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Let The Animals Do The Work - With Joel Salatin · UK Column Radio

0:07
Speaker 1: Hello.
0:08
Speaker 2: I'm Charles Mallett with a UK column interview. There'll be
0:11
notes and links posted with the interview at ukcolumn dot org.
0:16
I'm joined by Joel Salatin, who is a Christian, libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist,
0:22
lunatic farmer. Those are his words and not mine. Joel,
0:27
thank you very much indeed for joining me. I wish
0:29
you were warm. Welcome to UK column.
0:32
Speaker 3: Thank you, it's a delight to be here.
0:34
Speaker 1: Good.
0:34
Speaker 2: Now, what I'd like to do before we get into
0:37
what you are doing and your sort of current philosophy
0:41
and ideas, is just to go back a bit and
0:43
give the audience the chance to understand how you've got
0:47
to where you are and how your life before now
0:52
sort of took shape. So going back to it, because
0:54
I know that your family certainly were involved in Venezuela
0:57
before moving to Virginia, you can just give us an
1:00
idea of how it is that you came to be.
1:04
Speaker 1: Involved in farming in the way that you are now.
1:06
Speaker 3: To start with, please, well, sure, so, my my paternal
1:11
grandfather always wanted a farm, but he never did. He
1:15
you know, he worked in a in an automobile factory
1:18
in Indiana and had a great, big garden. But he
1:22
was a he was truly an entrepreneur, an inventor. He
1:25
invented the very first walking garden sprinkler, you know that
1:29
that winds up its hose you know, and walks through
1:32
your called it the sprink Real he patented it, and
1:36
he was a bit of a you know, inventive, creative guy,
1:39
and was a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and
1:42
Farming magazine in what nineteen forty five when it came out,
1:47
had large compost piles and all this kind of thing.
1:50
And and then so so my dad kind of got
1:53
that that environmental that non chemical bent from him and
1:56
the love of farming and all, and and so here
1:59
he is my dad, uh you after after he was
2:02
in the Navy in World War Two and got out
2:05
and and wanted to farm. But you know, here you
2:07
are a Midwestern boy, no money, no land. What do
2:11
you do? And so he devised a plan to go
2:14
to South America, earn, earn money and buy land. And
2:19
that's exactly what he did. He went with Texas Oil
2:21
Company to Venezuela in the early oil exploration of the
2:26
you know, wildcat ventures off of the coast of Venezuela.
2:29
This was the you know, the beginning of Opek, and
2:33
in seven years was able to save enough money to
2:35
buy a thousand acre piece of land. We started raising
2:38
chickens and and he quickly took over the local chicken
2:43
market because our chickens were cleaner than the than than
2:48
the indigenous chickens at the time, and that made a
2:51
lot of neighbors angry. Uh. They didn't like the fact
2:54
that Dad had, you know, these these Spanish type of
2:57
markets where you know, the farmers bring their where into
3:00
the marketplace and you know, you have the vendors there
3:03
lined up buying. And so when the revolution, when the
3:06
junta came there in nineteen fifty nine, of ousting Edis Jimenez,
3:13
we were we became collateral damage, if you will, of
3:20
the breakdown of law and order that happens, you know,
3:22
when there's anarchy and a coup. And so we basically
3:27
fled the back door as the machine guns came in
3:29
the front door, as neighbors settled scores that they wouldn't
3:31
settle under normal circumstances. And after six months trying to stay,
3:36
we finally every door closed, and so we got back
3:39
on a ship and arrived back in the US Easter
3:42
Sunday nineteen sixty one, and Dad still wanted to go back.
3:46
He was thirty nine, he'd been there twelve years. He
3:48
loved the people, love the language, loved the culture. I mean,
3:51
how can you not like a place that grows bananas
3:53
and pineapples and papayas, you know, in the backyard. And
3:56
so that's why we didn't go back to the Midwest
3:59
and instead looked at farms within a day's drive of Washington,
4:02
d C. So that if things settled, we could we
4:04
could get to an embassy quickly and get paperwork and
4:06
get back. That never happened, but that's why we ended
4:10
up here in Virginia, three hours away from Washington, d C.
4:13
And bought the most gullied, worn out farm, very very
4:18
cheap available. It was definitely the armpit of the community.
4:21
And looking back now, I remember when I hit thirty nine.
4:25
When I hit thirty nine, Dad was thirty nine, and
4:27
I was thinking, Wow, if I lost it all, would
4:31
I start over? And Dad went up in my you know,
4:36
in my estimation when I realized what that meant, and
4:39
we started over. And so I was four when we
4:42
came here to this property, and we started, you know,
4:47
how do you how do you how do you fix?
4:51
How do you repair an eroded rock, piled, gullied, you know,
4:56
infertile place. And Dad sought advice from both government sources
5:01
and private source how do we do this? And all
5:04
the advice was plant corn, biochemical fertilizers, borrow money, build silos,
5:10
plow more ground, grazed the grays of the woods, all
5:13
that sort of thing. Well, he knew, he knew that
5:16
that wasn't the right approach, and so we began experimenting.
5:21
And we began experimenting with a lot of things, from
5:25
composting to rotational grazing, moving the animals, electric fencing, He
5:30
invented some electric fencing materials, portable shade mobiles for animals,
5:35
mobile mobile farm infrastructure, and and over time gradually developed
5:41
kind of a oh I don't know, uh, you know,
5:44
an an economically and ecologically workable recipe for restoration. And
5:49
so over my lifetime, I've watched the soil build up
5:53
over the rocks, i watched the gullies, you know, heel
5:56
up and and uh it's it's it's gone from the
6:00
you know, from the the most abused farm in the
6:04
community to arguably the most abundant.
6:08
Speaker 2: You paint an amazing picture, but also you describe it
6:11
in such a way that it sounds almost too simple,
6:15
which it can't have been. It clearly has been an
6:19
epic challenge, you know, and then will have been enormous
6:23
sort of amounts of learning along the way. I know
6:25
you're fond of quoting Alan Savory in terms of everything
6:29
relating to everything. I think just just can we just
6:32
give the audience a you know, an encapsulation of what
6:35
it was that Savory meant by that, how you interpret that,
6:39
and how that relates to the land that you that
6:41
you care for.
6:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, yeah, it's it's a great question. And when
6:45
when Savory says everything relates to everything, and of course, you
6:48
know he didn't invent that phrase, it's it's very it's
6:51
a very actually an Eastern not a Western concept that
6:56
you know, we're all related, you know, the idea we're
6:58
all relatives. And so how that kind of came out
7:03
at our place was to realize that this is fundamentally
7:07
the farming, if you will, is fundamentally a biological pursuit,
7:12
not a mechanical pursuit. And and that is a fundamental difference. Uh.
7:19
We we still in our Western you know, Greco Roman
7:22
Western reductionist linear thinking, compartmentalized, individualized, disconnected thinking, we still
7:28
think that life is fundamentally mechanical. That's how we have
7:32
license to pull genes out of this, put genes over here,
7:35
DNA from here, DNA over there. And we view it,
7:38
and we view our animals and our plants as basically
7:41
a sophisticated wheel bearing or a you know, a sophisticated transmission,
7:48
all right, And it's about parts and that and and
7:53
there is certainly elements to that. I mean, we know that,
7:56
you know, there are different tissues and different organs and
7:59
different things. We understand that. But but at it, at
8:02
its most fundamental essence, life is fundamentally biological, not mechanical.
