those of us in the system that are ready to access our neighbors with quiche and noodles and charcuterie and, you know, name it, to free us up,

01:25:25.000 it would completely invert the entire food system in a year.

01:25:33.000 The entire food system as you speak of like when you're talking about the genetically modified organisms and you're talking about these companies that provide them like Monsanto there's a backlash against that now because of the information that's been released about the detrimental effects of them and you're seeing like in Brazil they won lawsuits the farmers won massive lawsuits against Monsanto and these Or various GMO products that they've created.

01:26:00.000 Say, you're talking about Iowa and the fertility of the land in Iowa.

01:26:05.000 What could possibly happen?

01:26:09.000 Could all these farms that are set up to just specifically grow grains, and a lot of them grains that are specifically grown, just to feed livestock?

01:26:19.000 Or make alcohol.

01:26:21.000 Is that what it is, too?

01:26:22.000 Well, yeah, corn, you know, all the alcohol, corn alcohol.

01:26:26.000 That's what most of the farms...

01:26:28.000 Well, a lot of it, you know.

01:26:29.000 All right, but go ahead.

01:26:31.000 Massive amounts of money are invested in these systems.

01:26:34.000 What could they do?

01:26:35.000 I mean, what could be done to change all that?

01:26:38.000 Could those farms be sort of turned around and brought to more of a comprehensive approach to farming like you're prescribing?

01:26:46.000 What did delivery stables do when the automobile came? 0.98

01:26:51.000 That's what we're talking about here.

01:26:52.000 Think about that transition.

01:26:56.000 Think about the horse-drawn hackneys when the electric streetcar came.

01:27:00.000 I mean, that's the level of change here.

01:27:04.000 You're talking about massive societal change. 0.97

01:27:10.000 There will be some losers. 0.58

01:27:12.000 But you know what? 0.98

01:27:13.000 I think?

01:27:21.000 I think?

01:27:44.000 Absolutely.

01:27:47.000 Absolutely.

01:27:48.000 Absolutely.

01:28:04.000 We're good to go.

01:28:28.000 But see, under our system, you don't have any of that stuff.

01:28:32.000 So, I mean, a thousand tractor trailer loads is a lot of food, alright?

01:28:35.000 Anyway, I had two vets there that were part of the extermination federal tax force. 0.70

01:28:41.000 Both of them said that we are considered...

01:28:47.000 I mean, they came to visit because they'd read about us.

01:28:49.000 You know, we're here.

01:28:51.000 You know, they came from Oklahoma or whatever.

01:28:53.000 We'll go see this place.

01:28:54.000 And both of them said that we are considered a typhoid Mary, right?

01:28:58.000 In the community.

01:29:01.000 Because, you know, we don't vaccinate, we don't medicate, and we don't, you know, we don't do all the orthodoxy that the industry says you're supposed to do.

01:29:11.000 That's the orthodoxy.

01:29:14.000 And if you don't adhere to that, and of course then that orthodoxy drives insurance.

01:29:20.000 How does a farmer sell his product?

01:29:22.000 How does he get product liability insurance?

01:29:24.000 The insurance company says, well, we won't underwrite you unless you use best agricultural practices.

01:29:31.000 Well, the insurance company doesn't know anything about agriculture.

01:29:33.000 Where are they going to find out about what's best agricultural practices?

01:29:36.000 They ring up the land-grant university, which is the lackey of the industry, and they say, well, you need this protocol of vaccinations, this protocol of medications, this protocol of chlorine, this protocol of fuming.

01:29:49.000 And if the farm doesn't do that, it's high-risk.

01:29:52.000 It's a high-risk farm.

01:29:53.000 You better not do it.

01:29:53.000 And so right now, a lot of farmers like us are unable to get Insurance, because the underwriters won't insure risky farming, which goes against the orthodoxy of the system.

01:30:09.000 Because the insurance executives play golf with the industrial ag executives, play golf with the bureaucracy executives.

01:30:18.000 It's all a big fraternity.

01:30:19.000 It's not a conspiracy.

01:30:21.000 It's a fraternity of ideas.

01:30:23.000 And they've all drunk the Kool-Aid.

01:30:25.000 That is madness.

01:30:27.000 And it's incredibly frustrating because you're so transparent about your process and the benefits of your process. 0.99

01:30:34.000 When you're sitting out there in one of the videos that I watched, you're sitting out there with these pigs These pigs are just hanging out. 0.98

01:30:42.000 They come up to you like the pig got under your arm and you put your arm on him. 0.97

01:30:46.000 It's like, hey, what's up? 0.88

01:30:48.000 They're just rooting around. 0.81

01:30:51.000 Anybody that wouldn't see the benefits of that, you have to be either, you have to have a financial vested interest in not seeing it, or you have to be insane. 0.99

01:31:00.000 Yeah, you have to be insane. 0.96

01:31:02.000 The best compliment I ever got was a young chef. 0.94

01:31:05.000 A young chef came out.

01:31:06.000 He wanted to see the farm.

01:31:07.000 He was starting to buy our stuff and really liked it.

01:31:09.000 He wanted to come out and see the pigs, so I took him up to the pigs.

01:31:12.000 He says, you know, he was a young guy.

01:31:14.000 He said, I have never...

01:31:16.000 I've never seen a live pig.

01:31:18.000 He cuts them up and cooks them all the time, but he'd never been physically present with a live pig.

01:31:23.000 And he just got really quiet.

01:31:24.000 I just let him enjoy it for a little while, and the pigs were gnawing on his shoestrings and just there.

01:31:30.000 And he finally said, you know, I don't know anything about raising pigs, but I think if I was a pig, this is the way I'd want to live.

01:31:40.000 And I said, that's right.

01:31:41.000 It resonates in our soul.

01:31:43.000 I mean, if you have a conscience at all, it resonates in your conscience. 0.98

01:31:48.000 Yeah, here's your pigs up here on the screen. 0.99

01:31:50.000 I mean, these pigs are just chilling. 0.99

01:31:52.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:31:53.000 They're having a great time.

01:31:54.000 They're not stuck in some disgusting pen where they're lumped in.

01:31:58.000 I mean, there was a story recently of a farmer who they believe fell.

01:32:02.000 They believe he may have had a heart attack.

01:32:03.000 He's an older gentleman.

01:32:04.000 Fell into a... 0.75

01:32:07.000 A pen and was killed by the pigs. 0.98

01:32:10.000 And everybody's like, oh, pigs are vicious.

01:32:14.000 It's the conditions that are vicious. 0.99

01:32:16.000 These pigs aren't going to kill anybody. 1.00

01:32:18.000 These pigs come right up to you and nuzzle with you, man. 1.00

01:32:20.000 I've seen it. 1.00

01:32:21.000 They will kill you if you quit moving. 0.86

01:32:23.000 They're omnivores, you know. 1.00

01:32:25.000 Oh yeah, if you're dead. 0.93

01:32:26.000 If you're dead.

01:32:28.000 I tell kindergartners that want to go in and pet them, I said, absolutely, you're welcome to go in and pet them.

01:32:33.000 Just keep wiggling.

01:32:35.000 Just keep wiggling.

01:32:37.000 That's hilarious.

01:32:38.000 They'll eat your toes first and your fingers, and in an hour they'll be to your spleen, you know, so keep moving.

01:32:44.000 They are omnivores.

01:32:45.000 Yeah, and they are survivors.

01:32:47.000 They are.

01:32:48.000 They're very cool.

01:32:48.000 That's one of the interesting things about pigs is this huge problem with feral, what we call feral hogs, because they're not a native species to North America, and they don't really have any natural predators.

01:33:00.000 I mean other than you know coyotes which have sort of taken them on and mountain lions and all the other animals that we have in North America but The number one invasive species problem we have as far as, like, big animals is pigs.

01:33:12.000 Well, there again, there again, the problem, it's a political problem.

01:33:16.000 It's not an ecological problem.

01:33:18.000 You know, in Europe they have feral pigs too, but it's not a problem.

01:33:21.000 You know why? 0.50

01:33:22.000 Because you can go out and shoot a pig and sell it to a restaurant. 0.99

01:33:26.000 You can sell it to a neighbor.

01:33:27.000 They allow, you know, wild shot animals, deer and pigs, To go into commerce.

01:33:35.000 I think the worry about that though is from a sportsman's point of view that you're going to have people out there sniping and poaching deer and all the really precious wild animals and selling them to restaurants and there won't be any there for hunters.

