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Nov. 16, 2024 - RFK Jr. The Defender

51:18

Small Farms Healthy Food with Joel Salatin Farmer VIDEO

Farmer Joel Salatin discusses the solutions to making farming provide more food at a higher nutritional density with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in this episode. Now with video.

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	Hey, everybody.
	Today, my guest is Joel Saladin, who is part of the family that owns Polyphase Farms in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.
	The farm highlighted in the New York Times bestseller Omnivore's Dilemma and the award-winning documentary Food, Inc.
	The farm uses no chemicals and raises pasture livestock, including beef, pork, poultry, turkey, lamb, and rabbit.
	Which is directly marketed in the region and shipped nationwide.
	He is the author of 16 books.
	Joel Saladin is a sought-after conference speaker on divergent agricultural business and food integrity topics.
	He is the editor of the Stockman Grass Farmer, and he writes columns in numerous publications.
	Welcome to the show.
	I'm really, really happy to talk to you.
	Thank you.
	It's really an honor and privilege to be with you, always.
	So tell us a little bit about your farm and where that sits in the national grid of organic agriculture.
	Yeah, so we're in Virginia, Shenandoah Valley.
	Our family came here in 1961, and mom and dad never made a living from the farm.
	They worked off farm.
	Dad was an accountant, mom was a school teacher, and that paid the mortgage.
	So by the time I'm getting into teenage years, I loved the farm.
	I got my first chickens when I was 10 years old, had a little laying chicken business.
	But Dad was very innovative, and I'm at the stage of my life where I realize now, the older I get, the smarter Dad was.
	Some of us get to that point.
	I'm hoping my kids get to that point pretty soon.
	Yeah, wouldn't that be great?
	Yes.
	So, he was, this was in the 60s and 70s, and we basically had a glorified homestead experimental farm.
	We milked a couple cows.
	We, you know, had some chickens in the big garden.
	But he was totally, his father had been a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine in the mid-1940s when it first came out.
	So, he got this ecology kit, compost, and all that from his dad.
	So we came here, you know, how do you make a living on this small farm?
	And all the advice was, you know, buy chemicals, borrow more money, plant corn, build silos, graze the woodlot, you know, those kinds of things.
	And we knew that that wasn't correct ecologically.
	But more importantly, he understood that it was incorrect economically.
	You know, we couldn't We're good to go.
	Animals move.
	They don't stay in buildings.
	They don't stay in places.
	There's a lot of diversity.
	So you don't see single species things.
	Carbon doesn't move very far.
	What builds soil is decomposing carbon.
	And, you know, so starting with those kind of things, we just started developing.
	And...
	I came back to the farm full-time September 24, 1982, and it's not gone fast, but it's just been nice and steady up to where today we're servicing.
	It takes about 22 of us to actually run the farm and do the things that we're doing.
	And then you market through what kind of distributors?
	Yeah, so our brand is Polyface Farm, and we sell here at the farm.
	We have about 35 urban drop points within four hours of the farm, so that gets us to, you know, Caswick, Maryland, D.C., Annapolis, and then down to, you know, Williamsburg, Virginia Beach.
	And of course, Northern Virginia is the lion's share, Richmond.
	And then we ship nationwide as well.
	We also service some institutions.
	Of course, you know, we lost almost all of our restaurants.
	We were servicing, I don't know what, 50 restaurants in 2020 and lost all of them.
	They're not coming back into business.
	If you didn't have a drive-up window in 2020, you were in trouble.
	If you didn't have a what?
	A drive-up window in your restaurant.
	So fast food...
	Fast food did real well.
	And I think you've actually pointed this out, that the COVID, the 2020, was the largest transfer of wealth in the restaurant industry from white tablecloth mom and pops sit-down restaurants to fast food restaurants.
	It transferred that entire restaurant equity to the great big...
	As opposed to, you know, embedded small kind of chef-owned and smaller white tablecloth places, the kind of places that we serviced.
	And so, yeah, that was a big deal.
