MAFIA MOMENTS: Joel Salatin on Restoring Americas Soil Quality and Why You Should Care?

On this episode of the podcast, we're taking you back in time to Episode #75 where we had the chance to sit down with Joel Salatin to discuss Regenerative Farming and why Americans should invest heavily into the future of our soil & food.

If you enjoyed this segment of the episode, please go check out the full-length podcast with Joel Salatin.

Also, if you feel compelled, please rate our show and share it with a friend. Your support means the world to us and helps us continue forward on our mission to help fix the food system.

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Join the revolutionary Joel Salatin, the mastermind behind Polyface Farm, as he imparts his wisdom on regenerative farming and the urgent need to rethink our relationship with the earth. In this groundbreaking discussion, we unravel the secrets of a farm that resonates with biodiversity, where animals dance a sustainable ballet of grazing and fertilizing, and the soil's vitality is as crucial as the air we breathe. Salatin's compelling stories and insights challenge the conventional food system and provide a blueprint for a future where food is grown in harmony with nature's design.

Venture into the world of pastured meats with us, where Joel Salatin illustrates the stark differences in nutrient profiles compared to their conventionally raised counterparts. From pastured eggs rich in folic acid to grass-finished beef bursting with riboflavin, this episode is a treasure trove of revelations about the meat we consume and the profound effects of farming practices on taste and health. Salatin's passion for quality food production is infectious, guiding us toward choices that not only tantalize the palate but also fortify our health.

This conversation isn't just about farming; it's an urgent call to action. As Salatin eloquently points out, the future of our food system hinges on decentralization, adaptability, and the ingenuity of small-scale operations. We probe the potential for an 'uberization' of food commerce, unlocking the power of community resilience and self-sufficiency. So, prepare to be inspired, informed, and perhaps even transformed, as we share a feast of insights on how we can collectively cultivate a more sustainable, nourishing world.

Here's a summary of the full-length podcast:

(0:00:01) - Regenerative Farming With Joel Salatin
Joel Salatin shares his journey and vision for sustainable farming, emphasizing the connection between soil health and food quality.

(0:13:23) - Restoring Land With Nature's Principles
Nature's influence on farming, using grasslands and herbivores, restoring fertility with perennials and strategic cattle movement.

(0:25:04) - Biodiversity and Fertility in Agriculture
Nature's intricate connections between species and their roles in distributing nutrients, focusing on animal fertility democratization and the choreography of farm animals at Polyface Farm.

(0:33:58) - Nutritional Quality of Pastured Meats
Nature's food production prioritizes growth over taste and nutrition, but pastured farming methods yield higher nutrient levels and better taste.

(0:40:35) - Animals and Food Selection Instincts
Food is seen as inert fuel, leading to selection of processed options; animals prefer nutrient-rich foods; industrial vs. natural production.

(0:46:12) - Nutrition and Variety in Eating
Nature's instinctual eating, genetic factors, and pastured livestock can increase diet variety for improved health.

(0:52:11) - Food Industry
Nature's labeling nuances in agriculture, genetic diversity, and creating location-specific breeds for genuine pasture-raised methods.

(1:00:25) - Resilience Through Decentralization and Adaptability
Resilience is crucial in systems, highlighted by COVID-19's impact on large-scale facilities. Decentralization and adaptability in agriculture proved advantageous. Challenges of decentralizing and democratizing food processing include bureaucracy and startup costs.

(1:06:18) - Revolutionizing the Food System Through Circumvention
Centralization, long-distance transportation, and misuse of antibiotics contribute to E. coli and salmonella outbreaks. Decentralizing and "uberizing" the food system could promote informed consumer choice and modern food safety.

(1:16:36) - The Future of Food and Farming
Nature's movement towards homesteading and self-reliance, competitiveness of small-scale farming, and potential for community-based resilience.

Creators & Guests

Host

Brett Ender 🥩⚡️

The food system is corrupt and trying to poison us... I will teach you how to fight back. Co-Host of @themeatmafiapod 🥩

Host

Harry Gray 🥩⚡️

Leading the Red Meat Renaissance 🥩 ⚡️| Co-Host of @themeatmafiapod

What is The Meat Mafia Podcast?

The Meat Mafia Podcast is hosted by @MeatMafiaBrett and @MeatMafiaHarry with the mission of addressing fundamental problems in our food and healthcare system. Our concerns with our healthcare system can be drawn back to issues in our food system as far back as soil health. Our principles are simple: eat real foods, buy locally, and cook your own meals.

When you listen to our podcast, you will hear stories and conversations from people working on the fringes of the food and healthcare system to address the major crises overshadowing modern society: how do we become healthy again?

themeatmafiapodcast.substack.com

0:00:01 - Speaker 1
What's going on? Meat Mafia? Welcome back to another episode of the one and only Meat Mafia podcast. On today's episode, we are joined by the legend Joel Salatin. Joel is a multi-generational regenerative farmer, author and outspoken advocate for reforming our food system through more diligent land stewardship. He's appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast twice in Michael Pollan's book the Omnivore's Dilemma and given talks at Google and TEDx. He's an icon in the world of farming for his innovative approach to holistic land management and his outspoken commentary on the problems plaguing our food system. In our discussion with Joel, we discuss getting started as a farmer, the nutrients, vitamins and minerals in our food and soil, the role of the microbiome in your health and resiliency, the future of sustainable agriculture in the United States and, finally, decentralization of food. Joel addresses a number of the systemic problems facing our food system. In our conversation today, he lays out some of the problems, as well as some of the solutions that he sees for a better food system for the future.

Without further ado, joel Salatin. I hate ads so I'll make this quick. We have given you guys some discount codes on three great products we have partnered with. These are affiliate brands that we have used in the past and we love them all. We have Element Electrolyte Mix, kettle and Fire Bone Broth and Faro Skin Care. Go to the links in the description to check them out. All right now for the episode. Enjoy, joel Salatin. Welcome to the Meat Mafia podcast. We are so excited to have you.

0:01:38 - Speaker 2
Thank you, it's my honor and I'm delighted to be with you. Yes.

0:01:42 - Speaker 1
So we usually start off by doing this little thing where we talk about the different guests that we've had on. So we've had on a few Virginians, so you're not our first Virginian on the podcast. We've had on a few farmers. You're not our first farmer We've had on a Virginia farmer, so you're not our first Virginian farmer, but you are our first Virginian farmer who's been on Joe Rogan's podcast. So that is your differentiator right now. And I think you might keep that title for a while.

0:02:12 - Speaker 2
It might be. Yeah, it might be.

0:02:15 - Speaker 3
And I'm thinking too, joel, sometimes one of the traditions on the Meat Mafia podcast is we like to do a baptism by bone broth, but with your tradition of drinking out of the trough, we might have to switch that to the trough potentially. I think that makes sense.

0:02:32 - Speaker 2
Sure, sure, yeah, yeah, I drink out of the trough whenever I can.

0:02:36 - Speaker 1
Well, joel, it's a pleasure to have you on. You've been a real inspiration for us. I know when I first started getting interested in regenerative farming, I came across your work and was struck by the honest and genuine nature into which you speak about bringing real food to every American's tables, and I think that the work you've done to date in terms of publishing books, getting on podcasts, the work that you're doing on your farm is just incredible. So we're honored to have you on today and we're excited to talk about Polyface and all the different things that you've been up to over the past few months and years.

0:03:10 - Speaker 2
Sure, great. Well, you lead and I'll dance with you. That sounds fine.

0:03:15 - Speaker 3
Let's do it. Beautiful, harrison, I don't know if it was similar to you, but, joel, I first came across you I think I was a sophomore in high school and it was pretty cool because my science class actually showed us food Inc and that was really. That was really the first exposure that I got into our food system and really just understanding the role that big food plays and how vastly you know how how far we've moved away from eating actual real food. Harrison, I don't know if it was similar for you, if you got to see it in high school or not, but that was the first time I came across Joel.

0:03:46 - Speaker 1
My first experience with Joel was through Michael Pollan's book, so got it. Yeah, I mean you've been everywhere, joel, so maybe a good place to start for people who aren't familiar with you is just maybe how you got into farming, maybe a little bit of the backstory behind Polyface. I think that would be great context for people, just as a starting point.