01:33:52.000 The thing is nature has a way of balancing it out and when there's an overpopulation they're easy to get and then once they get harder to get Then people get discouraged from hunting because they're too hard to get.

01:34:06.000 I would be more in support of that for pigs than the other animals simply because pigs breed all year round.

01:34:12.000 They'll have several litters a year of many, whereas a deer will have one fawn.

01:34:17.000 You know, and they'll have a fawn or two, and they'll have them once a year.

01:34:21.000 Yeah, well, maybe you could control it with licenses.

01:34:23.000 Just give people, you know, you can harvest so many a year or whatever.

01:34:27.000 I mean, there's a lot of ways to skin the cat.

01:34:30.000 The bottom line I'm getting to, though, is that when you prohibit a food source from entering commerce, you automatically have the government...

01:34:44.000 Manipulating a supply and demand situation.

01:34:50.000 And that's the reality.

01:34:53.000 And so, you know, the people that are concerned about, and you go down to some areas, I mean, yeah, the wild pig problem is a real, it's a real land abuse problem.

01:35:03.000 Well, they're having them in suburban San Jose.

01:35:06.000 San Jose, people are having their lawns chewed up.

01:35:09.000 There was a big news story about it the other day where they showed these pigs running across people's lawns in this normal suburban street.

01:35:16.000 They're chewing up their lawns.

01:35:17.000 They're resourceful and they're smart. 1.00

01:35:19.000 Pigs are the smartest. 0.99

01:35:20.000 Supposedly one of the smartest animals there is, and they are.

01:35:25.000 They're really smart.

01:35:27.000 So if we would allow people to actually practice consenting adult voluntary commerce on some of these things, it would then incentivize innovation,

01:35:43.000 entrepreneurship, and the antidote We're good to go.

01:36:06.000 And in order to do it, they're going to have to greatly drop the bird size in their houses.

01:36:12.000 And I know that there's a lot of research going into building these living compost bedding situations in these houses.

01:36:21.000 Even in the poultry industry?

01:36:22.000 Yes, in the poultry industry, yeah.

01:36:25.000 I mean, you know, Denmark...

01:36:28.000 Denmark made the change.

01:36:30.000 They outlawed factory pork houses years ago.

01:36:34.000 They've been fine.

01:36:35.000 They've gone to deep bedded houses, completely different situation.

01:36:40.000 And it makes a completely different living environment.

01:36:44.000 So, you know, you can...

01:36:47.000 You can make those changes.

01:36:48.000 They're not insurmountable.

01:36:50.000 And those changes, though, still are not where you're at.

01:36:53.000 Oh, no.

01:36:54.000 You've got these animals moving around in this giant farm, and you move your electric fences from place to place.

01:37:03.000 What's the method?

01:37:05.000 How do you get the animals to move?

01:37:07.000 You have them in one area for a day?

01:37:11.000 A day, yeah.

01:37:12.000 How big is the area that you fence in?

01:37:13.000 Well, I mean, let's take cows. 1.00

01:37:15.000 I mean, we've gone as tight as 400 head on two acres for a day.

01:37:20.000 I mean, that's pretty tight.

01:37:21.000 That's pretty tight.

01:37:22.000 An acre is a football field, just for people trying to visualize what's an acre.

01:37:26.000 It's roughly a football field.

01:37:27.000 So, you know, imagine 400 cows on two acres.

01:37:30.000 I mean, that's pretty dense, all right?

01:37:32.000 Yeah.

01:37:32.000 But the beauty is that when you move them all the time like this, they get very docile.

01:37:37.000 I mean, you know, their root...

01:37:39.000 They're routine.

01:37:40.000 And you incentivize it because every day at 4 o'clock when you go out and call them, they're going to a new salad bar.

01:37:46.000 If every day at 4 o'clock a certain call meant there's a bowl of ice cream for you, you'd get pretty used to that call as well.

01:37:54.000 And is that what you do?

01:37:54.000 You call them?

01:37:55.000 Yeah, we call them.

01:37:56.000 We don't herd them.

01:37:56.000 We call them.

01:37:57.000 What's the call?

01:37:58.000 Do you have a noise you make?

01:37:59.000 Oh, I can't wait!

01:38:02.000 And so they hear that and they know it's a little dinner bell.

01:38:04.000 Yeah, it's like a dinner bell.

01:38:06.000 And they just come right on.

01:38:09.000 Wow.

01:38:09.000 So then you set up this new...

01:38:12.000 You put the stakes down.

01:38:13.000 You set up this new area.

01:38:15.000 The fence is totally portable.

01:38:17.000 So you're essentially...

01:38:18.000 I mean, envision a field like a ladder.

01:38:21.000 And the permanent...

01:38:22.000 The edges of the field are the stringers of the ladder.

01:38:28.000 And the portable fences are the rungs.

01:38:32.000 So the permanents are there all the time, and we simply move the rungs, you know, contract or expand the rungs based on how much grass there is, how many there are in the herd, that sort of thing.

01:38:44.000 So it's a very artistic, you know, there's a science, but there's also an art to it.

01:38:49.000 As we essentially give them one plateful a day.

01:38:54.000 And you alternate animals in these areas.

01:38:57.000 Yeah, so the cows go through first, then the egg mobiles come in after them.

01:39:01.000 So after the cows are there, then you push the chicken house in there, you fence that in as well.

01:39:05.000 No, that's not fenced.

01:39:06.000 Those chickens can run anywhere they want to. 1.00

01:39:08.000 They just hang around the Eggmobile because that's where feed and water and nest boxes are.

01:39:13.000 So you don't have to fence them.

01:39:14.000 You don't have to fence them.

01:39:15.000 They go out up to 200 yards and scavenge and scratch out cow patties.

01:39:20.000 And when it starts getting dark, they come back in.

01:39:22.000 And when it starts getting dark, they go back in for security.

01:39:23.000 That's how we have it in our yard.

01:39:24.000 We leave the door open at night.

01:39:27.000 And then at night, we shut the door.

01:39:29.000 They know that chickens are...

01:39:33.000 You're chickened? 0.99

01:39:34.000 Scared, right?

01:39:34.000 I mean, we use the word slang, you know, you're chickened, you're scared.

01:39:37.000 And so their instinct is to get somewhere secure for the night.

01:39:41.000 They don't want to just sit out on the ground at night.

01:39:44.000 So your coop or the Eggmobile, that's a secure place, and they naturally are drawn to that as dark starts to go down.

01:39:54.000 So for them, you don't have to worry about that.

01:39:56.000 You just move this giant structure that you've created, which is very innovative.

01:40:00.000 Is this your design, the structure?

01:40:01.000 Yeah.

01:40:01.000 See if you can pull up the Eggmobile because it's pretty interesting.

01:40:05.000 See if you can find the video of it.

01:40:07.000 It was in one of those polyface, that's what you call it, polyface farm?

01:40:13.000 Mm-hmm.

01:40:14.000 It was one of those videos.

01:40:15.000 Right.

01:40:16.000 Is your design, you just figured out how to stack them in there in this sort of way?

01:40:20.000 Well, essentially, it's a chicken house on wheels, is what it is.

01:40:26.000 And so, you know, where you would normally make a chicken house, for example, yeah, there you go, where you normally make a chicken house stationary, this is simply mounted on wheels, on an axle, like a trailer.

01:40:39.000 And you just hooked up to it with a tractor.

01:40:41.000 And the chickens are all inside.

01:40:43.000 And you can move it up the public road or to the far side of the field or whatever.

01:40:48.000 And there's the guard dog.

01:40:50.000 The guard dog's with him as well.

01:40:52.000 And the guard dog keeps coyotes away.

01:40:54.000 He keeps coyotes and hawks and things like drumsticks for dinner.

01:40:58.000 He keeps those away.

01:40:59.000 We lost a chicken.

01:41:00.000 We don't know what happened.

01:41:01.000 I'm pretty sure it was a hawk.

01:41:03.000 Something just scooped one up.

01:41:05.000 It just vanished.

01:41:08.000 No feathers, no nothing.

01:41:09.000 Oh, yeah.

01:41:10.000 They do.

01:41:11.000 That's for sure.

01:41:11.000 Wow, you got a lot of chickens, man.

01:41:13.000 Oh, yeah.

