Joel Salatin | Sustainable Agricultural, Factory Farming Fallacies, & The Rural Tsunami

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01:38 In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the Fireside Chats. His aim was to reassure the common man that our society would recover from its troubled times. Start from 1930 and I deal with a different kind of fire! For a new era of worldly frustration we offer a fresh conversation. I'm Greg Carlwood These are The Hireside Chats Rock me like a hurricane, Hireside Chatters from sunny San Diego. I'm Greg Carlwood and for all the frustration and anger we might have with the authoritarian corporate industrial nexus... We can do very little to combat it directly It seems like power-hungry politicians and monopoly minded monstrosities are a staple of our reality And repetitiously reminding ourselves just how bad they are doesn't seem to contribute much to their demise or our success

02:33 If you're waiting to see billion-dollar factory farm food producers who dominate the grocery store and fast food franchises with a drive through line around the building go away entirely, sadly I think you'll be waiting a long time. But why not live your life as if it's already happened? And scrolling Twitter for the latest news about our supply chain and food production problems doesn't do anything to make your family less vulnerable to them! But we can do a lot more than just watch and wait and worry. Well, if you're stuck on these things today's guest Joel Salatin is exactly the guy to help you out He's the founder and proprietor of the now famous Polyface Farms in Swope Virginia where he produces high quality beyond organic meats which are raised using environmentally responsible ecologically beneficial sustainable agriculture

03:21 He's also the author of great books like Salad Bar Beef, Pastured Poultry Profits, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal War Stories from the Local Food Front. You Can Farm! The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start and Succeed in a Farm Enterprise, The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer... Folks, this ain't normal. A farmer's advice for happier hens healthier people and a better world and the latest one on the list polyface micro success with livestock on a homestead scale I am very much looking forward to this the high priest of the pasture and everyone's favorite Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer The Beaves Master himself Joel welcome to The Higher Side Thank you Greg it's delight to be with you

04:06 Thank you, man. This really is an honor I've been a fan of yours for quite some time I've heard dozens of your interviews and I read everything I want to do is illegal several years ago Right up my alley but really frustrating stories to read And hey! You lived them so you know But when it comes to food security if I'm being honest... ...I just wasn't ready to take it that seriously before COVID Like a lot of people I think about it but I've been stuck in this mindset of well.. ..."I'll start a garden when things get really bad". But if things are really bad, then a small garden isn't gonna be enough anyway. So I'll just cross my fingers and hope that the grocery store stays stocked because i have no space for animals or a backup plan. And that's all true but rather than just stress about hard times there's still a lot we can do to build relationships with the high quality independent food producers around us even if we aren't ready to become one ourselves, and in turn get a better product and bolster some resilience for ourselves regardless of what's going on in the world at large

05:06 And that said, let's kick this off with your description of what Polyface Farms does different. Because you really are considered the gold standard and for many years you've been a major catalyst and leader in what has become a growing movement to take back our food security and quality The bio on your blog says the farm services more than 5,000 families 50 restaurants 10 retail outlets and a farmers market with salad bar beef piggerator pork pastured poultry and forestry products so it is a good sized operation but what more would you say about the products and processes that make the polyface farm way stand out for the few people who might still be unfamiliar

05:50 Well, I think the key here is that we're trying to model our production after nature's templates and so you know it's not real complex. It's actually fairly simple and if you look at nature There is no animal-less ecology. All ecologies have animals, and so animals create a tremendous function in the ecology. There are several reasons they are pruners. Humans can't go along and mow all the grass or prune the trees whatever, so you have animals as pruners. You have animals moving fertility around rocks and sticks and minerals, organic matter tends to gravitationally move from high ground to low ground. And so animals eat in the fertile valleys and then go up on the ridges to watch for predators and poop and pee on the ridges. That moves that gravitationally located fertility back up onto high ground to create democratized fertility opportunities.

06:48 Animals serve a tremendous function. Now, the one thing about animals though that you look in nature is that they move! They're not sedentary. They don't stay in...they're not in confinement animal feeding operations or not in feedlots and not in little pens. They actually move and so we move the animals around on pasture every day or every couple of days and so this creates a mosaic, a vegetative mosaic rather than a single type of plant at a single level of maturity. Instead, what you have is a quilt pattern and that maintains the pollinators and gives places for field mice to run too. You have this proliferation not only just raw production but you have proliferation of wildlife as well so the commercial production works hand in hand symbiotically with natural biology. Then you have

07:42 in nature. You don't see bags of chemical 10-10-10 fertilizer being spread anywhere, it actually maintains fertility from insitu decomposition of carbon that was created by photosynthesis from solar energy and so we don't buy chemical fertilizers what we do have though is an industrial chipper that we use for working in the woods with crooked and diseased and dead trees, chipping those. And that then provides a carbon base for large scale composting which becomes our fertilizer factory. And so you know that carbon in situ becomes a pretty important ingredient. Then I just say finally we try to sell everything we can as locally as we can

08:31 That world has changed a little bit in the last 10 years with, you know FedEx and UPS and logistics of door-to-door distribution. But what we're after here is a pretty direct channel as direct as possible directly from the farm to the plate and to cut out as many middlemen as possible so we become processor distributor marketer And we wear more those middleman hats So that we can get a higher margin per pound of chicken, per dozen eggs. And we're not just in the commodity business like colonial serfs to the big centralized processing and distribution outfits that take most of the income instead. We own more up the chain to the final consumer and get more of those retail dollars capture more of those retail dollars

09:27 One of the big issues in agriculture right now is, of course, succession. The average farmer's 60 years old so we do run a very formal stewardship apprenticeship program where we launch and germinate and teach aspiring young farmers how to be successful. So that's kind of a short little dive into some of the underpinnings of why we do what we do Yeah, that is a great summary and to that last point I did hear a statistic recently that something like 50% of farmland in America is going to change ownership over the next decade or so. And usually that means it's gonna funnel right into the hands of the big corporate monopolies we want to avoid So training people to know what to do with that land very important