8:07
And what that means is, for example, your body and mind, Charles. Uh,
8:13
we have trillions, trillions of microbes inside of us, who
8:18
are who are making decisions. Hey, you know, I want
8:22
a little boron from you? Can you give me a
8:24
little polysaccher ride over here? And there's this, there's this
8:28
unbelievable uh, you know, commerce like a trade fair going
8:33
on inside of us. You know, in our gut, in
8:35
our blood vessels, and and it's going on out in
8:39
the ecology. You know, the bird is looking for a
8:42
nesting place, and the and the cow is looking for
8:45
a certain plant to feed its you know, microbiome, and
8:49
all of these decisions and these these fascinating relationships are
8:54
being developed in us and around us, and so you
8:59
can't just you know, you can't just pull out one
9:02
piece without affecting, you know, all these other pieces. And
9:06
so our whole, our whole philosophy and mentality was was
9:11
viewing the farm and our ecology as a whole and
9:16
not well, we we're corn farmers, or we're you know,
9:19
apple growers, or we're wheat farmers, but rather that we're
9:22
actually stewards of a whole of a whole organ here,
9:27
a whole ecosystem, and how do we how do we
9:30
balance out economic, emotional, and ecological interests to to move
9:37
the whole forward and not just you know, parts of it,
9:41
not not just exploit exploit pieces of it for short
9:45
term gain.
9:47
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and of course you you know, you identify the
9:51
trap that farmers have been either pushed into or fallen
9:54
into for decades, which is exactly as you described the
9:58
insistence that well, first of all, innovation and progress must
10:02
mean technology, it must mean increased mechanization and all that
10:06
side of it.
10:07
Speaker 1: But of course the obverse may in fact be the case.
10:12
Speaker 2: Just describe, therefore, with that philosophy, how you arrived at
10:17
deciding to do this specific at well, and indeed the
10:20
general things that you have done and are doing that
10:22
have sort of led you to where you are now.
10:24
Speaker 3: Sure, so when you when you take that approach, you
10:30
move from hubris to humility as you look at as
10:34
you look at nature's patterns, and so when you look
10:38
at nature's patterns, it's really elegantly simple. I mean, if
10:42
you think about it, in nature, animals move. Let's just
10:46
take a very simple thing. Animals move. They're not in
10:48
confinement houses, they're not locked up in factories. They actually move.
10:54
And so as soon as you take that approach, then
10:58
a whole whole bunch of other threads, you know, cascade
11:04
out of that of that understanding. Well, if animals move,
11:08
then well I've got to I must. I've got to
11:12
be able to control them. I've got to be able
11:14
to shelter them wherever they happen to be. I've got
11:17
to be able to get water wherever they have to be.
11:20
And so what happens is a simple phrase like that
11:23
animals move germinates a whole a bunch of related things
11:33
that you have to create or develop in order to
11:37
facilitate something as simple as animals move. Well, now we
11:41
don't make big, you know, confinement buildings. Instead, we figure
11:46
out how to make mobile shelters, and so we we
11:49
One of the first things that Dad did was make
11:52
a great, big mobile shelter for the cows, like a
11:54
like a portable shade tree. So we weren't and we
11:58
moved a cat, moved to a with the cows, and
12:01
so we could get all the manure of the urine
12:03
that the cows were generating, not under trees, but out
12:06
in the pasture, you know, where it needed to be.
12:10
And that was a signal part. Then we started developing
12:15
water systems. We started building ponds. We've now built I
12:18
don't know what twenty ponds, and we have about twenty
12:21
kilometers if you can imagine it, twenty kilometers of buried
12:25
water line that gravity feeds from permaculture style high ponds
12:29
up and up on high high valleys that only get water,
12:34
you know, a few days a year, but by holding
12:37
it up there we can gravity flow and with no
12:40
pumps and no electricity, we gravity flow water over the
12:43
whole farm to to give water to the chickens and
12:46
the pigs and the cows and the different things, and
12:48
even use it for irrigation when when we have significant droughts.
12:53
And then so you have your shell and you have
12:56
control because the neighbors. The neighbors don't want the pigs
12:59
dogging up their rose bushes, all right, so we got it.
13:02
If we're gonna move the animals, we have to keep
13:03
them at home. And so this developed that this required uh,
13:07
some sort of a portable fence system where we could
13:11
manage the animals. And of course, uh now now we
13:14
have everything from you know, electrified poultry net to you
13:18
know poly braid poly braid electric fencing systems, computer microchip energizers,
13:24
and we didn't have those things in the early days
13:27
and and so so all of this, uh, this high tech,
13:31
high tech infrastructure has come alongside. Now, much of it
13:35
invented in Germany, h some of it invented in New
13:38
Zealand and Australia. To to facilitate the movement of animals.
13:43
So that's a long answer to a simple thing. Just
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but I hope you can understand that just the simple
13:49
concept of animals move generates a domino effect of necessary creativity,
13:57
innovation and development, you know, to that forward. Another another
14:02
simple phrase was carbon builds soil. Soil is not built
14:07
by ten ten ten chemical fertilizer, it's not built by herbicides. Uh,
14:12
and it certainly isn't built by by tillage. That's the
14:15
that's the hardest thing on soil that there is. And
14:18
so we we we we saw, you know, we sold
14:23
the plow uh that was here when we bought the
14:26
farmer was a little plow here. As we got rid
14:28
of that and let the grasses come and devoted ourselves
14:32
to a carbon economy. What that meant was that we
14:38
instead of buying fertilizer and things, we looked at how
14:42
do we how do we eliminate leaks on the first place,
14:47
how do we eliminate leaks of carbon? And then how
14:50
to leverage the carbon that we have? And so we
14:53
were we we had a lot of woods, a lot
14:55
of encroached areas that had been neglected, old old fields
15:00
that had overgrown. And so the first really big I
15:05
guess the second big machine that we bought, we bought
15:08
a dump truck early back in the early sixties. And
15:10
then the next big machine we bought was a chipper,
15:13
a wood chipper, and we began chipping, you know, junk trees,
15:19
crooked trees, and upgrading fence lines and wood lots and
15:22
cleaning them up. And those chips then became what we
15:26
call a carbonaceous diaper for the cows when they were
15:29
on hay in the wintertime, and that carbonationous diaper holds
15:33
up all the manure and urine. And then we started
15:36
using pigs. Dad had passed away by now, and one
15:40
of my innovations that I brought to the table was
15:42
using we used to make big windrow compost piles, the
15:46
compost the barn cleanings. Now we use pigs and we
15:51
put corn in under the end the carbonationous diaper. It
15:54
ferments in that anaerobic anaerobic betting pack, and then we
15:58
put the pigs in. The pig then seek the corn
16:01
and convert it from anaerobic to aerobic compost without any
16:05
petroleum or machinery or labor on my part. And the
16:09
pigs enjoy doing the work. So that's another phrase in nature.
16:13
Animals do the work, not people, not machines. Animals do
16:16
the work. So how can we harness harness the plow
16:20
on the pig nose, the scratcher on the chicken's feet,
16:24
you know, the beak on the duck?
16:26
Speaker 1: All right?
16:26
Speaker 3: How can we harvest those things or leverage those those
16:30
innate you know, phenotypical distinctives, to honor, to honor that
16:37
specialness uniqueness of an animal to actually do things that
16:41
we would otherwise use chemicals or machinery or human labor
16:44
to do. And so those are just, you know, a
16:46
couple of very simple phrases. Animals move carbon, build soil,
16:52
and and and animals do the work. You know, those
16:57
are three very simple phrases with profound ramifications as to
17:02
how we're going to design and create and create a
17:06
functional farm.
17:08
Speaker 2: And yet, as you said earlier, that message has been
17:11
completely subverted by the orthodoxy put forward by governments certainly
17:16
all over the Western world, and people are led to
17:19
believe that they absolutely have to destroy the soil with
17:22
all the sorts of chemicals you're talking about, and to
17:25
put in for cash, you know, sort of cash crops,
17:30
high intensity products with high yield and all this kind
17:33
of thing because they've been convinced that that's the only
17:36
way to make money out of it and to make
17:38
it work as a business. But what I think I'd
17:42
like to get a good understanding is from what you're describing,
17:46
which makes perfect sense. Why on earth would you ever
17:49
choose to work against nature and against the livestock With
17:53
that in mind, how does that then transform into making
17:57
it a business venture that's viable.
17:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, thank thank you for going that direction, because
18:02
often you know, the the ecological farming community uh kind
18:08
of punts punts the economy question, and so I I
18:12
fully embrace it. So thank you for going that direction.
18:16
And so on our farm, Uh, first of all, let
18:19
me say we are we do not aspire to independence.
18:24
The whole idea that I'm going to be a self
18:26
sufficient independent farm, I think is uh is a is
18:30
a devil's Errand it's much better to be mutual, mutually
18:34
interdependent within a community because there are people that know
18:38
how to do things and have land that's more conducive
18:41
to do things that than mine here. And so for example,
18:45
we buy grain for our chickens and pigs and turkeys.
18:49
We buy grain from local farmers, GMO free. It's not
18:52
just helping modified, but from local farmers. We provide them
18:55
an extra income for their for their product and a
18:59
nice guaranteed market and and and they you know, they
19:04
provide us a needed product. So so I just want
19:07
to I just want to say, first of all, I'm
19:09
not I'm not interested in in being an island. I'm
19:13
very interested in being a a a community, community dependent
19:21
kind of kind of outfit. So that said, we, uh,
19:28
first of all, we move the cows every day to
19:30
a to a new spot. And so in our county, Charles,
19:35
in our county, the average cow day, so a cow
19:39
day is our measurement. You know, every every vocation needs
19:42
a needs a measurement like a you know, uh, a
19:45
carpenter uses whatever, well, I guess in the Great Britain
19:49
they use meters or or centimeters. You know, a weather
19:54
man uses temperate centigrade, a wheat farmer uses bushels, a
20:01
gold gold trader uses ounces or troy ounces. Anyway, you know,
20:06
every vocation requires a way to measure, to audit what
20:10
you're doing. And so for us, our cows, our measure
20:14
is a cow day what one cow will eat in
20:16
a day. So we so we we measure our our
20:21
pasture production by how many cows it's able to feed
20:25
for a certain period of time. And so uh so
20:29
in our in our county, the average cow days per
20:31
acre is eighty. That that means an acre uh an
20:35
acre will will will feed one cow for eighty days
20:38
a year, or eighty cows for one day a year.
20:41
Just want everybody to follow me on this. So on
20:44
our farm we now average almost four hundred cow days
20:48
per acre, so we're almost five times the county average.
20:52
Why well, because we move the cows every day, and
20:55
so we allow the grass to go through a juvenile,
21:00
rapid growth phase. Grass grows in a sigmoid curve and
21:04
s curve start slow, then it grows real fast, then
21:07
it slows down heads towards senessence. I call the first
21:11
phase diaper grass, teenage grass, and then nursing home grass. Okay,
21:16
just so you see the and so so by by
21:19
moving the cows every day, we're able to place them
21:23
right before, right before senessence, right after that blaze of growth,
21:28
to prune that grass and restart it. So we're already
21:31
getting you know, arguably three times h easily three times
21:36
the county average on our cow days per acre from
21:39
a production standpoint, and and and that doesn't cost very
21:44
much because all we have to do is move them
21:47
and the labor is about the same because the cows
21:51
are in a you know, in a in a close
21:53
mob rather than spread out, so we can always find
21:55
them easily. We don't have to go searching around, you know,
21:58
with our ATV email machine, trying to find the cows.
22:01
They're not. They're all in one, in one little spot.
22:05
We call this mob stocking, herbivorous solar conversion, lignified carbon sequestration, fertilization.
22:12
And you can, you know, if you practice in front
22:14
of a mirror a lot, you can learn to say that.
22:16
All right. So that's that's the cow component. Now, So
22:19
what follows the herbivores in nature? Remember, animals are doing
22:23
the work. So rather than rather than using grubicides and
22:26
parasiticides and things to keep the cows uh clean and
22:29
bug free, we follow the cows with eggmobiles. So these
22:33
are portable chicken houses on wheels that we follow the cows.
22:37
The chickens then scratch through the cow patties and and
22:40
and scratch them out into the soil, which increases the fertility.
22:44
But mainly the chickens are picking up the fly larva
22:47
otherwise known as maggots that would hash and affect the cows.
22:51
So the chickens are sanitizing like the egret on the
22:54
rhinos nose, you know, the birds that are following the
22:56
wildebeests and the serengetti. This is this is one of
22:59
the most ubiquitous symbiotic relationships in nature, is that the
23:04
bird and the herbivore. You put those together and they're
23:08
very symbiotic. And so we follow the cows with the eggmobiles. Uh,
23:13
you know, about four days behind before the flies hatch.
23:16
And then we're picking up tens of thousands of dollars
23:20
worth of eggs as a byproduct of the pastor sanitation program.
23:24
So we turn what would otherwise be a waste product
23:26
into and you know, an actual or profit enterprise. So chickens, broiler,
23:32
chicken meat, chickens. We run in little floorless field shelters.
23:39
We move them every day across the field and uh,
23:43
and that means there's no concrete, there's no fans, there
23:46
no buildings, so we replace all of that physical, depreciable
23:51
infrastructure with our equity, which is more human centric and
23:58
and it's a it's a modular and management intensive, you know,
24:04
replacement of depreciable, capital intensive infrastructure with little field shelters
24:09
that we just move along. And because the chickens are
24:11
so healthy and they get fresh air and sunshine, exercise,
24:15
green grass in addition to the GMO free feed, we
24:19
don't have to vaccinate, medicate, you know, or run fans
24:23
or anything like that. So there's no concrete, so there's
24:27
there's a lot less expense in that respect. And the
24:31
same ground we run the chickens on, we can graze
24:35
with cows, we can graze with sheep, and we do.
24:37
And so now I hope you're starting to see. And
24:39
then we run turkeys and so on the same acre
24:43
at different times of the season. We will run the
24:47
broilers across, well, you know, that generates twelve thousand dollars
24:51
an acre, and then you run the cows across to
24:55
eat to prune the grass that the chickens encouraged, you know,
24:59
by dropping their chicken minor. So the cows are generating
25:03
eight hundred dollars an acre. Then you run the eggbo
25:05
bil across behind the cows, that's generating another two or
25:08
three hundred dollars an acre. And then you can run
25:11
the turkeys across the same area later in the season
25:15
and that's generating another ten or twelve thousand dollars an acre.
25:19
And then you can run sheep across the same area
25:21
and that's generating another eight hundred dollars an acre. My
25:24
point is, you add all these things up and you're
25:26
in the twenty to twenty five thousand dollars per acre
25:30
income range. And I challenge any farmer to show me
25:34
how wheat, corn or any other cropping system can generate
25:38
that kind of income per acre, Which means the bottom
25:43
line is we're able to actually support a white collar
25:47
salary farm income on basically twenty to twenty five acres,
25:53
which is a very exciting proposition, especially for small farmers.
25:59
Speaker 2: It is absolutely However, the government doesn't want you to
26:03
do it, the food industry doesn't want you to do it,
26:06
and the media are in effect banging the drum for
26:11
both of those can't How therefore, do you persist with it?
26:17
And how do you critically how do you find and
26:20
exploit your market.
26:22
Speaker 3: Well, fortunately, let me let me that's a kind of
26:28
two dimensional question. One one is is uh is very
26:34
astute on your part to understand there is pushback. There
26:37
is pushback from from you know, large interests. But the other,
26:45
the flip side, though, is that as centralization and corporatization
26:51
within the food system accelerate, let's just call it industrialization
26:56
of the food system with with its with its concomitant uh,
27:01
you know, vaccines and and whatever, chlorines and antimicrobials and
27:06
blah blah, you know, all those things. As that accelerates,
27:11
it is actually stimulating or catalyzing a pushback on the
27:19
consumer end, saying I don't want that. I want an unvaccinated, unmedicated,
27:24
GMO free you know, pastured u u uh, a nutrient
27:29
more nutrient dense, safer product. Okay, So so that the
27:34
two the two objectives are intention the consumer objective. Now certainly,
27:40
certainly they are consumers who don't care, you know, they're
27:42
the ones that are still eating at McDonald's or whatever.