01:41:13.000 Yeah, that's a lot of chickens.

01:41:15.000 That's a thousand chickens. 0.98

01:41:16.000 Now, are those egg-laying chickens?

01:41:18.000 Those are egg-layers.

01:41:19.000 And you have different chickens that are egg-laying chickens and different chickens that are meat chickens.

01:41:23.000 That's right.

01:41:24.000 It's like dairy and beef.

01:41:27.000 Dairy cows...

01:41:32.000 We're good to go.

01:41:37.000 We're good to go.

01:41:56.000 Great.

01:41:57.000 If you're going to eat it, you want an Emmett Smith.

01:41:59.000 Right.

01:41:59.000 If you want it to lay an egg, you want a Kobe Bryant.

01:42:01.000 Gotcha.

01:42:02.000 Kobe Bryant, you egg layer.

01:42:05.000 He's called Kobe Bryant an egg layer.

01:42:08.000 So it's essentially just the breed of chicken itself.

01:42:14.000 Yeah.

01:42:14.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:42:15.000 That's right.

01:42:15.000 I mean, hogs, some sheep are known especially for their wool.

01:42:23.000 Like the Merinos, you know, they're known for their wool.

01:42:25.000 Others are known more for their meat. 0.99

01:42:28.000 Pigs, some pigs are known for their fat. 0.70

01:42:31.000 They were called lard hogs. 1.00

01:42:33.000 Back in the day, we ate lard, you know, and so they would get real fat.

01:42:38.000 Other pigs are known for the length of their loin. 0.97

01:42:41.000 Others for their maternal instincts, you know, big, big litters.

01:42:45.000 So, yeah, all these breeds have different characteristics.

01:42:49.000 Do you only have hens or do you have roosters as well? 0.99

01:42:52.000 We have roosters as well.

01:42:53.000 The eggs are not all fertile.

01:42:55.000 We don't have enough roosters to fertilize all of them. 1.00

01:42:57.000 But we do have enough roosters so that kids can watch them crow. 0.97

01:43:04.000 I've had a lot of people say that are transcendentalists or...

01:43:13.000 That if we actually come back as a different being, they really want to come back as a rooster at Polyphase.

01:43:19.000 Why?

01:43:20.000 Well, because they've got about 200 hens per rooster. 1.00

01:43:25.000 It seems like you'd get outrun.

01:43:27.000 They would just start running you.

01:43:28.000 They would tell you what to do.

01:43:29.000 Yeah, they can get henpecked. 0.99

01:43:31.000 Yeah, henpecked.

01:43:32.000 That's the other term.

01:43:34.000 Chickens being scared and henpecked.

01:43:36.000 Those are both real.

01:43:37.000 And henpecks do peck, man. 0.56

01:43:39.000 Oh, yeah, they do.

01:43:40.000 There's some wild pigs in San Jose.

01:43:41.000 You see this?

01:43:43.000 Oh, wow.

01:43:44.000 Look at that.

01:43:45.000 Yeah.

01:43:45.000 He's getting food right there.

01:43:48.000 Yep.

01:43:48.000 I mean, they have a real problem now.

01:43:50.000 It's just started to make its way up there.

01:43:52.000 A lot of people don't associate California with wild pigs.

01:43:56.000 What I was getting at was, do you breed your own chickens?

01:43:59.000 We have just started.

01:44:00.000 We've just started.

01:44:01.000 We haven't in the past.

01:44:02.000 We've always gotten them from a hatchery.

01:44:04.000 But what we've seen, you'd find this fascinating, I'm sure.

01:44:08.000 What we've seen is, in my lifetime, and I'm not that old, but I have watched the genetic viability of animals, of domestic livestock, drop.

01:44:20.000 Because of the props, the crutches that we use, antibiotics, hot feed, candy bar, I call it candy bar diets, and unnatural feeding regimens.

01:44:33.000 And so we have really seen the strength, just the viability of these farm animals plummet.

01:44:46.000 So our son, Daniel, when he was eight, started with rabbits.

01:44:51.000 These are meat rabbits, not pet rabbits, but they're meat rabbits.

01:44:54.000 Some friends had a couple does and a buck, and they couldn't take them to a new apartment where they were moving, so they said, you know, would you like these rabbits?

01:45:02.000 Well, he was eight years old is about the time to start an entrepreneur business, you know?

01:45:07.000 And so he said, I mean, I started with chickens when I was 10, so I was two years late, but he started with rabbits when he was 8. And so he said, yeah, I'll tell you, I wanted to raise some rabbits.

01:45:18.000 He did that.

01:45:18.000 And if you read any rabbit-rearing book, it'll say, never give them grass.

01:45:23.000 Don't give them that because they'll get diarrhea and die.

01:45:26.000 And of course, that's exactly what we found.

01:45:29.000 But what he did, he did what's called line breeding, which is kind of a wild breeding.

01:45:34.000 And it took him five years to work through a lot of mortality and culling.

01:45:40.000 But in five years, the rabbit started really getting strong, vibrant, big litters, healthy.

01:45:47.000 Now, 24 years later, they're almost bulletproof.

01:45:52.000 And what we've seen in the genetic selection process over that time of not using any crutches and just letting it be kind of a Darwinian selection process has made us now want to...

01:46:11.000 We want to duplicate that with our other animals.

01:46:14.000 And so we started last year with our chickens taking our oldest, what we call survivor genetics, the oldest hens that are still laying, mating them to the roosters.

01:46:23.000 And what we want to do is just keep taking the oldest hens, mating them to the roosters, So we eventually create a survivor genetic.

01:46:33.000 In other words, that's the chicken that knew to hide when the hawk came.

01:46:37.000 That's the chicken that knew to get under shelter when the rain came. 0.99

01:46:40.000 That's the chicken that didn't get flu, that didn't get bug, that didn't have a prolapse the first egg she did.

01:46:48.000 I mean, I call it survivor genetics.

01:46:50.000 We're doing that now with our cows.

01:46:52.000 We're selecting our own bulls.

01:46:54.000 And breeding from our own bulls.

01:46:56.000 And we're very excited about what this kind of wild line breeding type of thing can do if you knock out all the crutches.

01:47:09.000 The problem is that it puts you crossways of the animal welfare crowd because they can't abide the idea that if I have a sick animal, I'm just going to let it die.

01:47:20.000 Oh, you know, I mean, they've been bambi-ited and thumper-ited to death to where, you know, every dog and cat has to have a monogrammed L.L. Bean cushion in an air-conditioned ante-room. 0.99

01:47:33.000 And that's the only way to care for animals.

01:47:36.000 And the problem is that we don't, we're not going to get genetic strength if we don't let nature cull out the weaklings.

01:47:43.000 That's the problem.

01:47:44.000 You know, and so we wouldn't have the vibrant rabbits that Daniel has if we had started at the beginning, oh, let's prop these up with antibiotics so the weak ones can survive.

01:47:56.000 If everybody walks into the room wearing crutches, You don't know who can stand on their own two feet.

01:48:02.000 Right.

01:48:02.000 It's only when you start knocking crutches out that you find out who can stand.

01:48:06.000 It's that anthropomorphizing of animals.

01:48:08.000 Yes, absolutely.

01:48:11.000 We wouldn't do that with people, of course.

01:48:14.000 No, we wouldn't do it with people.

01:48:15.000 But these are animals, and this is the natural world, and this is why animals survive.

01:48:20.000 And if you don't do that, they won't survive.

01:48:23.000 Then you will have the weak ones breed, and they'll develop all sorts of huge issues.

01:48:27.000 Which could be argued, essentially, that that's happening with people, but people have a lot of other things to offer.

01:48:32.000 Our innovation, our creativity, and our ability to communicate, and our thinking are what makes us uniquely human.

01:48:39.000 The animals, it's simply their body, their life, their existence, and the way they interact with nature. 0.74

01:48:47.000 When you tamper with that, you're essentially pretending you're smarter than nature itself, and that's ridiculous.

01:48:56.000 We can show real clearly by what you've said today about factory farming, about the development of these diseases, that we're not smarter than nature.

01:49:06.000 We don't.

01:49:07.000 No one could know everything.

01:49:10.000 There's not one person that's smart enough to be able to see the whole big picture.

01:49:15.000 We need a lot of other eyes on this.

01:49:16.000 We need a lot of other thoughts on this.

