Joel Salatin - Folks, This Ain't Normal

Full transcript: Joel Salatin on London Real

5:05 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Joel Salatin, the American farmer, lecturer and author. Your organic grass-fed Polyface Farm serves more than 3,000 local families, retail outlets and restaurants, and is featured as the blueprint of sustainable agriculture and documentary films like Food, Inc. and Fresh. According to Time magazine, you’re the most innovative farmer in the world, and also the first mentor of our previous guest, Mr Tai Lopez.

5:30 You are the author of 10 books, including Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal, Folks, This Ain’t Normal, and most recently The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs. Joel, welcome to London Real. Thank you it’s great to be with you. It’s great to be here too. I’m curious what it’s like when you fly into London and you’re like, okay, here I am in the UK and I’m in London.

5:52 What do you think of the city the country in general, and also when it comes to things like agriculture? Well, I first of all, you have to kind of pinch yourself. You know, I mean, I’m really a farm boy, and I still am there two-thirds of the time, and I never want to lose my farmers calluses. You know, they’re there, but this one-third of my life is this, you know, going around, and what strikes me most in traveling is just how similar we are, sure. We’re different.

6:25 We have different, you know, politics and different climates and different latitudes and longitudes and that sort of thing, but really we’re a lot more similar than dissimilar. You know, everybody wants to be healthy. They all want a better future for their kids than they had for themselves. They want happy marriages. They want happy relationships.

6:49 They want to do noble things, you know, sacred good noble things. That’s everywhere, and the needs are essentially the same, and societal whatever, you know, societal problems and issues, those sorts of things. They’re very similar, and so that’s what always strikes me is just how, in the big scheme of things, a city is a city is a city. The country is the country is the country, and we’re all people, and we’re all just here struggling with legacy and with, you know, sacred calling and that sort of thing.

7:32 Yeah, it’s interesting you say that, cuz you watch the news, and it’s kind of us and them, and those people do those funny things and believe in that, and they hate us and we hate them. And when you go shake hands with someone, probably even more so on a farm, you’re like, wait a second, they’re just like me. What they probably want to do is aspire to noble things, like you said: live in peace, raise a family, put the right things in their body, do the right things for the environment.

7:55 Right? Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. We’re way more cousins than enemies, in that sense of the word. You know, from a big picture, right?

8:06 You know, when I’ve been here now about 12, 13 years, and recently I’ve been speaking, you know, this whole. I think in the last few years, just like in the rest of the world, and especially in London, people are thinking more about locally grown things and this kind of thing. And you know, London, it’s got this climate where there’s so much rain and so much green, and it’s also fairly dense compared to America. That, you know, someone once said that we have one of the most diverse availabilities of all sorts of different kinds of food types and meat types.

8:34 And in a weird way, is this like a microcosm to study as far as what the world might look like one day if we’re you know, a lot more population. And what things do you think we’re doing right here or wrong? Well, I think it’s like all developed countries right now. If we want to, not to condescend to undeveloped countries, but that’s that’s a term that we use in the west. You know, we developed and undeveloped countries, and the similarities are striking, you know, certainly between the US and the UK as well as Europe, and the similarities are that we are degrading the land.

9:12 Generally, our food system is degrading the land and degrading our health. We’re, the food that we’re eating is not the same as our grandparents ate, in either quality or type. I mean, you know, in the US we’ve increased our wheat consumption, per capita wheat consumption, by like three times just in the last two decades. You know, growing up we didn’t have. We had either soda crackers or graham crackers.

9:45 We didn’t have Wheat Thins and wheat wafers and wheat curries, you know? What I’m saying, all these different things. We didn’t have Doritos and all this, and so we’re fundamentally changing the way we eat, what we eat, but the soil has been degraded through chemical applications, pesticides, herbicides. So the actual you nutrition of an ounce of broccoli today is like a third of what it was in the 1930s or 40s. You know, those are fundamental differences, but our bodies have not changed that much.

10:24 You know, our bodies are still far more similar to what it was like 5,000 years ago than it is today. So never in the history of civilization have we been able to change so many fundamental aspects of our nest this rapidly as we have here in recent years. And so the challenges facing us are very, very similar. We’ve got concentrated animal feeding operations. We’ve got, you know, a new language, you know: listeria, campylobacter, abactor, E. coli, BSE, spongiform and copath.

11:02 When I was growing up and you were growing up, we probably didn’t even know anybody that had a food allergy. The phrase food allergy, we didn’t know. When you got together for a meal, you know, a potluck, friends or whatever, you didn’t have to, well, who’s gluten intolerant, who’s allergic to fish, who’s all, you know? We didn’t do that. We just all came together and ate, you know, and so it’s, I think, it’s truly a remarkable response.

11:35 On the, it’s a remarkable response from nature and from food specifically to speak to us. Whatever, violently, in other words, food now doesn’t view us as the farm or the land’s friend. If I could be a little bit mystical for a minute, it views us as an impostor, as a conquistador, and that’s not a good thing, and that’s pretty much everywhere in the developed, you know, in the developed world so it’s given us feedback that we’re doing something wrong to the land.

12:14 Yes, listen, this new lexicon, this new lexicon of of little Latin squiggly words that we’ve all learned to say is an indicator. It’s an indicator of a new language that is essentially nature. In my view, it’s nature, on its knees, begging us, stop, please stop. And the question is, are we listening, or do we say, oh, well, let’s see, can we invent a new drug, a new chemical, a new, you know, can we manipulate the DNA more, in more sophisticated ways, to more fundamentally express our dominion and conquistador mentality over, you know, over nature.

12:58 Right? What if you got a phone call today from President-elect Trump and he said, Joel, I want you to be the next secretary of agriculture? We’re going big. You have carte blanche. You can do whatever you want for the next four years.

13:13 What would you do? The first thing I would do, maybe you had that call already? I don’t know. No, no, no. I haven’t gotten that call.

13:20 I don’t anticipate that call. He watches this show, so maybe, no, no. Well, great. Hi, President-elect Trump. It’s good to have you.

13:30 So, the first thing that I would do is I would, um, use my bully pulpit to push a constitutional amendment. I mean, we’re going big here. Yeah, going big. a constitutional amendment that guarantees every single citizen the freedom of food choice from the source of their choice. Right now, if you want raw milk, you can’t get it.

14:04 Uh, if you want a chicken that never went through a chlorine bath, it’s almost impossible to get. When people go to the supermarket and they see all this bounty, you know, full shelves in the supermarket, what they don’t realize is how many things are not there. What is not there is the artisanal craft, um, cottage industry, small farm stuff, home butchery, local butchery, home canning. I mean, there’s a, one of my favorite books is called Vertical Diversification.

14:47 It was written by a guy named Howard D back in the 1950s, and he was, like, under secretary of agriculture in like 1915 in the US, at the end of his life. His friend said, D, you need to write a book about your thinking, and he wrote this book about vertical diversification, and he explained how when farmers are only selling commodities, they’re always on the end of a whip, because a farmer is the only part in the food chain that can defer some pretty major things, like, you know, if I don’t have enough money to fertilize my soil this year, I just won’t fertilize it. If I don’t have money to pay my family or my kids, well, we just won’t get paid this year.

15:35 Whereas, you know, if you’re running a distribution company, you can’t run bald tires on your truck; it won’t pass inspection. You know, you can run bald tires on your tractor and defer expenses for a while. And so what happens is, as you move up that chain all the way to the supermarket, you have less and less wiggle room in the system, both legally and, uh, whatever, in public relations. You have less and less wiggle room as you get down to the farm, you have more.

16:07 And so he was a huge advocate of what he called vertical diversification, where we take our commodities closer to the retail level. If you’re making chicken, we’ll make chicken pot pie. And his book has all these stories of people that, for example, lifted their farm out of poverty in the Depression by, instead of butchering chickens and canning them and selling canned chicken through the Postal Service. I mean, people would buy, you know, quarts of canned chicken.

16:43 And this was completely unregulated. It was, but it gave farmers access to the retail dollar at that time. The amount of money, the amount, if you take the retail dollar, the farmer’s portion was in the 40 percentile range. 40 cents of the retail dollar went to the farmer. Okay, today it’s down to 9 cents.

17:08 And so the farmer has gotten less and less and less of a percentage of this retail dollar. And never has our culture been more interested in convenience food. We eat on the run, we eat in the car. We want convenience food, but never has the farmer been so denied access to being able to access that value-added, you know, retail aspect. Okay, and so this comes back to the amendment, of saying that I should be able to have, so, okay, yeah.

17:40 So the amendment is, the amendment is that every citizen should be able to purchase the food of their choice from the source of their choice. So if you want to come out to my farm and you look around and say, man, I like what you’re doing here. In fact, I really like that pepperoni you made last week. I want to buy a pound of that. We should be able to interact as human beings.

18:04 We should be able to interact in a personal commerce without a bureaucrat getting in the middle of this transaction. And if we offered that, believe me, everywhere I travel there are thousands and thousands of farmers with answers to campylobacter, listeria, foodborne disease, nutrient deficiency all over the place, but they’re hampered from being able to access the market due to these scale-prejudicial licensing and regulations that get between you and I being able to interact in business. And that’s because the product gets commoditized.

18:48 The product gets commoditized. It should be. And all the product has to pass through a gauntlet of scale-prejudicial licenses, okay, and infrastructure, and that’s where corners get cut. Yeah. Look, if the government says in order to make shudder you need a $1,000 thermometer to monitor temperature, well, that’s one thing if you’re making a tractor-trailer load.