	But the farm now, you know, we have this production, but we also do a lot of...
	We have the Lunatic Learning Center.
	We do a lot of farm tours and gatherings and things for folks to come and see.
	We know there are two ways to get people on board.
	See it and eat it.
	And if you can see it and eat it, that's even better.
	And so that's been a key part of our whole program.
	What do you mean by drop points?
	Are those like farmers markets?
	No, they're not.
	They're individual homes.
	We call them hostess homes.
	I think we have one host and all the rest of them are hostesses.
	You know, women buy all the food in the country.
	Men don't.
	And we're pleased with that, okay?
	So these are serviced monthly.
	People order online, and we go in directly from the farm and service.
	So it's a la carte.
	There's not a subscription.
	It's not a...
	A volume-centric thing.
	But you buy online and we deliver the orders directly to you.
	And these become little fellowship hubs.
	These become...
	People meet each other, and they become little fellowship hubs of people who care about food, care about the environment, care about livestock care, and the kind of issues that we care about.
	And it's wonderful to be able to service them and have them meet each other and build these little tribes, if you will, that understand these issues.
	Share these values.
	It's really wonderful.
	I still don't understand how it works.
	Are they little mini distributorships in there?
	No, we're working directly with them.
	So what it is, is they order online and we're going to be in, let's say, whatever, Leesburg, Virginia on Tuesday.
	So we go every month on a schedule and people order and we Compile their orders here and bring them up and they meet us at that host home, at that rendezvous place.
	They meet us there.
	So obviously we have to be in places that are conducive to, you know, to 30 or 40 people showing up in a one hour period.
	You know, to pick up their food.
	But it allows us direct contact with our customer.
	That way, they get to see us, we get to see them.
	And they get to meet each other and, you know, share notes.
	And so it's a, you know, it's a...
	We do everything possible to try to create a familial operation.
	You can't believe how much people yearn for a connection like this.
	Last year, we began taking a hen, a laying hen.
	We called her Polly Hen.
	We're Polly Face, so we took Polly Hen and made a nice little wooden thing, and we'd take her.
	And so customers could come and meet this chicken.
	And we had people that weren't even customers coming three or four blocks walking Come see the chicken.
	It's in town.
	It's in the city.
	Come see the chicken.
	It was crazy.
	We could not imagine just the sheer...
	One lady kept pulling her son out of school.
	He was in third grade.
	And every month when we came, she'd pull him out of school early so he could come and pet the chicken.
	And it was just a huge connective thing.
	Yeah.
	Those are the kinds of things that we're doing, in addition to, obviously, really good food, to stimulate the whole story, family, fellowship, connection thing to the food and the farm.
	Now, I mean, did you make this whole thing up as you were going along, or are there models for this happening elsewhere in the country?
	Yeah, actually, I don't want to take too much credit, but we kind of conceived of this.
	Here's the thing.
	We were unhappy with what we saw at farmer's markets.
	Now, I'm a friend of farmer's markets.
	Don't read into this at all.
	But farmer's markets, they're almost more social gatherings than actual transfer of food.
	You don't see people at a farmer's market typically buying a half a beef and buying a bushel of green beans and buying little...
	Whatever.
	They're participating in the local food scene, but it's one hand only because the other hand's carrying Fifi, the coiffed oodle dog, and we're all there to kind of meet each other and slap each other on the back for being...
	You know, wonderful people participating in the local food system.
	And so we tried numerous farmers markets and we were just never pleased with the investment of time and energy and realized, well, what if we just use the power of the Internet And this is going back now, goodness, 20-some years.
	What if we use that, communicate directly with our people and pre-buy, so they're pre-buy, so we're not going speculating, and we can service them right where they live, and they can see us, we can see them, and we can actually electronically aggregate stuff.
	And it just took off.
	It took off and it enabled us To put way more on the truck, to get way more for our time, and everything was sold before we pulled out of the driveway.
	So we didn't have to come home and unpack a bunch of stuff that didn't sell.
	It was all pre-sold.
