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Aug. 1, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
44:44
Food and Farming Solutions with Joel Salatin

Joel Salatin provides much needed solutions to our farming and food crisis in this hopeful episode. Joel F. Salatin is an American farmer, lecturer, and author. Salatin raises livestock on his Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. For more info on his farming and farm visit: https://www.polyfacefarms.com/

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Hey everybody, my guest today is Joel Saladin.
Joel and his family own the Polyface Farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, which has been the subject of over a dozen documentaries and numerous media reports.
The farm was the good guy in Michael Pollan's iconic film, Omnivore's Dilemma, and the subsequent award-winning documentary, Food, Inc.
He is the author of 15 books spanning ecological agriculture, How to and culture.
He writes numerous magazine columns and is editor of Stockman Grass Farmer, the world's premier pastured livestock trade magazine.
Polyface Farm serves more than 8,000 families and ships nationwide to clients who want pastured non-GMO meat and poultry, beef, pork, chicken, turkey, rabbit, and lamb.
The Farm Host Gatherings offers numerous tours and educational venues and operates a formal farm apprenticeship program.
I'm really happy to have you here, Joel.
Thank you for joining us.
Oh, thank you, Robert F. I just can't imagine anybody I'd rather talk to right now than you.
You know, a lot of the people I have on here tend to depress my listeners, but you have a very, very kind of an optimistic view of life.
I'd say an optimistic approach to life.
So give us some reason for hope and a time.
You know, President Biden had, I think, really shocked a lot of the country by saying that we were likely to face food shortages.
Because of the Russian embargo of the Ukraine.
So I think people are starting to think more seriously about their food and, you know, tell us what your reaction is.
Well, my reaction is that I'm very excited that for the first time in my life, and I'm 65, and so I've been on this podium, if you will, for a long, long time, and have been accused of being a food snob, an elitist.
I've had commissioners of agriculture say, if we farm like Salatin, we just have to decide which half of the world to die because everybody would starve and all this.
And what's fascinating to me is for the first time in my life, we've got this national conversation happening where we're actually talking about resiliency and not efficiency.
And look, I want to be as efficient as anybody is as anybody.
But if first you don't have resiliency, you don't have anything to be efficient about if you don't first have resiliency.
And so here we are on our farm.
Let me just clarify this, because resiliency is a term of art in farming that some of our listeners might not know about.
That is the capacity to produce food, even...
Under stressful circumstances like wars, droughts, famines, etc.
Right, right.
Any kind of shocking, shocking occurrence.
Yeah, so think of resiliency as forgiveness in the system, if you will.
Obviously, you're well aware of resiliency in immune systems.
You know, we want to build resilient immune systems.
Anyway, so here we are.
know, we're watching these media reports about ammonium fertilizer going up 400% shortages and things like this.
And the fact of the matter is our farm doesn't buy any chemical fertilizer.
We don't buy any of that stuff because we are running on biology and biology trumps the chemicals every day.
And so the earthworms don't need chemical fertilizer.
They don't need petroleum.
They need solar energy converted by chlorophyll and photosynthesis into sugars that the soil biology uses.
And so there's this whole community.
There's this community of beings.
You know, the actinomycetes and mycelium, they have all sorts of interesting names.
And it's in the soil, you know, and there's this entire trade of commerce going on in the soil as these things are being traded around.
The very idea that in order to have soil fertility, you need to import things from 2,000 miles away that are mined, that just doesn't make any sense.
Farmers like us have proven that it doesn't make any sense.
We're very excited that these huge increases we're seeing.
Another one is in the big processing plants.
The big processing plants with COVID, they've been decimated with Quarantine and all sorts of, you know, protocol restrictions.
And those of us that use very small local abattoirs, that's a nice way to say a slaughterhouse, you know, a butcher shop, when you use a very small one, you don't have, you know, 5,000 people crowded under one roof with no sunlight and on a dark, damp situation.
And so even in the processing of We're seeing a resilience from regionally based, smaller scale kind of operations.
And so the shortages that we're seeing are primarily all at large scale, at big scale, and big scale in today's vulnerabilities, in today's new fragilities.
Scale, which has always been touted as being the answer to everything, is now being seen as a liability, not an asset.