19:18 It’s quite a different thing if you’re making a five-gallon bucket. One is not a problem. The other keeps you from being able to start. See, innovation always has to start embryonically small, and what happens when we take a transaction between you and I and we call it the same as a transaction between a chicken conglomerate and a conglomerate in Thailand that’s importing chicken. When we call those two transactions the same thing, we make the innov, the innovative alternative too big to be able to have a prototype.

20:07 And the problem is new things are born small. Babies, you know, they’re born small. And right now they’re being snuffed out. Yeah. And if the baby is too big to be birthed, then the dream, my entrepreneurial dream, can never get through the birth canal because it has to be birthed.

20:25 So big, we desperately need mechanisms to allow these small dreams to be birthed. If it’s successful, it grows. If it’s not, it dies, that’s fine, but it has to be birthed small. So my amendment would free up this innovation sector and individual consumers to be able to opt out of the supermarket, opt out of the conventional fair, and say, you know what, I’m going to make an end run around the system. And there is, there is latent desire for that.

20:58 I mean, it’s what drove Brexit. It’s what drove Trump’s ascendancy. This reminds me a little of the Freedom of Information Act, where we’re talking about bandwidth to the internet, and the big cable companies want to control it. But the beauty of the internet is that I can put a website up and I can get similar search rankings as Comcast. And so it seems like you’re saying a similar thing.

21:17 I go to the supermarket right now and I see food controlled by probably three major food distributors in America. Yes, and I’ll never see the little guys. You’re almost de-democratizing that. Exactly, just like the internet. My website on our little farm is not significantly different than Tyson’s.

21:38 I mean, it’s the ultimate democratizer, but the reason it works is because there’s equal access. We don’t have to go to a licensing class and fill out reports. Just imagine if, to go on eBay with a product, you had to get certified that you could operate your computer, right? You had to get your occupational safety certified, so when the hot bid comes in and you jump up, you don’t get a splinter in your rear end from the plywood makeshift table. So the regulation is killing the little guy.

22:13 And at the same time, I’m guessing Tyson has some nice, well-paid people in DC that keep the regulations at least unchanged, to where they control a large part of the market and the profits. Or if a regulation comes down, that regulation tends to be, you know, gentle or concessionary toward them, and it tends to affect us, you know, a lot more. A lot. What else could you do? A couple other sweeping things: where no more of this or no more of that.

22:41 Oh well. So, so you get to your constitutional amendment. Now you free up entrepreneurism, which I really think Trump would be in favor of. I think that would excite him. The second thing, and capitalism usually leads to innovation when it’s allowed to go free.

22:57 Yes, exactly, exactly. The next thing I would do is eliminate all subsidies. Not all, no, no, more subsidies, nothing. All right, because every time the government pen, whatever, manipulates the marketplace, it’s picking winners and losers, and we don’t need the government picking winners and losers. We just need winners and losers.

23:21 A lot of that going on in the EU as well, plenty of that. Have you seen the movie King Corn? I’m sure you saw that, and so, saw back in the day. If people haven’t watched it, they should watch it, because it’s an interesting statement on, of course, high-fructose corn syrup, but it has these two guys. They leave college, you must have been laughing.

23:37 They go out to the Midwest. They plant, I think, an acre of corn, and they sit around and they go ahead and grow it. And they till it. First of all, they take the first bite of the corn and they spit it out and they’re like, this doesn’t taste like corn. And then the kind of the mentor farmer comes over and says, oh no, no, that’s not edible corn.

23:52 That’s high-fructose corn syrup corn. And then they’re like, okay, we’re going to go sell it and get our profit. He’s like, no, no, no, you don’t make money on this. You get the government check, and that’s the only way you make money on it. Right?

24:03 And I don’t know, I thought that’s something I remember as being something that’s wrong. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. The whole the whole, and of course now, they’ve in the US, they’ve changed the word. They don’t call it subsidy anymore.

24:18 They call it crop insurance. Crop insurance sounds much more benign and helpful than subsidies. So you know, we, so we use wordsmith and clever speak, you know, to change the language so that people will continue to accept the same silliness. Right. Now, did that come out of a policy in the 50s for America to grow its own food, from kind of a global safety point of view?

24:41 And do you think that went too far? Because as I thought, I remember in the movie, it was like there was some policies back then that were, they did it for a security reason. Um, and do you think that’s kind of out of date? Well, sure. Well, you have to realize that the, um, you know, the downside of self-government is to vote special concessions for ourselves.

25:02 I mean, Benjamin Franklin said, you know, we have a republic, as until the people determine that they can vote for themselves large sums from the public, uh, you know, Treasury. And so in the early ’20s and ’30s, as what I just described, of the farmer being on the end of this whip, you know, um, you got to remember, farmers at that time were, this was still an agrarian economy, and farmers were, there were millions of them, you know, lots and lots and lots of them. And so they were a big political force, and so they decided to vote for themselves protections.

25:49 And this all came out of those sorts of protections, uh, including, you know, the Transcontinental Railroad. We’ve got to make sure that we grow grain to have something to haul on a railroad, you know, so you had policies that concessioned the railroad. So we want to make sure that there’s plenty of commodity and business to haul on the railroads. That was a concession to the, to the big, you know, railroad barons. Right?

26:14 And so you have all of these, all these, um, these little things, and they add up over time to where what we get, you know, down the road a century, all these well-intentioned things for security become, um, you know, convoluted. We’ve got hardening of the, you know, not hardening of the arteries, we’ve got hardening of the bureaucracies, you know, as they overlap and build redundancy, and this and that, and it just becomes a labyrinth of problems. You know, the Romans always had an axiom that you could tell the health and vitality of a culture by the number of laws that it had.

26:53 Said, when a, you know, when a culture is vibrant and strong and healthy, you don’t need very many laws. You know, the lunatic fringe out there, you know, those innovators, the lunatic fringe, who cares if somebody doesn’t want to vaccinate their kid? It’s okay. Who cares if somebody wants to drink raw milk and kill themselves? That’s okay.

27:13 You know, those lunatics, not a problem. We’re strong, we can handle those weirdos. But when a culture becomes vapid and paranoid and, you know, timid and weak, it sees bogeymen everywhere, all these bogeymen and demons, and so it tends to create more and more laws to, oh, to protect me, I’m scared, I’m scared, and scared, and this is what happens. And so I would suggest that our laws upon laws upon laws today do not indicate a new, whatever, you know, a new evolution toward strength and awareness.

28:01 They indicate a new devolution into fear and timidity, where all we see are bogeymen and demons. And we got to tell that one to stop, and tell that one to stop. And one of the reasons why the electronic, you know, Amazon and the whole internet revolution has occurred is because that’s the only sector of the economy that’s largely unregulated. And food has been the hardest because it’s had regulations longer than anything else, so it’s the most regulated.

28:34 Electronics, the least regulated, and you can see the vibrancy of the two movements, and the whatever, the power of the orthodoxy in the two movements just by looking at how long it’s been, you know, it’s been, controlled. Right? So second one, no more subsidies. Say you get one more, and maybe this has to do with some of these organizations like Tyson, or maybe it has to do with laws when it comes to growing meat in agriculture. I don’t know.

29:03 But what if you have one more? What would be on your list? Oh my, one more would probably be to change the, because the believe it or not, the school lunch program is under the USDA, and I would probably move the school lunch program to a local source, to local source, like, you know, triple the money. And when people say, oh, we don’t have the money for that, listen, you know, if all the money we spent on the Iraq War in one day would, like, triple the school every meal in the whole lunch program for like three years.

29:51 I mean, it’s crazy. It’s not like there’s not money in the system. We just don’t want to allocate it that way right now. The school lunch program is essentially a salvage program for, you know, cell bu and, you know, scavenge program for the industry. It’s a salvage program for the industry.

30:12 It’s essentially a sweetheart subsidy deal for the industry when it has stuff that they can’t sell to people that actually buy it. Well, then the government buys it and gives it to our kids. And so I would, I think I would fundamentally revamp that, because as the kids go, so goes the country. And so if we move the kids from Doritos to pasture meats and baby carrots, and that sort of thing, now the parents would rebel, but that’s too bad. You know, parents can go take a hike.

30:43 You said I had carte blanche, so I’m going to do it. I’m sovereign for the day, and we’re going to do it. And I’m convinced that if we locally source with fresh stuff, pretty soon the kids, the kids, their body speaks to them, and they understand, yeah, this is real food. Right? How are our food and diet choices going to play out over the next 20 years in America and the rest of the world?

31:09 Are we headed for some really dark times coming up, or do you see more people educating themselves and listening to the kind of things you’re talking about? Or is that really 40, 50 years out? You know, the one thing I don’t do is prophesy. But I can tell you this: what I see happening now is, um, both sides gaining. In other words, yeah, there is a burgeoning local food awareness.

31:37 I mean, viscerally, for us, it’s, you know, five years ago we were composting chicken feet. Now we can’t get enough of them, and we sell them, and we’ve increased the price three times in a year and we still can’t keep chicken feet in. Why? Because of the Paleo, the foodie, the Weston A. Price folks.

32:00 They’re getting this scratch cooking and gelatin. So we have a burgeoning, you know, food revolution going on in this sector. But we also have the opposite going on in the industrial sector, where we’re seeing a circling of the wagons, you know, a cheerleading of the salvation by genetically modified organisms, you know, new drugs, new-generation drugs, driverless tractors, you know, robotics, all this stuff. So that’s, it’s interesting to me, you know, the old Hegelian thesis, antithesis and synthesis, and it’s interesting to see that you see these equal and opposite reactions, you know, occurring at the same time, where we’re going to end up with this, you know, who knows?