27:45
But but but for the ones who do, and that
27:47
is a growing number, because I don't know the sentiment,
27:51
you know, I can't wait to get back to the UK.
27:53
I haven't been there since before COVID and I would
27:57
typically do seminars in the UK, you know, uh along
28:02
and uh and uh, I'm hoping to get back, but
28:06
I'm I'm assuming that there as I read the news,
28:10
that there's there's a lot of a similar amount of
28:16
concern about about the way things are the government, the economy,
28:23
you know, whatever, and and so what as well as here.
28:29
And obviously I know UK is following our presidential election. Uh.
28:34
And that's you know that that's a huge unknown right now.
28:37
My point is, I think worldwide, if I may describe
28:41
it like this, you ever had a wasp nest wasp
28:44
best on the backboards, you know, and you go in
28:46
and out. It's about the size of a you know,
28:48
a softball, and you're the palm of your hand. And
28:50
those those uh, those wasps just sit there every day, uh,
28:54
just kind of you know, hanging out. You never you
28:57
don't see them, you on once in a while, one
28:59
flies off and comes back. Well, one day you and
29:02
your beloved decided to let's clean off the back porch.
29:06
So you get the broom and you all you get
29:08
to work and you start cleaning off the back porch
29:10
and accidentally, you bang the rafter that that wasp best
29:14
is on with the broom handle, and all of a sudden,
29:17
the wasp they don't come after you, at least not yet,
29:20
but but suddenly they're all just you know, they're up
29:22
and they're what happened? You know what happened? Something's not
29:26
quite right. I don't know where this happened, where this
29:28
came from, but but let's be ready. That's the way
29:31
I feel like the world is right now. The world
29:33
is like that that disturbed wasp nest. A lot of
29:37
they don't know quick, they don't know quite where the
29:40
where the hit came from, but they know there's been
29:44
a disturbance and there and and people are aware. And
29:47
if there's one thing you don't want to be when
29:50
things go wonky, it's you don't want to be the
29:54
sick one. You don't want to be the one in
29:55
the back bedroom saying, hey, when you guys are going
29:58
out to your safe haven, can you pick up my
30:00
bed and bring me with you? And so this is
30:03
this is stimulating, Uh, this is Charles, This is stimulating
30:08
a massive interest in wellness, in health, in in staying
30:14
staying functional, so that you can actually respond. You know,
30:18
if a lion is going to chase you, you want to
30:21
be able to run faster than than the guy with you. Okay,
30:25
and and uh uh, you know you don't have to
30:28
You don't have to outrun the lion. You just have
30:30
to outrun the guy, the guy you're with, and and
30:34
so so. So we have this in this I've never
30:38
seen as much in my lifetime. We have this demand
30:43
for high quality, nutrient dense, more safely produced food, and
30:50
secure produced food, food that doesn't require a fertilizer from Russia,
30:55
from Putin's Russia.
30:57
Speaker 1: Uh.
30:57
Speaker 3: I mean here in the US, the farmers went crazy
31:00
when Russia invaded Ukraine. We put this, uh, put the
31:06
herding on on their imports, and suddenly fertilizer jumped four
31:10
hundred percent. Turns out that all the American farmers were
31:13
dependent on Russia for their for their fertilizer. Well, that's
31:16
not a very secure food system on our farm. We
31:19
just laughed because we don't buy any of it, so
31:21
it didn't affect us at all. And consumers start seeing that.
31:26
Food buyers begin seeing that saying, well, wait a minute,
31:29
I'm going to get buy farm from a from a
31:31
place that that is not as dependent on foreign you know,
31:35
foreign geopolitical whatever harmony and so and so that's driving it.
31:43
The the the the system though, as you mentioned, the
31:48
the the government, the bureaucracy, the big players, they're not
31:54
rolling out the red carpet for an alternative to come
31:57
to market. And so, uh, you know. The single biggest
32:01
impediment to what I would call the intentional the intentional
32:07
seeking consumer and the intentional authentic production farmer, the fly
32:13
in their in their ointment is what I call the
32:18
food police. The regulations that well, you can't you can't
32:21
make hot dogs without you, you can't, you can't butcher
32:24
chickens on your farm, you can't, you can't sell a
32:28
t bone steak or a rib by steak from your
32:30
cow unless it goes to this facility and has this,
32:33
this and this this. All of the food safety regulations,
32:38
all the food safety regulations are size prejudicial. They're all
32:42
sized prejudicial, which inherently makes them unfair. Somebody can ask, well, well,
32:48
give me an example of a of a regulation that's
32:51
not that's not a scale prejudicial, all right. The the
32:57
amount of effort it takes to put to push the
32:59
break of a of a commercial lorry. I think that's
33:03
what you call tractor trailers in Great Britain, a lorr
33:06
uh compared to a for example, a a smart car,
33:11
a little tiny, you know, smart car, that's the same effort.
33:15
So speed limits are a perfect example of of a
33:18
of a regulation that is not size or scale prejudicial.
33:24
But all the food regulations are. For example, if I
33:27
want to make pepperoni, I want to make some shark cootery,
33:32
I can't. Uh, there's going to be all sorts of
33:36
of licensing and and requirements for me to make that charcoutery.
33:42
The way innovation happens if you study the diffusion, the
33:44
diffusion of innovation, and all innovation happens at embryonic at
33:52
embryonic prototype stages. Uh, you know, you start with a
33:56
with a prototype, you start very small, and then then
33:59
you grow from there. And the problem with food regulations
34:02
is that they require such expensive infrastructure just to start
34:07
to butcher one chicken, to make one bucketful of of
34:11
of trial shark goootery, all right, to make one beat
34:14
pie meat pie for your neighbors, all right? That that
34:18
that that the entrepreneurial embryonic prototype is too expensive or
34:26
too big to be birthed, and so that embryo is
34:30
still born. And I travel the world especially you know this, this,
34:35
by the way, is not the case in third world countries.
34:40
You can pretty much you know, if you can butcher
34:42
a chicken and sell it to a neighbor, you know,
34:44
have at it that they're happy to get it. But
34:47
in our techno sophisticated uh countries, those kinds of food
34:57
freedoms to to freely interact neighbor to neighbor as consenting adults,
35:02
exercising freedom of choice as to what I'm going to eat. Uh,
35:06
that kind of freedom is is not Uh, it is
35:11
not available. And so uh so what what what we
35:17
So we've had our battles. I mean, one of the
35:19
books that I wrote was everything I want to do
35:21
is illegal? Uh, describing the battles we've had with the food,
35:27
I call it the food police.
35:29
Speaker 2: Uh.
35:29
Speaker 3: That that continually get in the way between us and
35:33
our our very uh you know, happy voluntary customers who
35:41
who want our food, and and you have all these
35:44
you know, impediments in the ways. I mean that that
35:47
that's the number one impediment. And so and in America
35:51
we've actually started the rogue the rogue food movement to
35:56
to shine a spotlight on farmers and uh food folks
36:02
who have circumvented the government regulations. For example, here you
36:06
can start a private membership association. So the you know,
36:09
the government says, well, we've got to protect the public,
36:12
Well what about protecting the private. And so these are
36:15
private associations that are developed to circumvent, to circumvent the
36:21
regulations because the because the food transaction is not a sale,
36:26
it's not in commerce. It's simply a it's simply a
36:32
private arrangement between two people outside the government sphere. There's
36:38
a lady in North Carolina that has started a five
36:40
oh one sea food church. If you join her church,
36:44
you can get this food. And and again that's that's
36:46
freedom of religion. We can exercise our religion. My religion
36:50
requires me to get this kind of food. That's one.
