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Oct. 6, 2025 - Epoch Times
21:51
Why Small Farmers Are Disappearing | Joel Salatin
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Do you notice there's no flies, there's no smell.
These are unvaccinated, unmedicated, no pharmaceuticals, none of that.
In this episode, I sit down with farmer Joel Salatin.
He and his family own Polyface Farms and he's the author of 17 books, including Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, War Stories from the Local Food Front.
You can't have a porta potty, so now you're at $50,000 to put in a certified septic system in order to have a kitchen that passes compliance.
Salatin believes that what America desperately needs is a food emancipation proclamation.
Which basically says you and I can engage in a food transaction without the government's permission.
In my lifetime, I have watched this erosion of farmer access to retail dollars.
Meanwhile, we're seeing farmers go out of business hand over fist.
The average farmer is now 60 years old.
So in the next 15 years, half of all America's agriculture equity is going to change hands.
The question is, is it all going to go to Vanguard, BlackRock, Bill Gates, the Chinese?
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellek.
Joel Salatin, it's so good to have you on American Thought Leaders.
It's a privilege and an honor to be with you, Jan.
We're here in your milieu.
We're here at Polyface Farm.
So let's see some of the really interesting things you've managed to do here on the farm.
Sure, let's take a little tour.
Isn't this a wonderful venue?
Oh, incredible.
Oh, yeah, look at these guys.
They're pretty beautiful animals, I mean.
Oh, yeah.
Well, they are.
They're really, like, they're really in good shape.
Oh, yeah.
It's very somehow it's very clear.
No grain, no grain whatsoever.
This grass is all they need.
Yeah.
So this is, you know, this is like the ultimate grass fed, basically.
It's the ultimate grass fed.
exactly right that's what you call happy turkeys right there
Turkeys actually eat about three times as much grass as a chicken.
And because of that, they need way more grit.
So this group of turkeys is eating 50 pounds of rocks a day for their gizzard.
Of rocks.
Of rocks.
We have pans of rocks in there.
It's called grit.
But it's big.
It's the size of a marble.
They're big, big pieces of rocks.
And then they're incredibly intelligent and they're very personable.
They're very people oriented as opposed to chickens, which aren't nearly as for example.
This fella.
They almost look prehistoric, don't they?
They do a lot.
I call them pterodactyls.
You know, they're like the prehistoric pterodactyl bird.
Yeah, they'll clean every piece of green vegetation here that there is.
And this, so, and this is kind of the best once they've just.
Once they're gone.
I mean, it really looks, it really does look like it's been mowed.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
Like, look at this.
Yeah, it's been mowed.
This is done.
None of this was done.
Like, you know, literally looks like someone came in and chopped it.
These are unvaccinated, unmedicated, no pharmaceuticals, no wormers, grubicides, no ractopamine, none of that.
Do you notice there's no flies, there's no smell.
It's actually, I would say it's a pleasant smell.
It's a whole different pig world.
Everything's eating and being eaten.
I mean, a compost pile is all about life, death, decomposition, regeneration.
Everything's being consumed by something else and then essentially regenerating in some other form.
What makes the sacrifice of the pig sacred is the respect and honor bestowed during life.
That framework, that ethical moral framework hangs on starting to honor the least of these animals, the plants, and honoring them to create a moral ethical.
That's our relationship with the natural world.
That's right.
That's right.
That will translate into our relationship with each other.
Exactly.
And so is it any wonder that a society that now factory farms commodifies and disrespects life in a factory farm will also disrespect the individual desires of a person.
And so, yeah, it's very, very similar.
And just, you know, watching what happened over the last, you know, this is watching over however many years, you kind of getting a feeling that we kind of get wrong.
Right.
And unless we start correcting that, we're going to have a lot of problems.
That's right.
Okay.
All right, pigs.
All right.
These are big acorns, aren't they?
All right.
Carry on, pigs.
So these guys get moved every four days.
We call this the Millennium Feathernet.
The house gets moved every two days, you know, within the oval, and then the whole circle gets moved every four days.
We can go in.
So just step high.
There you go.
And go in and just see how pretty the birds are.
Hi ladies.
We've been hatching our own layers now for about 12 years.
So these are our own.
These are beautiful animals.
I mean, wow, right?
These are our own genetics.
We call it functional genetics.
We don't care how big you are, what color you are, anything.
All we care is: are you old?
Are you healthy?
Are you productive?
If you are, we want your genetics.
So we've been selecting those now for about 12 years.
And these are the offspring of that selection process.
And they're over.
They're pretty good-looking animals.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So this is early in the morning, so they're just beginning to lay.
There is zero smell, no flies.
This is the official way to hold a chicken is you put your middle finger between their legs.
Right.
And I've seen it.
I've never, I haven't done it.
And you hold them like this.
That way, if they want to scratch, they're just out in the air.
You know, people, they hold them up here like this.
Well, then they can scratch, you know, all this.
But you hold them like this and just let their breasts sit in your hand.
And they get real, they get real content, don't you?
