Hello, I'm Charles Mallett with Auk column interview.
There'll be notes and links posted with the interview at
ukcolumn.org. I'm joined by Joel Salatin, who
is Christian, libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist,
lunatic farmer. Those are his words and not
mine. Joel, thank you very much indeed
for joining me. I wish you a warm welcome to UK
column. Thank you.
It's a delight to be here. Good.
Now what I'd like to do before we get into what you are doing
and your sort of current philosophy and and ideas, it's
just to go back a bit and give the audience the chance to
understand how you've got to where you are and how your life
before now sort of took shape. So going back to it, because I
know that you, your family certainly were involved in
Venezuela before moving to Virginia.
If you can just give us an idea of how it is that you came to be
involved in farming in the way that you are now to start with,
please. Well, sure.
So my, my paternal grandfather always wanted to farm, but he
never did. He, you know, he worked in a, in
an automobile factory in Indiana and had a great big garden, but
he was a, he was truly an entrepreneur and inventor.
He invented the very first walking garden sprinkler, you
know, that, that, that winds up its hose, you know, and walks
through your, call it the sprink reel.
He patented it. And she was a bit of a very, you
know, inventive, creative guy and was a charter subscriber to
Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming magazine in what, 1945
when it came out had large compost piles and all this kind
of thing. And, and then so, so my dad kind
of got that, that environmental, that non chemical bent from him
and the love of, of farming and all.
And, And so here he is. My dad is a yeah, after, after
he was in the Navy in World War Two and got out and, and wanted
to farm. But, you know, here you are a
Midwestern boy, no money, no land.
What do you do? And so he devised a plan to go
to South America, earn, earn money and buy land.
And that's exactly what he did. He went with Texas oil company
to Venezuela and in the early oil exploration of the, you
know, Wildcat ventures off of the coast of Venezuela, this was
the, you know, the beginning of OPEC and in seven years was able
to save enough money to buy 1000 acre piece of land.
We started raising chickens and, and he quickly took over the
local chicken market because our chickens were cleaner than the
than, than the indigenous chickens at the time.
And that made a lot of neighbors angry.
They didn't like the fact that dad had, you know, these, these
Spanish type of markets where, you know, the farmers bring
their wares into the marketplace.
And yeah, you have the, the vendors there lined up buying.
And so when the revolution, when the junta came there in 1959 of
ousting Bettis Jimenez, we, we were, we became collateral
damage, if you will, of the breakdown of law and order that
happens, you know, when there's anarchy and, and a coup.
And so we basically fled the back door as the machine guns
came in the front door as neighbors settled scores that
they wouldn't settle under a normal circumstances.
And after six months trying to stay, we, we finally, every door
closed. And so we got back on a ship and
arrived back in the US Easter Sunday 1961.
And Dad still wanted to go back. He was 39.
He'd been there 12 years. He loved the people of the
language, love the culture. I mean, how can you not like a
place that grows bananas and pineapples and papayas, you
know, in the backyard? And so.
So that's why we didn't go back to the Midwest and instead
looked at farms within a day's drive of Washington, DC, so that
if things settle, we can, we can get to an embassy quickly and
get paperwork and get back. That never happened.
But that's why we ended up here in Virginia, 3 hours away from
Washington, DC and bought the most gullied, worn out farm
very, very cheap available. It was definitely the armpit of
the community. And, and looking back now, I
remember when I hit 39, when I hit 39, dad was 39.
And I was thinking, wow, if I lost it all, would I start over?
And, and dad went up in my, you know, in my estimation, when I
realized what that meant. And we started over.
And so I was four when we came here to this property.
And we started, you know, how do you, how do you, how do you fix,
how do you repair an eroded rock pile gully, you know, infertile
place? And dad sought advice from both
government sources and private source.
How do we do this? And all the advice was plant
corn, buy chemical fertilizers, borrow money, build silos, plow
more ground, graze the, graze the woods, all that sort of
thing. Well, he knew, he, he knew that
that wasn't the right approach. And so we began experimenting
and we began experimenting with a lot of things from composting
to rotational grazing, moving the animals, electric fencing.
He invented some electric fencing materials, portable
shade mobiles for animals, mobile mobile farm
infrastructure and, and over time gradually developed kind of
a, oh, I don't know, you know, an, an economically and
ecologically workable recipe for restoration.
And so over my lifetime, I've watched the soil build up over
the rocks. I've watched the gullies, you
know, heal up and, and it's, it's, it's gone from the, you
know, from the the most abused farm in the community to
arguably the most abundant. You paint an amazing picture,
but also you describe it in such a way that it sounds almost too
simple, which it can't have been.
It, it clearly has been an epic challenge, you know, and then
will have been enormous sort of amounts of learning along the
way. I know you're fond of quoting
Alan Savory in terms of everything relating to
everything. I think just just can we just
give the audience, you know, an encapsulation of what it was
that Savory meant by that, how you interpret that and how that
relates to the land that you that you care for?
Yeah. So, yeah, it's, it's a great
question. And when, when Savory says
everything relates to everything.
And of course, you know, he didn't invent that phrase.
It's, it's very, it's a very actually an Eastern, not a
Western concept that, you know, we're all related.
You know, it was the idea we're all relatives.
And so how that kind of came out at our place was to realize that
this is fundamentally the farming, if you will, is
fundamentally a biological pursuit, not a mechanical
pursuit. And, and that is a fundamental
difference. We, we still in, in our western,
you know, Greco Roman, Western reductionist, linear thinking,
compartmentalized, individualized, disconnected
thinking. We still think that life is
fundamentally mechanical. That's how we have license to
pull genes out of this, put genes over here, DNA from here,
DNA over there. And we view it at, we view our
animals and our plants as basically a, a sophisticated
wheel bearing or a, you know, a sophisticated transmission.
All right. And, and, and it's about parts
and that and, and there, there is certainly elements to that.
I mean, we know that, you know, there are different tissues and
different organs and different things, but we understand that.
But, but at it, at its most fundamental essence, life is
fundamentally biological, not mechanical.
And what that means is, for example, your body and mine,
Charles, we have trillions, trillions of microbes inside of
us who are, who are making decisions.
Hey, you know, I want a little boron from you.
Can you give me a little polysaccharide over here?
And, and there's this, there's this unbelievable, you know, a
commerce, like a trade fair going on inside of us, you know,
in our gut, in our blood vessels.