01:49:19.000 When you start applying the same sort of compassion and That we rightly do to human beings, you start applying them to animals, you actually wind up screwing the animals over.

01:49:31.000 Yeah, and you create artificial fragility.

01:49:36.000 Sir Albert Howard, who, of course, developed the scientific aerobic composting process, which his book is still kind of the icon of the whole sustainable agriculture community.

01:49:46.000 It was written in 1943, an agricultural testament.

01:49:50.000 He says in there that when you use artificial manures in the soil, and that's what he called chemical fertilizers, artificial manures, it grows artificial plants, which make artificial animals Which then make artificial people who can only stay alive using artificials.

01:50:10.000 That was in 1943. Wow.

01:50:12.000 Wasn't that prescient?

01:50:14.000 Yeah, that guy was on the ball.

01:50:15.000 That was when it was just coming out.

01:50:17.000 Yeah.

01:50:18.000 I mean, how long had factory farming even been around then?

01:50:20.000 20 years?

01:50:21.000 Yeah, it wasn't.

01:50:22.000 We were just, I mean, that was 1943. We were just really beginning to start using chemical fertilizers at that point.

01:50:30.000 Now, when they have the issue with large-scale agriculture, when they chew up all the minerals in the ground and they have to add minerals when they go over the topsoil of American farmlands, I mean, there was a paper that was written about it, I can't remember the year,

01:50:45.000 but it was a long time ago, I believe it was in the 1940s, about the mineral deficiencies of topsoil.

01:50:53.000 What do they do about that now?

01:50:55.000 And does that same issue still happen in a farm like yours?

01:50:59.000 Well, yes, absolutely.

01:51:01.000 I mean, mineral deficiency is a major problem in nature.

01:51:05.000 Fortunately, nature has a mechanism to remedy it.

01:51:10.000 Amazingly, it's on site.

01:51:12.000 It doesn't need a bunch of stuff brought in.

01:51:15.000 And the way nature remedies it is with an active decomposition cycle.

01:51:19.000 The way it works is when organic matter decomposes in the soil, It gives off, it exudes carbon dioxide.

01:51:27.000 When things rot, they give off carbon dioxide.

01:51:31.000 And so that carbon dioxide, as it percolates up through the pores in the soil, the aggregates in the soil, if you look at the soil in an electron microscope, it really looks like a marsh.

01:51:44.000 There's all these little You know, cavities and aggregates and moisture and all these, you know, slogging, weird-looking, you know, bugs and cow-looking things and, you know, predators and herbivores.

01:51:58.000 There are more living beings in a double handful of healthy soil than there are people on the face of the earth.

01:52:05.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:52:05.000 That's how alive it is. 0.71

01:52:07.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:52:09.000 Yeah.

01:52:09.000 That's crazy.

01:52:10.000 Yeah.

01:52:11.000 Wow.

01:52:16.000 It eases up through the aggregates in this kind of marshy soil.

01:52:22.000 It encounters H2O, water, in those aggregates.

01:52:27.000 And when the CO2 hits H2O, it makes carbonic acid.

01:52:35.000 Now, carbonic acid, if we said this is a rock right here...

01:52:42.000 And we want to find out how much zinc, cobalt, molybdenum, aluminum, whatever, is in this rock.

01:52:51.000 We could treat it with lots of reagents.

01:52:54.000 We could use sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid.

01:52:56.000 We could use lots of different acids.

01:52:58.000 Guess which one is the most efficient acid to use?

01:53:04.000 Carbonic acid.

01:53:06.000 So nature, you know, so creation has this wonderful ability.

01:53:11.000 If there is carbon decomposing in the soil and moisture, that creates a carbonic acid to break out the minerals that are in the parent rock material in the soil.

01:53:27.000 If I went outside the studio here and picked up a rock and brought it in and said...

01:53:33.000 Is that rock, does it contain the same minerals?

01:53:36.000 I mean, is it the same thing as it was 2,000 years ago?

01:53:41.000 You'd say yes.

01:53:42.000 I mean, that's the rock.

01:53:43.000 I mean, there's not a big hole through it.

01:53:45.000 Yeah, that's the way it was.

01:53:47.000 And so we have plenty of parent mineral out here.

01:53:53.000 The problem is we don't have an active decomposition cycle.

01:53:58.000 How do you destroy a decomposition cycle?

01:54:04.000 You do it when you don't have a carbon-centric system.

01:54:12.000 And everything about modern farming is trying to get rid of carbon.

01:54:18.000 This is one of the things that we're looking at, maybe if you've read the book, Wheat Belly.

01:54:25.000 What about gluten and those sorts of things is that it used to be when our grandpappies were planting wheat, wheat would grow six feet tall.

01:54:39.000 It was real, real tall.

01:54:41.000 So that the grain to stem ratio was whatever it was, you know, the ratio.

01:54:47.000 Well, the taller the wheat, the taller the stalk...

01:54:56.000 We're good to go.

01:55:14.000 Down to where it's a very short stem.

01:55:16.000 And that ratio has fundamentally changed, which also affects the enzymes and the nutrient components of those seed heads.

01:55:24.000 But we can combine it faster and we can grow a bigger head on a smaller plant.

01:55:30.000 But guess what we also did?

01:55:31.000 We also deprived the soil of the carbon that the straw and the stalk would produce from a given amount of grain.

01:55:40.000 That deprived the soil of the carbon injection that was supposed to come when we took the grain head off.

01:55:48.000 And now we don't have that carbon decomposition cycle.

01:55:53.000 Wow.

01:55:54.000 And so the solution to that in the industrial way is to just pour bags.

01:56:00.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:56:01.000 Add minerals.

01:56:02.000 You know, mine minerals somewhere else and add them.

01:56:07.000 But all that can be done in-house.

01:56:09.000 Absolutely, it can all be done in-house.

01:56:11.000 The wheat issue is a big one with Americans today.

01:56:15.000 Everyone wants to be gluten-free, and I'm guilty of it, too.

01:56:19.000 I stopped eating gluten recently, and I found that almost immediately, I felt less...

01:56:28.000 Bloated after a meal, if that's a good term, less sedated after a meal.

01:56:32.000 I didn't feel so tired.

01:56:34.000 And when I started reading about it, I read that when wheat had been changed, to change the size of it, to make it more hearty, it also became more difficult to digest.

01:56:47.000 Yes, absolutely.

01:56:48.000 Is it possible to get that old wheat back?

01:56:50.000 Absolutely.

01:56:51.000 There are people doing it right now.

01:56:52.000 I mean, Washington State, the old Red Rife heritage varieties, absolutely.

01:56:59.000 They're available.

01:57:01.000 You can buy them.

01:57:02.000 So how do you get bread that's made out of that?

01:57:06.000 Well, you can have your own flour mill if you want to buy it by the bag. 0.99

01:57:11.000 That sounds like a pain in the ass. 0.98

01:57:13.000 Well, you know, that's where modern times are really exciting because we now have techno-glitzy gadgets in our kitchens. 0.99

01:57:24.000 When people ask me, you know, what's the most important thing a person can do to advance the integrity food movement?

01:57:30.000 My first answer is, get in your kitchen. 0.81

01:57:34.000 And I'm not talking about hoop skirts, hearth cooking, washboards, you know, barefoot pregnant in the kitchen. 1.00

01:57:40.000 I'm talking about embracing techno-glitzy gadgetry that we have today.

01:57:45.000 The kitchens we have today are not grandma's kitchens.

01:57:48.000 You know, I mean, we've got two faucets with running water.

01:57:51.000 You know, one's hot, one's cold.

01:57:54.000 I mean, we've got ovens, we've got refrigeration, we've got stainless steel, we've got Cuisinart's, we've got blenders and cool little, you know...

01:58:03.000 You know, mills and flour mills and stuff.

01:58:06.000 And so, you know, when we buy 25 pounds a week of flour at a time, and you can absolutely get it as bulk, and you can use this gadgetry and grind it up and bake your own bread in a computerized bread maker.

01:58:26.000 Wow.

01:58:27.000 Grandma never had it so well.

01:58:28.000 It's never been easier to actually eat well than today, ever.

01:58:33.000 That's interesting.

01:58:34.000 That's so true.

01:58:35.000 Well, if you have the money, right?

01:58:36.000 That's the big knock on organic food.

01:58:39.000 You know, most people don't have the money to go to Whole Foods or Air One.