And so those of us that are running speedboats instead of aircraft carriers, we can navigate the shoals and the disturbing waters that we're in right now globally.
We can navigate those much more efficiently.
The other day, a lady came into our farm store here, and we've always been a higher price than in the store because all of our costs are internalized rather than externalized.
And so a lady was in and she was shocked.
She looked at the meat counter, said, wow, your sirloin steaks are $9 a pound at Costco.
They're $16 a pound.
I don't go to Costco, so I didn't know what the prices were at Costco.
And it just floored me.
This was the first time in my life that our prices have been substantially lower than what was in the supermarket.
And the fact is, we do buy some diesel and we're seeing some price increases, but we're not seeing anything like the price increases that the great big commercial, orthodox, conventional, industrial companies Folks are seeing.
And so, for the first time in my life, I think that the biological view, the ecological authenticity, is actually going to show up at the real-time price tag and not have to be touted as an altruistic, well, we're not giving anybody diarrhea, we're not polluting any streams, and we've always thrown those things into it.
Maybe we don't have to now.
It's just going to be real-time competitiveness.
Because of all these inputs, these chemical inputs, the chemical herbicides, the pesticides, the fertilizers that, you know, are now the baseline of American agriculture, almost all of them are petroleum-based.
Yes, all of them.
The herbicides, the pesticides, all of them are petroleum-based.
Ammonium nitrate is petroleum-based.
And yet, we know that through very managed, intensive composting, a true carbon economy, where we integrate biomass as our key fertility program, Those kinds of things allow us to be in situ or localize our whole input chain of custody, and it's really remarkable.
The Rodale Institute, there's a guy in Australia named Colin Seiss who invented a system called pasture cropping, where it's a no-till, no chemical, no fertilizer.
He grows grain.
He's got 2,000 farmers in Australia running this.
It's now jumped to here.
Rodale in Emmaus, Pennsylvania is promoting something very similar.
The guy in Australia uses livestock.
The Rodale uses crimper shredders.
They're not identical.
But the whole thing is essentially using on location, strategically grown and managed carbon with a no-till, no-fertilizer system to actually feed the soil biology so you don't have to use any chemicals.
All of these systems, all these protocols, have struggled and struggled and struggled against cheap petroleum, cheap chemicals, and been I laughed at, poo-pooed by the land-grant colleges.
And suddenly now, I just got an email today from a big commercial farmer in Kansas.
He says, we can't do this anymore.
Can you tell us how to do this without all these inputs?
And so I have never been more excited about the possibilities of actually moving, maybe even globally, but certainly in the U.S., moving us to a new appreciation of soil biology, soil development, and And where we love earthworms more than we do chemicals.
The fact is there's a huge amount of inertia in the system that will prevent all those people who are west of the Appalachian and east of the Rocky Mountains, all those miles and miles of corn.
I mean, how do they ever convert?
Do any of them ever convert?
Can they convert?
Yeah, some certainly do convert.
And can they convert?
Absolutely, they can convert.
But normally, it takes major business, economic, cultural upheaval for conversion.
You know that.
People don't make changes until they get hit in the head.
And so the same thing will be true here.
And of course, what's really one of the biggest cultural problems with this is that the average farmer is now 60 years old and 60-year-olds tend to not like to make changes as much as 20-year-olds.
And so we have that militating against us at the very time when we need...
Creativity, innovation, and the ability, enough emotional and mental energy to pivot.
The lion's share of our farmland is owned and operated by people that are older and don't have the capacity, the bandwidth, To make those kind of pivots like you would when you're, you know, 28, 29, and 30.
And so, you know, that's one of our biggest issues.
So, you know, they will ask for relief, they will ask for government payments, they will ask for all sorts of things.
But I can tell you that unless they're in complete financial upside down, people are making this transition.
You can move to an ecological system, whether it's going to grass, which is what we advocate, going to a pasture-based system.
We don't need feedlots.
Ruminants aren't supposed to eat grain.
They're four-legged sauerkraut vats.
They're supposed to eat biomass and ferment it in their fermentation tanks.
And so we don't feed any grain to our animals.
So when you see these, oh, we're not going to have any wheat.
