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April 8, 2025 - Epoch Times
07:35
No Chemicals, No Vaccines, No Subsidies: Inside Joel Salatin’s Radical Approach to Farming
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I've been in this space long enough to have watched the natural farming, sustainable farming, organic farming, now it's regenerative farming.
So about every 10 years, the old buzzword wears out and there's got to be a new one.
So again, I get to be the lunatic.
So when people say, what kind of farming do you do?
I like to kind of rattle the cage and say, profitable.
Profitable. Well, that's a new concept.
Profitable farming.
Without any government subsidies, by the way.
And so I have fun with it.
But the basic concept is that you're studying creation's pattern and order and trying to duplicate that on a domestic scale.
So I'll just give you an example.
So on our farm, we're asking, well, Well, what do we notice when we look at animals in nature?
Well, they move.
They're not confined in houses in little cubicles with their tails cut off and all this.
No, no, no.
They actually move.
So just the idea of moving animals, that choreography, if you will.
I mean, think about the Serengeti.
What you see is movement.
The animals aren't sedentary.
That's one of the things that separates them from plants.
They move around.
And so as soon as you say, well, animals move, oh, well, okay, now we need to be able to provide shelter for them that's portable.
We need to provide water to them that's portable, feed that's portable.
And control, you know, because Starbucks doesn't want our cows down on their parking lot.
Okay, so we got to keep them home.
And so you have these things that are a natural, you know, a natural outgrowth of a simple phrase, animals move.
And so our farms, whatever, creativity and innovations that we've done from, you know, Eggmobiles and Gobbledygos and, you know, and all the things that we've done.
have not become come because we sat around in a room and you know it had a focus group on how can we be different you know rather it comes from a very strategic understanding animals move okay so how do we how do we duplicate that that migratory that movement choreography and what are the symbiotic relationships for example in nature you know the The wildebeests or the Cape buffalo don't get grubicides
and parasiticides.
Well, how do they stay healthy?
Birds. Birds follow them.
Birds, you know, the egret on the rhino's nose.
They pick out the little bugs and things and they scratch through the dung and spread that out so the sun can solarize it and it covers more ground.
And so we follow our cow herd with Eggmobiles, portable chicken houses.
The chickens then scratch through the cow patties, eat out the fly larva, disinfect it for the cows the next time they come through, and you have this very natural cycle.
So while the average farm is shooting their cows up with grubicides and parasiticides, we simply collect thousands of dollars worth of eggs as a byproduct of our...
Of our pasture sanitation program.
And so that's the way we duplicate these systems.
I mean, that's fascinating.
Yeah, I can give you a couple more.
Let's take the cows.
I mean, cows are herbivores.
But you've got to realize that for, oh, 20 years maybe, our agriculture experts took farmers like me to free steak dinners.
To teach us this new way of growing cows where we grind up dead cows and we cook it and then we feed that back to our cows in their feedlots.
And I looked at this, as well as other people that agree, that think like I do, and we looked around and we said, well, where on the planet do herbivores eat carrion?
They don't.
They're herbivores.
They're plant eaters.
They don't eat meat.
And so our farm, as well as others like us, didn't buy into that narrative, while the rest of the world did.
And 30 years after that, we had bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
Mad cow.
I didn't know that mad cow would happen in 30 years.
But I knew that this was chaos.
It was not ordered.
It did not comport.
With any pattern that you could see in nature.
And so for me, that was enough.
But we have this Jurassic Park mentality in our agriculture elite circles.
If you remember the movie Jurassic Park and the The scientist is euphoric over what he's created with these dinosaurs and they're eating cars and people, you know, mayhem and destroying the planet.
And the journalist, who's of course the alter ego in the movie, gets in the face of the scientist and says, but sir, just because we can, should we?
That's a pregnant question.
And that should be asked at every technological advance.
Advance that we make because we're really smart.
We're made in the image of God.
We've got these big brains.
My dad used to say, we're so smart we can overrun our headlights.
In other words, we can invent things that we can't spiritually, emotionally, or physically metabolize.
We invent this thing and then we spend two generations trying to figure out how to handle what we invented.
The DDT.
Monosodium glutamate, the hydrogenated vegetable oil.
It would behoove us to come at this gently and not like a bunch of swashbuckling conquistadors walking into sacred ground.
I mean, we've only cataloged and named 10%.
Of the microorganisms in soil.
Think about that.
Only 10%?
90%?
We don't know what they do.
We don't know their name.
We don't know their function.
And yet we come to the soil and said, hey, we'll just put some intravenous synthetic nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, and voila!
We'll have food.
And suddenly our food is a quarter as nutritious as it was 100 years ago.
Our broccoli's less nutritious.
Our carrot's less nutritious.
And we have...
And we can find these animals in these factory houses and suddenly we have this new lexicon.
I mean, I can remember very well as a child, we never heard the phrase food allergy.
We never heard the phrase, you know, celiac disease or gluten intolerance or listeria, fistaria, campylobacter, E. coli, salmonella.
We never heard those words.
And I would suggest that that Lexicon, that new lexicon, is nature's lexicon on its knees begging us, enough, please!
You've disrespected us, you've abused us, enough!
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