#150: Better Food Systems featuring Joel Salatin
Awesome. Well, Joel, thanks so much for having us. This is, our second episode with you, but the first one in person, and this one's special just because we're finishing up our road trip and, finishing up at the right spot, Polyface Farms. So thanks for having us.
Joel:We're delighted for you to be here, and it's an honor. Yeah.
Brett:Yeah. This the Zoom podcast is always good, but you just don't get that same dynamic that you get in person. Right?
Joel:Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We learned that during COVID, didn't we?
Joel:Mhmm.
Brett:You know? We we really did.
Joel:Everybody just missed we're we're social beings. We like to touch and hug and kiss and all sorts of cool stuff.
Harry:Yeah. We we touched on that a little bit in the first podcast about how you actually saw a resurgence of interest in sort of what you were up to, because of COVID. People were starting to show up on the farm and wanted to get a little bit more back in touch with what's happening with the food system, especially with the shock that happened, during COVID.
Joel:You know, I think it's, I think one of the most interesting things about the whole where we are right now is that for decades, this is kind of a new thought I've had, and I'm I'm putting it in a new book that I'm working on. But, that for decades, we've we've sold our ourselves on the notion that, you can that that true freedom comes from not participating in the mundane things of life. You know, growing tomatoes, canning squash, butchering a chicken, gathering eggs, for I mean, even cooking in your kitchen. You know, that if you really wanna be free, you know, you you you you let somebody else take care of that. You know, you get Hot Pockets and Lunchables, and and and you let somebody you know, you get Uber Eats, and and you let somebody else take care of that.
Joel:What we learned in the black swan of COVID, on several levels, first in 2020 when the store shelves went bare everybody was panicking. And now with the war in Ukraine, with the price of fertilizer quadrupling, wheat, and supply chains, fragmenting, what we now what we now realize is that true freedom comes from participation. Those of us who who didn't buy fertilizer and made compost instead, those of us who didn't buy from the store and had our gardens instead, those of us who canned and developed a larder, you know, of of stored goods, you know, we could eat for six months without going to the store. And so here here we were kind of, I don't know, marginalized philosophically marginalized by the culture for all these decades, and suddenly, we find out that true freedom true freedom comes from participating in the mundane parts of life, which is, of course, what's driving the homestead movement.
Brett:Such a interesting topic to explore, and it's something that's very close to both Harry and I too because up to COVID, I was living in New York, Harry was living in Boston. We're working these corporate jobs. You have a plethora of restaurants and grocery stores and things like that, and we've kind of outsourced everything that you're talking about. And then the COVID situation hits, and I've never really connected or met a rancher before, and I don't even know where I would get a lot of the food and things that you're talking about. So it's been fascinating just to see that progression.
Joel:Yep. It and and and, of course, we've seen it we've seen it here. I mean, people have actually asked me, do you sell food insurance? Never heard of food insurance. You know, we have flood insurance, fire insurance, car insurance, health insurance.
Joel:You know, we have all sorts of it. But food insurance? And it just indicates the, you know, the concern that people have about about food sourcing and food security. And, and, you know, the the ultimate security is is your personal participation in that everybody can't grow everything they, you know, they eat. We certainly don't either.
Joel:But if you can get if you can get some of the staples, you know, in your backyard and and from your, you know, your hanging herb herb, herb pipe, you know, the the pocketed pipe in your patio, maybe a a beehive of honey on the, you know, on the rooftop, whatever. Anything that you can do like that is, is is as secure as you can get. Mhmm.
Harry:It feels like we're experiencing somewhat of a cultural shift around what's happening in the food system. I don't know if you've experienced that from your perspective.
Joel:Sure. Well, I'm I'm seeing it both directions. You know, the old, Hegelian, you know, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. And and so, yes, we're seeing a definite resurgence of of, domestic culinary interest. I mean, you know, canning jars, canning lits are are selling four times as much as they did four years ago.
Joel:You know, people who sell seats to gardeners are triple sales, can't keep up. So that, you know, that's that's really cool on the one end. And on the other end, then we have the Bill Gates group that's that's trying to eliminate livestock, go to, you know, synthetics lab lab produced fake materials as if, you know, that as if that's gonna be the future. And so I see both, you know, both elements kind of growing at the same time, and, that's that's actually fairly, you know, actually fairly typical.
Brett:Absolutely. One of the things that we were talking about prior to hitting record is we were talking about some of the original books that you had written in the mid nineties and how we're almost surprised at how relevant a lot of those themes still are in 2022. And I was just thinking, from the lens of a customer, is there a difference in someone that was buying from Polyface in the nineties versus someone that's buying from you guys today? Like, do you find customers to be a little bit more informed and come to you with more information? I'm just just curious if you ever thought about that before.
Joel:No. I I I think I think in general, in the the one I think overall, they're very, very similar.
Harry:Mhmm.
Joel:I mean, they don't wanna get Tyson chicken. They wanna get clean chicken. They don't want chemicals. They want, you know, all this. But the biggest change we've seen in customers is just, culinary ignorance.
Joel:You know, when we started fifty years ago, everybody knew how to cut up a chicken, for example, knew knew how to make a hamburger. We've got customers that ask us, how do you make a hamburger? You know? The the level of of, of culinary ignorance is truly profound, and I'm not trying to be condescending or or disparage anyone. It's just remarkable what I've watched in fifty years, the erosion of of of of culinary culinary knowledge so that you're you're not intimidated by a recipe.
Joel:You're not intimidated by a new thing. Oh, sure. Yeah. We'll go in and we'll, you know, we'll you know, there's a lot of of experience and kind of, what we say pre understanding. I mean, if you have never done if you've never boiled water in the kitchen, and you even pick up a recipe book, it's a little bit intimidating.
Joel:There's there's a bit of pre understanding there. You know, what does it mean to win flat? Well, how flat is flat? How you know, there's a lot of pre understanding there. And what we've got to in our culture now is is as we have, become dependent on convenience and processed foods, we have lost even those very basic, basic culinary kind of pre understanding.
Joel:It's it's it's really quite profound. So, you know, so we we realize we have to, you know, we have to give recipes. We have to explain to people how do you, you know, how do you use this. And of course when it comes to meat, you know, our favorite thing is a crock pot. I mean that's like that's like bulletproof.
Joel:Yeah. You know, if you're gonna grill steaks, that's there's a little bit of art to that. Mhmm. But there's no art to throwing a piece of meat and some potatoes and carrots and onions in a crock pot and walking away all day. You come back at whether you come back at four, five, six, or seven, it's not burnt.
Joel:It just sits there and just, you know, percolates all day. It's it's like it's like the, you know, the, the ultimate, risk proof, from scratch cooking deal you can do.
Brett:He's speaking your language.
Harry:Yeah totally. I'm about to jump out on my seat. That's my favorite way to cook because you can't mess it up. Right. Yeah it's it's easy.
Joel:And it takes the least amount of energy.
Harry:Right.
Joel:Forty forty watts less than a light bulb, and it just sits there all day.
Harry:Yeah.
Joel:It's the ultimate no time no time cooking.
Harry:Mhmm. This, the idea of us not really having any of these culinary skills is is really interesting because it's kind of reflective of this entire theme of just outsourcing all of our skills to other places. I mean, you can probably extrapolate that to so many different areas of modern culture, but it it it couldn't be more relevant to just preparing food preparing food, which is actually pretty scary when you think about it. Like, where are where are our skills going?
Joel:Yeah. Well, that's right. That's right. Where are our skills going? And so that's why now I mean, look look at the, the proliferation of cooking shows.
Joel:Mhmm. Look at, look at the interest in in, just workshops. Goodness. You know, I'm involved with numerous, you know, informational, you know, fair type farm food fair type platforms and and the the cooking stuff always. Cooking, butchery, that kind of thing.
Joel:Just homemade, you know, charcuterie, making your own baloney, summer sausage. I mean, those those workshops just fill up in a heartbeat.
Brett:They sell out quickly?
Joel:They they sell out very, very quickly. Yeah.
Brett:Wow. Yeah. Because we're we're really in nutrition podcast by trade, and, you know, we've talked about the carnivore diet, the keto diet, paleo, eating real foods. But I think the number one thing that we always go back to is like if you just start cooking the majority of your meals, you're gonna be at such a better spot compared to 99% of the population. And it's a it's a shame we don't know what good food tastes like anymore.
Brett:And a lot of these dishes are are so simple, just knowing how to steer it sear a steak or bake a chicken or butter base something. It's not incredibly complicated, but I guess we just have lost that art for whatever reason.
Joel:Yeah. We we've lost and I'm glad I'm glad you said art because it's, yes, it's, it's science and skill, but there's also an artistic element to it. And, and I think I think one of the main reasons people are are scared of it is because they don't wanna make a mistake. They don't wanna burn the house down. They don't want bad smells.
Joel:They don't wanna smoke up the you know, send the fire alarms off. And and so so the, whatever, the the intimidation factor, overrides the, inquisitive factor. And, and that's unfortunate. You know, I I encourage people, look, you know, just start start with something.
Harry:Mhmm.
Joel:And, you know, all all journeys start with one one step, and, and you call before you walk. And, there's plenty of, you know, metaphors for that, but but, you know, we we we all know people who just seem to be like like my wife, Therese. You know? I mean, she just it's like a miracle every day, you know, and this this just appears on the and and it seems effortless. I know it's not.
Joel:Yeah. But it it seems effortless, and and it's like anything. You start you start into it, and you and you develop techniques, shortcuts, you know, all sorts of, skillful ways, and it becomes way, way easier.
Brett:How do you how do you and Teresa like to eat? Is it do you stick do you call it a diet? Do you just think about eating real foods or prioritizing animal protein?
Joel:We just eat what we've got. Mhmm. You know, we literally eat what we've got. And so, I mean, we we do eat a lot of meat. So, you know, I I do think that, our bodies are you know, we have different genetics, and, and some people are more conducive to some things more than others.
Joel:I mean you know think about milk, dairy, that's a kind of a big one. Some people have a little more problem with it than others. I mean for me, I'm a meat and fruit. I can live on meat and fruit, you know? I love bread, but I could go the rest of my life and not eat bread.
Joel:Sourdough, that's a little different story. But anyway, you know, we we, you know, we have we have sausage and eggs and and milk, and so that's what we eat for breakfast, you know, and and supper. We pretty much eat out of the garden if we have, you know, so we you know, she has always canned several hundred quarts of stuff. So our our larder's in the basement. And last night, she said, go get me a a jar of green beans and peaches and and, tomato juice.
