#479 - Joel Salatin

[0] Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

[1] The Joe Rogan Experience.

[2] Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

[3] A sure sign, sir, that we live in a mad, mad world is when a person has sane ideas and he comes across as a revolutionary.

[4] And I have Joel Salton, for folks who don't know, he is an American farmer, a lecturer, you're an author, and your approach to farming is so natural.

[5] and so normal and so in my opinion non -controversial that it's it's quite fascinating that in this day and age with this mad mad world of factory farming and pumping these animals full of hormones and chemicals and antibiotics that your approach has sort of revolutionized a lot of the ideas that people have about farming.

[6] I think it's a real sign that there's something wrong with us.

[7] When I watch your methods and I've seen your videos and I've heard you talk on it, it seems like no nonsense.

[8] It seems like it seems normal.

[9] It seems like common sense.

[10] It seems like old knowledge.

[11] But yet you're looked at as some sort of a wild man out there.

[12] A lunatic.

[13] You're a lunatic.

[14] You're nice to your animals.

[15] Yeah, we are.

[16] I mean, you know, people say, oh, you're just so clever, you know, how do you come up with this?

[17] And my response is that this is not new, you know.

[18] I mean, take take just for example, you know, our culture, right, I mean, our experts, you know, our U .S. duh, and our U .S. duh, our experts.

[19] Yeah.

[20] You know, they don't think that animals are supposed to move.

[21] I mean, but animals are supposed to move.

[22] I mean, that's like a fundamental natural pattern.

[23] And so if you posit, oh, animals are supposed to move, well, then a whole series of things happen, you know, from, you know, control mechanisms, shelter, you know, water delivery systems, all sorts of things happen to happen.

[24] If you just posit something as intuitively simple as on our farm, animals are going to move.

[25] it's amazing so you know if animals are going to move you have to keep them home you have to be able to move them you know in the right place at the right time so then you have to have portable control mechanisms or you got to keep them you know comfortable so then you have portable shade mechanisms and uh you got to give them water so we've got to be able to have portable water and um and so all these things necessarily flow from just something as basic as animals move.

[26] Find it fascinating.

[27] It is fascinating because most people have, they've gone the opposite way with it.

[28] What they've said is we don't want animals to move, so let's contain them.

[29] Right.

[30] Right.

[31] I mean, so the industrial system is predicated on, you know, we lock all these animals up in a, you know, in a confinement facility.

[32] You know, 15 ,000 chickens in a house, you know, nine laying hens in a 16 by 22 inch cubicle.

[33] I mean, there's not enough room even to sit down.

[34] Cattle in feed lots, pigs in, you know, confinement houses.

[35] And we do the same thing kind of in our plants.

[36] I mean, that's the, you know, the next thing then is in nature, there are no monocultures.

[37] There are no monospecies.

[38] anywhere you go in nature, no matter where you'd hike, there's going to be at least two species.

[39] You're going to encounter multiple things.

[40] In fact, you're going to counter animals and plants in proximity.

[41] Amazing!

[42] You know, it's not going to be fields of animalless wheat or fields of animalless strawberries.

[43] And then over here, the animals can find in a little itty -bitty building, stinking up the neighborhood.

[44] Instead, in nature, these things are actually proximate, and they're actually symbiotic.

[45] I mean, they actually have a lot of synergistic functions to each other.

[46] I found it fascinating that when you raise your pigs, you call them wood -finished, forest -finished pigs?

[47] Yeah, we call them a pasture -finished or acorn glens.

[48] We call them glens, you know, for the old lepros.

[49] You know, lurking in the woods and the forest.

[50] It just has a nice ring to it.

[51] But, yeah, we use electric fence.

[52] In other words, this is not, you know, Luddite.

[53] This is not anti -technology stuff.

[54] What we're doing is using pigs.

[55] All pigs have four -wheel drive, and they like to disturb places.

[56] I mean, you know, they have a great big plow on the end of their face.

[57] called a nose.

[58] And so all we're doing is taking the way buffalo and fire and predators used to move across the landscape with, you know, with periodic disturbance.

[59] We don't have buffalo anymore.

[60] We don't have the fire.

[61] We don't even have the wolves much.

[62] And so how do we create this disturbance?

[63] You know, this is a very important ecological principle that, um, that living organisms have to be disturbed in order to have succession to another level.

[64] You know, whether it's, you know, the pain that comes from exercise, you know, if you want to, if you want to be physically fit, you got to disturb your body.

[65] You got to get up off a couch potato.

[66] And ecology is the same way.

[67] It needs to be disturbed.

[68] And so, you know, actually the ecology is used to having a lot of, you know, disturbance factors on it.

[69] Disturbance and then rest.

[70] Disturbance and then rest.

[71] And so we use high -tech electric fencing to be able to move these pigs around in these forest glens from one little section to another in a kind of rapid rotation so that we have very intense disturbance and then a long period of rest.

[72] Intense disturbance, a long period of rest.

[73] And what that does is the pigs then go in and they till, they eat bugs that would affect the trees, they root out starchy, weedy, you know, species, things like that, and eat a lot of goodies.

[74] You know, they get fresh air, they get exercise, sunshine, and are able to fully express their pigness.

[75] And what you end up with then is an incredibly nutrient -dense product as opposed to a white meat flabby product like out of the industry.

[76] And the other thing is that you now have a whole new bunch of species that have germinated and sprouted in this disturbed environment, this disturbed soil.

[77] And you actually capture more solar energy than you would with just leaves and sterile forest bottom.

[78] So the actual product, the pig itself, would be more like a wild pig then.

[79] Yeah, that's exactly right.

[80] In fact, we supply about 50 restaurants, and we've had chefs do displacement tests where they'll get like industry pork and our pork and using their very carefully calibrated scales, they can make, you know, two blocks of meat that are exactly the same weight, put them in a pan of water, measure the displacement.

[81] and our pork displaces less water per pound than the industrial pork.

[82] What does that mean?

[83] Well, what it means is that the tissue is stronger.

[84] In other words, there is more weight per cubic inch, which means it's better formed.

[85] Why would that?

[86] We call that muscle tone.

[87] Oh, I see, I see.

[88] So they're denser.

[89] Fat, fat, and, you know, flab, if we can say, flab is a lot more volume per pound.

[90] Oh, I see.

[91] If you jump in a swimming pool and you're, you know, really muscle -toned, sometimes you have trouble floating.

[92] But if you're a, you know, fat person, you know, you can float in that water like a blimp all day, you know, it just works fine.

[93] And so, you know, density, muscle tone and density can be measured with a displacement test.

[94] That's fascinating.

[95] So this much more nutrient dense.

[96] Absolutely.

[97] Is it preferred by these chefs to flavor -wise?

[98] Absolutely.

[99] I mean, that's why they get it.

[100] And the result is that you actually get more nutrition per pound because it's, You know, it's denser.

[101] I smoked a wild ham for the first time this past weekend.

[102] Cool, cool.

[103] And it was fascinating how much different it tasted than a regular ham.

[104] So your, your hams would be similar to that.

[105] Right, that's right.

[106] Darker meat.

[107] Darker, yeah.

[108] You know, when the industry says pork, you know, remember they had the campaign for, what, 10 years, pork the other white meat?

[109] I think now it's, what's the new?

[110] They abandon that slogan now it's something like.

[111] you know get with it or something like that so be inspired be inspired be inspired by an animal that lives in a box how what yeah so so so crazy is that yeah so you know my father -in -law he's in his 80s now and you know they used to raise hogs on their farm and it's interesting they built there they had a kind of a shed shelter where the pigs would go in and eat like soured milk and whey and and leftovers from, they milked about 20 cows, and so there'd always be leftovers.

[112] And the pigs would go in there.

[113] Well, they actually built it with the sill two feet above the ground, so the pigs had to jump up in there, and that exercise made their hams taste way better, and it increased oxygen flow to their hams, so the meat was rose -colored rather than white.

[114] And that rose -color indicates iron, hemoglobin, iron, So the exercise of jumping in and the extra, I collect old ag books.

[115] Anything before 1950s pretty good.

[116] After that, it all went to pot.

[117] And so if you read any like old 1910, 1920, 1900 swine book, the first thing it'll say is exercise, exercise, because the pork responds to that oxygenation.

[118] of the blood and makes the meat a deep, you know, a deep, rich color, which indicates, you know, iron.

[119] That is so fascinating.

[120] So this white meat, this pork the other white, what a crazy ad campaign that is then.

[121] Well, of course it is.

[122] It's based entirely on ignorance.

[123] Sure it is.

[124] Yes, it is.

[125] I mean, the same thing as, you know, our chickens are vegetarians.

[126] Right.

[127] That's ridiculous.

[128] Birds are omnivores.

[129] Yeah.

[130] I mean, whoever saw a robin refuse a worm, you know.

[131] I mean, birds are omnivores.

[132] So this whole idea of, you know, vegetarian fed chickens is just...

[133] Does it be sick chickens?

[134] Yeah, it makes, you know, pale nutrient deficient eggs.

[135] Yeah, there's a big difference in the color of the eggs.

[136] I have chickens.

[137] I have 13 chickens in my yard.

[138] And my wife and I have been doing that for the past year and a half now.

[139] And it's amazing how much better the eggs taste.

[140] It's amazing how much darker the yolk is.

[141] it's like a dark orange and uh you know we have a big yard and we keep them and we have a huge house built that's bigger than the studio bigger than this room at least and uh the chickens all live in there they have plenty of room to run around and then we Taj Mahal chicken house it's a big chicken house and then we open the door and uh let them roam around the yard and and you know pick up bugs and worms and all that stuff but and express their chickenness that's a good way to that's a good way to put it well you know in our in our in our country right now, in the industrial foods, I call it the industrial, you know, corporate U .S. Dove fraternity, they don't view life as fundamentally biological.

[142] They view life as fundamentally mechanical.

[143] That's the big difference between the industrial food perspective and what I'll call a more a craft -oriented food perspective, is food is food fundamentally biological?

[144] or is it mechanical?

[145] And they don't ask, I mean, I've never seen a research project that starts with an umbrella supposition.

[146] Let's define what makes a happy chicken or a happy pig.

[147] You know, it's all about how do we grow them faster, fat, or bigger, cheaper, and as if they're just inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated, however cleverly hubris can imagine to manipulate them.

[148] And I would suggest that a culture that views its food, its plant, and animals from that kind of mechanistic, manipulative standpoint will view its people the same way and other cultures the same way.

[149] That's a very good point.

[150] Both points.

[151] Yeah, it's a very good point.

[152] Do you think that your style of farming, is that possible on a large scale?

[153] that's my favorite question uh you know can we feed the world because ultimately all of this is just a bunch of is an exercise in uh you know feel goodness you know warm fuzziness unless it actually does translate to feeding the world so let let's take that and interrupt me any time um first of all for the first time in human history we're producing twice as much human edible food as we need on the planet twice as much half of all human edible food never gets eaten by a human that's the first time that's ever happened which means that if if you or i could you know click our fingers today and suddenly double the earth's food production not a single other person would get a meal food people go hungry not because there's not enough food but because of you know demographic problems infrastructure problems, you know, there's not a road, you know, cultural issues like in inner cities and, you know, that have been taken over by, you know, drugs, mayhem, and gangs.

[154] Businesses don't want to go there, you know, people with integrity food don't want to go there.

[155] And so there's a tremendous amount of waste.

[156] I mean, I was talking to a guy that just was at a green bean factory in Zimbabwe.

[157] They They were exporting to Europe, and they were taking in five tons a day and only shipping two tons.

[158] I said, what happened to those are three tons?

[159] Well, they're crooked.

[160] They're too long.

[161] They're too short.

[162] They've got a little black spot.

[163] And so we're wasting a lot of food.

[164] Secondly, there is a tremendous amount of land that's not being used because we have a fundamentally segregated food system, not an integrated food system.

[165] so we you know we produce the food over here but we and we eat it over here we feed it over here we have the manure over here you know the the old integrated system is no longer there are 35 million acres of lawn in the u .s and 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses that's 71 million acres that's enough to feed the entire u .s without a single farm or ranch wow So this food that's going bad, so if we're making twice as much food as people need, is it a matter of the food deteriorating too quickly to get to people or it's never going to get to people?

[166] It's never going to get to people.

[167] You know, go by the back door of any supermarket produce department and you will see, you know, dumpsters full of spoiled stuff.

[168] One of the reasons, I mean, there are numerous reasons, there are residue problems, for example, you know, a dairy that accidentally dumps some antibiotic, for example, and then it taints a whole tractor -trailer load of milk.

[169] That's common.

[170] That's common.

[171] You have cosmetic issues, you know, a piece of fruit that has one little blemish, throw away.

[172] The long, you know, the long warehouses.

[173] and chain of custody between, you know, between field and fork, that creates spoilage issues.

[174] And so, you know, there are just a lot of factors in the system that don't do it, that spoil food.

[175] That being said, we can absolutely grow a lot more food than we do.

[176] People are enamored.

[177] You know, they see, you know, six combines running side by side down through a Kansas wheat field and say, wow, look at that, you know, where they see a great big, you know, 500 -acre fumigated strawberry field in California, you know, wow, look at all that production.

[178] But the fact is that even a very rudimentary, almost poorly done backyard garden is more productive per square yard than the most industrial, sophisticated, technologically advanced, monospeciated industrial farm.

[179] That's the truth.

[180] Why is that?

[181] Why is that?

[182] Because there is a, when you diversify, when you have a diversified cornucopia of plants and animals in proximity, you actually have a synergistic effect so that instead of growing one species, if you reduce the production of one species and grow two species on the same area, you get.

[183] like 120 % of your production.

[184] So, for example, you know, we, you know, we have pasture livestock.

[185] So we run the cows across the pasture.

[186] We run the egg mobiles behind them.

[187] The egg mobiles have chickens that scratch through the cow patties and eat the, eat now the newly exposed grasshoppers and crickets that the cows exposed by eating the grass.

