Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 58 - Joel Salatin: Producing Meat and Saving the Planet

Episode Date: July 31, 2020

Joel Salatin is a farmer, lecturer, and author whose books include Folks, This Ain't Normal; You Can Farm; Salad Bar Beef. Salatin raises livestock on his Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley.---Check out Joel's Farm HERE!Check out Joel's Latest Book HERE!---Thanks For Listening!---RESOURCES/COACHING: I am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE! Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS:Follow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!Support the Show.

Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. Today, I sit down with my good friend, Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm. Polyface Farm is a regenerative farm based out of Virginia that does an incredible job of allowing nature and livestock to live symbiotically, the way it was intended to be, producing both a better environment for us and the animals to live in, but also higher quality protein. Joel is somebody who's been at this for a long, long time, and we get into every layer of how this impacts the environment, the livestock, our health, and ways that you can go about implementing some of these processes in your life and supporting farmers just like Joel. So sit back and enjoy today's episode with Joel Salatin.

Welcome in everybody. Today we have Joel Salatin on the podcast. Joe is a farmer, lecturer, and author. He co-wrote a book with Dr. Sina McCullough, who was on the podcast last month, and he operates Polyface Farm. And the mission of Polyface Farm, this is pulled from the website, is to develop environmentally, economically, and emotionally enhancing agricultural prototypes and facilitate their duplication throughout the world. And from looking through Joel's work, you'll really see that the animals live in a healthy environment. The byproducts of that is quality meat that takes care of the planet in a way that seems to scale

a lot better than, in my opinion, conventional livestock practices. And this was a real big paradigm shift for me. And I'm hoping that we can dive into that today, Joel. So welcome on, man. It's an absolute pleasure to have you. Oh, the honor's all mine. Thank you, Dan. Of course. So tell me a little bit, you just got back from a trip, but what are the operations of the farm look like for you coming back from a trip? What are you coming back to? What do you need to do? What do you have to do? What's first on the list? Yeah, well, you know, when I I mean, when I go away, of course, I try to I try to get enough things kind of done here ahead that people kind of minimize some of the decisions. But really, I mean, I've got such a great team. Of course, my son, Daniel, great name, Daniel, runs the farm and I mean, does all day to day operations. So

I'm now the most expendable, the most expendable guy on the team. And so, you know, we say, we say, I just, I just run around, you know, so, so yeah, there's not much to pick up. I mean, the main thing to pick up is just you know desk work and and and uh then go out and see where everything is because we're doing we're doing uh our seminar another one of our seminar two-day seminars tomorrow so i had to get out and where'd everything move well the week i was gone you know and uh if i'm gonna take if i'm gonna take a bunch of uh seminar folks up to find the the cows the pigs, I got to know where they are. So, yeah, it's good.

I think that's a really great segue actually into kind of my first question. And people who are listening are probably like, wait a minute, the animals move? Because when we talk about conventional livestock, we are thinking of some of perhaps the really grotesque YouTube videos we've seen where animals are in a cage, or at least if you live in California, where I do, you'll see animals kind of living in very definitive areas and they don't really rotate around. And it sounds like you do things quite a bit differently on your farm. Could you kind of divulge a little bit about, one, why that is and what that actually looks like?

Sure. So, you know, one of our whatever themes here is to appreciate that nature's template, if you will, nature's pattern is the best approach. And so we're always looking at, well, how does nature do these things? I mean, you look at nature, you see animals move, they migrate. I mean, they might move with seasons. I mean, predators move them, fly cycles move them, monsoons move them. I mean, there's all sorts of movement, but all of this is to ensure that they don't stay in one place. I mean, the movement is critical for all of the hygienic, sanitation, and ecological benefits that they provide. And so, if animals don't move, then you actually negate all of these, you know, beautiful synergies and complementary elements that the animals offer.

Yeah. And so, I mean, just think about this. you wouldn't get any of the benefits of that cat you know when they purr on your lap when when they catch a mouse right i mean there's all sorts of benefits of a cat and so the same thing is with animals and so uh so moving them around so how do we move them around i mean the thing is we you know we can't we can't do the the the bison migrations anymore uh because you know, we can't do the bison migrations anymore because, you know, the next door farmer doesn't want our animals on his place. So how do you duplicate this movement today? And so we have wonderful technology. We've got electric fence, for example, that allows us to very cheaply and efficiently define one day's pruning area, for example, for a herd of cows. And so we can actually use this high-tech, lightweight, cheap fencing to actually steer

a herd, and I mean a big herd, hundreds and hundreds of head at a time. We can steer them around a landscape with the same precision as a zero- turn mower on a golf course. That's never been possible in human history. And so, you know, we don't have lions and we don't have wolves. So we use electric fence to steer the animals around at the proper time. And then, well, you know, nature doesn't have grombocytes and parasiticides. How do we keep things sanitary behind the cows as they move? And so we use egg mobiles, chickens, laying chickens, like the egret on the rhino's nose. That symbiotic, that bird-herbivore relationship is one of the most symbiotic foundational relationships in nature. And so we have portable hen houses that we move behind the cow herd and the chicken scratch through the cow patties, eat out the fly larva, spread the cow patties way out

so they're not just plumped up in a little spot. And they eat the grasshoppers and crickets and things that would be, you know, that are insect competitive out on the landscape. And so, so you can kind of start seeing this, this synergy. And, and so, so the technology of pneumatic tires and electric fencing and computer microchip energizers, and frankly, water pipe, you know, if you're going to move them around, well, we got to be able to get water everywhere. We can't always send them to some, you know, river somewhere. And so we have eight miles. So permaculture, you've probably heard of permaculture. So up on high ground, we've actually excavated some ponds that gravity feed surface runoff.

So we're not damming up, you know, creeks and rivers and things like that, but actually damming up surface runoff, which by definition, when you have surface runoff, it means that the commons is full. So we don't want to deplete the commons. If everybody sticks a straw in an aquifer or a river and sucks on it, then you don't have a river and you don't have an aquifer. So what we're after is how can we duplicate increasing the commons? So, you know, before the Europeans came, North America had beavers. You know, 8% of our land mass was water, most of it beaver ponds. We had 200 million beavers here.