Joel:So I went to the cellar and brought up three quarts and supper. You know? Oh, yeah. So, you know, we we basically eat from eat from what we have.
Harry:Let's take a minute to talk about some of the sponsors and brands who support the show.
Speaker 4:Who are you thinking?
Harry:I was thinking about Carnivore Bar. What what are your thoughts on Carnivore Bar?
Speaker 4:I mean, it's unbelievable. It's an unbelievable product. We were lucky enough to have the founder, Philip Meese, on the show a few months ago, and he was able to send us a bunch of product when we started the relationship and absolutely loved it. I mean, you know, it's a minimum ingredient product, beef, tallow, salt, and then they do have a honey flavored option as well, but it's so nice to have a bar that's like three to four ingredients. And, like, when you're following a carnivore diet, it's really tough to find products that are in line with that specific diet.
Speaker 4:You know?
Harry:Yeah. For me, it kinda hits, like, the holy trinity of what you're looking for when you're looking for food. So it's nutrient dense, it's convenient, and it tastes great. And as you said, most people who are trying to eat healthy, the convenience factor is kind of a a tough part. So just being able to have something you can grab on the go, know know that you're gonna have that nutrition for the day, it's huge.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And we we were lucky enough. We got to actually see their factory too in Missouri, and they're just doing things the right way. I love how they offer an option for, like, carnivore purest where it's just beef, tallow, salt. Then they also have an animal based option too if you do want a little bit of sweetness, a little bit of variety, they have a honey in that option.
Speaker 4:And they're just people that are doing things the right way. They're very mission focused. They're carnivores themselves. And, you know, we're always on the go. We're traveling.
Speaker 4:We've taken a bunch of flights together. To have a bar that has 30 grams of fat too, like, that's huge from an energy density standpoint. Right?
Harry:Yeah. He checks all the boxes or the company checks all the boxes and I just think the fact that they're sourcing from a regenerative farm as well and Joyce Farms, just a win win.
Speaker 4:%. So Carnivore Bar. So we got the affiliate link, and then it's code mafia for 10% off. And then another one
Harry:of our sponsors, one of our favorite farms, Holy Cow, What what they're doing, Holy Cow is is pretty remarkable. The relationships that they've built, in the industry and how long they've been doing the grass fed, grass finished regenerative model is really, innovative. They were one of the first people, to be doing that and supplying Whole Foods early on. Just a a great, community farm and also just product is something that speaks for itself.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think number one to your point, Harry, they're just incredible people. We got to hear them speak at the Beef Initiative Conference in Colorado. We had never met them before, but just hearing Warren's story where they were following a standard American diet, he had had a heart attack, and they were just looking for answers of like, how can we actually get healthier? Do I need to be dependent on medication?
Speaker 4:And they started changing their diets to incorporating more animal foods, and he completely reversed those symptoms of his stroke. And now they're just doing things the right way. They're they're grass finishing their beef. They're incorporating incredible practices. They have great relationships with the animals, and they're very passionate about just, like, connecting directly with the customer and also educating their customer on grass finished beef.
Harry:Yeah. And I think the best part is too, they're shipping nationally and trying to reach a bigger audience. So being able to not only supply beef nationally, but also educate people on the the quality of good, clean, whole foods is just it's an incredible mission.
Speaker 4:How much do you love their beef bacon, by the way? I know that's your go to.
Harry:It's one of the best things I've ever tasted.
Speaker 4:It's that good? No.
Harry:Honest to god, it's so good. Holy cow. Yeah. One of the other farms that supports us is Perennial Pastures, another regenerative farm out of San Diego. Our experience with Kevin Munoz, the owner, we had him on the show, a young first generation rancher who's really empowered by this movement of regenerative agriculture and really wants to be a leader in the space.
Harry:I think our conversation with him was so insightful just in terms of how mission focused he is and how he really thinks about his farm as a business and wanting it to be here fifty, a hundred years down the road even though he's just the first generation of it. And I think just being able to spend time with him out in San Diego was kind of the perfect indication of that where we got to go have a meal with him at his house, hang out with his wife and kids. Like, what an amazing person, and I think his mission focus around raising really high quality beef and restoring nutrients to the soil is just one of one of those rare missions that I think everyone can get around.
Speaker 4:Yeah. He has such a commitment to really feeding the local community in San Diego in the San Diego County First and foremost, but he's also passionate about feeding the community around the country. So I know they've invested a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of resources to being able to order beef in bulk on their website. So I know I know that they now offer quarter half whole cows directly directly off the website. They have that great ancestral blend ground beef product, so it actually has organ grinds mixed into the ground beef.
Speaker 4:So you're getting the benefits of, like, an ounce or so of organ meat. But because it's in the ground beef, you really can't taste it at all. And I think to your point, Harry, just an another amazing person, you know, he Kev was someone that he was following a paleo diet in college and started realizing, wow, when I nourish my body with real foods, I feel amazing. Had a really successful stint in tech, but realized that there was just something else that he was passionate about. So he's one of those rare cases where he put his money where his mouth is and he's a first generation farmer just bootstrapping this thing, raising money, and just so passionate about feeding the community.
Speaker 4:Just an amazing guy.
Harry:Yeah. Absolutely. What are your thoughts on organ supplements, and what do you think about the company that supports our podcast, Optimal Carnivore?
Speaker 4:Such a good question, man. I think organ meat is something that's gained a ton of notoriety the last few years, and for good reason. I don't wanna speak for you, but I think both of us have had a ton of benefits just incorporating organ meats into our diet. I would say that, you know, we definitely prefer the raw source of organs, where we'll just, you know, chop up some liver and some heart. And, you know, there are different ways to prepare it.
Speaker 4:I think the raw source is the most nutrient dense, but, you know, we're fortunate that there are companies like Optimal Carnivore that exist that freeze dry organ capsules so you can actually take them on the go. You know, there are a ton of times where we're traveling where we're not gonna have access to raw organs. So we can just, I can throw a little Ziploc bag together of optimal carnivore and be good to go. And I think six pills is an ounce of organs, which is like the daily recommended amount that will give you a lot of those really good quality vitamins in there. So that's kinda how I think we've been using it.
Speaker 4:What am I done missing anything there?
Harry:No. I I think that the fact that it it just makes organs accessible to people, and I think that organs are generally just a food group that are underutilized when it comes to eating nose to tail. And the nature's vitamin is a perfect name for these organ, foods. And I think a lot of people are pretty, you know, in the mainstream object to eating, organ meats. But when you put it in a pill form, it's doesn't taste bad, it's convenient.
Harry:You can put it in your backpack. It makes things a lot easier. And I also think that just generally, these brands are optimal carnivore is focused on making people healthier, which is just such a strong mission. And, you know, I think liver capsules is a great way to get people thinking about their health differently.
Speaker 4:A %. There's there's probably someone that's listening to this right now, and you're interested in organ meats, but the taste might make you a bit squeamish. You feel strange about eating raw foods. Maybe you cook liver and you don't like it. Maybe it has a metallic taste.
Speaker 4:I think that's also where the organ capsules play such a great role is that you're still getting that nutrient density, but you're getting it in a very convenient capsule like format, and it just takes away any of that squeamishness that you might have to the taste. It's just a great product. And also Richard who runs Optimal Carnivore, he started listening to the show really early on and he's built his own organ supply chain and is just doing things the right way and really trying to support the right people in the space. So just proud to be associated with them, honestly.
Harry:Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks for listening. Now we're gonna go back to the show. What do you say to people because there's obviously an economic reality to food, and I think it's very divergent right now because there's the cheap food is very convenient as well.
Harry:So people who are stretched for time, working longer hours, it's almost like a a tough a tough opportunity cost to say, hey. Cook your meals. And by the way, you're gonna pay a little bit more for it. What do you say to people, like, when that question is brought up? Because it really is kind of the the sad reality of the situation.
Joel:Well, from a nutritional standpoint, basically, all processing destroys nutrition. I mean, we'll just let's just say it. You you can take, one of the most interesting, science experiments, that a guy in in my high school did when I was in high school. We were talking about, you know, fifty years ago. This guy, he took a he took a box of Wheaties, and and he had he had, two sets of rats.
Joel:And he fed one Wheaties, and he fed the other one the ingredients that were in Wheaties that were listed on the on the box, the ingredients. The rats fed the ingredients thrived, and the ones eating the Wheaties got sick. And and were well, I mean, they were they were not healthy. Skinny and, you know, and so, I've never forgotten that. I mean, it was just such a revelatory experiment.
Joel:You know, I ran into two ladies out in California. They were doing a a farm to school program. Had a little, three acre farm, and they did the school district had incorporated this this farm into the biology and science program. And so I think one day a week, the kids rotated through this farm. And they had a they had a big earthworm bed that looked about the size of a coffin.
Joel:You know, it was about six feet long and two feet wide and a couple feet deep. And I had a lid on a big box raising these earth these worms. And, to make a point, the the two, teachers said, alright. Your assignment is Monday when you come, I want you to bring food. And so Monday, the kids came and, of course, they brought, you know, Twizzlers and Hot Pockets and, you know, I don't know I don't know what, you know, artificials.
Joel:But anyway, it was it was a bunch of, you know, stickers bar or whatever. Okay? Things that kids eat. And the teachers, the two ladies, they put in an apple, an orange, a a pound of, ground beef. And, okay.
Joel:They put it in a worm bed. A week later, of course, the kids were all primed for this. They go charging up the hill, open up the box. They pull out, you know, the Twizzlers, the Snickers bar, the, Hot Pockets, pull out all their stuff. It's not touched.
Joel:Over here on the other end where apple, orange, ground beef had gone in, it was all gone. The obvious question was, well, why would you wanna eat something worms won't even eat? But but it but it it it makes this wonderful, point that essentially processing across the board, Food will never be as nutritious as it is in its raw state Mhmm. Ever. Okay?
Joel:And, so so you're never gonna get the same nutrition out of something that's processed. So you know, if you're interested in nutrition, a little bit extra time, maybe a little bit extra money will probably help. Now we also know that even within the raw material, there's a huge difference in quality. For example, several years ago, we participated with 11 other farmers around the country, in an egg nutrition egg study. They studied about 12 nutrients in eggs, and, the official USDA nutrition label on a carton of eggs says, forty eight micrograms per egg of folic acid.