And, and it's going on out in the ecology, You know, the, the,
the bird is looking for a nesting place and the, and the
cow is looking for a certain plant to feed its, you know,
microbiome and, and all of these decisions in these, these
fascinating relationships are being developed in US and around
us. And so you can't just, you know,
you can't just pull out one piece without affecting, you
know, all these other pieces. And so our whole, our whole
philosophy and mentality, what was, was viewing the farm and
our ecology as a whole. And not, well, we're, we're corn
farmers or we're, you know, apple growers or we're wheat
farmers, but rather that we're actually stewards of, of a
whole, of a whole organ here, a whole ecosystem.
And, and how do we, how do we balance out economic, emotional
and ecological interests to, to, to move the whole forward and
not just, you know, parts of it, not, not just exploit, exploit
pieces of it for short term gain.
Absolutely. And of course, you, you know,
you identify the, the, the trap that farmers have been either
pushed into or fallen into for decades, which is exactly as you
described the, the, the insistence that, well, first of
all, innovation and progress must mean technology.
It must mean increased mechanization and, and all that
side of it. But of course, the obverse may
in fact be the case. Just describe, therefore, with
that philosophy, how you arrived at deciding to do the specific,
well and indeed the general things that you have done and
are doing that have sort of led you to where you are now.
Sure. So, so when you when you take
that approach you, you move from hubris to humility as you look
at as you look at nature's patterns.
And so when you look at nature's patterns, it's really elegantly
simple. I mean, if you think about it,
in nature, animals move. Let's just take a very simple
thing. Animals move that they're not in
confinement houses, they're not locked up in, in, in factories,
They actually move. And so as soon as you take that
approach, then a whole, a whole bunch of other threads, you
know, cascade out of that, of that understanding.
Well, if animals move, then, well, I've got a, I must, I've
got to be able to control them. I've got to be able to shelter
them wherever they happen to be. I've got to be able to get water
wherever they have to be. And So what happens is a simple
phrase like that animals move germinates a whole, a bunch of
related things that you have to create or develop in order to
facilitate something as simple as animals move.
Well, now we don't make big, you know, confinement buildings.
Instead, we figure out how to make mobile shelters.
And so we, we, one of the first things that dad did was make a
great big mobile shelter for the cows, like a, like a portable
shade tree. So we weren't, and we moved it
and we moved it around with the cows.
And so we could get all the manure and the urine that the
cows were generating, not under trees, but out in the pasture,
you know, where, where it needed to be.
And that was a signal part. Then we started developing water
systems. We started building ponds.
We've now built, I don't know what, 20 ponds and we have about
20 kilometers, if you can imagine it, 20 kilometers of
buried water line that gravity feeds from permaculture style
high ponds up and up on high, high valleys that, that only get
water, you know, a few days a year.
But by holding it up there, we can gravity flow and, and with
no pumps, no electricity, we gravity flow water over the
whole farm took to, to give water to the chickens and the
pigs and the cows and, and the different things and even use it
for irrigation when, when we have a significant droughts.
And then so you have your shot and you have control because
the, the neighbors, the neighbors don't want the pigs
digging up their rose bushes. All right, so we got it.
If we're going to move the animals, we have to keep them at
home. And so this developed that this
required some sort of a, a portable fence system where we
could manage the animals. And of course, now, now we have
everything from, you know, electrified poultry net to, you
know, Poly braid, Poly braid, electric fencing systems,
computer microchipped energizers.
And we didn't have those things in the early days.
And, and so, so all of this, this high tech, high tech
infrastructure has come alongside now much of it
invented in Germany, some of it invented in New Zealand and
Australia to, to facilitate the movement of animals.
So that's a long answer to a simple thing just but, but I
hope you can understand the just the simple concept of animals
move generates a domino effect of of necessary creativity,
innovation and development. You know, to make that forward.
Another, another simple phrase was carbon build soil.
Soil is not built by 10/10/10 chemical fertilizer.
It's not built by herbicides and it certainly isn't built by by
tillage. That's the, that's the, the
hardest thing on soil that there is.
And so we, we, we, we sold, you know, we sold the plow that was
here when we bought the farm. There was a little plow here.
We, we got rid of that and, and let the grasses come and devoted
ourselves to a carbon economy. What that meant was that we,
instead of buying fertilizer and things, we looked at how do we,
how do we eliminate leaks on the 1st place, how to eliminate
leaks of carbon and then how to leverage the carbon that we
have. And so we were, we, we had a lot
of woods, a lot of encroached areas that had been neglected,
old, old fields that had overgrown.
And so the first really big, I guess the second big machine
that we bought, we bought a dump truck early, back in the early
60s. And then the the next big
machine we bought was a chipper, a wood chipper.
And, and we began chipping, you know, junk trees, crooked trees
and upgrading fence lines and wood lots and cleaning them up.
And those chips then became what we call a carbonaceous diaper
for the cows when they were on hay in the winter time.
And that carbonaceous diaper holds up all the manure and
urine. And then we started using pigs
that had passed away by now. And one of my innovations that I
brought to the table was using, we, we used to make big window
compost piles the, the compost, the, the barn cleanings.
Now we use pigs and we put corn in, under the, in the
carbonaceous diaper. It ferments in that anaerobic,
anaerobic bedding pack. And then we put the pigs in the
pigs then seek the corn and convert it from anaerobic to
aerobic compost without any petroleum or machinery or labor
on my part. And the pigs enjoy doing the
work. So that's another phrase in
nature, animals do the work, not people, not machines.
Animals do the work. So how can we harness, harness
the plow on the pig nose, the, the scratcher on the chicken's
feet, you know, the, the, the beak on the duck?
All right, How can we harvest those things or leverage those,
those innate, you know, phenotypical distinctives to
honor, to honor that specialness, a uniqueness of an
animal actually do things that we would otherwise use chemicals
or machinery or human labor to do.
And so those are just, you know, a couple of very simple phrases.
Animals move carbon, build soil and, and, and animals do the
work. You know those those are three
very simple phrases with profound ramifications as to how
we're going to design and and create create a functional farm.
And yet, as you said earlier, that message has been completely
subverted by the orthodoxy put forward by governments,
certainly all all over the Western world.