We're going to run out of grain and all this stuff.
We say, well, we don't use very much.
And when it comes to omnivores like poultry and pork, which are omnivores and do need grain, those, if we didn't feed grain to cows and dairy cows and all that, we would have plenty left over for the omnivores.
And as far as chickens go, if one out of three households in America had enough chickens to eat their kitchen scraps, there would not be any egg industry in the entire country.
You know, we, a city, a village in Belgium, in Belgium, over in Europe, Pat Foreman talked about this in her wonderful book, City Chicks.
It's a clever title, City Chicks.
It's about backyard chickens, you know, in the city.
And this town in Belgium offered their families, they said, if anybody wants three chickens, we'll buy you chickens and you can have them for your, you know, to take care of your kitchen scraps, your food scraps.
And 2,000 families put up their hands and said, yeah, we'll take those.
So they bought 6,000 chickens, dispersed them, three apiece to 2,000 households.
And in one month, their landfill Their landfill tonnage dropped by 100 tons in one month just because of the chickens eating all the food scraps that didn't go into the landfill.
I mean, what we have right now, Robert, is a segregated food system.
It's extremely segregated.
We get the fertilizer over.
We grow the grain over here.
We grow the cows over here.
We do the chickens over here.
We process them over here.
We sell them over here.
I mean, the average morsel of food in America travels 1,500 miles.
The average morsel of food on your plate has seen more of America than the farmer that grows it.
And what we need is an integrated, not a segregated system.
And I know these are powerful words, but words need to be powerful to evoke understanding.
And so what we want is an integrated system so that we have proximity to these different cycles.
There's no reason to...
Right now, 40% of all human edible food does not get eaten on the planet by humans.
That's the first time that's ever happened in human history.
We throw away more food today than we've ever thrown away in human history.
Why?
Because sell-by dates run out.
Because somebody hits up a box with a forklift in a warehouse.
Somebody didn't watch the temperature on the temp control and check the box.
And so the HACCP plan says you got to throw it out.
The amount of wastage in a segregated, bifurcated food system staggers the imagination.
And so When we move to a more regional, I could use the word local, but let's just think regional.
When we move to a more regional focused system, then those chains of custody shorten and the fragility shortens and you actually build way more resiliency and less dependency that is then stymied by far off events and far off things.
I mean, another force of inertia are the federal subsidies.
And then if people do your kind of farming, are they still reliant on federal payments?
Yeah, well, I don't agree with any subsidies at all.
I would like to see the whole program abolished.
You know, when people say free markets have gotten us where we are, no.
We We haven't had free markets for a long time.
Abraham Lincoln started the USDA. I call it the USDA. So we've had government meddling in agriculture for a long, long time.
So don't talk to me about free markets.
We haven't even been there for 150 years.
And so, yes, there is a whole, just like all, you know, whatever, bureaucratic, federalized systems, there is an entire mega panoply of programs and things to maintain the status quo and make sure nobody changes. there is an entire mega panoply of programs and things Because, yeah, you're exactly right.
You're pointing up, you know, when people ask me, well, what you say makes sense, but how in the world, why don't people do this?
It makes so much sense.
And it's because you hit the nail on the head.
If we actually went to an authentic, ecological, resilient approach, it would completely invert the power, prestige, profits of the entire food system.
And that's a great big ship to turn around.
And there's a lot of things that are inherent in the system to make sure that that can't turn around.
The system just is not sustainable, even from a soil standpoint.
We're spending capital every year.
We're going into capital every single year in terms of spending our soil reserves.
Yes, our soil and our water.
Our aquifers, the big Ogallala aquifer, is dropping every year.
We have subsidence.
That's part of the problem that New Orleans has.
And so what we have right now is a We're on a trajectory.
You know, there's an old Chinese saying that if you keep going the way you're going, you're going to end up where you're headed.
And right now, every bushel of corn costs us a bushel and a half of soil.
We have a dead zone the size of Rhode Island and the Gulf of Mexico.
And certainly you're very aware of water riparian things.
And so, Robert, we have a culture, we have a country right now, as clever as we are, you know, we've got javelin missiles and stingers and, you know, we're hearing a lot about our capabilities, but we don't have the capability as a culture to put on our national balance sheet The liabilities that we're creating.