[188] And then we run broiler chickens, meat chickens over that same ground.

[189] We run turkeys over that same ground.

[190] And so, So all of those animals, they're not on the same square foot at the same time, but they go like, you know, like different waves of production across the landscape.

[191] And so whereas the normal farm would have only one of those species confined in a little tiny building, we have an acre being used all throughout the year with a lot of different kinds of species going across.

[192] Suddenly you don't have pathogens.

[193] Suddenly you don't have the pathogens because the pathogens are confused because, you know, the cow pathogen hatches out next to a chicken pathogen and, you know, and they're toxic to each other.

[194] And so they have a war and they fight and they die.

[195] They cancel each other out.

[196] Yeah.

[197] Which is really what's supposed to happen in nature.

[198] Absolutely.

[199] Absolutely.

[200] And so, you know, the kind of diversity, you know, the kind of diversity.

[201] you see on the Serengeti in Africa, you know, at a waterhole in Zimbabwe, whatever.

[202] I mean, those kinds of diversities, A, they protect the animals from their own pathogens because almost all pathogens are species specific.

[203] So if you put multiple diversity together, it acts as a dead end, okay?

[204] But secondly, those animals occupy different spaces.

[205] You know, you've got herbivores, omnivores, carnivores, you know, they're all occupying the same space.

[206] And so a given area can stack, that's a permaculture concept, if you're familiar with permaculture, it can stack synergistic multiple species and enterprise on a single land base.

[207] Brian, pull up polyface farms.

[208] there's a video, a fascinating video so the folks at home can get a sense of what he's talking about when he's saying egg mobiles and you've designed this sort of chicken house that moves around.

[209] It's on like sleds.

[210] It's all wheels.

[211] And you pull it around and so the chickens will be in one spot and then you move it to another spot.

[212] And in doing so, you allow the land to get moved around.

[213] That's right.

[214] Rather than having a stationary structure where we're carrying everything in and carrying everything out and there's a toxicity build up with the animals being confined to one spot all the time.

[215] Instead, you are actually allowing the animals to move to mimic kind of their migratory pattern on a domestic scale.

[216] All we're doing is we're cutting out the natural, like the natural template and and laying it down on a domestic production model, say, how can we duplicate this pattern on a domestic model?

[217] That's what we're doing.

[218] And in doing so, like, it's such a large scale.

[219] Can this be duplicated, like the factory farming systems that are so rightly criticized in this country, which we find to be abhorrent.

[220] When you look at these videos of these chickens living stacked next to each other, it's horrific stuff.

[221] It is.

[222] What is it that's beneficial about those factory farms that keeps them from doing something like this?

[223] Well, what you have to understand is that those factory farms externalize a lot of their costs.

[224] So there's collateral damage, that collateral damage in terms of water pollution, fecal particulate in the air.

[225] One of the biggest ones right now is C -DIF and MRSA, you know, these antibiotic -resistant high, high past staff infections in hospitals and, you know, that people are getting.

[226] And now, of course, you know, we're seeing an exponential growth in autism.

[227] There's a link there to, for example, genetically modified organisms.

[228] That might be another discussion.

[229] But what I'm getting at is that the collateral damage of the industrial food system, including the nutrient deficiency, the fact that the omega -6s and omega -3s, are way out of whack.

[230] So the fats, instead of reducing cholesterol, you know, instead of being beneficial are negative.

[231] There are huge nutrient deficiencies.

[232] I mean, riboflavin, the eggs in your backyard chickens are probably in the area of 1 ,000 micrograms per egg.

[233] You know what the official USDA, you know, nutrient analysis for eggs is?

[234] Only 48 micrograms per eggs.

[235] Jesus.

[236] I mean, and, you know, and I'm sorry, not riboflite, folic acid, that's folic acid.

[237] Grass finished beef, 300 % more riboflavin.

[238] Riboflavin, of course, is what helps us to cape calm and not fly off the handle.

[239] It's the nerve.

[240] Riboflavin is the nerve one.

[241] You know, why are people raging and going crazy and, you know, shooting people in schools and stuff?

[242] We're deficient of riboflavin.

[243] So, you know, when people say, oh, it doesn't make any different food, is food is food, that's not true.

[244] I mean, there's a huge difference in this food.

[245] You know, vegetables the same way, whether they're grown in, you know, mineral -dense, biologically active soil compared to hydroponic or just, you know, what we call iv soil, you know, where the soil is just inert material to hold up a root and we basically IV chemical fertilizers into that soil to grow a, you know, to grow a plant.

[246] So there are, there are significant differences in the nutritional element.

[247] So this is all collateral damage.

[248] And the slinky effect between cause and effect takes a while.

[249] I mean, take DDT.

[250] DDT, it took 14 years from its initial use until 14 years later it was definitively discovered.

[251] Oh, that's why we have three -legged salamanders, infertile frogs, and dead zones.

[252] and eagles eggs won't hatch.

[253] You know, those cause and effects took a while to materialize because nature's pretty resilient.

[254] You know, you can beat yourself up for a while and, you know, still come out kicking for a while.

[255] And I'm sure there's probably also financial factors that were resisting their conclusions.

[256] Well, exactly.

[257] All of that collateral damage is deferred expense.

[258] You know, whether it's obesity, health care, pollution cleanup, superfund sites, you know, soil loss, aquifer depletion, desertification.

[259] These are all deferred damages because in our country, we don't have an accounting system to measure.

[260] I mean, our only accounting system is cash, you know, gross domestic product, you know, today's output.

[261] We don't have a way to measure these other elements.

[262] I mean, I'll give you one example.

[263] Let's take earthworms.

[264] Let's agree that earthworms are pretty important.

[265] Well, you know, who presents a business plan today to an investor?

[266] And the investor says, hey, I kind of like this.

[267] business plan, I think this is a good idea.

[268] We're going to, can I be your partner?

[269] We're going to be millionaires, you know, on this, on this business.

[270] But before I sign my investment strategy, I've got one question for you.

[271] I mean, I'm from the south, so, you know, you got to have a big hog, okay?

[272] So, but I got to ask you one question, what's this business going to do to the earthworms in our community?

[273] Nobody asks that.

[274] Nobody asks.

[275] And yet, you know, and yet fundamentally the mycorrhizia, the earthworms, the azobacter bacteria, the mycelium, the hydra, you know, they actually, this invisible community of beings actually supports all of life, what we see.

[276] You know, every visible thing that we see is supported by an invisible universe of microscopic bacteria and beings in us, around us, you know, in the soil.

[277] They're cousins.

[278] And now we know they talk to each other.

[279] So in a sense, what we're getting with factory farming is one small unit in the environment extracting money at the expense of all these other factors and these extraneous costs aren't factored in.

[280] That's correct.

[281] Because they don't have to be.

[282] They don't have to be.

[283] Our system is not set up for accounting those other things.

[284] That's fascinating.

[285] So if it was done correctly, if it was all done your way, although it would be more expensive, those external expenses wouldn't exist.

[286] In the big scheme of things, in the big scheme of things, the actual cost of food would actually be cheaper because you wouldn't have the collateral damage.

[287] I mean, just take one example in our lifetime, mad cow disease.

[288] I mean, realize, for 30 years, the European and the American expert credentialed, you know, PhD academic community took farmers like me to free steak dinners to teach us this new scientific method of, you know, feeding dead cows to cows.

[289] And our farm was branded barbarian, Luddite, anti -progressive, you know, science haters because we didn't buy into that.

[290] that model.

[291] The reason we didn't buy into was not because we were anti -science or anti -innovation or anything like that, it's because I looked around the earth and, you know, I couldn't find an herbivore that eats carry on.

[292] You know, I couldn't find it.

[293] And so we said, well, there must be a reason.

[294] And here, 30 years later, suddenly there's this big global, you know, collective, oops, maybe we shouldn't ought to done that.

[295] You know, as the whole scientific community realized, you know, what had happened.

[296] And so, so I just think there's a, there, that we have to appreciate that we are in Western culture, you know, we're a, we're a product of, you know, Greek, Roman, Western reductionist, compartmentalized, fragmented, systematized, individualized, democratized, parts -oriented, disconnected thinking.

[297] And there's an equally appropriate mindset from the East, which is we're all connected, we're all relatives, it's about holes, you know, it's about us, not just me. And that brings us an ethical framework as a protection over our moral innovation.

[298] You know, we're so clever.

[299] We can innovate things that we can't spiritually, morally, ethically, or physically metabolize.

[300] And so what happens is we innovate these things and then spend, you know, two generations trying to remediate, you know, remediate the collateral damage that our innovations did.

[301] And if we would just embrace that there is, there should be a moral, ethical, natural pattern that restricts, that constrains our innovation, then our innovation could actually be kept on a, you know, on an earth massaging tracked, track instead of an Earth Conquistador track.

[302] So you used to literally get corded to feed dead cows to cows.

[303] Oh, absolutely.

[304] Free seminars, you know, come out and, you know, they've got sponsors, you know, the local, you know, agribusiness community and, you know, the industrial, the food, you know, the industrial complex would, you know, buy dinner and sure, and you go hear these, you know, couple of PhDs from the taxpayer -funded research universities, you know.

[305] What was their motivation?

[306] Well, I don't understand why they would...

[307] Faster, bigger, cheaper, fatter.

[308] It's cheap.

[309] You know, I mean, it's cheap, it's cheap protein.

[310] Cheap, cheap food.

[311] But the idea of making your cows cannibals.

[312] Well, yeah, well, the industry still feeds, you know, chicken manure.

[313] I mean, well, we're still feeding in this country right now as we sit here.

[314] We're still feeding chicken feathers, manure.

[315] and chicken carcasses to chicken.

[316] They're doing it, you know, right in our neighborhood.

[317] So that's still being done.

[318] So we're still feeding, but at least it's not cows.

[319] All right.

[320] At least it's not cows.

[321] But, yeah, it's completely absurd.

[322] Why is it better to do it with chickens and cows?

[323] Well, it's, well, supposedly it's not the same kind of tissue.

[324] Oh, okay.

[325] You know, so it's at least it's one species removed, you know, so you have some, you have a little bit of wiggle room for the rogue prions that create the bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

[326] And that's the same disease that these cows get in mad cow disease that cannibals get in like in New Guinea.

[327] These neurological disease is where they can't move right.

[328] They start shaking.

[329] Road prions, yeah.

[330] Mm -hmm.

[331] Yeah, it punches holes in your brain.

[332] Yeah, it's a pretty bad way to go.

[333] Yeah, it seems pretty dark.

[334] When did factory farming start?

[335] Like what we consider today factory farming.

[336] When did all that start?

[337] Yeah, well, it's a great question.

[338] It really started in the 30s, 40s, and, 50s, a lot of things had to come together.

[339] And, of course, Michael Pollan in his, I think, omnivorce dilemma, examines this pretty nicely, but to point out that, or Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, you know, that was a blockbuster, you know, when it came out.

[340] And a lot of factors had to be in place.

[341] One was we had to have cheap energy because prior to, in order to have a factory farm, you have to have cheap transportation.

[342] in order to concentrate that many beings in one place and feed them and remove their excrement, you have to have cheap transportation.

[343] Cheap transportation requires cheap energy.

[344] You know, when everything was draft power, you know, mules and horses and oxen, you simply couldn't amalgamate that many things, whether it was animals or shoes or metal.

[345] you couldn't amalgamate that much material in one place.

[346] So every manufacturing facility, whether it was a farm or other manufacturing, had to nest within the carrying capacity of its ecological womb, if you will.

[347] There was a limit.

[348] How far can we cart stuff in and how far can we cart stuff out?

[349] There was a limit to that until we had chance.

[350] cheap energy and cheap transportation.

[351] So that really, you know, catapulted this.

[352] Then the next thing we had to have, we had to have pipable water.

[353] We had to have, so that meant plastic piping.

[354] We had to have very cheap piping.

[355] I mean, until then it was all cast iron pipe, you know, in the 1800s.

[356] It was, you know, you took a piece of wood and took an auger and board it out, you know, and pasted little pipes together.

[357] So, you know, we had to have plastic.

[358] So plastic had to be developed, which, of course, required patrols.

[359] So petroleum was really a catalyst.

[360] And then finally, in order to keep that many animals alive in one spot, required antibiotics.

[361] Because the fecal particulate, the fecal dust cloud that they live in, that they ingest, is very abrasive to the very tender mucus respiratory membranes.

[362] All the celia and those very, you know, you look at them under a microscope and it's like a, it's like going into a Stephen Spielberg set, you know, it's just amazing.

[363] Well, those very tender mucus membranes get sandpapered by this fecal particulate, this abrasive air, and they bleed then.

[364] And this is how salmonella and some of these things get into the actual tissue, even into the eggs.

[365] Remember the Wisconsin farm with the salmonella?

[366] It actually gets into the oviduct.

[367] Because now the old, the body's toxic hedges, you know, its filters, its strainers, have been overridden by this, you know, by this direct hemorrhaging of the tender mucous membranes.

[368] It gets right into the bloodstream.

[369] So that's how it, you know, it jumps those regular strainers.

[370] Wow.

[371] And so the antibiotics were necessary to try to, in order to keep the animals in such an unsterile, unhealthy environment to keep them alive.

[372] I don't know whether you've watched just lately, what's happened with pigs.

[373] It's been all over the newspapers and Wall Street Journal even.

[374] When you see pig futures hit Wall Street Journal, you know something's going on.

[375] And I think it was in, you know, January and part of February, they almost.

[376] doubled.

[377] What's the problem?

[378] Starting April 1 last year, just April 1 last year.

[379] So we're literally 12 months into this.

[380] Exactly 12 months.

[381] The industry started losing one in four piggies, industry -wide, to a viral diarrhea.

[382] Now, my joke is, you know, if there's one thing worse of diarrhea, it's got to be viral diarrhea.

[383] But anyway, this is attacking.