0:04:10 - Speaker 2
Sure. So, yeah, it's always hard to know where to start. But you know, unlike a lot of farmers in this space, my non-chemical whatever unorthodoxy. Uh goes back before me. My grandfather, my, my dad's dad, was a charter subscriber to rodale's organic gardening and farming magazine when it came out in 1948 and um, and so he influenced my dad and my dad was in, uh, was a business administration. He was a, you know, a good, a good numbers guy and an accountant, and so you know I grew up this way, all right.

So we came to the farm in 1961, when I was four years old, and it was the cheapest, most worn out gullied rock pile in the whole region. It was cheap. That's why dad bought it. It was cheap and um, back in those days land was actually valued based on its uh, based on its productive capacity. Not anymore now it's based on its uh, viewscape, uh and location.

But anyway, um started in and dad, dad um got experts. He and he got public and private consultants to come in and ask them how do I make a living on this farm? And every one of them, both public and private, the advice was buy chemical fertilizer, plant corn, plow up everything, graze the woods, build silos, borrow more money, and as an economist and accountant, dad knew that that just wasn't right. And of course the chemicals that you know vexed his righteous soul, and so he, you know, we went through those couple, three years of seeking and then he realized, you know, nobody has an answer for me, and so we just started. We started, we, he, I was just a kid. Um started, you know, looking at other things, and found andre voisin, who was the frenchman who kind of developed the grass, you know, the rotational grazing you know grass farming kind of concept.

And then we went. I remember one sunday I was maybe seven or eight, six maybe and we went down the road somewhere and, um, and and, and spent a sunday afternoon with a, with a farmer who was using portable, portable shelters with his animals. He was moving them around and I don't remember what animals it was, where, I don't know where we went, north or south, I don't know where it was. But what I remember was, coming home, dad's almost, uh, um, just childish enthusiasm over the concept of, of mobile infrastructure. That was a breakthrough, and, um, and so from that day on, dad, dad really developed, uh, his, his, thinking toward mobile infrastructure and and mobile animals, moving them around. So he invented some electric, some portable electric fence systems, a shade mobile for cows like a portable shade tree. And then, by, you know, mom was a school teacher and so, with her off-farm jobs, the farm got paid for within 10 years. So now we're at 71, 1971.

I'm now 14. And I've got my. I got my first chickens at 10 years old, started selling eggs I was, you know, entrepreneurial gift to gab, you know and everybody loved his little kid with eggs. So I sold these eggs around and the flock grew and grew and grew. In time I'm a 14. I've got, you know, 300 hands. I'm getting you know 80, 90 dozen eggs a week. I got to sell them.

And so we hooked up with the local curb market, which was a depression era market, developed for farmers to be able to get cash. Farmers had food but no cash and people in the city had cash but no food. So it was a. It was, it was kind of a precursor, and the beautiful thing was there were no regulations. There was a. There was an agreement between the inspection service and the extension service that if I joined 4-H and a woman joined the extension homemakers clubs, we could sell anything there without inspection. So we could butcher beef chickens, we could milk a cow, make yogurt, kefir, cottage cheese, meat pies, all this stuff we could. We could do all that and sell it.

So, um, all through high school I was up every weekend of the year this was a saturday morning market opened at six o'clock, can you imagine? And and I was up every every saturday morning at four o'clock to go down there and sell stuff, and and so this is. You know, this is mid seventies, this is the beginning of the. You know the hippie, the, the, you know Woodstock, the, the beaded bearded braless, you know kind of.

There was a kind of a back to the land movement then and I've always said we were, we were literally 20 years ahead of our time and and but. But. But we did see. We did see the opportunity in branded direct marketing as a local farm and we built up a local clientele. Then I went off to college. Nobody in the family wanted to do it, so we closed down the stand and by the time I came home, the two elderly matrons that had been there when I was a teen they had closed up and left. And those two elderly matrons, one one did baking items. One was a kind of diversified homestead. But through through my teen years they took me under wing, told me how to present stuff, market stuff, make signage, deal with, you know, good customers, bad customers. I wouldn't trade that experience for a million dollars to actually be down there as a kid under the tutelage of these two elderly, you know, grandmothers, and, and I'll always be grateful and beholden to them.

And so then when I came back from college, okay, so now it's my turn. Dad's still working in town, mom's still teaching school. I want to farm. How do I farm full time? And and I realized, you know, we'd always milked a couple of Gu guernsey cows said you know what I, I could milk 10 cows, sell the milk at retail, not jack it up because it's organic, not jack it up because it's grass, just just sell it like kroger sells it and and and food line and safeway, you know, just sell it at regular retail price. I could milk 10 cows and make a living on this farm. There was only one problem it was illegal. Yeah, and I've never gotten over the fact that that, that that illegality kept me off the farm.

Uh, so I, I went to work in town at the local newspaper. I'd worked there some in high school and, um, and and um, teresa and I got married. We built, we filled out an apartment in the attic and we we lived on, you know, 300 bucks a month, drove a $50 car she was. You know, she could sew anything, cook anything, can anything. She started canning, you know, 800 quarts of stuff a summer. If we didn't grow it, we didn't eat it. We only ate out of our garden. We didn't have a TV still don't have a TV and lived frugally, and so in a couple of years. Even though we didn't get paid a lot, we were saved enough that we could live on the farm for one year.

So I handed in my notice and walked out of that office September 24, 1982 and came back to the farm full time. I was 25. I fully expected that we'd run through it. I'd have to go take work somewhere, you know, to fill in but, as it turned out, never had to go back out off the farm. It was nip and tuck for about three years but we started, you know, direct marketing again finding customers telling our story. It took about three or four years till we, you know, realized, you know we could breathe and say, okay, we're going to make it, and and and so and. Today we, you know, we, we get 25 salaries off the farm. We, you know, we service about 8,000 families. We ship nationwide, we service some, you know, 40 restaurants, 10 institutions, commercial establishments, and it's just been. You know, we never aspired to it, but here it is and we're just really grateful and blessed to be here.

0:12:16 - Speaker 3
It's amazing to hear that story too, because people just see the finished product of Polyface Farms and they don't necessarily understand the whole backstory of what went into it. Like you were saying, you and your wife living off of $300 a month just eating the food that you were growing on the farm, you know? Just a quick question, joel what was it particularly about farming and ranching that spoke to you as a kid or as a teenager that made you realize that that was ultimately what you wanted to do with your life?

0:12:42 - Speaker 2
Well, you know a lot of things. Things happen when you're a child and you don't realize the significance until sometimes years later looking back. And so one of the things I know that struck me was uh, so we came to this farm I was four when we came and it was when I say it, I mean it was it we had a 16 foot deep gully. We measured we had I could walk the whole farm and never set foot on a piece of vegetation. It was that barren. And the garden there was a garden space by the house and it was nothing but clay clods. I mean you had to break them up with a sledgehammer to know whether it was a rock or dirt. I mean the garden.

And my grandfather remember I mentioned him. He was a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine, so he lived in Indiana and we'd go and visit him, you know, once a year or so in the fall or in the late summer after hay was in and before school started, because mom was a school teacher. So we had to go between hay and school starting right. So we always went about the same time of year up to up to grandma and grandpa's in indiana and he had these compost piles, um, uh, and his soil it was black and you could just stick your arm in it, you know, and and and everything was verdant. And he had this, this tea trellis, great grape arbor around it. He had a huge garden, it was like a quarter acre, which is a pretty big garden, and he sold produce in the community and he had this tea top trellis all the way around. Of course, I'm a little kid seven, eight, nine years old, and I can just barely reach these clusters of grapes and they were always ripe when we were up there late in the summer and they would just be dripping with, with juice and and sweetness, and, of course, you know, those bees up in there and all that and and and.

Looking back, I just I realized that that something got into my soul where I wanted, I wanted to be able to immerse myself in that kind of abundance. And our farm, our farm was struggling, was, it was weedy, it was thistles You'd have thought we were growing thistles as a crop. It, it, it, it was, it was infertile, it was, you know it was. It was not a, it was not an abundance place, but grandpa's place was an abundance place. And so the, the, the idea that just the idea of just being able to fall into that womb of, of, of nurturing abundance, just just, I think, as they say, it got ahold of me and, and, and, and never let go.

0:15:22 - Speaker 1
Joel, can you, can you speak to how you guys went about restoring your land? There's obviously your ability to use some of that mobile infrastructure seems like it maybe played a good role in how you guys manage that, but the whole management process of restoring infertile land is something that I think a lot of people are really interested in hearing more about that I think a lot of people are really interested in hearing more about.

