Joel Salatin contrasts pandemic-era food resilience: his Polyface Farm thrived with decentralized, regenerative practices, while industrial plants—like those processing 50,000+ hogs daily—became viral hotspots due to crowded, high-stress conditions. He argues the Prime Act (Congressman Thomas Massey) could cut red tape for local meat sales, citing vaccine skepticism and microbiome health as key immunity factors, while industrial farming’s soil depletion (e.g., corn monocrops) worsens climate risks—landfills emit more methane than cows. Salatin’s vision? A shift from fear-driven labels to sustainable, community-based food systems, where urban farms like St. Louis’ 30-family plot prove self-sufficiency is possible, even if cities exclude livestock. The pandemic exposed fragility in centralized models; decentralization may be the answer. [Automatically generated summary]
This is a perfect time to talk to someone like you about our food.
We're in a very strange crisis now, and you just keep hearing time and time again in the news how much ranchers and farmers and people are really suffering right now, and how much Folks who don't have anything to do with that are now being forced to understand the importance of the food supply chain and ranchers and farmers and all the stuff that we've taken for granted for quite a long time now.
And what's interesting about it is the juxtaposition between the, I'll just call it the industrial, the more, you know, a commercial industrial food sector versus the sector that I'm in, which is a local-centric, you know, direct sale branded product, you know, directly from the farm.
The pandemic is the best marketing strategy we've ever seen.
We're having the best season we've ever had.
And the same thing was with farmers around the country as I talked to them.
Everyone that's like us, that did not go into the supermarket system basically, that's selling in their community, in their region, regionally, directly off the farm, having the best year we've ever had.
It is the...
It's the industrial megasystem that's cracking.
And so for the first time, we're hearing talk of, well, maybe we need to add resiliency to efficiency.
And so...
So yeah, the system that's cracking, there's plenty of food.
I mean, there's plenty of food on farms being produced.
But of course, as you know, milk is being dumped, pigs are being euthanized.
The problem is not at the farm level.
The problem is in the chain of custody between the farmer and the consumer, and primarily in the large-scale processing situation.
I mean, if you think about it right now, Joe, probably in the United States, the only places right now where every day thousands of people come together in crowded conditions, Are these big meat processing plants?
I mean, the offices are closed.
The theaters are closed.
The convention centers are closed.
And so the only place where people are coming shoulder to shoulder, thousands every day, are in these mega processing facilities.
Teresa and I, my wife, actually co-own a very small abattoir, a slaughterhouse, a community slaughterhouse.
We have 20 employees.
And the difference in the vulnerability, in the exposure and risk factor between our little 20-person facility where we do, you know, maybe 50 to 70 beeves a week, 100 hogs, Versus these mega plants that have...
Well, as a farmer, cows are females who have had calves.
So it's a very – as opposed to steers, who would be – or bulls, which would be intact males, steers, non-intact.
So as a farmer, all this nomenclature is real, you know, it's – Yes, normal for you.
It's real – like a theologian teases out, you know, Presbyterians and Methodists, and we just say, well, they're Protestants, you know.
So – So, you know, we do.
We do.
It's a small facility.
And, you know, it's been in business for, I don't know, what, 60 years or so.
We've only co-owned it now for a little bit less than 10 years.
But the difference, because we do stuff by hand, workstations, you know, these stainless steel work tables are, what, you know, six, seven, eight feet?
Wide, three feet to four feet deep.
And each one is a workstation.
And you've got three guys out on the kill floor.
You've got two guys out in the cryovac room.
You've got four guys in the boning room.
You've got a guy over here running the sausage stuffer or the grinder.
It's inherently small-scale, spread out.
Completely different environment than when you're having 3,000 people in a cool, damp environment from—and I don't want to get into a rabbit trail discussion, but frankly, in these great, great big plants, most of the workers— Are generally not Americans.
They're coming from other countries looking for the American dream.
And so they're living in crowded conditions because they're trying to save every penny to send home to get uncle and aunt and other family members here from Ethiopia, Somalia, wherever it is.
And so they're living in a house that we would live for in a house.
They're living 20. And they're eating poorly.
They're in a stressful...
They're often separated from their family.
There's just a lot of stress in their lives and...
And so then you throw these big processing facilities, they're not eating well, and it's just an incubator.
I mean, if you wanted to create an incubator for a virus, there wouldn't be a better place.
Whereas small facilities are inherently, the workers are spread out, they tend to come from the community, they tend to be career craft people rather than just, you know, make this cut, Mac.
The average poultry processing plant in our area, they say that every job can be learned in 20 minutes.
Whereas at our plant, we cross-do.
We cut meat a while, and then we go pack a while, and you're on the cut floor, and then you're doing different things.
It's a real different environment.
And so these big plants are very vulnerable.
And that's why the recalls come from there.
You know, the microbials come from there.
I mean, an average fast food hamburger has pieces of 600 animals in it.
When you get a hamburger from us, it's one animal, you know.
So just the sheer, whatever, mixing, you know.
So, you know, for sure, we don't know a lot about this virus.
I mean, we're learning every day.
And, you know, you've got to kind of take a little bit, a grain of salt, too.
But one of the things we're certainly learning is that there's an advantage, that there is a density factor, a people density factor, like an urban, rural, you know, spreading out.
The whole social distancing spreading out thing is...
It seems to be a valuable thing.
And so if we take that into the food system, wouldn't it be an amazing thing if instead of having 150 to 200 mega processing facilities doing 98% of the nation's meat, if instead that were 200,000 Small-scale,
community-based, ecologically nested facilities, you know, all around the countryside, that would be an incredibly resilient system.
It sounds like a much better system like as you were talking before about your relationship with your customers It's a direct to farm.
I mean that's really ideal right cut out the middle person There's you cut out the confusion whether or not the animals are ethically raised or ethically slaughtered like what are the conditions they're living under I mean your poly face farms right so that that whole video that you have that I've seen that explains The way you do regenerative farming and you let these animals live the way these animals are supposed to live.
They're not confined to cages.
They're roaming around.
They're eating natural foods.
And you get a better product, you get a healthier product, and you get a better relationship with both the animals and the people that you sell this food to.
And ultimately, what we're looking for is a habitat that allows each life form, whether it's a plant or an animal, to fully express – we call it expressing the pigness of the pig or the chickeness of the chicken.
You could say the tomato-ness of the tomato.
And creating a habitat that allows that life – That life to express its phenotypical and physiological distinctiveness.
In humans, we would call this self-affirmation, you know, the Tom-ness of Tom, the Joe-ness of Joe, right?
It's that affirmation.
And one of the things that we're seeing as a result, as we move into the kind of the social consequences of this whole pandemic, is there's a new phrase called the Screen New Deal, where everything is going to AI, we're dehumanizing.
And so at a very time when people need to be personally affirmed, they're being denied their You know, their social humanity element.
I mean, you can't even see whether a person's smiling or frowning.
In this whole thing, like you, I've been screaming, let's talk about the immune system.
I literally have not been sick A day, basically, in 20 years.
I mean, not the flu, not a cold, not, I mean, just nothing.
And I'm 63. So I'm not saying that arrogantly or proudly.
I'm saying it gratefully that I think there are things that we can do to really build up our immune system.