And so we don't have the beavers today. But what we do have is excavation equipment to where we can go and duplicate this water, this riparian savings account, if you will, to give us water. So we have on our farm, we have eight miles of water pipe, you know, plastic, you know, polyethylene plastic water pipe that then delivers gravity, gravity flow water, no pumps, no electricity, no energy, but gravity and delivers it on all these different fields of the farm. So everywhere you go, you've got a valve and you can hook into water for the cows or the turkeys or the sheep or the chickens or the rabbits or, you know, whatever you have. And so you've And so you've got all these water points. So rather than... That's a fairly important thing. And again, I don't want to get too off

topic, but I remember taking an environmental studies class in college and talking about an aquifer in the central portion of North America that supplies quite a bit of the Midwest with water and how rapidly that aquifer is being depleted. Is depletion of these common aquifers and water sources a pretty serious problem across the country? Well, yes, it is. I'm sure you're referring to the largest sand aquifer in the U.S., which is the Ogallala, Ogallala Aquifer. It's under like, you know, four states. It's primarily sand as opposed to where we are. We're in a karst geology, which means it's limestone that looks like Swiss cheese. So imagine water in Swiss cheese as opposed to water in sand, all right? That's the difference. But, but these are all aquifers and yes, we are,

we are absolutely depleting them. And, um, and the recharge is not coming in as fast as the discharge with these big center pivot irrigations, uh, rigs and everything. And so, um, so yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a critical issue and it's not just here in the U S I mean, I was in Australia not long ago and i visited a farm where they had the original deed deed from like 1820 you know and at that time they that they priced farmland based on how far it was to an aquifer because when you're in 1820 when you're hand digging the well it makes a difference whether you go you know three meters or five meters and um so this place it it was 12 meters, I'm sorry,

four meters, about 12 feet down to the aquifer. And it took them about 40 years to deplete that one. And then another 40 years to deplete the next one. Today, they're in the third aquifer, they're down about 500 feet, and they're depleting the third aquifer, they're down about, they're down about 500 feet and they're depleting the third aquifer. So, you know, so, so what do you do? I mean, I mean, that's, that's not a sustainable approach. No. And I, I'm also not mistaken in traditional farming practices are not very kind to these natural water reservoirs we have, but they also deplete the topsoil quite rapidly, which I think is an issue if we look at, hey, you know, in America, we have 350 million

people who depend on our agricultural enterprise, but our topsoil is being depleted each and every year. What does that look like? And where are we going to end up if this continues? Well, you know, there's an old Chinese saying, Dan, that says, if you keep going the way you're going, you're going to end up where you're headed. And, you know, the fact that right now a bushel of corn costs us two bushels of soil, you know, we're depleting the soil about 10 times faster than it can be replenished. So, you know, when you look at the historical record, I mean, the Sahara Desert used to be a forest in the time of Carthage and Homer and the Iliad and the Odyssey. India, you know, archaeologists have found huge lime, you know,

huge lime plaster pits that were grain storage areas that is now desert. Virtually every desert on the planet has been man-made. And now we're seeing the desert march up through the north of Africa, and Spain is starting to feel, southern Spain is starting to feel that pressure from all the climatic conditions rolling over from Morocco and the north of Africa up into Spain. And the last time it was in Spain, I was meeting with some folks there, and they said if it actually jumps the Mediterranean and that desert hits Spain, Europe is done for. I'm not a big gloom and doomist, but the beautiful thing is that excellent farming, good land management can actually reverse this,

which brings me to the idea of not feeding herbivores grain. If you did nothing more, if you did nothing more than just not feeding herbivores grain, it would completely change the, you know, the vegetation. So cloud formation, if I could just touch on this. Cloud formation is the radiator of the planet. In other words, it takes a lot of calories to condense water, to take water vapor from vapor into a condensed state. And that really cools the atmosphere. In fact, that represents 95% of the cooling, In fact, that represents 95% of the cooling or the temperature of the planet is 95% water condensation and only 5% greenhouse gases.

So the greenhouse gases are a very, very minimal component of this whole climatic temperature thing. But in order to condense, water vapor needs a particle to condense on. Now, when I say particle, you know, we immediately think of something like a dust particle or something. No, I'm talking about much, much smaller than that. And a common one is ice crystals. Of course, we know, you know, cloud seeding uses little particles. But there's the one that's the favorite and normal is bacteria. And so bacteria actually exudes from plant stomata, from leaf stomata. The bacteria actually exudes out in an invisible cloud of particles that gives the water something to

condense on. And that is why we're seeing increasing dryness in dry areas and increasing wetness in wet areas, because the planet is going to balance out its temperature somehow. And so as vegetation decreases in deserts it becomes a you know a self-fulfilling and and self-perpetuating cycle as vegetation as vegetation decreases and exudes less bacteria then then the the the condensation occurs uh more rapidly and aggressively where there is vegetation and there is bacteria so you you get floods and deserts, you know. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Yeah, that's exactly right.

That's exactly what's happening. And so touching back and kind of circling back to giving herbivores the chance to eat grass. In my space, something that's become very popular in the last probably five years is commercial grass-fed beef. And to my understanding, an animal that evolved to eat grass has a better opportunity to metabolize grass, pack it away into its fat stores. It'll end up with a different fat profile than if it eats grain, which is part of the reason why grass-fed beef is a little bit more popular. And it might even end up with a higher quality finished product in terms of just nutrition. Can you talk a little bit about why it is that

grass-fed cattle tends to be healthier for human consumption than grain-fed cattle? Because I think it's something that people conventionally understand but they don't really get the mechanism right right so so um first of all most cattle even grain even grain finished cattle uh start their lives on pastures and nobody nobody births nobody births calves in a feedlot all all right? Feedlot is the finishing stage. But that finishing stage can undo much of the positive elements of the initial early stage. And so what happens, a couple of things happen. One is when an animal, I mean, if we just stick with nutrition for a minute and don't talk about ecology advantages. Yeah. And, and,

and I have to address on ecology, realize that nature tends toward perennials, not annuals. Yeah. Perennials builds oil, annuals deplete, what are annuals? What's like corn and soybeans and, and, and Austrian peas and whatever. Oh, that's the basis of fake meat, isn't it? Yeah, that's right. Okay. So the perennial, the prairie, if you will, the prairie, you know, has a good pasture will have as many as 50 different kinds of plants, you know, in a couple of acres.

