Today, Joel joins Ross and Christophe to share his practice of duplicating nature’s patterns on the farmscape. He offers his take on the flaws in the environmentalist approach to climate change and where the Christian faith community, libertarians, and economists fall short. Joel also describes how the regulatory environment is prejudiced against small-scale operations, exploring the way oversight stifles innovation.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Christophe Jospe: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. We are still at the Living Soil Symposium. I’m Christophe Jospe, here with my co-host, Ross Kenyon. We’re really excited to do this podcast, listener. I think you will figure out why if you’ve been following this journey all along. This is a real treat for you. And if you’re just tuning in for the first time, welcome, happy to have you on board. Ross, how about I pass it over to you?
Ross Kenyon: Sure. Hello, and bienvenue to the podcast. Happy to be here in Quebec and Montreal. We have with us today Joel Salatin, or [unclear] in Québécois. He prefers Joel Salatin, either one, that’s good. You probably know him from his many books that are excellent and well worth the read, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which has actually aged very well. I recently read it and I’m glad that it holds up. And also you might know him as the self-described lunatic from Food, Inc., if you’ve seen that documentary. Wanted to dive in, Joel. We like anyone’s backstory. Can you tell us about the [unclear] of Joel?
Joel Salatin: Well, sure. So we’re in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Our family came to the farm in 1961. My dad and mom did the typical work off the farm to make enough cash to pay the mortgage and pay for it. Took about ten years to pay off the farm. So as I was growing up there, you know, I fell in love with it. Got my first chickens when I was ten and just loved the farm and wanted to be there full-time. And so through high school I sold at the local curb market and cut my teeth on direct marketing there, sold to a couple schools, restaurants, and understood that a small farmer, you know, we had to be the marketer, the distributor, the processor, to get that increased income.
And so after college came back, did a two-and-a-half-year stint as an investigative reporter at the local newspaper. And Teresa and I got married, lived in an attic apartment in the farmhouse, drove a fifty-dollar car, lived on three hundred bucks a month, grew all our own food, made our own, you know, heat with our firewood. Never went out to eat. We never had a TV — we still don’t have a TV — and devoted ourselves to this dream of farming. And today we’re, you know, bumping on a three-million-dollar business with twenty full-time salaries, servicing about fifty restaurants, four thousand families, several institutions. And it’s a very exciting ride.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, your farming practices are extremely well known. I had a friend over recently and I was reading your books preparing for this. I was trying to explain exactly how you do what you do, and I seized upon the simple imagery of biomimicry — you’re trying to emulate natural systems. You’re not trying to conquer nature, you’re not trying to fight nature. You’re trying to take advantage of that natural momentum in the simplest way possible. There’s, like, there’s a gracefulness to it. Is that a fair description?
Joel Salatin: It is, in some ways. I call it a choreography. So our whole idea is, how does nature function? And when you look at nature, you see, well, there’s animals, animals move, they don’t stay in the same place, you know, soil is built by fertility, and, you know, you don’t ship carbon very far. And you start putting some of these things together, and it’s all about the pattern. Can we [unclear] nature’s pattern? And can we lay it down on a farmscape and duplicate nature’s pattern on a farmscape?
Ross Kenyon: And you have this beautiful phrase: mob stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization.
Christophe Jospe: You picked it up at the end, but you’re not as good at saying that as Joel. Try it one more time.
Ross Kenyon: Mob stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization.
Christophe Jospe: He still stumbled.
Joel Salatin: You see, it’s hard to realize that I spent, you know, hours in front of a mirror saying mob stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization before I did it the first time in public.
Ross Kenyon: So you are, you are way braver than I am.
Christophe Jospe: It’s funny, because since we’re here in Quebec there are headphones, because obviously not everyone is bilingual. And so I don’t know what the translator had to do to even get that. They probably were — it’s like [unclear]. I don’t know how to say it, okay?
Ross Kenyon: Okay, but that’s, that’s the technique, right? That’s what you’re doing here.