10:12 And if you couldn't tell already, Joel around here we love to throw a little shade at the system and if it hasn't been made obvious to people already We have a lot of problems with the way. We handle food in this country high quality meat in particular What would you say are some of the finer points of the problems with corporate factory farm food producers that don't exist with the polyface farm way Yeah, I think probably the easiest way to just dive into that one is to let's say that we had some diabolical committee. The kind that's taken out by James Bond in 007 series you know these horrible

10:50 diabolical people that want to destroy everything or own everything or take control of everything. Right, hypothetically, of course! Let's say we imagine a diabolical committee that said let's try to make a farm as pathogenic as possible. Let's see if we can have as much sickness and disease and pathogens as possible." Well, first thing we do is we'd only have one species. We don't want multi-species. We want one single thing. We want cows or dairy or chickens or apples or something. I just want one species. We don't wanna confuse the pathogens with alternative hosts. We want them concentrated on only one host

11:28 And then we're going to do that all the time. There's not going to be rest periods or vacation periods, and we're gonna make sure there's always a host for those pathogens so they can continue to proliferate at will And then when it comes to animals, let's make sure they don't have any sunshine. Sunshine is a wonderful sanitizer so let's not have sunshine and let's not have fresh air so they can breathe in fecal particulate all the time and that'll make nice lesions and abrasions in their mucus membranes or respiratory tracts of the fecal particulate can go right into their bloodstream I could go on and on, but you get what i'm after here. And the point is that we could not come up with a more diabolical pathogen-friendly system than what we have right now in the industrial confinement animal farming sector. So what we do on our farm instead

12:21 is we actually have the animals outside moving and if they're inside, they're only in for a little bit during inclement weather like right now where you know we're in snow and we're getting some more snow tonight. So the cows are out but the chickens are in hoop houses that have a lot of sunlight, a lot of fresh air natural comfort We have five hoop houses, so rather than centralizing them all in one big one we scale up by duplication not by centralization. That's a fundamental change in how you scale-up So rather than scaling up in a single spot we scale up with duplication with modules and that reduces the stress and all sorts of things

13:12 But they're on deep bedding. They're on like compost, you know like 18 inches deep with carbon, we call it a carbonaceous diaper and this actually sanitizes the droppings of the animals and you can go in there eat a sandwich it's that odor free and clean And that bedding pack grows its own nematodes and microbes that attack the pathogens Most bugs are actually good only about 5% of them are bad And so what we want is not sterilization. What we want is a habitat that allows the good bugs to proliferate and take out the bad bugs, that's kind of what we're after. So the differences in the way we raise the animals and the way the industry raises the animals are profound I would say at its most philosophical level We dare to ask does it matter if we respect the pigginess of the pig or the chickenness of the chicken?

14:10 Our culture, our greater culture, our industrial agriculture complex does not ask that question. They only ask how can we grow them fatter faster bigger cheaper and they take a very mechanistic view as if life is fundamentally mechanical rather than fundamentally biological and there's a big difference between biology and mechanics There are certain physics laws of different things that are interchangeable but There's a huge difference between living things and non-living things. If a bearing goes out in the front wheel of your car, you can sit there and apologize to it, you can rest it—you can do all sorts of things but when you get start to go that bearing is still going to go thump, thump, thump right? It's not going to heal but fortunately living things that are wounded that are damaged even emotionally thank God for that can heal with the right forgiveness, the right salve, the right ointment, the right rest

15:05 And so, viewing life from a fundamentally mechanistic standpoint as if all these animals are just inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly hubris can imagine to manipulate them creates an incredibly disrespectful Kind of approach to life and we believe that a society that doesn't ask how to make happy pigs Will not ask how to make happy citizens and happy people if we want to respect the individuality and the phenotypical expression of Tom and Mary and Jenny, we have to start with the least of these which is the pigs, the chickens, and tomato plants. So it's all about providing a habitat that allows each being to reach its physiological and phenotypical expression—its distinctiveness if you will—its niche in life.

16:06 So well said i feel like you've had this conversation before perhaps just so simple it's like sick animals make sick people sunlight fresh air movement proper diet all missing from factory farms conveniently and there's another aspect of this. In your book i believe it salad bar beef it might be everything i want to do is illegal but there's a part where you say another major problem with the beef industry is what i loosely call the pharmaceutical farm concept this is a catch all for the needling that goes on in the industry from vaccinations, which are immunodepressant to sub therapeutic antibiotic feeding to routine systematic grubicides and wormers like ivermectin. Funny that is popping up in such a book that I think was written in like the 90s but you even say

16:59 Today's battles over DDT will pale in comparison as we enter the era of genetic engineering and more insidious food processing manipulations. What is going on with our food now at that industry scale that concerns you most in this kind of realm? What's being added to it? Well, I'd have to think about that just for a minute I wasn't sure where you were headed with the question. But if we say right now at the industry level, what's the greatest concern? I would say it'd be kind of two things. One is disease, the virulence of disease whether it's avian influenza or swine flu or swine fever whatever it is. We've seen these massive diseases sweep through with hoof and mouth in Great Britain. We've seen avian influenza high path avian influenza here

17:50 And so there are these basic diseases, including a couple of years ago when the eggs had salmonella on those big Wisconsin factory farms. I think it's kind of a two-edged sword here you see a proliferation of disease I don't know how many of your listeners are over 50 years old, but you know listen if you're over 50. I'm just going to say 50 as a break point sure if you're over 50 years old think back did you ever hear the words? You know when you were child did you ever hear the words Campylobacter E coli Salmonella you never heard those things and so we now have