0:15:49 - Speaker 2
Well, absolutely so. We looked at nature and said well, how does nature build soil? Nature doesn't build soil with 10-10-10 chemical fertilizer and plows Nature. The deepest, richest soils on the planet are actually under grasslands, not forests and not bushes. They're under prairies, grasslands. The American Midwest, the Pampas of Argentina, the Serengeti of Africa, the steppes of Mongolia, these were all these are where the most fertile, deepest soils on the planet are and they were where the megafauna was. The megafauna, I mean, historically, the mastodons all the way to the bison and the wildebeest and the llamas and alpacas All of these were this megafauna.

So what you had? You had these perennials as opposed to annuals. So annuals have to be planted every year. That's like you know, squash and cucumbers and barley and wheat and corn.

Perennials are your, are your clovers and grasses and a lot of Forbes you know grow year after year after year, and so, and and the energy flow is completely different between an annual and a perennial. An annual is always putting its energy into some sort of big seed or fruit or something like that. Uh, so it is. It is soil, energy extractive into some fruit, seed, nut, whatever, whereas a perennial isennial, it places energy in the ground because it needs a bank account of energy in the ground to withstand a flood, a drought, a hot, a cold, to withstand extremes, because there's nobody around to plant it. It doesn't rejuvenate by seed as much as it rejuvenates from root ground, from root energy. That's the big difference between a perennial and an annual. So the energy flow is completely different, and so that's why the deep soils on the planet were all developed under perennials and nature has very few annuals.

There are annuals, but they're primarily short-term healers. They're, you know, after a uh, uh, you know, a flood comes through and and, you know, rips up something, or a volcano, you know, uh, devastates something, um it, it's. It's a kind of a short-term placeholder until the perennials can come back in. And so, you know, we've been here since 1961. We've never planted a seed in the past. All of this, all of the now, you know, we've probably increased from that point, we've probably increased the productive capacity. I'm not exaggerating here. Hang me about tenfold, okay, about tenfold. And and um, uh, so, so that that increase has not come because we plowed or because we bought fertilizer. We haven't even applied fertilizer. I'll tell you what we applied in a minute, but but you know, it has come as we have, uh um, stimulated and leveraged the, the resources on site and the multi-speciation that that nature would have normally had, and so the point is that one of the first things that we did was start moving the cows around with portable electric fence.

When you look at herbivores in nature, they're nature's pruners of these grasslands. The thing about these grasslands, these prairies, is that they grow in a cycle, they grow in an S curve. They start slow, then grow real fast, then go into senescence. I call that diaper grass, teenage grass and nursing home grass, and so if we want to collect more solar energy and convert solar energy into biomass, into carbon, what we want is for that grass to be in that fast growth period, not in diaper stage and not out here in nursing home stage. And it's the herbivore. Nature uses the herbivore to prune that plant as it approaches senescence, to freshen it up and restart it. Just like you know, it's amazing.

People would assume that an orchardist who doesn't prune his apple trees is negligent, or a viticulturalist who doesn't prune his grapevines is negligent, but somehow those of us who mimic nature's pruners with cattle to prune perennials and refresh and start this for carbon sequestration, somehow we're destroying the planet. You know, I mean it's crazy, but the bison, the wildebeest, the alpacas, the water buffalo, all of those things. Those are all pruners that restart this vegetative cycle so that the grass can regrow and put more energy in the soil, concentrate more sunlight into decomposable biomass. So that's one thing. The second thing is that the soil is built with decomposition and so the more we can get decomposition into the soil, on the soil, and stimulate carbon decomposition, the better the soil is going to be.

So we began composting, we started doing this carbonaceous diaper under the cows and we fed hay in the barn and we let it, you know, build up. The cows tromp out the oxygen. It's anaerobic. We add corn to it, the corn ferments. The cows come out. This bedding pack might be four feet deep. We put in the pigs. The pigs seek the fermented corn and as they do that, they aerate the fermented, the anaerobic stack, turn it into aerobic compost, and that is our fertilizer program.

So, so, so. So instead of buying, you know, chemical fertilizer, we bought a big commercial chipper that we use to generate wood chips from forest work, tree line, trimming, junk down, downed trees, crooked trees, things like that. As we upgrade and weed the woodlot that then becomes integrated Forest, gets integrated into pasture and brings fungi into the bacteria. Grasslands tend to be bacterial, forestlands tend to be fungal. The best soils have both bacteria and fungi, and so by integrating the forest land and the open land, we actually uh, build that soil.

So the first soil test we took in 1961, we averaged less than one percent organic matter. Today we average over eight percent organic matter. So so, you know, that's, that's a pretty dramatic difference. And when you realize that one pound of organic matter holds four pounds of water, we can now hold 130,000 gallons more water per acre now than we did 60 years ago. So this stuff I'm not saying that to brag, this stuff works. And so, you know, as we started down that path, we started doing a portable shade mobile, moving the cows every day, and we just saw, you know, we just saw nature respond. Then we added the chickens, and then we added the pigs, and uh, now and then we added turkeys, and rabbits and ducks and sheep, and and it's this we call it a ballet in the pasture. It's a choreography of animal movement through the pasture and and what you know what? What produced, you know? 1000 pounds 60 years ago produces 10,000 pounds today of the ecosystem is amazing.

0:23:46 - Speaker 1
The water cycle point is one that I find very fascinating, where I think you hit on it. But like 1% increase or decrease in soil carbon equates to almost like two swimming pools worth of water in the soil and at the same time we're seeing conventional agriculture which is not restoring the soil, and we're seeing desertification, soil erosion and all these other negative externalities in relation to how that land management is occurring. And I find it fascinating the comparison and contrast between what you're doing in conventional agriculture. Can you speak to some of the high input topics of agriculture and like what you've seen, because it sounds like you never even really entertained the idea of going the high input topics of agriculture, and like what you've seen, because it seems sounds like you never even really entertain the idea of going the high input route. I'm curious if you ever, if you guys ever, even thought about it no, we, we never even thought about it.

0:24:36 - Speaker 2
We realized. We realized that that soil is built, the way nature works, the, if we want to call it the template, the template of nature. It's all about decomposition, it's about carbon in situ, in other words, carbon on site. How do we leverage the carbon on site? And so the whole food system today, the industrial food system, is a primarily segregated system. We have broken apart these symbiotic relationships in nature. Let me just give you an example.

In nature, um, the herbivore goes down into the valley to graze, because that's where the best grass is, and then predators drive them up on the hilltop.

Uh, when they're, you know, when they're ready to ruminate. And so they go down, they graze in the valley, they go up to the top of the hill so they can look out and make sure the predators aren't coming, and in doing so they urinate and defecate on the hilltop. So one of the reasons for animals in nature is to bring gravitationally moving carbon, minerals and vitamins that naturally aggregate in the valley floor, to bring those back up to the ridgetop so that you democratize fertility. Otherwise the ridgetops and slopes would become completely infertile and everything would collect down in the valleys. So it's the predator cycle, it's the herbivore and the predator cycle that that nature uses, and birds, birds too to defy the gravitational movement that would concentrate minerals and fertility in low ground and instead go against gravity and bring it to high ground. You know so, this natural, you know this natural animal fertility democratization is a profound ecological principle and something that obviously the beyond beef and impossible burger folks aren't, you know, have no, have no appreciation for.

0:26:54 - Speaker 3
I don't know if they don't have a concept of it, but they certainly don't have an appreciation of it and joel, one of the things that you mentioned a few minutes ago was this almost I think you described it as like a ballet and choreography that a lot of your animals on the farm are doing. How can you expand on that ballet and choreography and how important that is to the overall ecosystem health of polyface?

0:27:15 - Speaker 2
sure so. So imagine, you know, the cows are, the cows are coming, so you got, you got this tall grass right and because it's, it's up there towards senescence. It's not, it's not short, overgrazed stuff, it's, you know, it's full of spiders and moles and voles and and, and and pollinators, and I mean it's just a cacophony of, of, of biomass abundance and insect and pollinator life. Okay, so the cows come through and and and they eat most of it. They tromp some of it onto the soil surface. They actually chip up some of the we call this bob stalking, herbivorous, solar conversion, lignified sequestration, fertilization and they come through, and now it's a whole different situation where they ate a lot, they pooped, they urinated and they trapped a lot of it on the ground.