There you go.
So these are roosts.
Daniel came up with this.
When we started with this, we had a hoop house.
But the problem with the hoop house is it doesn't have any structural integrity up high.
So you have to put all the bracing down to the ground.
Well, then that becomes something that can catch a chicken.
You can trip over that sort of thing.
So Daniel came up with this design that puts all the Structural integrity up high so you never run over a chicken and you don't have anything to trip on because and then you're pulling this into the new area.
Yeah, yeah, so it's on skids, pipe skids, and it just moves.
Yeah, so you hook up here with a tractor to the feed buggy.
This is all hooked together and it just trains in.
So this is a thousand layers.
And you can't use two geese or they form a clam.
So it's only one goose, and that way the goose knows my only friends are these chickens.
But the goose is the ultimate security agent.
The goose hates everybody.
Hates me, hates you, hates the world.
Totally non-discriminatory.
He hates everything.
And apparently everything you want to be doing here is illegal.
Well, yeah, just about.
You know, and it's not just food regulations, it's just other things.
I mean, for example, we have 700 acres of Appalachian hardwood forest.
You know, this is the belly of oak and black walnut.
We can legally cut a tree and mill it into boards, but we can't legally make it into a chair and sell it because that's manufacturing.
And we're in agriculture zone, agriculture zone that prohibits manufacturing.
So, you know, there's everything from food safety to, you know, we'd love to make chicken pot pies for our customers.
You can't do that without an inspected kitchen.
Well, what do you have to do to get an inspected kitchen?
You have to have an approved septic field.
You can't have a composting toilet.
You can't have a port-a-potty.
So now you're at $50,000 to put in a certified septic system in order to have a kitchen that passes compliance so that you can make a chicken pot pie.
When we started, we used to have 15, 16-year-old apprentices, but we can't have somebody under 18 running a power tool legally.
Now, you can put that 16-year-old behind 3,000 pounds of steel so that they hurdle it 70 miles an hour down the interstate.
That's perfectly safe.
But a cordless drill in the hand of a 16-year-old?
No, that can't work.
You just live every day wondering, well, you know, what infraction did I make today or who do I have to ask permission for today?
We really are just suffocated in this morass of regulatory oversight.
And the bottom line is you can't have successful small business with big government.
Big government and small business don't go together.
Big government and big business, that goes together really well.
Small government and small business, that goes together really well.
But big government and small business don't go together well.
Joel, we're going to take a quick break right now.
And folks, we're going to be right back.
And we're back with farmer and author Joel Salatin.
You're kind of become the face of this sort of small, regenerative agriculture, healthy, you know, don't use minimal kind of external product type operation.
And a lot of people gain a lot of inspiration out of that.
I'd like to go back.
My grandfather, my dad's dad, was a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming magazine when it came out in, what, 1945, just right there at the end of World War II.
As an economist, he understood that as a small farmer, we could never compete at the low-margin commodity level because we couldn't produce enough commodities.
We had to become the middleman, the processor, the marketer, the distributor, in addition to the producer, the middleman that makes all the money.
We needed to wear those hats so that we could get the full retail dollar because we couldn't turn enough pounds or widgets or bushels or whatever to compete at a low-margin volume scale.
Yeah, yeah.
We began direct marketing throughout high school.
I got my first chickens at 10 from Sears and Roebuck and started selling to neighbors and people at church and a couple of restaurants and schools.
By the time I was through high school, I had 300 laying hens and had a big garden and was selling produce and different things.
This entrepreneurship was just pushed right from the beginning.
Right, absolutely, right from the beginning.
And our prices, Jan, our prices were exactly the same as Kroger as a supermarket.
We weren't jacking them up because it's organic.
No, because we were able to wear all those hats and do it here at home, we didn't have to put our animals on a trailer and take them up the interstate to get them slaughtered.
Guess what?
We were able to compete at price with the store because it was so efficient being done here.
In my lifetime, I have watched this erosion of access, of farmer access to retail dollars.
Meanwhile, we're seeing farmers go out of business hand over fist.
The average farmer is now 60 years old.
So in the next 15 years, half of all America's agriculture equity is going to change hands.
The land, equipment, machinery, buildings.
The question is: is it all going to go to Vanguard, BlackRock, Bill Gates, the Chinese?
I mean, who's going to do this?
And meanwhile, America has gone to a convenience food addiction.
Well, you can make a chicken pot pie without MSG.
It doesn't need MSG.
You can make, you know, pickled beets without red dye 29.
You can do all of this stuff, convenience food, without any of these questionable additives.
And you can do it economically.
And that's the bottom line.
Absolutely.
Except that this red tape comes in and nothing.
Exactly.
And suddenly, these regulatory practices requirements make it so prohibitively capital expensive to comply with the infrastructure,
the paperwork, the licenses, the HACCP plans to be able to sell legally that the small organization can't get a seat at the table because you can't justify spending half a million dollars to make a five-gallon bucket full of charcuterie.
