Welcome to episode three of Behind the Shield. My name is James Geering and I will be a host for
this podcast. My guest on this episode is American farmer Joel Salatin. Now Joel, other than a farmer,
is also a lecturer and an author. His books include Folks This Ain't Normal, You Can Farm,
and The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs. Joel is an English major from Bob Jones University.
He is featured in food documentaries Food Inc and Fresh, which I recommend both of those.
He has done TED Talks and spoken at Google. Joel is known for his holistic method of animal husbandry.
He has a very unique look at not only the way the animals are raised, but even the way the food that
they eat is grown. So he will move his animals geographically through his farm
to make sure that the acorns, the grass, whatever they're actually eating normally,
has grown to the point where it has the maximum nutrition and the minimum amount of stress.
So the product is the healthiest, leanest meat that you can get. And therefore this low stress,
high nutrition environment creates the healthiest meat for the people that he sells to.
He doesn't use any chemicals, any drugs, or GMO feed. Now this whole topic is so important to me.
When you look outside the window, you look at our fellow citizens here in the US, in the UK,
and other Western developed countries, you are seeing a growing trend of ill health.
This can absolutely be improved through exercise and movement, but let's say you exercise for
four days a week, about an hour at a time. Well that's only four hours total in the 150 odd hours
a week that you have available to you. So the rest of the time is obviously in that balance of
energy in, energy out. The quality of that food is even more important. The gastrointestinal tract
is 80% of your immune system. So what you put in is either going to hurt or nourish your body.
The food that we've been eating, even the salads and the vegetables and people think they're eating
well, if they're covered in pesticides, if people are wearing hazmat suits to apply this to the food
that then goes into your children's body, clearly every cell in that food is not going to be
beneficial. It's going to have some good properties, but obviously some bad properties as well.
When you go locally to organic farms and you get vegetables and fruit that have not been sprayed
with these chemicals, that have been grown naturally, that's 100% nourishment, 100% nutrition.
The same with the meat. If the meat has not been treated with hormones and antibiotics and the meat
hasn't been shoulder to shoulder in some god-awful warehouse with these stress hormones just surging
through these poor animals, if its growth hasn't been rapidly accelerated through chemicals,
then the meat that you ingest is going to nourish your body. If it's the sick, overdeveloped
meat that's kept alive through pharmaceuticals, then again, this meat is not going to nourish.
It's going to hurt. We've seen a rapid increase in the amount of disease in this country,
heart disease, cancer, and I am 100% sure that a large part of it is to do with the food that we
have served. The other benefit of buying locally from these sustainable farms is you remove the
transportation costs, you remove the packaging, the impact on the environment. Your local farmer,
if you select one that prescribes to the same philosophy, doesn't have to ship that food
3,000 miles, doesn't have to cling wrap it and irradiate it and all the other processes that
happen to the food that are in the supermarket. The misunderstanding that this food is more
expensive is another lie. You take away the middleman, the publics, the supermarket that's
obviously trying to make a profit and understandably so, the cost of processing, the cost of packaging,
the cost of transportation, and you go from the home directly to the source, i.e. your local
farmer, they can afford to give you this product at a cheaper rate than the grocery stores do
because all those middlemen that are taking a cut have been eliminated. So you can't just
take a cut, you can't just take a cut, you can't just take a cut. That is a fallacy that good food
is more expensive. It really isn't if you know where to look. The other element is we consume
way too much meat in this country. So to think of it more like quality instead of quantity,
you take out a third of your meat consumption, replace it with more vegetables, beans, that kind
of thing. When you do buy your meat, you buy the high quality meat and that way you're nourishing
it more efficiently instead of hurting it. So in this interview, we talk about the food industry
and how it became industrialized in the first place. We touch on the effects of this process
on our food and why chemicals are usually used in factory farming, how sustainable farming creates
the best quality food, how to find the local farmer. Joel's up in the northeast so everyone
needs to find a farmer that subscribes to this same philosophy in their local area. So he'll talk
about it and we'll provide links to where he suggests on the show notes as well. And then
how to start a garden, how to take even that farmer out of the equation and grow some of
this stuff yourself. So it doesn't have to be an entire smorgasbord of vegetables and fruit,
but there's a few things that are very easy to grow in your local area. You can have chickens
and a chicken coop. There's all kinds of ideas that he comes up with and making yourself more
sustainable and that's going to affect how much you spend on food. If you're growing it yourself
and you can remove that cost from buying those certain vegetables or eggs or poultry. I am very
excited to introduce Joel. I think he's a voice that we don't normally hear. When we talk about
nutrition, you hear the doctor telling you about lower your cholesterol, remove fats from your
diet and you talk about calorie counting and all these areas of nutrition, but no one ever talks
about where the food comes from fundamentally and how if you eat this type of food and have
an abundance of vegetables on your plate, you can really forget about calorie counting.
This will totally nourish your body and if you remove a lot of the processed foods,
you really eliminate the need to quote unquote count calories. So without further ado,
I am extremely excited to introduce to you Joel Selatin. So thank you so much for
agreeing to be on Behind the Shield. One of the main problems that we have in first responders,
firemen, policemen, EMS is miseducation, I guess you could say from the dietary point of view.
There's a big push on the exercise side of losing weight and that kind of thing, but I think there's
a huge lack of knowledge of the kinds of food people should be eating and also fundamentally
where that food is coming from in the first place. So I'd love to take you down that road and have
you educate everyone that's listening. I wonder if we could start with the actual farm itself.
I understand your parents bought the farm, is that correct?
Yes, my mom and dad bought this when I was just four in 1961. So we've been here not quite 60 years
and I grew up here. My mother is still alive and day-to-day operations are now done by our son,
Daniel, and we have our grandchildren here. So we have four generations here on the farm.
Fantastic. And when you got there, was the soil in incredible condition?
It was in incredible condition, incredibly bad. We had very large gullies like corrugated roofing
down the hillside, large rock areas that had no vegetation on them whatsoever. These were shale
areas, a quarter acre or so in size that literally it was bare, bare rock. And today all those areas
are covered up with 12 inches of soil. It's not three feet like it was 500 years ago, but at least
it's covered up and growing something. And the gullies are healing slowly. And it was arguably
the armpit of the community today. It's, I would say, arguably the most productive farm in the
community. Yeah, certainly the most well-known, that's for sure. I grew up on a farm myself.