So we come behind the cows about four or five days with the egg mobile. So an egg mobile is simply a portable chicken house. The chickens free range out from the egg mobile and they scratch through the cow patties to eat the fly larva, also called maggots, as you know. And and, and I mean to a chicken. A maggot is, like you know, briar's ice cream, right. So so, so they're, they're eating these fly larvae. The fly larvae energize the chickens to scratch. So they take this little cow pie and they spread it into a great big area which fertilizes the pasture. They eat the exposed crickets, grasshoppers, pathogens and things like that, and help to scratch the duff and the dried grass again into the soil surface. And so the chickens act as a sanitizer behind the cows, just like the egret on the rhino's nose. And so you know, that's one thing that goes through. Obviously, you know, the sheep can go through as well, the, you know, turkeys. Turkeys can be on that same pasture. So at different times in a season and occupying different spots at different times in the same field, there might be cows, meat know, in the same area. And.

And so what that does is not only does it increase the economic viability, because you're actually stacking, you're stacking complementary enterprises on the same land base. So you know, we're, as you know, most, most farmers are monocropping. Even, you know, even most farmers are monocropping. Even beef cattle farmers are monocropping, they're just raising beef, right. And so what we want to do is permaculture style, we want to have stacking enterprises that bring more economic benefit on a given acre. That's one thing.

The second thing is that then, um, we get, you know, we get the benefits of all, not only the, the, the pruning that the cow does, but the pecking and scratching that the chicken does, and the, the long-legged insect uh consumption that the turkeys offer, um, and the turkeys offer a different, and each of these animals offers a different uh kind of manure, a different, a different relationship of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, molybdenum, boron, gobal in their manure and so, um, because all of them have a different digestive system. And all of that adds a complexity rather than simplicity. Modern conventional agriculture is all predicated on the fact that this is all very, very simple and it's mechanistic, and we can simplify this down to to basically, it's mechanical, like a bunch of interchangeable parts, whereas I believe that it's fundamentally complex. In fact, a lot of it is mysterious, in fact. In fact, we've only named 10 of the bacteria in the soil. 90, 90 of the soil beings have not even been identified yet. That's how little we know about the soil.

And yet, and yet, you know, and yet we've got people, you know, wading into that, into that arena, like a bunch of swashbuckling pirates.

You know, and we're just gonna, you know, take here and move here and move this around.

You know, with, with, with, complete hubris and no humility to the you know know, to the, to the intricacy that's going on, the, the every, you know, every you know cubic foot of soil every second has, you know, a quadrillion exchanges going on, just like our, our microbiome, our microbiome has has a quadrillion, um, uh, spontaneous decisions happening per millisecond, as our, as our trillions of microbes, um, you know, I'll trade you a, I'll trade you a boron for some of that polysaccharide and I'll trade you, you know, they're, they're, I, I just, I just view all this as as kind of star wars.

You know when, uh, when, luke skywalker walks into that space cafe looking for a fast ship and he first meets hans, hans, solo, right, you've got the millennium falcon, and over in the corner there's this band playing. You know, there's these, all these aliens, you know two heads and three tails and all this stuff, and that's why I see the soil is all these you know alien looking critters. You know one's lopping off somebody's head, another one's got a, got a narwhal spear. He, you know, he sucks out the, you know the aqueous little four-legged thing and you know, sucks it out. And all this stuff's going on, like, you know, it makes Steven Spielberg look like child's play. It's that exciting the drama, the theater and the cinema going on in our microbiome and in the soil 1% to 8%, your production capacity increases tenfold.

0:33:26 - Speaker 1
Can you speak to the quality of the product that you're producing at the endpoint of that journey? So like is the, is the beef and chicken and pig meat that you guys are producing? Is that better quality after you've made all these changes on the farm?

0:33:43 - Speaker 2
Oh is it better? Yeah, you've made all these changes on the farm. Oh is it better?

0:33:53 - Speaker 1
Yeah, you just almost like rattle the chain to see if the dog will bark, don't you? Yeah, that was a softball.

0:33:56 - Speaker 2
That was a softball. So you know, we've had numerous empirical studies done, fat studies. We've had numerous empirical studies done fat studies saturated, unsaturated, monounsaturated, different things. You know, one interesting one that we did several years ago was with 11 other pastured egg producers in America. We looked at 12, you know 12 things and and we sent the eggs to a lab and what we're trying to settle was so many people say, oh, come on, an egg is an egg is an egg. There's no difference in the egg. And so we looked at 12, 12 nutrients and it wasn't little 10% variations. It was dramatic. I'll give you one little 10% variations. It was, it was dramatic. I'll give you one folic acid. Folic acid is really important for pregnant women. And the USDA, like the. You go to the store and it's got the USDA nutrient label on there. It'll it'll tell you that the egg has like 48 micrograms of folic acid per egg. And and and our eggs you ready for this? Our eggs averaged 1,038 micrograms per egg.

You know, so we're not talking about little percentage deviations. You know, riboflavin in beef, riboflavin in beef, in grass, finished beef, you know, is 300% more than riboflavin in corn fed beef. Well, you say, well, you know what's the importance of riboflavin in corn fed beef. Well, you say, well, you know what's the importance of riboflavin. Well, riboflavin is the calming essential fatty acid. In other words, it calms your nerves. So, you know, you wonder sometimes why everybody's shooting off and being short with everybody and shooting up schools and road rage, and you know all the hard of it is because we're not getting, you know, we're not getting riboflavin, um, you know, in our meats, um, uh, the another one I mean there, there are numerous, one of these, there there's a real interesting, um, there's a real interesting thing that happened with, um, you know, with cooking. So we have tried to work with numerous institutions and we've succeeded a couple times, but we've failed many times and most of the times we fail it's because they have some sort of cooking protocol and what we've learned from all of our chefs and our institutional customers is that all of our meats cook about 20%, 25% shorter period of time than the store-bought stuff and and and there. There, we don't know exactly why. I mean, whether you're barbecuing a chicken, you know cooking a hamburger or whatever it is it it making pork, barbecue pulled pork? It always cooks way faster. And there are a couple of things. One is that because of the exercise. So so here's an interesting one. I don't know if you guys ever heard this that that muscle becomes moist when it gets exercised. It gets dry when it's not exercised. So muscles that are exercised are tough but moist. Muscles that are not exercised are tender but dry. So think about a chicken breast tender but dry, whereas the thigh is tougher but more moist. And moist I'm going to say succulent, okay, succulents. So. So succulents has to do with movement, and and tenderness has to do with movement, and so what we have found is that our meats are more moist.

We actually learned this. The main test that we passed on this was with Chipotle. We supplied Chipotle for 10 years before they went to centralized and kind of kind of uh lost their, lost their, uh lost their convictions, if you will, but anyway, we supplied. We supplied two of their restaurants for 10 years and um, and, and they only used uh, pork shoulders for their carnitas, because the shoulder is way more moist than the ham because there's more exercise. The front of the animal gets more exercise than the back of the animal. And so when they said, well, we're only going to use the shoulders, I said, well, we can't work with you, because we've got to move the shoulders and the ham, because we've got to use more of the pig. If you're going to use eight or ten a week, we've got to move the rest of this thing. And so they actually had a ship ship them out some hams, and they found that our hams were as moist as any shoulder they could find.

And and in fact, in fact, my father-in-law used to grow pigs, you know, when he was a kid and and they had a, a 24 inch um threshold in the, in the little pig pig shed where the pigs would jump in to get water and feed and stuff.

And I asked my father-in-law after, you know, when I was over there courting Teresa, my wife and I said you know, why do you have that 24 inch? I mean, it looks like those pigs have to really work to jump up in there every time. You know. He said, oh, that's the exercise of the hams and makes the hams real moist. And and so this was something that people knew long part of food lore, you know, uh, back in the day. And today it's all about just faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper. Nobody asks about taste, nobody asks about nutritional quality, it's just. It's just um, um, uh, it's just protoplasmic structure how fast, how cheap can we grow it? And what we're seeing is there are dramatic differences in the quality both nutrition, taste and handling dramatically different all the way across the board different all the way across the board.

0:40:07 - Speaker 3
Joel, one of the things you touched on a few minutes ago was just the micronutrient profile the eggs from Polyface. You mentioned how the riboflavin is off the chart. All the micronutrients. Do you think that that's part of where we've gone wrong within our food system? Is this tendency to over-focus on calories and macronutrients, proteins, carbs and fat, versus the actual micronutrient profile that you're able to extract from your food?