18:35 in modern times, in the last 30 years or so. We have an entire lexicon now of pathogenicity and disease toxicity that did not exist when we were kids. And what this is... There aren't a bunch of evil fairies up there hanging around in the atmosphere saying, oh let's attack the United States today! You know? There's nothing like that. What this is is an abuse against nature, against animals in this case that is so aggressive that nature starts to fight back with things like Campylobacter and

19:17 These diseases are human-induced, human made. They are management made, management induced and so this entire new lexicon that we've all now learned to say is very very recent and so the question is you know what's going to be the next one? What's the next permutation We know that antibiotic feeding makes superbugs, MRSA, C. diff. They're basically human-made from subtherapeutic feeding of antibiotics in these filthy fecal factory farms to try to keep the animals alive in terribly pathogen friendly conditions

19:54 We've never been able to do this at such scale as we have today because we can distribute feedstuffs and haul out manure more efficiently than we ever been able to do it. And so my first, when you say what's the biggest risk or the biggest problem in industry? I think what is going to be this next permutation of cheating nature where nature fights back, nature bats less with these new diseases that we've learned to save. Then the second thing I think that's heading quickly is simply what I'll call nutrient deficiency and that's across the board so what happens is when you shortcut nature and for example feed antibiotics instead of actually having healthy habitats

20:41 When you compensate with cheating, what happens is you begin to reduce the nutrition. You actually reduce the nutritional punch of food. For example several years ago we participated with 12 other farms in the country on a pastured egg study We sent our eggs to a lab for nutrient analysis. They measured 12 nutrients, I think it was maybe it was 10 anyway. I'll just pick one folic acid folic acid is real important for pregnant women especially so the USDA official nutrient label on eggs if you go down and get an egg carton at the store the official nutrient

21:23 level on folic acid for eggs is like 48 micrograms per egg. Our eggs, we had them tested the average was 1038 micrograms per egg. Wow! So that's 48 mcg versus 1038 mcg I could go on down the list but you get the idea Riboflavin, for example in beef. Riboflavin is 300% higher in grass finished beef than in grain finished beef and what's the importance of riboflavin? Riboflavin is the calming vitamin it's what keeps your nerves gentle and so you wonder why are we suddenly having kids shooting up schools and road rage and bricks thrown through building out the vengeance and rage in the culture

22:11 Partly it's because we're not getting riboflavin through beef, because it's all corn fed soybean fed as opposed to being out here on the pasture getting nutrients. And if I may just segue quickly into one other little side note kind of a little sidebar comment on that There's a huge amount of study now, as you know, developing via the microbiome. A lot of studies... The microbiome is for sure the test tube study thing of the future right now and one of the things that everyone who studies the microbiome agrees on is that it's all about diversity

22:52 even studies, for example autism. They know that one consistent thing among autistic kids is that they're missing a certain strain of microbes in their gut in the microbiome and so now we have fecal transplants where we're actually cleaning out the colon and then putting a healthy person's poop, basically back in somebody else's call. I mean think about a cow in a feedlot you know they're only getting what you know maybe four to five ingredients basically in their feedstuffs. If you don't count some mineral supplements things like that but the basic core is corn soybeans maybe some alfalfa basically about three or four or five things whereas out here on our pastures

23:36 The cows are eating up to 50, 60 different varieties of plants. Legumes grasses forbs medics herbs all sorts of things and All those have a different little nutrient nuanced profile. And so the simple American diet, which has become more and more and more simplified you know we only eat like 20 things You can actually vicariously get a huge array of diversity of things in your microbiome by eating grass finished beef where they've been on a multi speciated prairie type perennial Prairie polyculture

24:20 And so all of those different nuances are expressed in the meat itself. And so I think when you look at the industry, you know, the things that are kind of staring us in the face is this whole pathogen toxicity issue and then you have the nutrient deficiency issue. Those two things, I think, are becoming more acute as we chemicalize and cheapen down the food production system. Yeah, very well said. Many compounding problems and it's like they're farming systematically weak sick animals and in a lot of ways trying to inject them or medicate them back to health then it's just so backwards

25:07 I love the way that you generally encourage people, hey if you're worried about these things if you don't feel fulfilled at your cubicle job take this path we need more people on it and you don't have to be poor and struggle there are real economic models here that will work. Can you can have a successful business while feeling like you're making a real contribution of the community And I've heard you say that it's been a real urban to rural tsunami since COVID, which I understand. I've had the thoughts myself. Let me ask you about this latest book, Polyface Micro for people that are moving into a homesteader lifestyle what would be some of the advice they would get from this book that would apply to smaller scale operation?

25:49 Oh, well yeah. And Greg thanks for the plug. Sure! Yeah you referenced the rural tsunami it's real I just like to say that when a culture when a civilization gets jittery it heads for the hills. I mean you know that historically has always been where people go and they get the jitters You know we say man I'm heading for the hills We say it as a little trite saying but there is lot of truth to it People intuitively understand when things are going down, you don't want to be stuck in a 10th floor condo. You want to be out where you can trap a rabbit and plant a tomato and

26:29 maybe tap a spring for some water. And so in this newest book, Polyface Micro it grew out of my move from kind of a glorified homesteader to commercial scale farming and what I've heard the last five years over and over and over is wow what you're doing is amazing but I've only got five acres! I've only got three acres or ten acres how do you scale it down? So the whole tenor of the book is about scaling down, talking about how do you raise two steers? You know not 500 head of cows but two steers. How do you raise chickens for yourself

27:05 In fact, I even have a whole chapter on how do you have chickens and rabbits in an apartment in Manhattan where you don't even have to have any land. And so the book is pretty comprehensive. It's a big long book but I systematically go through the different major livestock options and give advice on how to scale things down also just how to design a homestead and pitfalls how to develop water. You can't move forward with anything really agriculture unless you have water and of course most time people think about wells, well okay we've got to have water if we punch a well and my chapter on water is trying to do everything you possibly can to not have a well I mean a well can certainly be a last resort but let's think about ponds and cisterns and all sorts of other