And people are led to believe that they absolutely have to
destroy the soil with all the sorts of chemicals you're
talking about and to to put, put in for cash, you know, sort of
cash crops, high intensity products with high yield and all
this kind of thing. Because they've been convinced
that that's the only way to make money out of it and to make it
work as a business. But what, what I think I'd like
to get a good understanding is from what you're describing,
which makes perfect sense. Why, why on earth would you ever
choose to work against nature and against the livestock?
With that in mind? How does that then transform
into making it a a business venture that's viable?
Yes, well, I thank, thank you for going that direction because
often, you know, the, the ecological farming community
kind of punts, punts, the economy question.
And so I, I fully embrace it. So thank you for for going that
direction. And so on our farm, first of
all, let me say, we are, we do not aspire to independence.
The whole idea that I'm going to be a self-sufficient independent
farm, I think is a, is a, is a devil's errand.
It's much better to be mutual, mutually interdependent within a
community because there are people that know how to do
things and have land that's more conducive to do things that,
that than mine here. And so, for example, we buy
grain for our chickens and pigs and turkeys.
We buy grain from local farmers GMO free.
It's not genetically modified, but from local farmers, we
provide them an extra income for their, for their product and a
nice guaranteed market and, and, and they, you know, they provide
us a needed product. So, so I just want to, I just
want to say, first of all, I'm not, I'm not interested in, in
being an island. I'm very interested in being a,
a, a, a community, community dependent kind of kind of
outfit. So with that said, we first of
all, we move the cows every day to a, to a new spot.
And so in our county, Charles, in our county, the average cow
day. So a cow day is our measurement.
You know, every, every vocation needs a, needs a measurement
like a, you know, a, a, a Carpenter uses whatever.
Well, I guess in, in the Great Britain they use meters or, or
centimeters. You know, a weatherman uses
temperate centigrade, a, a wheat farmer uses bushels, a, a gold
gold trader uses oz or Troy oz. Anyway, you know, every vocation
requires a way to measure, to audit what you're doing.
And so for us, our cows, our measure is a cow day, what one
cow will eat in a day. So we, so we, we measure our.
Our our pasture production by how many cows it's able to feed
for a certain period of time. And so, so in our, in our
county, the average cow days per acre is 80.
That that means an acre, an acre will will will feed one cow for
80 days a year or 80 cows for one day a year.
Just want everybody to follow me on this.
So on our farm, we now average almost 400 cow days per acre.
So we're almost five times the county average.
Why? Well, because we move the cows
every day and so we allow the grass to go through a a juvenile
rapid growth phase. Grass grows in a in a sigmoid
curve, an S curve start slow, then it grows real fast, then it
slows down as it heads towards senescence.
I call the first phase a diaper grass, teenage grass, and then
nursing home grass. OK.
Just so you see the, and so, so by by moving the cows every day,
we're able to place them right before, but right before
senescence, right after that blaze of growth to prune that
grass and restart it. So we're already getting, you
know, arguably three times, easily three times the county
average on our cow days per acre from a production standpoint.
And, and, and that doesn't cost very much because all we have to
do is move them and the labor is about the same because the cows
are in a, you know, in a, in a close mob rather than spread
out. So we can always find them
easily. We don't have to go searching
around, you know, with our ATV machine trying to find the cows
or not. They're, they're all in, in one,
in one little spot. We call this mob stocking,
herbivorous solar conversion, lignified carbon sequestration,
fertilization. And you can, you know, if you
practice in front of a mirror a lot, you can learn to say that.
All right, so that's, that's the cow component now.
So what follows the herbivores in nature?
Remember, animals are doing the work.
So rather than rather than using grub asides and parasiticides
and things to keep the cows clean and and bug free, we
follow the cows with egg mobiles.
So these are portable chicken houses on wheels that we follow
the cows. The chickens then scratch
through the cow patties and, and, and scratch them out into
the soil, which increases the fertility.
But mainly the chickens are picking up the fly larvae,
otherwise known as maggots that would hatch and affect the cows.
So the chickens are sanitizing like the egret on the rhinos
nose. You know, the birds that are
following the wildebeest and the Serengeti.
This is this is one of the most ubiquitous symbiotic
relationships in nature is that the bird and the herbivore, you
put those together and they're very symbiotic.
And so we follow the cows with the eggmobiles, you know, about
four days behind before the flies hatch.
And then we're picking up 10s of thousands of dollars worth of
eggs as a byproduct of the pasture sanitation program.
So we turn what would otherwise be a waste product into an, you
know, an actual for profit enterprise.
So chickens, broiler chicken, meat chickens, we run in little
floorless field shelters, we move them every day across the
field. And, and that means there's no
concrete, there's no fans or no buildings.
So we replace all of that physical depreciable
infrastructure with our equity, which is more a human centric
and, and it's a, it's a mobile, a modular and management
intensive, you know, replacement of depreciable capital intensive
infrastructure with little field shelters that we just move
along. And because the chickens are so
healthy and they get fresh air and sunshine, exercise, green
grass in addition to their GMO free feed, we don't have to
vaccinate, medicate, you know, or, or run fans or anything like
that. So there's no concrete.
So there's there's a lot less expense in that respect.
And the same ground we run the, the, the, the chickens on, we
can graze with cows, we can graze with sheep and we do.
And so, so now I hope you're starting to see.
And then we, then we run turkeys and so on the same acre at
different times of the season, we will run the broilers across.
Well, you know, that generates $12,000 an acre.
And then you run the, the cows across to, to eat the, to, to
prune the grass that the chickens encouraged, you know,
by dropping their chicken manure.
So the cows are generating $800.00 an acre.
Then you run the egg mobile across behind the cows, that's
generating another two or $300.00 an acre.
And then you can run the turkeys across the same area later in
the season and that's generating another 10 or $12,000 an acre.
And then you can run sheep across the same area and that's
generating another $800.00 an acre.
My point is you Add all these things up and you're in the 20
to $25,000 per acre income range.
And, and I challenge any farmer to show me how wheat, corn or
any other cropping system can generate that kind of income per
acre. Which means the bottom line is
we're able to actually support a white collar salary farm income
on basically 20 to 25 acres, which is a very exciting
proposition, especially for small farmers.
It is, absolutely. However, the government doesn't
want you to do it, the food industry doesn't want you to do
it, and the media are in effect banging the drum for both of
those cans. How therefore, do you persist
with it and how do you critically, how do you find and
exploit your market? Well, fortunately, let me let
me. That's a kind of two-dimensional
question. One, one is, is, is is very
astute on your part to understand there is push back.