Joel:I'll just pick one, folic acid. Forty eight micrograms per egg. Our eggs averaged 1,038. Wow. One thousand thirty eight micrograms of folic acid per egg.
Joel:We're not talking about 10% differences here. You know, grass finished beef, 300% more riboflavin than grain finished beef. Conjugated linoleic acid, it only takes fourteen days of grain feeding to chase it out of the body of a of a herbivore, whether dairy or beef. The point is that the the nutritional aspects vary greatly among depending on depending on providence. So if you, you know, if you really want food food, if you want nutrition, often, though you're paying more per pound, you're actually getting way more nutrition because the pounds are more dense.
Joel:And, and that, you know, that that makes a big difference. I mean, we we we've done food fairs where we you know take a ground, cook hamburgers and measure the amount of grease cook off from the hamburger, and you know stuff from the industry the conventional from the supermarket you know, cooks off like 30%, ours cooks off 5%.
Harry:Mhmm.
Joel:So, you know, one, you're losing 25 of your nutrition, the other one you're losing 5%. So, you know, can you afford to spend more on the other if you're really buying nutrition? Yeah. It it comes that way. So, you know, I just wanna really make the point that, that this is not the same food.
Joel:Mhmm. It is not the same food. That that's critical. An apple is not an apple. It's not an apple.
Joel:The BioNutrient Association is now making this cool little, handheld spectrophotometer. That's what Abby on NCIS has, you know, in her lab Yeah. That yeah. Where she puts a speck of paint and it gives you all the all the, chemical analysis of a speck of paint. And, so they're doing this with vegetables, and they've now found, for example, that the most nutrient dense carrot that they could find, you would have to eat, 10 times as many carrots of the poorest ones to get the same nutrition as the best ones.
Joel:Wow. And those are huge those are huge nutritional differences. And so let's talk about time. So so I I hope I've convinced people that paying attention to provenance, is your first responsibility to your microbiome. That's your first responsibility.
Joel:If if I'm gonna take care of this, I better think about provenance. Yeah. Now time. So, here again, there are all sorts of techniques. We talked about the crock pot.
Joel:You know? There's nothing like a crock pot. It's the ultimate no time meal. You know? You throw it in.
Joel:You go to work. You come home. It's done. It's never burned, it's never dry, it's never overcooked, you know. It's it's just there ready to go.
Joel:So, you know, that that's a that's a great one. But there are lots of other techniques. For example, I'll give you some that we do here. We have stewing heads. These are egg layers that finish their productive egg life.
Joel:What do you do with them? You know? So we butcher them, and and we we they're they're small. We can put about, I don't know, eight, nine of them in a great big roaster pan. You know, the kind that you put a turkey in for Thanksgiving?
Joel:And you can pack all those chickens in there, cook them, three fifty for four hours, pick the meat off, whack it up in little chunks, put it in quart freezer containers, put it in the freezer, and now you have precooked frozen chicken. You get home from work at five, supper's at six, defrost. You know, you you set it out in the sink in the morning before you go, and it's defrosted when you get home from work. You got chicken a la quinoa, and everybody thinks you're the, you know, the best gourmet in the world that took, you you know, a couple minutes because you already had cooked stuff ready to go. We freeze, you know, we freeze chicken broth.
Joel:You know, you can another is that you can cook extra so you have leftovers. I'm convinced that the benchmark that indicates that somebody gets what we're talking about here is leftovers. Because if you're eating leftovers, that means you didn't get single service. You didn't get all that packaging, you probably cooked it from scratch, you probably ate around the table, and you took your, you know, you had your leftovers. So I mean, we we live on leftovers.
Joel:We we love to overcook. You know, if you're look. If you're well we're back to the crock pot, you know? Fill it up.
Harry:Yeah.
Joel:Okay if you're gonna if you're gonna put if you're gonna put one pork backbone in it, put in four or five. Now you've got meals for you know, you could put some in some, ravioli. You can, you know, you could you can mix and match and and all those kinds of things. So the the time thing, all all I would say, it's a little bit like it's like the money. It's like the money thing.
Joel:When somebody says, oh, I can't afford this, well, then I hope that you're not buying 60 inch flat screen TVs, liquor, lottery tickets, Caribbean vacation, ski trips to Aspen, you know, fashion clothes.
Harry:Yeah.
Joel:Okay. You know we we kind of pick pick what we're you know pick and and no takeout. Takeout is expensive.
Brett:Oh my gosh. Really expensive,
Joel:and it's the same thing with time. So you don't have time. Well so how much time do you spend watching movies every week? I mean, the average American male right now this is the one I just read recently. The average American male now between 25 and 35 spends twenty hours a week playing video games.
Harry:Jeez.
Joel:That's average.
Harry:They get paid for that.
Joel:They don't get paid for
Harry:that. That's insane.
Joel:Yeah. Yeah. So so when you talk about time, this is average. Okay? How much cooking do you think you could do?
Joel:How how much intentional participation in the food system do you think you could have at twenty hours a week? That's a lot. My god. That's like that's like three hours a day.
Harry:Yeah. Maybe that's a good segue to the next topic of your next book where it's like, you know, if someone's looking to make a transition away from this modern lifestyle, and put that time towards something, it sounds like you're writing a new book on homesteading.
Joel:I am. Yeah. I'm I'm working on a new book. The working title is Homestead Tsunami. And, the subtitle is, good for the family and the culture.
Joel:And, this this will be a book about why, because whether you know it or not, we are in a homestead tsunami right now. I mean, in the in this last year, we had a steady I've never seen it like this before. A steady stream of these, rental RVs, you know, see see America across America, whatever. Yep. People from New York, Michigan, California, looking to relocate, getting out of the city.
Joel:There there's this there's this kind of intuitive understanding that if if things go down, if things fall apart, if the wheels fall off, I don't wanna be in the city. There's this this just deep understanding. And so so I'm seeing, just literally thousands of people, are are relocating. Many of them small acreages, you know, two, three, four, five. I I say anything under 20 is a small acreage.
Harry:Yeah.
Joel:And and they're not doing it to start a business, to start a farm business. They're doing it, to to they're doing it to try in at least this most basic area of life to disentangle from their enslavement to the system. And, as I said, we've been we've been told for a couple decades that true freedom comes from not participating in the mundane things of life. And here, suddenly, we realize, oh, true freedom is having your garden, having some chickens, a milk cow, a sourdough starter, mung beans sprouting on the windowsill, you know, an an herb herb garden. You know, that that is that is true, independence.
Brett:Joel, is the main difference between a homestead and a farm just the commercial aspect of it? Okay.
Joel:Yeah. Yeah. Many you know, in fact, I would say most farmers are not homesteaders. They're they're doing it as a business. I have the unique perspective that growing up here, we were basically a homestead.
Joel:Now dad dad wanted to make a living on the farm, but quickly gave that up. We came here in 1961, and, and, you know, the farm was a a a gully worn out rock pile. He had a mortgage to pay, a young family. So mom went to work off farm as a school teacher. Dad had his accounting.
Joel:He went to work for a firm and and and, he was not a CPA, but he did bookkeeping accounting work, tax preparation work. And, those off farm salaries paid the mortgage.
Brett:Got
Joel:it. So, you know, within, within ten years, the farm was paid for. Okay? But those were by that time, dad and mom are now getting older. We kids are getting they're getting older, so their energy is waning.
Joel:We kids are getting older. Our energy is coming up, but there's, you know, there's no, there's no, what was you say, a going concern. But, you know, we milked cows. We had garden. We, you know, made we we even did a home, you know, home butchery.
Joel:I had my egg business starting at at 10 years old, started with eggs, chickens. And and so, you know, it was never a growing concern, but but we had all that all those benefits. You know, we we we, had wood stove, so we, you know, had our had our energy. I mean, when I was in college, every summer I was home, June was haymaking. July was a big project, and then August was, getting firewood cut so mom and dad would not freeze over during the winter while I was gone.
Joel:And that's just the way those, you know, those summers went. And so we were we were, very much, you know, not off grid, but we were certainly, pretty independent. I always said if we could figure out how to grow Kleenex and toilet paper, we could pretty much pull the plug on society. That That was one of the things I
Brett:was gonna ask you is in the sixties and seventies, was your family even really going to the grocery store, the supermarket, or no just because you're growing so much incredible food out here?
Joel:Yeah. You know, toilet paper and Kleenex. And, you know, staples like, whatever, you know, sugar or flour. We never grew we never grew grains, so, you know, flour. But, you know, we we canned a lot.
Joel:We you know, corn came from the garden. We'd we'd all get around and and, cut corn and, you know, and freeze it. And, you know, we just we just ate from you know, we we made our own butter, churned butter, made yogurt, cottage cheese. We'd go, we went to neighbors and picked apples and then made, you know, applesauce. And we put bushels of apples in the in the well the well pit, the water well pit.
Joel:It was kinda like a root cellar, and we could eat those, you know, through the winter. We had, potatoes and stuff in the, you know, in the root cellar for the winter, butternut squash. Those things keep they keep a long time, you know, if it doesn't get too cold. And, we, you know, we we dig, I don't know, five, six, seven hundred pounds of potatoes and cover them up with straw in the barn and mommy the potatoes, go out with a five gallon bucket, pull the straw back, and fill the bucket, bring the potatoes in. That's that's just how we ate.
Joel:You know? And I I thought it was normal and then found out that it wasn't real normal.
Harry:Do do you think that, this sort of return to personal responsibility and and, personal autonomy over food and, honestly, you know, expand that to everything. Really just kinda understanding, you know, defending yourself and, how to protect yourself and take care of yourself. Do you think that's inevitable based on the trajectory of where things are going?
Joel:Well, I think so. I think I think there is a definite feeling in our culture of, of concern. Certainly, the the COVID black swan, brought it, you know, in in right in front of people's faces. I mean, I've never seen empty store shelves like I saw in 2020. So I mean
Brett:believable.
Joel:We we had I mean, this we sold here. We sold six months worth of stuff in six weeks. Oh. It it it was a it was just a it was like a flood. People came out here, regular people who said, oh, I knew about you guys, but I said, I'll never eat I'll never pay that for, you know, that kind of I'll never do that kind of food.
Joel:We're gonna go to Kroger's, you know? And and here we are because Kroger's doesn't have anything. And and so, you know, the the the fragility the the other the other aspect of this is, you know, for decades, the whole, mantra has been efficiency. Efficiency. And to get efficient, you have to scale up to be efficient.