36:53
There's another, there's another thread that's developing. Other Under the
36:56
American with Disabilities Act, my disability is I can't eat
37:00
chemical food. So under American Disabilities Act, I demand the
37:04
government to get out of the way of my getting
37:06
this kind of food. See, the problem is in the US, UH,
37:12
we don't have. We don't have a a right to
37:17
food choice. We have a right to to to assemble
37:23
and and I know, I know, Great Britain doesn't have
37:25
our Bill of Rights. We you know, we fought a
37:27
war over that and and we got a Bill of
37:29
Rights out of it. And our Bill of Rights guarantees
37:32
us the ability to assemble, so we can assemble. People
37:37
can get together without any license or requirement. We can.
37:41
We have freedom of religion. We we can. We can
37:44
uh worship however we want to. There's no state church here.
37:49
We we have the right to bear arms. Oh that's
37:53
a big one, you know, to the right to to
37:55
own a gun, you know. So the these are these
37:58
are rights, but there is no right. There is no
38:02
right too for me to be able to acquire the
38:07
food of my choice from the source of my choice.
38:11
And in fact, one of our congressmen, Congressman Thomas Massey
38:16
from Kentucky, has just put in a constitutional amendment for
38:21
our Bill of Rights, and he just sent it to me.
38:27
I can read it. It's short, the right of the
38:29
people to grow food and to purchase food from the
38:33
source of their choice shall not be infringed. And Congress
38:37
shall make no law regulating the production and distribution of
38:41
food products which do not move across state lines. And
38:45
so that's that's now been put in and will now
38:48
be debated going forward who knows how many years. But
38:52
that is in direct response to exactly what you described
38:56
that there is a there is a concert an effort
39:00
in the fraternity of government and big business to thwart,
39:07
to thwart competitors coming to the table with innovative, higher quality,
39:13
better products.
39:14
Speaker 1: Uh.
39:15
Speaker 3: I think that's the best way to say it. And
39:17
so so you know, there's there's an active adjuster movement
39:22
here in the US which is modeled directly after the
39:24
UK adjuster movement of the Middle Ages, where where a
39:29
group of people would come together and own, for example,
39:32
a stud horse for example that was too expensive for
39:37
one person to own, so maybe four or five people
39:40
would own it and they would hire a person to
39:42
take care of that horse. This was called an adjuster agreement,
39:46
and and that has now been used in the US
39:50
that uh so you so you you buy it, you
39:53
buy chicks, for example, you buy chicks for me if
39:58
you want fifty chickens, for example, for your family, for
40:00
your freezer for the year. By the fifty chicks. I
40:03
will raise them under this medieval British adjuster agreement. I
40:09
will raise them and I will process them for you
40:13
all under the the a gus of a of a caretaker,
40:18
and that way it's your chicken. You're simply paying a
40:21
caretaker's fee, like a janitorial service, and you get your chicken.
40:25
But they never enter commerce and they're not in sale.
40:28
Therefore they're not in the government system. So I don't
40:31
want to belabor the point, but I'm just telling you
40:33
that there is a very active, a very active underground
40:37
kind of uh gorilla marketing effort here in the US
40:43
to to circumvent, to circumvent the kind of things you're
40:48
talking about that thwart the ease with which I can
40:51
bring you know, a farm raised chicken or a farm
40:54
raised egg, or a you know, a farm of a
40:57
homemade you know, chicken pot pie, you know, to my
41:01
neighbors who want to buy it. Yeah.
41:04
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's fantastic you're drawing attention to people
41:06
who are finding these ways of working around the current situation,
41:10
because this is exactly the trap that's set by policy
41:14
and by industry and their effects sort of the overlap
41:17
and the cross pollination, and of course all of this
41:20
is enabled and driven by the confection of emergencies. At
41:26
the moment, the current emergency and enduring one is what
41:31
we're told is anthropogenic climate change, and therefore how the
41:36
policy must be driven by the desire and the requirement
41:40
for sustainability. And so, in a sense we see something
41:43
that's become a war of information. And with that being
41:47
the case, you know, you talk about your quite rightly.
41:51
You identify that there is a demand from people who
41:54
want to source food that has not had all the
41:57
pharmaceutical and chemical inputs. Trouble is that those same people,
42:02
everybody is getting a battering in terms of the the
42:05
information about this supposed emergency to which the default response
42:10
has to be this, how do we deal with this
42:12
on the on the information side of it?
42:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, on the information side, I've I've tried to
42:19
showcase every time I see a report. I mean, probably
42:24
one of the best is the Australian Walter Yennie, who
42:28
is kind of the leading uh scientific climatologist, who says
42:32
the whole greenhouse gas ghd G story is completely false
42:39
and and the atmospheric radiator, if you will, the radiator
42:42
of the Earth is actually condensation. It takes a lot
42:46
of energy to condense water vapor into clouds and and
42:51
and and those those water vapors require a little inny
42:55
bitty microscopic bacterium to a little particle to coalesce around.
43:01
It can't be dust. It's got to be uh, it's
43:03
got to be living. It's got to be a bacteria,
43:05
which is you know, living water. It's is there there there,
43:08
you know, we could go down another rabbit trail there.
43:10
But but but the point is that that vegetation exudes
43:15
vegetation exudes this bacteria into the atmosphere, and that then
43:20
allows the condensation of water, which then cools cools the Earth.
43:23
And the problem is is not greenhouse gas emissions. Uh,
43:27
it is the fact that we have that we have denuded,
43:31
denuded so much land area in the world through overgrazing,
43:38
through tillage, through uh cutting the rainforests. I mean there
43:44
there are any number of things that have been done
43:48
across a planet wide to read in many areas to
43:53
reduce the vegetation. I mean, think about think about Libya.
43:57
You know, back at the peak of the Roman Empire
43:59
lived you sent gorillas and lions to the Colosseum in Rome.
44:03
Uh you're not you know, lions and gorillas live in
44:06
the jungle. Uh. There there's scarcely a tree in Libya.
44:09
Now you know, it's a it's a desert, and and
44:12
and all of that vegetation was cut to feed the
44:15
the Rome, the Rome rival city of Carthage, and that developed.
44:19
You know Homer, the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Uh,
44:23
you know, he he walked across what is today the
44:26
Sahara Desert and said he never left the shade of
44:28
a tree. Uh.
44:30
Speaker 1: You know.
44:30
Speaker 3: So so so has man has. Has civilization done tremendous damage,
44:36
as it has, but it's it's done it uh over time,
44:41
and the earth does warm and cool. There are different cycles. Uh.
44:44
And so I'm not a U. I agree that the
44:50
the anthropogenic. Look, when I grew up, I'm old enough
44:54
to remember growing up when by this time, we were
44:56
all supposed to be an ice age due to you know,
44:59
due to to dust in the atmosphere and the sun
45:01
couldn't get through, and we were all gonna you know,
45:03
we're all gonna be frozen to death. Now we're all
45:06
going to be you know, cooked to death as crispy critters.
45:10
So I've watched just in my lifetime the scientific community
45:14
do a complete inversion, which you know, uh makes you
45:20
makes you question, uh, the entire you know, the entire thing.
45:25
And and so here we are at this stage of
45:28
the game, and all I know, and and so so
45:31
when I look at those kinds of when I look
45:35
at those kinds of inversions, I'm always interested in, well,
45:39
what what commonality? Where's the common ground? And interestingly, both
45:44
the ice agers and the earth warming scientists, both of
45:50
them are talking about carbon in the atmosphere. And so
45:56
I'm going to suggest and and and again I'm I
46:00
don't know about you know, how much of this whole
46:03
thing is created by people. What I do know is
46:07
that worldwide, we have moved the carbon from the soil
46:13
to the atmosphere. And what happens then when the atmosphere
46:17
becomes clogged, the carbon dioxide actually starts making plants grow better,
46:23
and so you end up the earth kind of starts
46:26
to heal itself as the carbon dioxide makes leaves more productives.