There is push back from, from, you know, large interests.
The other, the, the flip side though, is that as
centralization and corporatization within the food
system accelerate, let's just call it industrialization of the
food system with, with its, with its concomitant, you know,
vaccines and, and whatever chlorines and antimicrobials and
blah, blah, you know, all those things as that accelerates, it
is actually stimulating or, or catalyzing a push back on the
consumer end saying I don't want that.
I want an unvaccinated, unmedicated, GMO free, you know,
pastured a, a nutrient, a more nutrient dense, safer product.
OK, so, so the, the two, the two objectives are intention, the
consumer objective. Now, Certainly, certainly there
are consumers who don't care, you know, they're the ones that
are still eating at McDonald's or whatever, But, but, but for
the ones who do, and that is a growing number because I, I
don't know the sentiment, you know, I, I can't wait to get
back to the UKI haven't been there since before COVID.
And I, I would typically do seminars in the UK, you know,
along and, and I, I'm hoping to get back, but I'm, I'm assuming
that there, as I read the news that there's, there's a lot of a
similar amount of concern about, about the way things are, the
government, the economy, you know, whatever.
And, and So what as well as here.
And obviously I know UK is following our presidential
election and that's, you know, that that's a huge unknown right
now. My point is, I think worldwide,
if I may describe it like this, you ever had a wasp nest, wasp
nest on the back porch, you know, and you go in and out.
It's about the size of a, you know, a softball and you're the
palm of your hand. And those, those, those Wasps
just sit there every day just kind of, you know, hanging out.
You never, you don't see them. You want once in a while one
flies off and comes back. Well, one day you and your
beloved decided to let's clean off the back porch.
So you get the broom and you all you get to work and you start
cleaning off the back porch and accidentally you bang the rafter
that that wasp nest is on with the broom handle.
And all of a sudden the wasp, they don't come after you, at
least not yet. But but suddenly they're all
just, you know, they're up and they're, oh, what happened?
You know what, what happened? Something's not quite right.
I don't know where this happened, where this came from,
but but let's be ready. That's the way I feel like the
world is right now. The world is like that, that
disturbed wasp nest. A lot of they don't know quite
quick, they don't know quite where the where the hit came
from, but they know there's been a disturbance and there and, and
people are aware. And if there's one thing you
don't want to be when things go wonky, it's you don't want to be
the sick one. You don't want to be the one in
the back bedroom saying, hey, when you guys are going out to
your safe haven, can you pick up my bed and bring me with you?
And so this is this is stimulating, this is Charles,
this is stimulating a massive interest in Wellness, in health,
in, in staying, staying functional so that you can
actually respond. You know, if a lion's going to
chase you, you want to be able to run faster than than the guy
with you, OK. And, and you, you don't have to,
you don't have to outrun the lion.
You just have to outrun the guy, the guy you're with.
And, and so, so, so we have this in this, I've never seen as much
in my lifetime. We have this demand for high
quality, nutrient dense, more safely produced food and secure
produced food, a food that doesn't require a fertilizer
from Russia, from Putin's Russia.
I mean, here in the US, the farmers went crazy when Russia
invaded Ukraine. We put this, but the hurting on
on their imports and suddenly fertilizer jumped 400%.
Turns out that all the American farmers were dependent on Russia
for their for their fertilizer. Well, that's not a very secure
food system on our farm. We just laughed because we don't
buy any of it. So it didn't affect us at all.
And consumers start seeing that. Food buyers begin seeing that
saying, oh, wait a minute, I'm going to get my farm from a,
from a place that that is not as dependent on foreign, you know,
foreign geopolitical, whatever harmony.
And so and so that's driving it. The, the, the, the, the system
though, as you mentioned, the, the, the government, the
bureaucracy, the big players, they're not rolling out the red
carpet for an alternative to come to market.
And so, you know, the, the single biggest impediment to
what I would call the intentional, the intentional
seeking consumer and the intentional authentic production
farmer, the, the fly in their, in their ointment is the what I
call the food police. The regulations that, well, you
can't, you can't make hot dogs without you.
You can't, you can't butcher chickens on your farm.
You can't, you can't sell AT bone steak or a rib eye steak
from your cow unless it goes to this facility and has this, this
and this, this. All of the food safety
regulations, all the food safety regulations are size
prejudicial. They're all size prejudicial,
which inherently makes them unfair.
Somebody can ask, well, well, give me an example of a, of a
regulation that's not that's not a scaled prejudicial all right.
The the amount of effort it takes to put to push the brake
of a, of a commercial lorry. I think that's what you call
tractor trailers in Great Britain.
A lorry compared to a, for example, a, a smart car, a
little tiny, you know, smart car, that's the same effort.
So speed limits are a perfect example of a, of a, of a
regulation that is not size or scale prejudicial.
But all the food regulations are.
For example, if I want to make pepperoni, I want to make some
charcuterie. I can't, there's going to be all
sorts of, of licensing and, and requirements for me to make that
charcuterie. The way innovation happens, if
you study the, the diffusion of innovation in all innovation
happens at embryonic, at embryonic prototype stages.
You know, you, you start with a, with a prototype, you start very
small and then then you go from there.
And the problem with food regulations is that they require
such expensive infrastructure just to start to butcher one
chicken, to make one bucket full of, of, of trial charcuterie,
all right, to, to make one meat pie, meat pie for your
neighbors, all right. That, that, that, that the
entrepreneurial embryonic prototype is too expensive or
too big to be birthed. And so that embryo is stillborn.
And I, I travel the world, especially, you know, this, this
by the way, is not the case in 3rd world countries.
You can pretty much, you know, if you can butcher a chicken and
sell it to a neighbor, you know, have at it, they're happy to get
it. But in our techno sophisticated
countries, those kinds of, of food freedoms to, to freely
interact neighbor to neighbor as consenting adults exercising
freedom of choice as to what I'm going to eat.
That kind of freedom is is not is not available.
And so So what what we so we've had our battles.
I mean, I one of the books that I wrote was everything I want to
do is illegal describing the the battles we've had with the food.
I call it the food police that that continually get in the way
between US and our our very, you know, happy voluntary customers
who, who want our food and, and you have all these, you know,
impediments in the ways I mean that that that's the number one
impediment. And so, and in America, we've
actually started the rogue, the rogue food movement to, to shine
a spotlight on farmers and food folks who have circumvented the
government regulations. For example, here you can start
a private membership association.