My father was a veterinary surgeon in England. So I've had a unique perspective of 2016 and
the years prior and how we are fed and the choices that we make. I know that we weren't completely
organic. I remember using fertilizer and pesticide on some of the foods. And the chickens were fed
meal as well as pecking around in the grass. And I know we're going to talk about the way that you
farm some of those, but it gave me a different perspective when I came over here and see so many
people choosing their food from the fridge, the frozen aisle or everything being in a packet.
Now, did you always want to be a farmer? Were you destined to be a farmer since you were young?
Yes, from my earliest memories, I definitely wanted to be a farmer. I think, looking back
as you start thinking about your childhood memories sometimes, I realize now the impact
that my grandfather's farm and my great uncle's farm had on me. My grandfather, actually I
shouldn't say farm, his garden and my uncle's farm. I said, we came to this place, it was just
rocks and weeds and gullies and it was in rough shape. But their places, my grandfather was a
charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming magazine in 1949. Had just this lush
garden that was bounded with a tea trellis grape arbor. And I was a kid, you know, and you could
reach up and just pick these ripe succulent grapes. And it just seemed boundless to me.
And I think I never got away from that almost subconscious desire to nest in abundance, be able
to walk out the back door every day and feel like you're immersed and nestled in abundance,
very, very powerful metaphor.
Yeah, absolutely. Now, your parents then, when you were growing up, clearly they had a different
philosophy than a lot of people in that generation. So how was their philosophy formed to kick so hard
against what a lot of the other farms were doing around them?
That's a great question. My dad, his degree was in economics, he was in World War II. And then
after the, went to college after the war and got his degree in economics. And he, I think he came
to this more from an economic level than an environmental level. And he realized early on
that the chemical approach, whether it's chemical fertilizer or pesticide or herbicide, whatever,
but that trying to beat nature with chemicals was essentially a drug addiction. It was like a
drug addiction. And it was a vicious circle where you couldn't ever get ahead because nature bats
last. And so you were constantly looking for more potent chemicals, more, just more, more chemicals.
You know, we used 100 pounds last year, we got to use 200 this year. And he just saw it as a
treadmill that you could never get off of. I mean, like economically, you know, you can't
get yourself into wealth, you know, and you can't chemicalize yourself into health either.
And he saw that, I think, as primarily an economic equation, much more than an environmental
equation, which is kind of interesting, because most people, as soon as they hear about, you know,
not using all that stuff, they assume that you don't have an appreciation for economics,
because economics means that you go to concentrated animal feeding operations and factories and, you
know, industrial, monospeciated farms and chemicals and all that stuff. So I like to point that out,
because I think the assumption is that when you do well by the environment, you hurt yourself
economically. And if you're going to do well economically, you necessarily have to make some
compromises on the environment. Yeah, absolutely. It kind of reminds me of, I did an economics class
years and years ago in England. And one of the only things that stuck, I don't even think I
finished the class, to be honest, but was the term false economy. And I think that's where we're at
now is that they thought that these farming methods were going to save money initially.
But obviously, in the long run, now we have a nation of extremely unwell people. And now,
we're like, like you said, the debt is now having to be paid physically. I remember you had a great
quote in one of your interviews I heard you in, a gentleman in the 1940s has said something about if
you put chemicals in your food, it was eventually the people will have to be chemicalized as well.
Yeah, that was Sir Albert Howard, the British agronomist who brought aerobic, the scientist who
brought basically the aerobic composting formula of carbon, nitrogen, moisture, oxygen, and microbes
to the world in 1943, writing his iconic and agricultural testament, which is kind of considered
one of the pillars of the entire whatever sustainable ag regenerative agriculture movement.
He said, when we use artificial manure, that's what he called chemical fertilizers, artificial
manures. We grow artificial plants, which feed artificial animals, which make artificial people
who can only be kept alive by using artificial. And of course, look at our pharmaceutical industry.
You know, that was 1943 when he said that. And certainly, you know, being kept alive with
artificial is certainly where our nation has come at this point. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that
pretty much anyone that deals with EMS that's listening to this can testify that we have
these patients with literally a trash bag full of medications and they're not fixing anything at
all. And the bigger irony is anyone in the medical community has to take the Hippocratic oath. Yeah,
Hippocrates himself said, let food be thy medicine. So that's to me the biggest irony you can possibly
have in the medical industry right now. Yes. And I think one of the problems is that nobody knows
what their tolerances are. You know, I don't want anybody to listening to this to think that I'm
some sort of a cultish and it's anathema to ever eat a Snickers bar, or even drink a Coke for that
matter. Okay. But there's a big difference between having one once a month as a little treat and
having two a day or three a day and, you know, moderation in all things. And so, and, you know,
EMS personnel routinely spend a lot of time hanging out at the rescue squad or the fire station or
whatever. And what do we do when we just kind of hang around? Well, we snack, you know, we snack on
things. And so, you know, the old adage, you know, that the cops all go down to Dunkin' Donuts,
you know, the reason it's humor is good humor is because there's an element of truth to it.
And so we need to appreciate that none of us knows where our tolerances are. We don't know
when that snacking and what we're snacking on is going to result in diabetes or obesity or,
you know, any of these kinds of things. And the truth is, if you look at the label, you know,
you can't pronounce half of the stuff that's on the label. And that's brand new in the human
lexicon and the human gut. The microbiome, you know, was not designed to handle things that you
needed to be a scientist in a laboratory to make or things that were too hard to pronounce, to say.
I'm kind of with Michael Pollan who says, you know, we probably shouldn't eat anything that
wasn't available before 1900. That's kind of when things really went south. And of course,
we're going to all be very thankful that the hot dogs were introduced at the 1890 World's Fair. So,
you know, hot dogs just squeaked in under the 1900s benchmark.
That was the ones without nitrates back then, probably.
Yes. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. On our farm, we make hot dogs and they don't have anything
unpronounceable. You know, it's just beef and pork and they're really great. And they actually
taste like food. They don't taste like, you know, some synthetic material.