32:57 My personal belief is that what you, as an individual, can do now with this burgeoning local food movement, never has it been more available to you. If you really want to change the way you eat, and patronize a food system that builds soil, you know, protects animals, increases biodiversity, you know, all these things, it’s never been easier. All right. At the same time, we’ve never had more noise and more voices from the other side, um, whatever, pooh-poohing, demeaning this other movement.

33:36 There’s a, there’s a, you know, there’s a battle going on here. And I tend to think, I tend to think that societal change, so individuals can do a lot of cool stuff now, that’s been easier, but I think societally we’re still far more interested in the dysfunction of the Kardashians than we are our food. And we think that we can get health out of a bottle and from a surgeon, and so we can eat thoughtlessly and conveniently and cheaply and easily, and these guys will fix our ball bearings when they wear out.

34:17 Right? There, it sounds like a huge marketing and public relations war, because ultimately we’re all consumers, and we can go out of our way and choose a locally grown and organic option. Yeah, you might have to go online. You might have to order it, become part of a collective, get the food delivered, you know, weekly or whatever. Or you can go and drive through McDonald’s.

34:38 Yeah, and now there’s a PR war happening in your brain that’s oh, okay, this isn’t so, McDonald’s isn’t so bad, and we got the new vegetables at McDonald’s, and la la la and then, so it is, it’s this war in our brains, right? And we just have to try to make the correct and more informed choices. It is, and unfortunately, we don’t have an accounting system that accounts for all of those externalized costs that cheap food creates, from antimicrobial resistance to, you know, superbugs, MRSA, C. diff, to, you know, campylobacter, E. coli, listeria.

35:13 I mean, these are all caused by that. Interestingly, about 12 years ago the Government Accounting Office in the US, the Congressional GAO, a Government Accounting Office, which is a nonpartisan, you know, kind of, um, whatever research group that works for Congress, they were commissioned to research foodborne illness, you know, uh, toxic food. And they came out with four things that created foodborne illnesses. Number one was centralized farming, huge, huge centralized farms.

35:54 Number two, centralized processing, huge, huge mega processing facilities. Number three was long-distance transportation, you know, long distribution chains, and the fourth was, um, uh commitment to antibiotics. Was routine, routine antibiotic use. You know, drugging your dinner. Now, interestingly, so this is what they came up with.

36:25 Now that actually is true. I mean, something true came out of the government. All right. Cool. Great.

36:31 All right, now you would think that somebody at a high policy decision, a president, let’s say, would look at those four things and say, okay, if that’s the problem, what’s the opposite of those things? Well, what’s the opposite of centralized farms? Oh, a lot of small, vibrant family farms. What’s the opposite of centralized processing? Oh, community kitchens, cottage industry, uh, maybe your own home kitchen.

36:59 You know, domestic culinary arts. You know, use your techno-glitzy kitchen. It’s more gizzed than anybody’s ever had, and, uh, use it to prepare, preserve, package and, and, uh, work with food. Now we have time, bake. We’ve got, you know, hot and cold water.

37:17 We’ve got refrigerators. We’ve got, you know, ranges and cool stuff. Uh, the third was, um, long-distance distribution. What’s the opposite of warehouses and long-distance distribution? Uh, let’s see, let’s see, we’ve got to think real hard on that one.

37:34 What would be the opposite? Oh, uh, that sounds like local. Local, transparent. Transparent. Yeah.

37:40 Systems. And the fourth one, the routine use of antibiotics. Well, what’s the opposite of that? Well, the opposite of that is creating a terrain on farm for the tomatoes, the peppers, the chickens and the pigs, a habitat that actually reverences and honors the physiological distinctiveness of that life-form of that being, so it affirms the pigness. It affirms the tomato.

38:10 It affirms, you know, a habitat, and creates a terrain that actually builds immunological function. Wow, amazing that, you know, we could actually build immunological function. And so, you know, the solutions to these four things are not rocket science. But what would we do? We just push them under the table, because that’s too hard, right?

38:36 And we have, we have too big a ship to turn around. You know, we’ve got, as I think Teddy Roosevelt has said, to have said, he said it’s really hard to get a person to see something different when his paycheck depends on believing something else. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it’s funny. Yeah, I’ve heard, I think this was in a movie, I’m not sure where, they said you go and you buy that Big Mac at McDonald’s, and they charge you $3, but if you look at all the costs, it’s more like $12 or $14, because you’re paying for, you know, all the diseases, all the carbon, all of this and this.

39:08 But people don’t know it, and it’s patted into their tax bill, and etc. And so if they knew those things, or if they were actually priced into the product and not priced into some government body, um, then that might make people decide differently. You know, isn’t it amazing that if I go out and pollute a river, that is not a liability against gross domestic product, that’s actually an asset, because the cost of cleanup stimulates economic activity? You know, if we have a bunch of juvenile delinquents and we have to build more detention centers, that’s economic activity.

39:44 If we, I mean, it’s, you have to laugh, because intuitively we all understand, well, no pollution should be a liability. More jails should be a liability. More people on welfare should be a liability. You know, it shouldn’t be an asset of economic activity, but that’s how inverted and skewed and whatever, you know, wonky our accounting system is, that people as creative as we’re supposedly, we’re supposedly very creative, yeah, that we’re so creative that we’re so uncreative that we can’t even measure, account or articulate exactly, as you said, for these externalized costs that are buried in the price of the shortcuts.

40:31 So less government could be the answer here? Yes, I agree. There was a movie that came out a year or two ago called Cowspiracy. Yes, I’m curious what you think of it. I think you might have seen it.

40:41 I don’t know. You know, I and let me just say that there’s kind of two parts of that movie and I’m kind of curious how you feel about both of them, because at one point they come at the end and conclude that, you know, animals are bad. But at one point early on the movie, it was interesting, because they kind of put the onus back into the consumer, and saying, okay, if you really want to take responsibility, look at your own food choices. And while you will give money to Greenpeace, you’ll, uh, put a tap on your shower to reduce the water flow, you won’t take responsibility that buying that piece of factory-farm meat is actually going to waste 100 gallons of water.

41:16 So whereas maybe some people that grow meat might disagree with the ultimate conclusions as far as the methane production, and it might go to global warming, I thought it was interesting to just put it back to the consumer by saying, everyone’s willing to do all these other things, save the world, save this, save that, but when it comes to saying, why don’t you look at your diet? No, no, no, no. I’ve always been able to eat what I want to eat. Um, let alone for your own health, but maybe the planet.

41:40 Um, general thoughts about that film? Yes. Well, the general thought is I’m in complete agreement that we are the masters of our trajectory. Uh, it’s not only, is that affirming and empowering to a person to say, yes, I can affect change? Uh, who wants to think that they can’t affect change?

42:03 I mean, that’s, well, you curl up in your cocoon then, right, if you say that you can’t affect change. So I’m a huge promoter of, I mean, on our farm, on our little slogan on our cooler bags for our customers is healing the land one bite at a time. So we’re very aggressive about making that connection, that dot, between my mouth and, ultimately, the air, soil and water, the resource commons that we all enjoy. I get that 100%. So now let’s deal with, we shouldn’t have animals.

42:39 Um, we have to understand first of all that prior to modern times there were actually way more pounds of animals than there are today, even with factory farms and all that. In the United States, you know, we had we had, um, millions and hundreds of millions of bison. We had flocks of birds that were so magnificent. Audubon said he sat under a tree. The founder of the Audubon Society sat under a tree.

43:09 He said, I couldn’t see the sun for three days because the birds blocked out the sun. Native Americans had stories of flocks of birds coming in like passenger pigeons, which are now extinct, and, uh, you know, prairie chickens and things, and landing in a forest so thickly that they literally broke all the branches off, and they’d get up in the morning and look, and and all they saw were these spires, you know, sticking up, and all the branches were gone, and an inch of bird poop on the ground. 200 million beavers, who ate more salad because they’re herbivores.

43:45 They ate more salad than a human. So that’s, way more than half the human population in the US right now that was eating salads. Okay, it was a huge export in the early days, beaver pelts, right? And they absolutely, and now they’re now they’re gone. What I’m getting at is that when you add up all these things, there was actually more nutrition produced pre-European colonization of North America than is there today, even with Monsanto, you know, chemical fertilizers and John Deere tractors.

44:26 So if animals, if animals create climate change, why didn’t it happen at that time? So you know, that’s one response, and that’s a response that doesn’t have an answer. Well, the answer is it’s not the animals, it’s the way the animals are managed. So the second, uh, whatever point that I’ll say about Cowspiracy is, uh, in fact I did an article on this for Mother Earth News magazine called, um, you can’t measure what ain’t, and essentially typical Salatin speak.

45:03 Yeah, Sal, you can’t measure what ain’t, and the point there is that the scientists measure the data points that exist, and right now our orthodox, you know, production matrixes are all, um, very different than this this choreography of symbiotic animals that was pre-European, that was the amazing, you know, migrations and predator-prey and fire and you know, all this stuff. And so, uh, what’s happened is we have taken the animals out of their, I mean, I could talk for an hour on just that role, but let, just trust me, we have taken animals out of this symbiotic ecological role, and we have, of, of integration and symbiosis, and we have segregated them to a monospeciated uh idea of, of, of, of segregated, um, disinvolvement with their with with the environment they were supposed to be in, and when you take what, what ecologically is symbiosis and you divorce it, you don’t end up with positives.

46:24 You end up with two negatives instead of one. Instead of having 1 + 1 = 3, you have 1 – 1 = -2. And that’s what we’ve got in our system. So, um, so I liken it to this. Imagine if I wanted to measure, let’s say, I came to Great Britain and I wanted to see what your education system was like, and so I went to the worst classroom with the worst teacher in the worst, um, community of the country and looked at the education system.