Joel Salatin: Yes. Yes. The whole idea is to mimic the way the bison, the pheasants, the prairie chickens, all of this movement. If we could close our eyes and think back, you know, to pre-European America, North America, I think if there’s one thing that would strike us — as we just say, we can fly a drone over North America in 1500 — what would strike us is the sheer activity of things going on: the animals, the birds, and the diversity of plants, the amount of biomass. To think about eight- to ten-foot-tall grass in Nebraska and Kansas stretching out for the Sandhills, you know, as far as the eye can see. Just this sea of grass. And even New Mexico, you know, was full of grass forage. And just that abundance, that picture of abundance — it’s quite a powerful picture.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I remember reading Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage about Lewis and Clark’s expedition. And it seems like they didn’t have to go anywhere to hunt. [unclear] “Today we killed twenty elk” — you’re like, just from the river, you didn’t have to go anywhere. It was that abundant.
Joel Salatin: Yeah. And with a flintlock. [unclear] It wasn’t the pump shotgun, you know, it was a flintlock.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, and it’s kind of funny when you think or looking back a hundred years or even millennia. And in reading your book, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs, you talk about things that used to be that aren’t there anymore, that did great ecosystem services, like the beavers, or the ways that soil was totally built up. And so here we are, humans, trying to do the right thing by Mother Nature and trying to really be stewards of the land, because God has given us this land and we want to do our best to take care of it. But could you talk a little bit about — I don’t know, for lack of a better word — the pillaging that humans have done to the Earth?
Joel Salatin: Well, yeah, if you study the rise and fall of civilizations, what dominate, you know, the books in the history record are all the wars. You know, war, war, war. But most of those wars were about land and about resources and feeding our people, or ocean access, harbors. So the rise and fall of civilization is unfortunately a story that doesn’t get told as much as the consequence of resource exploitation, which was conquering. You know, then you have a war. And in fact a lot of people think today that the next wars in the world will be over things like water, you know. It won’t be over [unclear].
And so the rise and fall of civilizations — I mean, think of Egypt and India and different things. All of the deserts in the world were man-created. I mean, Homer, who wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey, walked across the entirety of North Africa, said he never left the shade of a tree. And to imagine that desert was at one time a forest thousands of years ago is quite amazing. And in our own North America here, you know, the abundance from 200 million beavers, you know, 150 million bison. I mean, in fact it should give us all pause to realize that 500 years ago there was more weight of animals on North America 500 years ago than there is today, including all the people.
Ross Kenyon: That’s amazing. I noticed also that you love referencing 1491 by Charles Mann, and another part of this story is that the landscapes, especially of the Americas, were not just naturally created but actually quite intensively managed — the human factor of it. When environmentalists sometimes think about nature, humans are apart from it, they’re separate. But the way that you farm, you think actually this is sort of like an active management experience of nature. And that is a key thing that we’re losing in the sort of debate over the environment.
Joel Salatin: Well, sure. When we look back at what I call the kind of the conquistador mentality toward resources, anyone who cares and who thinks wants to repent in sackcloth and ashes. All right? So I’ve done that, I admit there, let’s do that. But is the answer then that, well, because our ancestors did it this way and it was treated badly, well then the only way we can interact with the ecology with integrity is to abandon it? And so let’s lock it up in a state park, wilderness area, let’s lock it up somewhere, so that the only way to actually have integrity ecology management is to make sure we don’t desecrate it with human breath.
And I suggest — yes, I get the guilt, I get the “oh, I’m sorry.” Well, let’s do that, wipe ourselves off and stand up and use our intellectual capacity and our mechanical ability in our hands. And let’s instead use these hands that have harmed, and an intellectual ability that have harmed, and use them to heal. So rather than having environmentalism by abandonment, let’s have environmentalism by participation.
Ross Kenyon: So do people know where to place you? Because some of the things you say strike one as very left-wing, other things are very conservative and sometimes very free market. Listeners to the show will know that we reference all sorts. We reference free market economics, we reference quite liberal environmental readings, deep ecology, stuff like that. We keep things interesting, to read stuff you might not always agree with, and don’t agree with a hundred percent. I know that’s a big value of yours, that you reference. What is wrong with the left’s approach to environmentalism? And I really enjoyed Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal, the stories in that.
I think — I’m sorry to ramble here, I’ll say one more thing. I think most people, when they hear, like, if you ask them should [unclear] be regulated, the knee-jerk reaction would be like, well, sure, yes. And they’re not always thinking about how the details really matter, and just more of it for the sake of it is often quite dangerous, and you’ve been on the business end of that many times. What are they missing?