0:40:29 - Speaker 2
Oh, without a doubt, absolutely. We have seen. Look, fundamentally in our culture, food is viewed as primarily just inert stuff. It's like petroleum in the car, right? And in fact, now think about it. Sterility is now equated with safety. So if we want safe food it's gotta be sterilized. And so what we have is a situation where Coca-Cola is sterile. I mean you can't grow a, you can't grow mold in coca-cola, right, but? But raw, raw milk is unsafe because it's unsterile, and and but.

But our microbiome is not sterile. I mean our microbiome is a petri dish. You know of microbes and and so you know velveta cheese, I. So you know Velveeta cheese. I mean you could squirt Velveeta cheese on a table, walk away from it for two years. It doesn't mold, it doesn't dry, it doesn't do, it just sits there for two years, it doesn't change at all. But you put real cheese on a table and, at ambient temperature, in five days it's all fuzzy, grows legs, legs and walks off the table and and so so, so essentially, if, look, if it won't rot, if it won't rot, it won't decompose. If it won't decompose, it won't digest. So I mean that's such a simple rule and yet think I mean uh, red dye 29, modest sodium glutamate. High fructose corn syrup. I mean all of our not all all, but most of our foods, the conventional foods now in the supermarket are all selected for shelf life, for non-rotting, non-digesting. That's what they're selected for. Nobody's selecting tomatoes for nutrient profile. They're selecting tomatoes that can withstand bouncing around in the back of a truck for 1500 miles, you know, going from the farm to the supermarket. And if that's what you're selecting for tomatoes, you're going to get cardboard tomatoes. Cardboard tomatoes don't have nutrition in them. Anybody that's had a you know a homegrown homegrown, you know juice running down your elbow tomato knows the difference between the cardboard tomato at the supermarket and a homegrown tomato, and so you know those. Those differences are really really easy to to tell. You know, and I would just. I would just say this too One of the most dramatic things that that I ever saw was was the pet test.

So we had a customer, so we had a customer who had a little pet dog and um little Pomeranian or something you know, and it it wouldn't eat meat out of it, wouldn't eat meat. Uh, she, she'd know what was wrong with it, why don't you know it wouldn't eat every meat and um, and so she heard about us and she wanted to come out and get some meat. And so she came out and her husband gave her the raspberries oh, you're going to pay, you know, an arm and a leg and it can't be worth anything. Blah, blah, blah. And she came out anyway and got some, went home, she's in the kitchen fixing you know something and the dog's in and the dog's just worrying her death, yipping at her heels, just caring. She said look, you know you don't even like me. Why what are you yipping around? It worried her so much she finally dropped a piece of meat on the floor and the dog immediately dropped on it and and devoured it. Just as her husband came down the stairs to the kitchen, he saw that he said wherever you went and got that meat, that's the only meat I'm eating the rest of my life. And they trusted their dog more than anything else you know. And so she told me that story. I couldn't believe it.

So I actually went to the store, got some meat and got some of ours and I put it out. We had four cats four we didn't have a Pomeranian dog, we had four cats at the time and I put the tooth out on paper plates on a back porch and sat back to watch. Those cats came up. They smelled. They put their noses and smelled the stuff from the supermarket. And then all four of them I took pictures of it All four of them surrounded the paper plate with our it was ground beef on it. Surrounded the paper plate with our it was ground beef on it. And they ate it and almost ate the plate and licked it up before they would even go over and look at the adjacent. I mean I didn't put them five feet apart, I put them six inches apart and they wouldn't even look at that. And so I always tell people if you don't trust yourself or trust the doctor or trust my slick marketing campaign, ask your pets and your pets will tell you that's what you need to do.

0:45:11 - Speaker 1
What do you attribute that to? Is that their ability to actually smell some of these nutrients that are more abundant in your meat?

0:45:18 - Speaker 2
Oh, absolutely. You know, animals, animals are so much more tuned in. Look, they don't have TVs, so they, they, they don't have, they don't have social media. You know, look, they don't have tvs, you know, so they, they don't have, they don't have social media. You know they don't have stuff going on in their, in their heads and their ears. You know, telling them you're supposed to, you know you can look like uh, you know whatever, beau derrick, you know, if you eat like this and and they don't have any, I'm dating myself. You know, beau, she's like not young anymore.

0:45:45 - Speaker 3
Anyway, you might have to do some research on that one.

0:45:52 - Speaker 2
when we get off no she's, she's beautiful, she's beautiful, it's a good, it's a good pick, yeah, so. So, so my, my point, my point, is that the animals are, so, you know, key to the situation. They're not swayed by peer dependency, they're not swayed by, you know, you know, media messaging, that sort of thing. And so, yes, they have a very innate, innate sense. Listen, I had a neighbor. He bought a little place, a homestead near us. He was buying some hay, and we were talking about hay one day and and he said, you know, would you mind, you know, selling me a couple bales and I can just see if there's any difference in in hay. You know, would you mind, you know, selling me a couple bales and I can just see if there's any difference in hay, you know, in the community. And so he took a patty of our hay, put it down the bottom of the manger he had a milk cow put it in the bottom of the manger and then he took this other hay he'd been buying and covered it all up, put it, stacked it up in the manger, right, the cow walked in there. She took all that hay from the top, flung it out of the manger to get to ours in the bottom that was grown on compost instead of chemical fertilizer.

Listen, those animals are so much smarter than us when it comes to this. It's because they haven't lost their instinctual, primitive, innate capacity to sense, to smell, to you know, to um, to, to know how they feel. I mean, we, we, we don't even ask, we don't even ask our bodies how they feel. We, we eat stuff. Come up, you know, oh, I feel terrible. And then we go back tomorrow, eat the same thing. You know, if you get up and feel terrible, once you start, once you eat something else, try something else, and if you feel good when you get up, well then you know, stay with that. And but we, we don't even, we don't even trust ourselves, we just assume. Well, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm eating like everybody else and I have a problem. I go to the doctor, I get you know Zintac or I get you know Tums or whatever, and fix it. And and and, listen, you're not having digestive orders because you're.

0:47:54 - Speaker 3
You're not having digestive disorders because you're drug deficient. Nobody is sick because they're drug deficient, and and, and so you know you need to, you need to be aware of that, joel. Speaking of that kind of intuitive approach to eating, what approach has worked the best for you, your wife and your family over the years to help you kind of metabolically thrive and feel your best?

0:48:12 - Speaker 2
Yeah, well, it's a great question and I don't know that we have it all figured out, but I think a lot is this whole thing I'm talking about. How do you feel? And for me, I'm a meat and fruit guy. I thrive on fruit and I thrive on meat. Do I eat vegetables? Yeah, you know, I eat some vegetables but but I love bread, but bread doesn't love me. So I go easy on bread and and and you know some of it's genetic, some of it is just our our genetic soup is. Is is amazing. And when you look at different cultures around the world and you know what, what they eat, you know. I think part of our problem as Americans is we just don't eat much variety anymore. If you get, if you get Dolly Madison, dolly Madison or Martha Washington's cookbooks from either Montpelier or Mount Vernon and Harrison, you know what I'm talking about these are our Virginia.

You know our great Virginia icons, right, but you get their cookbooks and you know what Half of the stuff in there we don't even know what they are. You know currant berries and goose and I mean they have like, like you know, 50 different kinds of fruit that they grew on their, on their homesteads. I mean this was common. Why they didn't? Because they had to grow it. They didn't have Costco, they didn't have Walmart, right, so they had to grow it.

And and you know the Australian Aborigines, they say, ate 2,500 different things routinely, 2,500 different foodstuffs. Americans eat what like 25. We just don't eat any variety and yet our microbiome is dependent on variety. So let me just say a word about that.

When it comes to pastured livestock, so getting these chickens out on a perennial diversified pasture, what we want is we want to be able to go out in that pasture and in a few square feet we want to be able to find 10, 15, 20 varieties of plants, you know, clovers and grasses and forbs and legumes and different things. And so one of the fastest ways that a modern American, fastest ways that a modern American, one of the fastest ways a modern American can diversify their diet rapidly is eating pastured chickens, pastured eggs, pastured beef. That's on a perennial, diversified pasture sward, not alfalfa, not corn, but a diversified perennial pasture sward. Because every one of those plants brings in a different chemical, a different vitamin, a different mineral into the body, into the muscle tissue, and so we can tap in to that, that, that variety, that that vegetative variety, by eating something that's been eating that kind of buffet in their diet that's such a nuanced point, it's so fascinating too yeah, it is.