as 50 different kinds of plants, you know, in a couple of acres. And so the herbivore that ingests that is ingesting a tremendous amount of variety and diversity into its diet. Chicory, clover, you know, plantain, everything from herbs to grasses to clovers to forbs, every one of those concentrates a different chemical and biological profile. Yeah. So that actually, as you know, Dan, the American diet, the standard American diet is extremely simple. I mean, it's like we eat about 20 different foods. That's about it. Native diets, if you study native diets at all, goodness, even if you just go back to Martha Washington's cookbook, you know, George's wife, or Dolly Madison, she did a wonderful

cookbook there at Montpelier with James Madison, you know, the father of the U.S. Constitution. And if you read their cookbooks today, literally 60 to 70, maybe 80 percent of the ingredients we've never heard of. I mean, boysenberries, currants, just all sorts of strange things. And so when you go move, you know, fast forward to today, our diet has become much more simplified. And so as you simplify, as you simplify the food system, it becomes even more important that you complex the sourcing of that provenance. And so the complexity, the nutritional complexity of grass-finished beef

versus beef that's just finished on basically corn and soybeans and maybe a little bit of alfalfa, it's a much more complex mineral vitamin structure. Yeah. And that makes all the sense in the world when you really break it down, because the same thing is true for humans. And I'm aware in Japan, Japan is really big on nutritional variety. And it's one of the things that their government preaches. They still eat a lot of rice and fish, but they really prioritize getting variety in the diet. And that's how, if you're not taking a bunch of supplements like we love to do here in America, that's how you get some of those harder to get vitamins, some of your B vitamins, some of the, you know, we get D vitamin

from the sun, but we get the different vitamins, minerals, polyphenols from eating a broad diet. And that's what keeps us robust and healthy. So I don't see why it would be any different for another animal, but shifting them towards just eating these two relatively nutrient devoid crops at the end of their life cycle can probably leach quite a bit of nutrition out of the finished product. Well, it certainly does. In fact, it only takes two weeks of grain feeding to leach out all the conjugated linoleic acid, basically from a beef. And if you know anything about conjugated linoleic acid, known as CLA, CLA is like the nerve ending.

is like the nerve ending. It maintains the elasticity of the whip on the end of the nerve ending to let it go across the synapses. So, you know, CLA is a big deal. Another one is riboflavin, you know, one of the B vitamins. And riboflavin is known as the stress relief vitamin. vitamins and riboflavin is known as the stress relief vitamin um riboflavin keeps you you know emotionally stable right and um and and there's and uh most of the you know empirical um evidence is that um that the difference in riboflavin between-finished versus grain-finished beef is about 300%, not 30%, but 300%. And so it gives me pause to realize all of the hate, the anger, the rogue rage, you know, name the things, you know, teen suicide. I can't help but wonder if much of the emotional mental instability of our country is because we're depriving ourselves of riboflavin, you know, because we're not getting it in the meat that we're eating at all.

No, I agree. I think one of the biggest misconceptions we have here in America is that if, you know, we eat what we are told to eat, we should be nourished. But a lot of the foods that we're told to eat, whether it's grains that are, they say they're whole grains, but they're not really whole grains. They're just grains that have been pulverized. Or it's beef, but it's not beef of the highest quality. So we're, we might be getting those macronutrients, the proteins, the carbs, the fats, but we're so deficient in these micronutrients. One of the ones that I talk about all the time, and this isn't something that people who spend any time outside have to concern themselves with, but the deficiency

we have culturally with vitamin D, in my mind, is absolutely part of the reason that we have had such a prevalence with coronavirus. And it's a big reason, in my opinion, why we have, to your point, issues with depression and anxiety, because we have a massive portion of our society who is vitamin D deficient at the highest level, simply because they don't get outside. And then you look at all the other vitamins that we can only get from our diet and we just don't and we remain deficient. So it all really adds up to poorer health that could easily be remedied by changing our agricultural practices. Well, yeah. And if we could just go a little bit, drill down a little bit farther in this whole thing and realize that, you know, they're saying, you know, you are what you eat.

Well, one step further is you are what you eat eats. No doubt. And so when we raise animals in factory farms in confinement and deny them exercise, fresh air, in many cases, sunshine. You know, now, even in a feedlot, beef normally hangs around outside. But in a factory chicken house, a factory hog house, they never even see the sunlight, daylight. And so when you...

Are you there? okay okay uh what once in a while here in rural america it kicks you off uh kicks you off the uh zoom zoom is far from ideal it can be a little tricky but just keep pounding through the connection looks stable knock on wood up into this okay yeah yeah well you just looked real still for a minute and so i'm always uh i'm always a little bit uh gun shy you know when you're totally good so keep shooting those foul shots you know all right so um so the point is is it any wonder when we don't move animals around, we can find them in tightness in a highly toxic pathogenic, we basically lock them in their own bathroom. They can't get away

from their own excrement. They can't get fresh air, sunshine. So what happens is, is it any wonder that a sedentary toxic habitat that we're raising our animals in will translate into a sedentary toxic habitat for us. You know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to think, well, you know, this is related. It's connected. And so, if I want full vitality, If I want full vitality, I want to eat an animal that's enjoyed a habitat that allowed it to enjoy full vitality. Absolutely. At Polyface here, we humorously call this respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig. In other words, only when we ingest a fully self-expressed pig, all right, can we get the your psychology toward the pig, transfer the psychology to people. use its animals as inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated, however cleverly hubris can imagine to manipulate it, will probably start looking at its citizens the same way,