[384] the industrial pigs.

[385] We're not seeing it, you know, out in the countryside in pastured pigs and our sort of things.

[386] But it's making pork futures skyrocket.

[387] The industry is on its heels.

[388] They're desperate to find a cure.

[389] Of course, you know, finding a cure would mean changing their model.

[390] But, of course, they're trying to find a technological cure, you know, some more potent concoction, all right, to knock this out in such an un -uner.

[391] unhealthy environment.

[392] And so imagine that.

[393] I mean nationwide of all the whatever millions of pigs, one in four, 25 % of all piggies right now being born in the U .S. are dying.

[394] Wow.

[395] From viral diarrhea.

[396] That's incredible.

[397] Yeah.

[398] It's a big deal.

[399] Big deal.

[400] This environment that you're talking about, this pathogen rich environment where they're the fetal particulates in the air, completely not natural.

[401] In nature, they're in wide open fields.

[402] and the air and the natural environment filters all this.

[403] This is something that's completely been over the last, you know, less than 100 years.

[404] It's very recent.

[405] It's only in the last, you know, 50 to 60 years.

[406] Our rule of thumb is that good food production, good farming, good food production, should be aesthetically and aromatically sensually romantic.

[407] You know, I mean, look, if you've got...

[408] a walk through sheep dip and put on a hazmat suit to go visit your food you might not want to eat it yeah yeah absolutely now this this idea of factory farming um this this huge large scale thing where you're stuffing all these chickens into could could those farms be converted to a more holistic approach like you're you're prescribing that is such a uh a great question and and uh you i'll tell you the truth my heart goes out to farmers who have signed on the dotted line and and and been kind of taken in by this you know by this model but um the fact is they are so um anti nature that i don't see a retrofit uh and that's one of the problems when you have capital intensive infrastructure When you have single -designed or single -use capital -intensive infrastructure, even when it becomes a detriment to society to have that infrastructure, we still have to use it because we're economically and emotionally vested in it.

[409] You know, our toys run our thinking.

[410] I mean, look at the health field.

[411] I mean, you know, we have to use our infrastructure because it's really expensive.

[412] and so we've got to use this stuff and the same thing is true in farming now you know when you pour that much concrete and bend that much rebar uh you know you you feel compelled to use it so it's a real problem and um and i i just um yeah i just don't see really efficient ways of retrofitting a lot of these structures uh you know they might make good miniature golf courses they might you know they smell though god yeah well uh i mean just to give you to give you an example of some things that can be done with a different model um one is just to give you an example one is that if you go to a composting bedding in a in an operation um you can immediately a lot of the problems.

[413] The problem is that that takes a lot of carbon.

[414] In order to have compost, you have to have a carbon nitrogen ratio that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 to 35 to 1.

[415] All right.

[416] CN, it's called the CN ratio.

[417] And, of course, you have to have moisture, you have to have air, and you have to have microbes.

[418] So there's five components to a compost pile.

[419] But you have to have one other thing, and that is, enough size to support an internal community of microbial beings.

[420] Yeah, they've got to have their, you know, TV shows.

[421] They've got to build their roads, have their schools, you know, and have banks and, you know, politicians and stuff, too.

[422] So it takes room for these microorganisms to build those communities.

[423] You can't build a compost pile that's 12 inches, about 12 inches, about 12 inches, too small.

[424] The smallest size is like, you know, a yard by a yard by a yard.

[425] all right well um the problem is that in most you know uh factory farming facilities you can't not only can you not even have any bedding in there the animals are on slatted floors or virtually no concrete there there is no life there is no community of beings good community of beings in nature a lot of people don't realize there are a lot more good bacteria than bad bacteria there really aren't that many bad bacteria in nature you know if you're keeping score of of things there are actually a lot more good ones than bad ones when you come to this invisible you know world of little microbial beings and and so the default position what I'm getting to is the default position of nature is health We, in our culture right now, we've got things so out of whack that we just assume that the default position of nature is sickness.

[426] You know, that nature's broken and I've got to fix it.

[427] That's not true.

[428] The default position of nature is wellness and health.

[429] If there's sickness, then that indicates something out of whack.

[430] There's a protocol that's been violated.

[431] So one of the ways to house animals, animals, at least temporarily, in shelter, is to have a living blanket.

[432] I call it a carbonaceous diaper for them to live on that is deep enough and alive enough with all these microbes so that nematodes attack the pathogenic microbes so that in this sphere there's enough community of beings interacting in this war of good bugs and bad bugs.

[433] The good bugs beat out the bad bugs.

[434] That's the right position.

[435] And that can be done.

[436] We actually use that when we feed hay in the wintertime in our haysheds.

[437] We use it for the pigs in the winter when they're in housing for the brooder house where we start chicks.

[438] We, you know, we have it where we can build up 24 inches of bedding.

[439] In the hay shed with the cows, we can go four feet deep with this carbonaceous living composting bedding and and you know and that is a partial answer but the buildings that are currently designed can't handle a living compost medium for the animals to be on there they're they're structurally not designed to handle that and so you know the retrofit becomes pretty tough that's fascinating so it's almost like they need to be destroyed and it need to be start from scratch yeah yeah and and uh the beautiful thing is really they don't need to be replaced with very much they just need to be abandoned you know most you know most most um most great breakthroughs throughout history breakthroughs have been breakwifts something you know think about the breakthrough for for example um compact discs You know, the Germans tried to do it for a long time, but they couldn't get past the long play disc model.

[440] You know, we just can't do it.

[441] And the Japanese, who didn't have a history of LP records like Germany did, they said, well, why does it have to be, you know, this size?

[442] Let's make it smaller.

[443] Boom, the Japanese own, you know, that whole market.

[444] So it was a break with tradition.

[445] And many innovations, many innovative things are breakwifts.

[446] That's the key to the breakthrough.

[447] There's a lot of people that don't realize that what we're dealing with when you're talking about a lot of the flus and a lot of the diseases that become pandemics that they start with livestock, avian flu, swine flu, some of the most horrific flus that we've experienced in the past hundred years have come as a direct result of this type of farming.

[448] Yes, that's right.

[449] The concentration, the total unnatural concentration and build up of toxicity in these places is incredible.

[450] And so what happens is that the industry uses concoctions, you know, from something as benign as chlorine all the way to, you know, stiffer stuff to try to sanitize, clean, wash down.

[451] all that stuff but all that does is um is open the door for the survivors and every and every time a new concoction is developed there are survivors and the survivors become more and more virulent so that for example when the industry says oh look e coli it's been around forever you know get over it e coli is part of a cow's digestion well that's true but not the virulent strains that were developing by feeding unnatural feeds and the drugs.

[452] And so where those would normally be fairly benign in our highly acidic digestive system, they become more virulent and they survive in us instead of us killing them.

[453] And that's this evolution of things.

[454] I mean, you know, take, you know, Arkansas now, where they're, where they're, where they're farmers are now budgeting $70 per acre to hand machete superweeds that have morphed as a result of glyphosate roundup because of genetically modified organism, corn, and soybeans being planted, it's created these survivor superweeds because everything, whenever we try to sterilize or sanitize, there are survivors, and those survivors become tougher and tougher and tougher.

[455] We are a bunch of dummies, aren't we?

[456] We really are.

[457] As a human race, we are just a bunch of silly dummies.

[458] There's an issue that is a big one with antibiotic soaps.

[459] A lot of people think it's real smart to wash with antibiotic soaps, but what they don't realize is that antibiotic soaps kill all the good flora on your strength as well.

[460] And it seems like that's really similar to what.

[461] what's going on here.

[462] Your talk of the live bedding, what that is, is nature's own way of dealing with the pathogens instead of pumping some chemicals into them.

[463] That's right.

[464] And there's nothing unnatural about it.

[465] In other words, you don't get virulent survivors.

[466] They're all on the equal, you know, a creation playing field, if you will, all right?

[467] And our responsibility then is simply to create a habitat.

[468] that allows this battlefield to play out in its natural setting.

[469] Natural setting is the key because there is sort of a give and take, a place, a jigsaw puzzle piece, place for all the various elements of a farm, of an ecosystem.

[470] And that's what you're addressing when you're...

[471] That's what I found so incredibly fascinating about the idea of continuing to move these animals.

[472] And you have these very low -voltage electric fences that are just enough so they go, up, I don't want to go near there.

[473] No one's getting hurt, but they're like, no, it's, it's, it's, it's called a psychological barrier.

[474] It's essentially a car battery you use, right?

[475] So it's portable.

[476] Well, it's an energize, I mean, it's a car battery power, car battery powering an energizer.

[477] It has high voltage, but no amperage.

[478] So, you know, you get a lot of pain, but there's no danger because you're running like, you know, a, goodness, you know, a 20th of an amp, okay?

[479] I mean, there's, there's no energy, but there's a, but, but there's a lot of pressure.

[480] And so, um, so, so yeah, these systems, again, you know, these are computer microchip systems.

[481] So, you know, I think, I think as we've talked about how did the factory farm develop, I think perhaps, you know, rather than, uh, continue, you can go wherever you want to with the questions, but, but I would like to, to point out to folks that as bad as that is and depressing and, yeah, we're a bunch of dummies and all that.

[482] My goodness, we have now innovated the most amazing infrastructure to be able, for the first time in human history, to caress our Earth nest, our lover, if you will, more strategically and purposefully than we have ever been able to do it before.

[483] And the tech and and the infrastructure is amazing one is electric fencing i mean you can now in in a wheelbarrow full of material you can now place hundreds of thousands of animals in a certain spot for a day and and and manage carefully their intersection with a given piece of nature that's that's unprecedented We've never been able to do that before.

[484] And we can protect them.

[485] We can make them comfortable not with stationary barns and, you know, big post and beam.

[486] You know, you have to cut down the whole forest to do this.

[487] But now with bandsaw technology, instead of, you know, the big old circular saws that removed a quarter of an inch per cut.

[488] Now with a little Honda engine, you know, that saps all, that, you know, just sips fuel.

[489] and a one -tenth of an inch thick bandsaw, we can now mill tinker toy -like lath structure material to build very lightweight portable barns, portable shelters.

[490] So we use those on our farm.

[491] We have all these portable infrastructures for turkeys, chickens, cows, pigs, so that we can move a shade tree or a barn protective shelter with the animals with a four -wheeler, you know, a couple of guys pushing it along, okay?

[492] This portable infrastructure then allows us to keep the animals controlled and comfortable.

[493] And with black pipe, we can live.

[494] miles.

[495] What's black pipe?

[496] A plastic pipe.

[497] Okay.

[498] We can now develop a pond or a spring and put that water in a nice clean delivery system, like the plumbing in your house, and deliver it miles so the animals aren't, you know, drinking out of their toilet.

[499] They're not, you know, pooping and then drinking out of it and all that.

[500] Like you see, no, they're actually eating.

[501] I drink out of the cow troughs.

[502] I mean, that water's clean enough.

[503] for me to drink you drink out of that absolutely oh it it builds up your immune system oh how dare you does it yeah yeah yeah you ever get sick you know uh knock on wood i haven't been sick for years i don't remember the last time i was sick i mean even with a cold really yeah well really i mean i take a lot of vitamin c every day um you know scorbic acid i take my uh you know dopatropic for keep me you know from going crazy.

[504] What's dopatropic?

[505] It's a, it's an herb mix.

[506] It, you know, it's related to dopamine and stuff, but it, it's a, it's a calmer.

[507] It's a calm.

[508] I travel so much now that in such an unnatural environment, you know, I was starting a couple years ago, I was starting into a kind of a fighter flight subconscious, fight or flight thing where I would get, I couldn't breathe, you know, on our airplane and stuff because it was, and, you know, I'd get all congested and all this.

[509] And I went to a quack, an alternative medical practitioner that uses the kind of machines they use in Europe.

[510] You know, when you go in the emergency room in Europe and you grab two probes and a little needle, you know, tells you everything it's wrong with you.

[511] You know, it costs like pennies, you know.

[512] I mean, that's how they can get along with government health care because they actually are smart about it.

[513] One of these probes you hold on with your hands and they tell you what's wrong with you?

[514] Scientology.

[515] Yeah, yeah.

[516] No, it's pretty cool.

[517] Anyway, I mean, it's not endorsed by any medical work.

[518] Oh, absolutely.

[519] Listen, yeah, I thought it was funny, too.

[520] I went for my first visit.

[521] I sat down.

[522] She said, somewhere in your background, you had a bladder issue, didn't you?

[523] I didn't, I hadn't said a word.

[524] I mean, I'm 57, right?

[525] When I was, how old was I?

[526] eight I had a malfunctioning kidney valve a malfunctioning kidney valve almost died I mean this was a long time ago right they went in with surgery and repaired that valve but what it was doing it was letting my urine back up from my bladder back up into the kidney it's a one -way check valve okay so you know your bladder's under pressure right right and and and that urine is supposed to only go one direction all right into the bladder well I had one malfunction valve that was letting as the bladder filled up with pressure it was the balloon was pushing the urine back up into the kidney right all right so they went and repaired it anyway in in in 10 minutes her machine picked up that which was you know 50 year a 50 year old whatever you know bodily injury you know a problem um and and boy I you know I sat up and saluted at that point you know What's the machine called?

[527] I don't know what the machine's called.

[528] If I knew more about it, then somebody would come after me and put me in jail probably.

[529] Quack watch is, is that the same machine?

[530] Right.

[531] It says that that's one of the machines.

[532] There's different kinds of models of it, I'm guessing.

[533] Yeah.

[534] This is Quackwatch, though.

[535] This is a website that's saying it's a quack.

[536] Well, I don't know if it's that machine or not.

[537] I don't want to tell you who she is because she'd probably.

[538] get put in jail if you knew who she was but really yeah she'd get put in jail for that yeah i mean you know the a m a goes after people my goodness they go after raw milk producers and backyard chicken growers and that's that is a true story that's a true fact the going after raw milk there's an orthodoxy there's an orthodoxy that's really crazy today and of course you know we're heretics and the inquisition is very real yeah fooling patients with computer magic eight balls.