You know, Wendell Berry talks a lot about this, that what's wrong with us creates more gross domestic product than what's right with us.
I mean, if I go out here and I pollute the river next to me, the cost of cleanup doesn't come off of national GDP. It's a positive GDP because we had to hire somebody.
We had to burn fuel to get there, buy some trucks and equipment and things to go and clean it up.
We lose our teenagers.
We lose our kids.
We have to build a new juvenile detention center.
So guess what?
A juvenile detention center should be a negative gross domestic product.
But no, it's positive because we have to buy concrete, steel, hire employees.
And so if a culture cannot capture the actual negative liabilities of Of its system, then it's going to lie to itself every day.
And that's exactly what we do.
We create business plans.
When's the last time you ever heard of an entrepreneur going into a bank or with a business plan for a business loan?
And the banker says, well, Marianne, this is a wonderful business plan.
In fact, I think you're going to be a millionaire.
I wouldn't mind being your partner.
But before I loan you the money, I want to know what's this business going to do to the earthworms in our community?
Nobody asks that, right?
And yet, does anybody listening to our voice today think that earthworms are less important than Wall Street?
At the end of the day, we all know earthworms are more important than Wall Street, and yet they don't even rate.
But fortunately, the IRS hasn't figured out how to tax them yet, so on our farm, We have decaquintupled the number of earthworms in the half century we've been here.
I mean, they're all over.
We've got earthworm castings.
You can turn your ankle on our earthworm castings.
And the IRS doesn't tax them.
So that's true wealth.
That's real true wealth.
And we're glad that the IRS hasn't discovered it yet.
I had a friend who you may have run across, Bill Nyman.
Yes.
We're at Nyman Ranch for a long time, which was doing the same kind of thing that you did, but he ran into a lot of obstacles.
He was making really good food, and it was a very, very idealistic system with a lot of independent farmers who were being supported and given marketplaces across the country.
What are you doing different than them?
Doing different than Bill Nyman or doing different than the conventional?
Because you do the same kind of thing yourself, but you live from one form, right?
Yeah, so we're certainly not exactly like Nyman Ranch, but I know Bill and Nicolette, friends of mine, we've done things together.
Nicolette, who's Bill Nyman's wife.
Yes.
I was an attorney who worked for me for many years, suing all the industrial hog facilities.
We were suing Wendell Murphy and the Smithfield Foods and Tyson and all the big industrial meat production factories.
I knew you would know who Nicolette was.
Thank you for bringing everybody up to speed.
I call them a true power duo.
So what we do on our farm is everything is on pastures.
So this grass-finished beef, we move the cows every day to a fresh spot.
So the whole idea is to mimic nature's template.
Nature doesn't put chickens in confinement houses.
They don't put pigs on slatted floors over slurry pits.
Nature doesn't put cows in grain feedlots.
And so we're looking fundamentally at what is this natural template.
People have to understand that 500 years ago, North America produced more nutrition, more food than we do today, even with chemical fertilizer, John Deere tractors and agriculture subsidies.
Now, it wasn't all eaten by humans.
You know, there were 2 million wolves that needed 20 pounds of meat a day.
There were, you know, 100 million bison.
There were 200 million beavers that ate more.
They're herbivores.
Beavers are.
They don't eat meat.
And so these herbivores actually, I mean, these beavers 500 years ago actually ate more vegetables, more vegetable matter than all the humans in North America today.
So, you know, Audubon, Audubon sat under a tree in 1820, recorded in his diary, he said, I couldn't see the sun for three days because of the passenger pigeons that flew over.
That was before confinement chicken houses.
Nobody was hauling grain to feed flocks of birds that blocked out the sun for three days.
The ecological abundance with the choreography, the choreography of symbiotic, multi-species, complex relationships is just beyond imagination almost for us to think about in our bifurcated, segregated commercial industrial complex relationships is just beyond imagination almost for us to think
And all of that manure and urine and skeletons and bodies and feathers, that was because it was dispersed and it was moved across the land, it was a blessing to the land, as opposed to today, all of that that is concentrated at a processing plant.
Concentrated at a production, concentrated animal feeding operation.