as just manipulative peasants and wedges. Yeah, no doubt. And one of the things that I think is interesting, when you brought up toxicity and just sanitation, the way we keep our animals, like if the animal is healthier and we know it's eating a good diet, we know we get better nutrition because we are getting the extension of the better nourished animal. But many of these animals are kept in situations that are so kind of grotesque, we have to pump them full of drugs. Does that stuff get passed on to us when we eat that meat? And then at what level are, I would, I would ask at what level is the average American consuming some of these perhaps hormones and antibiotics that we pump into these animals to keep them alive in these horrific conditions? Yeah. Well, you're well aware of how many drugs humans take. I mean,

yeah, here in America, I believe we take more drugs than any other country. Yeah. Okay. Well, the little dirty secret in animal agriculture is that we use way, way more drugs in our animals than we do in our human population so just so just take your take all the drugs used by humans double it that's terrifying and plus a little more and you're all you're already come in so what does that do that's that's why we now have these super bugs and c diff are the are the most common but but um are losing. I mean, goodness, 20 big pharmaceutical companies, they just wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, was it last week, talking about this new development fund that because we're losing drugs so fast to superbugs that they've created –

20 pharmaceutical companies have tossed a billion dollars – with a B, not an M – a billion dollars into a fund to fast-track next-generation development so we can try to – we can super drug faster than super bugs. And the initial question is, do you really think that we can outrun a life form that can make 20 generations in a couple of hours? Really? No, you're kidding me. We're not going to outrun that. So somehow we have to, at scale and without losing production,

we have to figure out how to produce this food without these horrendous externalized consequences in the food system. And that's exactly what we're trying to do. I think it's one of the more frustrating things, at least, that I've seen, and somebody who's health conscious, who really sees the value in nutrition and what proper nutrition can do for the body, looking at this current situation with COVID-19. And I know that this has been politicized and I don't want it to get politicized, but if you simply look at the fact that people who are in

relatively good fitness, who don't have comorbidities, have a much better chance of not contracting the illness and certainly a much lower chance of dying from it, it makes all the sense in the world to, hey, you can work on all the vaccines you want. You can work on all the drugs you want. I'm not saying don't do that. But there's very little dialogue at the bureaucratic level about what we can do with our health because there's no money to be made in that. And, you know, it's frustrating because it seems like, well, here we go again. We've seen it with the viruses.

it with the viruses. Now we're going to see it with the bacteria where we try to pump all the money into the drugs when effectively we have a large portion of the answer to this problem already in place. We just don't want to talk about it. Absolutely. So, boy, you're talking my language. So I'm desperate for somebody at one of those press briefings to push our dear Dr. Anthony Fauci aside and say, OK, Americans, guess what? We're going to take one week and work on our immune systems. Let's build our immune systems and really go after it for one week. We're going to invest each of us in our immune system. So what are we going to do? Well, number one, you know, we're going to invest each of us in our immune system. So what are we going to do? Well, number one, you know, we're going to quit drinking soft drinks. You know, Coke and

Pepsi, you're out of business. We're not going to eat at McDonald's or Burger King or, you know, we're going to shut down the fast food and we're going to actually cook from scratch. Whole foods fixed from scratch. Yep. That means we're going to get in our kitchen and we're going to actually cook from scratch. Whole foods fixed from scratch. Yep, that means we're going to get in our kitchen and we're going to love it. We're going to do experiments. We're going to learn about – we're going to learn about crock pots and ice cream makers and time bake and, you know, this is not grandma's kitchen. We've never techno-gadgetized our kitchens so profusely

and been lost as to how to use the technology. All right, what else are we going to do? Well, let's start by drinking somewhere between two and three liters of water a day. And guess what? We're going to get outside for at least an hour a day and take a brisk walk enough to kind of build up a little bit of sweat. We want to get a little bit of perspiration for about 20 minutes a day. And we're going to sleep eight and a half hours at night, just sleep eight and a half hours a night. And finally, the last part of the recipe is, why don't we, let's forgive everybody we hate. is, why don't we, let's forgive everybody we hate. Let's just forgive them all. Let's just forgive them all. That simple recipe would just be a profound change of American culture

and immunological function. I mean, it is. It's depressing to sit around and watch the country struggle with this and become increasingly divided over how politicized this has become when at the core of it, regardless of where the virus is spreading and how you think about the bureaucracy's handling of it, if we were healthier, if we were more robust, if we took back control of, like you said, just learning to enjoy cooking food again, learning to enjoy the taste of water over the taste of the soft drink. This is the recipe for potentially better managing this virus, but it's also the recipe for managing metabolic syndrome, to managing depression, to managing all of the stuff that makes us dive into the nastiness of politics,

right? I'm an angry human being. I don't like my life. So I want to get into even more frustration and anger. And to your point about forgiving the people that you have hatred towards, it's a lot easier to forgive people and be happy when you're healthy. And I think that right now, we're as emotionally unhealthy as we've ever been. And we're certainly as physically unhealthy as we've ever been. And one of the things that I ruminate on all the time is, is our bureaucratic adjustment to this virus going to leave us in a place where we're now even more dependent on having everything delivered to our home. We don't want to go outside. And I'm concerned that when you combine the poor

lifestyle factors that we already exhibited as a culture, pile on top of that the fact that everybody's having DoorDash deliver McDonald's for dinner three nights a week because that's the new habit. I don't know how we're going to get out of this if we don't start to educate people from the highest level about what it takes to be a healthy human being because I don't think it's that hard. Oh, I agree with you. I couldn't agree with you more. You know, when we say develop whatever domestic culinary arts, you know, a great grandma had to go to the spring, you know, and bring a bucket of water. We've got tap water. We've got, you know, we've got ovens. You know, we don't have wood cook stoves.

I mean, we now have all the gadgetry. I have all the gadgetry. Fixing whole foods from scratch for ourselves has never been easier and more convenient. I mean, my wife and I, we give crockpots for wedding gifts. We think a crockpot is like a magic thing. I mean, it's 40 watts. Throw whatever you want to in there, you leave for the day, and it just sits there, you know, kind of all day long at 40 watts, less than a light bulb.