Yeah, absolutely. So that kind of pushed me to the next question. I think this is a huge pivotal one.
We obviously, our generation, I'm 42 now, so I was raised outside of my farm, I was raised to
believe that, you know, it's safe to spray all our food in insecticides and, you know,
the mass production and pasteurizing our milk and all these other areas that we literally were
taught by our school boards and our health boards of the respective countries. So when did the
industrialization of food really begin? And then what was the regression from there?
Well, I think that the real catalyst came post World War II, because you have to remember that
ammunition, bombs, explosives are made from nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. And of
course, those are the three things that are in chemical fertilizer. And so after World War II,
we had all these stockpiles of NP and K. We had all these businesses, you know, that,
you know, big businesses that had developed to mine and bag and create NP and K. And so it was
extremely cheap. And so the natural thing was, well, let's find a market for these things,
let's go. And of course, in that day, you know, you could sprinkle some of this on the soil and
it would really take off. Well, the soil, a lot of the soils responded to the natural
matter. A lot of the soils responded to it because they still had organic matter left over from
draft power from all the animal manures and all that stuff. So, you know, they responded to it.
And so I'm a little bit careful to, you know, to cast great disparagements on, you know, on
great-grandpa who reached for that bag of chemical fertilizer as opposed to shoveling, shoveling,
shoveling, shoveling in a day when, you know, there were not front-end loaders. You know,
there was, so the alternative was, well, do I spread a little bag of stuff? I mean, it's like
a miracle. Or do I shovel? And people were tired of shoveling. They'd been shoveling all the time.
And so for the first five or six years, you know, this took off. And of course, it was all cheap
because they were leftover stockpiles from the war effort. In many cases, it had virtually been paid
for and was just, you know, a salvage operation. So it was extremely cheap, extremely, you know,
marketable. It was accessible. And so that took off. Well, in the early 1950s then, you know,
we had the development of the tractor and, of course, rural electrification, plastic pipe,
chippers, shredders, you know, and gradually the components, the components to run a true
carbon-centric system gradually came into being through the 1950s. So that by 1960s,
there was absolutely no reason whatsoever to be using chemical fertilizers. But by that time,
that orthodoxy was so entrenched in the cultural psyche that it was very difficult to, as we say,
unring that bell. You can't unring a bell. And so you couldn't restart that clock.
By that time, you know, the land-grant universities, the research nonprofits,
all of the USDA, all of these things were stacked and stocked with a paradigm that was a chemical
oriented paradigm. The truth is that 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 gulf, the size of New Jersey and the gulf of Mexico.
That's the truth. But we didn't have a Manhattan product project for that. We had a Manhattan
project for something else. And so that's where we ended up. And then the Monsanto
pesticide area was another separate arm of that whole movement?
Well, yeah. Well, you know, it's like every, if you read the diffusion of innovation,
these business books that talk about, you know, new things and how they market, how they change
markets and how markets adapt, what you see is this, you know, gentle, slow start. And then
it comes to this, the trajectory starts to steepen and steepen because you get all the
components necessary to make it efficient, you know, mining, laboratories, distribution,
packaging, marketing, advertising, you know, all these things have to come together. And so it
just got steeper and the curve got faster and faster. And so, you know, what started out as
started out as pigs coming in off of pasture and going into a small piggery of 20 sows
gradually became a piggery, you know, a concentrate animal feeding operation of
5,000 sows, pigs, chickens, the same thing. Antibiotics played a huge role in this because
prior to antibiotics, you simply couldn't, you know, put this many animals in one spot
in such filthy conditions and have them survive. So the concentrate animal feeding operation
was definitely a product of antibiotics that allowed us to keep these animals alive
in such filthy and unsanitary conditions. And then of course you had petroleum came along,
which allowed us to efficiently transport stuff. I mean, you couldn't have a CAFO 150 years ago
because you simply couldn't put, you couldn't bring in that much food stuff and haul out that
much manure. You simply couldn't do it 150 years ago because you couldn't do it with draft power.
It was too, transportation was too expensive and too difficult, too arduous and laborious.
But when petroleum came along and transportation was extremely cheap, then all of these historic
kind of boundaries could be broken and you could just, and you could do pretty much anything you
wanted to. So you have a pocket full of antibiotics and the truck is idling on the porch and suddenly
all these historic parameters, these historic norms, you know, could be punched through.
We didn't have to do only what we could move with draft power. We didn't have to do only what we
could shovel or move. And then as we did that, the capacity to take that paradigm on down the road
did indeed occur. And Joel Arthur Barker, who wrote the book Paradigms, said that every paradigm
eventually exceeds its point of efficiency. And that's of course exactly where we are now
as this paradigm of concentrated animals, segregated food systems, monospeciation,
chemical fertilization, and now of course, you know, genetically modified organisms and whatever.
These have now, you know, continued to accelerate. And so now suddenly in the last 30 years,
we have this burgeoning problem with, for example, food allergies. You know, when I was growing up,
the phrase food allergies didn't even exist. I mean, nobody said anything. You could have a potluck
or a get-together. Nobody had to worry about gluten or peanuts or whatever. And now, you know,
you can't have a get-together without accommodating half a dozen special food allergy requests.
Then you have, you know, E. coli, salmonella, campylobacter, listeria, bovine, spongiform,
encephalopathy. You know, all of these things have come in the last 30 years as that supposedly
progressive and scientific paradigm has exceeded its point of efficiency. And nature is now batting
last. And we're seeing it, of course, in consequences, as you mentioned, you know, in
bags full of medications and social, emotional problems from rage to depression to
all sorts of things that, of course, first responders deal with on a daily basis. For sure,
first responders are on the cutting edge of society's fringes. And it's society's fringes
where you see the fabric, the matrix of a civilization, you see them beginning to crumble.
And so first responders have a very unique and special look into the mortar that's cracking
on the bastions of civilization. It's quite profound.
Yeah, that's a very good way of looking at it. I never even thought about that. But we certainly,
I think to me, it's just so blatant that the philosophy we have in our health care at the
moment just does not work. It's not like someone has blood pressure medicine for six months, and
then they come up to you one day like, God, that medicine works so well. My blood pressure is
perfect now. I don't have to take any more medicine. I don't have to take any more medicine.