One of the things that I do that kind of makes all my staff laugh is that I routinely bend down with the cows and drink water out of the cow tank.
I don't drink it when it's pond water, although I've drunk pond water.
But when it's fairly clean water, I get down.
Of course, the cows are dripping saliva and stuff in it, and I just drink right out of it just like a cow.
And I'm serious.
I believe that that It builds your microbiome.
I want all those bugs, all that diversity.
We live in the most amazing microscopic soup.
It's a soup.
If you could take an electromagnetic photograph of the air, of where we are, our skin is exuding stuff.
You know, our noses are Clothes, everything, it would look like the cloud over Pigpen in the Peanuts comic strip, you know?
I mean, that's literally what we're living in.
And all of this life, all of, you know, viruses, bacteria, microorganisms, all of this life is literally having a conversation, right?
Hey, you know, I'd like to hook on to you in a symbiotic relationship.
Hey, man, I'm a parasite.
I'm going to take you down.
You know...
It's like a drama, it's like a play that's going on inside of us, outside of us, and the thought that we can somehow, whatever, you know, isolate ourselves and extract ourselves from this magnificent life conversation that's going on in us, on our skin, our clothes, our hair, our eyes.
It's just silly and it's part of how our immune system works.
Our immune system actually – I need your bugs.
My immune system needs your bugs.
Your immune system needs my bugs.
And so – now, does that mean we all run into the nursing homes and take vulnerable – no, no, no.
I mean, there are certainly people that are very vulnerable, so we want to be careful there.
I get that.
But for the rest of us that are generally healthy, going about our daily stuff, I mean, goodness, worry affects your cortisol limits almost more than anything.
Worry.
You know, I got on a plane yesterday to come out here.
And thanks for the nice business class ticket, by the way.
You're welcome.
And the lady's sitting in front of me.
So we're in business class.
I'm sitting.
So there's an aisle and there's two seats on either side.
And so I sit down.
There's nobody next to me.
I'm next to the window.
A lady in front of me is on the aisle.
So she's a little bit diagonal for me in front.
A guy sits...
I crossed from her on the aisle, on the opposing aisle, and she asked him to move over to the window.
And I'm just watching this play out.
Of course, I'm trying to keep my glasses from fogging up with my mask in my face.
And I'm thinking, she's worried.
She's fearful.
What have we done to ourselves as a culture that every single person we come in contact with is a Might be my killer.
I mean, that's a horrible – and so what does that do to our cortisol?
Boom, you know.
And suddenly our immune system is – whatever – compromised because we're living in this fear all the time.
I think one of the things that you said, though, when you said most of us that are healthy, I think that's not really true.
I think most of us are not healthy.
And I think that's one of the things we're finding out from this crisis.
Is that when you talk about protecting vulnerable people, there's a lot of us that are vulnerable.
Maybe not you or me, but a large number of people that are overweight, that eat poor food, and that don't take care of themselves, and those people are particularly vulnerable.
And so they're right to be afraid, but they're wrong to think that the only way to solve this is to make sure that you stay away from everybody.
The way to solve this is to stop eating shit and become a healthy person.
While you're alive, there's always a moment, a chance to be healthier.
While you're alive.
If you're alive and you're not terribly ill and dying, you could start drinking water, stop drinking soda, stop eating chips, start eating fruits and vegetables, start eating lean meats, healthy foods.
Whenever I watch a newscast and watch the daily, like, you know, coronavirus briefing from the White House, right?
And you've got all these experts standing around, and everybody's standing there waiting for this magic vaccine.
And, of course, you know, the CDC gets $4.6 billion a year selling vaccines.
They have, whatever, 20 patent vaccines.
And so, really, the CDC is a very vested interest in trying to develop a vaccine.
There's a lot of money in sickness.
There's a lot of money in sickness.
And so, you know, we didn't get this coronavirus because of a lack of vaccine.
We got this coronavirus because something in this beautiful life bath that I described was out of whack.
Now, you know, we can...
Start discussing where it possibly came from.
I think right now that's conjecture.
I mean, I think we do know that it came out of Wuhan, but just how?
I mean, we're not sure.
But the fact is...
That there was an imbalance in life.
And just like in our lifetime, Joe, we've learned to say words that when I was a child, did you ever hear the term, you know, salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, food allergy even?
I mean, how many kids in elementary school did you know that had food allergies?
Mom isn't having to email—we didn't even have email back then—but mom isn't calling all the other mothers saying, well, now, what can your child eat and what can your little Mary have?
And, you know, oh, we better not have any peanuts.
I mean, that didn't exist.
And what's happened—the way I look at this is that humanity, that we as collective humanity, we've essentially taken this beautiful, benevolent earth, this benevolent A sustainer,
partner, mentor, abundant provider, and taking this partner to the boxing ring, and instead of caressing This abundant, wonderful partner provider, we've pummeled it and pummeled it.
We've pulled the water out of its aquifers.
We've destroyed its soil.
We've put a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico.
We've used antibiotics in animals and made MRSA and C. diff and superbugs.
And so nature has been gently, gently Begging for relief as we've essentially put our foot on her neck, right?
And she's saying, E. coli, salmonella, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, right?
Including diabetes and all these other things.
And we simply don't listen and continue to pummel and eventually...
Eventually, when our benevolent nest, whatever, you know, is KO'd, we find out, oops, maybe we should have paid attention.
Yeah, and I think a real parallel is when you were talking about these large-scale meat processing plants are a perfect sort of petri dish for viruses to grow so...
Our factory farms.
So are these farms where you're stuffing pigs next to each other.
You're doing all this unnatural stuff, right?
It's unnatural for people to be stuffed into a warehouse right next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, working all day.
It's unnatural for them to be stuffed into these homes, shoulder to shoulder, with bad food and all the things that you would need to keep your body healthy and strong.
The same can be said about these factory farm situations.
One thing that I find so attractive about the way you run your farm is that there's no weirdness in watching these animals during the day.
They seem like animals just doing normal stuff.
If you see a chicken wandering around just pecking at the grass, Looks normal.
See a chicken in a cage getting fed out of a little cup or something, it looks all kinds of fucked up, right?
And we know that these diseases are all coming from these places.
I mean, there's a ton of agricultural diseases.
You know, that are based from these factory farm situations where these animals live in these really horrific conditions and then the bacteria jump and...
They're breathing in their fecal particulate matter, which is, you know, putting lesions in their tender respiratory membranes, making lesions there.
And so when you have those kinds of conditions – and they're not getting exercise.
They're not getting fresh air.
And so – I mean they're not getting salad.
They're not getting any vitamin D from the sunshine.
And so what happens is you get an extremely concentrated host facility for pathogenicity.
That's what happens.
You get a very concentrated host facility because there's always a host.
They're close to each other.
The pathogen doesn't have to say, wow, boy, I wonder if I can make it that half mile over to another.
No, they're always right there.
And so you're right.
It's like an incubator.
And so if we wanted to sit down, look, if we wanted to sit down and say, let's say we had a James Bond conspiratist, you know, and said, we're going to form a committee and make a pathogen friendly farm.
You know, the old James Bond nemesis, right?
And so we form a committee and say, how can we make a pathogen-friendly farm?