01:58:44.000 Let me address the money.

01:58:46.000 The way to address the money is to eat whole foods, not processed foods.

01:58:50.000 Mm-hmm.

01:58:52.000 I'm sure you're familiar with the movie Food, Inc.

01:58:55.000 And of course, it's a powerful movie, very profound.

01:58:59.000 But there's a real weakness in that movie where that family that goes to Burger King and they buy a Whopper or whatever they get and they buy, it looks like a 200-ounce soft drink, but whatever it is, it's a big one.

01:59:12.000 And french fries.

01:59:13.000 And then they say they can't afford to buy produce, vegetables.

01:59:19.000 The fact is, that meal, I don't eat at Burger King, but anyway, they're all the same.

01:59:26.000 That meal costs no more than two whole pounds of our polyface, grass-fattened, grass-finished, world-class ground beef.

01:59:38.000 And there's more nutrition in half a pound of my ground beef than there is in that entire meal, fast food meal.

01:59:48.000 So when somebody says they can't afford it, The first thing I do is I want to grab them and say, okay, let's go to your house.

01:59:55.000 And here's what we're not going to find.

01:59:56.000 We're not going to find any fast food boxes or fast food receipts.

01:59:59.000 We're not going to find soda, alcohol, tobacco, coffee, widescreen TVs.

02:00:06.000 We're not going to find $100 designer jeans with holes already in the knees.

02:00:10.000 We're not going to find, you know, Netflix, People Magazine, you know, name your thing.

02:00:16.000 I mean, you know...

02:00:18.000 Lottery tickets, that's a big one.

02:00:22.000 You show me the house that doesn't have any of those things, and then let's talk about price.

02:00:28.000 Talk about what you actually can't afford.

02:00:30.000 Talk about what you can't afford.

02:00:31.000 What are your actual priorities?

02:00:32.000 Because my position is we choose even 95% of poor people still have most of those things.

02:00:42.000 We choose what we're willing to buy.

02:00:44.000 You can buy wheat by the bushel.

02:00:47.000 You can make $800 worth of bread from a $6 bushel of wheat.

02:00:55.000 What it means is you have to participate in the food system.

02:01:01.000 Our problem is not that it's not available or we can't get it or we don't know what to do.

02:01:05.000 Our problem is that we want convenience.

02:01:07.000 We don't want to have to think.

02:01:08.000 We don't want to have to plan ahead.

02:01:10.000 We don't want to plan menus.

02:01:12.000 We want just convenient spontaneity.

02:01:16.000 And you cannot have an integrity economic sector of anything.

02:01:21.000 Automobiles, food, clothes, entertainment.

02:01:24.000 You cannot have an integrity economic sector of anything that When you so profoundly abdicate personal participation in that economic sector.

02:01:35.000 But it is more expensive when you go to a supermarket and you buy organic vegetables.

02:01:39.000 Oh, yeah.

02:01:40.000 Yeah, it is.

02:01:40.000 It is.

02:01:41.000 But they're better.

02:01:41.000 And some folks feel like they are better.

02:01:43.000 Yeah.

02:01:44.000 Are they better scientifically?

02:01:46.000 Let me say this.

02:01:51.000 I don't want to get crossways of everything out there.

02:01:58.000 In my view, we should just not eat from the supermarket.

02:02:03.000 Don't eat from a supermarket.

02:02:05.000 No.

02:02:05.000 Where do you get your food?

02:02:06.000 You get it from a farmer's market.

02:02:09.000 You get it from a community-supported agriculture, a food-buying club, a metropolitan food club.

02:02:15.000 You go to farms, buy bulk.

02:02:19.000 I mean, the way to deal with the price is buy it unprocessed and buy volume.

02:02:24.000 Which means that you have to recreate your domestic larder.

02:02:27.000 You know, we don't even use that word anymore.

02:02:29.000 Larder?

02:02:29.000 Who's ever heard of that word?

02:02:31.000 But that's where all the food was 80 years ago.

02:02:33.000 If I came to L.A. and said, where's the food in L.A.? It's not in a warehouse.

02:02:38.000 It would be in individual larders in houses.

02:02:41.000 And so when you buy in bulk and you buy unprocessed and you put your sweat equity into the Preparing, processing, preserving, and packaging.

02:02:57.000 Then you can actually save money over the processed counterpart.

02:03:03.000 That's incredible.

02:03:04.000 In other words, you can get top of the line, local, the best stuff in the world.

02:03:18.000 I went to the green markets in New York City, arguably the most expensive farmer's market in the country.

02:03:24.000 I asked my hostess, I said, would you do something for me?

02:03:28.000 Could you take me to the vendor with the most expensive potato in America?

02:03:33.000 Oh, I know exactly who we need to go to.

02:03:34.000 She went down the stalls there, and there was a vendor there that had about 20 varieties of potatoes.

02:03:40.000 They were beautiful.

02:03:41.000 They had them in little box cubbies, you know, in this beautiful wooden slanted display.

02:03:46.000 There were red ones and yellow ones and green ones and blue ones and all this.

02:03:49.000 So I looked through the boxes, and I found the most expensive one.

02:03:51.000 It was a little heirloom Peruvian blue fingerling potato for $2 a pound.

02:03:59.000 That's expensive for a potato.

02:04:01.000 But you know where most potatoes, how most potatoes were being sold in New York City?

02:04:08.000 Four dollars a pound as potato chips.

02:04:12.000 We've got Cuisinart's, we've got Slicers, Dicers, and Fry Babies.

02:04:19.000 You can get the most expensive potato in America.

02:04:23.000 And it's half the price of potato chips.

02:04:25.000 But potato chips is not food.

02:04:26.000 I mean, it is, but it's not.

02:04:28.000 I mean, it's a snack and people buy it for convenience.

02:04:31.000 If you get a real honest-to-goodness potato and slice it yourself and fry it in lard and a fry baby, that is food.

02:04:38.000 It is food, but what I'm saying is most people when they get it, they get it as a snack and they don't have the time.

02:04:44.000 When someone buys a bag of chips, they're not going to go to the store and get a potato and slice it.

02:04:50.000 In this modern world that we live in, I'm saying.

02:04:53.000 I know, in this modern world.

02:04:54.000 So we should essentially go direct to farmers and go to farmers markets whenever possible and you save a ton of money.

02:05:00.000 Save a ton of money.

02:05:01.000 Mother Earth News, this issue actually has...

02:05:05.000 A big spreadsheet where they did exactly that.

02:05:09.000 They have a whole bunch of items that they bought at the supermarket, at the farmer's market, and I guess CSAs or something.

02:05:18.000 Anyway, it is profound the savings going direct to farmers can create.

02:05:25.000 It's amazing.

02:05:27.000 And buying volume and...

02:05:30.000 And taking the middle man out of it.

02:05:32.000 That's the thing.

02:05:33.000 Is it possible with your methods and the way that you're describing farming and what you've done with your farm, is it possible to feed this entire country that way?

02:05:43.000 Oh, no question.

02:05:44.000 Not only is it possible, it's actually the only regenerative way to do it.

02:05:50.000 Because when you break apart the feed from the animal from the manure...

02:05:58.000 And we can even include people in that as well.

02:06:00.000 When you break all those that are supposed to be synergistic blessings, when you break them apart, the whole thing floats on a counterfeit.

02:06:14.000 Cheap energy, cheap oil, and...

02:06:20.000 And a fragile house of cards that depends on clever pharmaceuticals staying one mutation ahead of the mutating bugs to function.

02:06:34.000 So the argument against what you're prescribing and describing is that what you have is...

02:06:41.000 Sort of a beautiful, small business model for creating a very ethical farm and raising animals in a very nice way.

02:06:53.000 But it's impractical when you're talking about feeding a nation of 300 million people.

02:06:57.000 But you're saying that Not just the fact that you factor in when you farm your way the lack of sort of invisible costs that you get with factory farming, the lack of all the other factors that you have to bring in like chemicals and antibiotics and all these different things that are just unnecessary completely,

02:07:18.000 but the actual volume of food.

02:07:21.000 The actual volume of food, absolutely.

02:07:23.000 The actual volume of food is more in symbiotic places.

02:07:28.000 Let me...

02:07:29.000 And our kind of farming with portable infrastructure allows you to use nooks and crannies that currently aren't being used.

02:07:37.000 Let me give you an example.