My blood pressure is perfect now. I don't have to take it anymore. That never happens. They're on
that medication the rest of their life. They're on the diabetes medication, the cholesterol
medication. And I see my blood work from the way I eat. And you see some of these great
documentaries, Food Inc. and Forks Over Knives and Fat Sick and Nearly Dead. And you see these
people healed just by returning and eating the way they were supposed to eat 100 years ago.
And it's that simple. And yet, this lie is so ingrained in people's psyche that when you
talk to them like that, you get looked at like you just pooped in their cornflakes. And it's
incredible that they've managed to pull that off in such a short time.
Well, it certainly is. And then you have the fire station, the rescue squad. Again, everybody's
hanging around there. So they've got vending machines with nabs and soda and all this in.
I mean, it's just a disaster waiting to happen. And so, yes, the whole food, the body food
connection is profoundly inarguable today. And everywhere I go, I run into people that have
healed their children from autism, healed themselves from cancers, all sorts of things,
simply by fundamentally changing diet. The human experience was not designed to be
propped up to have crutches of pharmaceuticals. The person that needs this stuff should be an
anomaly, not the norm. And the fact that it is becoming such a norm is indicative that something
is greatly out of whack. Absolutely. I know one of the statistics that blew me away was,
and I didn't realize this until somewhat recently, that the GI tract is actually 80% of our immune
system. So obviously, whatever you put in your mouth that travels through that tube and comes
out your other end is going to affect you positively or negatively. And as you mentioned with
the bacteria in there, it's going to kill them and destroy everything, or it's going to get them to
bloom and thrive in the right way, not in an imbalanced way like C. diff or something like that.
Yes. Well, we are studying now a lot of the whole microbiome thing. And each of us has three trillion,
and each of us has three trillion beings, critters, in our digestive tract. Three trillion.
That's a pretty big community. And when you think about it, there's a lot of intricacy there too.
And they have to build highways and have fire stations and rescue squads and hospitals and
schools and go to the Lions Club and whatever. They're doing all sorts of stuff down there.
And that's a very complex community to maintain. And if we put toxins into it, if we put foreign
material into that community, it's going to upset that community just like polluted water in a
community or corrupt politicians or whatever. You throw corruption in a community, and you're
going to be in disarray. And that's the same thing in this bacterial microbial community of
three trillion members in our gut. We don't see it, but it's nonetheless there and completely
dependent on what we're giving it every day. Right. And is that, am I correct in understanding
that down the line of GMOs, by messing with the genetic structure of these basically foreign
objects, that the body is now not able to recognize them? These ancient, ancient bacteria are not
able to recognize these particles that are coming in and that's what's causing the problems? Or am
I off there? No, you're in the ballpark. And I'm not a scientist in that regard, so I can't give you
all the Latin ins and outs of this thing, but yes, you're exactly right. The GMO studies that have
been done where they actually feed them the way you and I would eat and not in some special contrived
prejudicial study that Monsanto sets up, the truth, I mean, I'll give you an example. When
Monsanto was looking at GMO potatoes, for example, they specifically chose geriatric rats. This is
all in Jeffrey Smith's book, Seeds of Deception. It's a great book. Anybody that wants to, you know,
get a kind of layman's look at GMOs. And so they got geriatric rats and fed them. Well, they didn't
see any difference in the GMOs versus the non-GMOs. But when the same experiment was repeated in
Scotland, but instead of being completely repeated, they repeated everything except,
except they used juvenile rats instead of geriatric rats. Well, then suddenly they had all
sorts of problems. They had organ, you know, organ malfunction. They had sociopathy, had mental,
you know, mental breakdown, just, you know, all sorts of problems. Just by changing the experiment
from geriatric rats who already, you know, had their routines and their personalities and their
organs and whatever, you know, there's no, you know, geriatrics, they don't change much. They've
already lived their life and it's done. You don't see the big differences. But in the young ones,
where the metabolism is faster and they're still developing, they saw, you know, huge, huge
differences. And so, you know, these kinds of studies have been now done all over the world.
And the only people who can't see them, of course, are the people who are, you know,
who are in agreement with the basic idea that life is fundamentally mechanical. And, you know,
that's where it comes down. You know, the industrial mindset suggests that life is
fundamentally mechanical and we can tweak and move and adjust this DNA and that DNA and throw
chemicals on the soil and whatever. Whereas many of us believe that life is fundamentally
not mechanical but biological. And there's a huge difference between biology and mechanics.
One of the big differences is that living things are spontaneous. They kind of think. They don't
just follow a routine. They often, you know, kind of have a mind of their own. But the main thing is
that biological things can heal. Mechanical things can't. If a bearing goes out in your
front wheel of your truck, you know, it's not going to get better by rest or by,
you know, praying over or whatever. It's only going to get better if you take it out and replace it.
But, you know, biological things can heal. They can be in rough shape and you can change the diet.
You can change the support. You can have a relationship that's gone south and you can
ask for forgiveness and apologize and the relationship can be healed. I mean, this
fundamental idea that biological systems can heal is the great hope, is the great hope that we have.
And it's a wonderful thing compared to mechanics. But the entire industrial food system that, you
know, that you can live on, on Twinkies and Cocoa Puffs and Mountain Dew is predicated on a, on the
idea that your body and my body and life is fundamentally mechanical and it doesn't really
matter. It doesn't really matter what biology goes in. Yeah, it's very scary. I think one of
the other fundamental things that we're seeing in the last few generations now is it seems like
if you remove the desire to have all the money, all the power and just disseminate it back to the
whole country, we would eliminate a lot of those problems as well. And you see that with the mega
farms now, you know, one or two farm companies that want to provide all the food to the entire
country or the world for that matter. I mean, of course, it's going to just fundamentally fall
apart instead of having all these small farms being supported by their local communities and
the food traveling, you know, as I know your policy is less than four hours. And then that way it's
not being packaged, it's not being frozen or irradiated or any of those things. You go to
your local farmer, you pick up your food and then you bring it home. Yeah, well, there are a lot of
aspects to the global food matrix. As you mentioned, the first one being opaqueness. I mean,
you just can't follow that chain of custody. And so you don't know what is going on in that shrimp
farm in Thailand that's showing up at your Applebee's restaurant. And so when you start eating
more local, you actually have a shorter chain of custody from farm to farm to plate. And the
shorter chain of custody allows you to have more accountability because there's more transparency
in that shorter chain of custody. And I think I think another thing that's really powerful
is that when you have a local centric food system, you actually increase a capacity for resilience
and security in the food system. When you're dependent on a Costco warehouse a thousand miles
away, that ultimately is a fairly fragile system. I mean, you have to assume that trucks can run on
time, that computers work, that the merchant marine gets their stuff hauled to the dock on time.