46:29
That's what plants need, leaves more productive, and then they
46:32
exude more bacteria, which makes better clouds. Which makes the
46:35
hydrology come back into an equilibrium state again. And so
46:39
there's this there's this constant cycling. And so the commonality
46:45
between both schools of thought is about carbon, and so
46:49
we need to put the carbon back in the soil.
46:52
You know, in Australia in eighteen twenty the average organic
46:58
matter in the soil was twenty percent. Today it's scarcely
47:02
two percent today. In the United States, five hundred years ago,
47:06
the average organic matter in the soil was up around
47:10
six percent. Today were a little over one percent. So
47:14
all that organic matter, which is related to carbon, all
47:18
that organic matter in the soil is gone. Where did
47:20
it go? It went into the atmosphere. And so doing
47:25
the systems that we use here at our farm, with
47:29
the control grazing and the multi speciation and the perennial
47:33
you know, that's another thing, the perennial pasture development. We
47:37
have raised our organic matter in my lifetime from one
47:41
percent in nineteen sixty one to eight point two percent today.
47:45
All we would need, listen, Charles, all we would need
47:49
in the United States. I don't know about the world,
47:52
but in the United States at least, if we just
47:55
raised our organic matter one percent nationwide across all you know,
48:01
farm and ranchland. If we just raised it one percent nationwide,
48:05
we would return atmospheric carbon to pre industrial levels, like
48:11
back to like nineteen sixty, just one percent. On our
48:14
farm we've raised it seven percent. So it is doable.
48:18
And this is a very this is a very doable thing.
48:22
And when you realize that that organic matter also is
48:25
the sponge of the soil and reduces flooding and reduces
48:29
drought and all those kinds of things, you start you
48:32
start realizing pretty quickly, hey, let's devote ourselves to increasing
48:37
our organic matter in our soils, and that solves a
48:41
multitude of issues.
48:43
Speaker 1: Absolutely. I mean, that's clearly the key to it.
48:46
Speaker 2: And it's you know, we talk about the sort of
48:48
climate issue and generating therefore something that can be put
48:53
in front of people as a threat, and therefore these
48:57
corporations and so called philanthropists come up with solutions. For example,
49:03
Bill Gates with his sort of gate ag On project
49:06
and all the rest of it, Jeff as Osd with
49:08
his Earth Fund, all these guys now jumping on the
49:12
sort of regenerative agriculture bandwagon at the same time as
49:16
pushing ahead with fake food, you know, meat grown and
49:20
gabs on all that side of it. One thing that
49:23
I think we haven't really so much talked about is
49:26
that is the dimension of human health and how people
49:31
are in large part not conscious at all of the
49:35
relationship between exactly what you're describing, what they're buying, and
49:40
how healthy they are. How, you know, how do we
49:47
deal with these projects that are I'm effectively sort of
49:51
hijacking legitimate concerns for the environment or legitimate concerns for
49:56
human health by making out that they've got it covered.
50:00
Speaker 1: You know, you have to look at Unilever or.
50:01
Speaker 2: Craft or Cargill, who will say that doing this something,
50:04
but actually then not, Yeah.
50:07
Speaker 3: They certainly aren't well for first of all, on the
50:09
on the fake food, the lab lab grown, cell cultured uh,
50:12
you know, meat, meat substitutes. Let me just say at
50:15
the top, uh as an opener, that that is the
50:20
most undemocratic way to feed populations that's ever been invented.
50:26
You know, the beauty of the beauty of natural systems
50:30
is as long as the sun shines and the rainfalls.
50:35
You you can you can grow a plant, you can
50:37
grow an animal, you can you can have you can
50:39
have a milk cow. All right. Uh. But but if
50:43
all of that, if the only way to acquire food
50:46
is through a one billion dollar bill Gates owned uh
50:51
laboratory of synthetics, suddenly that democratic access the food becomes
50:59
tightly trolled. And I don't know about you, but I
51:03
think most people when they when they think of that
51:08
level of of of controlled access, very quickly realize this.
51:16
This this is not progress. It is it is a
51:20
regression into a you know, a pre Magna carta kind
51:24
of food system. So if if I may use our
51:28
great you know, British friends, uh, and the history there,
51:33
I mean that that was that was all about you know,
51:35
King John and control. You know, who's going to control
51:37
the land?
51:38
Speaker 2: Uh?
51:38
Speaker 3: What are they going to be? The rights of of
51:40
the lords and nobles and and even the peasants. It
51:42
established the commons. All of these kind of rights were
51:46
were demanded at that time to to democratize access to markets,
51:51
to food, to to land, to these kinds of things. Uh.
51:55
And so so that that would be my opening thing.
51:59
The second thing is to realize that now empirically we
52:03
can we can test for nutrient density in foods, and
52:08
and there's there's a group in America called the Bionutrient
52:13
Food Association founded by Dan Kittridge, and the bio Nutrient
52:17
Food Association has been studying the the the variations, the
52:23
wide variations in different foods. The first one they did,
52:26
I think was a carrot. And what they found was
52:29
that the so that they got all these carrots, they
52:32
tested them for numerous you know, uh, vitamins and minerals
52:37
and fatty acids and stuff, and and they found that
52:40
you would have to eat like a hundred of the
52:44
worst carrots to get the nutrition of the best carrot.
52:48
The same thing was found in broccoli. They're now doing
52:52
beef for example, and and and beef what the and
52:55
they're measuring one hundred and fifty nutrients in beef, you know,
52:58
ribaflab and conjugated lintelic acid B twelve, B six, uh,
53:02
you know, vitamin K, all these different things, minerals one
53:06
hundred and fifty of them. And the one thing that
53:08
they've already found that there there's is still active research.
53:11
It's it's ongoing. But the one thing they've found the most,
53:17
the most signal determinant of nutrition in beef is how
53:24
many different kinds of plants did the animal eat. Isn't
53:29
that fascinating? How many different kinds of plants did the
53:31
animal eat? And and and so so A beef cow
53:36
fed or dairy cow fed, for example, just corn silage
53:40
or you know, a very simplified ration is not going
53:43
to offer the same nutrition by by long shot. We're
53:47
not talking about little five percent deviations. We're talking about well,
53:51
for example, in grass finished beef, for example, the average
53:55
grass finished beef has three hundred percent more rival flavi
54:00
and then grain finished beef conjugated little laic acid, which
54:04
is an anti cartonagen. I mean, you can just go
54:07
down the line. We had our eggs chest tested actually
54:09
at a lab. We worked with a with an independent
54:12
outfit that wanted to wanted to to to allay, you know,
54:18
finally and put to rest this idea that, oh, come on,
54:21
you know, it doesn't make any difference whether you farm
54:23
this way or that way. So they got twelve of
54:25
us around the around the US to send the do
54:28
pastured eggs pastured eggs, We said, could you send them
54:32
to a lab? And they and we send them to
54:34
a lab. And so we got this wonderful test back
54:38
on about twelve nutrients and you know, the USDA official
54:43
like you know, commercial conventional label on an egg nutrition
54:48
is it has forty eight micrograms of folic acid for
54:51
example per egg forty eight micrograms per egg and uh
54:55
and hours averaged over one thousand micrograms per egg. So
55:02
so these are not little deviations. These are big deviations.
55:06
And so when we talk about health and human nutrition,
55:10
are you know the reason that we're having the number
55:13
of health problems we are? And I'm sure in Great
55:16
Britain you're having the same maybe not the same as
55:19
the US, but but similar. You're seeing increase of autism,
55:22
you're seeing increase of cancer, and these not these chronic
55:27
you know, obesity and a lack of fertility, uh, both
55:31
men and women, especially men, a lack of fertility. These
55:35
kinds of things, these are all these are all indicative
55:40
of of a of a lack of nutrition in the
55:45
food that we eat. And so not only you know,
55:51
not eating processed food, you know, ultra process that's that's
55:56
kind of uh an obvious don't eat. But even the
56:00
difference between a a squash grown in compost rich soil
56:07
versus a squash grown in chemical soil, the difference in
56:11
nutrition is off the charts, and we've got numerous, numerous studies.