And you come home, and if you come home at four, it's fine. If you come home at five, it's fine. Goodness, if you get stuck, and you don't come home till eight, it doesn't burn, it doesn't dry out. It just sits there. I mean, this is like Aladdin's lamp in the kitchen, man. I mean, this is like the ultimate genie. It's so simple, so easy. I mean, if you throw meat in there, you don't even have to thaw it out. It just thaws out gently as it's in the crock pot when it starts, and it's all done. And so, of course, now we have the Instapot and all that stuff. But, yeah, you're exactly right. And the relationship now that we know between the gut and the brain,

the relationship between the gut and the brain, we always thought it was, you know, everybody said, well, that's in your head, that's in your head. Actually, a lot of this stuff is in your gut. And then it becomes, it gets to your head, but it originates in your head. Actually, a lot of this stuff is in your gut. And then it becomes, it gets to your head, but it originates in your gut. So the microbiome, the microbiome is everything. And that's why this diversified diet, I mean, our chickens, our chickens are out on the pasture. So they're eating plantain and all sorts of medics and herbs and clovers and stuff like

that, along with their regular grain feed, which is GMO free, by the way. But the point is that all of this translates into a completely different structure and nutritional profile. We actually participated with Mother Earth News Magazine about, I don't know, seven or eight years ago. They were tired of people saying, oh, it doesn't matter. You know, an egg is an egg is an egg or, you know, it doesn't matter how it's raised. And so they actually found a lab and I think it was a Washington state that would do really empirical nutritional analysis on food stuff. They said, we'll pay for it. We want some pastured egg producers in the country to submit their eggs to this test.

We'll send them to the lab, and we'll see where they go. And so they checked for about, so we were one of 12 that sent our eggs in, and they came back. They checked for about eight different, whatever, nutrient elements. One of them was folic acid, which is really important for pregnant women, folic acid. And so the actual USDA label that goes on in the grocery store, I think it says that the uh the egg contains 48 micrograms of folic acid yeah our eggs from our farm contain 1038 grams per egg

i mean yeah from 48 to 1038 i mean that's that's not a difference. It's not a 20%. It's a multiplicative difference. Yeah, that shows up functionally. So when we say the food as being the difference between taking a vitamin and not taking a vitamin, just choosing the right egg, you no longer have to take a vitamin. I mean, the pastured eggs, I get mine from a little farm out in Marin County where they just graze on the hills and they eat what they eat. And my client brings them to me when she comes in for her sessions. And they're small little eggs. The orange is the deepest. It's so orange, it's almost a brown.

And there's more omega-3, more vitamin E, more folic acid. You crack it open and when my girlfriend looks at it, she goes, what's wrong with that egg? And I'm like, what's wrong with, no, there's nothing wrong with this egg. Eggs aren't supposed to be dull and yellow. They're supposed to be vibrant and orange. And to your point, like if I eat two of those eggs a day, I'm getting omega-3 folic acid, vitamin E, I'm getting so many things that otherwise I just simply wouldn't get it's a completely different end product it's unbelievable how big of a difference that simple nutritional change for the animal makes in the end product yeah but the question then the the the opposition always says oh but that's cute for you but how does the scale

how do we actually the the world this way? And so one of the things that I think our farm has brought credibly to the discussion is that using high-tech, you know, mobile electric-type control mechanisms, buried water lines, control mechanisms, buried water lines. We're actually running flocks of 1,000 birds, not 20, not 30, but 1,000 birds in flocks on pasture, moved every couple of days across the pasture. So there's no dirt. There's no bare spots. The chickens are on new ground all the time. And because they're on new ground, that stimulates the ingestion because the you know the salad the salad bar if you will is fresh and uh and and so by using um

by using very a different type of portable infrastructure and this high-tech uh control mechanisms and the water, the combination of portable water, portable control, and portable shelter. In other words, if you're going to move these animals around all the time, you can't have a stationary idea. You've got to move them. And so having the water, the shelter, and the control, all mobile and portable, allows you to scale this, you know, without losing the pasture component, the green, you know, the green, the carotene, without losing the carotene component. Yeah.

You can move this, you can move all this along. So, you know, we have turkeys, you know, we raise turkeys on pasture. Their shelter is what we call a gobbledygook for turkeys. The layers are in the egg mobiles, and we have the millennium feather net. You know, the sheep are in the Lamborghini. So, you know, all these things, but all these things move along in a very symbiotic relational choreography. We call it ballet in the pasture. And the pigs, they're out on their pastures, and they're moved every few days. We don't actually save any grain having the pigs out on pasture. What we do get is they get that daily tonic of green material.

And so sometimes the pasture is not a feed savings. It's simply a, I mean, in herbivores, we don't give our cows any grain at all because they're herbivores or the sheep. But on the omnivores, the chickens and the pigs, the turkeys, they're omnivores. And so they do get grain. But the green material and the fresh ground, the exercise, the sunshine, it changes the pituitary, the hormonal function. All of that comes through the meat profile. And so there's a huge difference. Hey, guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast. And so there's a huge difference. or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked

and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. I have a question about the scaling stuff because to me, it's somewhat frustrating that the expectation is that this has to scale nationally. And to me, that seems, I'm not saying it can't scale nationally, but is it really all or nothing?

Is this not something that even if we can't scale it to the point where it feeds every human being in this country, is it not reasonable to say, hey, let's just see how much this can scale? And even if it only ends up supplying half of the country with their meat and eggs is that not exponentially better than where we're at right now like why is it why is there such a push for this needing to be scaled to literally every human being and every human being eating exactly the way they do now. Yeah, of course. Yeah, so a couple things on that.

When grass grows, it grows in a sigmoid curve, an S curve, so it starts slow and then grows faster and then slows down towards senescence. So to help you visualize those three stages, I call them diaper phase, teenage phase, and nursing home phase, all right? And so the reason that there are herbivores all over the planet is not happenstance, it's by design, because the problem with grass, and by the way, grass or we just call them forages, legumes, grasses, forbs, herbs, all these forages, they actually metabolize solar energy into biomass more efficiently than trees. So if you really want to grow soil and grow biomass, you move toward forages, not forests. Now, I love trees.