So the, you know, the government says, well, we've got to protect
the public. Well, what about protecting the
private? And so these are private
associations that are developed to circumvent, to circumvent the
regulations because the, because the, the food transaction is not
a sale, it's not in commerce. It's simply a, it's simply a
private arrangement between two people outside the government
sphere. There's a lady in North Carolina
that has started a 5O1C food church.
If you join her church, you can get this food.
And, and again, that's, that's freedom of religion.
We can exercise our religion. My religion requires me to get
this kind of food. That's one.
There's another, there's another thread that's developing other
under the American with Disabilities Act.
My disability is I can't eat chemical food.
So under American Disabilities Act, I demand the government to
get out of the way of my getting this kind of food.
See the the problem is in the US, we don't have, we don't have
a, a right to food choice. We have a right to, to, to
assemble. And, and I know, I know Great
Britain doesn't have our Bill of Rights.
We, you know, we fought a war over that and, and we got a Bill
of Rights out of it. And our Bill of Rights
guarantees us the ability to assemble.
So we can assemble. People can get together without
any license or requirement. We can, we have freedom of
religion. We, we can, we can worship
however we want to. There's no state church here.
We, we have the, the right to bear arms.
Oh, that's a big one, you know, to the right to, to own a gun,
you know, so these, these are, these are rights.
But there is no right, there is no right to, for me to be able
to acquire the food of my choice from the source of my choice.
And in fact, one of our congressmen, Congressman Thomas
Massie from Kentucky, has just put in a constitutional
amendment for our Bill of Rights, and he just sent it to
me. I can read it.
It's short. The right of the people to grow
food and to purchase food from the source of their choice shall
not be infringed. And Congress shall make no law
regulating the production and distribution of food products
which do not move across state lines.
And so that's, that's now been put in and will now be debated
going forward. Who knows how many years.
But, but that, that is in direct response to exactly what you
described, that there is a, that there is a, a concerted effort
in the fraternity of government and big business to thwart, to
thwart competitors coming to the table with innovative, higher
quality, better products. I think that's the best way to
say it. And so, so, you know, there's,
there's an active edgester movement here in the US, which
is modeled directly after the UK edgester movement of the Middle
Ages, where where a group of people would come together and
own, for example, a, a stud horse, for example, that was too
expensive for one person to own. So maybe four or five people
would own it and they would hire a person to take care of that
horse. This was called an Ajister
agreement And, and, and that has now been used in the US that so
you, so you, you buy it, you buy chicks.
For example, you buy chicks for me.
If you want 50 chickens, for example, for your family, for
your freezer for the year, buy the 50 chicks.
I will raise them under this medieval British Ajister
agreement. I will raise them and I will
process them. For you all under the the Ageas
of a of a caretaker and that way it's your chicken.
You're simply paying a caretaker's fee like a
janitorial service and and you get your chicken, but they they
never enter commerce and they're not in sale.
Therefore they're not in the government system.
So I don't want to belabor the point, but I'm just telling you
that there is a very active, a very active underground kind of
gorilla marketing effort here in the US to, to circumvent to
circumvent the kind of things you're talking about that thwart
the ease with which I can bring, you know, a farm raised chicken
or a frying raised egg or, you know, a, a, a farm, a, a
homemade, you know, chicken pot pie, You know, you know, to, to
my neighbours who who want to buy it.
Yeah, I, well, I think it's fantastic you were drawing
attention to people who are finding these ways of, of
working around the current situation because this is
exactly the the trap that's set by policy and by industry.
And that affects the sort of the, the overlap and the the
cross pollination. And of course all of this is
enabled and driven by the the confection of emergencies.
At the moment, the current emergency and enduring 1 is what
we're told is, is anthropogenic climate change and therefore how
the policy must be driven by the desire and the requirement for
sustainability. And so in a sense, we see
something that's become a war of information.
And with that being the case, you know, you talk about your
quite rightly, you identified that there is a demand from
people who want to source food that has not had all the
pharmaceutical and chemical inputs.
The trouble is that those same people, everybody is getting a
battering in terms of the the information about this supposed
emergency to which the default response has to be this.
How do we deal with this on the on the information side of it?
Yeah, well, on the information side, I've I've tried to
showcase every time I see a report, I mean, probably one of
the best is the Australian Walter Yenny, who is kind of the
leading scientific climatologist who says the whole greenhouse
gas GHDG story is completely false.
And and the atmospheric radiator, if you will, the
radiator of the Earth is actually condensation.
It takes a lot of energy to condense water vapor into clouds
and, and, and, and those, those water vapors require a little
itty bitty microscopic bacterium to a little particle to coalesce
around. It can't be dust.
It's got to be, it's got to be living.
It's got to be a bacteria, which is, you know, living water.
It's, is there, there, there, you know, we could go down
another rabbit trail there. But, but, but the point is that
that vegetation exudes vegetation exudes this bacteria
into the atmosphere and that then allows the condensation of
water which then cools, cools the earth.
And the problem is, is not greenhouse gas emissions.
It it is the fact that we have that we have denuded, denuded so
much land area in the world through overgrazing, through
tillage, through cutting the rainforests.
I mean, there, there are any number of things that have been
done a planet wide to read in, in many areas to reduce the
vegetation. I mean, think about, think about
Libya, you know, back at the peak of the Roman Empire, Libya
sent guerrillas and lions to the Coliseum in Rome.
You're not, you know, lions and guerrillas live in the jungle.
They're they're scarcely a tree in Libya now.
You know, it's a, it's a desert and, and, and all of that
vegetation was cut to feed the, the, the Rome, the Rome rival
city of Carthage. And that developed, you know, a
Homer, the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, you know, he,
he walked across what is today the Sahara Desert and said he
never left the shade of a tree. You know, so, so, so has man
has, has civilization done tremendous damage?
Yes, it has. But it's, it's done it over time
and, and the earth does warm and cool.
There are different cycles and and so I'm not AII agree that
the the anthropogenic look when I grew up, I'm old enough to
remember growing up when by this time we were all supposed to be
in an Ice Age due to, you know, due to to dust in the atmosphere
and the sun couldn't get through.
And we were all going to, you know, we're all going to be
frozen to death now. We're all going to be, you know,
cooked to death as crispy critters.