So hey, listen, you know, uh, to me, I would much rather get my salad, my salad, in a good juicy burger or a t-bone steak than have to eat a salad. I mean I do eat salad, but anyway it makes it. Or a T-bone steak that have to eat a salad, and I mean I do eat salad, but anyway it makes it. It makes a humorous way to to look at. How are you, you know, how are you getting that diversity in your diet, joel?

0:51:37 - Speaker 3
one of the things oh I was.

0:51:40 - Speaker 1
I was oh go ahead go ahead.

0:51:42 - Speaker 3
I just had a really, just really quick question just based off that Cause I'm very interested. Harrison and I have talked about this a lot. Joel and we've had on a few guests that have talked about pasture-raised versus grass-fed grass-finished meat. You were touching on some of the imperial studies and some of the nutritional studies you've done with your own meat. Do you find is there it just is pasture-raised versus grass-fed grass-finished more impactful in terms of the nutrient content of your meat? I don't know how nuanced that question is, but just curious. What matters more?

0:52:11 - Speaker 2
Yeah, well, as you can imagine, there's all sorts of whatever clever speak and greenwashing out there in the movement, and so we like to use the term for beef. For beef we like to say um, grass finished. Because right now the industry says that if a cow has ever eaten one blade of grass then she's obviously grass fed. Well, that's not what a person. When they say grass fed, they mean not grain fed, right, but but but the but. The industry uses very, you know, clever speak and wordsmithing and to obfuscate things. But the omnivore, we don't, we can't say grass-finished on the omnivore, which is, you know, which is a turkey chicken pork, because they're eating a lot of grain supplementation. So there we use the term pasture raised or pasture based in order to differentiate from, you know, from a factory farm adulterated with people that have stationary houses and a moonscape yard or like organic, organic certification that requires outdoor. Well, they make a little three-foot apron in a 10,000 bird house and call that pasture. The chickens never go outside, they never see it. Even the, the in France, the, the you know, it's not just Americans in France, the La Belle Rouge chickens, la Belle Rouge, which is their, you know, top brand of chicken in France they say that the pastor doesn't do anything for the chicken except psychologically. The chicken can see out there and think that. You know it's okay. So there's actually. There are actually efforts right now to create video screens in houses. There was actually an experiment done on dairy cows to put eye goggles with pictures of pasture in a confinement dairy and the cows actually responded and gave more milk because they thought they were on, you know, on a bucolic setting. So there's all sorts of crazy things going on.

And and the main thing is, you know, look at the website carefully. You know. I mean, we've got, we've got an organic certified outfit up near us here in the Shenandoah Valley and if you go on our website, meet our farmers yeah, meet their farmers. There's a dad and mom and they got their couple of kids and they're all standing in front of their confinement chicken house. There's not a chicken on, there's not a chicken outside, there's no chicken on pasture. Those chickens aren't getting, they're not getting any worms or bugs or fresh sunshine or anything. And so you know, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to look at a website and you know and see what's. You know what's actually going on.

I was asked about an outfit that's, you know, shipping all over and they're trying to present themselves. As you know, the homesteaders answer to the, you know, food system and so, yeah, yeah, you know I'll look at their website. So I looked at their website. I said I clicked on um on uh chicken. You know, let's see how they do their chicken and the home page of their chicken, uh is a home page with the background is five tyson chicken houses. Well, you know that's not a homesteader, you know that's not a pastored operation. So be smart when you're looking at websites. Obviously, the best is to go visit the farm that's the best thing and turn off Netflix and just go visit the farm. But if you can't, you can actually really get skilled at looking at websites and comparing and what the language, what's the pictures, what's the language? And there are definitely red flags out there that you can see what's going on.

0:56:10 - Speaker 1
Joel, one of the things you brought up was variety and I was really curious on getting your take on how we've almost bred variety out of a lot of the species in our food system, whether it's, you know, corn, soy, wheat, like the variety of those plants has shrunk over, you know, from 1900s to you know even a few decades later. I think it's like you know only a handful of species that are still being bred for those, and then the same thing with livestock and other animals. Is that? Does that play into the that variety topic that you were talking about?

0:56:44 - Speaker 2
Oh, absolutely, genetic. Genetic diversity has been nature's whatever adapt, you know, adaptable wildcard right for forever is genetic diversity, and and and that's why we have so many different breeds that have geographic names, because, you know, guernsey came from the Guernsey Island. The Scottish Highlander didn't come from Senegal, you know, it came from the Scottish Highlands. And so what we have are these geographical genetic. You know, types that thrived in a certain area, certain climate, and so what we would like to see at our farm, you know we're now hatching egg layers, chickens, and we, you know, we have our own brood cow herd. We also buy calves, but we have brood cows and what we'd like to see is basically a, you know, a swope cow, a Swope chicken. You know, one that thrives in our bio region, and then, and then you know, 50 miles away there'd be another one, 50 miles away there'd be another one. And so, instead of getting hooked up with heritage, breeds and stuff that worked, you know, 500 years ago, let's, let's, let's take what our forefathers did in breeding and genetic selection and and let's and let's create for our grandchildren. Let's create a thousand new brands, new genetic names that are, that are, that show special promise for adaptability in different bioregions. You know, that would actually add diversity to the gene pool, rather than detracting diversity from the gene pool, which is what we have right now.

Oh, you know it, it's angus angus cow. That's, that's all. You see, you know, well, there, um, you know, there's a lot of others with a lot of different traits, and, um, and, let's, let, let's, let's, let, let's add genetic diversity. You know, no, no one animal, no one genetic profile has all the answers. You always, there are always trade-offs. Well, we, we get maternal, but we lose fertility. We get fertility and we lose longevity. We get, you know, and, and you, you trade off. So you're looking for, you know, you're looking for a balance within the, you know, within the genetic pool.

0:59:08 - Speaker 1
Joel, one of the things I've heard you speak to is that you guys have a processing plant on site. Is that correct?

0:59:16 - Speaker 2
We do our own poultry. Okay, we don't do beef and pork, but we do do our own poultry and we co-own with another partner a small slaughterhouse. Yes, that does our beef and pork.

0:59:32 - Speaker 1
Yes, how do you? One of the things we talk about all the time is the concentration in that industry in particular. There's basically four players and I think not a lot of people realize that that's one of the biggest bottlenecks in our food system around the processing side. How do you think about that topic and sort of the problems that it creates?

0:59:53 - Speaker 2
Yeah, well, you know that that has developed over time and and it has been justified by, you know, using phrases like, you know scale and efficiency, and you know cheap food and those kinds of things. But of course, recently, especially since COVID, that efficiency is starting to break down and we're seeing a profound awareness of fragility. And so the new operative term is resilience, and I think people are beginning to realize that if you're not resilient first, if you don't survive first, there's nothing to be efficient about later. So the first thing is to be resilient, to be a survivor. And so you know what's happening right now and what happened in COVID is these great big outfits, as you mentioned perfectly, the, the, the concentration of these outfits are, are, are are fragile when you have viruses, when you have people on top of each other working in moist, dark, tight conditions, and you're just vulnerable to diseases. That's just the way it is. You know, a Tyson chicken house is far more vulnerable to a disease than a backyard flock of chickens. Either one of them could get sick, absolutely it could, but the vulnerability is way higher on the concentrated, you know, larger thing. We all know that intuitively. I mean, if you know if your county suddenly had an outbreak of of the flu, people don't say, well, let's take all the kids and let's put them all in the gymnasium for a week till the flu passes, and let's put them all in the gymnasium for a week till the flu passes. No, they close the schools and say stay home, don't go, you know, don't visit, stay around and let the thing run its course. We intuitively understand that pathogens thrive in concentration and they are hampered or they decrease with decentralization. They are hampered or they decrease with decentralization.