Well, we would have only one species.
We'd crowd it up.
We'd take out the oxygen, the fresh air, the sunshine.
We'd give it a minimalistic diet.
What I've just described is modern, efficient industrial factory farming.
You couldn't design a better system for conductivity of pathogenicity.
So two things to realize is the bottleneck in the food system right now, the reason the supermarket is low on meat is not because there aren't animals in the field.
It's because of the processing.
It's not the trucking.
It's not the production.
It's not even the store shelf.
It's the processing.
So it's the processing that's the bottleneck.
And so my vision is that – so we get two questions.
First of all, let's deal with the production.
With the production, absolutely, if we spread out the production, if we did, for example, if we took all the confinement chicken houses and put those chickens on pasture – No problem.
It doesn't take any more land to grow the feed for a chicken on pasture than it does in a confinement house.
And so, for example, I know one guy that's – it's not ready to sell yet, but he claims to have had great success putting reflective Coke can bottoms on like a traffic cone, but he claims to have had great success putting reflective Coke can bottoms on like a traffic cone, hanging it out with his chickens, and that splays the sun rays all out hanging it out
In fact, this was exactly one of the defensive measures the U.S. Navy used and still uses for incoming missiles.
They have a cannon that blows out pieces of aluminum foil, basically, like graffiti, aluminum foil graffiti out into the air, and it jams the whatever, you know, the honing devices of a missile.
The Hawks are the same way.
What I'm getting at is that there are – we don't lose very much.
We protect them greatly.
There are a lot of things that you can do to mitigate that kind of pressure.
But the fact is, the industry loses tons of birds, too, in a flood, in a heat wave, in a whatever.
And so the idea that these birds in this big confinement house are actually protected from malady This is simply not true.
Now, one of the things that it would require is many more people on farms.
So, you know, I've thought a lot about, obviously, as unemployment has skyrocketed through this, Right now, sitting here, it's hard for us to imagine what it'll take to fill football stadiums again, to fill Caribbean cruises, to fill theaters, music venues, whatever, boxing matches.
Right now, it's hard to conceive what it'll take.
People are so terrified.
It's hard to...
Appreciate how much of this is going to come back, the hospitality industry and all that.
So what's going to happen?
So where are the jobs?
What are people going to do?
And I would suggest that one of the things that people can do is that we can have a lot of these smaller plants and we have way more people actually growing food, participating in food production personally.
Is food going to be more expensive?
Maybe so.
You get to be healthy, and we have a healthy planet, and what's that worth?
If you start putting dollars on these externalized costs, you know, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the fact that we have, you know, hundreds of square miles that don't grow shrimp anymore, you know, because it's toxic from the runoff from the Mississippi, from chemical farming.
So there's a lot of these externalized costs.
And not only that, but if this actually became normative, The new way, the new orthodoxy, there would be definitely economies of scale that we don't have right now.
I mean, I'll just give you one example that probably nobody would think of.
So we pay workman's compensation at our farm.
So how do you determine the exposure level, the risk factor of a poultry worker?
I mean, think about if you have a Tyson chicken farm and you hire an employee to be in the chicken house, Think about his workman's comp risk.
I mean, there's fecal particulate all day long that he's breathing.
For us, a poultry worker goes out in the field and Move some chickens in a field.
There's no fecal particulate.
There's no dust.
There's no augers.
There's no spinning fans, vent shafts.
There's none of this.
And so part of the cost, the reason that our chicken is more expensive than what's in the store, is not only externalized cost, but it is unrecognized cost.
Unrecognized savings that we offer that can't be captured in a Square peg in a round hole.
Certainly one that's being championed right now by Congressman Thomas Massey called the Prime Act.
He's had it in for five years, and amazingly, it's kind of just floundered for five years.
All of a sudden, in the last two months, he's got 18 new co-sponsors because of this.
And what the Prime Act would do, it would allow uninspected, custom-processed meat In-state to be sold by the piece.
That's not legal right now.
Right now, the only way that you can sell a T-bone, if you want to buy a T-bone steak for me, the only way for you to get it is for me to go to a federal-inspected slaughterhouse, get the animal processed, packaged under inspection, and put in for you.
Custom houses are where if you want to buy a half a beef, a quarter beef, all right, and it goes in with your name on that quarter and they're custom processing it for me, yeah, then I can buy it.
And what Congressman Massey is saying with the Prime Act is, Why should we discriminate and only allow people to tap into the lower cost and lower overheads of the custom processing facility to only those people who can afford to buy a quarter of beef at a time?
That's very poverty discriminatory.
Let's open that up so that people can buy it by the piece.
We're not going to ship it interstate.
We're not going to sell it at Walmart.
Okay, there's...
But if you and I as neighbors...
If we want to do business together, and I'm using a powerful phrasing here, as consenting adults, if we want to exercise freedom of choice and participate in a consensual relationship of commerce, why should that be a bureaucrat's business between two consenting neighbors?
So what you're saying is long, but is the regulatory process in place to make sure that people are using the proper sanitation methods, making sure that the animals are healthy, making sure that all these things are in place so that unscrupulous characters don't take advantage of the system and then screw over the consumer and the consumer gets sick?
This is like best case scenario for the regulation, right?
And I would simply ask that at some point, when you have a very close, transparent relationship one-on-one, you don't have truckers and warehouses and big slaughterhouses and supermarkets, It's blah, blah, blah in between us.
There is a lot of protection in that relational transaction that beats all the paperwork you can amass on the industrial scale.
We recognize scale in a lot of things in life.
For example, in Virginia, where I'm from, if you want to do daycare, let's say you want to do a work-at-home deal, you want to do a side gig and keep children, you can keep up to three in your home without subjecting yourself to the licensing and compliance of daycare regulations you can keep up to three in your home without subjecting yourself to the licensing and compliance of daycare regulations because they know if all you're going to do is keep three in your homes, those This is not a daycare center.
The same thing is true with elder care.
My wife's grandmother spent her last year in a lady's home who is allowed to keep three people as elder care.
She was an RN. She wanted to not have to go to the hospital every day and started a side gig in her home.
She cooked four of them, she took care of them, three of them in her home.
I'm just giving you an example of where it's reasonable to appreciate that a different relationship at scale can create its own safety.
In that particular thing.
Can you keep a hundred in your home without a license?
No.
But three, if you're only going to keep three, you're probably going to see them.
You're probably going to have a direct relationship with each of their caregivers, their people that are signing off for them.
It's a different relationship.
And so all I would say is that from the safety issue That there needs to be some place, a point at which we can opt to do business with each other without a bureaucrat involved.
If you wanted to slaughter a cow and then you wanted to give some of the meat away to your neighbor, would you have to bring it to some sort of a facility?
But everything else in society that we've determined is a hazardous – a controlled substance, a hazardous substance, the prohibition is both on seller and buyer.
Right.
And I don't want to go down that rabbit hole either of I'm a pretty libertarian drug, let it all go.
But without regard to that, the prohibitions are equal on even possession.
If you want to have a ton of cocaine in your house, Even if you just went over there in a corner on a pallet, yeah, I've got a ton of cocaine here, what's wrong with that?
You can't have that, all right?
But when it comes to food products, the prohibitions are only on one side, and they don't include if you give it away.