So I've watched just in my lifetime, the scientific
community do a complete inversion, which, you know,
makes you makes you question the entire, you know, the entire
thing. And, and so here we are at this
stage of the game and all I know.
And, and so, so when I look at those kinds of when I look at
those kinds of inversions, I'm always interested in what, what,
what commonality, what, where's the common ground?
And interestingly, both the ice agers and the earth warming
scientists, both of them are talking about carbon in the
atmosphere. And so I'm going to suggest and,
and, and again, I'm, I, I don't know about, you know, how much
of this whole thing is created by, by people.
What I do know is that worldwide we have moved the carbon from
the soil to the atmosphere. And what happens then when the
atmosphere becomes clogged, the carbon dioxide actually starts
making plants grow better. And so you end up the earth kind
of starts to heal itself as the carbon dioxide makes leaves more
productive. That's what plants need, leaves
more productive. And then they exude more
bacteria, which makes better clouds, which makes the
hydrology come back into an equilibrium state again.
And, and, and, and, and so there's this, there's this,
there's this constant cycling. And so the, the commonality
between both schools of thought is about carbon.
And so we need to put the carbon back in the soil.
You know, in, in Australia in 1820, the, the average organic
matter in the soil was 20%. Today it's, it's scarcely 2%
today. In the United States, 500 years
ago, the average organic matter in the soil was up around 6%.
Today were a little over 1%. So all that organic matter which
is related to carbon, all that organic matter in the soil is
gone. Where did it go?
It went into the atmosphere. And so, so, so doing the systems
that that we use here at our farm with the controlled grazing
and the multi speciation and the and the perennial, you know,
that's another thing, the perennial pasture development,
we have raised our organic matter in my lifetime from 1% in
1961 to 8.2% today. All we would need listen
Charles, all we would need in the United States, I don't know
about the world, but in the United States at least if we
just raised our organic matter 1% nationwide across all you
know farm and ranch land. If we just raised it 1%
nationwide, we would return atmospheric carbon to pre
industrial levels like back to like 1960 just 1% on our farm,
we've raised it 7%. So it is doable and, and this is
a very, this is a very doable thing.
And when you realize that that organic matter also is the
sponge of the soil and reduces flooding and reduces drought and
all those kinds of things, you start, you start realizing
pretty quickly, hey, let's devote ourselves to increasing
our organic matter in our soils. And that solves a a a multitude
of issues. Absolutely.
I mean that that's clearly the key to it.
And, and it's, you know, we talk about the sort of climate issue
and, and generating therefore something that can be put in
front of some of people as a threat.
And therefore these corporations and so-called philanthropists
come up with solutions. For example, Bill Gates with his
sort of Gates AG1 project and all the all the rest of it, Jeff
Bezos with his Earth fund, all these guys now jumping on the,
the sort of regenerative agriculture bandwagon at the
same time as pushing ahead with fake food, you know, meat, grain
and tabs and, and all that side of it.
One thing that I think we haven't really so much talked
about is the, is the dimension of human health and how people
are in large part not conscious at all of the relationship
between exactly what you're describing, what they're buying
and how healthy they are. How, you know, how do we deal
with the these projects that aren't effectively sort of
hijacking legitimate concerns for the environment or
legitimate concerns for human health by making out that
they've got it covered? You know, you only have to look
at Unilever or Craft or Cargill, who all say they're doing this,
that and the other, but actually they're not.
Yeah, they certainly aren't. Well, first of all, on the on
the fake food, the lab, lab grown cell cultured, you know,
meat, meat substitutes. Let me just say at the top as an
opener that that is the most undemocratic way to feed
populations that's ever been invented.
You know, the beauty of the beauty of natural systems is as
long as the sun shines and the rainfalls you, you, you can, you
can grow a plant, you can grow an animal.
You can you can have you can have a milk cow all right.
But, but if all of that, if the only way to acquire food is
through a $1 billion Bill Gates owned laboratory of, of, of
synthetics, suddenly that democratic access to food
becomes tightly controlled. And I don't know about you, but
I, I think most people, when they, when they think of that
level of, of, of controlled access, very quickly realize
this, this, this is not progress.
It is, it is a, a, a regression into a, you know, a, a pre Magna
Carta kind of a food system. So if, if I may use our great,
you know, British friends and the history there.
I mean that that was, that was all about, you know, King John
and control, you know, who's going to control the land?
What are they going to be the rights of, of the Lords and
nobles and, and even the peasants.
It established the Commons, all of these kind of rights were
were demanded at that time to to democratize access to markets,
to food, to, to land, to these kinds of things.
And so, so that that would be my opening thing.
The second thing is to realize that now empirically, we can, we
can test for nutrient density in foods.
And, and there's, there's a group in America called the Bio
Nutrient Food Association founded by Dan Kittredge and the
Bio Nutrient Food Association has been studying the, the, the
variations, the wide variations in different foods.
The first one they did, I think was a carrot.
And what they found was that the, so that they got all these
carrots, they tested them for numerous, you know, vitamins and
minerals and fatty acids and stuff.
And, and they found that you would have to eat like 100 of
the worst carrots to get the nutrition of the best carrot.
The same thing was found in broccoli.
They're now doing beef, for example, and, and, and beef what
the, and they're measuring 150 nutrients in beef, you know,
riboflavin, conjugated linoleic acid, B12B6, you know, vitamin
K, all these different things, minerals, 150 of them.
And, and the one thing that they've already found it there,
there's still active research. It's, it's ongoing.
But the one thing they've found the most, the most signal
determinant of nutrition in beef is how many different kinds of
plants did the animal eat? Isn't that fascinating?
How many different kinds of plants did the animal eat?
And, and, and so, so an, A, a beef cow fed or dairy cow fed,
for example, just corn silage or you know, a very simplified
ration is not going to offer the same nutrition by by long shot.
We're we're not talking about little 5% deviations.
We're talking about, well, for example, in in grass finished
beef, for example, the average grass finished beef has 300%
more riboflavin than grain finished beef conjugated
linoleic acid, which an anti carcinogen.
I mean, you can just go down the line.
We had our eggs chest tested actually at a lab.
We worked with a, with a, an independent outfit that wanted
to, wanted to, to to allay, you know, finally and put to rest
this idea that, oh, come on, you know it, it doesn't make any
difference whether you farm this way or that way.
So they got twelve of us around the around the US to send the do
pastured eggs, pastured eggs. We said, could you send them to
the, to a lab and they and, and we send to the lab.