Instead of being a blessing, it becomes a curse on the land because it is way too much for our ecological womb to metabolize in that small, that tiny a space.
So nature has these wonderful symbiotic systems in place that we as commercial farmers, if we tap into them, the productivity is just amazing.
Unbelievable.
On our farm, for example, we're getting five times the production per acre of our county average.
Our county average averages 80 cow days per acre.
A cow day is what one cow will eat on a day.
So in our county, the average...
Acre will support 80 cows for one day a year or one cow for 80 days a year.
On our farm, we're averaging 400 cow days, and we haven't planted a seed or bought a bag of chemical fertilizer in 60 years.
And it was a gullied rock pile when we came in 1960.
It could only support 10 cows.
Today, it supports 100 cows.
I mean, I'm not bragging here.
I'm simply, I'm giving humble, humble, A humble recognition to infinitely beautiful creators' design that it's our responsibility to duplicate on a commercial scale.
So, for example, in nature, what sanitizes behind herbivores?
You know, the wildebeest on the Serengeti, the Cape Buffalo in Botswana.
The American bison on the American plain.
It was birds.
Birds followed them.
It was prairie chickens, turkeys.
It's the egret on the rhinoceros' nose.
It's these birds.
So we follow the cows with egg mobiles that are portable chicken houses.
The laying hens scatter out.
They peck through the fly larva in the cow patties, scratch the cow patties into the soil surface to disperse it and cover a lot more ground and act as a sanitizer.
So we don't use grubicides and parasiticides and all those things that taint the meat.
Instead, we use the birds, but we didn't invent it.
Nature invented it.
We're just mimicking what we see in nature.
We do large-scale composting.
So in the winter, when we're feeding hay, we feed on a, we call it a carbonaceous diaper.
We use wood chips.
So if all the trees being burned up because they're dying, because they got disease and stuff, if those were chipped and used as livestock bedding, for example, as a carbonaceous diaper, when the soil is dormant in the wintertime, we let this build up It builds up four feet deep.
We put corn in it.
The corn ferments because the cows tromp out the oxygen.
And then when the cows come out, when the grass begins to grow in the spring, we put pigs in there.
Pigs then seek the fermented corn.
That pays their salary.
And they turn it like a big egg beater, inject oxygen, and all of that carbonaceous diaper four feet deep becomes a big compost pile.
Then when the pigs are done, we spread it on the fields.
And so instead of using big compost turners and petroleum and equipment to do all that, we use pigs to do the turning.
And the beauty of the pigs doing the turning is it fully honors the pigness of the pig.
We're not asking the pig to do something the pig doesn't want to do.
They love to do this.
And we think having an ethical framework in which the pig can express its pigness is the ultimate ethical framework on which we build a culture that respects the Robertness of Robert and the Joelness of Joel and the Maryness of Mary.
If we don't respect the pigness of the pig, the least of these, how can we expect to respect the greater of these?
And as a result, what happens is, as a culture, We view pigs as just inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated, however cleverly hubris can imagine to manipulate them.
And I would suggest that that mechanistic view toward nature eventually comes down to a mechanistic view of control among the citizenry.
So it is respecting the pigness of the pig that creates a moral, ethical framework to respect you and I as humans, as people in the systems.
And so as we violate the pigness of the pig, the chickenness of the tomato-ness of the tomato, for that matter, as we violate those things with assaults of disrespect and chemicals and violence against them, it's no wonder that we soon begin to assault our own citizenry with tyranny and crazy protocols.
Yeah, it's interesting you say that.
I just did a blurb for a book for Vandana Chiba, who's one of my great heroes.
Yes, yes.
She's one of the great...
Oh, yes.
She's a beacon of light against GMO champions, eloquent champions against GMO crops and chemical agriculture, and one of her persistent themes...
Is the relationship between chemical agriculture and industrial agriculture and autocratic political systems, which ultimately commoditize humanity, commoditize landscapes, commoditize wildlife and domestic animals as well.
Yes.
Well, one of the beauties of the approach that I'm bringing to the discussion here and that we bring, one of the beauties of this approach is that it is fundamentally personalized.
It's something that we can do.
We can do compost.
We can't make 10-10-10 chemical fertilizer.