56:17
You can look at the charts, you can look at
56:18
the data, and it's it's very very clear, and so thinking,
56:24
thinking people, intentionally minded people are viewing these, you know,
56:29
these alternatives and saying, hey, you know, I'm gonna I'm
56:33
going to feed my microbiome more the kind of things
56:37
that it would have eaten two hundred years ago rather
56:40
than the stuff that is today. The only reason life
56:44
expectancy has gone up in the last century is not
56:47
because of better nutrition. It's because we've been able to
56:51
reduce infant mortality. You know, in eighteen fifty, forty three
56:56
percent of all babies born in eighteen fifty did not
57:00
see their fifth their fifth birthday. So if you if
57:03
you made it to your fifth birth story, you're probably
57:05
good to you know, ninety years old. So life expectancy
57:08
hasn't really gone up. But that's that's what you know,
57:10
that's what averages and data do to you. They skew
57:12
things sometimes and we don't realize. You know, a lot
57:15
of women died in childbirth in the US. The number
57:18
one killer of women in nineteen hundred, the number one
57:21
killer of women in nineteen hundred was burns. You know
57:24
those big those big hoop skirts. They catch on fire
57:27
on the hearth, the wood fire, and you know, there
57:30
goes mama up in flames and without good you know, uh,
57:34
burn care units. You know a lot of them got
57:36
infections and died. So so our mortality, our overall life
57:42
expectancy has actually not changed. In fact, a lot of
57:47
people would argue it's actually gone down. Uh, it's only
57:51
skewed because of the you know, because the averages with
57:54
infant mortality, childbirth, you know, burns, and and and infectious
57:58
disease like you know, whooping cough, things like that, which
58:02
were urban problems that gradually got solved by plumbers, not
58:07
by vaccines.
58:08
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and now the great push to get us all
58:10
out of rural areas and back into vast conurbations where
58:14
we're easier to control, and control, of course, is something
58:17
we need to come back to.
58:19
Speaker 1: Nutrition.
58:20
Speaker 2: In the United Kingdom, we have an enormous and destructive
58:24
organization called the National Health Service, which doesn't contain the
58:27
word nutrition even in its lexicon. We are told by
58:30
government the reason we have to subsidize farming was because
58:34
of the emergency during the Second World War, and it's
58:37
the only way to feed the nation. And we talk
58:39
about food security, of course, utterly hollow because we have
58:42
nothing like food security here. The counter to what you're
58:46
saying will always be yes. But you can't produce enough
58:51
food for everybody in that way. Tell the audience why
58:56
that's not true.
59:00
Speaker 3: This is absolutely not true. I don't know what the
59:03
statistics are in the UK, but I can tell you
59:05
that in the US we have we have thirty six
59:11
thirty six million acres I'm sorry, thirty five million acres
59:15
of lawn. I don't know how many acres of lawn
59:17
there are in the UK, but there's a lot of lawn.
59:20
I mean, the UK invented the lawn, right, I mean
59:22
that's historically, that's that's where the lawn came from. If
59:27
you if you were wealthy enough to have a lawn
59:29
rather than a garden, you know you were you were
59:32
pretty well off. Uh so there's a lot of lawn.
59:35
And number two, in the US, we have thirty six million.
59:38
I always get the one thirty five. One's thirty six
59:41
thirty six million acres devoted to housing and feeding recreational horses.
59:45
Now I'm not opposed to horses. I don't hate horses.
59:49
What I am suggesting though, is, look, if it comes
59:52
between between starvation and a horse, I'm going to get
59:56
rid of the horse and grow food. And so these
1:00:01
these are these are lifestyle decisions culturally that we make. Uh.
1:00:06
If in the US, if we just took the lawn
1:00:08
and the horse and took those two thirty five and
1:00:12
thirty six million acres, we could feed the entire country
1:00:14
without a single farm, I mean, that's astounding, all right,
1:00:19
And and so so the UK is similar in in
1:00:23
the Yeah, it is more populated than the US, that
1:00:25
is true, but it also doesn't have the air in
1:00:28
Southwest and deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. So the
1:00:32
the UK is an incredibly abundant area. And and I've
1:00:38
been there numerous times. I love I love everything about
1:00:41
the UK, uh, except that you can't have a gun.
1:00:44
But otherwise, you know, I love I love going there visiting.
1:00:49
But under under the same under the same scarcity issues
1:00:57
as the US, in that a lot more can be
1:01:00
done by stacking stacking enterprises on a you know, on
1:01:06
a piece of land like we do as opposed to
1:01:09
having you know, segregate segregated food systems, you have integrated
1:01:13
food systems. I mean, I think the UK is a
1:01:17
little worse than the America and its inability to, for example,
1:01:21
salvage waste food and use it for either human food
1:01:25
or livestock feed. Uh, it becomes very, very difficult. This
1:01:28
is outrageous. I mean historically, historically pigs and chickens were
1:01:33
right up against the household because they ate all the
1:01:36
garden scraps and and and all this that those things
1:01:38
were not composted. They became the first cycle of feed
1:01:41
to the next thing. But we've got we've got yogurt
1:01:44
yogurt operations, we've got cheese making operations that don't feed
1:01:49
their leftovers, uh, their spoilage or their way to to
1:01:54
pigs for example. This is a no brainer. We need
1:01:58
we need to to into great these these processing and
1:02:03
waste streams uh as as a first step in an
1:02:08
integrated food production approach, as opposed to a segregated food
1:02:13
production approach where we we split up all these historic
1:02:17
marriages and replace them instead with truckloads and trainloads of
1:02:23
imported things and and and and uh. You know, inner
1:02:28
energy intensive, chemically intensive, uh, infrastructure intensive kind of kind
1:02:33
of substitutes.
1:02:35
Speaker 2: You're quite right, and and and yet we see people
1:02:40
continually being pushed in effectively in the wrong direction by
1:02:44
so many of these controlling influences. Although you know, you
1:02:47
articulate so clearly how things can be done, how things
1:02:51
can be changed, how there can be a better outcome
1:02:54
for the environment, for the livestock, for the farm, for
1:02:57
the farmer, and for the consumer. And yet most of
1:03:02
the the sort of information content type is telling you that, no, no,
1:03:06
you can't do that, you shouldn't do that, you mustn't
1:03:08
do it like that.
1:03:09
Speaker 3: If I might add one thing right there, Charles, you know,
1:03:11
think about think about the the dynamic for example, of
1:03:14
edible landscaping. Uh. Now I like flower I like flowers
1:03:18
as much as anybody else, but uh, the whole, the
1:03:21
whole edible landscaping idea that instead of having just an
1:03:25
ornamental tree, well, let's have an apple tree, a pear tree,
1:03:28
a peach tree. It doesn't take any more soil or
1:03:32
maintenance to have, uh, a fruit or nut producing tree
1:03:36
as just an ornamental tree. And so but but there's
1:03:39
a there's, Charles, there's there's a almost a an eliteist
1:03:45
stigma against against integrating and incorporating something like farming into
1:03:54
the urban sector. I mean, I got a call. I
1:03:56
got a call from a lady in Texas who's in
1:03:59
a homeowner's association, and she had to pay a fine
1:04:02
to her homeowners association because she had the audacity to
1:04:06
grow two tomato plants in her garden space. And and
1:04:11
the home owners association said, that's farming, that's farming. Farming
1:04:15
is not allowed in this home owners space. She had
1:04:17
to pay a fine for growing too tomatoes instead of
1:04:19
you know whatever, daffodils and lily's and and that kind
1:04:24
of elitist mentality. Uh, listen, we we have to we
1:04:31
have to rediscover that we're we're part of the ecology.