47:06 I’d come away saying, who, I think, I think we’d be better not to have any education in Great Britain. Look how terrible it is. That’s the truth of the current data points. Okay, for the science that leads you to conclude something that, if you had a data point that currently doesn’t exist except on a few farms around the world, it makes, it makes you have a data point that leads you to a conclusion that’s entirely skewed. Okay, now is less methane produced from a cow on a, you know, ecologically balanced farm as opposed to in a, uh, yeah, by the cow.

47:48 Yes, but not in the whole system. You have to understand that decomposing biomass, when biomass decomposes, it gives off methane, and it’s the same amount of methane whether it decomposes inside an animal or outside of an animal, and that’s why 90-some percent of the Earth’s methane comes from swamps and wetlands, is because all that bulrushes and swamp grass and, you know, slowly decomposing material, um, decomposes. The truth is that this, that what’s what’s new right now is the addition of all the petroleum into the equation, but the actual methane is quite a system, and remember, the biomass, as it grows, it inhales all these atmospheric toxins and gases, breaks them down, sequesters them in the soil as food for the soil biology, and the biomass exhales oxygen so you and I can breathe.

48:50 And this has been going on actually quite well for a very, because the conclusion the movie makes at the end is that even grass-fed farming is still not sustainable because of all the gases they’re producing, and it goes, and then all the water that all this is using, but like you said, there they’re taking the wrong data points and extrapolating wrong data points, and even, um, and even a zero-sum deal, as if, as if, as if grazing is all negative, when actually grazing is pruning, like, uh, an orchardist would prune an orchard to stimulate new verdant growth, or a viticulturist a vineyard, to stimulate new verdant growth, because grass has a very rapid metabolism, and it grows old and dies, and then exudes and then decomposes methane. It’s actually much more efficient to prune it and keep it young and vigorous and vital, so it can breathe deeper.

49:52 You know, when you’re jogging you’re breathing more dramatically than when you’re, you know, in a nursing home on an oxygen tent, right? Yeah, and so what we don’t want is nursing home grass. We want teenage grass that’s, you know, that’s vibrant and viral. Yeah, and that’s actually inhaling a lot more toxins than anything else. Yeah, and people can watch your most recent TED Talk, where you kind of talk about that whole grass cycle.

50:18 Yeah, I actually bring grass in right. Yeah, have the plants. Yeah, to see, and then you kind of go into that balance ecosystem with your animals. And I do want to get into what it’s like, you know, on your farm, but I want to ask a little bit about farming, and then you, like you said, you’ve got this bully pulpit, but two-thirds of the time you’re getting those calluses on your hands because you’re on the ground as a farmer. I want to talk a little bit about farming.

50:40 Um, I’m two generations away from men who had calluses on their arms, as I told you before, missing toes from tractors. Uh, my grandpa had a limp his whole life because he was thrown off a horse when he was 11. Um, you know, when he was taking care of cows, grew up in the 4-H system, which people don’t know, where you raise these cows and calves, and it’s just part of the local community in Arizona. M, head, heart, hands and health. Yeah, head and health.

51:07 Yeah, and you know, it was, it was, and for me, I was a city boy from San Diego. I fly over to Phoenix, I go up to Casa Grande in Phoenix, where my grandpa had his cattle ranch, and I’d fly out to Colorado, where my other grandpa had his potato and barley ranch. She’d sell us barley to Coors beer, and we’d go out and dig up potatoes, and for a six-year-old kid, you don’t know know why you’re digging up potatoes. There’s so many potatoes everywhere. But it’s a certain character that’s built on that farm and I’m just, I don’t know if stoic is even doing it justice, but you know, my grandpa never complained about anything.

51:40 Um, they got on with their work, and I, uh, I interviewed my dad many years later, and he actually went out to college at Caltech, and I said to him once, uh, when he started getting D’s this first semester, I said, do you ever think about quitting? Because he was an ace on his local high school, when he got out there, he was, with, uhuh, sure, and he said, no Brian, I never quit, because on the farm if you quit, you die. Yeah, and so there’s this underlying mentality that you get up the next day and you get on with it, because that’s all you got.

52:09 And, um, my grandpa and grandpa, they never sat me down and said, Brian, you don’t complain, you don’t do this, you get on with it. But I just saw them, they got up at 5 in the morning, they did the work. Nobody gave them awards. Nobody gave him congratulations. Um, can you speak about the character of a of a man on a farm and a family that grows up in that in that area?

52:30 Yeah, well, am I giving you juice? No, no, you’re you’re you’re, you’re eloquent. You’re doing it very well. I think, I think that on the farm, you know, we tend to have this pastoral idea of this, you know, romanticized place today, I think. And it is a wonderful place.

52:52 I don’t want to detract from that, but the truth is, you know, there are foxes, and there are rainstorms, and there are floods and winds and cold and and snow. And, um, we have to stay with it. There are plants depending on us, there are animals depending on us, there are needs. There are stewardship, husbandry, caretaking needs that depend on us, and, um, that builds character. And I think another thing that it builds is, I think it builds an appreciation for the realization that there’s something bigger than us, bigger than me.

53:36 I’m such a big advocate of kids and gardens, you know, whether it’s at schools or in your home, your backyard, kids and gardens, because being able to interact viscerally with our nest really affirms our interaction with this ecological umbilical, you know, you know, it really is. And there’s an affirming thing that happens here when, look, when you plant that tomato seed and then you nurse that plant through it. It’s an important lesson to realize, you know, if that plant dies, the video game doesn’t give you a new plant.

54:15 If you run your car and you wreck it, you know, you wait two seconds and you get a new icon, right? You get a new car, and you run. Life isn’t like that. It’s not this fantasy where, you know, we mess it all up and suddenly, you know, the game makes it all okay again. We can start over.

54:31 No, you can’t start over, and this is for all the marbles. So when that tomato plant dies because you didn’t water it on time or pick the tomato bug off of it or whatever, um, it’s dead, you know, and you can cry over it, and you can, what, but it’s gone. And then, and then to nurture that plant up and get that tomato and have that participatory affirmation, man, that does so much for your personhood, your, you know, to affirm you as a part of something big and grand.

55:10 It’s far more valuable to me than being the top points getter on Angry Birds. And I think that’s a powerful thing for our children to be able to participate in this, in this grand theater that’s mystical, it’s magical, it’s bigger than us, it’s bigger than me, and when you’re participating with life, you realize how fragile it is. It’s not entitled, it’s fragile. If it’s going to be, it’s up to me, and the fact that we can shape and we are totally dependent on something.

55:50 So both, both, I can participate, and I can enjoy dependency too. That’s a, it’s, it’s, it’s both an affirming and a humbling thing. It’s quite, quite powerful, and they start a relationship with their food early, so they see that, okay, I grow this, I eat it, now, and there’s not 40 more of them there until I grow it again. Right? That’s right.

56:10 And then when I raise that cow as a 4-H thing and I feed him with a bottle, just like a baby bottle, and he grows up. If we want to eat, I have to kill him, and then that whole relationship starts in the appreciation. So in order to have life there must be death, whether it’s the carrot that dies. And don’t go into me about, you know, carrots aren’t sentient. Listen, when, when, the more we know now about plants, we know that they communicate with pheromones.

56:38 They track each other. They, uh, they build up, uh, screens against, you know, attack. Okay, so they don’t talk. They don’t meow. They don’t moo, but they collaborate.

56:51 But they absolutely, they communicate and they collaborate. The point is it’s a powerful lesson that for me to live, something has to die. And I use this with children all the time. I say, look, this is a beautiful lesson. It is, in order for me to, in order for me to enjoy a fullness of life, part of that is me dying to self, serving to serve you, and when I serve you in sacrificial love and and care, I live.

57:27 You know, that’s a powerful lesson, and we see that in nature. This life, death, decomposition, regeneration, life, death, decomposition, regenerate. It’s a very powerful metaphor for some of the most powerful spiritual and emotional you know, truths of life. Right? So deep connection to nature, deep connections to life.

57:48 That’s what happens to a lot of people that are growing up on farms. In fact, you know, I wrote a book, Folks, This Ain’t Normal, and that title came out of, I was doing a lot of college lectures, college speaking, and as I was around these young people, I realized that they thought that we live, that this is the way it’s always been. I’ve always had a smartphone. We’ve always had the Kardashians. We’ve always had, you know, Hollywood.

58:16 We’ve always had all this, and the truth is we haven’t. And, and I got this great, this, this real sense, and still do from time to time, that a lot of people think we can actually levitate into some Star Trek, you know, alternative reality and sever our dependency on the soil, the air and water. Um, and we, and we almost speak of them condescendingly. We speak of farmers condescendingly, you know, oh, if you’re, if you’re not smart enough to become an attorney, a doctor, an IT guy or an engineer, well then you can go be a farmer.

58:50 We have this kind of societal, uh, condescension. Yeah, I want to quote you from the, it was the USA, and they said that about you, and I wanted to bring that up, and you said, quote, we have this cultural stigma against an agrarian existence, first of all, and that it’s only good enough for the DNF students, the grammar-assaulting hillbilly that trips over the transmission in the backyard. Why do we do that? Why do we do that? Um, I think it’s, I think it’s this, this kind of hillbilly mystique, but I think a lot of it Um, I think it’s, I think it’s this kind of hillbilly mystique, but I think a lot of it is just a mentality of peasants.