So if it was really dangerous, you shouldn't be able to buy it, you shouldn't be able to possess it, and you shouldn't be able to give it away.
But the difference is, first of all, cocaine is illegal.
Beef's not illegal.
And second of all, the idea is you're trying to protect the consumer.
And I think that they have exceptions for these small situations where you're the farmer and maybe this guy's growing tomatoes and you trade him some filet mignon for some tomatoes.
Well, I think it's just protection for the consumer.
And I think it's also like it'd be fine if it was a small neighborhood where you knew the farmer and you had a great relationship with them.
But they're talking about doing things at scale when you're talking about selling food to, you know, a large city.
You can't really just hope the guy did a good job.
That's the argument for regulation.
The argument for regulation is when things scale up, when you need someone to step in and protect the consumers, because if there is one bad actor who's not taking care of it, he has the potential of sickening thousands of people.
The factory farms that I've seen in videos where they have these pigs, they're stuffed next to each other in this large warehouse and the same with the chickens.
How much space would you need to have the same amount of chickens and the same amount of pigs if you let them free range?
What you don't see in those videos is you don't see The hundreds of acres growing corn and soybeans To feed them in that house.
The industry wants you to think that this is some sort of an island.
Boy, we're cranking this out of this house.
They're not showing you the tractor trailers bringing in the grain and hauling out the manure and the square miles of fields to spread the manure.
They're not showing you how dependent that is on this massive land base.
And so in the pastured model, the decentralized pastured model, Instead of having 15,000—I mean, our farm, we're going to raise like 45,000 chickens this summer.
We're not backyard by any means.
But guess what?
Those are in 275-bird shelters that are moved every day across pastures.
It doesn't take one more acre to produce the feed or handle the manure, whether the chicken is outside or inside.
The difference is when you come and see our operation, you see all the land.
When you see the factory farm, You don't see any of the land.
I'm a big believer in mutual interdependence, not complete independence.
We don't have any intention to grow our own grain.
We don't have the soils for it.
We don't have the equipment for it.
We don't have the skill set for it.
So we buy from neighbors who do GMO-free, non-genetically modified, GMO-free grain, and we give them more than they would on a commodity scale.
And so they love us because we're giving them more per bushel, and they have a nice secure buyer, and they're local, they're close.
We're not getting it from foreign countries, and it's all close.
So what happens is in the kind of situation I'm describing, instead of having a fundamentally segregated food system, you have a fundamentally integrated food system.
I mean, why would you have to import stuff if you can grow pineapples and macadamia nuts in your backyard?
Come on, you know.
So there's a huge disconnect.
And this is one of the reasons that we're having this, I think, this blowback from nature is that instead of having a fundamentally integrated system, I mean, think of how in Switzerland, you know, they take the cows up to the mountain pastures, they milk, and the milk flows down and they make cheese up there.
The whey from the cheese goes into the The pigs eat the whey, and so instead of transporting milk to a centralized cheese maker and pigs to a centralized processor, they're actually making the cheese on site.
So all they've got to actually transport is cheese and pork.
So they slaughter, you know, contiguous nearby, not on the same farm necessarily, but nearby.
So you don't have all this transportation.
What you have is a fundamentally decentralized, we could even say democratized, could we say food distancing, that creates resiliency in the system.
So instead of being tied to these 100 or 150 mega processing facilities, We're decentralized throughout the land base.
How much more money do you think it would cost for food?
We kind of touched on this earlier, but if you're dealing with this more natural-based system and it's more complex, it's going to require more people, and it's going to require complete restructuring of the system that's currently in place.
You know, there are all sorts of special, you know, whatever, fraternal negotiated things to make that happen.
And the fact is that you don't have to watch the news very much to know that farm suicide is spiking.
You know, there are implications.
I mean, the whole...
The domino effect of dysfunction.
There's a reason why rural America has a bigger opioid problem than urban America.
The pandemic has been primarily an urban situation, but the opioid crisis has been primarily a rural situation.
Why?
Because folks feel disaffirmed.
I mean, one of the biggest One of the biggest things that this virus has brought out, you know, they say that the crisis never makes, it never makes a trend.
It simply accelerates or brings into focus a trend that was already there.
And one of the trends that's been happening in this country now for 20 years is a bifurcation of access between rural and urban to the internet.
Like on our farm, you know, We still have hours of the day where we can't get cell phone service.
We can't get internet service.
Somebody comes to the store and we can't run their credit card because the Wi-Fi is down.
It's very, very slow.
We can't do Skype.
We barely can do Zoom.
When I do Zoom calls, it kicks me off about three times every hour.
But when you're running a business, or you're trying to do schoolwork from home, so what's happening is we're now getting a very accelerated urban-rural divide of opportunity because rural, we don't have this access.
And I'm not asking for big government programs, but I am telling you that this access to broadband internet, especially now as we start Working from home.
And as we have people there, there are lots of people, I'm sure you probably know some, that are saying, I'm getting out of the city and I ain't going back.
I mean, right now, New York City, all the movie companies in New York, their warehouses are stuck full of people who called them and said, I fled the city from the coronavirus.
I want you to clean out my apartment, put it in a warehouse, and I'll tell you where to send it when I get myself situated.
I mean, that's a phenomenon that's already happening.
Well, where are those people going to go?
I mean, ideally, we would actually spread out and create a more, you know, spread out population on the landscape.
Well, people are realizing the hazards of living on top of each other like that, not just because of virus and the things spread like wildfire through the population, but also when you have to get out.
If something goes down and you got to get out of there and you realize, like, I don't even have a car.
What am I going to do?
Carry my bed on my back?
What are you going to do?
And people realize, like, hey, maybe this isn't the best idea to live like this.
And then when they look at the prospects of New York City going back to normal like what it was five months ago, boy, that's a long road.
You might be two years from now before it's like that again.
I was watching this documentary on the construction of viruses, this piece, and they were talking about when they give an 18-month window for creating a vaccine for this virus.
I had Dr. Peter Hotez on, who is an expert in vaccines and infectious diseases and tropical diseases.
And one of the things that he was saying that if you get the flu shot, even if it's not for the correct strain, there's still enough pieces of this that will protect you from getting really bad sickness from the flu strain, even if it's the wrong strain.
But yeah, but I think that in general, we need to be asking as a nation – I mean, I'm still waiting for when they do the daily briefs up there in the White House, I'm still waiting for somebody up there, anybody, somebody to step to the microphone and say, "Look, folks, let's talk about immunity." Let's talk about how you build immunity.
And the fact that we're in the middle of this and we've still got the coke trucks running up and down the road.
And look, I like a coke, you know, once a year, twice a year.
But there's a big difference between doing that and three times a day.
What are we eating?
Are we eating, you know, comfort food, taco chips?
Look, I like chocolate, but enough is enough, you know.
And are we in our kitchens?
Are we actually getting good food?
Are we hydrating?
Most of us are dehydrated because the water tastes bad.
Well, let's make sure we each drink half a gallon a day.
Let's start there.
How about sleep?
Are you getting, you know, eight and a half hours a night?
Or are you staying up watching Netflix because you're depressed?
Eating chips and drinking soda because you're depressed and you're getting six hours of sleep.