When you look for solutions in a society, you know, in a culture, it's got a problem.
Asking for a regulatory solution is the worst option possible.
Yeah, you want a market solution.
That's what you're asking.
Exactly.
Yeah, you want a liberty solution.
We solve this with freedom.
What I do want is a viable underground railroad so that those of us who want to escape the shackles of the regulatory system and take ownership of our food choices can do so.
And if we did, the price of local food would drop by 30 or 40 percent.
So suddenly now really good food is available to non-wealthy people.
Food deserts would go away because empty lots could be turned into food things and people could make food in their kitchens and offer it there in the community.
And then there would be an on-ramp for thousands and thousands of young farmers with small acreages to be able to make a full-time living on their farm.
I mean, I would argue that these, you know, we call the oligarchs, let's just say the large-scale operations that are, you know, sort of deep, deep in the system and, you know, providing the food to America as we speak.
I mean, it would help them to get better.
And I think that's positive.
Oh, absolutely.
Oh, I do too.
I mean, yeah, philosophically, absolutely.
If they were suddenly pressured by 100,000 little competitors, you'd better believe we would see changes very fast.
And this is really the best part of capitalism, isn't it?
Yes.
Our biggest showdown was we were dressing these chickens.
And, you know, early on, I mean, you know, I'm in my 20s.
We're starting this pastured poultry thing.
We're selling to local people.
They're coming out here to the farm to get their chickens.
I mean, they walk right in where we, I mean, we process them in the morning, we clean up, they come and they walk right into where we process them.
I mean, it can't be dirty.
These are people buying their food right here.
And the state came in and said, that's illegal.
And it never occurred to me that it would be, you know, that's how naive I was.
What do you mean?
I'm a voluntary farmer.
They're a voluntary buyer.
We're neighbors.
What do you mean we can't butcher a chicken here and sell it to them?
And they said, well, the air is unsanitary.
And they said, if one fly enters your processing area, then it's an adulterated chicken and inedible.
Here was the way they were trying to get me.
Your windows have to be covered with fly-impregnable mesh.
Their interpretation was that that assumed you had a wall.
I said, no, it doesn't say I have to have a wall.
It says if I have to have a wall and there's windows, they have to be screened.
This became the crux of the showdown.
And they're saying this is all illegal.
We're going to shut you down because you have to have a wall.
I said, it doesn't say I have to have a wall.
It just says if there is a wall and it's got windows in it.
So we went around and around and around.
We finally went through the federal inspection.
We got our senator, our delegate involved, and our attorney and different things.
Anyway, three months later, we won.
We won that.
Nightmare.
You know, I keep thinking about how all of this really started from a grandfather's passion for organic.
Yeah.
Right?
Or non-chemical or however it's called, you know?
There's something beautiful about that.
There is.
It sort of got infused into a young debater.
Yeah, yeah.
And if there are young people listening to this or young parents with kids, you know, I like to tell the story that was pivotal in my early childhood.
So, you know, my mom was a, my mom was a health and phys ed teacher before Title IX, girls, you know, girls phys ed, very, very athletic, very athletic.
My older brother, very athletic, played football, gymnastics.
You know, he was here I come.
I'm this, I'm this pudgy late bloomer, you know.
And, but, yeah, I've got, you know, mom that's this, you know, health and phys ed, older brother that's this, you know, standout.
So I hit seventh grade.
I'm going to go out for the, for the baseball team at school.
So I got to the baseball team and I don't make it.
Okay.
And That year, there was a forensics meet, public speaking, poetry reading, prose, you know.
And I entered that and won it.
And the next year, then I go on up to high school.
I'm in eighth grade.
I'll go out for the basketball team.
They have an eighth grade basketball team.
We'll go out to the basketball.
So I go out for it.
And I still remember today looking at that list, and my name's not there.
And at that moment, I made it, okay?
Hang it.
I'm good at talking, writing, you know, communicating.
I'm going to put all my energy in that.
And so I joined, I was on the joined the debate team.
I was in drama, theater, you know.
And so I tell children that sometimes are struggling with something, trying to meet somebody else's expectations or things that they feel like they should do.
Take those early failures happily.
Embrace them because they help you know what you're good at and what you're not good at.
You know, the entire business program called Strength Finders, I'm sure you're familiar with it, their whole premise is: you hear people say, you need to work on your weak, you're weak there.
You need to work on that.
No, actually, their whole model is forget your weakness, get a partner, hire somebody that does your weakness, and instead leverage your strength.
Leverage your strength.
You'll go farther leveraging your strength than trying to overcome your weakness.
And I just think that's profound.
And I know in my own life, it was pivotal in me moving.
So I didn't play sports in high school.
I was on stage.
And I honed that communication capacity.
And the truth is, today, a lot of our success is my ability to tell stories, to communicate.
Because communicators always lead their vocation.
Learn to tell stories.
Be a storyteller.
And people will come to hear you.
Well, Joel Salatin, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
It's been a pleasure to be with you.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining Joel Salatin and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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