Christophe Jospe: Can I just pile on a funny anecdote? At the campfire, where Joel was basically holding court, and a bunch of Canadians were saying, well, of course more policy is good for farming, and I could see where this is going. You were very diplomatic.
Joel Salatin: Yeah. Well, again, the whole idea that government intervention — I’ll just use that as a broad term, government intervention — is necessary on so many levels assumes that there is an elite that knows way more than the crowd. And often it’s the commoner, it’s the peasant, who actually has the common-sense knowledge to figure out how to do things. And when you arrogate all the decision-making to a centralized level and assume that a bunch of academic elites are going to be able to determine the best approach, you necessarily dismiss or marginalize the contribution of all of the peasants who are actually down here in the trenches working every day.
And so I think the reason that I’ve taken the moniker Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic — I’ve taken that moniker is because I frankly got tired of “well, he’s an environmentalist, so I guess he wants bigger government, more agencies, more oversight,” you know, name your additional government. And what I’ve seen — I mean, I can just give you an example. The environmentalists got through legislation, for example, to subsidize riparian protection on farms. So they paid farmers: if you get your cows out of the creek, we’ll pay to have an alternative water system put in so they don’t have to drink in the creek. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?
Ross Kenyon: Sure.
Joel Salatin: But the problem is, by the time the bureaucracy got through it, they would not put in mobile portable water systems. They were all concrete pads with, you know, installed water systems that did not have enough flow to handle mob stocking. So here you have now thousands of farms in the United States with government-supported riparian protection water schemes, infrastructure that precludes mob stock grazing, because the water flow in each of these little permanent stations fails. Number one, they’re stationary, so you don’t have water where the cows need to be. And number two, the flow is assuming a continuous graze model, which is, you know, what’s the orthodoxy — continuous graze model, where ten cows can access this water for an hour and ten cows access that one for an hour, and you don’t have to get all the water together.
When you begin actually mimicking what the bison did in nature and you start running groups of 500, 600, 1,000 animals together, run on small acreages and moving them in this biomimicry migratory choreography, it creates needs for different infrastructure to accommodate that level of biomass and biological management. And you can’t do it with a little, you know, piece of concrete and a little toilet tank stopper on it. You need some different infrastructure.
So that’s a perfect — so we actually lease farms who have participated in this, you know, environmental money, and the first thing we do is completely abandon that whole multi-thousand-dollar government-paid-for program, because there’s really nothing in it that we can use and we have to put in our own system that’s functional. And so, you know, there’s just an example of good intentions gone awry, because the devil is in the details and it is in how you actually implement the program. And that can be said, you know, over and over and over again.
Ross Kenyon: You know what breaks my heart about policy like that is that once it’s in place — and it goes through the legislative process, which, who knows how many hands get in the cookie jar in that process, but even assuming that it makes it through relatively unscathed, conditions on the ground can change. And then if you’re locked into this thing, like, there’s no — what’s Milton Friedman’s line? Something like, there’s no such thing as a temporary government program. Like, once those rules are set, they’re probably gonna be there for a while. So I think a base level of skepticism saying, is this going to adapt fast enough? Is this the best way to do this? And I’m not sure. You have things too, like — yeah, go ahead.
Joel Salatin: Yeah, a perfect example, I’ll give a perfect example. So in 1906 Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle. And as the food system industrialized and it developed in its industrialization and opaqueness, people got concerned about, can we trust Armour? Can we trust Swift and Company? Can we trust these, you know, these big outfits? And of course Upton Sinclair exposed a lot of problems in there. And Teddy Roosevelt, being a fairly communist kind of guy, was happy to create an agency of oversight, the Food Safety and Inspection Service. So here we go, through this industrial system with an industrial-scale oversight and whole federal agency. And we move up closer to today, and what’s happened is that this oversight is now extremely prejudicial to small-scale operations.
And so I can tell you, you know, when the inspection service visited us the first time and we had this open-air chicken processing facility —
Ross Kenyon: That’s on Food, Inc. It is.