You know, this hyperallergenic thing where a lot of the allergies we have today are because we're so sterile.
I mean, this was part of the kind of unspoken part of the book Guns, Germs, and Steel.
You know, that was a fascinating book, and it talked about the ascendancy of the Europeans who kept livestock in their house, and that's why they We're immune to smallpox and all these things that were devastating to the other people that didn't have nearby livestock.
And so we want our customers to come out and pet a calf, go in the brooder and pick up a chick and hold a chicken.
I would be interested to see what's going to happen when people do go back to normal life with these compromised immune systems from being inside all the time, whether or not just regular common cold kicks in on a larger scale.
I can't give you names right now, but I'm like you.
I'm sleuthing all this different material.
And I can tell you there are numerous medical doctors who are saying that as we come out of this, we're going to see a spate of exactly colds, flu, different things, because we haven't been exercising our immune systems in this soup.
And in fact, Governor Cuomo was...
It was interesting, his reaction the other day when he got the report, the data now, there's, you know, more data is coming out every day.
And one of the reports that just came out last week was that in New York, the people who continued working actually had less, less, whatever, positives to the virus than the people who sheltered across the demographic, including frontline hospital workers.
Which, you know, you look at that and you say, well, you know, the people who were sheltering, they were dwelling on it.
I mean, they were watching news all day.
If you watch the media all day, you are scared to death, okay?
And rightly so.
That's what you're feeding your mind.
But if you're working and you're building and you're creating and you're doing your things, sure, you might think about the virus once in a while.
But, I mean, literally...
In my day, I don't think about it but a few minutes a day.
It's only when I come in and turn on the news or look at podcasts that I'm interested in it.
But I'm out there busy.
And there's something that happens, I think, psychosomatically when your mind is consumed every day with...
Well, the media's played into it, and also people are hearing terrible stories about emergency rooms, particularly in New York City and places where it's stuffed full of people, and the hospitals are overrun, the ICUs are overrun.
Thank goodness that that has sort of calmed down, even in New York City.
Cuomo basically said today that they're back to where they were when the pandemic exploded, so...
It's nice that they've sort of leveled that out, but what's going to happen when you just let people out again?
Are they going to start getting sick like crazy again?
I mean, is it going to be another spread?
There's a real worry about that, and we're worried that during this time, we haven't been encouraging people to build up their immune system.
And so, you know, interestingly, I've got a book that's actually, we'll have in hand in whatever, 10 days, a new book coming out I've written with a nutritionist biochemist, Dr. Sina McCullough.
And the title of the book is Beyond Labels.
And it's a doctor and a farmer Lead you to a place of food empowerment.
You know, when you stand in front of a bunch of labels and you see everything from organic certified to fair trade to, you know, natural, they're very confusing.
And what happens is when you're faced with So much choice of label information, you tend to just shut down.
You get paralyzed.
You say, Forget it.
It's too complicated.
It's too difficult.
And so we've written this book.
She, from this chemistry standpoint, me from a farmer's standpoint, trying to cut through this.
And so people can be empowered to actually make food decisions.
And we talk a lot about immunity, feeding your microbiome, to build that up so that you have a diversified enough I've exercised enough immune system that you can withstand this.
And so I think that developing a robust immune system, think about if that occupied your mind, how am I going to develop a robust immune system?
Just think about Dwelling on that as opposed to, oh no, am I going to get it?
Am I going to get it?
I don't think we've scratched the surface as to what thinking, I'm going to build my immune system.
Let's go get them.
Just the mind-body connection, what that does to your body to suddenly get a burst of hope.
I mean, that kind of stress plays a big factor with people's immune systems all the time.
If people are stressed out, they always get sick.
It's real, real common.
It just makes sense.
And I think this kind of fear, particularly, I mean, the way I was experiencing it, when the Lockdown was first ordered and everyone was at the supermarket.
No one was wearing masks yet, but everyone was stockpiling food.
And, you know, we were nervous.
We were real nervous because we didn't know what this was going to be like.
And we were also, I was nervous particularly because I feel like the information we were getting out of China was not correct.
And I was worried that when you see those videos of them spraying disinfectant on houses and buildings, it's like maybe this is way worse than we think it is and it's going to hit America really hard because we've been lied to by the Chinese.
There was a lot of fear.
So I remember lying in bed at night and like testing my breath like maybe I have it now.
Maybe it's going to get worse.
There was a lot of that.
There was a lot of that.
I didn't sleep real good at all for maybe the first few days of lockdown until I sort of calmed down and realized, well, I'm not going anywhere.
I can't get it.
And then I got tested.
I'm like, okay, well, this is nice to know that I don't have it currently.
Maybe if I just keep doing what I'm doing, I won't get it.
Then, you know, I'd have days where half the day I'd think, this is all bullshit.
What we need to do is tell people how to strengthen their immune system, and then you read some crazy story about some new inflammatory syndrome they're finding on, you know, some patients where, you know, their feet are swelling up.
And I think that that brings up the issue of how our society now views death.
I read an interesting article just in the last couple of days about how – as we have left – it used to be when we were kids, We use the term, somebody dropped dead.
We say apparently medicine failed them or the hospital failed.
It's like instead of just people, yeah, we do drop dead.
Instead, every death is some sort of a failure of our techno-sophisticated cryogenic, you know, It's a system that's supposed to keep everybody, you know, beautiful and perfect forever.
And the fact is – and I think that's an advantage of on the farm where we are.
I mean, we see death every day.
I mean, we know that things – and in fact, death makes room.
I mean, a compost pile.
It's death and life.
I mean it's – you've got microbes eating stuff that was living and then that makes new life.
And of course my family knows that when I go, they're supposed to put me in a compost pile.
But my thing is that, look, I don't want a bunch of people to die, but the fact is that That death is transformative, and I don't want to get all too mystical and spiritual, but whatever your spiritual tradition is – mine happens to be Judeo-Christian ethics,
so I think there is an afterlife – but even if there's nothing, even if you say, well, I'm dead and there's no spirit and I'm gone, even so, that makes room For tomorrow's babies.
It makes room for new ideas, new things.
I mean, you can't have life without the regenerative capacity of death and the foundation of ecology.
Is life, death, decomposition, regeneration.
Regeneration might look like something else.
But that's our digestion.
It's compost.
It's everything.
And when we get sterilized and move away from that, I think we lose the beauty of the transformative capacity of that part of life.
Yeah, I think it speaks to what you were talking about earlier, that they look at death as some sort of a failure instead of just a part of the natural cycle.
I was reading about one of the, you know, they try to find new ways that the coronavirus looks terrible in articles.
And one thing they were saying was it takes between two and ten years off the life expectancy of the average person who gets it.
I'm like, okay, well, how did you come to that conclusion?
Well, they came to that conclusion because they looked at old people who got it that might have possibly lived, you know, seven, eight years, five years more, and they just started doing these random calculations based on how old people normally die.
But then the problem with that is if you look at the overall numbers, the average age that people die from coronavirus is actually older than the average age people die.
Which is like, well, what are you saying then?
It's taking years off some people's lives, but everything does.
If you fall down, it takes years off your life if you're old, right?