A lot of things have to work smoothly in that situation. But when you have a local centric
system where you know your farmer or you're very, very close, you can actually see what's on
inventory. You know where it is. You can walk there if you had to. The point is that there's a
tremendous amount of resiliency and forgiveness built into the system when you have a local
centric system, when you have a proximity between producer and consumer as opposed to long distance.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that another huge lie really or misunderstanding, I guess,
would be a more gentle way of saying it, is that the pesticide covered foreign fruit and vegetables,
for example, that we find in our shelves in the local supermarket are cheaper than organic. And
obviously they are if you buy the organic in the same shop or in Whole Foods. But if you just go
to your local farmers market, it's cheaper. I mean, I have bags and bags full of produce that I buy
once a week from my local farm. And I mean, literally, probably four or five of those cloth
grocery bags is for about $50. There's no way in hell you'd be able to buy that much food.
But again, that simple, simple message doesn't get out there. And if you remove the middleman
and the price of the gas and the taxes and all the other skimming that goes on between them and you,
then all of a sudden it's cheaper and they still make their money and you still get your food.
Yes. Well, that's exactly right. And you're mentioning this makes me
think about just the cost of processing and packaging and all that. The way to get
affordable food is to get Whole Foods, just raw foods, and then use your own kitchen to prepare,
package, preserve the food. I was in New York City a couple of years ago and we went down to
the green market there on Union Square, arguably the most expensive farmers market in the most
expensive city of the world. And I asked my hostess, could you show me the most expensive
potato in this market? She said, oh, I know just the guy. So we shoulder our way through the crowd,
come up to this farmer with his stand and he's got like a credenza, a bunch of little cubbies
with all these potatoes. And he has about 20 different varieties, orange ones, red ones,
blue ones, long ones, skinny ones, round ones, whatever. And so I looked and I found the most
expensive one. It was a blue Peruvian heirloom fingerling potato for a dollar 99 a pound,
which is a little bit pricey for potatoes. But all around that green market are supermarkets
with 120 feet of fluorescent lighted tile floor with shelves full of potato chips for 2.99 a pound,
way, way more expensive than those little potatoes. So when I say, get in your kitchen,
I don't mean go back to washboards, hoop skirts, and hearth cooking as romantic as that may sound
to somebody that's never done it. We've never techno gadgetized our kitchen as comfortably as
we have today with hot and cold running water, refrigerators, freezers, flickable button stoves,
slow cookers, Tom's bake, Cuisinart, fry babies, bread makers, ice cream makers, Tupperware.
Grandma would have given her IT for all this stuff. And so we've never been able to more
efficiently or sanitarily or simply actually prepare food. And yet the average American is
far more interested and knowledgeable about the latest dysfunction in the Kardashian household
than they are what's going to become flesh of their flesh and bone of their bones at six o'clock.
And when that's the case, those shortcuts that we take for our own food and nutrition,
our own body's well-being, those shortcuts are going to come back to haunt us. And of course,
that's exactly what we see.
Yeah. And again, you touched with the packaging. I mean, if you look at a grocery cart full of food,
by the time you empty all of those food items out of whatever surrounding them, you end up with
two garbage bags full of crap that you've got to get rid of now somewhere. Whereas if you are
taking home cloth bags full of vegetables, you have zero packaging.
Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Yeah. Well, I mean, just for canning,
I mean, if you bought a bushel basket full of green beans and just canned them, we get an
argument about canning or not, but let's just assume that. I mean, put them in glass jars.
There's virtually no waste except you're probably going to throw away the little lid.
But the comparison in the amount of packaging material for landfills and for petroleum use and
just the sheer volume of that is amazing.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it would make such a huge difference on the, I think everyone's community,
I mean, because some people might not have that giant bird-filled mountain in their
local area yet, but if you go to any larger urban area, I mean, they have those things
at the side of the freeways and it's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So something has to
stop there too. Yeah. Uh-huh. That's right. So I'm going to transition now a little bit to
Polyface. Well, first I had a question about Polyface. Where did you come up with the name?
Well, poly of course is the Greek, the Latin prefix for many and so we knew that we wanted to do a lot
of different things. So we decided that we would be Polyface, the farm of many faces.
Right. And I know you have several different species of livestock on there.
The transient pastures that you use in pretty much all your animals, can you describe that?
Because I think that's fascinating to me. I watched your TEDx talk and I'm sure you'll talk
about it now, but the difference in the maturity of the grasses and how that ultimately affects
the animals themselves. Okay. So grass grows in an S-curve, a similar way to the grass.
It starts slow, then grows real fast, and then goes into senescence and slows down. And so
the idea, the reason that there are so many herbivores around the planet is to prune that
grass as it moves towards senescence, to prune it back to pre-adolescent stage so it can go through
another vibrant, vigorous, you know, plant-based, you know, plant-based, you know,
green-growth stage, which of course also means that it's going to inhale
carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, break off the carbon, leave it in the soil,
and exhale the oxygen so you and I can breathe. So we don't, so when we look at, you know,
at nature, at the template of nature, what we see are animals moving. In fact, we see large
herds of animals moving. But we don't have those large herds anymore. We don't have the wolves.
We don't have fire. So, you know, and an 8 million head herd of bison running down through your,
you know, your Starbucks and the elementary school might not be a really good thing.
What we do have now is electric fencing, which acts as a steering mechanism, a steering wheel,
a brake, and an accelerator on that four-legged pruner. So we can now steer the animals,
steer the animals around the pasture so that we perfectly manage the meeting, the timing of that
meeting between plant and animal so that they work in symbiosis rather than competitively.