I'm not trying to tell everybody to chop their trees down. I'm just telling you the deepest soils, the deepest, most fertile soils on the planet did not originate under forests. They're under prairies. You know, the American prairie, the Serengeti in Africa, the Pampas of Argentina, the steppes of Mongolia, these deep, fertile soils, they're not under trees. They're under perennials with herbivores on top. That's the whole deal. And so the reason the herbivore is important is because as this forage reaches this nursing home status and goes into senescence,

the herbivore prunes the plant back like an orchardist would prune an apple tree or a viticulturalist would prune a vineyard. They don't do it to kill it. They do it to stimulate new, verdant, lush growth. And so in nature, predator the predator behind them these are and monsoons and everything these large herds naturally move across the landscape to prune and then leave the area long enough for the by for the for the forage to reacute to go through its bodies of growth forever to reaccumulate it's um you know it's

biomass 95 of the domestic livestock on the planet are not raised that way they're they're what's called continuous grace they're just put in a field and left there year round and so the grass the forage never gets out of um senescence never gets out of diapers it never gets into teenage it never gets into teenage and it certainly never gets towards senescence so it just stays in this little diaper stage or if you want to use an automobile analogy it never gets out of first gear okay so so by by by moving by moving our our herbivores every day, we're able to only allow them to prune the vegetation after it's gone through the blaze and growth stage only at that one little spot. finding them in little paddocks with a portable electric fencing defining where they are today. So they might not be on a given, you know, square yard, but maybe, I don't know, three or four days in a year. But it's strategic to allow that forage to go through its place of growth. Bottom line is

in our county, the average production on pasture is 80 cow days per acre. So a cow day is what one cow will eat in a day. Like, Dan, if I took all the food you ate today, put it on a plate, that would be one person day of food, okay? Got it. So a cow day is what one cow will eat in a day. In our county, it's 80. On our farm, it's 400. 400.

So five times. Never planted a seed five times. We've we've never seen and never bought a bag of chemical fertilizer even if you said it was three times i mean just back it off i mean we rent we rent several properties and on those we're always at least double because we don't we don't have all the diversity and the time we've been doing this for 60 years. So, you know, it takes time for the fertility and the soil to come back. The point is, the point is, the point is that nationwide, think of all, think of all the land that's in pasture in this country with simple, with simple management,

a simple change in standard operating procedure of management, we can easily double our complete production. That's not pipe dreaming. That's not, you know, blowing smoke. That's absolutely what we can do. So, then if you quit feeding herbivores grain, I mean, you go to places like Illinois and Iowa where those deep, richest, you know, Indiana, the Corn Belt, that same area can produce just as much beef, for example, per acre as it does in corn or soybeans. Right now, mainline agriculture does not believe that because people aren't moving their cows around. Yeah. As soon as people start moving their cows around,

now we're actually comparing high level of management to high level of management, of management to high level of management and absolutely nature's template out competes our best you know uh uh corn ground hands down it out competes it but but you can't do that simply by turning a bunch of cows out in a field and look at them twice a year and assume that all this is all going to work out right. No, that's a very, whatever, non-efficient, it's a non-efficient way to grow things. Yeah, but you've done something special in that you've been able to get, I believe you said 400 cow days per acre versus 80, which is 5x that simply by letting the synergy take place and kind of guiding it along with your fencing. Something you said that I thought was interesting is that you don't use any chemical fertilizer.

Do you use any fertilizer at all? Well, we do a lot of composting. Okay, cool. Yeah. So we have two primary inputs. So we have two primary inputs. One is the grain that we import to feed the chickens and the pigs and things. So that obviously is importing fertility from offsite.

I'll address that in just a moment. The other is we do a tremendous amount of composting where we have a big commercial wood chipper. You'd love this thing, Dan this thing dance the ultimate man toy i mean it's a big diesel machine that'll that'll take 19 inch 19 inch diameter um um you know uh logs and turn them into chips i mean you can chuck a tree in it you know and it just goes through this thing and turns into chips. Anyway, that becomes our carbon base. So we don't put our money in chemical fertilizer. We put our money, our fertilizer money goes into a carbon cycle, a carbon economy where we weed the woodlot.

We take out diseased, crooked, and dead trees, and we upgrade the woodlot, taking out the junk stuff, which reduces fire hazard. So now the woods can't burn and we're taking that carbon and we're using it as a base for composting to keep the open land, you know, fertile. Now, as far as importing the grain, then the thing about importing the grain is that one of the things that animals have always done historically is they have moved they have moved fertility uphill and so we're we're an uphill farm we're we're you know a high terrain in our area and um and so you know in nature one of the beauties of animals is especially herbivores is that they go down into the valley.

In other words, over time, gravity moves sticks and rocks and minerals and biomass. It moves it down from the hills into the valley. And so you got this fertile valley. So the herbivores go and they eat in the fertile valley, and then they go back up to the hilltop to watch for predators. valley, and then they go back up to the hilltop to watch for predators. So the predator-prey relationship helps to ensure that the herbivores go sleep on the, you know, on the top of the hill instead of the bottom of the hill, and where they sleep, they're going to urinate, and they're going to defecate, and that puts all that, so that they're taking the valley fertility the gravitational valley fertility moving it back up on the hill where it then gradually moves down the hillside so animals

are one of our nature's only real mechanism to democratize uh and equalize biomass um uh movement across the face of the terrain by moving it from low ground to high ground. It's the only way nature has of moving, of creating egalitarian fertility and defying gravity. I think that's just really, really cool. So on our farm, we don't apologize for the fact that we are bringing grain from some of our neighbors and in the locale here that's down on low ground, and we're bringing grain from that up onto high ground. That simply is a mimic of that natural, you know, fertility cycle that we see in nature. No, and I only ask about the fertilizer in full transparency, because after I heard the episode you did with Joe on Joe's podcast, I had, I just had this like carnal push.