[539] I wonder if that's the same thing.

[540] I have no idea.

[541] I purposely try to not know all about it.

[542] The raw milk thing is a real craziness.

[543] If you've ever seen the there was a story recently where they arrested people with a SWAT team for selling raw milk.

[544] I mean they broke down doors and they had guns and they were in bulletproof vests and they're just there this farm, just milk.

[545] And then somehow or another, because we've made milk so toxic because of these environments that you're describing that you, would you drink raw milk on a normal, you know, farm like your farm where the cows are very healthy?

[546] I mean, you could drink that raw milk and it's actually easily digested.

[547] Your body digested far more easy.

[548] And a lot of people that are even lactose intolerant don't have a problem with the raw milk.

[549] Right.

[550] And, you know, the milk from an industrial farm is toxic.

[551] I mean, it does have a lot of problems.

[552] A lot of people don't realize that the Mayo Clinic was built.

[553] I mean, it started back during, you know, the early time of the century when cows were eating brewery waste, distillers grains, because they were, you know, without refrigeration, you put, they put the breweries and the cows together and in these urban sectors and, you know, they didn't understand bacteria and hygiene and sanitation, all that stuff.

[554] So the cows got, you know, brucellosis and all these things.

[555] passing on to people, and Mayo Clinic started putting cows back on pasture and feeding raw milk to their patients during the time when people were getting sick from urban industrial, you know, swill -fed cow milk.

[556] And that's how Mayo Clinic actually started.

[557] So that's a, yeah, I mean, raw milk is a wonderful material, but the cow has to be treated like a cow.

[558] You know, you have or respect her cowness as a cow.

[559] Respect their cowness.

[560] That's how you get, you don't get to all the milkness of milk if you don't respect the cowness of the cow.

[561] Right.

[562] And so what's happened is that the industry is so filthy and pathogen, you know, and toxic that, you know, and people fear food because they're, the average person is fearful of food.

[563] I mean, the average person is far more, you know, informed about the latest dysfunction in a Cardacian household, and they are, you know, what's going to become flesh of their flesh and bone of their bones at 6 o 'clock.

[564] I like how you pronounced it, Cardassian.

[565] That shows you really don't have a TV.

[566] I really like it.

[567] No, I don't.

[568] I don't.

[569] So, whatever they are, whoever they are.

[570] Exactly.

[571] I'm still asking.

[572] That butt, though.

[573] That butt, it's the butt.

[574] Yeah.

[575] It's all it is.

[576] It's all you need.

[577] Put a butt on TV and people will watch.

[578] So the point is, though, that, um, that, um, People are so paranoid of food and ignorant about food that they fear food today.

[579] People, I mean, we have customers call us up, if I thaw a chicken in a sink, will it get salmonella?

[580] You know, I mean, there's a profound ignorance in our culture regarding food because we're disconnected from it.

[581] And so afraid people ask for security from the government.

[582] Well, the government says, well, let's see, what should be our protocols?

[583] They go to the industry for the answers and concoct.

[584] an orthodoxy that actually shuts out the antidote for the very problems they're trying to solve.

[585] The idea that the government would have any solutions whatsoever to that is pretty ridiculous in the first place, because who would be the person that would be an expert on this?

[586] Would it be the industry that creates a lot of these problems?

[587] What we need is a guy like you working for the government.

[588] Oh, I wouldn't work for it.

[589] If I got chosen to work for the government, whatever agency I was in charge of, I'd shut it down before Sunday.

[590] What would you do if, like, let's say, let's say there's some catastrophic failure of our government and they just decide to quit, and everybody just decides to go under.

[591] And we need to figure out how to regulate farms.

[592] What could be done?

[593] What could be done at this point?

[594] I mean, you're suggesting that the factory farms, there's no retrofit.

[595] They should be destroyed, and you better off building miniature golf courses over them.

[596] How would we be able to distribute food to a nation of hungry people?

[597] Is it possible to use your methods, the methods you use, and how big is your farm in Virginia?

[598] Well, we own 550 acres, and we lease another nine farms, so we're running 2 ,000 acres.

[599] And we're producing a lot of food.

[600] In fact, we surpassed the county average in production on pasture by about a three -fold amount, which is pretty significant.

[601] So factory farms, given the same amount of space, produce less.

[602] Yeah.

[603] In fact, I mean, the thing that's important to realize, when you look at a factory farm when the industry shows this picture of this big chicken house or this big big factory or hog or, you know, cow feed lot, or a, you know, a square mile of strawberries in California, what you have to understand is those systems are not standalone islands.

[604] When they say, look at the efficiency, the small footprint, what they're not showing you are the square miles of subsidized grain or petroleum inputs, the land area that all that takes to sustain that little footprint, and then the land that it takes to assimilate all of the waste stream from that.

[605] so our system doesn't take one more um one more square yard of production than than the factory system the fact that we're doing um you know stackable synergistic symbiotic multi -speciated enterprises it's more productive but um but when you look at what we're producing even though you know, at first glance, the uneducated might say, well, it takes a lot more land to produce them this way.

[606] Actually, you're seeing all the land, just like when people say, well, it takes more people farming to do it your way.

[607] Yeah, but you know what?

[608] We don't have people fixing pollution areas.

[609] We don't have people burying people with C. diff and Mercia.

[610] We don't, you know, we're not making people sick from salmonella and E. coli.

[611] are you with me i mean so so in toto all we're doing is taking all the people that are currently trying to uh trying to triage the collateral damage of cheap food we're taking all those people and growing the food and all those jobs are coming back to the farm instead of being in you know, in whatever, you know, costly remedial programs they are.

[612] So you are essentially a standalone system, whereas when you're seeing a factory farm, there's a lot of stuff you're not seeing that's required to make that thing run.

[613] That's exactly right.

[614] Now, we do buy grain for our omnivores, but we buy local GMO -free grain, no genetically modified organisms.

[615] And, yes, you know, the whole idea is to create a carbon -centrales, so that we're not, you know, we're not shipping this stuff all over the place.

[616] And when people say, oh, but a locality can't produce it, Cornell did a fascinating study several years ago of New York.

[617] They took every metropolitan city, you know, Ithaca, Syracuse, Buffalo, Albany, New York City.

[618] And they took all the cities of New York and said, could we produce the calories for these urban sectors?

[619] You know, how much land would it take?

[620] And what they found was that every urban sector could produce all of its calories within 30 miles.

[621] So even in New York, it could be standalone self -sufficient, except for New York City, which if they went into New Jersey, it became self -sufficient as well, because New York's right on the edge of the state.

[622] And so a fundamentally integrated system rather than a segregated system becomes far more.

[623] efficient in the scheme of things becomes far more efficient than a segregated system with all this you know all this long -distance transportation because the ships are passing in the night that's what's happening you know Iowa produces all this food Iowa only eats only 5 % of the food that's eaten in Iowa is grown in Iowa what and Iowa is the most fertile piece of land in the in the planet why because they're they're not producing food.

[624] There's nothing to eat there.

[625] You know, if you want to eat, you know, berries and apples and things, that has to be imported from somewhere else because the whole state's in corn and soybeans.

[626] This genetically modified thing is a real hot topic.

[627] It is.

[628] Genetically modified seems to me to be along the same lines of this factory farming idea.

[629] Is that you're, instead of looking at it in a comprehensive approach, what you're doing is saying, well we got a problem let's attack that problem with chemicals yes well it's it's fundamentally bridging it's fundamentally um overrunning a lot of natural barriers that are there in place to protect um to protect happening what is happening which is a um a mishmash of genetic material so you have a you know a salmon that's partly a pepper plant partly a, you know, a tropical herb and part pig, okay?

[630] And you talk about, you mentioned allergies a little bit in the past.

[631] The, you know, when we were kids, I didn't know anybody with a food allergy.

[632] We didn't even know the phrase.

[633] I never even heard the phrase, okay?

[634] And now it's ubiquitous.

[635] What's happening is that we're getting all of this franken food.

[636] it's it's our our internal bacteria you know we've got three trillion beings in our insides and they're not capable of mutating and assimilating material as fast as our human brains can adulterate the food system and so what happens is we're sending down there a bunch of foreign material.

[637] What's this?

[638] I can just see them talking.

[639] Let's have a board meeting here to see what that, you know, GMO corn is.

[640] And so what happens is, you know, they can't assimilate it.

[641] And so the other thing about GMOs is that it is hard to contain.

[642] You know, by nature, it's promiscuous.

[643] So what you have here is a new life form.

[644] I mean, the only thing that people have been able to do before now is a mule.

[645] I mean, I a donkey on a horse makes a mule but a mule is sterile it's almost like God says all right you can do that you know donkey on horse but that's it you know you're not going to go any more than that this is not Mendel's peas Mendel was peas on peas he wasn't peas on tomatoes on pigs on monkeys you know it was it was within species and so this is a you know this is an assault on the sexual plumbing that nature has to maintain genetic purity.

[646] And it seems like the DDT issue, it hasn't been factored in as far as the long -term effects.

[647] That's right.

[648] Yeah.

[649] The feeding trials, all the feeding trials have only been like, you know, 60 days.

[650] Well, 60 days is nothing.

[651] Not only that, but if you're, you know, probably the, you know, world expert on this is Jeffrey Smith, who wrote Seeds of Deception.

[652] and is the premier world GMO expert, he points out that when, you know, when Monsanto was doing feeding trials for FDA on, for example, potatoes, GMO potatoes, they chose for the feeding trial geriatric rats.

[653] Well, geriatric rats are already completely formed.

[654] You know, you're not going to see any big changes in those.

[655] In Scotland, when the scientists there duplicated those studies with juvenile rats, same feeding trials same potatoes same everything all sorts of problems developed cognitive ability brain fog they couldn't go through a maze um organ development kidney malfunction uh fertility problems i mean you name it i had all these problems so you know one of the one of the problems with science is that it's very subjective you can set up an experiment within your paradigm you know Teddy Roosevelt used to say it's really hard to see it's really hard to get a guy to see something when his paycheck believes depends on seeing something else that's a good way of putting it too and and I think that's exactly what's happened here that you you can set up you know experiments and and constrict the parameters whether it's length of time type of subject you know you name it but you can set up the parameters of the experiments to skew the results, to not get a comprehensive eclectic view.

[656] Like the geriatric rats.

[657] Like the geriatric rats.

[658] Yeah, that seems like dirty pool.

[659] That's a bad thing that they did.

[660] And it's, they doing this just for profit.

[661] Absolutely.

[662] I mean, there's a lot of money on the line.

[663] A lot of money on the line.

[664] And so, you know, so, you know, where are we going to go from here?

[665] How do we go from here?

[666] And so, you know, when you ask, well, you know, what could you do, all right, we know this system's bad, how do we, how do we really, you know, move over here?

[667] And there are several answers.

[668] I mean, one is, you know, go underground, you know, just start buying the good stuff.

[669] Gorilla -type marketing.

[670] But I think the main one is that what we need is a food emancipation proclamation.

[671] We need a food emancipation proclamation to free the food system from the enslavement of bureaucratic orthodoxy so that consenting adults, and I'm choosing my words very carefully here, so that consenting adults could make a voluntary choice of food choice the type that they want from the source that they want.

[672] and if we allowed however many in our society, 5%, 10%, 20%, whoever wanted to opt out of government -sanctioned orthodoxy and say, hmm, is there something better out here?

[673] Can I choose something different?

[674] If anybody who wanted to opt out of the current current industrial government orthodox, could do so.

[675] Voluntary consenting adults here, you know, we're talking about the right of private contract.

[676] If I want to come to your farm voluntarily, no extortion here, okay, voluntarily look around, smell around, ask around, and I want what you're producing, I should be able to get it.

[677] When the government gets between my lips and my throat, I call that an invasion of privacy.

[678] And yes, I do also believe that we should legalize all drugs, all of them, because the government that can tell you you can't smoke dope can also tell you can't drink raw milk or refuse to vaccinate your children or, you know, go down the line.

[679] The fact is that the orthodoxy is so convoluted now that it's perfectly safe and fine to feed your kids Coca -Cola, Mountain Dew, Count Chocula, Cheerios and Pop -Tarts, but not homemade charcutory, pickles, raw milk, and backyard butchered chickens.

[680] Isn't that crazy?

[681] It's absolutely crazy.

[682] And if we would free up, I mean, I travel a lot, I talk to thousands and thousands of farmers.

[683] I just talked to 200 farmers up in San Jose this weekend, you know.

[684] And what's the limiting factor?

[685] Why is local food cheap?

[686] Why is our kind of food, I mean, cheap, more expensive than it has to be?

[687] Why are we perceived as elitist?

[688] Why isn't it more available?

[689] Why is it so hard to find integrity food?

[690] This is the issue.

[691] And if we would free up those of us in the system that are ready to access our neighbors with keesh and noodles and charcutery and, you know, name your, name it, to free us up, it would, it would completely invert the entire food system in a year.

[692] The entire food system, as you speak of, like when you're talking about the genetically modified organisms and you're talking about these companies that provide them like Monsanto, there's a backlash against that now because of the information that's been released about the detrimental effects of them.

[693] And you're seeing like in Brazil they won lawsuits, the farmers won massive lawsuits against Monsanto.

[694] and these various GMO products that they've created.

[695] Say you're talking about Iowa and the fertility of the land in Iowa.

[696] What could possibly happen?

[697] Could all these farms that are set up to just specifically grow grains and a lot of them grains that are specifically grown just to feed livestock?

[698] Or make alcohol.

[699] Is that what it is too?

[700] Well, yeah, corn, you know, all the alcohol, corn, corn alcohol.

[701] That's what most of the farms.

[702] Well, a lot of it, you know, all right, but go ahead.

[703] The massive amounts of money are invested in these systems.