One is that, you know, our country has never told people, when we talk about, you know, personal self-worth and your own personal affirmation in a climate of fear and worry, the worst thing you can do is tell lots of people, you're not important, you're not essential.
Yeah, you know what you've been doing all your life, what you do every day?
No, it's not essential.
What a faster way to, whatever, deaffirm a person than to tell them you're not essential.
I mean, I just think it's horrible.
And now we have the data, and again, these data points, and we've all become, I think through this, more wary of statisticians.
We're looking at death through the coronavirus, but We're saying, oh, you're putting dollars over lives.
You're saying the economy is more important than people's lives.
No, we're saying you need a nuanced perspective because if you ignore the economy, it actually costs lives, and it costs a staggering number of lives, and in a horrible way – suicide, drug addiction, depression.
And if I may go a little – just one other little Thread on this whole thing.
Again, thinking about, well, how can we employ all the people?
I mean, if our discretionary spending, if this is going to make people more careful about discretionary spending, you know, flying to Paris, going on a Caribbean cruise, going to the Sandals.
And we integrate the carbon from the forest, so we cut junk trees, dead trees, crooked trees, weak trees, and thin the forest.
And that enables the good trees, the healthy trees, to grow more vigorously, better, reduces fire potential because you're thinning it out, taking out all the dead stuff.
And that then becomes our carbon base for bedding the animals and for all the composting that we do.
And we do mountains and mountains of compost.
Where I'm going with this is...
When we talk about costs, right now, how much is our country spending fighting wildfires?
And how much are we losing fighting all these fires?
We're in California, right?
I mean, look at the devastation that fires have caused.
Imagine if we had thousands of people with chippers thinning the forest Turning them into almost park-like, like they were before the Europeans came, the Native Americans kept them going with fire, but there was megafauna here, megafauna.
And so we graze through, we convert a lot of it into silvopasture, widely spaced trees that are growing unimpeded with grazing animals underneath so that there's no fire damage, there's no buildup of fuel.
And suddenly we're producing our own food and we're eliminating the danger of wildfire with technology called chainsaws and chippers and that carbon becomes the fertility for the vineyards and the agricultural lands.
It feeds the soil, so now we have earthworms instead of hard soil.
We don't have erosion because our organic matter is up.
On our farm, using these principles, we've gone from 1% organic matter to over 8% organic matter in the soil, and every 1% holds another 20,000 gallons of water per acre.
So it sounds like your method could keep from the situation they find with some farms with the roting topsoil where they have to constantly supplement.
Like if you want to have like those monocrop agricultural fields where you see Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of acres of corn, just corn, or just soybeans, or just alfalfa, whatever it is.
Like, if you want to do those monocrop things, how are you going to re-fertilize the soil in the same manner with that large scale?
So another huge percentage, like 20%, goes to feed cattle.
And then another huge percent goes to hogs and chickens, of course.
But one of the problems with the hogs and chickens is that they are not integrated with the food system.
So right now, 50 percent, almost 50 percent, it's arguable, you know, what statistician, again, figures lie and liars figure, but somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of human edible food on the planet is never eaten by a human.
It spoils, it's thrown away, and 75% of everything that goes in the landfills is biodegradable.
So when you start matching up the waste, the waste streams and the losses in our food system and our waste streams, what happens is very quickly you start seeing that it's the segregated, it's this single species, single crop, single segregated notion Where it's not related, it's not symbiotic, it's not synergistic, that actually creates the problem.
A city in Belgium, this was articulated in Pat Foreman's wonderful book, the title is City Chicks, and she's talking about urban chickens.
A city in Belgium offered three chickens per household to anybody that wanted a chicken.
And they had 2,000 families raised their hands and said, yeah, we'll take three chickens.
So they got 6,000 chickens, distributed them through this city.
And in the first month, it dropped 100 tons of food waste to the landfill.
And so not only did they eliminate the landfill waste, all these people now suddenly had chickens.
And Pat's done all the math on this and shows that if one in three households had enough chickens to eat your kitchen scraps, there would not be an egg industry in the United States.
And the landfill would get way, way less material.
And so then the chickens don't need the corn from the cornfields, so the fields can be turned back into prairie to feed herbivores, which now would be cows, not bison.
But that's our herbivore of value.
And so now you're at perennials instead of annuals, and perennials instead of annuals, perennials put energy in the soil, annuals extract energy from the soil.
So now suddenly you're producing, instead of producing an annual fertilized with petroleum to feed beef for somebody else, instead You're not growing the corn,
you don't need the tractor, you don't need the petroleum, the cows fertilize it themselves, and the perennial builds the soil like it did with the bison, and you have the beef, instead of coming out of a feedlot, it's coming off the prairie, Like the bison did.
And suddenly you're building soils that are losing soil and your production doesn't change one iota.
It doesn't take any more land to produce the beef with what I've described than what it does with corn.
Corn is – I mean, that kind of monocrop, monospeciated thing is a complete – I mean, we started the interview talking about standing on nature on her neck, you know.
That is a quintessential example.
of standing on nature's neck.
And the reason our farm was so deteriorated when we came to it was because we're in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, and that was the breadbasket of the Confederacy during the Civil War, if you know your history.
And essentially the war was finally won when they burned all the crops in the Shenandoah Valley.
And during that time, The valley lost somewhere between three and five feet of soil during that time period.
So the soils are worn out and then we got the westward expansion and it all moved to Ohio and Indiana and then finally the Dakotas and, you know, kept heading west.
So this head west, young man head west, was partly because our agriculture destroyed the soils.
And if we don't start using our agriculture to build soils, We have a lot more to worry about than a COVID-19 deal.
A lot more to worry about.
If we don't figure out a way to produce food abundantly and grow soil while we're doing it, The pandemic is going to be the least of our concerns.
We have to use our carbon, our biomass strategically, which includes food scraps, by the way.
Use everything strategically.
You can't just throw stuff away.
This is sunlight.
I mean, the fact that landfills get green environmental awards for poking methane tubes in the landfill and running the excavation equipment on the methane from the decomposing material in a landfill It shouldn't be in there.
No, it's unconscionable.
What we need to do is hook up.
We need hook ups.
We need to where the waste streams like they move right into the use streams and you have circles, not linear thinking.
And, I mean, just another one, for example, is ponds.
A lot of people don't realize that before the Europeans came to North America, North America was 8% water.
Today, we're less than 1%.
I mean, surface area.
Think about the United States being 80% water, including...
I mean, it's the same as the wombats in Australia.
You know, now these wombats are like, you know, 80 pounds or little, you know, cute little wombats.
Well, they know by digging up skeletons, they used to have nine-foot wombats in Australia.
Nine foot wombats!
So when we look at the megafauna that was here, you know, the fact is that the planet used to have more animal weight on it than it does today with all the animals, all the factory farms, and all the people.
So it's not people and animals that are messing up the planet.
It's the human management of the ecosystem that's messing up.
The abundance here is through the roof.
So imagine if we, and this is what we've been doing on our farm, is every time we get a few extra dollars, we build another pond.
Now, we're not beavers, but we have excavation equipment that we can go in and build ponds.
So that when we have a flood and everything is flooding, we're actually trapping a lot of that, not all of it, but trapping a lot of it up on high ground permaculture style that we can then dispense for irrigation in a dry time so that...