And so the question I would just ask anyone who's reasonable listening to this podcast, I would simply ask, let me ask you this If, instead of 155,000 employee processing plants in 2020, if, instead of 155,000 employee processing plants in 2020, what if, instead, we had had 150,000, 20 employee processing plants all over the US, in all the little communities, do you think we would have had as big a glitch in the food system, and and and in the, and, in the, the, the, the viral impact within those processing facilities, if we had been that democratized, and and and and deconcentrated, uh, decentralized, and I think, intuitively, we don't need a rocket scientist to tell us if we'd had 150,000 plants instead of 150,000 small plants instead of 150 mega plants, we'd have been much less vulnerable. And so what's happening today is that these big, what I call aircraft carrier outfits are spending a lot of time now in human resources. Uh, you know, they wake up every morning worrying about oh man, is is john down there in, uh, you know, in in quadrant c gonna turn us into osha for not having the right, um, you know, covid precautions or the mat right, uh, protective equipment. I mean, there's all these things going on and and um, and that drives the thinking it, it in. In mechanical terms, we say it's carbon on the valves, whereas a place like ours is like a speedboat, you know, and we're able to navigate uh, stones and rocks and shoals. And you know we're nimble. Um, you know, there's there's a business book out. It's not the big that eats the small, it's the fast that eat the slow. It's all about being nimble, and so when you're smaller, you you're, you are more adaptable, you are more nimble.

And, and what's fascinating to me is, for the first time in my life, we're seeing, for example, tyson in the last 12 months, raised beef prices 32%.

We only raised ours 10%, because we don't buy any fertilizer If we don't get any fertilizer from Russia, who cares? We don't even buy the stuff. If we don't get wheat from Ukraine, who cares? We don't buy Ukrainian wheat. We get all of our grain from farmers within 50 miles of us, so we have a direct supply chain. And so when you have this concentration and these expanded supply lines in, you know, in whatever disruptive times, what you have is fragility rather than resilience. And when you, when you democratize and decentralize which is part of diversity okay, what you have then is you might not have the same level of efficiency, but you have resistance, resilience and you have adaptability and and nimbleness, and if there's ever time when we needed that, it's right now I know this is a super loaded question, but how do we democratize and decentralize in a way that will allow for these, the hyper localization of processors, because obviously we're looking at it from an outsider's perspective.

1:05:43 - Speaker 3
I heard it's incredibly difficult for someone to just start a processing facility the legality, the startup costs, etc. So how do we go about decentralizing this?

1:05:55 - Speaker 2
You're right.

1:05:57 - Speaker 3
It's so loaded, I know.

1:05:58 - Speaker 2
That is such a loaded question.

1:05:59 - Speaker 1
I know.

1:06:00 - Speaker 2
Do we have another two hours? No, I'll convince this as fast as I can. Another two hours? No, I'll convince this as fast as I can. I've got a couple ideas here to just throw out. One is that you are exactly right. The bureaucracy grows every day. It just continues to grow.

It was interesting back when we had all those E coli and salmonella outbreaks, you know, 20 years ago, there was a big study conducted by, at that time, the General Accounting Office, gao. It's now, it's not the GAO anymore, it's something else. But anyway, they did this bipartisan study on, you know, on pathogens in the meat system in the US. And guess what? You know, they put their finger on exactly the right. They said the reason we have this problem is centralization in production, centralization in processing and long-distance transportation. You know large-scale warehousing and sub-therapeutic use of antibiotic. I mean, you know they nailed it directly. Now, wouldn't you think? You know they nailed it directly. Now, wouldn't you think, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you think that somebody within the system would say, okay, if that's the culprit? You know what's the what's the opposite, what's the opposite of of large scale processing? Well, it'd be small scale, it'd be like community abattoirs and community canneries and you know a community processing food system. What's the opposite of concentrated production? Oh, I think those would be like smaller family farms, right? Diversified farms with lots of different species on them. And so we know the answers. We just don't do it, and so the onerous licensing has become just mind-numbing.

So I've got a couple thoughts. One is that when compliance becomes so tyrannous that circumvention is more efficient than we need to go to, we need to go to circumvention. So a friend and I, john Moody and I, have convened now for three years. We've done several of these. They're called rogue food conferences, rogue, rfc, rogue food conferences. Our next one's coming up in Tennessee. I think it's Tennessee. Is it Tennessee or Kentucky? I'm not sure you can Google rogue food conference just like it says yeah, august 16. And wait a minute, where is it? I'm not, I'm not sure here, yeah, here it is December 11 or December 10, december 10,. Rogue Food, tennessee, rogue Food Conference.

And what these are? These are conferences where we're finding the most clever, innovative circumventors in the country, people who have figured out how to transact meat and poultry commerce without any licensing whatsoever, everything from personal membership, associations like country clubs to you know, a contract with your customer. We co-own the animal and I'll butcher it on my front porch. I want the guts. You take the meat. You know, I can put your my own animal. I mean, there's all sorts of creative. There's a food church. Food church is being used where one of the membership perks is you know, you get, you get meat. There's there's all sorts of cool stuff going on and we're showcasing these people who have basically, you know, thumbed their nose at the bureaucracy and said you know, forget you, forget you, we're going to transact business anyway. The second option which I think really has traction and I would love for the libertarian party to take this up is what I call the uberization of the food system.

So a quick, quick history. So the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker was embedded in the village back, you know, 500 years ago, and everybody knew who the good ones were and who the bad ones were, because they all lived in the village. They saw their kids, they, you know, they saw them. They went to church together, they went to meet, you know, talk to each other on the street, and they knew who the charlatans were and who the good ones were. And so you didn't need a, you know, a bureaucracy to, to, to ride herd and give, give licenses. Well, with the industrial food system, all of these the butcher and a baker and a candlestick maker became so large that nobody wanted in their backyard and and, and and, um, and so they put razor wire up and guard houses and no trespassing signs. Well, people get scared when they see stuff behind no trespassing. What's going on back there? So people demanded a bureaucracy bigger than the industry, and that gave us the Food Safety Inspection Service, the Food Drug Administration, blah, blah, blah. So we got an industrial bureaucracy to handle an industrial food system.

Well, what's happened now is with the internet. With the internet, we have completely democratized the, the audit, the, the real-time auditability, and brought back at global scale the village voice of the butcher, baker and candlestick maker. Who would have guessed 30 years ago that people, by the millions, would jump into cars with people who don't have a license? Nothing at all, but nothing but an uber app? The reason is because because the, the riders can, can, can, judge, can judge the drivers and the drivers can judge the riders. And so the internet has democratized the audit trail in real time to take the government clear out of it.

Airbnb. 40 years ago, who would have thought that within 20 years there would be more hospitality rooms in the world than Marriott, Sheraton and Hilton combined? And nobody drove a nail in a wall. Can you believe that? And it was all done because of the mass democratization of access that the internet supplied. So I'm suggesting that, just like we have Uberized the transportation system, we've Airbnb'd, you know, uberized the hospitality industry.

Why not let's now Uberize the food system and say if I'm happy, if I'm, as a voluntary decision, why can't I, as a consenting adult I'm using loaded language here as a consenting adult, exercise freedom of choice to transact business with a friend without a bureaucrat getting in between our decision?

If I want to come to your farm, ask around, look around and, as a voluntary consenting adult, exercise freedom of choice for my microbiome what's wrong with that? And so there is momentum, I think, in the system for moving in that direction. And so right now, you know, that being said, there are numerous modular things. There's plant in a box, there are modular little plants springing up, but the problem with all these and I'm not opposed to them, I'm just saying that all of the food safety I know because we co-own a small slaughterhouse with 25 employees and all of the regulations are size prejudicial. It's much easier to comply if you're big than if you're small. We have the same paperwork to fill out as a plant, even though we only do 50 cows a week. We have the same paperwork as a plant that does 50 cows a minute. Okay, and and so it. So the the prejudice. So so it takes us. It takes us at our plant 500 to do what iowa beef packers does in in in 80. So when you have you versus $500, that's a huge price prejudice when it comes to the marketplace. So that's what's happening within the system and and that's and that's what creates these, these arbitrary, capricious hurdles for small scale production, and it puts small scale producers at a price disadvantage in the marketplace and so.

So yeah, I wish I had a magic recipe. I can tell you it's, it's a, it's a huge problem, you know, as the society, as the society goes into dysfunction. You know the big $64 million question is is the government going to get worse and worse, or will the government just cease to exist and fall into disarray? And I think historically we have to say the government's going to get worse and worse and worse until we finally have collapse and it implodes. I have no idea when that will be, but it doesn't bode well. So I'm a big believer in circumvention at this point, a circumvention rather than compliance. And let's, let's put our creativity on our heads and forget, and forget, trying to figure out how to bow and instead figure out how to buck.