[704] What could they do?

[705] I mean, what could be done to change all that?

[706] Could those farms be sort of turned around and brought to more of a comprehensive approach to farming like you're prescribing?

[707] What the delivery stables do when the automobile came?

[708] That's what we're talking about here.

[709] I mean, think about that transition.

[710] Think about the horse -drawn hackneys when the electric streetcar came.

[711] I mean, you're talking, that's the level of change here.

[712] You're talking about massive societal change.

[713] There will be some losers.

[714] But you know what?

[715] Those guys have been making fun of me and calling me a bioterrorist and a lunatic and, you know, a backwash.

[716] You're a bioterrorist?

[717] Yeah, because our chickens can, you know, commune with red -wing blackbirds and indigo buntings out in the field, and then those wild birds take our diseases to the science -based, environmentally controlled, you know, factory chicken houses and threatened the planet's food supply, all because we were so archaic and neanderthal that we had our chickens running around into pasture.

[718] Has that really been argued?

[719] Absolutely.

[720] You've really had that.

[721] Wow.

[722] That's hilarious.

[723] You barbarian.

[724] your chickens run loose.

[725] In fact, I had two federal veterinarians when the last time we had an avian flu outbreak in Virginia back about 12 years ago.

[726] And they, by the way, they exterminated landfill 1 ,000 tractor -trailer loads of poultry, 1 ,000 tractor -trailer loads of poultry within just about a five -county area of me. Wow.

[727] All right.

[728] Did they then in turn feed that poultry back to other chickens after they killed it?

[729] No, no, that was not because that was avian flu, so they actually landfilled or incinerated.

[730] Wow.

[731] It burned it up.

[732] But see, under our system, you don't have any of that stuff.

[733] So, I mean, a thousand tractor trailer loads is a lot of food, all right?

[734] Anyway, I had two vets there that were part of the extermination federal tax force.

[735] Both of them said that we are considered, I mean, they came to visit because they'd read about us.

[736] You know, we're here.

[737] You know, they came from Oklahoma or whatever.

[738] We'll go see this place.

[739] And both of them said that we are considered a typhoid Mary in the community.

[740] Because, you know, we don't vaccinate.

[741] We don't medicate.

[742] And we don't, you know, we don't do all the orthodoxy that the industry says you're supposed to do.

[743] I mean, that's the orthodoxy.

[744] See, that's the, and if you don't adhere to that.

[745] And, of course, then that orthodoxy drives insured.

[746] insurance?

[747] How does a farmer sell his product?

[748] How does he get product liability insurance?

[749] The insurance company says, well, we won't underwrite you unless you use best agricultural practices.

[750] Well, the insurance company doesn't know anything about agriculture.

[751] Where are they going to find out about what's best agricultural practices?

[752] The dang, they ring up the land grant university, which is the lackey of the industry, and they say, well, you need this protocol of vaccinations, this protocol of medications, this protocol of chlorine, this protocol of fuming.

[753] And if the farm doesn't do that it's high risk it's a high risk farm you better not do it and so right now a lot of farmers like us are unable to get insurance because the underwriters won't insure risky farming which is which which goes against the orthodoxy of the system because the insurance executives play golf with the you know the industrial ag executives play golf with the bureauc you know the barox executives it's all a big fraternity it's not a conspiracy it's a fraternity of ideas and they've all drunk the kool -a that is madness and it's incredibly frustrating because you're so transparent about your process and the benefits of your process when you're sitting out there in one of the videos that i watch you're sitting out there with these pigs these pigs are just hanging out they come up to you look the pig got under your arm and you like put your arm on him he's like hey what's up yeah you know and they're just rooting around and and anybody that wouldn't see the benefits of that you have to be either you have to have a financial vested interest in not seeing it or you have to be insane yeah yeah you have to be insane uh I the best compliment I ever got was a young chef young chef came out to see the farm he was starting to buy our stuff and really liked it he wanted to come out see the pigs so I took him up to the pigs he says you know I was a young guy he said I have never I've ever seen a live pig.

[754] He cuts them up and cooks them all the time, but he never been physically present with a live pig.

[755] And he just got really quiet.

[756] I just let him, you know, enjoy it for a little while.

[757] And the pigs were, you know, gnawing on his shoestrings and just there.

[758] And he finally said, you know, I don't know anything about raising pigs.

[759] But I think if I was a pig, this is the way I'd want to live.

[760] And it's right.

[761] It resonates in our soul.

[762] I mean, if you have, if you have a a conscience at all, it resonates in your conscience.

[763] Yeah, here's your pigs up here on the screen.

[764] I mean, these pigs are just chilling.

[765] Yeah.

[766] They're having a great time.

[767] They're not stuck in some disgusting pen where they're lumped in.

[768] I mean, there was a story recently of a farmer who they believe fell.

[769] They believe he may have had a heart attack.

[770] He said an older gentleman fell into a pen and was killed by the pigs.

[771] Right.

[772] But, I mean, that's, and everybody's like, oh, pigs are vicious.

[773] But it's the conditions that are vicious.

[774] These pigs aren't going to kill anybody.

[775] These pigs come right up to you and nuzzle with you, man. I've seen it.

[776] They will kill you if you quit moving.

[777] They're omnivores, you know.

[778] Oh, yeah.

[779] If you're dead.

[780] If you're dead, I tell kindergartners that want to go in and pet them, I said, absolutely, you're welcome to go in and pet them.

[781] Just keep wiggling.

[782] Just keep wiggling.

[783] That's hilarious.

[784] They'll eat your toes first and your fingers.

[785] In an hour, they'll be to your spleen, you know, so.

[786] Wow.

[787] Keep moving.

[788] They are omnivores.

[789] Yeah, and they are survivors.

[790] They are.

[791] They're very cool.

[792] That's one of the interesting things about pigs is this huge problem with feral, what we call feral hogs, because they're not a native species to North America, and they don't really have any natural predators other than coyotes, which have sort of taken them on and mountain lions and all the other animals that we have in North America.

[793] But the number one invasive species problem we have as far as big animals is pigs.

[794] Well, there again, there again, the problem, it's a political problem.

[795] It's not an ecological problem.

[796] You know, in Europe, they have feral pigs too, but it's not a problem.

[797] You know why?

[798] Because you can go out and shoot a pig and sell it to a restaurant.

[799] You can sell it to a neighbor.

[800] They allow, you know, wild shot animals, deer and pigs, to go into commerce.

[801] I think you worry about that, though, is from a sportsman's point of view that you're going to have people out there sniping and poaching deer and all the really precious wild animals and selling them to restaurants and there won't be any there for hunters.

[802] The thing is nature has a way of balancing it out and when there's an overpopulation, they're easy to get and then once they get harder to get, then people get discouraged from hunting because they're too hard to get.

[803] I would be more in support of that for pigs than the other animals simply because pigs breed all year round.

[804] They'll have several litters a year of many, but whereas a deer will have one fawn, you know, and they'll have a fawn or two, and they'll have them once a year.

[805] Yeah, well, maybe you could control it with licenses, just give people, you know, you can harvest so many a deer, so many a year or whatever.

[806] I mean, there's a lot of ways to skin the cat.

[807] The bottom line I'm getting to, though, is that when you, when you prohibit a food source from entering commerce, you, you automatically, um have the government manipulating a uh a supply and demand situation and that that's the reality and so uh so you know the the people that are that are concerned about and you go down in some areas i mean yeah the wild pig problem is a real it's a real land abuse problem well they're having them in suburban san jose san jose as people are having their lawns chewed up there was a big news story about it the other day where they showed these pigs running across people's lawns in this normal suburban street.

[808] They're chewing up their lawns.

[809] They're resourceful and they're smart.

[810] You know, picture the smartest, supposedly one of the smartest animals there is.

[811] And they are.

[812] They're really, they're really smart.

[813] So if we would, if we would allow people to actually practice consenting adult voluntary commerce on some of these things, it would, it would then incentivize innovation, entrepreneurship, and the antidote to all of the depressing things we've talked about.

[814] And our side then would rise and the other side would have to adapt.

[815] They'd either have to down, I mean, there's talk, for example, right now among the poultry industry of trying to go antibiotic -free in 10 years.

[816] And in order to do it, they're going to have to greatly.

[817] drop the bird size in their houses, and I know that there's a lot of research going into building these living compost bedding situations in these houses.

[818] Even in the poultry industry.

[819] Yes, in the poultry industry, yeah.

[820] I mean, you know, Denmark made the change.

[821] They outlawed factory pork houses years ago.

[822] They've been fine.

[823] They've gone to deep -bedded, you know, houses completely.

[824] completely different situation, and it makes a completely different living environment.

[825] So, you know, you can make those changes.

[826] They're not, they're not insurmountable.

[827] And those changes, though, still are not where you're at.

[828] You've got these animals moving around in this giant farm, and you move your electric fences from place to place.

[829] What's the method?

[830] Like, how do you get the animals to move like when you like you have them in one area for like a day day yeah how big is the area that you fence in let me let's take cows i mean we've gone as as as as 400 head on two acres for a day i mean that's pretty tight an acre is a football field just right for people trying to visualize what's an acre it's roughly a football field so you know imagine 400 cows on two acres i mean that's that's pretty dense all right yeah um but the beauty is that when you move them all the time like this, they get very docile.

[831] I mean, you know, they're routine.

[832] And you incentivize it because every day at 4 o 'clock, when you go out and call them, they're going to a new salad bar.

[833] You know, if every day at 4 o 'clock, a certain call meant, there's a bowl of ice cream for you, you know, you'd get pretty, you know, used to that call as well.

[834] And is that what you do?

[835] You call them?

[836] Yeah, we call them.

[837] We don't heard them.

[838] We call them.

[839] What's the call?

[840] Do you have a noise you make?

[841] Oh, get we!

[842] And so they hear that and they know it's a little dinner bell.

[843] Yeah, it's like a dinner bell.

[844] Yeah, and they just come right on.

[845] Wow.

[846] So then you set up this new, you put the stakes down, you set up this new area.

[847] The fence is totally portable.

[848] So you're essentially, I mean, envision a field like a ladder, and the permanent, the edges of the field are the stringers of the ladder.

[849] And the portable fences are the rungs.

[850] So the permanents are there all the time.

[851] and we simply move the rungs, you know, contract or expand the rungs based on how much grass there is, how many there are in the herd, you know, that sort of thing.

[852] So it's a very artistic, you know, there's a science, but there's also an art to it as we essentially give them one plate full a day.

[853] And you alternate animals in these areas.

[854] Yeah, so the cows go through first, then the egg mobiles come in after them.

[855] So after the cows are there, then you push the chicken house in there.

[856] You fenced that in as well.

[857] No, that's not fenced.

[858] Those chickens can run anywhere they want to.

[859] They just hang around the egg mobile because that's where we're feeding water and nest boxes are.

[860] So you don't have to fence them.

[861] They don't have to fence them.

[862] They go out up to 200 yards and scavenge and scratch out cow patties.

[863] And when it starts getting dark, they come back in.

[864] And it would start coming back.

[865] They go back in for security.

[866] That's how we have it in our yard.

[867] We leave the door open at night.

[868] And then at the end at night, we shut the door.

[869] They know that, I mean, you know, chickens are, you're chicken, it's scared, right?

[870] I mean, we use the word slang, you know, your chicken are scared.

[871] And so their instinct is to get somewhere secure for the night.

[872] They don't want to just sit out on the ground at night.

[873] So your coop or the eggmobile, that's a secure place, and they naturally are drawn to that as dark starts to go down.

[874] So for them, you don't have to worry about that.

[875] You just move this giant structure that you've created.

[876] which is very innovative.

[877] Is this your design, the structure?

[878] Yeah, yeah.

[879] See if you could pull up the Eggmobile, because it's pretty interesting.

[880] See if you could find the video of it.

[881] It was in one of those polyface.

[882] That's what you call it, Polyface Farm, is one of those videos.

[883] Right.

[884] It's your design.

[885] Do you just figure out how to stack them in there in this sort of a way?

[886] Well, essentially, it's a chicken house on wheels is what it is.

[887] And so, you know, where you would normally make a chicken house, for example, yeah, there you go, where you normally make a chicken house stationary, this is simply mounted on wheels, on an axle, like a trailer, and you just hooked up to it with a tractor, and the chickens are all inside, and you can move it, you know, up the public road or to the far side of the field or whatever, and there's the guard dog, the guard dog's with them as well.

[888] And the guard dog keeps coyotes away.

[889] He keeps coyotes and hawks and things that like drumsticks for dinner.

[890] He keeps those away.

[891] We lost a chicken.

[892] We don't know what happened.

[893] I'm pretty sure it was a hawk.

[894] Something just scooped one up.

[895] It just vanished.

[896] No feathers, no nothing.

[897] Oh, yeah.

[898] They do.

[899] Wow, you got a lot of chickens, man. Oh, yeah.

[900] Yeah, that's a lot of chickens.

[901] That's a thousand chickens.

[902] Now, are those egg -laying chickens or those...

[903] Those are egg layers.

[904] And you have different chickens that are egg -laying chickens and different chickens that are meat chicken.

[905] That's right.

[906] It's like dairy and beef.

[907] Dairy cows grow, make a lot of milk.

[908] Beef cows grow bulkier.

[909] Same with chickens.

[910] Layers, layers have a, they're genetically selected.

[911] Those breeds they lay eggs and they have a physique more like Kobe Bryant and the meat chickens have a physique have a physique have a physique more like Emmett Smith Oh, okay Great If you're gonna eat it You want to Emmett Smith Right If you want to lay an egg You want a Kobe Bryant Gotcha Kobe Brian your egg layer He's called Kobe Brian An Egg layer So So it's essentially Just the breed of chicken itself Yeah, yeah That's right That's right I mean all these I mean Hogs I mean sheep Some sheep are known Especially for their wool, like the marinos, you know, they're known for their wool.

[912] Others are known more for their meat.