Joel Salatin: Yes it is. It’s on Food, Inc. Yeah, they saw us, we were illegal. I said, why? Well, they said, because you can’t be outside and be sanitary. I guess these guys never go on picnics, but anyway, they said you inherently can’t be sanitary and be outside — even though we had empirical data showing that we had 25 times less colony-forming bacterial units per milliliter than the chlorinated factory USDA-inspected chicken. So here we were fighting for our farm and our viability on a system that was predicated on an industrial scale. As our politician’s legislative aide said, when we had a big meeting with them, she said, is it possible that you bureaucrats could not have conceived of an operation like Polyface when we were making this regulation? Of course, of course they didn’t.
What I’m getting to is that there’s a lot of thinking now that with Uberization — let’s just, you know, think of what a shake-up Uber has been. I mean, you get in a car with a complete stranger and you don’t know whether the car’s been through a rigorous checking, you don’t know the person’s background. Well, why does Uber work? Because there’s an instantaneous feedback loop. If you’re a bad rider, they can say, we’re not going to pick you up anymore, and if you don’t like the driver, they’re out of business. So the Uberization of the economy is part of the fragmentation, the democratization of information.
And so in the food system, as we bring this to the food system, the reason we didn’t have to have government oversight in food safety 500 years ago in the village was because everybody knew who the shyster butcher, baker and candlestick maker were, because the village talked, right, gossiping, and everybody talked about it. As we industrialized the food system and put big “no trespassing” security fences around everything, the food system became industrially opaque, which created fear in people. Now with the internet and with real-time feedback, auditing and monitoring and conversations, the Uberization of our real-time feedback loop is mimicking the village, the village feedback loop of the butcher, baker and candlestick maker of 500 years ago, making the industrial-scale food safety oversight of neighbor-to-neighbor food commerce obsolete.
Christophe Jospe: I love what you’re saying, and it brings to mind something that you had brought up when you were at this fireside chat and said, well, if I’m king for a day and I really want to change one thing, it would be: give people the freedom to choose where their food comes from. Which seems a lot like that’s the Uberization, right? But can you unpack that for us, and also in terms of this, where policy has gone wrong, but how this might make great effects in policy?
Joel Salatin: Well, listen, every day I travel around the world, and especially in the developed world — now, not so much in Africa and in, you know, other places, I don’t want to be condescending here, but you know what I’m talking about, the less sophisticated, less technocracy type of cultures — but in the ones that are what we have, is a complete lack of choice, of food choice in the marketplace. If I want to buy a glass of raw milk, I can’t buy a glass of raw milk. And yet if I decide that’s what my body wants for fuel, I mean, to feed my three-trillion-member internal microbiome, some elite person out there has told me no, I can’t do that.
So, you know, we live in a time of choice. I’m going to use some loaded words here, and so I would simply suggest that with the amount of choice available to consenting adults as voluntary participants in acts of choice, that should be extended to something as intimate as what becomes flesh of our flesh and bone of our bones. And so I’m a big believer in what I call the food Emancipation Proclamation, where we would free up the latent entrepreneurial food system for participants who actually see the regulatory oversight as demanding something that harms us instead of helps us.
You know, when they say we have to put an antimicrobial on our chickens, for example, to become government inspected, to have an antimicrobial on the chickens — we don’t want to put an antimicrobial on our chickens, and you should have the right to choose a chicken that doesn’t have antimicrobials on it. This just seems so basic, human rights: that the human right to choose our own food is certainly as big a human right as whether to worship or speak or assemble or any of the other rights that most of us in the free world have.
Ross Kenyon: I find it a bit insulting that — you use the example of a waiver. How come I can’t go to a local farm and waive my rights to sue? Hey, I know I’m taking the risk here, I know it’s not USDA inspected. Yet that is not good enough.
Joel Salatin: No, it’s not good enough, because every legal expert that we’ve consulted says at the end of the day you can’t waive away your — you can’t waive away your safety. In other words, if you go to a playground and you signed a hold-harmless arrangement, and the playground owner actually had a piece of equipment that was negligently kept up, you can still sue, because you can’t waive away your rights to safety. So yeah, we tried that. We tried that in Virginia. We went through the whole state to see if we could get all of our people to sign a waiver. All of our people are happy to sign a waiver. But no, it just doesn’t hold up.
Ross Kenyon: So we might not be making friends by doing this podcast. We’ve been picking on the left, we’ve been picking on the government, we’re coming for the right too.