27:56 options before we start punching more holes in an aquifer. I talk a lot about control, one of the biggest frustrations of newbie homesteaders is with animals especially, not with plants. The beauty of plants is you know you plant them and they don't run around! You know? You can...you don't have to put too many fences around your tomatoes to keep them from running over to the neighbors but animals can move and so one of the biggest frustrations with newbie homesteaders is just controlling animals and fencing movement how do you load pigs I mean everybody that's had pigs has loading stories because pigs are

28:37 you know, real short to the ground low center of gravity and they're smart as can be. And they don't trust because they are so smart building trust with a pig takes a lot longer than building trust with a sheep or a cow because they're not quite as intelligent. The more intelligent the longer it takes to build trust There's probably some human axiom there too. You know, the smarter a person or longer the more dubious they are that whether you have their best intentions in mind uh you know kind of joke about The Simpleton so as you move along the spectrum of the different domestic livestock each has different dietary needs shelter needs different ways they respond to you socially the way you move them different stress levels and flock size herd size

29:24 I'm sure there are things that I haven't addressed in the book, but the subtitle is success with livestock on a homestead scale and that's exactly what I tried to do. that I have not seen in the other homestead publications. A big one, for example is eggs and people are always my eggs are dirty. How can't I have cleaner eggs? You know, I've been on hundreds of homesteads throughout the world and the most common problem with eggs is putting the nest box too low. So, the nest box is just almost on the ground so that chickens can look in it you want those nest boxes up high so they have to have a destination and desire to go up there and not just sit there looking at loitering going peck around break eggs and have problems closing them up at night you know you wanna perch board in front so they can land on it and then go in and then let you close that up when you exclude the chickens at night so they get roosted in the boxes and poop their

30:25 These are techniques to keep your eggs nice and clean. I mean, who wants to mess with dirty eggs? And so I've tried to include all the different little nuances that people ask and that I know are missing from the mainstream homestead books. And I'm excited to have it out has been out now for about three months, and we're getting a lot of really good positive feedback from it. Nice. Yes. Exactly the direction that your writing should go i mean cuz so many people are daydreaming about going off grid or downsizing to an rv building a bunker but, you don't have to do that stuff if you start a small farm it has all the same benefits of escaping the smart cities but also gives you a viable business makes you a local hero in a crisis and maybe even pass it down so.

31:15 I'm sure there are people listening right now that are thinking screw it, I'm in. I've got enough money for a couple of acres and a rural area. I'm getting out of this city. I'm getting out of this cubicle Well, the first step is clearly land selection. What are the qualities that a person would be looking for for the right spot? Because let's say they're willing to move anywhere in the country to optimize their operation, to start on the right foot when it comes to weather and also regulation what are some of the best states or areas that you would look to start something like this up? Yeah I think your lead into that was really super.

31:56 There's a lot of frustration and even anger out there among many folks the way things are going in our country. And my encouragement to folks is take that frustration, take that anger and don't nurse it and get more frustrated and get ulcers about it instead take that emotional energy and channel it to building a parallel universe Let's not be reactive. Let's be proactive and let's respond in a positive way where we're actually building, okay I'm fine you can call it an agrarian bunker if you want to but let's create havens, harbor havens so that

32:36 when the society becomes more hopeless and helpless, we will be able to provide hope and help. That's a much better attitude I think going forward than just responding with anger and being upset. So if you are going to join this exodus of creating a remnant if you will where do we go? And so there are hard places and easy places. Let's think about climate You know a desert is a hard place to grow things think hard about a desert environment you know something where the rainfall is less than whatever less than 10 inches. You might be a little bit problematic probably in those areas we need actually fewer people living in those areas unfortunately many of those area's

33:26 because they are dry, are attractive. You know Arizona and Nevada but as you know we're overrunning water supplies there water is a constant problem there so don't add to that So think about water Also think about climatic patterns Along the coast is problematic I'm talking right along the coast where your in Hurricane Alley That can be as problematic. I mean, I'm talking about like New Orleans Okay that can be as problematic as a desert you know get up on little bit of high ground where you're not going to be flooded and I like to have a little bit of woods a little bit of forest I'm a big believer in these little bandsaw mills, you know where you can create your own lumber and

34:16 You don't have to build very much, whether it's a house or an outbuilding or whatever. To realize the value of lumber so I think that in general our trees are heavily underutilized and woodland is cheap too way cheaper than open land So if you get wooded land you can get a little more acreage for the same amount of money And then the other thing I would say with all that said The kind of overlay though over all of it is Where do you have people resources? Many times, the people resource is more important than all these other things that I've said because you have relationships and you can tap into whether it's family friends or whatever. You can tap into people who who have skills that you don't have. I say that what we need in our time is to build communities

35:16 that are proximate to people who know how to grow things, build things and fix things. And if you have close relationships and geographic proximity to an eclectic blend of people who know how to grow things, build things and fix things, you can't pull the plug on society but you can come closer than most people. In The Benedictine Option Rod Dreher talks about building these resilient communities, not as abbeys, not as cloistered communes but rather as places of refuge. As society begins to break down and become dysfunctional so again we're looking at it positively not negatively and so don't discount your people resource relationships that you have

36:09 And if you've lived in a place for awhile and you have connections there, the banker, the small engine repair shop, the tire place. Yeah all these different places these are all part of your team it's part of your network part of your community connection because you're not going to go out and build rubber tires You're not gonna go out and manufacture spark plugs for your chainsaw things like that so a lot of times if you want to get out of the city the best thing is just get on the outskirts. And a lot of times, a very small acreage close to an urban area is far more viable than a large acreage far away simply because you're closer to markets, you're closer to infrastructure and you're just closer to people that can help you do things that you don't know how to do