1:15:42 - Speaker 1
Joel, have you found during the past two, two years high tension time period that a lot of your ideas that you just talked about were they becoming more validated and were people or? I guess my ultimate question is what have you learned over the past two years, during this pandemic time period, you know, through operating your farm, through talking to more farmers, like what's kind of been your big takeaways from that time period as it relates to all the things that you were just talking about in terms of democratizing the food system?

1:16:14 - Speaker 2
yeah, well, well, first of all, uh, it has been perhaps the most affirming two years of my life I mean I've been this, this ugly, this ugly cinder.

You know, uh, ugly cinderella, in the ashes all my life, being accused of being a you, you know a bioterrorist and a. What do you want to do? You know, murder half the world because we know you can't feed the world any of that sort of thing. And suddenly you know we're, we're, we're finding, we're sitting in the driver's seat. You know we're, we're, we're seeing this and and we now have literally a homestead tsunami going on in the country. I mean, people are leaving the city. They're looking for two, three, five, 10 acres, they're looking for self-reliance, they're looking for this opportunity and there are homesteading fairs and conferences just springing up all over the country and it is absolutely one of the most exciting times I've ever been alive For us personally in our business. It's the first time in my life that we feel like we're actually becoming, literally by the day, more competitive in pricing in the marketplace, because we're not subject we're not subject to what to the big things. I mean. Look at gas costs. The average farm in America, half of their expenses are petroleum, half of their expenses on our farm, only 5% of our expenses are petroleum. Now, do I like high gas prices. No, I don't like it. But think about the viability, think about our viability. If we're 5% fuel-oriented versus 50% fuel-oriented, that means at least we'll be the last guy standing. And of course you know, by the time you're the last guy standing, somebody else, you know, figured out how to join you. You know on the mountain, and so there is.

So what I've learned is both encouragement and affirmation. I've seen a literally a tsunami of interest in small scale. You know, food production and rural, what I call agrarian bunkers around the country, bunkers around the country and, and and and. What I'm, what I'm optimistic about is just the whole. You know, price differentiation as our resiliency shows itself credible and valid. We, by the day, we become more and more, you know, more and more a valid option within the, within the system. That's, that's very exciting. So you know there's a lot, there's a lot to be frustrated and angry about in this whole deal. But I try to encourage people to say look at the bottom of the day. Yes, you can be angry, you can be frustrated. That's all negative. Let's see if we can invert that and take all that negative energy and focus it into positive innovation and creativity so that we can be hope and help when the culture becomes hopeless and helpless.

1:19:23 - Speaker 3
Wow, that's so powerful. So it's something we love to ask our guests as we wrap up our conversations. We love to just say you know, when you think about the future of the food system and just humanity in general, are you generally optimistic? And it sounds like for you you definitely are. Is that fair to say?

1:19:42 - Speaker 2
I'm pessimistic about the overall where the culture is going.

I'm pessimistic about the overall society and the culture, but I'm extremely optimistic about what we as individuals and communities, as we geographically whatever, proximate into a new tribalism of shared value and aggregate to ourselves people who know how to build things, fix things and grow things.

We need our communities to be looking at our eclectic skill mastery base. Who knows how to grow something? Who knows how to fix stuff? Who knows how to build stuff? And we need to actually be investing in those relationships. If that means pulling your money out of the stock market and investing in some is a diesel mechanic school, or or you know plumbing or some sort of a vocational skill, or or goodness, taking some people that you that you've put off knowing in your community, take them out to dinner, you know build relationships. I mean, that's where I think we're entering a time where people are realizing that those kinds of it's the non monetary things that are going to be more valuable than money, especially since money has gone off the rails onto something here he's hit the nail on the head with in terms of creating better quality food.

1:21:13 - Speaker 1
but how can you possibly feed the world or feed our population in this way? How do you think about you know that that topic in general, just supplying enough food for people? Is it a community based approach, like you've been talking about, or you know? How do you think about that?

1:21:33 - Speaker 2
Yeah, well, there again. I have a whole one hour presentation to answer that question. It's one of my most popular ones.

1:21:39 - Speaker 1
I'd say for the end.

1:21:40 - Speaker 2
Yeah, but. But I'll give you just a couple bullet points. First of all, right now, right now, the world is throwing away almost 50% of human edible food. It's past the sell-by date, it's blemished, it's got a little rust on it, it's not perfect, blah, blah, blah. And so, right now, that level of throwing away food has never happened in human history before. We've always had different streams If the cabbage isn't perfect, it goes into sauerkraut, if the apple isn't perfect, it goes into applesauce. But we've lost those, you know. We've lost those salvage strains today. And so you know, almost half of the food in the world.

So the point is, there's plenty of food. Don't worry about running out of food, there's plenty of it. Number two America. America has 35 million acres of lawn and 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses. That's 71 million acres. That's enough to feed the entire country without a single farm, and I haven't even gotten to golf courses yet. So the truth is that we are not even scratching the surface on productive capacity, and and and.

Number three if we integrated our system, so so you know, going back to the first one, instead of having ornamental trees we can have edible landscaping. It doesn't take any more room to grow an apple tree, as it does, you know, a non fruit bearing apple tree. So let's take our yards and you know, let's, let's, let's, let's, edible eyes them. I wrote a book called polyface, micro, about how to have chickens and rabbits in a Manhattan apartment without smell. And so so you know, we, we can micro down beautifully these systems to integrate them. So you know, we can have, I mean, pat Foreman wrote City Chicks and she pointed out that if one in three households had enough chickens to eat their food scraps, there would not be an egg industry in the United States that would produce all the eggs we need without a single egg in the supermarket. So we need to integrate our spaces rather than segregate our spaces.

And then, beyond that, for sure, the biological approach, this whole idea that you know that non-chemical farming isn't as productive. It stems from the whole, you know, from the old notion that you know that chemicals beat out chemicals beat out compost. Well, the problem was that it took a while for the for compost that Sir Albert Howard developed in 1943, it took a while for that to for all the ingredients to metabolize. We needed chainsaws and chippers and black plastic pipe and front-end loaders to really metabolize an efficient compost system. And so the point of innovation always is a ragged edge where you have this point of innovation. And then you have, you know, other things around it. And so you know, compost was an innovation in 1943, took about, you know, 20 years for, for, for the, the infrastructure to metabolize around it.

Meanwhile, chemicals you know chemicals were the chemical approach was really given a shot in the arm by world war one, world war two, which required n, p and k, nitrogen and phosphorus to make ammunition, and so the war effort subsidized the chemical laboratory, mining, distribution, marketing systems, so that at the end of World War II, with a lot of farm boys dead in the war, dad's sitting there. What am I gonna do? Well, you can either do compost, which requires shoveling, shoveling, shoveling, shoveling some more, or you can put on this little bag of 10, 10, 10. Which would you choose? So be gentle on grandpa, you know, uh, you and I, in the same position, probably would have reached for the same thing. And and so the fact is, and then it took about 20 years for the metabolism of compost to beat out the chemicals.

But the narrative, the land grant, colleges and the US duh, I call it the US duh. That had been clear. The orthodoxy by that time, by the 1960s, was well-entrenched in the chemical approach. And that's why, in 1961, when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, that was the wake-up call in the chemical approach. Um and and, and that's why, 1961, when rachel carson wrote silent spring, you know that was the wake-up call. Uh-oh, you know now maybe we've gone too far. Here's the point, guys. The point is, if we had had a manhattan project for compost, not only would we have fed the world, we would have done it without three-legged salamanders, infertile frogs and a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico. That's the truth.

1:26:35 - Speaker 1
Man, I feel like I just got a PhD in everything land management and food system. This has been amazing. It's a mic drop right there right there, joel, we're so grateful to have had you on. This has been an amazing conversation and our audience is going to love it, so really appreciate you taking the time to join us, and you are always welcome back on the meat mafia podcast, so hopefully we can get a part two going at some point in the future.

1:27:03 - Speaker 2
Thank you, glad to do it. All you got to do is holler. You know how. You know how to get ahold of of me, and and thank you for the opportunity and the platform and um, come see us. Come see us when you can we will absolutely harry.

1:27:15 - Speaker 3
We should do part two at polyface. Do a live podcast, that would be cool, that'd be amazing. Let's do it, awesome. Well, we appreciate it, joel. Thanks so much for doing this, man and hope to uh to meet you soon in the future. Okay, okay.

1:27:27 - Speaker 2
Great. Thank you, guys, thanks.

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