Christophe Jospe: All right, man, it’s coming right now. So let’s pick on the right.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, your book The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs is, I think it’s unique among your books because it’s written for your tribe, right?
Joel Salatin: Yes, it is. I call it my coming-out book. I’ve waited a long time to do that. But yes, again, my moniker is Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist. The first one is Christian, and of course the faith community as a whole has certainly not been known for environmental stewardship. In fact it’s been known to disparage tree-huggers, pinko commie, you know, Earth muffin. I mean, we got all sorts of, you know, cool slang phrases, and there’s been quite a bit of tension between the faith community and the environmental community. And so I actually see this as a real problem in the faith community, where we say, well, it’s all God’s stuff. And I ask, well, do you think God is really happy for a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico?
Ross Kenyon: It’s dominion, Joel.
Joel Salatin: Oh yeah. [unclear] Right, yeah, I know, it’s all about dominion, except dominion is arrogated to a place of conquistadors. Conquistadorism — that’s not a word, but I think everybody knows what I mean.
Ross Kenyon: I’ll allow it.
Joel Salatin: Yeah, you’ll allow it.
Ross Kenyon: If it expresses what you’re saying, it’s good enough.
Joel Salatin: Conquistadorism as opposed to nurturing. I mean, the dominion — yes, power is part of it, but the other part of it is, oh, I’m in charge, that means I’m responsible for all this. That’s the other side that is not part of the conversation. It’s all about the power as opposed to the responsibility. And so I’m trying to bring into that discussion the need to dare to ask, is what’s on the menu — is what I believe in the pew reflected in what’s on the menu? Does God care? And those are questions that are big on me.
Why is it that in any average church, if you have a potluck and you dare to go to the elders and say, um, can we not use any styrofoam? How about we go down to the thrift store and buy a bunch of plates and we’ll wash them with an eco-friendly detergent? And they get funny — like, so, the average church: where are you, some sort of green [unclear] Earth muffin, you know? I mean, that’s the reaction. And so what I’ve found is, if there is one non-partisan thing, it’s food, because we all eat. I mean, you can even be a nudist, you know, but food you pretty much have to partake of. And that’s a really broad bridge.
And so if we come back to food as an expression of Earth, of creation stewardship, it pushes the faith community down this road to wrestle with, well, is there a right and wrong way to farm? Is there a right and wrong way to produce food? And I don’t have all the answers, but I know that it honors God to at least wrestle with the question. That’s what I’m trying to bring.
Ross Kenyon: I would think so. One thing I really like about Christianity is that the standard that Christ set is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to actually mimic as mortals, as a fallen being, as one might say theologically. And one of the reasons why Christianity may not be as popular in my generation as it was in others is that standard is so difficult. And there’s very few people that I see that you might label as consistently Christian. Like, I see Seventh-day Adventists or Quakers who are really rigorous. It’s very hard to maintain that level of saying no to war, not wanting your taxes potentially, willing to go to jail because you don’t want to pay for war. And so you have Christians who sometimes — sometimes it doesn’t feel like their heart is fully in it, or that you’re that committed, because Christianity is a really radical idea.
Joel Salatin: Well, it is. And so I think that part of the reason why the church, if you will, has lost a lot of its power is the hypocrisy of it. I mean, whether it’s the Roman Catholic sex scandals that of course are rocking our world and rocking the Roman Catholic Church right now, or whether it’s young people who go to science class, you know, environmental sciences class, and learn about what grandma and grandpa have done to the Earth and then go to church and don’t hear anything addressed about that. And yet, you know, we recite “the Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” and we say that in the creed, and then, you know, in the stuff they’re seeing, that level of hypocrisy there as well. And nothing drives away people quicker from organizations than hypocrisy, having your walk not match your talk.
And so in The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs I’ve enjoyed kind of putting forth the idea that all of physical creation is an object lesson of spiritual truth, because you’re right, spiritual truth often is nebulous. What does forgiveness look like? You know, what does loving your neighbor look like? All right? And so I think — I may be wrong, but I think one of the reasons that we have this physical creation is so that God could demonstrate what it looks like, what neighborliness looks like. And guess what? Forgiveness does not look like a farm that has to use more and more drugs all the time to keep its animals healthy. That’s not forgiving. Forgiving is not a farm that has to use more chemicals to keep its soil healthy or keep the bugs away. A forgiving farm is one that has resilience — that’s the environmental term, resilience — but forgiving means that it has more stability, more balance.