Joel:Right? That's that's what we've been told. Efficiency. Efficiency. What happened in COVID and now in the Ukraine, we're starting to realize, first, you have to be resilient.
Joel:Mhmm. Because if you if you're not resilient first, there's nothing to be efficient about. So first, you have to survive before you can ever thrive. And so, I mean, sure, I wanna be as efficient as anybody, but the first goal is resilience. And and what we found out was that scale that scale, what I call a food aircraft carrier, whether it's a a Tyson processing plant, a, you know, a a Campbell Soup manufacturing facility, but a a food aircraft carrier is, is is not what you wanna be in when you have Rocky Shoals to navigate.
Joel:Mhmm. And and you have dysfunction and disturbance in the system. You wanna be a speedboat. And and and the question I ask everybody, I I say, let me ask you this. If in '20 if in the spring of twenty twenty, if instead of the our country being supplied by 305,000 employee mega processing facilities, if if that was the funnel, you know, if instead of that funnel where all the food came through these mega facilities, if instead the food was supplied by 300,050 employee neighborhood community based systems, would we have seen the the the crisis, would we have felt the fear?
Joel:Would would we have had that that we had in 2020? And the obvious answer is, of course not.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Joel:We we would've we would've had a much more diversified, democratic, decentralized, system. And so, you know, so you just take that to its ultimate and and you come to the homestead. Yeah. The homestead where okay. Not everybody can do this, but as for as for my household, we're gonna we're gonna actually have that level of independence and security.
Brett:Did you feel like for you, COVID almost served as a, like, a successful stress test, like, as this proof of concept of everything you're talking about, sovereignty, resiliency, autonomy that you've been speaking about for years. I'm sure you felt very sorry for a lot of the other farmers, but I'm sure that at the same time, it was, like, proof of work of everything that what you all are doing at Polyphase. Right?
Joel:Absolutely. I felt like I felt like, like Cinderella, living in the ashes all their life and suddenly get invited to the law. Yeah. Absolutely. Because because as especially then to add the insult to entry, this spring with the with the Ukraine situation, We don't buy fertilizer.
Harry:Mhmm. Yeah.
Joel:You know? We don't buy wheat from Ukraine. We we buy grape from local farmers right here, that we know, that we can go visit and see. And and so when you shorten those chains of custody, you greatly reduce the vulnerabilities in that in that chain of custody. And, and that, of course, reduces fragility and makes things more secure and more stable.
Joel:And so, yes, my big epiphany was right here at the store. One day, I'm in here and a customer comes in and she's looking at the meat count the beef in there, and she kinda, you know, catches her brow. I said, you okay? You need some help? She said, I just came from Costco.
Joel:Sirloin steak is $16.99 a pound. Yours is $9.99 a pound. And then I go to do some research. I find out, well, Tyson Tyson in twelve months raised their beef prices 32%. Why?
Joel:Because when you've got 5,000 employees crammed in cool, dark, damp conditions with a bunch of blood and guts all around, you know, that is a very vulnerable place when you have an active virus going on. Okay? But in a small neighborhood plant where people have are very spread out in their workstations just because that's the way it is, and you're not on top of each other, and you're there's only 20 of you and not 5,000. It's a totally it's a totally different, thing. And so what I realized is that these big companies were were literally being unable to sleep at night for oh, no.
Joel:You know, did I did I quarantine the right sector there because, you know, Dave over there got got COVID? Oh, no. Is somebody gonna, put in a a lawsuit because we didn't have the right plexiglass divider in in place in time before they came into work yesterday? I mean, this was the stuff that was going on. I mean, these new these new, protocols took millions of hours of time in these big outfits.
Joel:I realized, you know, here at the farm, we've got, what, you know, 20 people here. I never gave what I never thought. I didn't think anybody was gonna sue us or question us for court. We just went on about our business like normal, and, it it just was a nonissue. And and the lights went off in my head, and I realized, wow.
Joel:You know? What what we've been told for decades is the secret to success, efficiency, and and and economy can go can go too far over an edge. I mean, when, Joel Arthur Barker wrote the book, Paradigms and introduced the term paradigms to the world back in the eighties. One of his axioms was every paradigm eventually exceeds its point of efficiency. That's a fascinating concept.
Joel:And so and so, you know, when we brought chickens inside and we centralized chicken processing, it was it was okay for a while for a while for a while, but there's a big difference between 15,000 chickens in a house and 2,000 chickens in a house. Big difference. And and, and and so those things so what happens is that that as that paradigm eventually exceeded its point of efficiency, then what we were doing became affirmed on a very broad scale, affirmed. I mean, so, yeah, yeah, and that's one reason I'm on so many podcasts now. People are how are you respond?
Joel:You're you're not you're not whining about fertilizer prices? No. I don't I don't care. I don't buy any of the stuff. You know?
Joel:And so, yeah, we we feel affirmed and vindicated on a really deep broad scale now like we've never been. I've never been more excited about our farming future here because I now know our resiliency is is way up there.
Harry:That's amazing to hear. Do you feel like you're able to charge enough of a premium for that resiliency, like a resiliency premium to your day to day cost customers? Because the two scenarios that you just described, one is a panic where people are coming and buying six weeks worth of food in six months. The capitalist in you is probably thinking, well, maybe I can charge more food or for my well raised resilient food now. Yep.
Harry:But then your your role as kind of a food provider is really like, it's such a tough position to be in.
Joel:It is. That's one of the biggest tensions in business that there is. We've been at it several times now with these big avian high path avian influenza outbreaks, in the egg industry, you know, where where they've destroyed, whatever, 10,000,000 chickens, you know, and suddenly the eggs are short and eggs spike. And we've actually been through this cycle, more than once. And each time, suddenly, eggs are short, and and we're we're lower priced than in the store, you know, for, like, two or three months.
Joel:And the temptation is always to ride that wave, and we have we have never done it. We we've we've looked in the mirror and said, no. We're we're gonna hold the course. We're in it for the long haul. We want our customers to know that we're not jumping on a bandwagon just because there's some glitch in the system.
Joel:And, and that I think that has built a lot of loyalty, and appreciation that we're not going to capitalize on somebody else's mistakes. Now does that mean we don't go up? No. So like I said, Tyson went up 32%. We've gone up about 12%.
Joel:Okay? So we are very much now I can tell you right now, when we when we go price stuff, we are in many things cheaper, especially places like Whole Foods. We're cheaper than a lot of the a lot of the things there. And and so we have never we've never wanted to get rich. What we wanna do is is make enough profit that we're, you know, not paupers, but enough is enough.
Joel:I have no desire to drive a Ferrari. I have no desire to go on a Caribbean cruise. And so we just, you know, we just try to, make enough that that we can be happy and satisfied with where we are and and and pass that onto our customers.
Brett:Yeah. That passion and that that love to educate definitely comes through, and we can feel that. And it's funny that you mentioned Whole Foods because I have a very vivid memory of being in New York in 02/2019, and I swear the price of rib eyes were, like, $15.16 dollars. And I remember thinking that was expensive then. And now when I go to that same Whole Foods, it's, like, 25 to $28.
Brett:Right. So that perfectly reinforces everything that you're saying about these these big packers just raising prices.
Joel:Yep. Yep. So the so what I'm getting at is that the the scale what we've learned now is that the scale actually bakes in a certain degree of fragility.
Harry:Definitely.
Joel:That that we don't have here. And so, yeah, so we're we're very excited about about, this, you know, the these models, these pasture based models, the carbon economy, you know, driving our our agronomy, our fertility being driven by, you know, compost and carbon, for all those things that that that they have been like I say, you know, like, been in been in the ashes, and now we get invited to the ball. You know, it's it's it's pretty cool.
Harry:Do do you think about how, because I think where we are right now in terms of scale and and food is largely driven by what's happened with the incentives, you know, and subsidies that have been put in place. Do you think about how, you know, the government should be thinking about promoting what you're doing, or do you think they should even be having, see the table?
Joel:If I was king for a day, there wouldn't even be a USDA. I know that's a that's a an incredibly some people would say a reckless statement, but, at the at the end of the day, the USDA, I call it The US Duh US Duh. Has has not done anything positive. They've not done anything positive for nutrition. Now they've done they've done, you know, positive things for a select group of people.
Joel:That's for sure. But but no government agency has been more successful at eliminating its constituency as The US does. And, and I know, you know, when you look at at their objectives, number one is cheap food. Well, if you have cheap food, you're gonna have cheaply paid farmers. If you have cheaply paid farmers, you're gonna have nobody attracted to farming except the c and d students.
Joel:If we're gonna attract a and b students to be the frontline and we talk about frontline workers, frontline health workers, frontline firefighters, frontline if we're if we're gonna farmers are our frontline resource managers.
Harry:That's fine.
Joel:And if we're gonna have if we're gonna have our best and brightest on the front lines of our resource management, we have to have not only a a mental philosophical mystique that they're valuable, we have to have an economic reality that says they're valuable. I mean, I I ask people, you know, that that go to Farmer's Market, what would you think if your farmer showed up at his booth next week driving a Mercedes Benz? Would would that bother you? Most people, it would. Well, what's it?
Joel:You know? Well, you're driving a Mercedes Benz. You know? Why should your farmer be poor paid? And I don't wanna get into all about a fairness and all this stuff, but I'm trying to help people to understand that if if farmers are our frontline defense, stewards of our resources, air, soil, water, which are way more important than Wall Street and four zero one k plans and, you know, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.
Joel:Okay? If that's where it's gonna be, we have to we have to, as a culture, change not only our mental, but our practical, mindset as to who these people are. And so, yeah, I I I think, I think that the cheap you know, so so the US dollar has a has a number one is a cheap food policy. I mean, we don't have a cheap car policy. We don't have a cheap, celebrity policy.
Joel:We don't have a cheap NFL player policy. We don't have a cheap you know what I'm saying? Yep. But but we have a cheap food policy. And and and that mentality, it goes down within the within the, system.
Joel:And then and then the other one is that farmers are supposed to feel compelled to feed the world. American farmers are supposed to feed the world. Well, I've been all over the world. I was just in South Africa for two weeks. I was
Harry:gonna ask you about that.
Joel:Yeah. And I got news for you. Nobody in the world needs American food. Nobody. Nobody.