	And there are now numerous farms around the country that have taken this kind of urban drop point idea and adapted it, and it's just one of the many Whatever.
	Many opportunities that have come to us largely due to internet and the cheap cost of communication now that we didn't have 50 years ago.
	Yeah, I know.
	You know, I used to know very well, be good friends with Bill Nyman, who started Nyman Ranch, and his wife, Nicolette, was an attorney for me that I hired, and I brought her into the...
	Hog litigation and she met Bill through that and now she's a farmer.
	But their model was very interesting because they aggregated farmers from all over the country who were doing grass-fed beef and pasture-raised beef.
	And pork, and I think chickens as well, maybe other poultry, but they would then go certify these farms, look at their operations, make sure that they were compliant with these standards, and then they market them nationwide.
	So you can go to restaurants all over the country and get Naiman pork, Naiman beef, and it's, you know, delicious food.
	It tastes completely different than, you know, the Walmart pork.
	I'm not sure how they're doing right now.
	I know they had some reorganizations along the way, but is there anybody who's now kind of aggregating what you're doing and doing it nationally?
	Yeah, well, what, you know, what the whole logistics of the whole logistics of distribution has completely changed over the last goodness, just 10 or 15 years, because the software, you know, that UPS and FedEx because the software, you know, that UPS and FedEx and these folks use makes it so much more efficient.
	So, you know, it's not.
	It used to be that in order to distribute, you know, it was very, very expensive for a small-scale operation.
	But now, you know, we're plugged directly into UPS, and the truck comes every Tuesday afternoon and every Wednesday afternoon, and it goes right on the truck.
	And what's happening...
	You'll love this.
	You'll love this.
	What's happened now is if you had told me five years ago that we would ship eggs to whatever, Los Angeles, I'd have said you were crazy.
	But we figured out how to do it.
	We stole some ideas from other people and did some of our own and started doing it.
	We can now ship eggs into New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles cheaper than they can get them at farmer's market.
	Because when you have the level of corruption, regulation, high taxes, defund the police, all the things that are crumbling these cities, it makes business very difficult.
	You can't hire people, you can't protect your inventory.
	And as a result, places like where we are out here in the Shenandoah Valley, where we're low taxes, low crime, a great work ethic.
	We can now compete like we never could have before as these big metropolitan areas begin to move into dysfunctionality.
	you know, from a logistical political standpoint.
	And it's, I mean, part of me is...
	It's heartbroken that things are that broken, which is one of the reasons that your running excites me so much.
	But things have become that broken.
	But it's just amazing that we're creating opportunities in niches that we never would have even conceived of just even 10 years ago.
	Let's talk about another segue into another topic that I have a lot of interest in.
	Which are the bureaucratic impediments and costs on quality food production, how essentially the USDA, the FDA, and these other Regulatory agencies are making war on healthy food and organic food and raising the cost so much of all food in this country and giving us the lowest quality food and,
	you know, all the food that's I've been corralled through these industrial mazes so that only the worst food is actually reaching the American public at its high cost.
	Talk about that.
	Yeah, well, you're getting near and dear to my heart.
	You know, I wrote a book, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, and describing our, whatever, battles to the regulatory agencies over the years.
	And Notice I said everything I want to do is illegal.
	I didn't say everything I do is illegal.
	I said everything I want to do is illegal.
	That's an important distinction.
	But the thing to remember is that all the regulations are size prejudicial.
	They're size prejudicial.
	In other words, they're easier to comply with if you're large than if you're small.
	For example, if I want to make charcuterie, I want to make charcuterie.
	If to get licensed, if to get legal to sell it, I have to have a $5,000 24-7 thermocoupled thermometer.
	Well, if I'm making a tractor-trailer load of charcuterie, that $5,000 thermometer is not a great big deal.
	But if I'm making a five-gallon bucket or two five-gallon buckets on my farm or in my cottage industry, that's a game changer.
	That keeps me from even starting into the business.
	And so we have an incredible weighted cost because the paperwork and the compliance, this is not about safety.
	It's not about food safety.