02:07:38.000 Let's take pigs as an example.

02:07:41.000 We run pigs in the woods, and they eat acorns and bugs and weeds and things like that through the woods.

02:07:49.000 And they actually eat the bugs that would attack the trees in the woods, so the trees are healthier.

02:07:54.000 The fact is that we have millions and millions of acres of unused land.

02:08:03.000 There's not one reason for a single confinement hog facility in the entire country.

02:08:10.000 If we used our national forests, our Bureau of Land Management, Pinyon pine in Colorado, if we used mesquite in Texas, you know, Appalachian hardwoods in the Mid-Atlantic and South.

02:08:28.000 Every place has millions of acres where these pigs could be run. 1.00

02:08:37.000 And you simply vacate the houses.

02:08:41.000 So the truth is we are not beginning to leverage.

02:08:49.000 We're not beginning to leverage the resource base that we have.

02:08:53.000 So what you're talking about is the resources that are untouched.

02:08:56.000 Yes.

02:08:56.000 So the factory farm system that we have, the amount of food that they produce, in order to produce that same amount of food, we would have to use more land.

02:09:05.000 We would have to use more areas that we're not using now.

02:09:08.000 We would have to...

02:09:09.000 Yeah, but it would be good land use.

02:09:10.000 It's not harmful land use.

02:09:15.000 I understand, but that land is most likely either owned by the state, national wildlife...

02:09:21.000 Well, that's a problem too.

02:09:22.000 Well, yeah.

02:09:23.000 And then the other problem would be, where would the profit be?

02:09:26.000 Who would profit then?

02:09:27.000 If you're talking about national forests, and you're talking about a private company that grows agriculture or grows farm animals in these natural forests, who would be able to decide who gets to use their animals in this...

02:09:40.000 Right.

02:09:41.000 Well, when Governor Tim Kaine came to visit our farm toward the end of his gubernatorial time in Virginia, he really got it.

02:09:52.000 I mean, we went, did all this, saw all this, and he totally bought into it.

02:09:57.000 He said, so, you know, what...

02:10:01.000 What can I do?

02:10:03.000 What's the next step?

02:10:04.000 I said, well, Governor, let's have a meeting next week at the Governor's Mansion and iron out a lease arrangement where Polyface can run pigs in the state forests and keep all the trees from dying. 1.00

02:10:20.000 And, of course, you know, he smiled.

02:10:22.000 He knew cerebrally that I was exactly right because the Appalachian hardwood forests are dying.

02:10:31.000 And they're dying due to lack of disturbance.

02:10:34.000 Lack of disturbance in their ecosystem.

02:10:36.000 We don't have the buffalo.

02:10:37.000 We don't have the fires anymore.

02:10:39.000 So they're dying due to lack of disturbance.

02:10:41.000 So we can absolutely bring those forests back to vibrancy.

02:10:47.000 Right now they're just sterile.

02:10:49.000 They're just sitting there. 0.99

02:10:52.000 So they could be disturbed by these pigs. 0.75

02:10:54.000 And so his understanding of ecology...

02:11:03.000 Absolutely mandated that he get his head around this idea.

02:11:08.000 But, of course, he grinned and laughed, and we both realized, I mean, can you imagine what the radical environmental groups would do if you said we're going to start leasing some of the state parks so people can grow pigs in them?

02:11:21.000 I mean, it would be...

02:11:23.000 Well, I mean, it's unspeakable.

02:11:25.000 Well, let's just forget about their arguments against environmental groups or PETA or anybody who might have an argument against it.

02:11:31.000 If you had a clean slate and if it was your job, you could design the whole agricultural system of this country to feed America based on your principles.

02:11:45.000 Easy.

02:11:46.000 No question.

02:11:47.000 But we would have to use a lot of the land that's currently state land or national forests.

02:11:54.000 Do you know that right now the U.S. has 700 registered Dead zones.

02:12:00.000 Riparian dead zones. 0.99

02:12:02.000 One is the size of New Jersey and the Gulf of Mexico.

02:12:05.000 Those dead zones are collateral.

02:12:09.000 They are now inhospitable to life.

02:12:13.000 That's the definition of a dead zone.

02:12:16.000 They were once productive areas.

02:12:20.000 Fisheries and amphibians.

02:12:23.000 Productive areas that are now inhospitable to life.

02:12:31.000 They are a direct result of overrunning our nest's ability to handle our mechanistic creativity.

02:12:48.000 The fact is that in North Carolina, which leads the state in hog production, if you didn't have a hurricane every two years to flush all the manure lagoons out to the ocean, Well, I think.

02:13:26.000 Let's talk to the displaced shrimp fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico and talk about displacement.

02:13:33.000 Let's talk about land use.

02:13:34.000 Are you with me?

02:13:35.000 When we start talking about the whole land use issue, our system actually...

02:13:47.000 Would eliminate all of this dead zone, all of this inhospitable, the desertification, all the collateral damage.

02:13:56.000 We would actually have far more productive land than we do today because we're toxifying a very small part and that toxic stream is killing people A bunch of other land.

02:14:19.000 Why don't we just be honest and say, let's use it all in a healing fashion And we won't have any dead zones, and it'll all be progressively healing.

02:14:30.000 That sounds like a better alternative to me.

02:14:32.000 So the only way to have these healthy environments, these healthy growing environments, is to have sort of a symbiotic relationship with all the various different types of animals and the various different types of plants.

02:14:43.000 Is it possible to have acres and acres of things like corn and wheat?

02:14:52.000 I mean, can you grow a thousand, you know, acres of corn in a healthy way without having animals in that environment?

02:15:05.000 Probably the short answer is no, but...

02:15:09.000 But that doesn't mean you can't grow grain.

02:15:13.000 In Australia, Colin Cease there, who has vented a term called pasture cropping, has developed infrastructure and protocols for where you grow grain in perennial pasture without much tillage.

02:15:29.000 So you don't till the blanket.

02:15:34.000 You don't till the vegetative blanket Of the soil.

02:15:38.000 Instead, you use livestock as a pruder to prepare and even temporarily weaken the perennial grass, plant right into it the annuals, you know,

02:15:53.000 barley, wheat, rye, whatever, and it grows, beats out the grass.

02:15:57.000 The grass stays subordinated in the shadow so that when the grain dries down, you harvest the grain and you've already got a nice You know, regrowth of green material underneath without ever actually destroying the sod.

02:16:14.000 And there are now 2,000 farmers in Australia doing this.

02:16:18.000 It's jumping now to the U.S. It's a real hot technology.

02:16:24.000 And it works.

02:16:26.000 So, you know, there are a lot of pieces to this.

02:16:30.000 First of all, if you quit feeding herbivores grain...

02:16:35.000 You tremendously reduce the amount of grain that has to be produced.

02:16:38.000 Then you go to perennials.

02:16:56.000 Nature thrives on perennials.

02:16:58.000 So a productive regenerative food system should be concentrated on perennials, not annuals.

02:17:05.000 So describe to people that don't know what the difference between those are.

02:17:08.000 Well, a perennial is a plant you don't have to plant every year.

02:17:11.000 An annual is a plant you have to plant annually, okay, every year.

02:17:15.000 So grains, squash plants, you know, your garden vegetables, those are annuals.

02:17:24.000 Blackberries are perennials.

02:17:26.000 You plant them once, trees are perennials.

02:17:29.000 Vines, bushes, grasses, those are all perennials.

02:17:35.000 And so, that is the basis of nature's ecology, is perennials, not annuals.

02:17:41.000 Realize that our ag policy in the United States is to subsidize not perennials, but annuals.

02:17:49.000 Six of them.

02:17:50.000 You know, wheat, corn, soybeans, cotton, sugar, and rice.

02:17:56.000 All of those are annuals.

02:17:58.000 So, our official...

02:18:01.000 Ag incentivization is to incentivize the very thing that destroys soil.

02:18:06.000 That's hilarious.

02:18:07.000 And it's also hilarious that we insist on feeding animals grains just to get them fatter.

02:18:13.000 Right.

02:18:14.000 And that fat being an unhealthy fat, I'm amazed every time I go to a nice restaurant and they try to offer me that Kobe beef stuff.

02:18:21.000 Oh, yeah.

02:18:21.000 I'm like, will you get away from me with that sick cow?

02:18:24.000 That thing is sick. 1.00

02:18:25.000 Oh, it's wonderfully marbled.