So the cows move every day at four o'clock to a new paddock that's been allowed to rest for,
you know, two or three months so the grass is long. And we mob them in there real, you know,
at high density so they look like a mob of wild herbivores. And then the animals are
going to rest for a few months. And then tomorrow at four o'clock they'll move on to the next
paddock. And so any one area will only have a cow on it, you know, maybe three or four times in a
year. Then after the herd moves along, following about four days behind are the egg mobiles.
These are portable hen houses, chicken houses with layers who free range out from those hen
houses, scratch through the cow patties, eat out the fly larva, sanitize the paddock, turn the
grasshoppers and crickets into eggs, and work symbiotically with the herbivores just like,
you know, the birds in nature. So, you know, these are systems that we use. You know, pigs are
out in pig pastures with kind of silvo pastures, widely spaced trees and grasses. And again,
they get moved not every day, but every five to 12 days, they get moved to a new paddock. And
those we touch three times a year, acorn glens in the forest for the pigs, those get touched
once or twice a year, they're more extensive and not quite as intensive.
So yeah, everything is out and moving along.
So it's moving free range as it's designed to versus the factory meats that are stressed
and side by side and having to be medicated just to basically a chemical life support to less
slaughtered?
Yes, well, yeah, we don't have to use the antibiotics and the grubicides, the parasiticides
and all those things that the industry uses. Because we're actually using the different
the different animals in in symbiosis in relational symbiosis to each other. And,
you know, there's nothing as exciting as a confused pathogen. And in our industrial system,
everything is about monospeciation, you know, whether it's cherry trees or wheat fields or,
you know, Tyson chicken farm, the whole idea is to just grow one thing and grow it very densely
and grow it over and over and over again. Well, all three of those things, one thing densely and
over and over, nature doesn't do any of that stuff. Nature is always about multiple things.
And, and seasonal, you know, seasonal differences, different kinds of vegetation,
different times of the season. And, and actually, disturbance events, you know, whether it's fire
or a big herd moving through big flock of birds, you know, destroying an area for a day. But nature
is all about, you know, change up, change up. And of course, industry is all about same keep it the
same, keep it the same, keep it the same, keep it the same. Nature is all about spontaneity and
dynamics. And so on our farm, we, you know, we build ponds, we have a lot of tree peninsulas,
you know, forestal zones to stimulate wildlife. And of course, the pastor, so you have a lot of
this edge effect, you know, open land, forest land, riparian, the ponds we can use for irrigation in a
drought. Water is gravity fed through a matrix of six miles of, of, of water line water pipes, we have,
you know, fresh gravity, pressure, high pressure, gravity fed water on the whole place. So, you know,
it's not like we sit around here and do nothing. We just try to strategically interact with the
landscape in a way that builds resilience and redemptive capacity into the landscape.
Absolutely. I mean, like I said, I've seen the incredible farm that you have now and to say that
you went originally from a very barren landscape, that model surely would be of great interest to
areas that do have more drought, whether it's domestic or international for, you know, potentially
growing crops and feeding people there too. Yes, that's right. That's right. Yeah, that would be
incredible. So the other question I'm sure that everyone's listening to now is I'm pretty sure
they're sold as I was when I first heard you talk a long time ago. You know, side by side, there's
absolutely no question. You know, one, one animal is inhumanely raised and obviously the meat is
going to be very, very unhealthy. And we're seeing that with the ill health of our nation.
And then you've got the humanely raised that you're part of that group. So what are good
resources for people to find a farm like yours in their local area?
Well, fortunately, there are farms that are doing a good job, virtually in every community.
You know, there's the Weston A. Price Foundation, they do the Smart Shoppers Guide, there are every
state has, you know, some sort of sustainable ag, ecological agriculture, you know, network support
group in it. Find out, you know, who that is and check with that outfit. You know, check with your
CrossFit gym or wellness centers, naturopath, acupuncturists, often, you know, anybody in that
alternative wellness community will be plugged into, you know, the wellness food. The point is
that this is a non front page undercurrent, you know, we are a, we are an alternative of a gorilla,
a gorilla tribe, if you will. And so we're everywhere. But you have to find us, you have
to seek us out. And, and as soon as you start seeking farmers like ours out, you know, you will
you will find us. I mean, there's for pastured livestock, there's eatwild.com, which is the
number one national website for for pasture based livestock. It's not a certification thing. It's
just a, you know, it's just a place where farmers who do this can can register. So you know, there's
no substitute for knowing your farmer know your food, go visit the farm. If the farmer won't let
you visit, then, you know, don't go there. We have a 24 7365 open door policy here. Anyone can come
from anywhere anytime to see anything unannounced. That's our commitment to the transparency. And so
you just have to appreciate, you just have to understand that this is a tribe. So if you're,
if you're seeking that alternative wellness, you know, seek out the alternative wellness community
in your community, and you'll find a vibrant support network for these folks. The Nutritional
Therapy Association, nutritional therapists, they're a national network, there are several
several groups that do nutritional therapy, they're plugged in to this wellness community.
So yeah, it's there. You just have to, you just have to find it.
Fantastic. You mentioned the word certification, and just kind of jarred something else that I've
been meaning to ask you. So you are known for preparing your your chickens and I was the one
I've seen outside in the fresh air in the pasture. I know that's frowned upon by the governing
agencies that be so how's that battle coming on? Are they starting the people starting to push now
for deregulation of some of that stuff? Oh, not really. It's, it's, it's generally speaking,
it's getting worse and worse. What what we are seeing, I think, is a little more ability for
small producers to, you know, to comply with licensing, there does seem to be some,
you know, some give in the regulatory world to allow smaller outfits to comply cheaper, easier.
And, you know, and this is as it should be there. Their scale scale does make a difference. It does
make a difference whether you're, you know, making 10 pounds of cheese or 10,000 pounds of cheese.
And, and so this this whole compliance thing is a big deal.
There are definitely efforts underway to circumvent the compliance, which we think is great.