	It's about the cost of compliance, the overheads, the infrastructure requirements, the compliance paperwork requirements create such an overhead that when you don't have as many pounds of beef or pounds of pork or chicken or whatever to pass under that licensure overhead, the price becomes prohibitive.
	And so what happens is farmers like us get accused of being, oh, you're a bunch of elitists.
	You know, you've got this high-priced stuff.
	Well, I can tell you most of our high-pricing has nothing to do with actual production costs.
	It's actually trying to squeeze our, you know, our 300 beef a year through a filter that is built for 5,000 beef a day.
	And that's the problem.
	It's the scale prejudicial nature of these food requirements.
	And the crazy thing about it is that we can give it away.
	I can go butcher a pig in the backyard and give it to the neighbors and I'm a great American.
	But if they give me a dollar for it, now I'm suddenly a criminal.
	What is it about exchanging, taking a dollar for that, that suddenly turned me from a benevolent, charitable person into a criminal?
	It has nothing to do with food safety.
	It has to do with marked access.
	If you visit Williamsburg, I know you've been to Williamsburg many times, The thing that strikes you about William, which strikes me, is the amount of industry and value-added activity that's happening in the backyards and in the fields of those little farms, those little demonstration places.
	I mean, they've got candle makers, spoke makers, leather works, casket makers, spinners, weavers, all of the industry was being done On location.
	The Butcher Baker and Candlestick Maker were on location.
	And today, what's happened is the Industrial Revolution made the Butcher Baker and Candlestick Maker so big that nobody wanted it near them because it was ugly and smelled bad and, you know, dirty and all that.
	So they wanted them put out here.
	But then when they got out here and nobody could see them, they wanted government oversight to see behind that razor wire and the guard fence and say, what's going on behind that razor wire?
	Because when people can't see, they want the security of a government agent behind them to see.
	Well, what's happened now is that with the internet, we have now democratized The ability to get information, I call it Uberized.
	We've Uberized and I'm sure like you, if 40 years ago somebody had said, you know, in about 10 years, millions of people all over the planet are going to jump into cars with people that don't even have a chauffeur's license and ask the guy to take them someplace, you know.
	And it's all going to work because if you're a bad passenger, they'll dock you and you won't get a ride.
	And if they're a bad driver, you'll dock them and they won't get any business.
	And so the internet created, it's called the uberization, it created, it literally enabled on a global scale the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker and the village knowledge that wrapped around these embedded artisans to be duplicated on a very large grand scale.
	But food, which was the last portion to join the Industrial Revolution, will be the last to exit.
	And so we now have the capability to Uberize our food system, to break it down, to democratize it, to create an egalitarian marketplace for entrepreneurial small-scale brands and local food systems.
	We've never been able to do that as now with Uberization, Airbnb, those kinds of things, have this amazing bureaucracy you're so eloquent to talk about that's trying to preserve the taxi cab, that's trying to preserve the chauffeur service and not allow an Uberization of our food system.
	You know, years ago, I think it was in the late 90s or early 2000s, I forget which, but I did a big campaign in Poland because Poland had this extraordinary organic agricultural system.
	When it was a communist country, they didn't have money to buy chemicals.
	And you had a lot of small farms that were self-sufficient.
	And they were, you know, the farms were very diverse.
	They'd have a cow, they'd have a horse, a couple of cows, a couple of horses.
	They'd have a chicken coop.
	A lot of them had pigeons, which they ate over there.
	And then there were...
	In every town, there were local abattoirs, which is, of course, a slaughterhouse, a little slaughterhouse where you could slaughter one hog a day or one...
	And then they'd make this kielbasa, which was famous all over the world.
	That's where Polish kielbasa comes from.
	It comes from these...
	4,000 little abattoirs that, you know, didn't have any safety regulations.
	There was no, you know, it was just farmers doing what they'd been doing for 10,000 years, you know, killing their own beef.
	And of course, back in the old days, there was a There was a premium on hygiene, because if you were known for selling bad stuff that made people sick, you'd be out of business.