Joel:Nobody starves because there's not enough food. They starve because some, you know, warlord won't let the a truck cross without a extorted bribe. An avalanche, you know, destroyed an access road. The local leaders put all the, the the economy on the black market or whatever, but nobody in the world is starving because there's not enough food. Right now, 40% of all human edible food on the planet is thrown away.
Joel:We've never we've never had that much waste before, ever ever. So this this burden that the American farmer carries on his back, and it's real. It's real. I I've just I've just got to feed the world. I've just got to feed the world.
Joel:You know? And it's a it's a mental, and emotional drain. And so, you know, what we need is to allow other countries to feed themselves. I mean, again, I've been to Africa, and and they will tell you the reason we don't have a functional local agriculture system is because of cheap foreign imports or or or or US aid coming in. And the entrepreneurs every every tribe, every culture has entrepreneurs.
Joel:And what happens is the entrepreneurs who would be running local food and processing systems, you know, and the food system, they get displaced by handouts from the West. And guess what happens to displaced entrepreneurs? They find out another business to be entrepreneur in, which is usually shaking down, you know, trucks and forming little warlord gangs. Those are the entrepreneurs. Those guys that are walking around with their little cadre of, you know, AR 15 toting dudes, those are the entrepreneurs in the culture.
Joel:And, and so, yeah, I I take a pretty dim view of of this whole idea that that the world will starve if American, farmers don't meet their I mean, out west, we are irrigating we are irrigating. We we are we we are desertifying the West, depleting the aquifers to grow alfalfa to ship to Japan to feed racehorses. It's insane.
Harry:Our priorities are so out of way.
Joel:Yeah. It's it's it's insane. It's insane. I mean, America right now has 35,000,000 acres of lawn and 36,000,000 acres of of ground feeding and housing recreational horses. Now I'm not opposed to horses.
Joel:I don't think they're evil or anything. But, you know, that 71,000,000 acres, that's enough to feed the entire country without a single farm. You know, we're we're we're we're not running out. The tragedy of the human experience is not that we're not that we're loafing. It's that we're busy about the wrong things.
Brett:Right. Busy about the wrong things. That's actually interesting. I had no idea that food waste was 40%. Did you know that it was that high?
Harry:No. That that's insane. I mean, such a such a lack of just I mean, it's so inefficient. You think about all the people who could be benefiting from higher quality food, more nutritious food if that was reallocated.
Joel:Right. But, you know, it's got it's I mean, look at the dumpster behind the supermarket. I mean, if there's a blemish, if it's too long, too short, too crooked, you know, whatever, You know? And and and a lot of this waste is due to long supply chains. Mhmm.
Joel:You know? So if you eat seasonally I mean, here, for example, we don't eat strawberries. We don't eat strawberries except in May and June. And so we have strawberries. So, man, we eat strawberries.
Joel:Like, they're going out of style, May and June. Well, then what happens? Well, then come the raspberries in July. And then the blackberries come in late July. And then the apples by that time, the apples start coming in.
Joel:The mulberries are coming in from about, you know, mid June to mid August. You know, you when you start eating seasonally, it's not like you're depriving yourself. You're actually you're actually immersing consciously in the in the the abundance and satiation of our of our ecological womb. Mhmm. That's not a bad thing.
Harry:Yeah. Yeah. That's a beautiful way to put that. I was thinking before when you were talking about, what's happened kinda in terms of globalized food and this this perspective that Americans took to weaponize food and almost use it as a as a geopolitical tool. It almost being this massive oversight in terms of just, like, creating and and, continuing the culture of of, you know, health, wealth, and abundance in America and just kind of, like, letting that go to the wayside.
Harry:And then you start weaponizing food and using it as a tool to, you know, gain favor in in other countries. It's really just it's done if you look back, it's done a number on our health. Like, we're living through it.
Joel:Using food as a tool of violence is simply an expression of treating food from a perspective of violence. So when you when you are assaulting the earthworms with glyphosate and you're assaulting the chickens with a 15,000 bird confinement factory and you're assaulting the dairy cows with a little concrete paddock and eating, you know, high, you know, eating what's equivalent to, candy bars all day and only have, you know, two pregnancies in their lifetime. They're supposed to have 10. What I could go on, but but but you get the idea that that that as we as we fail to ask, how do we make happy pigs, how do we make happy tomatoes, When we fail to ask those questions and we and we view them as just inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated, however cleverly Hubris can imagine to manipulate them, we are inherently disrespecting and doing violence to the the the beautiful the beautiful synergistic, symbiotic, relational complexity that this whole soil soil and plant and animal web, you know, spins for itself. And so the natural extension of that is then to take what we've done domestically, and we extend that same perspective disrespectfully to other cultures, other belief systems, other things throughout the world.
Joel:And and we weaponize food like we've, you know, weaponized our our production mentality. And that's
Harry:It's amazing how
Joel:those Those are kind of profound ideas, but but, but they're but they're they're no less real.
Harry:I tell you, though. I mean, those are some interesting hoops to jump through because, I mean, it's just this principle that just gets reapplied throughout the entire life cycle of food.
Joel:Yeah. So, you know, when people ask me, well, what do you do for a living? I've I've actually just responded sometimes, make, happy copulating earthworms. I mean, it really does come down to that. We, you know, we don't think about that anymore.
Joel:We don't think about those terms. We, I mean, imagine you you you go to a bank and you're you're starting a business, and you you're going to the bank for this, you know, investment loan. And the banker looks at your business plan and says, that's a that's a pretty good business here. In fact, I think you're gonna be a millionaire, and I'd like to we'll do the boss hog thing. You know?
Joel:I'd I'd like to be your partner. You know? We're gonna we're gonna make a we're gonna make a million dollars here. But I have one question, before, before I load you this money for this business. What's what's it gonna do the earthworms in our community?
Joel:Yeah. Nobody asked that question. And yet and yet we all know intuitively that that question is more profound than whether the Dow Jones Industrials went up or down today. But in the way, when we're taking our shower, we're not thinking about the bumblebees, the pollinators, the earthworms. We just don't think about it.
Joel:We're thinking about the Kardashians, the NFL playoffs, the I mean, I just found out that in just the month of October, Virginians spent $528,000,000 betting on sports games.
Brett:It's incredible. Mainly football.
Joel:Yeah. What would $528,000,000 in a month in one state do I mean, here we are again, the cost of good food.
Harry:Right.
Joel:I mean, that that would be I don't know how many Virginians we have. You know? Do we have, like, you know, even if we have, you know, 10,000,000 people living here, I mean, that's enough for everybody to have plenty of food. And I'm not saying I'm not saying that it's that it's sinful to do that. I'm just I'm just trying to point out some of the more glaring, value displacements in our in our culture and just say, if if the shoe fits, where?
Joel:And and trust me, I have my hypocrisies too. But but let's let's see if we can try to reduce some of those. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You
Joel:can't reduce you can't eliminate all of them. You're gonna have inconsistencies. That's fine. But let let's try to get let's try to pick at least some of the low hanging fruit here Yeah. And and, and reduce some of those big glaring societal hypocrisies.
Brett:This is purely anecdotal, but you're reminding me. I grew up in Suburban New Jersey in the nineties, and I swear I felt like everyone had a garden back when we were growing up. I don't know if it was somebody in DC, but I felt like almost everyone in my neighborhood did. And now when I go walk that same neighborhood, I don't think anyone has a garden. So I'm just wondering from your perspective to bring it back to the homesteading, are there things that you think that everyone should be doing when it comes to their food that can maybe help with some of these problems that you're talking about?
Joel:Yeah. I I think that, that almost everyone can do something, visceral with the majesty of life. Now that might be nothing more than a quart jar of sprouted mung beans on the with a seal. It might be nothing more than a little you can buy now little kits, little, worm a vermicomposting kits, stick it under your sink, and you put your kitchen scraps in there. And the earthworms, you know, turn up, turn into castings that then you can put in your flowers or garden plants or whatever.
Joel:But I think when we when we live such an antiseptic, such an antiseptic life that we never encounter the mystery and majesty of of of viscerally watching life, you know, creation, death, you know, the rejuvenation that comes with decomposition, you know, those kinds of things really interacting with that. I think that we that we lose, humility, a humble outlook. We tend to think when we're when we're divorced from that, we tend to think that we're in charge.
Brett:Mhmm.
Joel:I got this. You know? And and and and video games have not helped this.
Harry:Totally.
Joel:I mean, you know, I'm driving my car, and it wrecks in a tree. And in five seconds, the game gives me a new car. Mhmm. Well, that's not life. That's not real.
Joel:That's that's insane. You know, that that that's complete insane fantasy. And and so what happens is, as we put more and more attention and time on this, we start coming to basic things of life as being at the at the whim of my fingertips. And so, you know, when you grow one tomato in your little patch and that tomato dies, life doesn't give you a new tomato. You know?
Joel:You've gotta wait a season. Well, maybe better better next year. You know? And what you start finding out is I'm ultimately not in charge. There there's something bigger going on, and I don't wanna get, you know, too spiritual here, but but I think it's very helpful.
Joel:It gives us a a better, a better balanced view of life to come realizing that I just don't have every tiger by the tail. Yes. There's there's weather. There's things. There's things going on.
Joel:There's fungi and mycelium and and, actinomycetes. You know? There there's stuff going on that's that's not just in my control.
Brett:Which is such an amazing point because we're really the only species that pretends like we're disconnected and removed from nature or better than nature. Yet we're also the most unhealthy species. We can't do these basic functions that no other animal struggles with.
Joel:That's right. That's right. We can we can overrun our own headlights. We can we can innovate things that we can't spiritually, emotionally, or physically metabolize. That's how creative we are.
Harry:It's it's insane to me because it it feels like the reality that we're living in is such a derivative of the reality of nature. And every conversation that we have with farmers, you guys see the life cycle every day. Mhmm. So it's it's almost you know, we we live in in a you know, it's a reality that's a further derivative away from what you experience. But just coming in contact with people who really are seeing these things day to day and your experience and understanding what life actually is Right.
Harry:It kinda brings brings us back down to, like, hey. There there's more going on here.
Joel:There is. And and the the tendency in our very, you know, Western reductionist mindset, linear thinking, is is is a very mechanistic view of almost everything. Right. You know, you don't feel good? Take this truck.
Joel:Mhmm. We we view we view life as kind of interchangeable parts. I mean, look what we've done with, you know, DNA. Look what we've, as if as if everything is some sort of a, you know, a a bearing in a car, you know, that goes thump thump. When you stop the car, you pull the wheel off, throw a new bearing in, boom, you're up and running.