59:25 Uh, the peasants are unskilled, they’re not smart, they’re, you know, unfruitful, and, well, it comes from pride in ourselves, thinking that we’re, you know, bigger than our dependency. And I would suggest that, uh, ultimately it’s a lot more important to keep very, very successful farmers functioning than very successful bankers. At the end of the day, I’d much rather, um, in a, in a, in a downturn, I’d much rather eat what a farmer can produce than eat what a banker can produce.

1:00:03 And we have this disconnect that we ultimately rely on this food and this soil and this water, and we a lot of times just think, oh, no, we’re going to have technologically replace that, and we should really be worrying about going to Mars and all these other things, when in fact we’re deeply rooted and deeply dependent, deeply dependent, and more so now as we’re not getting the right nutrients and not even doing the right thing with it, and we’re dying kind of because of it. Uh, let me ask you about Joel Salatin, because my grandpa Benedict, who, funny enough, now it’s funny that you come here today, because he had a feeding company. It’s called Benedict Feeding Company in Casa Grande near Phoenix, and I remember going there when I was a kid, and guess what, it smelled pretty bad, because I think at the time he was kind of on some cutting-edge science in the ’50s and ’60s of what to feed cows before they killed him, and this kind of thing, and I would go there and they’d have 10 or 20,000 head there.

1:00:52 Yeah, okay, so he had a feed yard, a feedlot, feedlot yeah, feedlot, which, don’t know, was like the last three or four months of the cow’s life. They fat him up and kill him. It’s like the worst thing to do, probably. Now, he ended up selling that and then he moved to a ranch where he had 300 Brahmans. He had Simmentals, and he actually mixed him to, uh, Simmental.

1:01:12 He was a big fan of that, and you know, I don’t know if he maybe something inside of him realized that the feedlot wasn’t the right place to be, or something, but even he got tired of smelling it. Yeah, I mean, as a kid I knew I didn’t want to be there. Oh yeah, but he didn’t have any TED Talks. All right, and my grandpa Rose was making potatoes and barley in Colorado, and he never had any TED Talks either. How does Joel Salatin get created, where a third of your life is spent on the bully pulpit, you’re at Google giving these talks, because when I look at your story, you just sound like a guy that just wanted to do things his way, but now you got 10 books that you published.

1:01:46 How does this guy get created? All right, well, uh, I stand on the shoulders you know, we’re products, we’re partly products of our parents and our home upbringing and so I enjoyed, um, a dad who was, I call him a convictional contrarian. You might remember in the mid ’70s when the Arab oil embargo happened during Jimmy Carter’s lines at gas stations, yeah, lines at gas stations, yeah, 50 cars backed up waiting for gas. Well, everybody’s, you know, mad at those Arabs, right?

1:02:21 You know, we all. And, um, and Dad, he was in his mid-50s at the time, and he was, uh, working off the farm. Mom and Dad never made a living from the farm. They worked off, our mom as a high school teacher, dad as an accountant, and, um, at this particular time he was the accountant for a large, um, metal fabric, a custom metal fabrication firm, so he read blueprints, did estimations, you know, um, reup the raw inventory, you know, and kept the books. It was 13 m away from our house.

1:02:57 He went out and bought a 10-speed bicycle and rode to work and back every day. He said, we don’t need their oil. He said, if everybody would do this, we’ll just tell them to keep their oil. Now that’s what I call conventional, con, convictional contrarianism. And, um, and so I stand on the shoulders I mean, that’s just one story I could tell you.

1:03:19 Lots, but that’s a good enough one to help you to understand. Here was a man who said, I’m not going to whine, I’m not going to complain. What can I actually do? I can’t change the Arabs. I can’t change US energy policy.

1:03:32 I can’t drill an oil well. What can I do? I can liberate myself mentally, emotionally, and I can do something good for my body at the same time. Don’t have to so, so I stand on that shoulders of that visionary, kind of a prophet, if you will. He was way ahead of his time.

1:03:50 And then my mother is a dramatist. She coached the debate team, she in the theater, you know, all this. So I got this wonderful melding of passion for a cause, for something for right, and this theatrical verbal, you know, communication bent to do that. And, um, so I stand on the shoulders of great. So as a kid, um, Dad always told the story of the third grade.

1:04:23 He goes to the PTA meeting and meets with my third-grade teacher, and the teacher meets him and she says, Mr Salatin, you have no secrets. So obviously, you know, I was an extrovert, precocious child, storyteller, okay? And I was in all these forensics and stuff, and the best thing that ever happened to me was getting cut from the seventh-grade baseball team and the eighth-grade basketball team. Now, remember, my mother was a fed teacher, okay? So you know, I had an older brother who was an athletic standout, he could do any, here I am next, you know, second born, and I get cut from the most rudimentary thing, you know, everybody gets to do it.

1:05:04 No, I didn’t get to do it. I was chubby, I was a late bloomer, but you know what, I could talk. I could read and I could write, and that being cut, looking back, I made a, okay, if I can’t do sports, I’m going to be good at something, and I put all my attention on debate, forensics, extemporaneous speaking, drama. I was in all the plays in school. Writing, I never entered an essay contest that I didn’t win.

1:05:37 So, I, yeah, these are gifts, and I don’t want to detract these are gifts, but there was a definite, I’m gonna, I’m going to sharpen this skill as I move forward. And so while in high school everybody else was, you know, going to ball games on Friday nights, I was down at the local newspaper writing obituaries and police reports, working part-time through high school at the newspaper, working with crunchy editors and and smelling the ink. And, man, I wouldn’t, today the reason I can write all these books is because you know, when the presses run at 12 midnight and something comes in at 10:30, I can’t sit here and say, oh, uh, I have writer’s block.

1:06:24 I can’t think of, editor’s saying I need it in 15 minutes get busy boy, you know, get busy boy, you know. And so, um, those experiences allowed me to enjoy what today we know as the StrengthsFinder idea. You know, we’ve always heard work on your weaknesses, work on no no, no, no, don’t work on your weaknesses, hone your strengths, and you’ll actually go farther than if you try to, uh, work on your weaknesses. So I’ve had this wonderful, uh, verbal, you know, uh, um, uh, house of very issue-oriented my dad wrote a lot of, um, edit letters to the editor, so the meal, the household meals were all full of issue talk, big picture cultural talk, um, and, um, and we never had a TV, so I read, you know, I grew up reading and performing, and what a joy that at this point in my life, um, I can meld this wonderful, uh, kind of salt-of-the-earth anchor with this stage and this performance thing.

1:07:39 It’s, it’s just such a wonderful blessing. It’s just great. Yeah, what a combination. And a lot of people would say, oh, you must have engineered that, you know, because these days, everyone has to have the TED Talk, and everyone has to have four books. But you did this organically, because you wanted to be a, originally, and then you were like, no, actually, I want to start practicing what I preach and start actually getting back on that farm.

1:08:01 So what a, what an amazing combination. I actually, I actually, my, my first goal was to be a, I always wanted to be a farmer, but when I was a kid, you know, 12, 13, I’m looking at this thing, and as I started looking at, well, what kind of, what’s my path, in, you know, and, uh, then as I became a teenager, this was Watergate, Nixon, you know, Woodward, Bernstein. I knew I had a flair for writing, and I love news, and, and that, I said, oh, well, I’ll go write a bestseller, and then I’ll retire to the farm, then I can be, you know, independently wealthy, and will be good to go.

1:08:37 And, um, and so that kind of, that kind of combination, uh, uh, was what I was looking at, and as it turned out, I actually came to the farm first, and the farm was successful enough that people started asking, how do you do this? How do you do this? I said, okay, if everybody wants to know how to do this, I’ll write a book about it. So in ’93 we did the Pastured Poultry Profits book, and, um, self-published, you know, and people clamored for it, and suddenly I realized, hm, there’s money in that, their information, and So then, two years later, Salad Bar Beef, and then two years later, You Can Farm, and they’ve, and all my books have come from, essentially, you know, I’m an idea marketer.

1:09:22 Okay, I’m a marketer of ideas, and so I’m listening. I’m listening to what I think the culture needs. What do they need? Sometimes a culture needs something that they don’t even realize they need, and so all my writing is a result of my perception as an idea marketer of what the culture needs, what would be helpful at this time, and so everything grows out of that desire to serve and meet needs of what I think would be helpful at the time. Okay, and I want to go through your books later.

1:09:57 Now, if that wasn’t enough to make you one of the most interesting men in the world, like the Dos Equis commercial, you and I have ridden in the same Lamborghini. Ah, and you and I actually met just under two years ago for the Tai Lopez Mentor conference at The Roosevelt Hotel, I think in January. And so on top of all these other things that you do, you have probably one of the most famous mentees ever, and that’s Mr Tai Lopez. I was curious if you remember what that young man was like and why he came to your farm?

1:10:26 He always quotes the lessons that he learned from you on that farm, and, um, how did that happen, and did you ever foresee that happening, and is it strange to you when you’re riding around in that Lamborghini, or is that just business as usual for you? Well, I’m not surprised. As you can imagine, he was a very unusual young man. Um, uh, completely curious, um, unabashedly curious, funny to a I mean, meal times were funnier than any sitcom you could ever imagine.

1:11:01 Um, always, always with questions, but always with, uh, with an edge of entertainment. You know, he’s a real entertainer now, he’s an entertainer. Okay, cracking jokes. Yeah, yeah. He is, he’s a real entertainer, but, um, I remember a couple of, of real serious conversations we had and one theme that kept coming back in some of these serious conversations as he started finishing his apprenticeship, he would look at me and he would say, Joel, I don’t want hit.