We never pump from an aquifer.
That's the commons.
When you pump from an aquifer, you're depleting the commons.
But if you're reducing flooding and using that in a drought to keep vegetation growing when there's so much sunlight, then you're actually increasing the commons.
And we believe very strongly that as a result of our farming, We should not be depleting the commons.
We should be increasing the commons.
As a result, there should be more soil, more water, more breathable air, more wildlife, more pollinators, more...
There's also been a false narrative that attributes most of our greenhouse gases or a significant number, a significant percentage of our greenhouse gases coming from cows.
And Cal agriculture.
And one of the things that they found through using satellite imaging and trying to detect methane, they're finding it's landfills.
These landfills are a huge, huge problem in terms of greenhouse gases.
The total wrong way of approaching it, the way you were saying...
Burying this biological material in the ground instead of using it as compost is actually not just counterproductive, but it's actually detrimental.
It's not the wrong way to do it because it doesn't serve the soil.
If all the biomass that we have, what's the word, non-leveraged or thrown away, if all the biomass we've thrown away in the last hundred years, if it had instead been leveraged for Soil building, feeding chickens, I mean, whatever.
Today, we would not have all that methane, and today, we would have soils that would be a lot richer, and we would have better earthworm populations.
We'd have a tremendous amount of soil, maintained soil-abundant fertility.
So the beautiful thing is that this is not that difficult to bring back.
I mean, I've been preaching this message, you know, all my life, and it's exciting to now suddenly have people stepping back and realize, wow, you know, we just kind of put a pause button and there are now – Dolphins in Venice again.
In Shanghai, you can see across the street.
How about L.A.? Yeah, L.A. I mean, amazing pictures.
Amazing pictures.
So when people say, let's get back to normal, look, I don't want the tragedy that we're having, but I also don't want to go back To normal, because normal was this foot on nature's neck saying, you know, we're going to...
So that's where you start saying, well, you know, what does the future look...
What could a future look like?
And that's where we start talking about decentralization, integration, you know, integrating all of our streams and...
I mean, my thing about the carbon economy, of course, you know, we're there in that hardwood region of Virginia, you know, near the Blue Ridge Parkway, Shenandoah National Park, all that stuff.
And the federal forests are atrocious.
I mean, dead trees.
The fuel buildup is just ridiculous.
Wouldn't it be cool if mommy or daddy could come home and their six year old says, you know, what did you do today?
And mommy and daddy are able to say, well, we stewarded You know, five acres up on Jack Mountain and kept it from having a fuel load to burn and took that biomass so that a farmer could feed his earthworms so there'd be soil for your future.
There'll be abundance and soil for your future.
I mean, what an affirming, sacred, righteous Vocation that would be.
And it would affirm people who want to work outside and have calluses and blisters on their hands.
You know, we've spent a couple generations marginalizing what we call blue-collar people.
And one of the big issues right now as we go to an AI, you know, a techno future, is what do we do with people that I'm suggesting that a carbon economy is one of many pathways to actually envisioning a future where thousands and
thousands of people would be employed in healing ministries so that we'd be caressing our nest You know, so many times the idea in agriculture and the farming community is that nature is a reluctant partner, that we've got to, you know, we've got to get them in a wrestling hole.
We've got to dominate and conquist the door.
We're going to make you, you know, we're going to push you.
When actually, nature is a benevolent lover that just wants to be caressed.
And we haven't And we haven't put attention on caressing in the right places for a long time.
Isn't it also that when you say the word we, God, there's so many of us and so many people are already invested in doing these jobs that are actually counterproductive for nature.
But the power – so you say, well, where do you start?
Well, you start at your dinner plate.
And that's why at our farm, our little moniker on our little cooler bags is healing the land one bite at a time.
We want our people to know that what's on your plate – When it's multiplied a billion times, you know, that actually creates the legacy, the legacy ecology you're leaving for your grandchildren.
That somehow that has to be made, and people have to understand that.
And I think that the wake-up call, the shock, the jar, the emotional jarring of this pandemic, I mean, We're seeing for the first time people who never would have darkened our door or asked us for anything They're asking us.
And that's why, you know, that's why C and I wrote this book, Beyond Labels.
And we started this a year ago.
We had no idea that it would launch in the middle of this.
But we realized, hey, this is a timely thing.
I mean, we're having people call me, can I go buy land near you that you'll manage so I have a bunker?
You know, when things go wonky, I mean, for the first time, I've never heard this before, but it's happening around the country.
People like us, we're getting calls.
How can I get on your first class list?
How can I get on your business class?
In other words, for the first time in our history, we've been in business now for, you know, half a century.
We were in it before organic was cool.
You know, we were one of those early, you know, very, very early.
And for, you know, for 30 years, we were the only game in town.
That was fun.
All right.
And 20 years ago, things as people started, you know, awareness and farmers markets and, you know, all this.
And so now we're not by any means the game in town.
But so for the first time in half a century, we're actually rationing.
We don't have enough.
We've got way more demand.
I did a post the other day, you know, the pandemic is the best marketing strategy we've ever had.
Well, if we hit 150 and overrun the ability of this little facility, it's called Plant in a Box, P-I-B. And his blog is thinking inside the box because his thing is Plant in a Box.
So instead of if we had sales for over 150,000 chickens, well then...
You don't expand this and make it bigger.
You duplicate it.
So your expansion is by duplication, not by concentration and scale on site.
Then what happens?
There's a sweet spot here.
There's a sweet spot.
If you don't overrun your ecology, so we're going to set this thing on a farm.
The acreage is enough to handle the processing water, and you compost all the guts on site.
Now, you don't have to run a sewage treatment plant.
You don't have to truck your guts to a rendering plant.
They become fertilizer on site, called this fertigation, and it's a sweet spot That the industry doesn't have.
And so there's no reason why we can't produce a million chickens and you just have eight of these scattered, you know, five miles apart, six miles apart.
And once you get them processed and they're in a bag, you can put them in a tractor trailer and ship them anywhere, okay?
That's not the bottleneck.
The bottleneck is integrating the processing with the production.
That's the bottleneck right now in our fragile system.
And so if we can do an integrative approach and have a democratized, decentralized approach, then suddenly we have an ecological, humane, people-friendly, community-friendly, Nutrient-friendly system.
It sounds like that would be a great thing though.
Yeah.
Especially now when we're realizing that it's difficult when the food supply chain goes down or something goes wrong and it's difficult to get food to people.
Wouldn't it be great to have, I've always said this, that it would be great if you had like the neighborhood had like one large plot of land and everyone in the neighborhood lived off that plot of land.
I mean, the idea of – I mean, you're familiar with urban agriculture.
I mean, we have food deserts, right?
Food deserts is a big, big problem.
But a lot of times, food deserts are in pretty rundown parts of the city that have vacant lots.
And there's a lot of productive capacity in these places.
One of the interesting ones I was on was in St. Louis.
And these three young couples had come together and they had purchased an old – it was an old crack house that the city bulldozed.
So there's this vacant lot.
It was half an acre.
It wasn't very big.
Half an acre.
And these three couples – They got apartments nearby, like within, you know, two minutes walk.
And it was in a pretty rundown area of the city, rundown neighborhood.