[913] Pigs.

[914] Some pigs are known for their fat.

[915] They were called lard hogs.

[916] Back in a day we ate lard, you know, and so they would get real fat.

[917] Other pigs are known for the length of their loin, others for their maternal instincts, you know, big, big litters.

[918] So, yeah, all these breeds have different characteristics.

[919] Do you only have hens or do you have roosters as well?

[920] We have roosters as well.

[921] The eggs are not all fertile.

[922] We don't have enough roosters to fertilize all of them.

[923] But we do have enough roosters so that, you know, kids can watch them crow and we can.

[924] I've had a lot of people say that are transcendentalists or, you know, that if that, if we actually come back as a different being, they really want to come back as a rooster at Polly phase.

[925] Why?

[926] Well, because they've got, you know, about 200 hens per rooster.

[927] It seems like you get outrun.

[928] They would just start running you.

[929] They would tell you what to do.

[930] Yeah, they can get hen packed.

[931] Yeah, hen packed.

[932] That's the other term.

[933] Chickens being scared and hen packed.

[934] Those are both real.

[935] And hen packs do pack, man. Oh, yeah, they do.

[936] There's some wild pigs in San Jose.

[937] And they, oh, wow, look at that.

[938] Yeah.

[939] Yeah, he's getting food right there.

[940] Yep.

[941] I mean, they have a real problem now.

[942] It's just started to make its way up there.

[943] A lot of people don't associate California with wild pigs.

[944] What I was getting at was, do you breed your own chickens?

[945] Do you...

[946] We have just started.

[947] We've just started.

[948] We haven't in the past.

[949] We've always gotten them from a hatchery.

[950] But what we've seen, you'd find this fascinating, I'm sure.

[951] What we've seen is in my lifetime, and I'm not that old.

[952] But I have watched the genetic viability of animals, of domestic livestock, drop.

[953] because of the props that we use, the crutches that we use, antibiotics, hot feed, you know, candy bar, I call it candy bar diets, you know, and unnatural feeding regimens.

[954] And so we have really seen the strength that just the, the viability of these farm animals plummet.

[955] So our son, Daniel, when he was eight, started.

[956] with rabbits.

[957] These are meat rabbits, not pet rabbits, but they're meat rabbits.

[958] Some friends had a couple doze and a buck, and they couldn't take them to a new apartment where they were moving.

[959] So they said, you know, would you like these rabbits?

[960] Well, he was eight, you know, eight years old is about the time to start an entrepreneur business, you know.

[961] And so he said, I mean, I started with chickens when I was 10.

[962] So I was two years late, but he started his rabbits when he was eight.

[963] And so he said, yeah, I'll tell you, I wanted to raise some rabbits.

[964] So he did that.

[965] And if you read any, like, you know, rabbit -rearing book, it'll say, never give them grass, you know, don't give them that because they'll get diary and die.

[966] And, of course, that's exactly what we found.

[967] But what he did, he did what's called line breeding, which is kind of a wild breeding.

[968] And it took him five years to work through a lot of mortality and culling.

[969] But in five years, the rabbit started really getting strong, vibrant, you know, big litters, healthy.

[970] now 24 years later they're almost bulletproof and and what we've seen in the in the genetic selection process over that time of not using any crutches and just letting it be kind of a you know a Darwinian selection process has made us now want to want to do that duplicate that with our other animals and so we've we started last year with our chickens taking our oldest, what we call survivor genetics, the oldest hens that are still laying, mating them to the roosters.

[971] And what we want to do is just keep taking the oldest hens, mating them back to the, mating them to the roosters.

[972] So we eventually create a survivor genetic.

[973] In other words, that's the chicken that knew to hide when the hawk came.

[974] That's the chicken that knew to get under shelter when the rain came.

[975] That's the chicken that didn't get flu, that didn't get bug, that didn't have a proletes.

[976] lapse the first eggs you did.

[977] I mean, I call it survivor genetics.

[978] We're doing that now with our cows.

[979] We're selecting our own bulls and breeding from our own bulls.

[980] And we're very excited about what this kind of wild line breeding type of thing can do if you knock out all the crutches.

[981] The problem is that it puts you crossways of the animal welfare crowd because they can't They can't abide the idea that if I have a sick animal, I'm just going to let it die.

[982] Oh, you know, I mean, you know, they've been ambi -eyed and thumper -rided to death to where, you know, every, every, you know, every dog and cat has to have a monogrammed L -L -Bin cushion in an air -conditioned antirroom.

[983] And that's the only way to care for animals.

[984] And the problem is that we don't, we're not going to get genetic strength if we don't let nature cull out the weaklings.

[985] That's the problem.

[986] You know, and so we wouldn't have the vibrant rabbits that Daniel has if we had started at the beginning, oh, let's prop these up with antibiotics so the weak ones can survive.

[987] If everybody walks into the room wearing crutches, you don't know who can stand on their own two feet.

[988] Right.

[989] It's only when you start knocking crutches out that you find out who can stand.

[990] It's that anthropomorphizing.

[991] Yes, absolutely.

[992] Of animals, that we wouldn't do that with people.

[993] of course.

[994] No, we wouldn't do it with people.

[995] But these are animals and this is the natural world and this is why animals survive and if you don't do that, they won't survive.

[996] Then you will have the weak ones breed and they'll develop all sorts of huge issues, which could be argued essentially that that's happening with people, but people have a lot of other things to offer.

[997] Our innovation, our creativity and our ability to communicate and our thinking are what makes us uniquely human.

[998] The animals, it's simply their body, their life.

[999] their existence and the way they interact with nature.

[1000] When you temper with that, when you tamper with that, you're essentially, you're pretending you're smarter than nature itself, and that's ridiculous.

[1001] We can't, we can show real clearly by what you've said today about factory farming, about the development of these diseases, that we're not smarter than nature.

[1002] We don't.

[1003] And that we, there's no one could know everything.

[1004] And there's not one person that's smart enough to be able to see the whole business.

[1005] big picture.

[1006] We need a lot of other eyes on this, and we need a lot of other thoughts on this, and when you start applying the same sort of compassion that we rightly do to human beings, you start applying them to animals, you actually wind up screwing the animals over.

[1007] Yeah, and you create artificial fragility.

[1008] You know, Sir Albert Howard, who of course, you know, developed the scientific aerobic composting process, which his book is still kind of the icon of the whole sustainable agriculture community.

[1009] It was written in 1943, an agricultural testament.

[1010] He says in there that when you use artificial manures in the soil, and that's what he called chemical fertilizers, artificial manures, it grows artificial plants, which make artificial animals, which then make artificial people who can only stay alive using artificials.

[1011] That was.

[1012] in 1943.

[1013] Wow.

[1014] Wasn't that precinct?

[1015] Yeah, that guy was on the ball.

[1016] Yeah.

[1017] That was when it was just coming out.

[1018] I mean, how long had factory farming even been around that?

[1019] 20 years?

[1020] It wasn't.

[1021] We were just, I mean, that was 1943.

[1022] We were just really beginning to start using chemical fertilizers at that point.

[1023] Now, when they have the issue with large scale agriculture, when they chew up all the minerals in the ground, then they have to add minerals when they go over.

[1024] the topsoil of American farmlands.

[1025] I mean, there was a paper that was written about it.

[1026] God, I can't remember the year, but it was a long time ago.

[1027] I believe it was in the 1940s about the mineral deficiencies of top oil, of topsoil.

[1028] What do they do about that now?

[1029] And does that same issue still happen in a farm like yours?

[1030] Well, yes, absolutely.

[1031] I mean, mineral deficiency is a major problem in nature.

[1032] Fortunately, nature has a mechanism to remedy it.

[1033] you know, amazingly, it's on site, doesn't need a bunch of stuff brought in, and the way nature remedies it is with an active decomposition cycle.

[1034] The way it works is when organic matter decomposes in the soil, it gives off, it exudes carbon dioxide.

[1035] All right, when things rot, they give off carbon dioxide.

[1036] And so that carbon dioxide, as it percolates up through the pores in the soil, you know, the aggregates in the soil, if you look at the soil in an electron microscope, it really looks like a marsh.

[1037] You know, there's all these little, you know, cavities and aggregates and moisture and all these, you know, slogging, weird -looking, you know, bugs and cow -looking things and, you know, predators and herbivores and it's an entire, you know, there are more living beings in a double handful of healthy soil than there are people on the face of the earth.

[1038] Whoa.

[1039] That's how alive it is.

[1040] Whoa.

[1041] Yeah.

[1042] That's crazy.

[1043] So, when that carbon dioxide eases up through the aggregates in this kind of marshy soil, it encounters H2O, water, all right, in those aggregates.

[1044] And when the CO2 hits H2, it makes carbonic acid.

[1045] Now, carbonic acid, if we said this is a rock right here, and we want to find out how much zinc, cobalt, molybdenum, you know, aluminum, whatever, is in this rock, we could treat it with lots of reagents.

[1046] We could use sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, you know, we could use lots of different acids.

[1047] Guess which one is the most efficient acid to use?

[1048] carbonic acid.

[1049] So nature, you know, so creation has this wonderful ability if there is, if there is carbon decomposing in the soil and moisture, that creates a carbonic acid to break out the minerals that are in the parent rock material in the soil.

[1050] If I went out, if I went outside the studio here and picked up a rock and brought it in and said, is that rock, does it contain the same minerals?

[1051] I mean, is it the same thing as it was 2 ,000 years ago?

[1052] You'd say, yes.

[1053] I mean, that's the rock.

[1054] I mean, it's, you know, there's not a big hole through it.

[1055] You know, yeah, that's the way it was.

[1056] And so we have plenty of parent mineral in, you know, out here.

[1057] The problem is we don't have an active decomposition cycle.

[1058] How do you, how do you destroy?

[1059] a decomposition cycle.

[1060] You do it when you don't feed this, when you don't have a carbon, a carbon -centric system.

[1061] And everything about modern farming is trying to get rid of carbon.

[1062] This is one of the things that we're looking at, maybe if you've read the book, Wheat Belly, about, you know, gluten and those sorts of things, is that it used to be when our grandpappies were planting wheat, wheat would grow, you know, six feet tall.

[1063] It was real, real tall so that the grain to stem ratio was whatever, what, you know, the ratio.

[1064] Well, the taller the wheat, the taller the stalk, the less weight it can hold out there.

[1065] You know, it wants to fall over, you know, because you go, the skyscraper gets taller and taller, right?

[1066] And so in genetic breeding and selection, what we've done in the last 50 years, is selected shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter cultivars down to where it's a very short stem.

[1067] And that ratio has fundamentally changed, which also affects the enzymes and the nutrient components of those seed heads.

[1068] But we can combine it faster and we can grow a bigger head on a smaller plant.

[1069] But guess what we also did?

[1070] also deprive the soil of the carbon that the straw and the stock would produce from a given amount of grain.

[1071] That deprived the soil of the carbon injection that was supposed to come when we took the grain head off.

[1072] And now we don't have that carbon decomposition cycle.

[1073] Wow.

[1074] And so the solution to that in the industrial way is just pour bags.

[1075] Yeah.

[1076] Yeah, yeah, add mineral.

[1077] You know, mine minerals somewhere else and add them.

[1078] But all that can be done in -house.

[1079] It can all, absolutely, it can all be done in house.

[1080] The wheat issue is a big one with Americans today.

[1081] Everyone wants to be gluten -free, and, you know, I'm guilty of it too.

[1082] I stopped eating gluten recently.

[1083] And I found that almost immediately, like, I felt more, I felt less bloated after a meal, if that's a good term, less sedated after a meal.

[1084] I just, I didn't feel so tired.

[1085] And what I started reading about it, I read that when wheat had been changed to change the size of it, to make it more hardy, it also became more difficult to digest.

[1086] Yes, absolutely.

[1087] Is it possible to get that old wheat back?

[1088] Absolutely.

[1089] There are people doing it right now.

[1090] I mean, Washington State, the old red, red, rife heritage varieties, absolutely.

[1091] you can they're they're available you can buy them yeah so how do you uh get bread that's mean you well you uh i mean you can have your own flour mill if you want to buy it you know by the bag that sounds like a pain in the ass well you know uh that that's where modern times are really exciting because we now have techno glitzy gadgets in our kitchens uh when people ask me you know what's what's the most important thing a person can do to advance the integrity food movement.

[1092] My first answer is, get in your kitchen.

[1093] And I'm not talking about hoop skirts, hearth cooking, washboards, you know, barefoot pregnant in the kitchen.

[1094] I'm talking about embracing technoglitzy gadgetry that we have today.

[1095] The kitchens we have today are not grandma's kitchens.

[1096] You know, I mean, we've got two faucets with running water, you know, one's hot, one's cold.

[1097] I mean, we've got ovens, we've got refrigeration, we've got stainless steel, we've We've got quezon arts.

[1098] We've got blenders and cool little, you know, mills and flour mills and stuff.

[1099] And so, you know, when we buy it, we buy 25 pounds a wheat of, you know, flour at a time.

[1100] And you can absolutely get it, you know, as bulk.

[1101] And you can use this gadgetry and grind it up and, you know, bake your own bread.

[1102] In a computerized breadmaker.

[1103] Wow.

[1104] Grandma never had it so well.

[1105] It's never been easier to actually eat well than today, ever.

[1106] That's interesting.

[1107] That's so true.

[1108] Well, if you have the money, right, that's the big knock on organic food, you know, that, you know, most people don't have the money to go to whole foods or airworn or all these.

[1109] Let me address the money.

[1110] The way to address the money is to eat whole foods, not processed foods.

[1111] I'm sure you're familiar with the movie Food, Inc. And, of course, you know, it's a powerful movie, very profound.