02:18:28.000 No, that thing's dying. 0.60

02:18:29.000 Yeah.

02:18:30.000 The thing's barely alive when you shoot it.

02:18:31.000 Yeah, that's right.

02:18:32.000 The liver's probably swollen up.

02:18:34.000 So the point is that if we quit feeding herbivores grain, we would grow way less.

02:18:41.000 Then, if we take the omnivores, the pigs and the chickens, and integrate them as salvagers, like, listen, if every kitchen...

02:18:58.000 If every kitchen had enough chickens to eat the kitchen scraps, there would not be an egg industry in the U.S. Not one.

02:19:10.000 This was the role of chickens.

02:19:12.000 What we do instead is we send our kitchen waste down the disposal or out in the garbage.

02:19:19.000 It goes to the landfill and the whole ecosystem is deprived of the biomass that's supposed to compost or digest and feed the next cycle of life.

02:19:32.000 The problem is it's really tough to keep two chickens in an apartment.

02:19:36.000 They don't take any more room than an aquarium or a gerbil.

02:19:40.000 Two chickens?

02:19:41.000 Yeah.

02:19:41.000 Well, they've got to run the whole idea.

02:19:43.000 They have to wander around and pack grass.

02:19:45.000 They don't need a lot of room.

02:19:47.000 I mean, if you had them three feet by two feet, it would be fine for two chickens.

02:19:53.000 Really?

02:19:53.000 Yeah.

02:19:54.000 Oh, yeah.

02:19:54.000 Yeah.

02:19:55.000 But what about foraging and all that good stuff that keeps them healthy?

02:19:58.000 Just build your box, your container, so that they can get to about 12 inches of compost underneath them.

02:20:10.000 You just throw your scraps in there, and then the compost feeds your little pot garden. 0.91

02:20:16.000 I mean, well, whatever kind of pot garden you have.

02:20:19.000 You know, container gardens?

02:20:19.000 You mean containers.

02:20:21.000 Containers, yeah.

02:20:21.000 But I'm happy with pot gardens, too.

02:20:23.000 I mean, take that whichever way you want to do it.

02:20:26.000 All right?

02:20:26.000 Anyway, that becomes your fertilizer for your house.

02:20:33.000 And what you do then is you turn your house, instead of an ecological liability, your house becomes an integrated part of the Well, it seems that in that sense that giant cities like New York where people are stacked on top of each other,

02:20:50.000 they essentially are factory farming humans.

02:20:52.000 Yeah, that's right.

02:20:54.000 That's right, they are.

02:20:55.000 But there are a lot of these cool ways now that we can do that.

02:21:01.000 Anyway, if you take the pig and the chicken and you use them as their salvage operation, then you cut even more grain So you take off the herbivore grain, you take off the chicken grain and the pig grain, suddenly you don't have much grain use.

02:21:18.000 And when you don't need very much grain, you don't have to plow very much, you don't have to plow very much, then you can go back to a perennially based system and you can go back to the historic rotations where several years of perennials built the fertility for the one or two years of annual extraction.

02:21:38.000 Okay?

02:21:40.000 Now you're on to a regenerating and actual healing soil building system.

02:21:46.000 So what you're prescribing or describing, in fact, is the way that our culture should have been engineered in the first place.

02:21:55.000 But...

02:21:56.000 A lot of what we have here is sort of the momentum of the past that we have to deal with.

02:22:04.000 The momentum of this factory farm establishment that was set up, that's been providing us with food for decades upon decades, almost a century now.

02:22:12.000 Yeah, and you have to understand, in context, don't be too hard on the ancestors, because what happened was it got easier to grow grain and feed it.

02:22:27.000 That came earlier than electric fence and scientific composting systems.

02:22:35.000 So it was the electric fence that allowed us to suddenly...

02:22:44.000 Free these animals from supposedly efficient confinement programs and grain feeding programs.

02:22:54.000 George Washington at Mount Vernon, he always complained about the pigs.

02:22:58.000 He was a very meticulous record keeper. 0.96

02:23:00.000 And he always complained about the pigs because he could never get them all in at once.

02:23:04.000 Because he just ran through the woods, and they had their babies, and you kind of, well, it's hog killing time, it's fall, let's get what we can, and they could never get them all.

02:23:14.000 So he never really knew, for a meticulous record keeper, this was a nightmare, right?

02:23:20.000 He never could count all of his stock. 0.96

02:23:23.000 But that's the way pigs were used. 1.00

02:23:25.000 Pigs were just kind of, they were salvagers. 0.72

02:23:28.000 They were kind of nook and cranny operators.

02:23:30.000 They weren't fenced in.

02:23:32.000 Yeah.

02:23:32.000 No, they weren't fenced in because there was no fence that would keep them in.

02:23:35.000 How in the world can you ever fence a pig in with a physical structure?

02:23:39.000 I mean, this is before metal wire.

02:23:42.000 You know, the only fence they had were like ricks of, you know, you've seen them around museums and stuff, little, you know, chestnut rail fences.

02:23:52.000 Mm-hmm. 0.94

02:23:52.000 Well, a pig would tear that apart in a hurry. 0.94

02:23:54.000 Yeah.

02:24:17.000 So the idea was that the livestock basically ran free, maybe with a herder or something, or there were some fields, but not that many.

02:24:27.000 And then what you did is you protected your garden.

02:24:32.000 You protected your berries and your really high-value stuff.

02:24:36.000 You protected that physically or with a fence or some sort of a barricade.

02:24:42.000 Because you simply couldn't afford to fence all the animals and control them.

02:24:46.000 So it became a lot easier to grow animals faster with grain than it did with controlled grazing because you couldn't control the grazing.

02:25:03.000 So now the technology of electric fencing and composting has enabled us to bring the perennial pasture-based model onto a par with the grain model.

02:25:23.000 And the beauty of that is that the pasture-based non-tillage model is a soil-building engine as opposed to tillage, which is a soil-destroying engine.

02:25:36.000 And so all of this, you know, all this has to be viewed in context.

02:25:40.000 You have to appreciate—I tell people, you know, don't crucify Grandpa.

02:25:45.000 He was trying to do what he did, but there's no excuse today for continuing Grandpa's situation because we don't have— We've got things that Grandpa would have given his eye teeth to have today.

02:25:59.000 Yeah, I think as we were saying before, we're on the momentum of this past that was set up that also probably couldn't possibly have anticipated the amount of population growth that we have today.

02:26:08.000 That's very possible.

02:26:09.000 When you look at our future as a country and feeding us, do you have hope?

02:26:15.000 Do you think that people are coming around?

02:26:18.000 People are certainly more aware where their food comes from now than ever before.

02:26:21.000 Do you see changes on the horizon?

02:26:24.000 I sure do, and I'm a pretty incorrigible optimist overall.

02:26:30.000 I don't think though that the changes will be gentle.

02:26:36.000 You have to understand, if what I've described in this program became normal, it would completely invert the power, position, prestige, and profit of the entire food and farming industry.

02:26:53.000 That's a big ship to turn around.

02:26:55.000 And they're not going to go gently into the night.

02:26:58.000 And so that's why we're seeing the backlash of the SWAT teams coming in, raiding people's freezers, private food clubs.

02:27:05.000 We're seeing an increasing backlash.

02:27:08.000 The Food Safety Modernization Act proposed...

02:27:13.000 You basically couldn't use compost to fertilize vegetables.

02:27:18.000 We can't have animals and produce on the same farm.

02:27:22.000 We're going to outlaw outdoor flocks of 3,000 chickens or more.

02:27:27.000 There's a huge pushback from that orthodoxy.

02:27:36.000 Generally, if you study collapse or guns and germs or 1493 or whatever, what you find is that major societal change generally doesn't happen.

02:27:49.000 People don't just wake up and say, I think I want a different society.

02:27:54.000 It usually follows some major thing.

02:28:00.000 The transition from draft power to automobile was incredibly disturbing in America.

02:28:11.000 Let me give you one more little story.

02:28:17.000 I spoke last week.

02:28:18.000 I'm getting ready to go to the Netherlands and do a week of seminars in the Netherlands.

02:28:23.000 I spoke to one of their top ag journalists this week.

02:28:29.000 Did an interview by phone, and he said that the previous week he had just interviewed the CEO of Syngenta, which is the European counterpart of Armand Santo.