I was like, I need to start growing my own things. I want to get back to that. I actually grew up on a 10-acre vineyard. It was a property in Tuolumne County up in the California foothills that my dad bought very cheap and he built his home on it. And he had about a thousand grapevines, 300 roses and two gardens. And I grew up with that, and I was exposed to that, and I learned all about how to prune, how to plant, how to fertilize. And as an adult now,

I live in a more suburban area, and I missed that piece of taking something from a seed to that finished product on your table. So I put a garden in my backyard and I was really, really hesitant about using chemical fertilizer. Not because I thought it was going to mess up my yield. I just wanted to see how close to nature can I keep this. So I actually watered my plants with the water from my 150-gallon fish tank. And I used the fish waste and I've never seen my plants look this green, look this good. And I know that fish fertilizer and fish emulsion is popular in conventional farming, but it was very serendipitous to pick a cucumber from my garden to then feed that cucumber to my fish, to then take the waste from the tank and water that same cucumber plant.

And to watch this synergy, obviously, I'm the middleman here, but it just got me thinking about, man, nature has all of the equipment. I mean, this is fish, for Christ's sake. Imagine what we could do when the organism is designed for the landscape so it really got me thinking about how we've meddled to the point where we've just disrupted this beyond what nature intended and we're actually going backwards yeah you're that's that's a great story that the truth is that um that there really is no uh whatever organic um organic system that that can be done on a commercial scale without animals uh i mean even the best the best organic growers

in in the nation from from from you know large commercial down to, you know, what I call craft artisanal commercial, where, you know, some of these really, really intensive farms that are just, you know, a couple of acres, but they're, you know, they earn a lot of money on their two acres because they're really intensive. All of those places import some sort of manure-based compost, all of them. Much of it actually comes from factory farms. And so, listen, what happens in the biology of an animal that takes in plant material and converts it to urine and manure, you know, what that does in nature is, I mean, we still don't begin to understand it all. It's that profound. And the fake meat crowd, the folks that, you know, the anti-animal crowd, you know, the Impossible Burger, Beyond Meat,

all these folks, I mean, they're just using chemical fertilizers to plow up and plant, you know, annuals, which is soil destructive, it's ecology destructive, it's a monoculture, it's wildlife destructive. We haven't even talked about wildlife. One of the beauties of our system is that it creates this beautiful mosaic so that rather than having, you know, one single crop or one single looking landscape, by moving these animals every day to a fresh paddock, you've got, you know, imagine, you know, you've got this, the jungle they're going into, and then you've got, you know, what they've just pruned or, you

know, exercised, if you will. And then you have this rest period, you have this, you know, what they've just pruned or, you know, exercised, if you will. And then you have this rest period, you have this, you know, this resting clean cycle. And what you get then is this beautiful, wonderful, not only beautiful to the eye, but beautiful for the diversity of wildlife, including pollinators, you get this mosaic. We participated a couple of years ago in a two-year study from the Smithsonian that took all the working landscape study, and one of the six things they measured was pollinators, and they found every single bumblebee known to exist in Virginia, they found in our farm, in our fields.

And that's because there's something always in bloom. Not in the dead of winter, for sure, but something's always in bloom. And this whole idea where we move honeybees around from place to place, that's an amazing – of tractor-trailers and modern humankind, but it actually indicates not progress. It indicates that a landscape is so undiversified that it can't carry a pollinator population off-season. That doesn't speak of progress. It speaks of regress. No, and we've got issues with, and I'm not an ecologist by any stretch, but I've got a pretty decent understanding as to how important bees in particular are to the maintenance

of the environment. And we've disrupted their natural habitat immensely. And even down to things like our cell phones tend to, from what I've heard, really can disrupt these pollinators. And we're eventually going to get to a point where bees are going to become a seriously problematic species that we have to work to maintain, or they're going to be gone from what I understand because to your point, we've ravaged the diversity of things that they can pollinate and go about their day. I remember growing up, like I said, on this vineyard and I saw bees

all the time, every day, big bumblebees. They were in the roses. They were in the lavender. They were in the wisteria. They were in the iris. They were in the daffodils. They were in the tulips. They're all over the place all year round. And, you know, now a decade and a half later, I live in a suburban area. And if I see a bee at all, it's like, oh, look, it's a bee. And it's such a rare sighting. And these are animals that for millennia lived right alongside us and did all of our dirty work. Sure, they did. I mean, one in three bites of food requires pollination. Some food plants don't require pollination, but many of them do.

And I think where you're headed, the thread that you're on, I really appreciate it and i i i kind of stumbled on this the other day um uh as a couple guys as i was talking with a fellow having a conversation and the thought occurred to us is it possible that simplification simplification of the food system and i'm going all the way back to the soil you know in other words compost compost is way more complex than 10 10 10 chemical fertilizer yeah so so when you when you simplify the soil simplify the food system then does that simplification transfer all the way over to a simplified gut and a simplified brain that makes people incapable of complex thought. And so then you literally mentally dumb down a population in its capacity to think, to

reason. That's kind of a profound progression. No, and I don't think it's that off base. It doesn't. It certainly made sense to me, and I've shared it a couple times since just so i don't forget that that that thing um but it certainly to me it connects a lot of dots as you look at the culture and you know you how can those people think that i mean what we're talking about really um uh well i don't want to get political no it's totally okay i i do get what you're talking about and i think one of the things

that's really you know our uh yeah our our trump you know in a nation of 330 million people are trump and biden really the only best two best people you know it's it's i've could i've said that exact sentiment no less than probably a hundred times in the last month that we've become a nation that's content picking the lesser of two political evils but we're also a nation of some incredibly ingenious brilliant people who could do a great job and and but we're also a nation of some incredibly ingenious, brilliant people who could do a great job. And now we're at this point where we're so divided. We're so black or white. Everybody wants to pick a side that we're going to need a leader who's capable of inspiring 330 million people and bringing us together. And know policies aside i don't

think either of these dudes is that guy i don't think this is the person we need at this moment so you know i i've got my seat belt fastened tightly because i think the next four years no matter who it ends up being has a very high potential of being a complete shit show. Yeah, I agree with you 100%. I think it's... It's going to take people who like the way you have challenged the conventional farming model. It's going to take people to challenge the conventional political model and go, is this really where we want to be in 20, 50, 100 years?