We can't make ammonium nitrate.
Just like we can't make Impossible Burgers and Beyond Beef, and we can't do bioengineered food, but we can grow a garden.
We can grow real tomatoes.
We can have a milk cow and milker in the backyard, and all she needs is sunlight and grass, and we have milk.
So this notion of industrial, engineered, whatever you want to call a Star Trek food system, ultimately is the most disempowering.
It's the most disempowering system because it makes it makes all of us dependent on techno glitzy, capital intensive, centralized systems as opposed to decentralized systems.
democratized, egalitarian, broad-based systems that spread the knowledge, the wherewithal, the ability, the capital, spreads it out across the landscape so that we can all participate in it as participants.
So I'm curious about one small footnote, which is I've had chickens my whole life, and I'm wondering how you safeguard your flocks against predators, not just like hawks and eagles and owls and foxes and raccoons, but also rats.
Oh yeah, rats.
Rats when they're tiny, when they're little chicks.
In our history, trust me, the number one predator in our whole history of life is rats.
And so several things.
One is we are big believers in a concrete floor in a chick brooder.
So rats can't get in it.
You know, a dirt floor, they can always somehow figure out how to get in.
We do always enjoy some feral cats.
When feral cats run around, we keep them.
You know, we like them.
And the other thing is to make sure that all of your, around your chick brooder and your building stuff is real clean.
You want it mowed clean.
You don't want like piles of Wood and you want to have it kind of clean around so rats don't have a good place to lounge.
Now, all that being said, we use guard geese.
We have guard dogs.
Guard geese are amazing.
I've watched geese chase off hawks.
It's amazing.
They're awake all the time.
I actually recommend people to, if you have a small flock, to actually have a portable shelter and just keep them secure all the time in a portable shelter.
Our broiler chickens, we raise tens of thousands of broiler chickens on pasture.
In little 10 foot by 12 foot by 2 foot tall, floorless little shelters that we move every day across the field.
One person with our little dolly can move 4,500 chickens in 60 minutes without starting an engine and no petroleum.
And in 60 years, we've only had one hawk take one of those chickens because they're completely enclosed.
So they're protected from weather.
They're protected from predators.
And the final thing I'll say about predators is that we do a lot of things on our farm to encourage wildlife zones.
So we fence out riparian and forestal areas and make literally wildlife runs through the farm So that there are healthy amounts of moles and voles and chipmunks and squirrels to feed the carnivorous predators.
A lot of times a predator issue is because there's an imbalance.
And in suburbia, in suburban America, there's more imbalance than you can imagine.
So by having these actual wildlife corridors, it actually stimulates...
You know, a healthy balance.
And so we don't just try to annihilate predators.
If we have one that is not satisfied with the plate that we've offered them, then that one gets taken out.
We don't try to do a blanket annihilation.
How about, let me ask you one other question on the same line.
Have you ever had problems with the weasels?
Because the weasels...
Yeah.
To me, the most destructive one, because they get in the chicken house and kill every single chicken in the house in one night.
Yeah, they do.
And they're actually, you can tell it's a weasel because there's almost, all they have are two marks in the neck where they've actually just sucked the blood.
They're bloodsuckers, the weasels are.
So, yes, name me any.
We've had everything from bears to foxes to raccoons, skunks, everything.
But you know what?
We haven't had any avian influenza.
We haven't had any of the big diseases that the industry has.
Why?
Because our chickens are immune.
So, yes, do we deal with predators?
Yes, predators are an issue for us.
There are a lot of things that we do to ameliorate that.
But when I look at these great big confinement houses of Tyson and Purdue and Pilgrim's Pride and stuff, I'm so thankful that we don't have the problems that they have.
I mean, when they have problems, they have big problems.
I mean, E. coli, salmonella, different things.
We actually submitted our chickens to a biology test several years ago for salmonella.
And our chickens, they cultured it on a petri dish.
And the store-bought chickens that had as many as 40 chlorine baths to sanitize them measured colony forming units per milliliter to the second permutation.
And I've already told you more than I understand.
And ours measured 3,600 on the store-bought, 133 on ours.
So we were 25 times cleaner.
And we don't use any chlorine at all.