Joel:Biology is not like that. You know? You know, you don't just go out and and and change out the fusarium wilt on a cucumber for a non fusarium wilt plant. You know? It it doesn't work that way.
Joel:And so I think exactly that's what you're describing there is a is just a a a, an understanding that that there there are things going on that I can't see, some that I can't even know actually and don't know. I mean, think about this. Right now right now, we know that there are about seven to 8,000,000,000, billion with a b, micro microorganisms in a handful of healthy soil. Alright? We have only named 10% of them.
Joel:90% are unnamed and unknown. And yet we come out here with chemical fertilizers, glyphosate, herbicide, pesticides, dumping this stuff on. We don't have a clue. I mean, it it it it's it's like a it's like a conquistador mentality. We we walk around like a bunch of swashbuckling, you know, pirates exploiting, this this amazing web of interconnectedness.
Joel:And we don't know what the ramifications of this, this, and this are. And and and yet we we do it with oh, I can grow this. I can do this. I can do that. And things like COVID, things like Vladimir Putin, you know, things like this, I think are really good to bring us up short and realize, oh, you know, maybe maybe there are constraints that are beyond human manipulation.
Brett:And you have such an interesting perspective when it comes to soil because didn't you increase the organic matter from one to 8% from the time your parents bought the property and to the time now in 2022?
Joel:Yep. Yep. We we early, earliest soil samples was eight was 1%. Today, it's over 8%. And when you consider that, every percentage increase in organic matter holds 20,000 gallons of water per acre.
Joel:So seven clicks would be seven times 23. A 40,000 gallons of water per acre. Because organic matter is like a sponge. It's, you know, soft, and it's it's, like, permeable. And so, so right now, we can hold a 40,000 gallons of water more per acre now than we did, you know, half a century ago.
Joel:And half a century ago, you know, a lot of people would say, well, that's a long time. No. No. It's not. In in geologic time, fifty years is is a is a spit in the ocean.
Joel:It's nothing. It's nothing. And so that's the beauty of this, that as much damage as we've create we've I mean, we've collectively, as a human, species, as much damage as we've created, it can be remedied extremely rapidly. That's the beauty of biology. Mechanics doesn't heal.
Joel:You know, if that wheel bearing goes out, you can go down there. You can say, oh, I'm sorry. You know? Did you just see some rest? Okay.
Joel:You need some rest. Here, you know, I'll I'll pour on some some oil. I'll I'll pray over you. I'll, you know, you you can do all sorts of things. You get back in the car and that wheelbarrow is gonna thump thump thump.
Joel:Yeah. But living things can forgive. You know? A wound on your hand, it'll heal. A wounded relationship can heal with an apology.
Joel:I mean, that's that's the the magnificence of living things versus mechanical things.
Harry:Mhmm. So one of the things you mentioned was the soil matter, organic matter improving from one to 8%. And a lot of people in kind of these industrialized, conventional food systems are seeing the exact opposite of that where we're zapping it down. That's right. What, what does that what does that world look like?
Joel:Well, what that world looks like is, is less hydration, so land dries out. As land dries out, it becomes more difficult to grow vegetation. When vegetation doesn't grow as much, you have less vegetation, so you have fewer biological exudates. In order for water to in order for vapor to condense, it needs a particle to condense on. And so, you know, Walter Yenny from doctor Walter Yenny from Australia is is the world leading guru of this.
Joel:He he says the whole climate change discussion is missing the point. It's not about greenhouse gas emissions. It's about it's about condensation in the atmosphere. That's the radiator of the planet. And the problem is we have so devegetated the planet with overgrazing, over tillage, over burning, over forestry depletion, you know, all these things that the the amount of vegetation on the surface of the planet is now incredibly less than it was two thousand years ago.
Joel:And so and so what happens is as the vegetation depletes, organic matter drops, water retention drops, flooding increases, drying increases, vegetation decreases, you don't have the exudates. Guess what? Now you don't have atmospheric condensation. You don't have cloud formation. Now rain patterns change.
Joel:Now, the the planet is having trouble cooling itself, And so it goes to places that have plenty of vegetation like over the tropics or, you know, parks in India and drops way more rain than normal. So you have you have extreme rain compensation in areas that are heavily vegetated, and you have extreme rain deprivation in places that are vegetatively lower. And that's why that's why, you know, you have these these anomalies. And so, so the yeah. There's an old Chinese saying that says, if you keep going the way you're you're headed if you keep going the way you're going, you're gonna end up where you're headed.
Joel:And, and so, you know, the fact that the fact that our our industrial chemically, fertilized soils are depleting both in volume and in organic matter, you know, is is the same thing that happened in Greece, in Rome, in India. I mean, you can just look at the ancient civilizations, the, you know, Libya, the North of I mean, Homer Homer who wrote the the Iliad and the Odyssey. Remember, you know, the Cyclops and the
Harry:Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Joel:Okay. He said he walked across the entire North Of Africa and never set left the shade of a tree. Libya supplied jaguars, lions, and and, and apes to the Colosseum in Rome for circuses and stuff. Well, there's only an animal in Libya now. I mean, it's it's just a desert.
Joel:Okay? And so so we we we can look through history, and and I get the burden. I I I feel it. You know? I feel incredibly, convicted about what my ancestors have done.
Joel:I get it. You know? I'm sorry. But the answer is not to just, to not just abandon the ecology, to say, well, let's not even try. No.
Joel:The answer is after you brush yourself off from repentance, take our mechanical ability, you know, opposing thumbs, and our intellectual capacity. Let's roll up our sleeves, and let's fix it. Mhmm. And I feel just to just to run that one step further, I feel like the discovery of petroleum in the early nineteen hundreds and and, you know, that golden age of of of cheap energy was almost like, was almost like god saying to humanity, I'm gonna give you one last chance, cheap energy to fix everything you've destroyed. You can build ponds.
Joel:You can, you know, you can you can do even better than the beavers. You can build swales. You can do permaculture. You can plant trees with backhoes. You know, you can do all sorts of you can remediate all this, in a couple of generations.
Joel:But instead of that, we built a food system that that takes 15 calories of energy to put one calorie on your plate. Mhmm. We built a food system that averages 1,500 miles between field and fork. We built a food system that that that takes way more energy than it actually offers, and and that's absolutely backwards. It ought to be running on solar energy through vegetation, carbon as a decomposer to feed the worms, to grow the soil, to grow the plants, to feed the people, to to steward this this this actual abundance cycle and not a scarcity cycle.
Brett:Joel, do you think that large industrial farms are actually aware of what they're doing to the soil, and do you have hope that they can actually change their practices?
Joel:It that's such a great question. You know, I I don't think so. I I think as a rule, I mean, Monsanto, you look at their website, they're presenting themselves as the ultimate sustainable agriculture, the repository of sustainable agriculture. So no. I I don't think so.
Joel:Now what I the people I meet though, on a daily basis, you know, you meet this farmer. He's got, you know, this a ranch, and he's got this acreage. He's growing it. And, man, I've just noticed, you know, about about, it it takes more money to get the same production. I'm losing blah blah blah blah blah, and I gotta make a change.
Joel:So I see it on an individual basis like this. But in the main, no. I don't I don't think here's the thing you gotta realize. If what we did became normal, it would completely invert the power, position, prestige, and profits of the entire food and farming system. That's a big ship to turn around.
Joel:Mhmm.
Harry:Yeah. Do do you ever think about the role of we touched on this a little bit, but just the role of money in all of this? Because we obviously got off the gold standard at a certain point. And I think that when we break money, it has a way of breaking values down the value chain, and food, I think, is clearly one of those. Do you think about that at all?
Joel:Well, I do. I think about it in terms of this, that we Wendell Berry writes a lot about this, that we as a culture have not figured out how to actually put an economic, liability on things that are liabilities. For example, if I go out here, when you came into the farm or you drove across the little creek out here, if I dump a bunch of pollution in that creek and the the EPA or Department of Environmental Quality has to come in here with a bunch of boom trucks and and and suck up yeah. Okay. Clean it up.
Joel:Alright? That actually goes on our gross domestic product record books as an asset. Mhmm. Because we make jobs, we burn fuel, we bought trucks, we, you know, economic activity. If we got a bunch of juvenile delinquents in the community and have to build a new juvenile detention center for all these delinquents, concrete, air conditioners, steel, wood, GDP goes up.
Joel:You know, Wendell Berry says, you know, it's it's as if what's wrong with us creates more GDP than what's right with
Brett:us. Mhmm.
Joel:And and so so the the bottom line for me is that when a culture cannot figure out how to economically quantify its cultural liabilities, it will tend to put a blind eye to them. And goodness, if it loses if if it if it views its liabilities as an asset, that's even worse. Mhmm. And so as a culture, we have not we have not as creative as we are, we have not figured out how to actually put, you know, put a, an economic value on the fact that we have a Mississippi River chemically created dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf Of Mexico. What what what what's a what's a dead zone the size of Rhode Island worth?
Joel:All those shrimp farmers, all those fisheries, all those things gone. What's that worth? We we a society that doesn't that can't quantify that will not quantify it, and therefore, will not rectify it because they they don't see a need. Yeah.
Harry:It's like the tragedy of the commons is directly related to our ability to because I I view a lot of it as this this externality related to printing money out of thin air Yeah. Which is breaks the natural law of of, like, economies. Right?
Joel:Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, oh, we gotta build more hospitals. Well, that should be a liability Right.
Joel:Not an asset. Now I'm not opposed to hospitals. I'm just suggesting that if we, you know, why why don't we figure out how to not have to use hospitals as much? You know, the fact that The United States look. You know, I'm a red blooded American like anybody else.
Joel:I love our country. Okay? I don't like a lot of things I see in it anymore, but I do love our country. And there are things that you wanna be first in. You wish the soccer team had won.
Joel:You know? You you you wanna be first in, you know, basketball. You let you wanna bring over the most Olympic golds. Right? But there are things we wanna be first in.
Joel:We are first in the world in chronic morbidity. Is it any wonder that we lead the world in chronic morbidity and our food culture? You go to anywhere in the world. I do this all the time. I ask people around the world.
Joel:When you think of American food, what do you think? McDonald's.
Harry:Yeah.
Joel:Always. Always. So we invented McDonald's, and we lead the world in chronic no. Have I done a scientific analysis? I'm not.