You know, we are big believers in the right of private contract is guaranteed by the Bill of
Rights. But we haven't been following the Bill of Rights for a very, very long time. And the right
of private contract says essentially, if you and I want to do business together, it's none of the
government's business if we want to do a private contract between each other, I want to buy from
you or you want to sell to me or whatever. But we have this, this big brother, you know,
this big brother bureaucracy that points its nose and gets in the way of innovative embryonic
solutions to our food system. And that then arbitrarily makes the price of alternative food
more expensive than it should be. And these are all, you know, these are all big issues that are
all part of the equation and part of our context. And the way to make progress fastest on this front
is for more and more and more people to take it upon themselves to find integrity food,
patronize it, and realize that we are changing our landscape one bite at a time. Whatever we have
on the landscape, the health of our nation, the health of our farms, health of our soil,
all of that today is a physical manifestation of the compounded decisions that everybody's been
making for the last X number of years. Where we will be in the future, in 20 years, 30 years, 40
years, will also be a physical manifestation of the decisions we make between now and then. So at
the end of the day, my question is, as a result of my decisions this week, have I helped, have I,
you know, the old parable of the dog, which dog will survive, which dog will thrive, will the one
you feed? So I'm asking, which dog are you feeding? Are you feeding the Monsanto dog, the dog of
obesity, health, and of ill health, erosion, abuse, and violence toward the ecology, toward the
biological world, or are you feeding the dog toward wellness, resilience, forgiveness, and healing?
And 20 years down the road, we'll know which dog we fed.
Yes, yes we will. It's interesting, I just found a quote the other day, Winston Churchill,
actually said, healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have. Now following this
most recent election process that we've had, I think it's clearer now than ever, and I'm not
saying versus left or right, I'm just saying the entire process from beginning to end,
that we do need to vote with our dollar, we do need to vote with our individual voice,
because if we put all our faith into whoever they place at the top of the pyramid, which should
really be upside down anyway, then we're at their mercy, but if we actually start making decisions
and voting, like you said, with our feet, then we are going to change this world.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, now the other thing I wanted to just touch on is, obviously a lot of people listening to this
are going to be in some sort of urban or suburban area. Now I looked into my homeowners association
rules and I'm not allowed to have chickens or anything. I'm hoping that that's going to change,
but do you have any tips on someone that just wants to take a corner of their garden and start
a very, very small scale vegetable patch and or chicken coop type deal?
Well, yeah, again, I think the more people do this, you know, the old victory gardens of World War II,
the more people that do this, the more awareness there is, the more interest there is.
It just, you know, it just moves the conversation forward and I would say the freedom forward
as more and more people come on board. So, yes, I'm a huge believer in doing something for yourself.
And if for no other reason than to just dabble your toe into the awesomeness and the mystery
and the magic of life. And I think for children, gardens are amazingly therapeutic, self-affirming.
I mean, the self-affirmation that comes from being able to plant a tomato seed and then,
you know, eat, pull a tomato off and watch the juice run down your elbows as you eat that tomato,
that is such a more powerful and profound human affirmation than being the top point skitter
on Angry Birds. I think so too.
Yeah. So, I think they have a lot to offer and wonderfully, we now have a lot of infrastructure
that enables us to do this more efficiently and easier. You know, we have these
PVC pipes with, you know, side pockets in them where you pack them full of compost, you pack your
plant in there and you drip on top and the plants grow out the sides of them, barrels
windows, the windows, the windows, the windows, the windows, the windows, the windows, the
like this. We have, you know, the patio gardens, the stackable pots where you can, you know,
beehives on your, on your roof, the house roof. Solariums, all these wonderful solarium kits,
stick them on the south side of your house and you can grow, you know, we're, you know, we eat,
we eat mess with mix and lettuce, you know, year round from our solarium on the side of our house.
Our house was built in 1790. So, if we can do it on our house, you can certainly do it on yours.
And I think that those kinds of participa, visceral participatory actions
move our collective psyche and move our collective understanding of this anchoring to our ecological
umbilical. I think it moves it to a place of humility rather than hubris. And I think a place
of humility is a place for all of us to start. Absolutely. Yeah. I think the appreciation when
you open the door, the appreciation of where you are is huge. I live in central Florida and people
get bogged down in their everyday lives. And I'd say to my little boy, just zoom out for a second.
We live in the state where most people will save up to come visit for a week. And this is your home.
This is where you live. Yeah. So, you know, to appreciate what's around you. And I'm right next
to what's called an Ocala National Forest and the Florida Greenway. So, we have amazing nature
running around. In fact, if my homeowners does stay inflexible, I probably will transition because
this is a horse farm community originally. So, there is a lot of land and there are, you know,
some mini farms that you can get for somewhat decent amount. But I think you're... Yeah. Well,
those HOA things are just... Oh, man, don't even get me started on those things. They're just
frustrating. And I'll tell you, what they do, what they show is not only a profound, whatever,
arrogance toward, you know, toward our dependency on nature, but I think they indicate a condescending
attitude toward farming, actually. And, you know, why is it that growing a rose bush is
perfectly acceptable, but a tomato plant is unacceptable? The only difference is, you know,
one's edible and one's just ornamental. But one smacks of garden shows, the other smacks of
farmers. And I think that as a culture, we have denigrated farming to the point where most farmers
are kind of apologetic about being farmers. Well, you know, I guess I didn't have enough brains to
be an engineer or a doctor, so, you know, I just became a farmer. And we've got this kind of universal
mindset that dumb people farm and smart people don't. And I think that that's a very, very dangerous
place to be when the most precious assets of any culture are air, soil, and water, and farmers are
our first responders to air, soil, and water, and we've condescended to them as if they don't really
matter. And that is a very dangerous place for civilization to be.
Yeah, well, especially as you said, I mean, they're not doctors, but they are. We've come full circle
and yeah, they provide the very medicine that we need. And I think that there's a phrase I love is
in America and England and other Western countries, we're malnourished and overfed, which sounds like
a ridiculous statement, but it's true that the calories that we consume are ungodly, yet the
nutrition on the plate is almost non-existent. That's right. That's right. It's empty. It's empty
calories with no nutrition to go with them. That's correct. Yeah. Well, I would love I mean, I
honestly think there is a movement that's happening in the United States, and I think that's
a movement. There's a couple of phrases I keep hearing now. There's definitely a paradigm shift
going on. I think people are finally getting sick and tired of being sick and tired,
being worked into the ground, not sleeping properly, overmedicated. And then the word that
comes up a lot is when you use it yourself is that tribe. And I'm going to have Sebastian Junger on
the podcast next month. And his book, Tribe is phenomenal. And as a fireman, I've touched on this
and a couple of other interviews. That's what's missing in society. And I think he absolutely hit
the nail on the head. And I think when you're connected to your community again, and obviously
through your farms, you're recreating that tribe that people pride in. That's the fundamental soul
of the human species. Yes. Yes. That will be an exciting program. That'll be great. Good for you.