And so we got this wonderful test back on about 12 nutrients.
And you know, the USDA official like, you know, commercial
conventional label on an egg nutrition is it has 48
micrograms of folic acid, for example, per egg, 48 micrograms
per egg and, and hours averaged over 1000 micrograms per egg.
So, so these are not little deviations.
These are big deviation. And so when we talk about Health
and Human nutrition, are, you know, the reason that we're
having the number of health problems we are, and I'm, I'm
sure in Great Britain, you're having the same, maybe not the
same as the US, but but similar. You're seeing increase of
autism, you're seeing increase of, of cancer and these not
these chronic, you know, obesity and a lack of fertility, both
men and women, especially men, a lack of fertility, these kinds
of things. These are all, these are all
indicative of, of a, of a lack of nutrition in the food that we
eat. And so not only, you know, not
eating processed food, you know, ultra processed, that's, that's
kind of an obvious don't eat. But even the difference between
a squat, a squash grown in compost rich soil versus a
squash grown, grown in chemical soil, the, the, the difference
in nutrition is, is off the charts.
And we've got numerous, numerous studies.
You can look at the charts, you can look at the, the data and
it's, it's very, very clear. And so thinking, thinking
people, intentionally minded people are viewing these, you
know, these alternatives and, and saying, hey, you know, I'm
going to, I'm going to feed my microbiome more the kind of
things that it would have eaten 200 years ago rather than the
stuff that that it is today. The only reason life expectancy
has gone up in the last century is not because of better
nutrition. It's because we've been able to
reduce infant mortality. You know, in 1850, 43% of all
babies born in 1850 did not see their 5th, their 5th birthday.
So if you, if you made it to your 5th birth story, you're
probably good to, you know, 90 years old.
So life expectancy hasn't really gone up.
But that's, that's what you know, that's what averages and
data do to you. They, they, they skew things
sometimes. And we don't realize, you know,
a lot of women died in childbirth in the US.
The number one killer of women in 1900, the number one killer
of women in 1900 was Burns. You know, those big, those big
hoop skirts, they, they catch on fire on the hearth, the, the,
the, the wood fire and you know, there goes Mama up in flames and
without good, you know, burn care units, you know, a lot of
them got infections and died. So, so our mortality, our, our
overall life expectancy has actually not changed.
In fact, a lot of people would argue it's actually gone down.
It's only skewed because of the, you know, because the averages
with infant mortality, childbirth, you know, burns and,
and, and, and infectious disease like, you know, cholera,
whooping cough, things like that, which were, which were
urban problems that gradually got solved by, by plumbers, not
by vaccines. Absolutely.
And now the the great push to get us all out of rural areas
and back into vast conurbations where we're easier to control
and, and control of course, is something we need to come back
to nutrition. In the United Kingdom, we have a
an enormous and destructive organization called the National
Health Service, which doesn't contain the word nutrition even
in its lexicon. We are told by government that
the reason we have to subsidise farming was because of the
emergency during the Second World War and it's the only way
to feed the nation. And we talk about food security,
of course, utterly hollow because we have nothing like
food security here. The counter to what you're
saying will always be yes, but you can't produce enough food
for everybody in that way. Tell the audience why that's not
true. Oh, it's absolutely, absolutely
not true. I don't know what the statistics
are in the UK, but I can tell you that in the US we have, we
have 3636 million acres. I'm sorry, 35,000,000 acres of
lawn, I don't know how many acres of lawn there are in the
UK, but there's a lot of, I mean, the UK invented the lawn,
right? I mean, that's historically,
that's, that's where the lawn came from.
If you, if you were wealthy enough to have a lawn rather
than a garden, you know, you were, you were pretty well off.
So, so there's a lot of lawn and, and #2 in the US we have 36
million. I always get the ones, 35 ones,
3636 million acres devoted to housing and feeding recreational
horses. Now, I'm not opposed to horses.
I don't hate horses. What I am suggesting though, is
look, if it comes between, between starvation and a horse,
I'm going to get rid of the horse and grow food.
And and so, so these these are these are lifestyle decisions
culturally that we make if in the US, if we just took the lawn
and the horse. And took those 235 and
36,000,000 acres, we could feed the entire country without a
single farm. I mean, that's astounding.
All right. And, and, and so, so the UK, it
is similar in, in that, yeah, it, it is more populated than
the US, that is true. But it also doesn't have the air
in Southwest and, and deserts of New Mexico and Arizona.
So that the, the, the UK is an incredibly abundant area.
And, and I've been there numerous times.
I love, I love everything about the UK except that you can't
have a gun. But otherwise, you know, I love,
I love going there visiting. But under, under the same,
they're under the same scarcity issues as the US in that a lot
more can be done by stacking, stacking enterprises on a, you
know, on a piece of land like we do, as opposed to having, you
know, segregate segregated food systems.
You have integrated food systems.
I mean, I think the UK is a little worse than the America
and its inability to, for example, salvage waste food and
use it for either human food or livestock feed becomes very,
very difficult. This is outrageous.
I mean, historically, historically, pigs and chickens
were right up against the household because they ate all
the garden scraps and, and, and all this, those things were not
composted. They became the first cycle of
feed to the next thing. But we've got, we've got yogurt,
yogurt operations, we've got cheese making operations that
don't feed their leftovers, their spoilage or their way to,
to pigs, for example. This is a no brainer.
We need, we need to, to integrate these, these
processing and waste streams as, as a first step in an integrated
food production approach, as opposed to a segregated food
production approach where we, we split up all these historic
marriages and replace them instead with truckloads and
train loads of imported things. And and and and, you know, inner
energy intensive, chemically intensive, infrastructure
intensive kind of kind of substitutes.
You're quite right. And, and and yet we see people
continually being pushed in, in effectively in the wrong
direction by so many of these controlling influences.
Although it's you know, you articulate so clearly how things
can be done, how things can be changed, how there can be a
better outcome for for the environment, for the livestock,
for the farm, for the farmer and for the consumer.
And yet most of the the the sort of information content out there
is telling you that no, no, you can't do that.
You shouldn't do that. You mustn't do it like that.
So I might add one thing right there, Charles, you know, think
about, think about the the dynamic, for example, of edible
landscaping. Now, I like flower, I like
flowers as much as anybody else. But the whole, the whole edible
landscaping idea that instead of having just an ornamental tree,
well, let's have an apple tree, a pear tree, a Peachtree.