Joel:No. No. But, yeah, I think it's important to realize we invented factory farming. We we we brought, DDT to the world. We brought we brought this this mechanical mentality.
Joel:I'm a lot older than you guys. When I was a kid, for the first twenty years of my life, you never heard phrases that we have today, food allergy. You never it didn't exist. No. You know, if if if mom if if mama wanted to have a a birthday party for the three year old and invite the friends, she'd have to spend a week on the phone with all the moms saying, okay.
Joel:What can I you know, what's your kid allergic to? What can I get? No. You just everybody brought their stuff and they and they ate. And, you know, campylobacter, listeria, e coli, salmonella, you know, I didn't know anybody that had type two diabetes.
Joel:I I didn't know anybody that was diabetic. We all knew one fat person. Teresa and I were talking about this the other day. You know? She knew one fat man.
Joel:I knew one fat lady growing up. Now there's a ton of them. Okay? I'm just I'm just pointing out that we we as humans, you know, we have pretty short memories, actually. Yeah.
Joel:We tend to think I mean, you know, I wrote my first book on a typewriter. Now our young people don't know what a typewriter is, never seen seen one. You know? Had one yell down from the living room the other day, what are these big CDs? Yeah.
Joel:They were LP records. Okay? And and so we we tend to we do tend to have short memories. And and so, so what we what we have done is, is is we've gotten to a place where a lot of people don't even remember where where we were at one point. And so, you know, when you say, are they gonna change?
Joel:I think it I think that kind of change when you talk about money and and economy and stuff, as long as those as long as those profits are rolling in, I mean, who could have thought that Bayer with their glyphosate, law, legal litigation issues, could set aside $9,000,000,000 to pay off plaintiffs and not even take its product off the market. Have you ever heard of such a thing? No. It's it's just it's crazy.
Brett:We really do have short memories. I saw I saw this great picture on Twitter a couple weeks ago, and it was the fattest I think it was the fattest man in the country in 1850. He was like literally a circus act that would travel around, and he looked like he's probably somewhere between like three fifty, four hundred pounds.
Joel:Uh-huh. And I'm
Brett:like, if you go to Walmart, you'll see multiple people that are probably fatter than him now. Yeah. People don't realize that that was a circus act back back then versus now it's just completely normalized.
Joel:Yeah. I was on the I was on the board of the local fire department, and there are people that call 911 to get service because they can't walk out their door. Mhmm. They're so big. Yeah.
Joel:This is this is crazy. I don't wanna get on all that, but but, you know, you you were asking, are are when are they gonna see the light? And history indicates that things have to really the wheels have to fall off. Now I'm seeing wheels falling off in individual farmers and ranching operations. Their wheels fall off at the, you know, the epiphany happens and, oh, you know, and I gotta make a change.
Joel:But but overall, the industry as we know it, the food industry, the, you know, the the New Jersey Street where they make the red dye '20 '9 and the and they you know, all this stuff. That's not that's not gonna change, I think, for for a long time.
Harry:Especially when they've kind of drained the profits out of farming and made it so that there's not really an incentive to drive up higher food quality and do things the right way from a quality perspective.
Joel:No. In fact, right now, the farmer the farmer's share of the retail dollar across the board. Obviously, different commodities are different amounts, but but the average now sorry. Across the board is 9% of the retail dollar.
Harry:Wow.
Joel:So we're we're getting ready to do a new farm bill, and we could say the new farm bill, from now on, farmers don't don't get a penny. You know? They're not gonna get paid a penny, and it would only change the price of food 9%. Is that not something?
Brett:It's insane. Yeah. I wonder what percentage of the dollar it was back in, like, the fifties or sixties.
Joel:In the fifties and sixties, it was it was almost 50%.
Harry:Almost 50%.
Joel:Almost 50%.
Brett:And did you feel
Joel:like In the in the forties and fifties. But but, boy, as soon as TV dinners, Velveeta cheese, all that that convenience type stuff start coming in, it, it it really plummeted. I mean, yeah, I'm sure you've heard there's more money in the cardboard of the box of Wheaties than there is in the corn in the box of Wheaties.
Brett:There's probably new nutrient more nutrients in that cardboard box too, honestly.
Joel:Might might be.
Harry:So we've, we've had a a really fun last few days. We've been on this road trip, and we had a chance to to stop at White Oak Pastures and see Will Harris.
Joel:Mhmm.
Harry:And, he was mentioning Gabe Brown. Mhmm. We were mentioning to him that we were coming up here. And it seems like there's this amazing, group of of, regenerative farmers who have really pushed this message forward. But when you look back behind you guys in terms of the next generation, do you see what you would like to see in terms of kinda carrying the torch forward in terms of doing things the right way, raising high quality food, and creating what what you view as a a positive future.
Joel:Yes. Yes. You know, every generation thinks, oh, it's gonna die with me, you know, but it doesn't. It doesn't. And, so, yes, there is a whole cadre of, of young people, innovative, entrepreneur, way more, you know, computer savvy, than than us old guys.
Joel:And, I I that's not gonna be a problem. That's not gonna be an issue. I I think, in fact, you know, in the next fifteen years, fifty percent of all American agriculture equity is gonna change hands because the average farmer is 60 years old. So so, half of all American agriculture equity, that's land, buildings, equipment, is all gonna change hands in the next fifteen years. Now you can either say, oh, no.
Joel:What are we what are we gonna do? Or you can say, wow. What a time of unprecedented opportunity. This is this is this is as much opportunity as as, as goodness was in front of the early pioneers. You know, the Homestead Act and Laura Ingalls Wilder and, you know, it's an unprecedented time of opportunity.
Joel:And, and I'm just seeing thousands of young to middle aged folks, stepping out. And and many of these homesteaders, they'll homestead for a couple of years, and some of the some of the more, whatever, savvy entrepreneurial ones, hey. We wanna sell some eggs. And what happened what happens then is that that nearby lands where farmers are aging out will become available to either buy or or lease. And and this thing that started as a well, let's just feed our family.
Joel:You don't know. Ten years down the road, suddenly, it's a it's a going concern. It's a it's a real, you know, commercial business. So I think there's, I think there's a lot of of, opportunity and a lot of interest right now. I mean, we're you know, we run the apprentice program.
Joel:We're still getting right on, you know, about a hundred applicants a year for our 11 spots, and it's just consistent right along. All these young people are ready to they're ready to go do something. So I'm I'm very optimistic about that.
Brett:It's amazing how optimistic you are about the 50% too. Isn't it incredible how much of it just comes down to perspective as well? Because I'm sure there's probably a crop of farmers that are like, oh my gosh. The average age of a farmer is 68. What's gonna happen with this younger generation where you're like, no.
Brett:These applicants that are coming in and working with us, they're all they're all kick ass. They've got piss and vinegar, and they wanna Exactly.
Joel:Exactly. Exactly. They got energy. They got they got new ideas. And and let me tell you, nothing is as frustrating as trying to present a new idea to a hermit curmudgeon old farmer.
Joel:I mean, they're they're impossible. And so, you know, my mentor, Alan Nation, when I would ask him about this, he'd say, well, they're we just have to wait till they die.
Harry:Mhmm.
Joel:I mean, it I don't wanna get morbid, but but, I mean, literally, we have to have a a a changing of the guard. Yeah. And as these guys age out, their lands, obviously, some will be some will be bought up by Bill Gates and company. Alright? I get it.
Joel:But a lot of it is gonna be bought and or managed, by a bunch of people who didn't grow up on farms under the tutelage that said we can't do it that way.
Harry:Right.
Joel:And so suddenly, we've got all these young land stewards who didn't who don't have to delearn and unlearn and and and fight with grandpa Mhmm. That could just go and and do new stuff.
Brett:It's it's even been encouraging from a consumer's perspective for both of us too, not being farmers. We see it. Right? With our friends and family, there's almost been this awakening this last two to three years, this unintentional and positive benefit of COVID of people that wanna connect with their local rancher, and they care about sourcing grass finished beef, and they're avoiding the inner aisle of the grocery store. So I feel like that gives us hope all day long, just seeing the response and behaviors of other con concerned consumers.
Joel:Yeah. Well, we, John Moody and I started the Rogue Food Conference. Mhmm. We just had our our fifth conference in Tennessee. The next one's coming up here at Polyface in, in May, May '12 and '13.
Joel:And, this was the first time we sold out in a month in advance and had people trying to scalp tickets to get in. Wow. The the the the desire for this and the reason this is important is because what we're doing, again, both sides of the spectrum. We see increasing, noose tightening, tyranny tightening from the government, food police, regulations, that sort of thing, economic regulations. Who can you buy?
Joel:Who can you sell? Even a digital currency. I mean, there's there's all sorts of worrisome stuff, As as as a society starts to wane, the the government power, before it collapses, tends to become more authoritarian to try to circle the wagons, protect our power. Right? Well, that has stimulated a backlash that's that's just burgeoning in rural America, especially among direct producer consumer, you know, farm farm to consumer marketing to create circumvent of opera options.
Joel:So we have personal membership associations. We have a we have a food church in North Carolina. We've got, herd share for for milk. All these things, they're just they're just increasingly, developing on the on the landscape as people, find ways to build a parallel universe. Don't don't even try to be inspected.
Joel:Don't even try to comply with the license. Just let's just build a parallel universe. And, and and that's one of the most exciting things to me right now. There's a lot of of effort, innovation, and and, energy going into a parallel universe, and and I'm excited for it.
Harry:Do you think we can do that on a US dollar system, or do we need to have some sort of workaround there?
Joel:Well, if they don't if they don't mess it up too much, I think so. I mean I mean, it's a it's a good question. You know, when a when a money supply when a money supply becomes completely irrelevant, then then people resort to other things. And the beauty of the Internet now is let me tell you. When I when I was a teenager, this was Vietnam, and it was the beginning of the the hippie movement.
Joel:Okay? The peace hippie movement. You guys are too young for that. But, it was the beginning of the hippie movement. And and one one of the threads of that whole movement was what we what we'll call barter fairs.
Joel:Barter fairs. So this was a this was an anti IRS thing. We're not gonna pay taxes to fight in Vietnam. So this was one of the, you know, one of the threads of the protest movement was cashless. We're go we're gonna go we're gonna just trade.
Joel:And, so there were these barter fears. You know, I bring six chickens. Another guy brings shirt and, you know, and and and people just trade. Of course, the IRS hated it. Mhmm.