	So that was the safety regulation, really.
	That's right.
	And then Smithfield wanted to come in and take over hog production in Poland.
	Oh, it bribed a...
	I offered a bribe to a state official called Andre Leper, who then turned them in.
	He told me that the second guy in command of Smithfield offered him a million-dollar bribe.
	And the bribe was to pass legislation, which they did end up passing, although Leper refused to do it.
	But it was legislation that said you could not operate.
	Smithfield had come in and bought the old Soviet slaughterhouses, which were huge.
	They were like the state-owned operation, and then it was modernizing them, but it passed a law simultaneously.
	It sponsored a law which was then passed that said that you could not operate a slaughterhouse in Poland unless you had laser-automated faucets in your bathrooms.
	And those are the kind of faucets you see, you know, if you go into an airport bathroom and you don't have to touch anything, you can, you know, you can just wave your hand under the faucet.
	Of course, none of these local abattoirs could afford that.
	In one fell swoop, Smithfield put every one of its competitors out of business by requiring a piece of technology that none of them needed and nobody could afford except for Smithfield.
	Yes.
	Oh, you know, it was a purposeful...
	And then, of course, Smithfield was purchased by the Chinese.
	It's now a Chinese company and it owns, I don't know, 30%, 40% of the hog production in our country.
	And it's really a colonial model.
	Yes.
	You know, USDA now works for China.
	Yes.
	Keeping little farmers out of business and this colonial model and strip mining and commoditizing our natural resources, our farmland and everything else, it's really distressing.
	It is very distressing.
	What you've just described has happened over and over and over here.
	Probably one of the biggest epiphanies I ever had was...
	It was several years ago when Congressman Dennis Kucinich, you may have known him.
	He was my campaign manager until a couple of months ago.
	Okay, well, you know, in California they had that abattoir where that downer cow, they had undercover animal welfare folks that videoed this downer cow, you know, that they prodded and hit with fire hoses and stuff to get her up so she'd stand up and get to the knock box and And it ended up, you know, closing down the plant and it was a big deal.
	And Congressman Kucinich convened a congressional hearing on what are we going to do about this, you know, slaughter problem in the U.S., the handling of these animals in these slaughterhouses.
	And and I was friends.
	I wasn't friends with him at the time, but I was friends with one of the other congressmen who was on the committee and or his legislative aide.
	And he asked me to come and be one of the twelve whatever testifiers at the hearing.
	And so I went up and the first guy.
	The first guy who spent the first, goodness, he hogged 20% of the whole time, was the head of Food Safety Inspection Service, the commissioner of the Food Safety Inspection Service.
	And I could not believe, here's the punchline, I could not believe my ears when he said, he was reporting how efficient they were and all this stuff, and he said, We now,
	our inspectors, are now being able to handle way more pounds of beef, way more pounds of animal across the line than they ever had because we've put so many of the small abattoirs out of business that the pounds per hour per inspector are showing how efficient we are.
	And I'm sitting there.
	Yeah, I'm sitting there.
	Do you have no shame?
	I thought you were supposed to check on quality.
	I didn't know that this was a race of efficiency.
	But then it struck me.
	Well, as you know, the revolving door is there.
	They've all drunk the same Kool-Aid.
	They're all in bed together.
	And so why is it surprising that in an industrial corporate fashion, Food, you know, processing paradigm would engender a similarly, you know, volume-based inspection paradigm.
	And so both of them are patting themselves on the back because they've got so much more volume going through.
	Nobody's caring about safety.
	Nobody's caring about quality.
	Oh boy, I lost him.
	What's happened?
	I went and asked security.
	They were pulling bandwidth hard and they said they were going to stop.
	Can you say that again?
	Nobody cares about safety.
	Nobody cares about quality.
	Nobody cares about safety.
	It's just how many pounds can we shove through this plant in a day?
	Both from the corporate and the inspector level.
	Both of them are after the same The same goal is how many pounds can we shove through in a day?
	And that then makes it very difficult for a small plant.