And they just started farming in this half acre and told all the neighbors, bring us your food scraps.
They got some chickens.
They started making compost.
They put up a little greenhouse.
They put up a kitchen.
And very, very simple, poor boy, bootstrap, you know, nothing.
And they quickly became a whole community, whatever, place for kids to come because kids were mesmerized by the chickens, they had a worm bed, the plants growing, they cooked stuff.
And I was there, you know, I was there with them for a couple of hours and here come kids down the sidewalk, you know, pulling a little red wagon with food scraps in it.
And they're feeding the worm beds.
And it's fantastic.
They were feeding like, you know, 30 families out of this...
But yeah, if we can restructure what's valuable to us, it's very important.
And as you were talking about earlier, these essential businesses, what is essential and not essential?
It's so arbitrary and strange, and this is something that politicians really aren't supposed to have the power to dictate what we can and can't do in that way.
And they're not doing it in a smart way.
Like, here's a perfect example.
Liquor stores are an essential business.
You know what's not an essential business?
Alcoholics Anonymous.
So Alcoholics Anonymous are not allowed to have their meetings, but liquor stores are open because they're essential.
We're going to appreciate what it's like to do stuff, to be able to go outside, to go to a restaurant, to go to a public gathering, have a picnic, that kind of stuff.
And it's really difficult to parse the information and get a straight answer on is this a good thing or a bad thing.
Ultimately, over the course of time, particularly what you were talking about with the unemployment rate equaling You know, 1% equaling 30,000 lives over the course of a year.
I mean, we really don't know what that number is going to look like here.
So as we go forward with this thing, I... I look at this and say, well, let's at least wipe ourselves off and say, okay, what can I learn from this?
What can we learn from this going forward?
And culturally, obviously, we can learn – well, we need to decentralize and diversify our food processing system.
I mean, for me, that's like number one.
And then for the average consumer, though, I mean, that's a macro thing.
But for the average consumer, what can you do to facilitate a secure food system and your own secure food system?
And one is to simply start stockpiling more food.
I mean, have more food in the house.
You don't have to go to the grocery store three times a week.
Buy in bulk.
Go to the farmer's market.
Buy from a farmer.
You can get...
20-pound bags of oatmeal.
You don't have to get a little cup full of Quaker oats.
You can get rolled crimped oats by the 50-pound bag.
It's pennies on the dollar.
I mean, this is how you save money.
When we talk about price, interestingly, our whole chicken price at Polyface is cheaper than boneless, skinless breasts from Tyson at Walmart.
So the way to save money is to get unprocessed.
That's how you eat well, okay?
You know the famous movie Food Inc., the documentary Food Inc., wonderful movie, but they presented the same thing.
Remember when that family went to the fast food place and they said they couldn't afford tomatoes?
A pound of our ground beef is cheaper than that burger, soft drink, and massive fries that he got.
And there's probably more nutrition in a half a pound of our ground meat than that whole meal.
But you can buy two pounds of our ground meat for the price of that whole meal.
The fact is that junk food is not cheap.
Junk food's expensive.
I mean, you start talking about nutrition.
I mean, a Snickers bar.
Snickers bar is twice as expensive per pound as our grass-finished, world-class ground beef.
So when you start looking at these kinds of things, you start realizing, oh, okay, so really I just need to adjust where my money's going and how I'm spending.
So spend bulk by bulk, by unprocessed, get in your kitchen, yes, and develop a A love for domestic culinary arts, okay?
And kitchens are a great place to teach your kids science, you know, fractions, a quarter teaspoon, a great place to teach your kids.
So math, math, fractions and stuff.
Science, you know, what happens when you put baking soda with vinegar and all this stuff.
I mean, you know, kitchen's a great first learning place.
Oh listen, the food processing scientists, they ain't dumb.
They know what our primitive You know, hot buttons are.
And yeah, salty, sweetie.
I mean, boy, they know exactly what it is.
So yeah, so Dr. Zach Bush has been actually developing microbiome bolstering concoctions to try to diversify your microbiome.
You know, one of the things that farmers like me that direct market to people One of our concerns, I mean, I don't talk a lot about it, but one of our concerns is that our food, for example, our chicken, we don't immerse it in chlorine, you know, so it actually has – it's living food.
And sometimes people are so sterile in their microbiome That they actually have to eat a little bit of real food a little bit at a time to build it up.
I mean, the other morning I was out in the garden picking asparagus.
And I had my knife and I was cutting it off.
Of course, I love fresh.
I mean, fresh garden picked.
I mean, there's nothing like a cool morning and a big old fat asparagus, you know, an inch thick.
And I just eat it fresh.
It's got some soil on it.
Eat the soil, you know.
Grandma used to say you're supposed to eat a pound of dirt before you're 12, right?
But, you know, how do we develop immune systems in babies?
We don't put them in plastic wrap bubble.
We put them around on the floor and the next thing we know they're You know, gnawing on the dog toy, and they've got a dust bunny in their mouth, right?
I mean, Richard Louv writes about this in Nature Deficit Disorder, which is, of course, an iconic book about the importance of touching nature and breathing in nature.
I mean, just the bacteria that exudes from vegetation and The ecology of plants.
That's why you get food from people that don't use pesticides.
And you say, well, there's not enough of that produced.
Well, as you said, It would be wonderful if this broadcast went into every single household in the world and tomorrow everybody Said, we're going to do different.
There's a big conference that happens every year in the East.
They're hoping that they can still have it.
It's in October.
The Homesteaders of America Conference.
And two weeks ago, they had 10,000 new email sign-ups for their postings.
In one day.
I mean...
That gets your attention.
That's huge.
And it's people that are looking on how to garden.
I mean, the number of gardening questions, just like And seeds.
I mean, seed companies are out.
All the seed companies basically did like a three- or four-day moratorium this spring, you know, because it ran out.
So this summer, what's going to be in short supply?
Canning supplies are going to be short.
Dehydrators, I'm sure, you know, produce dehydrators are going to be hard to get.
In our area right now, you cannot get a freezer now until August.
Everything's backordered clear until the middle of August.
Everybody snarfed up the freezers to be able to stockpile.
So that was one of the things I was saying, you know, how do we go forward?
Well, you do more for yourself.
And in our book, Beyond Labels, Sina and I end up, the last couple chapters are about moving to a place where you actually are Producing some of your own food, a backyard flock of chickens, a little, you know, garden, a little herb garden, you know.
And we have the technology now.
Mother Earth News Magazine, I mean, they've led this thing forever.
And you go to a Mother Earth News Fair...
And we were going to have the first one on a farm this year at our place, respecting 10,000 people, and we had to cancel.
It was in July.
So it's rolled over now to next year.
But there's every kind of patio tube herb garden with little pockets in it, and you grow all of your own herbs.
Beehives on your house roof.
There's so much.
There's so much that you can do.
And so I encourage people to jump in and just caress the mystery of life.
And it's good for your nutrition.
It's good for your soul.
It's good for your spirit.
In a time where everybody's concerned about death, surround yourself with something that's growing.
I think that's a great point and maybe a great way to end this.
Joel, thank you very much.
I really appreciate you, and I appreciate your message, and you really epitomize the best example of that sort of regenerative farming, and I really wish it'd be more widespread.