Joel:But but but I'm thinking today and and they they kind of, you know, they kind of flared out. You know? It it it just it went, and then it was done. But I'm thinking today, when you look at, you know, Craigslist I mean, at the democratization of information, We have an unprecedented opportunity to create barter among extremely diverse, sectors. For example, we go to an acupuncturist.
Joel:We pay in meat. So we take, you know, we well, what do you want? You know? And so we take some meat up, and, and that works. I I think that with the Internet now democratizing the ability to communicate across wide spectrums with people that have much broader, wider expertise and skills, services, and goods, I can actually imagine an almost, a bartering, kind of thing, you know, developing.
Joel:And, I mean, think I call this the uberization of the food system. Who would have guessed who would have guessed twenty years ago that millions of people around the globe would jump into cars with people that didn't have a special decal on the on the window, with drivers that didn't have any special training, and be and say take me to, you know, the Hilton. Nobody would have guessed that. What happened was the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker of of of the 15 hundreds were, were vetted by the village voice. The The butcher maker candlestick maker lived lived in a house above their shop.
Joel:Everybody knew what came in the front door, what went in the back door, that they they were embedded so the good ones were successful and the bad ones were not. With the industrial revolution, we took the butcher maker, candlestick maker, and scaled them up and placed them behind razor wire with guard houses, and and and people started getting scared. What's going on behind that wire? And people asked for the government to come in and oversee what they couldn't see behind the fence. That's the forties, fifties, and sixties, seventies.
Joel:Well, here comes the Internet and the computer, Airbnb and Uber, which completely circumvented and brought the the village butcher baker butcher baker candlestick maker, vetting from the feudal village was transformed into a global vetting with real time, monitoring, auditing through the Internet. And so the Internet has has reconfigured the, the auditing of yesteryear on a global scale. And so when you talk about how do you make I think that that kind of cleverness will will simply organically develop within the society with what we have now, the tools we have. There is just so much creativity going on. I I'm not sure at this point if it's gonna be crypto.
Joel:I mean, crypto's kinda had some some big hits here lately, And I'm concerned about digital currency just on its surface. Anything that could go in a computer could be hacked in a computer. I mean, that kind of thing. But I do think that there is enough, enough creativity and, practical, innovation in these spaces that if it's not the US dollar as we know it, people will still figure out how to how to transact win win situations.
Brett:Yeah. We've definitely seen tremendous demand for things like private membership associations and bartering systems. The question is, is there is there a way to be able to have those systems without the USDA? Because obviously, like, the Amos Miller situation is something that comes to mind for me. So I'm just curious
Joel:if you could So so so Amos Miller right now is the he is the front man for the PMA test. The problem with Amos Miller was he didn't have legal representation. He signed a cease and desist order that he never should have signed because he got very bad counsel. I mean, his court appointed counsel was against him. Alright?
Joel:Well, you know, for us peasants, the courtroom is an intimidating place. And if your own counsel thinks you're a jerk, that's really intimidating. Okay? Fortunately, now he's got some good counsel, really good counsel. Lead counsel is the attorney who who got the young guy in Wisconsin.
Harry:Kyle Rittenhouse.
Joel:Kyle Rittenhouse who got him off. K? So he got some good counsel now. So hopefully, that cease and desist order the the problem is the cease and desist order has muddied the water for the PMA. And so if we if we can get rid of the cease and desist order and go back to the fundamental PMA structure and let that go to court, then we're we're gonna have a win.
Joel:Or or or at least at least we're gonna have something definitive. Right now, the cease and desist order is is bigger than the PMA question. And all of us that are promoting PMAs and have seen them work and so far win in courts, we're desperate to have this this case go to trial to get a definitive precedent on the PMA, but we gotta get the cease and desist order out of the way first. So Got it. Yeah.
Joel:Amos Amos is definitely our poster boy right now. We're pulling for him, and, we hope that we hope that he will get, get to where his his moral and ethical arguments can actually be litigated and not just, court procedure when you sign this order.
Brett:Because he had, I think it was 4,000 members of his PMA.
Joel:That's right.
Brett:And they're saying, look. I'm consciously choosing to buy my meat, eggs, milk from you because I don't I want them as god intended. I don't want them sprayed with certain chemicals. And they would have they would have those chemicals sprayed on them if it was a USDA processing facility. Is that correct?
Joel:Well, yes and no. I mean, that's a little bit gray. But but the fact the fact is freedom of food choice is is perhaps one of the most, intimate personal decisions that a person can make. And when the government reaches into my mouth, I call that an invasion of privacy. And and, so my position is that as consenting adults, if we wanna voluntarily engage in commerce, we should be able to engage in commerce as consenting adults exercising our freedom of choice, you know, with with without a bureaucrat being involved.
Joel:Now we have to understand that where our culture is right now with health care and and the government intervention and dominance of health care, our our our official gut, our cultural position now is you don't own you. I don't own me. I am a I am a part of a of a societally collective collective organism. And so if I engage in risky behavior like drinking raw milk or eating uninspected chicken, if I engage in what the orthodoxy of the culture views as risky behavior, that's not just if I wanna hurt myself, let me hurt myself. It's now an economic liability on you because if I hurt myself, you have to take care of it.
Joel:And so people don't realize that when you start down this government intervention path, the ramifications become profound, down the line and show up in things like this. Mhmm. And so yeah. So so here we are with this kind of thing. I will tell you that we've got, Nick Nick, Frietis, who's a delegate here in Virginia, is, as we speak, putting in a bill for this next, general assembly in the spring to, allow customers to sign a waiver, a whole harmless waiver.
Joel:And, that that would be a remedy as well if it if it could be recognized. The biggest problem here is the federal the federal government, domination of what should be a state and local jurisdiction. So when I was in, Richmond One time testifying, I had a we had a we had a cottage food bill going in, and and I was testifying down there. And the the head of, meat and poultry inspection for Virginia, during a break, he came and came over and and, talked to me. He said he said, Joel, he said, we can't let people decide what to eat.
Joel:He said, we couldn't build enough hospitals fast enough to to handle all the sick people that would be getting, you know, dirty, tainted, pathogen food. Now I disagree completely with that because I think small farmers like us who don't have a bunch of, attorneys and insurance companies, protecting us, we're way more careful Mhmm. Than some of the bigger outfits. And we don't engage in some of the risky stuff that they do either, like, you know, twenty four seven breathing in fecal particulate in a confinement house. Alright?
Joel:Ours have fresh air and sunshine and grass. Okay. So so, on its surface, you know, we're not as as toxic or pathogenic. But without regard to that, the problem is I cannot argue against him on that point because there's no experiment that's been allowed. Mhmm.
Joel:What we need right now is for or somebody, congress, to to say, if a locality wants to have an unregulated food commerce within their jurisdiction, we give them the freedom to do so, and we're not gonna come in and shut them down. Then if our county wanted to try it and suddenly people started getting sick from bad food, well, okay. I'm I'm wrong. Now, you know, because I really think people would eat way better, be less sick, and we'd need fewer hospitals if we had unregulated direct direct I'm not saying we'll we'll supply Walmart. I'm saying direct producer consumer, interaction transaction.
Joel:But we can't even we can't even try the experiment because the federal government comes in and and dominates and says you can't. And so we're really under a we're really under a a a thumb here, that's that's a problem. And, in in our lack of experimentation, you know, when our country was founded, it was envisioned as a 50 state experiment. There was very little, very little, power irrigated to the federal level. Very little.
Joel:They didn't have a Department of Education, didn't have a Department of Housing, didn't have a Department of of, Health and Human Services, didn't have USDA, didn't have alright. I mean, just name your there was none of this. States did it. And and so if a state wanted to have a department of education, they could do their education. If another state said, you know what?
Joel:I don't think the state has anything to do with education. So we're gonna make our taxes low enough that parents can pay for their own education. Another state says, well, we think that there is some societal requirement for kids' education, but so what we'll get we'll give vouchers to parents so they can spend them wherever they want to. If a parent wants to send their kids to an atheist Vietnamese bow legged school, they can send their kids to an atheist Vietnamese bow legged school. Okay?
Joel:And, and so so you have these multiple experiments. Every, you know, states can watch each other. Oh, wow. They're, you know, their kids are doing better on the SAT or, well, they don't have any juvenile detention centers. They're, their their teenage suicide rates going down.
Joel:I wonder why. Well, maybe it's because that state has the 10 commandments in the class. You know, imagine I mean, people people that that that extol the virtues of diversity have arrogated to a one size fits all federal level all of these things that that our founders imagined being organic experiments and and let's try different things. And and so, you know, that's that's our fundamental problem right now, which is and and frankly, I'm not optimistic that that's gonna change anytime soon. I think I think I think the power irrigation in Washington is just on a juggernaut, and it's just gonna get it's gonna get worse before it finally collapses.
Joel:And so that's why I I don't have enough energy and time to sit here, whatever, complaining about all that. I'm putting all my attention energy, or let's start these young farmers. Let's get these entrepreneurs going. Let's build direct alliance, direct, you know, transactions, and let's just build a parallel universe that doesn't need Putin and doesn't need Fauci and doesn't need any of these people, and and and doesn't need hospitals very much. Okay?
Joel:And let's just build a parallel universe.
Harry:Yeah. It sounds like what you're saying is top down problems can't really be solved by top down solutions.
Joel:That's right. That's right. That's right. That's that's Einstein's theory of, what is it? Insanity.
Joel:Right? Try trying to do fix things with with the same thing that created the problem. And, so, yeah, I I'm a big believer in bottom up. If we've got a top down issue, the solution's gonna be bottom up.
Harry:Well, it's great to see the trajectory of everything and and just seeing a younger generation interested in this stuff. And I think a lot of that is due to a lot of the work that you've put out there and just your ability to continue to educate on these topics. So we're just grateful that you've opened your doors to us and come back on our podcast for round two. So just, really thankful for this conversation and just all the information you put out there. It's been a huge inspiration for us.
Joel:Great. Well, it's been a privilege and an honor and, blessings on you.
Brett:Thank you. Yeah. Thanks, Joel. Move some cows or what?
Joel:I don't think I'm gonna move them today. They've got plenty, and I'm just gonna I'm just gonna let them let them rest overnight. I'll move them tomorrow.
Brett:Love it. Love it. Well, thank you so much, Joel. Really appreciate it.
Joel:Thank you.
Harry:Thanks, Joel.
Creators and Guests