	You can feel the prejudice against a small, oh, I've got to go down there and see these slow people, you know, that aren't generating the material.
	And it's an overriding prejudice within the entire industry.
	Yeah, I mean, I remember looking at data back then, and I don't know if I could put my...
	Finger on it now, but the levels of fecal coliform in the large plants were much, much higher than what you were seeing in the small plants because the industrialization of the process and the emphasis on line speed Was ending up with actually a lower quality product in terms of
	safety.
	But of course, you have fewer inspectors.
	You can look at a lot more material, a lot more commodity coming through with a single inspector.
	And if that is...
	The target outcome, how many pounds you can get per inspector hour.
	Of course, you're going to shut down every small farmer in the country, every small abattoir.
	And the whole point of USDA, when it was started, was to preserve small farmers and food quality.
	Those things are now the targets of these industrial war machine that is putting out of business all the small farmers.
	And they don't produce food anymore.
	They produce commodities.
	They produce filler for your stomach, but there's nothing in it that's good for you.
	That's right.
	And we now learned We now learn that in 2020 that it has built in fragility to it.
	And so the longer your food chain, the longer it is between farm and plate, the more vulnerable it is to geopolitical shocks, to economic shocks, to Whatever, climate shocks, any kinds of things.
	And so, you know, so Putin invades Ukraine, fertilizer jumps 400%, and all the farmers are on national media crying, you know, oh, what are we going to do?
	What are we going to do?
	At our farm, it was not even a bobble because we don't buy any of that stuff.
	If we want a secure, safe, stable food system, the less we are tangled up and dependent in these long supply chains, marketing chains, they appear to be efficient, but they're actually very vulnerable and fragile to things that are outside of our control.
	You know, bringing these things to where we scale, we scale not by centralization, but by duplication.
	So that instead of having, listen, in 2020, do you think we would have had as big a, whatever, a food hiccup if instead of our country being supplied by 300 mega processing facilities, those funnels, instead if we had been supplied by 300,000, 50-employee community-minded neighborhood abattoirs and canneries and processors.
	It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that if we had had the 300,000 rather than the 300,000, that we would have been able to handle those shocks far, far better.
	Yeah, I mean, that's a really beautiful vision for our future.
	I mean, that's, you know, what I'd like to do as president, which is to get us food security back in this country where we're, you know, we have a decentralized supply, where there's diverse sources, where they're community-based,
	where it's small business people, where You know, the money being spent, money being purchased, money being used by consumers to purchase food is going as directly as possible to the farmer rather than, you know, to all these multinational intermediaries and fertilizer companies and oil refineries and chemical companies, etc.
	And, you know, let's keep it here in the United States and use what we've got.
	So how we get there, you know, from a policy standpoint, you know, there's one side of this issue that says, well, we need to fight the, do the antitrust stuff.
	You know, we got to break up these big companies, break up their, and I get that.
	I understand that.
	But I seldom see a monopoly that didn't get there with some sort of corrupt collusion with the regulatory agency.
	And so if you actually preserve liberty and freedom and market access from an entrepreneurial standpoint, People like us can compete fine.
	I don't have any problem competing.
	But what I can't compete with is when suddenly my two cows have to go in through a facility that is determined and arbitrated by Iowa beef packers that's doing 5,000 animals a day I can't compete at that level, and I don't need to, because two cows are different than 5,000.
	If I'm making meals in my kitchen, it's just easier to maintain cleanliness if I'm making 10 meals a day than if I'm making 1,000 meals a day.
	It's a whole different thing.
	So this scale really does, on many levels, it has...
	It has bearing on the actual democratization of food access, both from a consumer standpoint and a producer standpoint.
	Yeah, I mean, the other...
	Part of that policy directive is to eliminate the subsidies because industrial food production is almost always driven by subsidies.
	And when you have subsidies, you get market distortions and you lose all the efficiencies.
	Right, right.
	And you...
	And you lose the dynamic, the hidden finger of the market, and the accountability of the market.