And I don't think it's sustainable. I don't think we can do this bipartisan stuff forever. To circle back, actually, you know what, I'm going to let you go because you can't talk politics without giving somebody their chance to put two cents in. Well, I was just going to say that that's why one of the things that has developed over the last you know five or six months since the pandemic hit which has simply been another you know another whatever uh um you know whatever a bomb and that whole uh explosive confluence of things yeah um is a lot of discussion about so so how do we insulate ourselves? Whatever's going to happen in the next four years, how do we insulate ourselves from that? And so I'm actually

having a lot of discussions now with people trying to develop what I call, you know, agrarian bunkers, basically communal, you know, you can can either you can survive either by going off in a cave in idaho and becoming a mountain man hermit you know yeah or or or or you can surround yourself with an eclectic blend of people who know how to grow things build things and repair things and and do it relationally and so you invest in in relationships. And I think that right now, taking dollars that we have, and that at least still have a little bit of value, and investing them in non-cash relational complexity for the future i think is one of the best investments a person can make because i agree money and and you know um i mean you could eat bureaucrats but

it probably wouldn't be very good and no and lord knows they have zero nutrition that's for sure if you are what you eat i don't i don't want to eat them but i'll say this i think that especially now because who knows where we're going to be economically from these various stimulus checks on this massive unemployment stimulus these people loans if we are headed towards a recession if we are going to see the costs of goods go up, which is very plausible, having the ability to kind of create your own meal from seed to table and being able to potentially come together with other people and say, hey, I'm going to grow the cucumbers and the tomatoes and the peppers. Why don't you grow the rice and the wheat and then we'll maybe make a trade? That seems fair. That's, in my opinion,

far from unreasonable. And I think it's something that at some level, we're drawn to that. We just do it differently now. We like to collaborate. We're a collaborative species. And doing it at that most fundamental level is one of the most rewarding things you can do. You know, the fact that Americans are growing more gardens today than they did since World War II, I mean, seed companies are out of seeds. Canning supply companies are out of canning. I mean, in our area, we haven't been able to buy a freezer now for about three months. That's actually a really good thing. And so, but, but, but it, it does speak to this kind of self-reliant kind of universal mistrust.

I'm not waiting around for somebody else to take care of me, you know? Yeah. And that's, that's a really good, that's a good thing. I do. I think that's a genuinely good thing. I remember because Lowe's and Home Depot are very close to me and those were deemed essential and we don't need to dive into the rabbit hole of what should or shouldn't be essential but it was really all it was borderline comical to uh to see how many people were as you said building their garden while also getting their apparently essential brand new washer dryer set you know there The line was out the door around the block. People couldn't wait to spend their extra $600 a week. And I saw a lot of tomato

plants coming in and out of there. And you're right. There were a lot of people growing new gardens. So to just finish up, to circle the wagons, I think we've really covered some stuff that I think is of value. Anybody who's listened this far definitely has a changed perception of just how symbiotic we can be as people who potentially just guide nature's own way of maintaining our resources, of letting our animals eat what they want to eat, and the animals working in symbiosis with the environment. And I think that that's really valuable because we've brought up fake meat a couple of times. And I personally do not think that the answer for poor livestock practices is this monocrop vegetable oil filled fake meat. I think that gets us even further away from a healthy environment and a healthy body. And for people who have listened this far and have said, okay, you know, I want

to support farms that are doing this right. I want access to meat that's raised the right way that I think is raised in a healthy way that gives me the best nutrition. What can they do? How can they learn more? Where should they look? Well, around every area, there's a whole kind of a subculture of what I call integrity farmers. I mean, we're a fraternity, just like Monsanto has its fraternity. We have our fraternity. And so you need to get off of Netflix and, down a bag of potato chips and put some attention on sleuthing this. You'll find an entire subculture of integrity, food, farmers, processors, that sort of thing. Now, in shameless self-promotion, if you're just stuck and you can't figure out where to go, our farm, Polyface, get on our website. We ship nationwide. You can get stuff from us, and we ship nationwide. But what we're excited about is when people that are really stuck, you know, in a city area and don't know where to go, they get our stuff and they eat it,

and they suddenly say, oh, wow, I'm never going to eat anything else. And then they start looking around to see if they can shave a couple of dollars off, you know, and not have the shipping fee and that sort of thing. We promote that. We love it when somebody says, yeah, I've been with you for a year, but I found a local farmer. I'm going to move to him. And we say, you know, great. That's just fantastic. So there is an entire subculture, great. That's just fantastic. So there is an entire subculture, but it won't happen without you making an effort. And it won't happen if you say, well, somebody's got to do this for me. No, you've got to actually just like you're never going to get muscles if you don't exercise. Nobody can do that for you. And you're going to have to you have to exercise your food

discernment provenance muscles the same way. I agree. And I think in a capitalist society where you put your money as the biggest possibility, you impact change. And if you're somebody who's listening and you're like me, you're passionate about your health, you're passionate about the environment, and you don't know where to start, one of the best places to put your money is into the hands of farmers like Joel and farmers in your area who care about the environment, care about

the livestock, and care about providing their communities with healthy food. And instead of just continuing to give it to these big manufacturers that are not just giving poor livestock situations, but they're also, you know, they're not doing anything to help the environment. They're not doing anything sustainable. So let your money do the talking. And like Joel said, don't be afraid to get off your ass and do a little legwork because, you know, I am a huge proponent of the fact that I'd rather pay the farmer than pay the pharmacy, if you will. So pay the farmer, don't pay the pharmacy, guys. Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm, man, thank you so much for coming

on. I really appreciate it. Thank you. It's been an honor and delight, Dan. Thank you for having me. Hey, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the episode today with Joel. I know I had an awesome time speaking with him. As for what I am going to do to put some of this stuff into action, I'm going to continue working on my garden and I'm going to do the best job I can to find local farmers in my area who let their cattle and let their chickens do what they naturally want to do. So I can get the most nutritious eggs, I can get the most nutritious meat, and I can also do what I can to indirectly do a better job of supporting the planet. So one way or another, guys, I hope you enjoyed the episode. Do me a favor. If you liked it, share it. I know it makes a big difference

for me and Joel. Be sure you check out Joel's work, his books, and the Polyface Farm website. Have a good one. you