It doesn't take any more soil or maintenance to have a, a fruit
or nut producing tree as just an ornamental tree.
And so, but, but there's a, there's Charles, there's a,
there's a, almost, a, an elitist stigma against, against
integrating and incorporating something like farming into the
urban sector. I mean, I got a call, I got a
call from a lady in Texas who's in a homeowners association and
she had to pay a fine to her homeowners association because
she had the audacity to grow 2 tomato plants in her garden
space. And, and the homeowners
association said that's farming. That's farming.
Farming is not allowed in this homeowner's space.
She had to pay a fine for growing two tomatoes instead of,
you know, whatever daffodils and and lilies and, and, and that
kind of elitist mentality. Listen, we, we have to, we have
to rediscover that we're, we're part of the ecology.
We can't, we can't levitate into some Star Trek Nirvana
unanchored and disconnected to this ecological umbilical.
We are very attached to this ecological umbilical.
And so let's, let's lean in, let's lean into our attachment
instead of leaning away from it. And, and if we, if we do that,
there's we, there is not a country in the world.
And I've travelled, I've travelled worldwide for many
years. There's not a country in the
world that can't feed itself. That's like the ultimate, that's
the ultimate civilizational preservation technique.
And but it but it takes, it takes everyone realizing that
that I have both the responsibility and the privilege
of participating. I can't just sit on the
bleachers and expect somebody else to play the game.
I have to begin to participate so that I become part of the
solution and not just a, you know, a whiner or a complainer
or, or, or a parasite on society.
Is absolutely the right philosophy and I think that will
that will galvanized and inspire.
And now a percentage of the UK column audience are involved in
various agricultural projects. The vast majority of course
aren't and don't own land. You've spoken about being able
to use whatever space you do have to grow food like you know
fruit trees is a great example. We'll have to wind up in a
minute, but just as a sort of closing remark, I mean, how
would you encourage people on the individual level to do, you
know, to, to make a difference, to be able to shape their
futures and, and take control of their food supply in in the
right way, but also to support their, their local economy and
to make it work in the manner that you describe?
Sure. So this is one of my favorite
questions I have AI have a three A3 part recipe, So three parts
number one number one is get in your kitchen.
We we have to stop buying processed food.
We have to start touching raw ingredients, develop domestic
culinary arts, especially in the UK.
You know, we've never had so many sophisticated techno
gadgets in our kitchens. I'm not talking about living in
your kitchen. I mean, grandma would give her
eye teeth for the things that we have.
You don't have to go to a spring with a wooden bucket to bring
water. You don't have to, you know,
split wood to put in the wood stove to, to, to cook on.
We've got hot and cold running water, refrigerators, you know,
insta pots, crock pots. We've got, you know, all sorts
of gadgetry, ice cream makers, bread makers.
So, so the first thing is to stop patronizing the big
centralized processors and get and use raw ingredients and,
and, and, and embrace your own kitchen and your own domestic
culinary arts. That's number one, you, you
cannot have an authentic food system with so many people this
profoundly abdicating their, their participation in it.
You know, you can't abdicate that, that, that that audit,
audit, if you will. All right, that's number one.
Number two is do something yourself.
I don't care whether it's, you know, a little, a little hanging
with, there's all these neat little urban, urban like
pocketed PVC pillars that you can have on your porch, for
example, to, to grow herbs in, to grow things in.
You can have a, a, a pot garden on your porch.
Yeah, you can grow vegetables or if you can grow pot too, that's
fine. But my, my point is, you know,
there's all sorts of, of, of things you can do.
You can put a beehive on the roof.
You can put a Verma composting kit in your under your sink.
You can put a quart jar of, of mung bean sprouts on the
windowsill, OK, but do something yourself to, to viscerally,
viscerally encounter the mystery and majesty of growing something
of, of life and, and realize that there's, there's something
bigger than you, bigger than bigger than Netflix, bigger
than, you know, video things out out there.
All right, so number one, get in your kitchen #2 do something
yourself and #3 find your provenance sleuth, your
provenance so so you can take your entertainment budget for
the for the year, for example, and say for one year, instead of
going to the theater and going out to eat whatever, we're going
to devote our attention to finding our local food sources,
our good local food sources. We're going to find farmers that
pasture their livestock and don't have them in, in
confinement houses. We're going to find farmers who
have who, whose fertilizer is from compost, not from, you
know, chemical fertilizers. We're going to, we're going to
find these people and we're going to patronize them.
We're going to find the produce operator that, that, that, that
does local produce. And so find your own, you know,
put attention on finding your own local provenance and
gradually replace that, replace that supermarket experience and
that dependency on, you know, on, on corporate, on industrial,
want to say corporate on industrial processes.
So that's my recipe, Charles, three things.
Get in your kitchen, do something yourself and find your
provenance. Terrific, Joel.
Those are great words of wisdom and experience to finish what
finish up with now. I'm not going to let you go
before I ask you, please to tell us where we can follow what
you're doing and thinking and to get more information on your
background. So any any sort of social media
or website links that we can take?
Sure. So yeah, so, so I'm a bit of an
iconoclast. I don't even have a smartphone.
I'm still on flip phone material.
So, so I don't have a personal social media, but our farm,
Polyface, POLYFACE, Polyface farm has a very extensive
website and of course I have AI have a blog that I do called
Musings from the Lunatic farmer. I do a weekly podcast beyond
labels with Doctor Cena McCullough.
We have, you know, instructive videos.
We I've written 16 books. They are available in the UK
and, and so the Polyface Farms website is or you can follow me,
follow the farm, follow our work at at your leisure.
And, and, and just let me say we have many, many visitors from
around the world every year. And we love our UK visitors
because we just sit and and let them talk and enjoy the
wonderful British accent. Nobody here ever gets tired of
the wonderful British accent. Excellent.
Well I'll, I'll make sure all those various links and what not
to put with this, with this interview at ukcolumn.org.
And I should just remind the audience that if you are in a
position to support UK column financially and you're not
already doing so, it does cost £5 a month.
And we'd be very grateful for the support because it will
enable us to continue to provide interviews of such qualities as
this has been with Joel. So it just remains me to thank
you, Joel very, very much indeed for all that you've spoken
about, all the all that we've covered.
It's been a real pleasure to talk to you and I hope we'll
keep in touch and be able to speak to you again in future.
Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, it's been my honour.