1:04:36
We can't we can't levitate into some star trek nirvana, uh,
1:04:42
unanchored and disconnected to this ecological umbilical. We are very
1:04:47
attached to this ecological umbilical. And so let's let's lean in.
1:04:52
Let's lean into our attachment instead of leaning away from it.
1:04:56
And if we if we do that, there's we There
1:05:00
is not a country in the world. And I've traveled,
1:05:02
I've traveled worldwide for many years. There's not a country
1:05:06
in the world that can't feed itself. That's like the ultimate,
1:05:10
that's the ultimate civilizational uh preservation technique. And but but
1:05:17
it takes it takes everyone realizing that that I have
1:05:21
both the responsibility and the privilege of participating. I can't
1:05:25
just sit on the bleachers and expect somebody else to
1:05:28
play the game. I have to begin to participate so
1:05:32
that I become part of the solution and not just
1:05:35
a you know, a whiner or a complainer or or
1:05:38
or a parasite on society.
1:05:40
Speaker 2: It's absolutely the right philosophy and I think that will
1:05:42
that will galvanize and inspire. Now a percentage of the
1:05:47
UK column audience are involved in various agricultural projects. The
1:05:52
vast majority, of course aren't and don't own land. You've
1:05:56
spoken about being able to use whatever space you do
1:05:58
have to grow food like fruit trees is a great example.
1:06:02
We'll have to wind up in a minute. Just as
1:06:04
a sort of closing remark, I mean, how would you
1:06:09
encourage people on the individual level to do, you know,
1:06:13
to make a difference, to be able to shape their
1:06:16
futures and take control of their food supply in the
1:06:19
right way. But also to support their local economy and
1:06:23
to make it work in the manner that you describe.
1:06:25
Speaker 3: Sure. So this is one of my favorite questions. I
1:06:29
have a three part recipe, So three parts. Number one.
1:06:33
Number one is get in your kitchen. We have to
1:06:37
stop buying processed food. We have to start touching raw ingredients,
1:06:42
develop domestic culinary arts. Especially in the UK. You know,
1:06:48
we've never had so many sophisticated techno gadgets in our kitchens.
1:06:53
I'm not talking about living in your kitchen. I mean
1:06:56
Grandma would give her it teeth for the things that
1:06:59
we have. Don't have to go to a spring with
1:07:01
a wooden bucket to bring water. You don't have to
1:07:04
you know, split wood to put in the woodstove. Took on.
1:07:08
We've got hot and cold running water, refrigerators, you know,
1:07:11
insta pots, uh crock pots. We've got you know, all
1:07:14
sorts of gadgetry, ice cream makers, bread makers. So so
1:07:19
the first thing is to stop patronizing the big centralized
1:07:24
processors and get and use raw ingredients and and and
1:07:30
and uh embrace your own kitchen and your own domestic
1:07:34
culinary arts. That's number one. You cannot have an authentic
1:07:41
food system with so many people this profoundly abdicating their
1:07:46
their participation in it.
1:07:48
Speaker 1: Uh.
1:07:48
Speaker 3: You know you can't abdicate that that that uh that
1:07:52
audit audit if you will, all right, that's number one.
1:07:55
Number two is do something yourself. Uh. I don't care
1:07:58
whether it's you know, a little uh, a little hanging.
1:08:01
There's all these neat, little urban uh urban like pocketed
1:08:06
PVC pillars that you can have on your porch, for example,
1:08:10
to to grow herbs in, to grow things in.
1:08:13
Speaker 1: Uh.
1:08:14
Speaker 3: You can have a pot garden on your porch. Yeah. Uh,
1:08:18
you know you can grow vegetables. If you can grow
1:08:20
pot too, that's fine. But my point is, you know,
1:08:23
there's all sorts of things you can do. You can
1:08:26
put a bee ive on the roof. You can put
1:08:28
a verma composting kit in your under your sink. You
1:08:30
can put a quart jar of of mung bean sprouts
1:08:34
on the window sill. Okay, but do something yourself to
1:08:38
to viscerally, viscerally encounter the mystery and majesty of growing
1:08:46
something of life and realize that there's there's something bigger
1:08:50
than you, bigger than bigger than Netflix, bigger than you know. Uh.
1:08:57
Video things out out there, all right, So number one,
1:09:00
get in your kitchen. Number two do something yourself, and
1:09:03
number three find your provenance. Sleuth your provenance. Uh So
1:09:13
so you can take your entertainment budget for the for
1:09:15
the year, for example, uh and say for one year,
1:09:19
instead of going to the theater and going out to
1:09:21
eat whatever, We're going to devote our attention to finding
1:09:26
our local food sources, our good local food sources. We're
1:09:29
going to find farmers that pasture their livestock and don't
1:09:32
have them in in confinement houses. We're going to find
1:09:36
farmers who have who whose fertilizer is from compost, not
1:09:40
from you know, uh, chemical fertilizers. We're gonna we're gonna
1:09:44
find these people and we're going to patronize them. We're
1:09:47
going to find the produce operator that that that that
1:09:51
does local produce and so uh find your own you
1:09:55
know uh uh put attention on finding your own local
1:09:59
provenance and gradually replace that, replace that supermarket experience and
1:10:06
that dependency on you know, on corporate on industrial we'll
1:10:13
say corporate on industrial processes. So that's my recipe, Charles.
1:10:17
Three things. Get in your kitchen, do something yourself, and
1:10:21
find your prominence.
1:10:23
Speaker 1: Terrific, Joel.
1:10:24
Speaker 2: Those are great words of wisdom and experience to finish
1:10:28
finish up with now, I'm not going to let you
1:10:30
go before I ask you please to tell us where
1:10:33
we can follow what you're doing and thinking and to
1:10:37
get more information on your background. So any any sort
1:10:39
of social media or website links that we can take
1:10:41
into youre sure?
1:10:42
Speaker 3: So yeah, so so I'm a bit of an iconoclass.
1:10:46
I don't even have a smartphone. I'm still on flip
1:10:48
phone material. Uh so so I don't have a personal
1:10:54
social media but our farm, Polyface p o l y
1:10:59
f ace Face Farm has a very extensive website and
1:11:04
of course I have a blog that I do called
1:11:08
Musings from the Lunatic Farmer. I do a weekly podcast
1:11:12
Beyond Labels with doctor Cina McCullough. We have you know,
1:11:17
instructive videos. I've written sixteen books. They are available in
1:11:22
the UK. And so the Polyface Farm's website is where
1:11:28
you can follow me, follow the farm, follow our work
1:11:32
at your leisure and just let me say we have
1:11:37
many many visitors from around the world every year, and
1:11:41
we love our UK visitors because we just sit and
1:11:46
let them talk and enjoy the wonderful British accent. Nobody
1:11:51
here ever gets tired of the wonderful British accent.
1:11:55
Speaker 1: Excellent.
1:11:55
Speaker 2: Well, I'll make sure all those various links and want
1:11:58
not to put with this with this interview at UK
1:12:01
column dot org. And I should just remind the audience
1:12:05
that if you are in a position to support UK
1:12:07
Column financially and you're not already doing so, it does
1:12:09
cost five pounds a month, and we'd be very grateful
1:12:11
for the support because it will enable us to continue
1:12:14
to provide interviews of such quality as this has been
1:12:18
with Joel. So it just remains me to thank you
1:12:20
Joel very very much, indeed, for all that you've spoken about,
1:12:24
all that we've covered. It's been a real pleasure to
1:12:26
talk to you, and I hope we'll keep in touch
1:12:28
and be able to speak to you again in future.
1:12:30
Speaker 1: Thank you very much, indeed, thank you.
1:12:32
Speaker 3: It's been my honor