	You artificially manipulate the market in one direction or another, instead of just letting the market I have no trouble competing with Tyson, Cargill, whatever.
	I can message what I want to message.
	They message what they message.
	One of the beauties of the internet is that my website can look exactly...
	Nobody can tell that I'm a...
	I'm a couple million dollar business and Walmart is a multi-billion dollar business.
	When you look at a website, a website is like the, you know, the ultimate, you know, democratized facade, you know, for access.
	And so we can compete very well at this level, but we can't compete when a bureaucrat comes in and puts his finger on the scale and says, you know, we're going to push it this way.
	And then, you know, those big industrial facilities, one of the substances they get is their capacity to pollute the environment, to create huge amounts of waste and concentrated animal feed operations and then not properly dispose of it,
	whereas a farmer like you will take that waste, recycle it, use the manure, maybe have 300 hogs on a On a half a section of property and, you know, they raise the corn, the hogs eat the corn, the manure goes back into the field.
	And there's roughly a closed loop.
	But if you have 10,000 hogs on that You know, 320 acres, half section, and you try to spread that manure on the ground, most of it's going to go off in the rain, and, you know, it's going to end up in the water supply, the aquifer.
	It's going to turn the soils over, nitrify the soils, and it's going to kill the animals that graze on it.
	You know, but that's a subsidy for them.
	Yeah, absolutely it is.
	And, of course, Michael Pollan has written eloquently about this.
	He says what we've done is we have broken apart, we have segregated, we have segregated our beautiful relational balance, relational balance.
	You know, ecological, umbilical, and we've turned blessings into a curse.
	You know, nature loves Love's digested material, you know, manure and urine, you know, that's what built the Great Plains.
	The fertile plains of America were built with animals and that decomposition.
	But when you concentrate things and you overrun your ecological umbilical, then suddenly, you know, you've turned a blessing into a curse.
	And you segregate rather than integrate the different components.
	So we grow the feed over here, we grow the chickens over here, we process them over here, we sell them over there, and none of this is then...
	You know, integrated or related with each other, and so we view life as fundamentally a factory, you know, in the front door, out the back door, as opposed to a biological system.
	The difference between food and other things, you know, copper widgets and PVC pipe, is that food is a biological thing, and biological things are not just mechanical.
	They have a totally different dimension.
	And, you know, they need rest, they're spontaneous, they actually think, you know, they respond, they're sentient, all these things, you know, that a brake lining or a, you know, A wheel bearing in a car doesn't.
	Nature is like that.
	Nature is that spontaneous, dynamic thinking, conversing, relational kind of thing that you don't get from your car engine or a light socket.
	One last subject and I'll let you go.
	Talk about the drought and the panhandle and the cow shortage.
	Yeah, so the drought is a big deal.
	I was in Mississippi last fall talking to farmers that were actually having their cows, they were stepping into the cracks in the ground, the ground cracks that opened up so wide, cows were stepping in them and breaking their legs, and the farmers were having to put their cows down because they were losing these cows.
	And so, you know, the drought is real, and I don't want to get into a great big, you know, climate debate or anything like that, but all I'm going to say is droughts are real.
	They happen routinely.
	I mean, here on our farm, we figure, you know, four out of five years, we're going to have a drought at some time in the year.
	And so the problem that I see in the news organizations that are covering this is some are trying to find a bogeyman.
	You know, they're saying it's, you know...
	Cheap imports.
	It might be cell-cultured meat.
	They're trying to make us eat bugs.
	I mean, they're looking for a bogeyman.
	And the ones that understand that it is the drought that's been incredibly deep throughout the whole South for the last two years.
	When you don't have drought, you don't have grass, you don't have grass, you don't have cows.
	The ones that have done it have basically, the tragedy is they throw up their hands and say, well, I'm just a victim to climate and I can't do anything.
	But man, the beauty is that we can do something about those things.
	I mean, I've got a kind of a three-ingredient recipe.
	The first ingredient is ponds.
	You know, back in the 1940s and 50s, post Dust Bowl, the old Soil Conservation Service Used to partner with farmers to help cost share building ponds.