1:11:31 I don’t want to hit 40 with regrets. He said, I want to figure out what truth is, what right is, and pursue it passionately, so when I hit 40 I don’t have all these, well, I wish I should have, would have, could have done it, done it. You know, and how old was he then? He was, uh, 18. Okay, 18 or 19.

1:11:52 All right, which is a mature observation, for he was 18 when he came, I think, and 19 when he left. He was with us for 18 months, 18 months, um, and so, so that, that just, and we still, ever since that time, whatever, 22 years ago. We still have not had, we’ve had a couple close, but we’ve not had anybody who was more interested in my bookshelf section. And I have, I have a lot of books. I collect books.

1:12:20 I, I like books. Uh, I’m, I’m an avid reader, and of course, you know, he is, uh, a nutso reader. Yes, yes. And so he was constantly, we were constantly saying, Tai, bring back that handful of books, you know, my bookshelf section, gra, my bookshelves in the house gradually gravitated to his, you know, apprentice cottage, um, and we’d have to go and, and, and, uh, uh, get back to hijack books, but always discussing and, and, and thinking, um, uh, thinking about, uh, these issues.

1:12:51 Um, one of the things a lot of people don’t know is, and I joke about him today, because people ask, well, you know, what’s, what, what’s, what’s a little, uh, like a, a teaser story you can tell about Tai, and, um, and he’s, he’s a messy, a lot of people don’t realize that, for, I’ve told him today, I’m not telling you anything that I don’t tell to his face. We have a very sweet relationship. Um, I say, Tai, I’m glad you became a millionaire so you could hire people to clean up after you.

1:13:23 Um, because he was a, you know, uh, the Peanuts cartoon with Pig-Pen, you know, the guy that’s always got his dust cloud. That’s the way Tai is. You know, he carried chaff, hay seeds. I mean, he was just dribbling this stuff, you know, in the house, in the truck, in every place, and, um, and it was partly because I think his mind was so focused on finding truth, finding answers, finding fits. I don’t have time to brush the cuff off my jacket, you know?

1:13:54 I gotta. And, um, so anyway, that’s the, that’s the kind of little funny story about Tai, but no, Tai is just, um, he is, he is fantastic, and I’m so, I’m so proud of him. I’m just so proud of him that he’s taken these things, and, and, and he’s, he’s actually honored, he’s honored his past. A lot of people in his position wouldn’t want to admit that they lived with the Amish and lived on a farm and you know, did all these things, but he’s, uh, he’s, he’s happy in his own skin.

1:14:28 Enough say yep, yep, and I learn a lot there, and it’s okay. Yeah, that’s, that’s a guy happy in his skin, and that’s a good thing. What kind of lessons did he learn at your place in the 18 months, and can some of those lessons only be learned on a farm? I don’t know how many of his 67 steps are quotes from me. I think seven or eight of them, something like that.

1:14:53 There’s several, um, uh, but certainly one lesson, one thing that he learned, one thing that he brought to us, um, was he, he was, he pushed us, for example, to rent our first farm. We had a, we had a friend, we had a guy who, um, had bought a farm, and he was not a farmer, but he, he got bit by the farm bug, you know, going to buy this farm, and but he didn’t know anything about farming, and so he came to me. He knew about us. He came to me and he said, would you teach me how to do this?

1:15:27 Set this up for me, and then, and then I’ll take it over in two, three, four years. Well, I said no, because I was busy. I had enough stuff to do. I didn’t, I didn’t need to, CL, complicate my life with other things. Well, Tai overheard the conversation.

1:15:41 He was sitting there when the guy left, and he says, I want to do that, he said. It’s one thing to be here on a farm that’s, that’s far more developed, you know, where you’ve already put in water line and fencing and corrals, and, you know, you’re not at the prototype stage anymore. Excuse me, you know, you’re, you’re farther down that road. He said, um, I’d like to be, I’d like to develop a farm like this on the ground level. We’re going to think about where do the fences go, where, where are we going to get water, how are we going to get water, uh, all these things, and he said, if I promise to that, it won’t take any more, more of your time except to set it up.

1:16:27 He didn’t have any money. He said, he said, if you’ll finance it, maybe maybe this is where he learned this, um, use other people’s money. He said, if you’ll finance it and capitalize it, he said, I’ll run it, and we’ll, and how about we just, uh, share the profits 50/50? I said, well, how can I lose with that? He’s not asking to be an employee, and if we don’t make any money, I don’t owe him anything.

1:16:54 How can I, how can I, uh, uh, not do that? So I went back to the F and said yes, we’ll do this, and Tai’s going to run it, and we did it, and, and that was the first farm we leased, and so the, the, the point of the story was, uh, yes, we mentored Tai, but it’s people like that that move us beyond where we think we can go, and that’s always the sign of a leader. A leader takes you places that you wouldn’t go by yourself, and that’s, that’s a really powerful thing, and he, he was then affirmed.

1:17:38 He watched us, you know, buy the cattle. We were there with the planning, and, and, and putting in, you know, we dug post holes, and and we put the whole thing in, and, and he ran it. Then he had a little, um, a little blue Vega, or something, something, some ’19, he’s running this thing, yeah, yeah, some, some little rattletrap car, and, and, and he would run over there. It was, you know, uh, 15 minutes over there, and every day he’d go over there, and that became in his chores, so he actually stayed another season in order to do that.

1:18:10 Okay, and, um, and we ended up making I don’t know, six or 7,000. We gave him half of it, we kept half of it, and, uh, it was great for both of us, because it, it, it, it moved us beyond what we thought we could do, and it’s, he certainly was so affirmed after that, that he realized his potential to sell an idea, make a pitch, and I, I think it was very affirming for, for the gifts that he’s still expressing today. Did you always have him carry a Pat and pencil too?

1:18:41 Is that something standard you would do? Uh, not sure. I don’t, I don’t remember him telling some story about something, wr down, moving, write it down. I, I will tell you this, I will, which is related to that. Um, we’re, we’re big on benchmarks, benchmarks of proficiency.

1:19:01 Yeah, okay, because mastery, you know, you can teach a rudimentary skill, you know, a five-year-old can make an A, but it’s only after you’ve made an A a thousand times that you, that you become a master of making an A. It’s the repetition, you know, the 10,000 hours or the 10 years. You know, it’s the repetition that creates the mastery, and so, uh, Tai, um, uh, so we had these benchmarks, uh, that we’ve established over the years and we said, you know, you should be able to move a chicken shelter in 60 seconds.

1:19:38 That’s our benchmark. Now I can do it in about 40, but that’s, I mean, I’m 37. You’re still right, 37. I think was your record. Oh, okay, so I’m okay to do 60.

1:19:47 That’s okay. I mean, I’m not expecting everybody to be like a, and, and Tai would actually carry his wife and set his stopwatch, and he would race me, so you’re going to move these 10. I’m going to move these 10, and, uh, and, and, and he would race me, and he’s the only, I think, the only intern we’ve ever had, the only apprentice that ever took it to that level. I’m going to race the master. That shows how unusual, uh, he was.

1:20:20 Most people are, well, you know, if I can, if I can get along, or there, there, their mind goes into zero, whatever. But this, turning everything into a game and everything into a competition, this separates the crowd from the leaders. And we tell this story to apprentices and interns today. Maybe some are even watching this and say, look, if you want to, if you want to be a master, these are the things that you do. You don’t just, okay, we’re going to go out and move shelters, and I’ve got so much time to do this, and we just, no, no, it’s, you’re competing against the master, you’re competing against the clock and then you compete against yourself and see, can I even do it better than the benchmark?

1:21:07 That’s how you actually move to a place of getting along to a place of leadership. Right? And that’s where innovation comes from. Yes, that’s where innovation comes from. Talk to me about marketing, because again, another facet of your personality is when you started direct marketing your products to consumers, and so you got a lot of knowledge and experience on what it’s like to speak directly to those consumers and from what we’re talking about in the early part of this conversation, you know, maybe the more educated that farmers get on this aspect, they can literally cut these middlemen out and make their products no longer commodities.

1:21:44 What, what can we learn from you when it comes to marketing? What you can learn from me is that the actual production skill, in a lot of ways, is secondary to communication skills. People who know how to communicate lead their field. The marketers are always the ones who lead their fields, the ones who can do that. And so when, when, uh, when parents come up to me, they’ve got, you know, 10-year-old in tow, and the 10-year-old has said I want to be a farmer, about Joel Salatin, okay, and the parents come up to me and they say, what can we do, you know, to, you know, what my answer is?

1:22:35 Join the local theater company. Why? Because storytellers become the leaders, and ultimately marketing is about storytelling. Right? But farmers, um, are not told that that’s important.

1:22:54 They certainly don’t learn that. In fact, most farmers don’t like people. That’s why we’re farmers, right? That’s why we’re farmers, and so this, no, this notion that I have to, yeah, really like people, love people, listen to people, and think about people all the time, who, you know, I’d rather think about the tractor sitting in the field, or I’d rather, you know, spend time with that. And so, um, I encourage folks to join the theater company, get on the debate team, uh, join Toastmasters, which is a, you know, verbal self-help group.

1:23:37 Speaking. Yeah, but develop these skills now. Now there are certain, because, as you know, right now the single biggest fear of every adult is public speaking. That’s the number one fear. Now some people will never be, and I get that, that’s fine.

1:23:54 So the next thing is find a partner who has that skill. So I appreciate that there are stages in life, and there are temperaments and personalities that are introverts that are not storytellers. That’s fine. Just understand that if you want a farm that, that is, resilient and secure because it’s getting the full retail dollar, and you own your. If you want to be an entrepreneurial farm and not just a colonial cog in a feudal wheel.