37:01 A lot of the stuff in farming is not necessarily soil knowledge or animal knowledge. It's engineering knowledge, welding knowledge fabrication knowledge those kinds of things and nobody is good at everything Nobody can be a master of everything and so if you get out on the backside of a hill that's an hour away from a Coke machine, not that we're going to go drink Cokes but you get what I'm saying? An hour away from a Coke machine. Every trip to town becomes extremely expensive every piece of infrastructure becomes difficult UPS will add a big surcharge every package you get in those kinds of things Add up and so i talk about hard places And easy places and there's hard land and easy land and hard places and easy places

37:54 And so, kind of want to make your checklist put all that in your hopper as you go forward. Right now I can assure you the places that are seeing people move into them to emigrate are Tennessee Texas and Florida a lot of that is due to regulations and COVID protocols but those states they're just not as heavily regulated. Virginia just had a big election And we flipped from blue to red all the way down every state office, including the General Assembly. So maybe we'll join some of those big attractive states as well but I want you to think less about running away from something as running to something. Running away from it is more fear-based. Running towards something is more faith based and generally

38:51 We get more positive energy and constructive capacity if we're by faith running towards something than if we're in fear, running away from something. Yeah well said and all really good advice I've heard you say bloom where your rooted which is another great way to express that idea of using your network and being thankful you have one, not leaving that area. But of course big cities digital communication these things all destroy the relationships that used to be the staple of American life but it kind is what is I want also got a shoehorn in here a little segment about raw dairy because this is a chapter and everything I wanna do as illegal and you say that raw milk is the most demonized product modern society and I agree we drink

39:42 raw milk in this house and it freaks out all of our guests. They won't add it to their coffee, they'll just I'll just take a black fine or whatever but you also say milk related illnesses is just barely a blip on the radar screen of the human story didn't really exist before the industrial revolution so help people understand the real deal when it comes to raw milk and how we got so conditioned to be afraid of it essentially Yeah, so the raw milk story is really quite an interesting history lesson. You know people obviously drank for all built for millennia right? But in the late 1800s as the Industrial Revolution took hold and people started moving to the cities and factories began

40:30 When you study innovation, innovation is never a nice clean edge. I call it the ragged edge. There's kind of point called the point of the spear which is very first piece of the innovation and then all things necessary to metabolize that innovation come along raggedly in time, sometimes actually quite a bit after that initial point of innovation. A really good one for today that I think everybody can identify with is the struggle over sales tax right now. When sales tax started coming into localities back 40-50 years ago this was gonna be the new way localities were gonna finance their infrastructure and public works and things like that

41:20 And it was all predicated on a point of sale, you know? A cash register. Well as e-commerce started suddenly there was no physically located cash register at that transaction and localities started to suffer sales tax deprivation Because people were buying things, but they weren't buying things at a local cash register. So this created literally a multi-year search for how do we handle this? And look I'm not interested in any more taxes than anybody else but i do very much appreciate that if you're a locality and you were counting on this whatever million dollars a year from this revenue source and suddenly the entire community

42:06 circumvents that and we're down a million, obviously we can't deliver the services. We can't do the things that we thought we would do or will debate what surfaces are important right now. Anybody who knows me knows it I don't think the government needs to deliver very many services but without regard to that it was a very real problem and so now Amazon and these big merchandisers they're having to send sales tax checks to the different states to help compensate for what e-commerce is doing. So that's a perfect example of the metabolism of the spirit. Well, the same thing happened with milk with dairy back in the late 1800s as people began moving to the city and the cities started developing faster than electricity indoor plumbing refrigeration and those kind of things And so when you were still moving milk by mule train or by horse carriage and you were now living

43:02 close by in a city, what happened was the two things that needed refrigeration or quick usage in a city were milk and beer. And so cities as they urbanized had city dairies and city breweries embedded located in the city to create approximate beer and milk production Well, the breweries have a byproduct called distiller's grains. And so they said well what are we going to do with all these distillers grains? Oh well let's just feed it to the cows over here and so they started feeding all the cows distiller's grains These were called SWILL dairies S-W-I-L-L swill dairies and So that brewery waste swill going into the cows created infections in the cows that created

44:04 problems in the milk, undulant favor, tuberculosis things like that through the milk. And so people started getting sick with this milk and so what do we do about that? Well it wasn't a problem as long as the cows were eating a regular diet of you know forage and grass and things like that it was only a problem in these other dairies but the government in its great wisdom decided it was way too hard to regulate or license different kinds of milk, you know. Are your cows eating this? Well then you're okay but if your cow's eating this then you got to get a license and so through the pasteurization process they were able to stop a lot of these milk-borne diseases from these filthy filthy I mean the pictures you see in these 1870s to 1900 dairies

44:57 They're just unbelievable. And remember, this was in a time when the whole idea of microbes and the invisible world of microscopic critters was just kind of coming into the fore. I mean people were still debating whether they need to watch surgical instruments between amputations or delivering babies so the easiest thing to do was just to demand pasteurization of all milk and criminalize raw milk That was the easiest procedure. Well, interesting, the Mayo Clinic that we're still operating today it began operating at the turn of early 1900s because those doctors hooked up with some pastured you know some old style pasture dairies and started realizing the curative effects of truly nutritional raw milk

45:56 And that was the foundation of the Mayo Clinic when it started, the raw milk versus this urban swill milk. So this period of time and by the time you hit the 1930's we had lab testing stainless steel refrigeration started coming in big-time like 1915, 1920 there was refrigeration got away from the ice boxes and so here is the point, the urbanization outran the capacity of hygiene. Urbanization outran hygiene to the point that we actually had a ton of problems in our cities, dysentery, cholera in our cities because they were so filthy there was manure everywhere it was at the bakery, the manure was at the dairy, when you went to get a wedding dress, the garment shop