Yeah, I can't wait for that. Well, this is an exciting program, too, though. I mean, I was
scrambling because it came together so quickly. But everyone listening to you, we don't... I mean,
you said it yourself, this umpteen scientists that you could interview. But how many farmers do you
get to, you know, actual conscious farmers that truly grow the way it's supposed to be grown and
raise livestock the way it's supposed to be raised and educate our generation? I mean, you know,
pretty much yours and mine and everyone younger than us of what it's supposed to be like, because
we were all told something different. And I even growing up on my farm, it was a hybrid of the old
style and the industrial style. And my father was a vet. So he was, you know, healing animals the
whole time. But even he believed a lot of the things that we were told. So I think this shift
really is going to happen. But I think people need to take a look in the mirror and be brave,
make a courageous decision and say, I'm going to, you know, it's OK to change your mind. It's OK
to say, you know what, you got me. Congratulations, you juke me. And, you know, I have these ailments
now. But today is the day I turn around and say enough is enough. I'm investing in my health.
And that example you use, I've heard you in other interviews, people say they can't afford to eat
healthy. And then you point out all the material items that we have in our homes that we quote,
unquote, can't live without. It's time to rethink about that. Right, right. That's right. There's
plenty of money in the system. What's not there is the conviction to live by value. And that's
the next hurdle. Live by value and just do it. So, yeah, that's good.
14
Absolutely. OK, well, I'm going to wrap up with a couple of short questions and then I will let
you go because I know you had an interview before this and I'm sure you probably got a bunch of
people racked up. So obviously you've written several books yourself. Folks, this ain't normal
is the one that I've got coming to me. As far as you as a reader, is there a book and or a movie
that you recommend? 15
16 Well, the movie, I mean, Food Inc. is as powerful as they get. It's a little bit of a
downer. As long as you come out of there realizing there are farmers like me to go patronize, it's
good. But it's a little bit of a downer. We like Fresh better. There's a documentary out
named Fresh. We're in that one too, but it's a much more upbeat, can-do type of movie.
16
17 Books. Well, you know, I tend to gravitate toward farming books.
18 But, you know, it doesn't get any better than
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America. You know, Wendell Berry is iconic in the sustainable ag
movement and certainly articulates a lot of the issues very well. He's wonderful to read and
profound. So if somebody wants to just, I mean, besides my book, to look at these issues,
Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America is probably as good as they get.
19 Okay. Yeah, I have seen Fresh as well. That was a very well-made film too.
And then one more question. When you need to laugh, when you've had a bad day or you just had enough
and you need to laugh, what do you do? Where do you go? Who do you hang out with?
20 Oh, well, I enjoy being at home. I mean, I travel a lot. So
when I want to get away, I get home. So I enjoy being at home. What I do for enjoyment is, you
know, I read and, you know, my wife and I are right now are going through Downton Abbey. That's just
a wonderful series. We don't have a TV. So, you know, we get a DVD of a series if we like it.
But we have a lot of laughter on the farm. We've got a lot of people here. Whenever there's a lot
of people and they enjoy each other, there's a lot of laughter just in the shenanigans of every day's
ordinary activity. Last evening, I'll tell you this, yesterday afternoon, those people who know
me and have read after me know that I do not have great carpenter skill. And but I get along, but
just, you know, it's kind of slap, slap dab together, you know. And so yesterday afternoon,
I was helping my 13 year old grandson put together his duck, duck pin in for the winter for in one of
the hoop houses. And I've done, you know, we've done this every year for like three or four years.
He's had his ducks and we just make like a 12 foot by, you know, by 18 foot, he's only got 40 ducks.
So not like that, that'd be real big. So we kind of make this level, this little plastic bird netting
pin inside the hoop house. So the, the length, the hens, the chickens are outside and this little pin
of ducks is inside. So it's a, you know, it's an enclosure within the enclosure. And we've used the
same, we use the same materials every year. Okay. So we're out there and for some reason, last year,
the boards got misplaced. Somebody put them away. We didn't have, so we had to start a fresh,
I was going to make this thing a little bit simpler. So, so we did. And we are, we got done
and Travis, he's 13, he just turned 13. He's standing there. He's looking at this. He says,
well, grandpa, that's a pretty good job. It just looks like a two year old built
about last till I split. So, so that's a, that's, that's humor.
Yeah. The kids, kids say some funny stuff. I remember it's not quite the same genre,
but I remember when my son was probably only five and he came out of the shower holding his,
holding his manhood and looks at me and goes, daddy, look, it's almost as big as yours now.
I said, thanks. Thanks a lot. I, but yeah, that keeps me laughing every day too. And I think
that's, that's another thing that we're missing. We should be laughing a lot more.
Oh, very good. All right. So just to finish up then, where can people find you just before,
before we hang up so they know where to look? Yeah. Yeah. Poly face farms is our website.
That's all one word P O L Y F A C E farms. If you get poly about P O L Y F in there,
it'll pop right up. And it's a website. We have all sorts of links. We have resources,
you know, lots, lots of, lots of information there, places where I'll be speaking,
all those kinds of things. We have a gift shop, you know, if you want to wear a shirt that says,
you know, grass fed or, or a lunatic farmer or whatever, you know, we have that as well.
So yeah, check that out. Lots of information there. And that's poly face farms.com.
Fantastic. All right. Well, thank you so much for talking to us today. I'm sure that there's
a huge amount of people out there that are going to have their minds blown by, by this talk.
And I would love if, if it's okay with you in the future, down the line sometime to come up to
the farm and actually maybe shoot an interview on video, follow up. Absolutely. We'd love,
we'd love to have you. Love to have you.