1:24:29 Feudal, F-E-U-D-A-L, not F-U-T-I-L. Well, maybe they both kind of go along. Um, but if you want to be that kind of farm, you want to have a brand, you want to have a story, you want to have a customer, you want to have that retail dollar. So if you can’t do it, realize you need to find somebody else with that skill set that will, and, and, uh, I’m a big believer that the, all the skills, all the talents and gifts necessary to be successful in a business don’t grow on the same pair of legs.

1:25:04 And so, um, so we need, we need to develop these relationships in partnerships with shared skin in the game, not employees. I’m not saying employees. I’m saying, you know, relationships that are collaborative, where both of us are stakeholders. We both win, we both lose, and we form these, um, uh, partnerships, formal or informal, but where, where I get you because you have strengths where I’m weak, and, and I work for you because I’m strong where you’re weak.

1:25:43 Those have been the way success has been built, routinely. Yeah, and, and most farms, most farmers have been told you don’t want anybody else in, in fact, you don’t want any other people on this farm. You don’t even want customers on this farm, because they might trip and sue you, and blah, blah, blah. You know, we’re back to the bogeymen and the demons again. And so suddenly the farmer goes through this trajectory of life where youthful energy and enthusiasm and excitement into aging, and, and, and, and downscaling, and oh my joints ache and my bones hurt, and nobody wants this farm, and, and suddenly I’m an old geezer, and who’s going to take this farm, and it’s gone, right?

1:26:30 Because they never allow people on the farm, customers, new blood. And you talk about that too, and you, you love people visiting you. Right? Absolutely. We have a 24/7/365 open door policy.

1:26:41 Anyone can come from anywhere on the planet at any time to see anything unannounced. Amen to that. Right? You’re going to get a lot of people come visit you now. Um, that’s incredible.

1:26:52 That’s really incredible, and I hope you’ll come sometime. I’d like to come. Definitely, we’re only six hours away from London. You know, you just jump on a plane, and, cuz, we’re on the East Coast. You know, if we were in California, we’d be like really far away.

1:27:03 But I want to move one of those chicken coops, see if I can do it faster. 37 seconds. There you go. But you know, it’s interesting you say that about communication, because we were talking earlier, and, uh, I think all great companies these days are media companies first, and this is what we teach in our business accelerator course, that you got to get that message, and especially today when you got to sell locally, because each farmer has to tell their story so you can connect with them, and then when it’s like, okay, I’m buying this meat and I’m buying this produce from people who care, and they do it this way, and I’ve seen the video of them on the thing, and I’ve seen Joel move the chickens from here to here after the cows were on there with the dung, and he rotates it, and now I understand why I’m buying this food.

1:27:41 It’s no longer a commodity I buy. Right, right, because now, a, you have, you have, um, information, but, b, you have a memory, and, and it’s all about that. That’s why we want people to come to the farm and our customers to come to the farm, uh, because we want them to have memory, so when they sit down, in fact, this is a scientific, uh, uh, discovery, now that we actually digest food better if it brings a memory. We have hormonal-like secretions, uh, so if we sit down to a meal and we have a memory like I saw those potatoes when they were growing, that we actually digest better.

1:28:24 Interesting. If we have, if we have this visceral memory, it’s pretty powerful. We’re learning a lot about this kind of esoteric, mystical, uh, um, universe around us, and it’s, it’s way more than we understand. Yeah, a lot of gut intelligence, a lot of things like that. And you know, vineyards were the original ones of doing this kind of marketing.

1:28:44 Sure, because you go to that place in France and you go to that vineyard, and man, every time you’re going to order that bottle, and when you drink it, you’re going, I remember when the guy told me this thing. And now it’s, it’s implant the whole terroir, uh, thing. Yeah, it’s a real connection. And now, when you used to sell eggs down at the farmers market, you knew a lot about marketing, because you used to crack that egg open and show it to people and really tell that story.

1:29:07 Yes. Yes, I, um, you, there were like six or seven of us at farmers market that had eggs, and I’m thinking, how can I, and all of them were selling eggs at half the price that I was selling my eggs. How do I compete with these guys that are selling at half price to, to mine and get customers to buy my eggs? The light bulb went off, so I went to the store and bought eggs, and so I’d go with two saucers, and when market opened up, I’d crack one of the supermarket eggs, I’d crack one of my eggs, and, um, of course, you know, all the customers are women.

1:29:43 You know, men don’t buy. The women are all, you know, men just look in the refrigerator and say, honey, I can’t find it, you know, and close it, and that’s all men do. You got to know your market right, you got to know your market. You know, 90% of all food decisions are made by women, so, so the woman comes by and looks at my saucers, and originally I would try to be scientific and explain, you know, the riboflavin and the fatty acids and all this. Of course, you know, immediately the little six-year-old is, you know, Mommy, this guy’s boring, you know, because people don’t get that.

1:30:16 So I went to the Socratic method. Ask a question. So I said, well, what do you see? She says, well, this egg has this, you know, real dark, rich colored yolk, and this one looks kind of pale in comparison. So what’s the first thing you notice in your child?

1:30:33 You know, they’ve got their little four, five, six, seven year old with them. What do you notice in your child the first time they’re, or they’re at home? Um, what’s the first thing you notice in your child when they’re not feeling good? Oh, they, you know, they’re kind of the color. Color is often in their cheeks.

1:30:50 I say, are you okay? Oh, sick egg, good egg, good egg. They make that connection just like that, and they self-discover it. You know, it’s not like it’s not me cramming science down their throat. It’s them self-discovering.

1:31:03 I said, what else do you notice? I said, well, this one stands up real high, you know, it’s tight and it stands up real high. This one here is kind of, you know, spread out and sprawled over the saucer. I say, um, you got to be careful about this with women, you know, you got to be careful about this. I say, um, have you heard of muscle tone?

1:31:24 You know, like fitness, muscle? Oh yeah, yeah, you know, like like being tight, you know. Um, oh okay, this is Jane Fonda here, you know, this is tightness, and this one’s kind of like sag, and you know, like flabby under the arms, all. Oh, you know, fitness egg. Oh yeah, I’ll take two dozen.

1:31:44 And what happened was immediately, even though I was way priced, way higher than anybody else at the market, I sold out every week and sold three times as many eggs, because I was willing to put the product out there, differentiate it aggressively, and let the story, and let the story go. And what was interesting was that while we were at that market for whatever, three years, not a single other vendor ever cracked out one of their eggs. Ever. So yeah, marketing’s fun.

1:32:21 What does that tell you? They just open to marketing. You know, I, I several things. I, I think, I think a lot of farmers feel selfish and greedy, uh, mercenary, if they dare to say I have a better chicken or a better egg. That’s like, farmers, we’re, we’re peasants, right?

1:32:45 You know, we’re told you’re, you’re just a farmer, you know, come on, find your, find your place as a farmer. You know, you’re, your, your social status, your whatever, and, and so if I dare to blow my trumpet, um, that’s not the place of the, of the humble husbandman, you know, and so I think a lot of it is cultural. A lot of it is cultural, that, that, oh, I, I, I would never do that. I I’d be perceived as some sort of a, a greedy mercenary, you know, whatever, uh, and the other thing I think was that I knew nobody else had them on pasture.

1:33:25 They were all in backyard, you know, dirt chicken yards, better than the store, but not good enough to do what I was doing, and so they were a little bit squeamish about, you know, whether or not they wanted to go head-to-head with that, putting their eggs on display. Interestingly, when organics came out, I bought the organic eggs from the supermarket, did the same thing, and had the same result. So, um, so yeah, it was a, it was a good, good, good time, good basic, and we, we still, we still do, you know, um, comparisons, and, and, uh you know, food fairs.

1:34:02 We, we’re, we’re, we’re very aggressive about, um, about the differences. Okay, latest book, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs. Another great salad and title. Um, what’s this book about? What’s a premise?

1:34:17 This book’s a little more spiritual. Yes, tell me about it. Is this what the world needs? Like you said, you write a book every couple years. What the world needs.

1:34:26 Yeah, okay. So, so I grew up in a, in a conservative Christian household, uh, went to church, you know, I accepted Christ, I, I, you know, biblical. All right, we all get that. And what’s funny was, so when we, when we go, our, our church friends were all, you know, straight-laced, fundamental, you know, religious, um, uh, folks, and our farm friends were all, you know, this is ’60s and ’70s, right? They were all Earth muffins, you know, marijuana-smoking, woo, cool dude, you know, hippie, hippie, dippy types.

1:35:01 Right? This is back-to-the-land movement, you know, of the Mother Earth, Earth muffins, and, and growing up to me, this was totally normal. I didn’t realize how unusual this was until later in life when when I started feeling this tension between the conservative, the, the religious right, if you will, and this, this environmental movement, and um, and realized that the two, the, there was, there was just a complete chasm between the two groups, and I found myself, when I was with my Christian friends, um, um, bringing up environmental issues and apologizing for my, you know, kind of uh, liberal, socialistic tendencies of my environmental friends, and when I was with my environmental friends, I found myself, you know, bringing up my, my responsibilities to a Creator, as, as steward of, of God’s stuff, all right, and apologizing for my Christian friends who were scoffing and making fun at these, you know, these, these greeny weeny, you know, environmental, uh, wackos, right?