[1112] but there's a real weakness in that movie where that you know that family that goes to Burger King and they buy that you know they buy a whopper or whatever they get and they buy uh it looks like a you know a 200 ounce soft drink but you know whatever it is it's a big one and uh french fries and then they say they can't afford to buy you know produce vegetables the fact is that meal not you know i don't i don't eat at Burger King but anyway they're all the same um that meal costs no more than two whole pounds of our polyface grass -fattened, grass -finished, world -class ground beef.

[1113] And there's more nutrition in half a pound of my ground beef than there is in that entire meal, fast food meal.

[1114] So when somebody says they can't afford it, the first thing I do is I want to grab them and say, okay, let's go to your house.

[1115] And here's what we're not going to find.

[1116] We're not going to find any fast food boxes or fast food receipts.

[1117] We're not going to find soda, alcohol, tobacco, coffee, widescreen TVs.

[1118] We're not going to find $100 designer jeans with holes already in the knees.

[1119] We're not going to find, you know, Netflix, People magazine, you know, name your thing.

[1120] I mean, you know, lottery tickets, that's a big one, okay?

[1121] You show me the house that doesn't have any of those things.

[1122] And then let's talk about price.

[1123] Talk about what you actually can't afford.

[1124] Talk about what you can.

[1125] What are your actual priorities?

[1126] Because my position is we choose even 95 % of poor people still have most of those things.

[1127] We choose what we're willing to buy.

[1128] You can buy wheat by the bushel.

[1129] You can make $800 worth of bread from a $6 bushel of wheat.

[1130] what it means is you have to participate in the food system this this is our problem is not that it's not available we can't get it or we don't know what to do our problem is that we want convenience we don't want to have to think we don't have to we don't want to have to plan ahead we don't have to want to you know plan menus we we want to just uh you know convenient spontaneity and you cannot have an integrity economic sector of anything automobiles food clothes entertainment You cannot have an integrity, economic sector of anything when you so profoundly abdicate personal participation in that economic sector.

[1131] But it is more expensive when you go to a supermarket and you buy organic vegetables.

[1132] Oh, yeah.

[1133] Yeah, it is.

[1134] It is.

[1135] And some folks feel like they are better.

[1136] Yeah.

[1137] Are they better scientifically?

[1138] Well, let me say this.

[1139] I don't want to get, you know, crossways of every, well, I guess I might as well.

[1140] I might as well get crossways or everything out there.

[1141] And in my view, you know, we should just not eat from the supermarket.

[1142] Don't eat from a supermarket.

[1143] No. Where do you get your food?

[1144] Oh, you get it from farmers market.

[1145] You get it from a community supported agriculture, a food buying club, a metropolitan food club.

[1146] You could go to farms, buy bulk.

[1147] I mean, the way to deal with the price is buy it unprocessed and buy volume, which means that you have to recreate your domestic larder.

[1148] You know, we don't even use that word anymore, larder, who's ever heard you know that word?

[1149] But that's where all the food was 80 years ago.

[1150] If I came to L .A. and said, where's the food in L .A.?

[1151] It's not in a warehouse.

[1152] It would be in individual larders in houses.

[1153] And so when you buy in bulk and you buy unprocessed, and you put your sweat equity into preparing, processing, preserving, and packaging, then you can actually save money over the processed counterpart.

[1154] That's incredible.

[1155] In other words, you can get top of the line, local, the best stuff in the world that's cheaper than the processed stuff in the supermarket.

[1156] I went to the green markets in New York City, arguably the most expensive farmer's market in the country.

[1157] I asked my hostess, I said, would you do something for me?

[1158] Could you take me to the vendor with the most expensive potato in America?

[1159] So she, oh, I know exactly who we need to go to.

[1160] She went down the stalls there, and there was a vendor there that had about 20 varieties of potatoes.

[1161] They were beautiful.

[1162] They had them in little box cubbies now in this beautiful wooden slanted display.

[1163] There were red ones and yellow ones.

[1164] and green ones and blue ones and all this.

[1165] So I looked through the boxes and I found the most expensive one.

[1166] It was a little heirloom Peruvian blue fingerling potato for $2 a pound.

[1167] That's expensive for a potato.

[1168] But you know where most potatoes, how most places were being sold in New York City?

[1169] $4 a pound as potato chips.

[1170] We've got quezen arts.

[1171] We've got slicers, dicers, and fry babies.

[1172] You can get the most expensive.

[1173] potato in America and it's half the price of potato chips but potato chips is not food i mean it is but it's not i mean it's a snack and people buy it for convenience if you get a real honest to goodness potato and slice it yourself and fry it in lard and a fry baby that is food it is food but what i'm saying is most people when they get it they get it as a snack and they don't have the time when someone buys a bag of chips they're not going to go to the store and get a potato and slice it and in this modern world that we live in, I'm saying.

[1174] I know, in this modern world.

[1175] So we should essentially go direct to farmers and go to farmers markets whenever possible, and you save a ton of money.

[1176] Save a ton of money.

[1177] Mother Earth News, this issue actually has a big spreadsheet where they did exactly that.

[1178] They have a whole bunch of items that they bought at the supermarket, at the farmer's market, and I guess CSAs or something.

[1179] it is profound the savings going direct to farmers can create.

[1180] It's amazing.

[1181] And buying volume and taking the middleman out of it.

[1182] That's the thing.

[1183] Is it possible with your methods and the way that you're describing farming and what you've done with your farm?

[1184] Is it possible to feed this entire country that way?

[1185] Oh, no question.

[1186] Not only is it possible, it's actually the only regenerative.

[1187] way to do it because when you break apart the when you break apart the feed from the animal from the manure and we can even include people in that as well when you break all those those those that are supposed to be synergistic blessings when you break them apart the whole thing floats on a counterfeit cheap energy, cheap oil, and a fragile house of cards that depends on, you know, clever pharmaceuticals staying, you know, one mutation ahead of the mutating bugs to function.

[1188] So the argument against what you're prescribing and describing is that what you have is sort of a beautiful small business model for creating a very ethical farm and raising animals in a very nice way.

[1189] But it's impractical when you're talking about feeding a nation of 300 million people.

[1190] But you're saying that not just the fact that you factor in when you farm your way, the lack of sort of invisible costs that you get with factory farming, the lack of all the other factors that you have to bring in, like chemicals and antibiotics and all these different things that are just unnecessary completely.

[1191] But the actual volume of food.

[1192] The actual volume of food, absolutely.

[1193] The actual volume of food is more in symbiotic places.

[1194] And our kind of farming with portable infrastructure allows you to use nooks and crannies that currently aren't being used.

[1195] Let me give you an example.

[1196] Let's take pigs as an example.

[1197] we run pigs in the in the woods and they eat acorns and bugs and you know weeds and things like that through the woods um and they actually you know eat the bugs that would attack the trees in the woods and the trees are healthier the fact is that we have millions and millions of acres of unused land there's not one reason for a single confinement hog facility in the entire country if we used our national forests, our Bureau of Land Management, you know, pinion pine in Colorado, if we used mesquite in Texas, you know, Appalachian hardwoods in the Mid -Atlantic and South.

[1198] Every place has millions of acres where these pigs could be run.

[1199] And you simply vacate the houses.

[1200] So the truth is we are not beginning to leverage.

[1201] We're not beginning to leverage the resource base that we have.

[1202] So what you're talking about is the resources that are untouched.

[1203] Yes.

[1204] So the factory farm system that we have, the amount of food that they produce, in order to produce that same amount of food, we would have to use more land.

[1205] We would have to use more areas that we're not using now.

[1206] We would have to...

[1207] Yeah, but it would be good land use.

[1208] It's not harmful land use.

[1209] I understand, but that land is most likely either owned by the state, national wildlife.

[1210] Well, yeah, and then the other problem would be, where would the profit be?

[1211] Who would profit then?

[1212] If you're talking about national forests and you're talking about a private company that grows agricultural, grows farm animals in these natural forests, who would be able to decide who gets to use their animals?

[1213] and this right well when uh when governor tim kane uh came uh came to visit our farm toward the end of his governance uh gubernatorial uh time in virginia um he really got it i mean we went see the we went did all this you know saw this and he he totally he totally bought into it he said so um you know what what can i do you know what what's the next step i said well governor i said uh let's have a meeting next week at the at the governor's mansion and iron out a lease arrangement where polyface can can run pigs in the state forests and keep all the trees from dying and of course you know he smiled at it he knew he knew cerebrally that I was exactly right because the Appalachian hardwood forests are dying and and they're dying due to lack of disturbance lack of disturbance in their ecosystem we don't have the buffalo we don't have the fires anymore so they're dying due to lack of disturbance so we can absolutely bring those forests back to vibrancy um right now they're just sterile they're just you know they're just sitting there so they could be disturbed by these they could be disturbed by these pigs and so so his his understanding of ecology absolutely um mandated that he you know get his head around this idea.

[1214] But, of course, he grinned and laughed, and we both realized, I mean, can you imagine what the radical environmental groups would do if you said, we're going to start, you know, leasing some of the state parks so people can grow pigs in them?

[1215] I mean, it would be, well, I mean, it's unspeakable.

[1216] Well, let's just forget about their arguments against environmental groups or PETA or anybody who might have an argument against it.

[1217] If you had a clean slate and if it was your job, you could design the whole agricultural system of this country to feed America based on your principles.

[1218] Oh, easy.

[1219] No question.

[1220] But we would have to use a lot of the land that's currently state land or national forests or...

[1221] Do you know that right now the U .S. has 700 registered dead zones, riparian dead zones.

[1222] One is the size of New Jersey.

[1223] One is the size of New Jersey.

[1224] Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico.

[1225] Those dead zones are collateral.

[1226] They are now in hospitable to life.

[1227] I mean, that's the definition of a dead zone.

[1228] They were once productive areas, you know, fisheries and amphibians, you know, productive areas that are now inhospitable to life.

[1229] They are a direct result of overrunning our nest's ability to handle our mechanistic creativity.

[1230] And so the fact is that in North Carolina, which leads the state in hog production, if you didn't have a hurricane every two years to flush all the manure lagoons out to the ocean, North Carolina would now be buried in hog manure.

[1231] That's the truth.

[1232] And so fortunately, we get a hurricane every couple of years to flush North Carolina like a big toilet so it doesn't choke on its own waste.

[1233] Wow.

[1234] So, you know, so the idea of whose land are we using here, let's talk to the displaced shrimp fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico and talk about displacement.

[1235] Let's talk about land use.

[1236] Are you with me?

[1237] When we start talking about the whole land use issue, our system actually would eliminate all of this dead zone, all of this inhospitable, the desertification, all the collateral damage.

[1238] We would actually have far more productive land than we do today because we're toxifying a very small part and what you know that that toxic stream is killing a bunch of other land why don't we just be honest and say let's use it all in a healing fashion and we won't have any dead zones and it'll all be progressively healing.

[1239] That sounds like a better alternative to me. So the only way to have these healthy environments, these healthy growing environments is to have sort of a symbiotic relationship with all the various different types of animals and the various different types of plants.

[1240] Is it possible to have acres and acres of things like corn and wheat without animals roaming free and still have some sort of a healthy environment?

[1241] I mean, can you grow a thousand, you know, acres of corn in a healthy way without having animals in that environment?

[1242] Probably the short answer is no, but if you, but that doesn't mean you can't grow grain.

[1243] I mean, there are now, in Australia, they're really experienced, Colin Seas there, who has vented a term called pasture cropping, has developed infrastructure and protocols.

[1244] calls for where you grow grain in perennial pasture without much tillage.

[1245] So you don't you don't till the blanket, you don't till the vegetative blanket of the soil.

[1246] Instead, you use livestock as a pruter to prepare and even temporarily weaken the perennial grass, plant right into it.

[1247] The annuals, you know, barley, wheat, rye, whatever, and it grows, beats out the grass.

[1248] The grass stays subordinated it in the shadow so that when the grain dries down, you harvest the grain and you've already got a nice, you know, regrowth of green material underneath without ever actually destroying the sod.

[1249] And that's being, there are now 2 ,000 farmers in Australia doing this.

[1250] It's jumping now to the U .S. It's a real hot technology.

[1251] And it works.

[1252] So, you know, there are a lot of pieces to this.

[1253] First of all, if you quit feeding herbivore's grain, you tremendously reduce the amount of grain that has to be produced.

[1254] Then you go to perennials.

[1255] That's a very, very good point.

[1256] Then you go to perennial.

[1257] And, you know, at the top of the program, we talked about these principles of nature.

[1258] You know, one is animals move.

[1259] Another is that nature, nature likes perennials.

[1260] Nature has very few annuals, actually.

[1261] Nature thrives on perennials.

[1262] So a productive regenerative food system should be concentrated on perennials, not annual.

[1263] To describe to people that don't know what the difference between those are.

[1264] Well, a perennial is a plant, you don't have to plant every year.

[1265] An annual is a plant, you have to plant annually, okay, every year.

[1266] So grains, squash plants, you know, your garden vegetables, those are annuals.

[1267] Blackberries are perennials.

[1268] You know, you plant them once, trees are perennials, vines, bushes, grasses, okay, those are all perennials.

[1269] And so that is the basis of nature's ecology, is perennials, not annuals.

[1270] realize that our ag policy in the United States is to subsidize, not perennials, but annuals, six of them.

[1271] You know, wheat, corn, soybeans, cotton, sugar, and rice.

[1272] All of those are annuals.

[1273] So our official ag incentivization is to incentivize the very thing that destroys soil.

[1274] That's hilarious.

[1275] And it's also hilarious that we insist on feeding.

[1276] animals' grains just to get them fatter.

[1277] Right.

[1278] And, you know, that fat being an unhealthy fat, I, I'm amazed every time I go to a nice restaurant and they try to offer me that Kobe beef stuff.

[1279] Oh, yeah.

[1280] I'm like, will you get away from me with that sick cow?

[1281] Yeah.

[1282] That thing is sick.

[1283] Oh, it's so, it's wonderfully marbled.

[1284] No, that thing's dying.

[1285] Yeah.

[1286] That thing's barely alive when you shoot it.