46:57 Because there was manure everywhere in 1915, there were editorials in large metropolitan newspapers predicting the implosion—the collapse of the city because of all the manure and the lack of hygiene. By the 1930s we started getting piping, indoor plumbing, stainless steel refrigeration, sewer systems So, that's why Sally Fallon at Weston A. Price Foundation says actually what stopped cholera, dysentery smallpox and measles had nothing to do with vaccines it was all the plumbers are what stopped it all because the plumbers got us to be able to have indoor plumbing to be able to wash dishes and take a bath more than once a week and that sort of thing

47:43 So we still have today, unfortunately the way these regulations work. Once they're entrenched and the entire dairy licensing milk compliance community is still stuck back in this short period of time from about 1870 to 1925, stuck in that very very short period of time in which the urbanization outran the hygiene Yes that is a really great breakdown of story that a lot of people should be made more aware of and you also make it great point in the book. That,

48:21 Now the corporate boys a big milk are incentivized to keep pasteurization requirements in place so that no small upstart can afford the equipment required for such a thing you can't just. Casually build a company out of milk doing it the old fashioned way, And I think that's an interesting point. A lot of times these regulations, they say they're there for our safety but they conveniently create a barrier of entry that is hard for the average person to meet and Convenience for them, I guess. I would say but in terms of nutrition, obviously there's a comparison as we kill a lot of great stuff in the milk and pasteurization to today and it is one of those things I wish people would wake up to because it's very simple and it seems to make a big difference in health from what I understand

49:15 Well, yeah. The whole pasteurization process especially the high temperature pasteurization kills many of the enzymes and in fact it kills many of the protective bacteria and microbes that protect you from diseases that could come in milk, spoilers. In other words raw milk if it goes bad it just spoils and you know looks bad and smells and you throw out or you make cottage cheese or something out of it but when you pasteurize milk you destroy those protective microbes that are attacking the pathogens in the milk

49:57 As a result, you open it up to actually more damage than if it hadn't been pasteurized in the first place. And this happens all over the place—I mean hogs on slatted floors, cows on concrete… This is what happened with antimicrobial soap right? How long did antimicrobial soap last I mean like two years came and went why because people realized What we don't want, we don't want sterility. Sterility opens your skin up, opens everything up to the bad bugs. So what we want is a habitat with a healthy battleground for good bugs to defeat the bad bugs and this is probably leading the world in this kind of arena right now as Finland

50:45 Finland has done massive studies on, for example, childhood immunity and immune systems. And what they found is that the level of sickness of children exposed to domestic livestock farm dirt compost manure is exponentially less than sickness rates of urban children that are kept clean all the time. And so in Finland, they're actually bagging farm dirt and they did another study where they took these bags, they placed them in urban houses and like had to kids come up and pat them every couple times a day just to get

51:32 farm dirt, fecal dust because the hygiene hypothesis is basically saying that your immune system is a muscle and it needs to be exercised just like your physical muscles. And when your immune system never gets exercised, it gets lethargic and when it gets lethargic then you know some little assault, a little skin, a little scratch, a little bit of pollen suddenly you're down and out you're immuno-compromised, and we've certainly heard a lot about that lately. And so in Finland they're actually encouraging urban families to get these bags of farm dirt in their house for their kids to touch in order to get diversified assaults— gentle routine assaults on the immune system. I thought what we need to do in this country is

52:26 I need to start a business where people could subscribe to every quarter. We'd give them like, instead of a welcome mat put a welcome out in their house would be kind of flat mat with some of our compost in it you know and they walk in there and be part of their therapy, their immune building program and every quarter we come in and replace it with new ingredients so this sterile thing fixation that our culture has on sterility. There are places you want sterile, you want sterile in a lab, you want sterile in surgery certainly but most places in life most of our living surfaces our touching surfaces our living spaces we don't want sterility. Sterility actually opens us up to more virulent pathogens thats certainly the way it is

53:19 on farms when we try to fumigate, chlorinate sterilize our living quarters for our animals. Then suddenly they get all these strange souped up diseases because we've tried to sterilize well then the survivors of the sterilization program are more virulent because they've mutated remember these microbes you know They're getting born, getting married having babies and retiring. You know they're doing what we do in 80 years you know they're doing it in hours and so for us to think that we can run ahead of natural adaptation is just silly which is why we need to be talking about basic immune function and the microbial battlefield rather than sterilization

54:10 Yes yes cheers to that and I know you are a fan of doctors at bush i am as well have learned a lot about these sorts of things from him. And when you think about soil i like the idea of the welcome mat because, A lot of listeners if they really reflect on when was the last time you touched dirt. It might be weeks it might be months, what was last time you walked on the earth barefoot without rubber soles of your shoes probably the same thing weeks or months maybe years in some cases it's crazy how isolated we become from our environment that were supposed to be symbiotic with

54:50 And this really has been amazing people who feel like there's something missing in their life or they have anxiety about being so reliant on a shaky system you can do something about it and if you're not gonna take the plunge personally at least former relationship with people who are and get your food from them cuz it is a win-win. And before we go, remind people where they can learn more about the farm your links and any upcoming events you might be doing. The things that you do out there seem pretty enticing I might have to take a trip! I hope you do Gregg We'd love to have you so yes our website is polyfacefarms P-O-L-Y F-A-C-E if you just google in poly it'll probably pop up you know polyface farms dot com

55:40 We have everything from, you know you can get food. You can get swag. You can see our value statements a link to my I do a blog routinely. You can get that. You can see where I'm speaking and I'm actually going to be in California soon nice And so you can kind of see where I'm speaking if you want to come in here and be a part of that. And, I can't help but give one more plug to another thing that we just started which is kind of our biggest personal thing that developed as a result of COVID. I was traveling all over the world doing a lot of seminars and speaking and all that shut down. At the end of 2020 were sitting here looking at it saying wow