	They realized how important it was to hydrate the landscape.
	Now, the same USDA considers ponds to be a liability because they make landing spots for wildlife that bring diseases to concentrated animal feeding operations and CAFOs.
	So we've taken, again, we've taken...
	Water that ought to be a wonderful asset and a blessing to a nation, and we've turned it into a demon.
	But 500 years ago, beavers had 8% of American landscape.
	It wasn't America then, but it was covered with beaver ponds.
	8% today were less than 4% water.
	But when you cover, when you have that much water, Like the beaver ponds did, it creates base flow, it fills aquifers, it makes ambient temperatures easier, evapotranspiration, cloud formation.
	I mean, there's all sorts of beautiful things that happen.
	And so I suggest that the first thing we need to do is be on an aggressive pond building campaign so that we eliminate flooding.
	And have water to be able to irrigate.
	So we're not pulling water from streams and aquifers and things like that.
	So that as a result of us walking here, we are actually increasing the water commons, not decreasing the water commons.
	And so on our farm, we've built over 20 ponds over the years.
	We can now irrigate when the water shuts off.
	And that ameliorates droughts.
	The second ingredient is...
	It's organic matter.
	You know, one pound of organic matter holds four pounds of water.
	That's the sponginess of the soil.
	And, of course, our modern agriculture system with chemical fertilizers that cannibalize out the organic matter, tillage that cannibalizes out the single crop production, all of those things Reduce organic matter in the soil.
	On our farm, we've gone from 1% in 1961 to over 8% today.
	That 7% increase in organic matter, which means we can hold 140,000 gallons of water per acre today that we couldn't in 1961.
	I'm not saying that to brag.
	I'm saying this is doable.
	This is not...
	This is not unattainable.
	We can roll up our sleeves and we can wade into this.
	We don't have to just...
	We should momentarily repent in sackcloth and ashes for all the damage we've done.
	Let's do that.
	But then let's stand up and dust ourselves off and say, okay, this head and these hands that have hurt can also heal.
	And let's jump on that.
	So organic matter.
	And then the third is simply vegetation.
	We need more vegetation.
	And you don't get vegetation by overgrazing And monocropping, any of that kind of thing, you get vegetation, especially with diversity, where you intermingle forests and pasture and perennials, and you create this abundance.
	A lot of people don't realize that 500 years ago, North America produced more food than we do today.
	So with all of our chemical fertilizers, John Deere tractors, and everything else, hybrid seeds, we are still not producing the food that was produced here 500 years ago.
	Now, it wasn't all eaten by people.
	You know, there were 100 million bison.
	There were 2 million wolves that needed 20 pounds of meat a day.
	There were...
	You know, there were bears.
	I mean, Lewis and Clark Expedition said every mile they went, they encountered a bear.
	That's a lot of bears, okay?
	And so it wasn't all eaten by people, but it was an abundance situation which should give us all in the farming business pause to realize that we have actually...
	In total, over the last 200 years of this nation, as great as this nation is, I love this country, but we have, in total, we have actually reduced our ecological abundance, our total productive abundance.
	We reduced it rather than increased it.
	And I suggest that a mandate for tomorrow should be Seeing what those workable patterns were and are, and then facilitating them, participating with them on the landscape.
	So ponds, organic matter, and vegetation are the three ways to mitigate drought.
	And what I would like to see is as we all, you know, our heart breaks for the drought, but instead of just acting like Well, there's nothing I can do and it's out of my hands.
	Let's meet it head on and let's realize, obviously, we can't completely change the weather.
	We can't eliminate everything.
	But there are a lot of things that we can do to mitigate, I would say, to bring forgiveness and redemptive capacity back into the landscape.
	We are not just...
	Inner bystanders here.
	We are active participants to either help or hurt, and that's where we need to be, so that as farmers, we provide oases of hope and help when society becomes hopeless and helpless.
	Joel Saladin, thank you so much for joining us today and for educating us about all these important subjects.
	And I hope to have you back on this show soon.

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