One of the reasons is because In these big confinement factory houses, the chickens are breathing in fecal particulate all day.
Every day, they're breathing in fecal particulate.
It goes in their respiratory membranes.
It's like sandpaper against their respiratory tracts.
It makes abrasions in their mucous membranes, and it actually penetrates so that they go to the processor with their feathers, their arteries, their guts, their meat is completely satiated in this fecal particulate.
But out here in the pasture, there is no fecal particulate, and so they actually come in clean.
These are all things that the industry, they're paranoid about all sorts of things that we just...
They're just not issues here.
They're just not issues.
And it's very exciting to see those kind of things happen.
And it's exciting to see people step up to this.
I think one of the things that this whole COVID thing did is that I don't think I've ever seen a more engaged and acute crisis.
Interest right now in immunology and health.
How do I guard against disease?
And the best way is to have a vibrant immune system.
Well, how do you build a vibrant immune system?
Well, first of all, you don't drink Coke every day, and you don't eat junk food all the time, and you eat From scratch, you actually get in your kitchen.
You know, yeah, you discover the kitchen.
I've always said how you know a person that really gets it in the food system is do you eat leftovers?
Because if you eat leftovers, it means you probably cook as a family and you ate as a family.
Half of the stuff that's sold in the supermarket is sold in single serving containers.
You know, we become grazers through life as opposed to, you know, communal indulgent provenance.
So here we are.
You don't eat the junk food.
You eat good food and you exercise 20 minutes a day, work up a sweat, get 20 minutes of sunshine a day, get that vitamin D in, you know, get eight hours of sleep.
And I'm giving you a recipe for immune system.
Drink a half a gallon of water a day.
Everybody's dehydrated.
And stop watching the news.
Maybe watch an hour of news a week, but watch five hours of comedy and laugh yourself silly.
Laughter does good like a medicine.
Do some good laughing.
And then I always like to say, make a list of all the people that you hate and forgive them because that kind of stress just eats you up and it weakens you.
Anyway, that's kind of my little recipe.
I don't know how far you are from Smithfield, Virginia, probably an hour's drive or something.
Yeah, it's just a couple hours.
But I started working on this issue in the 90s, and I think it was around the mid-80s.
There was a North Carolina Senator Wendell Murphy Looked at what these billionaires, Bo Pilgrim, John Tyson, had done to the chicken industry.
And they had put a million or two million chicken farmers out of business.
And they were raising chickens in battery cages, a million chickens in a single plant.
And they made themselves billionaires, put everybody out of business, and they started creating these slaughterhouses with line speeds that were going so fast that the chickens were just contaminating each other, not only in the chicken house, but in the processing facility.
Murphy looked at that and said, I can do the same thing with hogs.
Right.
He passed 26 laws in North Carolina that made it virtually impossible, gave huge subsidies to the industrial hog farming.
Yes.
And made it almost impossible to sue an industrial hog farm, no matter how much they disrupt your life.
Right.
And then he left the Senate and he went into that business and he created these facilities called Murphy, you know, Murphy 3000s.
Mm-hmm.
And within a few years, it was at that time, there were 28,000 independent hog farmers in North Carolina.
By the time I started working on this, about six or eight years later, there was 2,200 farms, hog farms, factories, and 80% of them owned or contracted with Smithfield, with one company now owned by the Chinese.
Yes.
Which controls now the landscape, the American landscapes.
Thomas Jefferson said, you know, American democracy is based on the proliferation of independent yeoman farmers, you know, on small plots.
Yeah.
And we now have our landscapes being agricultural food production being controlled by these huge facilities.
And as you know, a hog produces 10 times the amount of feces by weight as a human being.
So if you have a hog farm with 30,000 men in it, it's producing the same amount of crap as a city of 300,000 people.
And they take that and they dump it on the fields.
Yep.
It poisons the grass.
The only thing they can grow is Bermuda grass, and if the cows eat it, the cow's going to die from nitrogen poisoning.
They're really making our landscapes toxic.
They're destroying our democracy at the same time.
They're giving us food that is poisoned.
Yeah.
That is right.
So the answer, and this is where I tend, on the political spectrum, I tend toward the libertarian spectrum.
And I say, quit buying it.