56:23 I wonder how many billions of dollars are floating from people not doing conferences anymore. And so this past year in 2021, we just kind of let it be out there hey you know if you want to get together if your outfit isn't too scared and you want to get come to the farm, we'll give you the world's best food. We've got a great space it's kind of outdoor there's no HVAC system so it's not recycled air and we'll greet you with smiles and come and have a good time for your... we call these The Gatherings. We did six last year and they were extremely well received different kinds of groups and we've already got six booked for this year coming up but we're real excited about these different kinds of gatherings so folks can

57:08 get together and felt we are social beings. You know, we want relationship. We want to be encouraged and affirmed by people in person. And so we are eight hours from half of the U.S. population not California unfortunately but a lot of people within eight hours. And we're more than happy to have you join us on one of these gatherings there's a lot of interesting ones coming along and just watch the website for those gatherings as they start getting posted Amazing. Yeah, it seems like it would be very cathartic in these times and I might have to make it out while I can still fly because that seems like eventually I won't be able to but man been a real pleasure. I know you do a ton of interviews and most of the questions and topics are the same but it is important stuff and I appreciate you sharing it with us. I don't know that anything's going to change from the top down so we got to find individual solutions from the bottom up and That's your expertise. So thanks for taking the time and keep doing what you

58:06 Thank you, Greg. It's been an honor to be with you! Thank You! Well take me home country roads yes people Joel Salatin the Farmer Supreme I'm sure so many of you are aware of who Joel is and his contributions to the food movement He really has done so much and inspired so many people to see farming in a new light, to use sustainable methods, to go direct-to-consumer and realize you can have a nice business just doing things the right way. Securing your own high quality food at the same time and fulfilling a much needed need in the world

58:48 I didn't think much about it until i was preparing for this, but why do most Americans have this mental image of a poor struggling farmer barely making ends meet slaving away morning to night? Could this be a little bit of conditioning? I'm not sure. It's very possible, I would say We were shown all these new forms of convenience. We were sold a glamorous city lifestyle, the big machine popped us on that teeted dependence and it tasted so sweet it took a few generations to realize we'd been had I really do see it that way watch some old TV dinner ads

59:28 Nobody ever seemed to ask, is this stuff the same quality as a home-cooked meal? Who cares it's easier! And the scalding heat hides the taste of cardboard. It's magic The rotten fruits of the city life sales pitch are more obvious than ever and now that we don't have the skills and we lost the multi generational aspect and the land We need leaders like Joel to get us back in the game And this might not be the same level of excitement as shows about secret moon bases, alien overlords or portals to hidden realms. But if you have to think of it as a monolithic global totalitarian cabal methodically weakening its subjects and coaxing us into its domestication trap is that better?

1:00:15 And like I tried to say in the intro, i don't think we ever get to truly eliminate the trapper. We can only avoid the trap for ourselves and a lot of people will get caught up in that trap many people are now! I basically am you know? I don't have any sustainability in my life except I get my meat from Sunrise Ranch and previous guest Doug Lindemood who is a disciple of The Polyface Farmway and that's a huge step that's a step everyone listening could take And if a hundred thousand people, roughly hear this show which isn't abnormal with all the various places it plays think about the impact that would make on independent sustainable farm infrastructure. It might be a drop in the bucket when it comes to corporate meat producers and their bottom line but it would do so much to strengthen and support the folks out there doing it right way they need customers

1:01:13 So if you are one of those folks who thinks farming shows are boring, I'm happy to get back to mud floods in the inner earth but i need you to be healthy. Because the people who are open-minded and on our page intellectually overall are a minority we know that but we need a strong minority and we start with being our best selves That said, I feel really honored to have gotten some of Joel's time. I loved the way he framed the qualities of a pathogenic-friendly farm and how you really couldn't do a better job making sick and weak animals No light overcrowding no movement and feeding them unnatural feed like grain and soy plus the hormone injections and the vaccinations And these things they do try to prop their animals back up with medicine

1:02:01 It's gross, it's sick. It's a blight on the world and it's an abomination of the way things should be Again maybe we can't end at all but we can refuse to participate in the cascading benefits of that should be obvious now if they weren't already In fact, I just saw a Reddit post that feels appropriate to cite here. But they said while we argue about what COVID is really about small businesses are shutting down across the country medium businesses are being bought for cheap by the huge businesses COVID is an excuse for the elite to buy back our country and they're trying to own everything I agree with that, food is a big part of it. Mom and Pop restaurants being dominated by corporate joints is a big part of it. And again corporate places use corporate food suppliers But you know be bold, be brave get out there and stop making it easy for them Joel still has his clients and his clients have their meat supply who cares what's going on with international shipping

1:03:02 And when it comes to my small business, you guys know how we do things around here. If you liked the first hour of this interview, we get into so much more in the second hour for PLUS members including... The externalized costs of cheap meat that are not found in the price tag The coordination between corporate food and corporate medicine RFID chips and digital tracking in agriculture Joel's encounters with the food police, what he would do to the American food infrastructure if he was king for a day. Some recent success stories in the growing food independence movement some questions from the THC audience and improving soil fertility without animals

1:03:43 Sign up at thehiresidechats.com to keep me going, give yourself more quality content and take advantage of the seven day free trial that's standard now when you sign up cancel any time also I wanted to get two more audience questions than we did sorry about that but i did have a lot of the same themes in mind and I just tried to pepper a lot of those things in throughout so hopefully most people feel like they got answers for the questions they submitted One of those questions was about Maine's new Right to Food constitutional amendment, and Joel of course said he supports it but didn't really detail what it is. So let me read this from the National Law Review Earlier this week Maine voters approved an amendment to the state's constitution under this amendment Maine residents may create their own food supply whether statewide or in silos