[1287] Yeah, that's right.

[1288] The liver's probably swollen up.

[1289] So the point is that if we quit feeding herbivores grain, we would grow way less.

[1290] Then, if we take the omnivores, the pigs and the chickens, and integrate them as salvagers, like, listen, if every kitchen had enough chickens to eat its kitchen scraps, I mean, you know, like get rid of the pet dog and put in two chickens, right?

[1291] Okay.

[1292] If every kitchen had enough chickens to eat the kitchen scraps, there would not be an egg industry in the U .S. Not one.

[1293] Okay.

[1294] This was the role of chickens.

[1295] What we do instead is we send our kitchen waste down the disposal or out in the garbage.

[1296] It goes to the landfill, and the whole ecosystem is deprived of the biomass that's supposed to compost or digest and feed the next cycle of life.

[1297] The problem is it's really tough to keep two chickens in an apartment.

[1298] They don't take any more room than an aquarium or a gerbil.

[1299] Two chickens?

[1300] Yeah.

[1301] Well, they've got to run the whole idea.

[1302] They have to wander around and pack grass.

[1303] They don't need a lot of room.

[1304] I mean, if you had them three feet by two feet would be fine for two chickens.

[1305] Really?

[1306] Yeah.

[1307] Oh, yeah.

[1308] Yeah.

[1309] But what about foraging and all that good stuff that keeps them healthy?

[1310] Yeah.

[1311] Just, you know, build your box, your container so that they can, you know, so that they can get to about 12 inches of compost underneath them.

[1312] and you just throw your scraps in there, and then the compost, you know, feeds your little pot garden.

[1313] I mean, well, you know, whatever kind of pot garden you have, you know, container gardens.

[1314] You need containers.

[1315] Containers, yeah.

[1316] But I'm happy with pot gardens, too.

[1317] I mean, take that whichever way you want to do it, all right?

[1318] Anyway, that becomes your, you know, your fertilizer for your house.

[1319] And what you do then is you turn your house instead of an ecological liability, your house becomes an integrated part of an ecosystem asset.

[1320] Well, it seems that in that sense that giant cities like New York where people are stacked on top of each other, they essentially are factory farming humans.

[1321] Yeah, that's right.

[1322] That's right.

[1323] They are.

[1324] But there are a lot of these cool ways now that we can do that.

[1325] Anyway, if you take the pig and the chicken and you use them as their salvage operation, then you cut even more grain.

[1326] So you take off the herbivore grain, you take off the chicken grain and the pig grain, suddenly you don't have much grain use.

[1327] And when you don't need very much grain, you don't have to plow very much, you don't have to plow very much, then you can go back to a perennially based system, and you can go back to the historic rotations where several years of perennials built the fertility for the one or two years of annual extraction.

[1328] okay now now you're on to a regenerating an actual healing soil building system so what you're prescribing or describing in fact is the way that our culture should have been engineered in the first place but a lot of what we have here is sort of the the momentum of the past that we have to deal with the momentum of this factory farm establishment that was set up that's been providing us with food for decades upon decades, almost a century now.

[1329] Yeah.

[1330] And you have to understand, in context, don't be too hard on the ancestors because what happened was it got easier.

[1331] It got easier to grow grain and feed it.

[1332] That came earlier than electric fence and scientific composting systems.

[1333] so it was the electric fence that allowed us to suddenly um free free these animals from supposedly efficient confinement programs and grain feeding programs it was the i mean george washington at mount vernon he always complained about the pigs he was a very meticulous record keeper and he always complained about the pigs because he could never get them all in at once you know he just ran through the woods and they had their babies and you know you kind of well it's hog killing time it's fall you know let's get what we can and they they'd get what they can never get them all so he never really knew you know for for a meticulous record keeper this was a nightmare right you know he never could count all of his stock and but but that's the way pigs were used pigs were just kind of they were just they were salvagers they were kind of nook and cranny you know operators they weren't fenced in no they weren't fenced in because there was no fence that would keep them in.

[1334] How in a world can you ever fence a pig in with a physical structure?

[1335] Even, I mean, this is before metal wire.

[1336] You know, the only fence they had were like you know, ricks of you've seen them around museums and stuff, little, you know, chestnut rail fences.

[1337] Well, a pig would tear that apart in a hurry.

[1338] So what they did, they farmed, they had an agriculture that was primarily exclusionary rather than inclusionary.

[1339] So instead of Instead of having, I mean, Thomas Jefferson wrote about this at Monticello in his farm book, he had several slave boys that their job was to keep the livestock out of the gardens.

[1340] So the idea was that the livestock basically, you know, ran free, maybe with a herder or something.

[1341] Or, you know, there were some fields, but not that many.

[1342] And then what you did is you protected your garden.

[1343] You protected your berries and your, you know, you're really high.

[1344] value stuff, you protected that physically or with a fence, some sort of a barricade because you simply couldn't afford to fence all the animals and control them.

[1345] So it became a lot easier to grow animals faster with grain than it did with controlled grazing because you couldn't control the grazing.

[1346] So now the technology of electric fencing and composting has enabled us to bring the perennial pasture -based model onto a par with the grain model.

[1347] And the beauty of that is that the pasture -based non -tillage model is it's a soil -building engine as opposed to tithe.

[1348] village, which is a soil -destroying engine.

[1349] And so all of this, you know, all this has to be viewed in context.

[1350] You have to appreciate, I tell people, you know, don't crucify Grandpa.

[1351] You know, he was trying to do what he did.

[1352] But there's no excuse today for continuing Grandpa's situation because we don't have, we've got things that Grandpa would have given his eye teeth to have today.

[1353] Yeah, I think as we're saying before, we're on the momentum of this power.

[1354] that was set up that couldn't also probably couldn't possibly have anticipated the amount of population growth that we have today that's very possible when you look at our future as a as a country and feeding us do you do you have hope do you do you think that people are coming around people are certainly more aware where their food comes from now than ever before do you see changes on the horizon I sure do and I'm a I'm a pretty incorrigible optimist overall I don't think, though, that the changes will be gentle.

[1355] You have to understand if what I've described in this program became normal, it would completely invert the power, position, prestige, and profit of the entire food and farming industry.

[1356] That's a big ship to turn around.

[1357] And they're not going to go gently into the night.

[1358] And so that's why we're seeing the backlash of the SWATs.

[1359] teams, you know, coming in, raiding people's freezers, private food clubs, we're seeing an increasing backlash, the Food Safety Modernization Act, you know, proposed that, you know, you basically couldn't use compost to fertilize vegetables.

[1360] We can't have animals and produce on the same farm.

[1361] You know, we're going to outlaw outdoor flocks of 3 ,000 chickens or more.

[1362] I mean, there's a huge pushback from.

[1363] from that orthodoxy.

[1364] And generally, you know, if you study collapse or guns and germs or 1493 or whatever, what you find is that major societal change generally doesn't happen.

[1365] You know, people don't just wake up and say, I think I want a different society.

[1366] You know, it usually follows some major, you know, major thing.

[1367] And, I mean, you know, the transition from draft power to automobile was incredibly disturbing, you know, in America.

[1368] And I think that if the industry, let me give you one more little story, I spoke last week.

[1369] I'm getting ready to go to the Netherlands and do a week of seminars in the Netherlands.

[1370] I spoke to one of their top ag journalists this week, did an interview by phone, and he said that the previous week he had just interviewed the CEO of Singenta, which is the European counterpart of Armand Santo.

[1371] And several years ago, they adopted a plan, a target that they would increase productivity in grains, the grains that they were working on, by 20 % by 2020.

[1372] You know, 20 % by 2020 has a nice, you know, ring to it.

[1373] Well, there are several years into that plan.

[1374] He said for the last 15 years, it's been totally flat.

[1375] Nothing we can do.

[1376] Nothing we can invent, nothing we can do has been able to change grain production at all for the last 15 years.

[1377] What we're seeing is what Joel Arthur Barker said when he wrote the book Paradigms 40 years ago and introduced the word to the world, he said, one of the axioms of paradigms is that just when they appear to have achieved perfection, they're on the brink of collapse.

[1378] And the industrial food system has promised disease -free, famine -free, you know, paradise.

[1379] And now with GMOs and they're there are a lot of people that are really pumped up on their hubris who have bought into this notion that we're going to go into some paradise nirvana only to find out oops um gmos are causing spontaneous abortions and uh infertility oops is that true i mean what where has that been Don Huber.

[1380] I mean, have him on your show.

[1381] Don Huber.

[1382] He's a professor and emeritus from Purdue University, and he's showing the direct relationship between, or have Jeffrey Smith on, but the direct relationship between glyphosate, which is Roundup, which is the herbicide that's now doubled in use since GMOs came out.

[1383] That was the number one thing.

[1384] And there are absolutely, absolutely, in the last.

[1385] year see we're we're in our 15th year with GMOs remember it took 14 years to establish the DDT relationship with you know infertile frogs and and eggs that wouldn't hatch we're now 15 years last year there were something like 74 studies around the world impugning not only the claims but showing harmful side effects collateral damage of GMOs the idea that GMOs are actually more productive is pretty much universally debunk now.

[1386] They simply have not shown a productivity increase.

[1387] And so what I'm getting at is that the industry has continued to peg the future on this thing and present this kind of argument, this face that all is well, man, we're getting.

[1388] you ready to perfect everything it's going to be you know it's going to be a new day in the morning right and suddenly we see all these studies we see these direct science causal links collateral damage we see you know one in four pigs right now in the industry you know is dying from a viral uh we see these things, we see, you know, Listeria, campelobacter, salmonella, e -cola, all these new Latin squiggly words, you know, food pathogens, autism on the increase.

[1389] My take is that we are just about ready for nature to say, you know, you've you have bet, you have taken enough shortcuts, now I'm going to bat.

[1390] And it follows Barker's ideas.

[1391] that all paradigms at the point of perfection are on the brink of collapse when they're presented as perfect that's when they're on the brink of collapse I hope people are listening to you I know people in the podcast are listening to you but I hope people out there in the world of agriculture are listening to you I know there's a lot of blowback against you but I hope people are taking into consideration all these things that you're saying is there's so much logic to your words and there's so much wisdom and so so much research done that it's it's a very puzzling situation for someone like me who knows very little about it other than talking to you and reading and watching documentaries it's it's a very strange time it is indeed and and that's why i encourage people to um you know to take their recreation entertainment budget of time and time and money and and start to uh participate in the food system go visit a couple of farmers you know every single community is surrounded by really integrity farmers now they're everywhere they're everywhere there is not a community in in the country uh that is devoid of really high quality integrity food many of them are wanting to farm full time you know and they need like 10 more customers or 20 more customers to tip them over so they don't have to commute to town with their town job to support their farm addiction.

[1392] I implore urban people, you know, go to one less movie, go to one less whatever, you know, opera, whatever, but invest in this, in this integrity food idea, and you will hear farmers say the same things I'm saying.

[1393] They'll use, you know, and you'll be able to see it with your eyes.

[1394] You'll be able to taste, see, touch.

[1395] You will sensually connect with your ecological umbilical.

[1396] And that's a good place to be.

[1397] I love the term integrity food, too.

[1398] That really is a great term.

[1399] Yeah.

[1400] I love that you throw that around.

[1401] And I think what you're offering as far as advice is fantastic.

[1402] Encourage people to go to these farmers markets, connect to these people that are growing food in this way.

[1403] And I think people are most certainly.

[1404] more aware now than ever of where their food is coming from.

[1405] The term organic.

[1406] I mean, you never even heard that a couple of decades ago when it comes to food.

[1407] It just didn't exist.

[1408] Nobody talked about it.

[1409] Nobody talked about GMOs.

[1410] Nobody talked about anything.

[1411] All, you know, the 14 plus years that we have had GMOs have been this massive series of debates and denials and, you know, but I think people are more aware of it than ever before.

[1412] And I think a lot of it is because of people like you.

[1413] So thank you very much.

[1414] And thanks for coming on here.

[1415] It was a really interesting conversation.

[1416] I really, really enjoyed it, and I really appreciate all of your knowledge and the fact that you express it with so much passion.

[1417] It was really fun.

[1418] Thank you.

[1419] It's been a privilege to be with you.

[1420] Please.

[1421] It's been an honor.

[1422] Joel Salton, please follow him on Twitter, ladies and gentlemen.

[1423] He is the author of, give your books out.

[1424] What are the names of your books?

[1425] Well, there's nine of them right now, but the ones that, you know, that people need to know about would be the folks, this ain't normal, as well as the sheer ecstasy of being a lunatic farmer.

[1426] Perhaps my favorite is everything I want to do is illegal.

[1427] Holy cows and hog heaven.

[1428] You can farm the entrepreneur's guide to start and succeed in your farming enterprise.

[1429] The latest one is fields of farmers, mentoring, partnering, and germinating tomorrow's farmers.

[1430] So, yeah, there's good stuff there.

[1431] Beautiful.

[1432] Joel Salton, ladies and gentlemen, J -O -E -N -E -E -N.

[1433] L -S -A -L -A -L -A -T -I -N on Twitter.

[1434] Thank you very much, sir.

[1435] Thanks also to our sponsors.

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[1437] Go to lumosity .com forward slash Joe.

[1438] Click the start training button and get your learn on, folks.

[1439] Thanks also to stamps .com.

[1440] Go to stamps .com.

[1441] Enter in the code word J -R -E and get your $110 -dollar bonus offer, which includes a digital scale and up to 50.

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[1445] use the code word Rogan and save 10 % off any and all supplements.

[1446] Thursday night, I will be at the Fillmore, the Jackie Gleason Theater with Tony Hinchcliffe in Miami Beach.

[1447] Miami Beach, it's Miami, somewhere in Miami, Miami, Florida.

[1448] I don't know exactly where it is, but Joe Rogan .net, go there, find all the dates, and I'll see you guys soon.

[1449] Much love.

[1450] I don't know.