Trust me, a golden rule farm — do unto your neighbors what you want them to do unto you — is not a farm that stinks up the neighborhood, or pours pollution down a river, or makes a dead zone and eliminates the shrimp fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico. That is not neighborliness. And so bottom line for me is, I want people who come and visit our farm, I want them as they leave to say to each other, oh, that’s what forgiveness looks like. Oh, that’s what abundance looks like. Oh, that’s what neighborliness looks like. And if we can get the spiritual concepts physical, then perhaps the faith community could re-establish some credibility in our world.
Ross Kenyon: It sounds like you’re onto something. So we’ve been throwing punches on all sides of the political spectrum. I have one more on that theme too.
Christophe Jospe: I’m just queuing you up, Ross, to be asking your question.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, give it a try. Yeah. Well, so, so what’s wrong with libertarians?
Joel Salatin: Oh yeah. What’s wrong [unclear]? Let’s look. Absolutely. The problem with libertarians is that they take a completely me-centered approach to everything. They deny that it takes a village, and it does take a village. And so, yeah, they laugh at Hillary for saying, you know, it takes a village. Well, it does take a village. Anybody who’s had a child knows it takes a village. Okay? And if we look at soil — the soil, you know, the actinomycetes, the mycelium, the [unclear], the azotobacter bacteria — nothing exists by itself. It is a village. It’s a village in the soil. It’s a village in our home. It’s a village in our community. It is a village.
And so, you know, the libertarians. I mean, one of the key gurus of libertarianism, he actually visited our farm, and he said as he left, well, of course, I’m an Earth-firster: first we take over the Earth and use it up, and now we’re going to go to Mars and use it up.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] tell me who it was.
Joel Salatin: That’s a secret, I won’t do that.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, better not.
Joel Salatin: But, but, you know, I just — I was speechless. How could anybody be that ridiculous? And so one of the reasons that I use the word commons so frequently — commons, we don’t hear it enough, I think, in our discussions, just in our culture, we don’t hear the word commons. It’s got a little bit of a heritage to it, you know, the commons. And among millennials especially it really stimulates conversation: commons, what do you mean by that? Haven’t heard that word, no. It’s the stuff that was here before us, like soil, like water, like community, intellectual capacity. It’s the commons.
And so we believe that as a result of farming, that we should leave more commons to our children rather than leave fewer commons. And of course America, as well as most agriculture in the world, has actually left less commons: less potable water, less soil, less breathable air. And so as a libertarian, yes, I’m a small-governmenter, but I think that we need to message the village and the commons. And we’re not an island, we’re not independent, we’re not just individuals, we’re way more than that as well. And I think that’s where the libertarians have a weakness, is failure to recognize those larger dimensions of individual responsibility and liberty.
Christophe Jospe: Just to make a comment on that. I mean, that’s sort of, that’s regeneration, right? That’s not just our land, our communities, and we’re leaving it better than we found it. Yeah. Where do you — Ross?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m not totally sure why that is. If you read someone like F. A. Hayek, his focus on complexity and being embedded in social systems that are diverse and multi-dimensional, that’s a whole different way of thinking about society rather than the sort of neoclassical supply-and-demand libertarian econometrics approach to everything. I’m not sure why that latter approach is always so favored, or at least is the more caricatured version that you see everywhere. I’m not sure why that is, because it’s part of the tradition [unclear]. It’s just neglected a little bit. Yeah. Well, what are the significant problems? You mentioned economists.
Joel Salatin: So I’ll go there just for a moment. One of the problems that we have in our culture — in fact in Western culture, all the cultures basically that are outgrowths of the Greco-Roman Western reductionist, linear, compartmentalized, individualized —
Ross Kenyon: You just generate these things everywhere.
Joel Salatin: — or whack, segmented, segregated. Yeah, okay. So one of the problems is that we don’t have a way to measure — you mentioned the word complexity, which is a wonderful word — the complexity of ramifications of an activity. So what happens is, in America we measure our success by gross domestic product, GDP, gross domestic product. Well, if I go out and pollute the river in front of my house, that actually adds to gross domestic product, because it’s going to take labor, machinery, energy and time to clean it up.