1:04:36 However, it does not impact food assistance programs and references to food processing and preparation that would have conflicted with state and federal laws regarding the licensing and inspection of food were removed from the measure. Maine has been at the forefront of the Food Sovereignty Movement passing its own food sovereign laws under the Maine Food Sovereignty Act of 2007 which was amended in 2017 The vision behind Maine's food laws is to create a food system where producers have control over how their food is grown, sold and distributed. The latest constitutional amendment allows Maine residents to have more control over their food supply by allowing residents to save and exchange seeds as well as produce consume and sell their own food who knew we needed a law to share seed amongst each other

1:05:26 But it goes on to say, while the Right to Food Amendment provides more individual control over food supply and sourcing there are concerns over the potential food safety and environmental risks that the new amendment poses. A number of organizations and associations oppose the bill on this ground alleging that such control of the food supply would provide a means of circumventing existing food safety standards and regulations Ultimately, court challenges may significantly impact the scope of this amendment. And that last part is how it always goes right? I wonder who those organizations and associations were funded by We can't let people source their own food because what about food safety as if number one People don't have their own incentives to eat healthy food

1:06:15 You know, we don't need to be supervised on that. And number two... We just talked about how piss poor our food supply is already so if those are your standards well we don't need them either Besides that in higher side news the THC forum has always been sort of an afterthought I spent good money on a robust well-oiled forum but it's never been very well integrated It's got a separate login and it's just not how it should be So now I'm spending the money to have the forum ported over to a system that works better within WordPress. It won't have its own domain, it won't be so disjointed and members will have more fully featured profile page. Now the main thing that made me do this is my tech guys get SO many support tickets from members who are not actually about technical support

1:07:09 And one of those things that clogs up the support tickets is people who just want to cancel their accounts. And that really kills me because I pay our support people well and folks should be cancelling their own accounts! It's not hard, it's right on my account page You signed up without assistance, you gotta cancel without assistance. But people get lazy and when my guys spend an hour or two manually cancelling accounts for people I lose the subscription AND pay out more than most peoples entire sub time to the support folks And it's just not sustainable So doing this I think will hopefully get more people engaged in their profile in general, which will contain more than just a place to cancel but it will be clear because you'll see it regularly. That said though if you have problems with your account at all these guys are there to help but if you don't want to login and cancel and instead just fire off an email of support You're being lazy! And you're costing me more money

1:08:10 which also goes for guest requests or people trying to remember who a guest was. The list goes on, but we can't give good support when the system is clogged up with people just trying to get in touch with me for this or that please be mindful of what the support system is supposed to be for But this is also taking a step further down the road of building a tighter community We have the higher side meetups going on and then it helps people find each other and meet space But we'll also have a space on people's profiles for their own businesses so we can support each other when that makes sense. And, we will have a way to message each other in private So you can make friends that way! In summary... We should get better engagement out of the forum in general. We should save me money on support tickets and provide better opportunities for networking all with this one change It is a beautiful thing

1:09:04 Expect that in the coming weeks. And as for the meetups, let's see what we got on the calendar! On January 28th our first digital event someone is setting up a digital hangout via PlayStation Party Chat For all of you gamers out there it was something to do and it was set up by someone trying to ease the pain of another local lockdown in Canada I'm sorry about that man but I hope this is a fun time and some members join you The 28th is also the Nashville event too. So if you live around the Nashville area, check that out and we'll save February announcements for next time but you can also check the calendar or even add your own events it's totally community run and I just deliver the messages

1:09:50 But that is it, another show in the bag. Big thanks again to Joel for his time and his work I hope you appreciated it as well More fun stuff coming soon and I will see ya then! I love all of you guys, I've done my part Your move factory farm frauds corporate nutrition extractors And bad food industry actors You're fuckin' dead When I get down I eat a bunch Of corporate junk Fuck that makes you fat And that is another show complete. Remember, as much as you enjoyed this which is just the free first hour I hope you'll become a plus member to hear the full two-hour interviews

1:13:02 You also can engage with other Plus Members in the comments and the forums. And you'll find your answer to one of the most common questions I get, which is where can i find those cover songs that you use at the end of the show? Well they are free downloads for Plus Members too! Without Plus Members I can't hire the occasional musician to bring these odd cover song ideas to fruition. Plus members are how I'm able to do what I do without ads and without the big machine being on my back We can fit so much more into a two-hour interview, and I do my best to make it worth your time and money. The conversation only gets deeper, weirder, and more controversial in that private hour! How could it not the way things are going?

1:13:43 But the best way to sign up is at TheHigherSideChats.com, where new first-time subscribers always get a free 7 day trial because I'm just that confident! There's no PayPal on the website but if you need to use PayPal then sign up through Patreon and you get all of the same episodes Our website is a credit or debit system, but you can also scope out the other options like a few various cryptos. Cash or check mailed to the P.O box and I'll even barter with most people if you have your own business and produce something nice that my wife or kid or taste buds might like But the architects of consensus reality have made it clear that these themes and topics aren't really welcome on the main stage. And so this is how we secure a little counterculture corner for ourselves, and I hope you'll join PLUS because that's the only way it works!

1:14:32 Besides, you can cancel any time right on your profile page. The most common concern I hear is people just being unsure if THC Plus will work with their podcast app and the answer is probably yes! But if not we have several high-level app recommendations for whatever phone you use and the website is made for mobile too We're trained to tip a waitress for bringing us a sandwich, but that tip doesn't give you access to a second sandwich. Really I'm not asking for any more than that and think I offer better service. Come get your second serving of tasty conspiracy goodness in exchange for that small token of your appreciation. Beyond that let it also be known we have grown and survived as long as we have by word-of-mouth

1:15:14 I don't care so much about social media likes or follows, but tell the right people about THC. And not just listeners but the high-level figures who are better suited to sit down with me than most other hosts! And if you can help me with any of these things I can work to bring you better shows which is just a win-win for both us. Informative, entertaining and action packed! It also never hurts to thank a guest you liked if you have the time either we want them to know people are listening so they're willing to come back down the road too Thank YOU for spending some time with me and cheers to a better tomorrow