Everybody quit buying it.
You're familiar with the great American smoke-out, you know, where nobody smokes for a day.
To try to, you know, get the tobacco companies.
Why don't we have a great American junk food out?
And if nobody went to McDonald's or Hardee's or Burger King or Taco Bell for one week, just one week, imagine, those outfits would be brought to their knees.
You don't need a law.
You don't need a regulation.
You don't need a bureaucracy.
You don't need an agency.
You don't...
I'm being very trying to...
We don't even need an attorney.
You know, you just need to stop buying it and just don't buy it.
And people don't realize that I think that what we have, yes, you gave this beautiful litany of what's the problem, but that developed, yes, was there collusion with the fratter side, with the U.S. duh and the Congress and the, yes, all of that's true.
But the other part is also true that somebody bought it.
Somebody decided this cheap food is the way to go and that lets me go to all the soccer games and I can go on the Caribbean cruises and I don't have to think about and I can eat non-intentionally so I can be intentional every place else.
And I'm suggesting that there are lots of things in life that we need to be less intentional about, where we need to be more intentional about our food.
Because one of our little slogans here at the farm is, That we're healing the landscape one bite at a time.
Our point is that when you look at your plate, I like to encourage people to squint.
There's a Native American named Tom Brown.
He wrote all the tracker books.
Maybe you're familiar with that.
And he has this technique of, it was a Native American technique of squinting the eyes to kind of see things that nobody else would see.
And I encourage people to do that in your plate of food.
Look through it.
What do you see on the other side?
On the other side of that is not cellophane and styrofoam at a supermarket.
What's on the other side is a landscape.
And is that what you're eating?
Does that represent a landscape that builds soil, that increases the commons, that hydrates the landscape?
That populates the countryside with loving caretakers, stewards, who get up every morning embracing the awesome responsibility and privilege of being able to be participants as caressers of our ecological umbilical.
We can do this.
There's no law that says we can't.
All we have to do is have the will and recognize that what's on our plate is actually creating the landscape our grandchildren will inherit.
It's as simple as that.
And what we have today is the culmination of trillions and trillions and trillions of decisions that people have been making.
Your parents, my parents, our ancestors have brought us to this place.
And the world we're going to have in 50 years is also going to be a physical manifestation of trillions and trillions of decisions that we make between now and then.
And so I just encourage people to take this seriously and realize that every decision You know, there's that old saying about the two dogs and the little boy asks his grandfather which dog will thrive, and the grandfather says, the dog that you feed.
If we want a different world, we have to feed a different world.
I guess that pun is perfectly intended.
We do have to feed a different kind of world if we're going to have a different kind of world.
Yeah, one of the dogs is the good dog, the other dog is the bad dog.
Yeah, yeah.
The grandfather says, feed the good dog.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
That's right.
That's the one that will thrive.
How do people purchase good food from Polyface Farms?
Well, we do ship nationwide.
All you've got to do is jump on our website, Polyface Farms.
If you just Google in P-O-L-Y, it'll probably pop right up.
We ship out every Tuesday, and we're glad to service people.
But beyond that, we hope that maybe you start there because it's easy, because you heard it here, and you want to do that.
We're grateful.
We're honored for that.
But at the end of the day, what we really want, we don't franchise.
We're not trying to build an empire.
What we're trying to do is facilitate a movement of authentic, accountable, integrity, transparent farms.
And Anyone is welcome to come and visit us, 24-7-365.
We have a complete open door policy.
There are no trespassing signs here.
If you go to any industrial farm, there's no trespassing signs all over the place.
Here, we welcome anyone to come at any time.
That's our commitment to transparency.
And so we're glad to serve anyone.
Well, we have a website, polyfacefarms.com.
Is our website, P-O-L-Y-F-A-C-E-F-A-R-M-S, polyfacefarms.com.
Yeah, we've been in, I don't know, a dozen documentaries.
I mean, there's one called Polyfaces, but Food, Inc., Fresh, Farmageddon, American Meat.
I can't even think of all of them.
We've been in numerous documentaries.
We're also glad to encourage you to patronize whoever your regional producers are and encourage them as well.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for joining us, Joel Saladin, Polyface Farms.
Thank you.
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