02:28:39.000 And several years ago, they adopted a plan, a target that they would increase productivity in grains, the grains that they were working on, by 20% by 2020. 20% by 2020 has a nice ring to it.

02:28:55.000 Well, there's several years into that plan, he said for the last 15 years, it's been totally flat.

02:29:03.000 Nothing we can do, nothing we can invent, nothing we can do has been able to change grain production at all for the last 15 years.

02:29:14.000 What we're seeing...

02:29:16.000 It's what Joel Arthur Barker said when he wrote the book Paradigms 40 years ago and introduced the word to the world.

02:29:22.000 He said, one of the axioms of paradigms is that just when they appear to have achieved perfection, they're on the brink of collapse.

02:29:34.000 And the industrial food system has promised disease-free, famine-free, you know...

02:29:46.000 Paradise.

02:29:48.000 And now with GMOs and there are a lot of people that are really pumped up on their hubris who have bought into this notion that we're going to go into some paradise nirvana only to find out Oops,

02:30:09.000 GMOs are causing spontaneous abortions and infertility. 0.82

02:30:14.000 Oops...

02:30:14.000 Is that true?

02:30:15.000 I mean, where has that been established?

02:30:17.000 Don Huber, I mean, have him on your show.

02:30:19.000 Don Huber, he's a professor and emeritus from Purdue University.

02:30:22.000 And he's showing the direct relationship between, or have Jeffrey Smith on, but the direct relationship between glyphosate, which is Roundup, which is the...

02:30:34.000 Which is the herbicide that's now doubled in use since GMOs came out.

02:30:39.000 That was the number one thing.

02:30:42.000 And there are...

02:30:44.000 Absolutely.

02:30:45.000 In the last year...

02:30:47.000 See, we're in our 15th year with GMOs.

02:30:52.000 Remember, it took 14 years to establish the DDT relationship with...

02:31:00.000 We're good to go.

02:31:28.000 And so what I'm getting at is that the industry has continued to peg the future on this thing and present this kind of argument, this face that all is well.

02:31:45.000 Man, we're getting ready to perfect everything.

02:31:48.000 It's going to be...

02:31:49.000 You know, it's going to be a new day in the morning, right?

02:31:52.000 And suddenly, we see all these studies.

02:31:55.000 We see these direct causal links, collateral damage.

02:31:58.000 We see, you know, one in four pigs right now in the industry, you know, is dying from a viral...

02:32:06.000 We see these things.

02:32:08.000 We see, you know, listeria, campylobacter, salmonella, E. coli...

02:32:16.000 All these new Latin squiggly words, you know, food pathogens, autism on the increase.

02:32:22.000 My take is that we are just about ready for nature to say, you know, you have taken enough shortcuts, now I'm going to bat.

02:32:33.000 And it follows Barker's idea that all paradigms at the point of perfection are on the brink of collapse.

02:32:42.000 When they're presented as perfect that's when they're on the brink of collapse.

02:32:49.000 I hope people are listening to you.

02:32:51.000 I know people on the podcast are listening to you, but I hope people out there in the world of agriculture are listening to you.

02:32:58.000 I know there's a lot of blowback against you, but I hope people are taking into consideration all these things you're saying because there's so much logic to your words and there's so much wisdom and so much research done that it's just...

02:33:14.000 It's a very puzzling situation for someone like me who knows very little about it other than talking to you and reading and watching documentaries.

02:33:22.000 It's a very strange time.

02:33:25.000 It is indeed.

02:33:26.000 And that's why I encourage people to take their recreation entertainment budget of time and money and start to participate in the food system.

02:33:39.000 Go visit a couple of farmers.

02:33:40.000 Every single community is surrounded by really integrity farmers now.

02:33:46.000 They're everywhere.

02:33:47.000 They're everywhere.

02:33:47.000 There is not a community in the country that is devoid of really high quality integrity food.

02:33:57.000 Many of them are wanting to farm full-time, and they need like 10 more customers or 20 more customers to tip them over so they don't have to commute to town with their town job to support their farm addiction.

02:34:10.000 I implore urban people, you know, go to one less movie. 0.91

02:34:16.000 Go to one less...

02:34:18.000 Whatever.

02:34:19.000 Opera.

02:34:20.000 Whatever.

02:34:21.000 But invest in this integrity food idea.

02:34:27.000 And you will hear farmers say the same things I'm saying.

02:34:33.000 And you'll be able to see it with your eyes.

02:34:36.000 You'll be able to taste, see, touch.

02:34:38.000 You will sensually connect with your ecological umbilical.

02:34:44.000 And that's a good place to be.

02:34:46.000 I love the term integrity food, too.

02:34:48.000 It really is a great term.

02:34:50.000 I love that you throw that around.

02:34:52.000 And I think what you're offering as far as advice is fantastic.

02:34:57.000 Encourage people to go to these farmers markets, connect to these people that are growing food in this way.

02:35:03.000 I think people are most certainly more aware now than ever of where their food is coming from.

02:35:09.000 The term organic, I mean, never even heard that a couple of decades ago when it comes to food.

02:35:13.000 It just didn't exist.

02:35:15.000 Nobody talked about it.

02:35:16.000 Nobody talked about GMOs.

02:35:17.000 Nobody talked about anything.

02:35:20.000 The 14 plus years that we have had GMOs.

02:35:23.000 Have been this massive series of debates and denials.

02:35:28.000 But I think people are more aware of it than ever before.

02:35:30.000 And I think a lot of it is because of people like you.

02:35:32.000 So thank you very much.

02:35:33.000 And thanks for coming on here.

02:35:34.000 It was a really interesting conversation.

02:35:36.000 I really, really enjoyed it.

02:35:37.000 And I really appreciate all of your knowledge and the fact that you...

02:35:41.000 Express it with so much passion.

02:35:43.000 It was really fun.

02:35:43.000 Thank you.

02:35:44.000 It's been a privilege to be with you.

02:35:45.000 Please.

02:35:45.000 It's been an honor.

02:35:46.000 Joel Salatin, please follow him on Twitter, ladies and gentlemen.

02:35:49.000 He is the author of Give Your Books Out.

02:35:53.000 What are the names of your books?

02:35:54.000 Well, there's nine of them right now, but the ones that people need to know about would be The Folks, This Ain't Normal.

02:36:03.000 As well as the sheer ecstasy of being a lunatic farmer.

02:36:07.000 Perhaps my favorite is Everything I Want to Do is Illegal.

02:36:12.000 Holy Cows and Hog Heaven.

02:36:15.000 You Can Farm.

02:36:16.000 The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start and Succeed in Your Farming Enterprise.

02:36:20.000 The latest one is Fields of Farmers.

02:36:24.000 Mentoring, interning, partnering, and germinating.

02:36:28.000 Tomorrow's Farmers.

02:36:29.000 So...

02:36:30.000 Yeah, there's good stuff there.

02:36:32.000 Beautiful.

02:36:33.000 Joel Salatin, ladies and gentlemen.

02:36:34.000 J-O-E-L-S-A-L-A-T-I-N on Twitter.

02:36:39.000 Thank you very much, sir.

02:36:41.000 Thanks also to our sponsors.

02:36:42.000 Thanks to Lumosity.com.

02:36:44.000 Go to Lumosity.com forward slash Joe.

02:36:48.000 Click the Start Training button and get your learn on, folks.

02:36:53.000 Thanks also to Stamps.com.

02:36:56.000 Go to Stamps.com.

02:36:58.000 Enter in the code word J-R-E and get your $110 bonus offer, which includes a digital scale and up to $55 of free postage.

02:37:07.000 Thanks also to Onnit.com.

02:37:09.000 Go to O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word Rogan and save 10% off any and all supplements.

02:37:15.000 Thursday night, I will be at the Fillmore at the Jackie Gleason Theater with Tony Hinchcliffe in Miami Beach.

02:37:23.000 Miami Beach?

02:37:23.000 It's Miami.

02:37:24.000 Somewhere in Miami.

02:37:25.000 Miami, Florida?

02:37:26.000 I don't know exactly where it is, but...

02:37:28.000 JoeRogan.net.

02:37:29.000 Go there.

02:37:29.000 Find all the dates.

02:37:30.000 And I'll see you guys soon.

02:37:32.000 Much love.

The Joe Rogan Experience - April 01, 2014

Joe Rogan Experience #479 - Joel Salatin

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