1:36:25 And, um, and so, um, as I matured in my thinking, and as I live in this, so I live in this strange world you know, this, this, this bridge between these two groups, and, um, and as I become more and more embarrassed about the the fun that the religious right, the conservative, uh, um, Christian community, how they, how they view environmentalism, and, and I watch you know, um, um, church potlucks, uh, never even question whether to use Styrofoam or not, or, um, you know, just, just to have a very almost demeaning view toward, oh, these guys, yeah, yeah, I know, they’re, you know, they’re, they’re, peace between the two groups. So what I’m doing is, so, so this book was a challenge to the Christian community, the, the, the conservative religious right community, to, to ask the question, is what you believe in the pew showing up on your menu?

1:37:37 That’s the question, and the thesis is that all of physical creation is an object lesson of spiritual truth, so when you come to my farm, do you, does, is it an object lesson, does it, does it viscerally manifest forgiveness, whosoever will, the Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you? And so this book examines, from these, from these, you know, uh, um, uh, freedom versus enslavement, um, long view versus short-term view, um, it examines these great spiritual truths that the religious right preaches from the pulpit through a, a, a physical, on-farm, farm food system, what better exemplifies these spiritual truths. Okay, that’s a bold move.

1:38:38 You’re firing a shot across the bow on big farming. Let me tell, we didn’t self-publish this book, okay, because, you know, I’m a marketer, remember, and I knew that the Christian community was not my constituency, that was not my bread and butter, okay, and so I, I got, um, I got FaithWords to publish this. That’s their market. They, they know this constituency. Interestingly, they could not get a cover endorsement from a pastor.

1:39:08 They sent out guys to like 150 pastors, could not get a single one to, to put a, a little, you should read this book on the back. Why? What does a pastor do whose head elder has a Tyson chicken house, you know? What does a pastor do when the choir director has just gushed at Wednesday night prayer meeting about her happiness that her well-educated daughter has just landed a PhD research position at Monsanto? I mean, these are real issues, right?

1:39:43 Real issues. And, um, again, I don’t write for sales. I don’t write, you know, I write because, because I believe this will be helpful, and I now have it’s only came out in June, so it hasn’t even been out a year yet, but I have a stack of letters from people who have said, I thought I was the only one in my congregation that got this, thank you for articulating what I couldn’t say but I felt, I knew all these years. Now there is somebody else, and it’s, it’s very, very gratifying to encourage, to affirm these, these mavericks, you know, out here, that, that take a stewardship position from a, from a from a biblical, from a, from a, a theological perspective.

1:40:34 We’re stewards. It’s God’s stuff, it’s not my stuff. I mean, do is God happy when I pollute his streams? What’s his return on investment? We talk about return on investment.

1:40:45 Well, is, is eroding soil and giving God deserts from, o, from, from, uh, you know, from spring is that a return on investment? If I’m God, I’m going to say, woo, I don’t think I like that return on investment. I mean, why can’t we have this discussion? But in the average church, if you dare to question, you know, um, maybe we shouldn’t have Kentucky Fried Chicken at the church potluck next week. Well, you’re, you’re sarily dismissed.

1:41:12 Oh, one of those. Oh, you’re gonna be one of those commie pinko greeny weeny environmental wackos, you know, and you can’t even have the conversation. So I’m hoping that this book will at least break through some of that. There’s a, there, there is humor, you know, so even people who disagree can still, uh, enjoy it, I hope. And, uh, and interestingly, the ones who warmed up to it most have been my non-Christian environmental friends, who are buying them by the case and giving them to all their Christian friends say, here, you need to read this.

1:41:49 So that’s pretty exciting. Nice. Well, respect to you for going after it that way because a lot of people, if they were just trying to sell books, they don’t touch religion and politics, cuz it’s polarizing. But, um, good for you, and I think that over time I think that book will be important, you know, to show. I hope so.

1:42:05 For the people that are watching us, can you give us some of your secrets of success over the years, things that you’ve learned that you could maybe pass on to us? You know, something maybe that had a fundamental change in your game? Was there any kind of a daily routine or a mindset that maybe you adopted 20, 30 years ago, that you were like, well, when I did this, you know, good things happened to me, or good energy came into my life? Maybe it’s publishing, or I don’t know what it is, but is there, is there something that you can think and much, much more.

1:42:54 Now, back to the rest of the show. Joel, ask everyone the same question at the end. I’m going to ask you if you can make a phone call to the 20-year-old Joel and give that man a bit of advice. What would you tell him? What would you tell him?

1:43:16 I would tell him that whatever you do in life, whatever vocation you choose, make sure that when you look back on what you’ve left behind, it’s all been devoted to healing. We do a lot for the almighty dollar, for expediency, for quick things, but when you look back, is that, is that the balance sheet going to show? When we, when it has hurt on this side, healing on this side, is healing going to be, is, is healing going to greatly eclipse the hurt? I mean, there’s always got to be, you know, no pain without gain.

1:44:01 There’s going to be hurt. Things, I mean, you know, if a raccoon gets in the chickens, we kill the raccoon. Okay, I mean, so, so we’re, uh, there, there can’t be progress without some waves. Okay, but, but, but it, in is a trajectory of your life, is it devoted toward economic, ecological, emotional healing? Is, is that what people are going to remember you for, that, that you healed?

1:44:30 To me, that’s just a wonderful epitaph. You know, he healed. That’s good. Second part of that question, best advice you ever received, could be from your dad, could be from another author, a farmer, but is there something that sticks in your mind where you’re like, yeah, sure, oh, whenever I think of that, I think of Dad always saying, when he sent, as a little kid, he sends you to get to the shop to get a wrench, a plier, right, because you’re the gopher, right?

1:44:56 Run now, you can rest when you get back. That’s a great piece of advice. Run now, you can rest when you get back. You know, when, when you got to get going, you got to get going, and you can’t sit around, wait for somebody else to hold your hand, wait for somebody else to do, wait for an agency or a bureaucracy or an entitlement. No, no.

1:45:15 Run now, run now, you can rest later. And lastly, to that 20-year-old that’s watching us anywhere around the world, could be China, South America, Russia, or, um, you know, back at home in America, what advice do you give to them? They’ve listened to what you said, you know, they want to change things. They want to change their own diet. They want to change how they buy their food, how they look at their food, even how the government regulates the food.

1:45:38 What’s the one thing they can do to start really enacting some change, you know, today? Yeah, today. Um, I, I think the, the most important thing that you can do is, is take, is, is write a mission statement for yourself, because if it’s not written, if you don’t have an agenda, you’ll be filling somebody else’s agenda, right? So if it’s not written down, it ain’t going to happen. So, so get an agenda for yourself.

1:46:05 Find your true north, what really floats your boat. Now, it might change in 10 years, that’s okay, because we grow, we learn, you know, we’ve made goals and objectives that two years later we look at the ones we made two years ago and said, that was the stupidest objective we could have made. That we, we, I’m glad we didn’t do that, you know. But at least have a, you know, have a, have a, a place where you’re going, and and then how do you eat an elephant?

1:46:30 One bite at a time. So break it down into something that you can do tomorrow. I tell people, you know, um, when I talk about the food system, what, what can you do? I say, get in your kitchen. What that means is, for one person, it may be, um, that for the first time in your life you actually, uh, cook a meal from scratch.

1:46:50 You make something from scratch. You get out of recipe book, and you acquire stuff, and you fix it from scratch. Um, but that first step is the most important one, because we get paralyzed by looking too far ahead, um, and movement creates movement. I’m doing a lot of cliches here, but they’re so powerful, because, uh, I think that in our society we’ve become a very technical society, and technicians are all about making a full blueprint before you start building anything, okay.

1:47:35 And the truth is, I’m sure in your life, in mind, you know, if somebody had said 30 years ago, here’s what you’re going to be doing today, wouldn’t even cross my mind. Okay. I thought I was on a different path, and, um, once we have, have this, what do we think really floats our boat? Let’s get that Vision out there, what we really want to do, and then we simply put one action step. We do one thing today, one thing that’s all one thing, because that will be the movement that creates the inertia for what we do tomorrow.

1:48:12 Yeah, and and, and too often people want this whole plan way out, and they’re afraid to take the first step until you’ve assured them there’s no cliff out there. Right? I can’t do that for you. Yeah. All I can do is encourage you to actually have a passionate vision, and then take one step, and then the second step will show the third step.

1:48:37 Yeah, and it’s a meandering place, but it’s just one step. Don’t get ahead of yourself, yeah, let it play out. Enjoy the moment, enjoy the day, enjoy the step that you’ve taken. Maybe it’s for the first time, you turn off all your electronics and you go visit a farmer. You know, I mean, these first steps can be anything, but do something that’s not your normal routine that indicates coming to the altar, you know, coming to a new place, and if you do that today, it’ll be easier tomorrow.

1:49:18 Easier tomorrow, and then that’s the whole you know, the 67 steps thing, right? Once you do it for this long, you start doing new things, then you start getting addicted to new things. You start getting excited about new things, and you actually transfer all this all this energy of fear that’s paralyzing into an energy of faith about tomorrow, and ultimately faith moves us to much better places than fear. Powerful words, Joel Salatin. Um, thank you so much for coming on.

1:49:52 You are recognized universally as I would say the original gangster of the sustainable farming, organic farming. It’s just, you know, universally recognized as a man way ahead of his time, and, uh, I’m so glad you still devote a third of your time to travel and talk about these messages, and you know, they ring true today. It seems even more so than in the past, and it’s really important that people listen to these lessons, and like you said, it could mean just cooking a meal.

1:50:18 You’re not even asking them to go into the kitchen and look at all the things that shouldn’t be in your fridge. No, just connect with the food, connect with positive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, powerful lessons. So thanks so much for the time. As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey.

1:50:32 Uh, wish you well on yours, Joel, and thanks for all the time today. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. Like CL, thank you.