Ross Kenyon: And you created jobs.
Joel Salatin: And you create jobs, yeah. And so, you know, prisons are a perfect example. You know, the fastest growing job market in the world: security and prisons. And all of that should come off the gross domestic product as a liability if you do accounting. You know, there’s liabilities and assets, right? And to call more prisons assets is absurd. To call production of corn — without accounting to the fact that every bushel of corn costs us three bushels of soil — to call the bushel of corn an asset without measuring the three bushels of soil as a liability, I’m out of words to describe.
Ross Kenyon: How is that possible?
Joel Salatin: Well, it certainly is untrue. It’s a lie. And so the fact is that a culture that doesn’t have a way, either in accounting or in the political sphere or whatever, to account for these massive asset losses or liability incursions is a society doomed to fail. You can’t call bad good and expect it to function.
Ross Kenyon: So to take it back to the mob stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization — that was better.
Christophe Jospe: That’s real quick, though. Joel, do you have somewhere to be at any time?
Joel Salatin: No. I do, but not soon.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. We’re gonna leave that in the tapes, probably. Okay, sorry, Christophe, go back to your lovely — you did it. Thanks. Thanks for asking.
Well, so, to take it back to that thing I just said, you know, you’re talking about assets. And assets, if it’s a piece of equipment, it depreciates. But here in the mob stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization, you have appreciating assets. You have animals which are growing bigger, and hey, what do you know, they’re sequestering carbon — which obviously Nori cares deeply about, because we want to help people who are doing that thing get paid to do more of that thing and create an incentive market where people are like, hold on, I can farm carbon and there’s a voluntary market out there that’s gonna pay me for my carbon removal certificates.
So, I mean, there’s a lot to unpack. You could talk about appreciating versus depreciating assets, but that’s not actually my question — maybe you can work it in there. I want to talk about scale. Like, we want more of you all around the world to start doing this thing now, to present an alternative to people who care deeply about how their food is produced and where their food comes from, and the interaction between that land steward and the way that food is made, to say, you know what, I choose that and I want that. But kind of spell it out for us. How do you see this going down and all happening a whole lot more quickly?
Joel Salatin: Yeah. Well, goodness. Again, if I could be king for the day, I would eliminate all crop insurance and government subsidies.
Ross Kenyon: You heartless b*stard.
Joel Salatin: Yeah, I know, it’s completely heartless.
Ross Kenyon: Let’s quickly just tell us: why is that bad?
Joel Salatin: Well, what’s bad is that again you have a preferred group that has decided, this group, we’re going to take taxpayer dollars from you with violence at the point of a gun — you know, if you don’t pay your taxes, they’re going to come after you — and we’re going to [unclear], we’re going to make sure that we protect and shelter this certain little segment here, and we’re not going to deal with [unclear]. What happens is, if you start picking winners and losers in the marketplace, you arbitrarily pick winners and losers in the marketplace, the problem is that the marketplace is way too dynamic to be able to do that with any level of whatever integrity, because it’s flexing, it’s moving around.
And so if we took away — I mean, this is Michael Pollan’s whole thing, is why does a carrot, you know, cost more than a Snickers bar? Well, it’s because carrot farmers don’t get crop insurance. You know, the corn farmers make the corn syrup to go in the Snickers bar, get the crop insurance. So what you have is a skewed evaluation of commodities and of foodstuffs in the marketplace. And so the first way to bring honesty into the marketplace is to take out the prejudicial governmental involvement that skews the winners and losers. It makes winners out of people who otherwise would lose and makes losers out of people who otherwise would win. And that’s incredible. In a time where social justice is on everybody’s lips, that should curl the hair of anybody who wants to espouse justice.
Ross Kenyon: You know, one thing I’ve seen too with regard to food, or just talking about capitalism generally, is people will say, well, look at the free market run amok now, where you have giant ag companies controlling everything. If you read, like, your book Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal — like, what free market? Exactly. It seems like there’s nothing but regulations that you have to wade through, and you don’t have the lawyers to do it. That’s — you’re just one guy.
Joel Salatin: That’s right. And I have a bunch of attorneys. So yeah, we haven’t had a free market in agriculture for a very, very long time. And so to say that where we are is a result of free markets is simply to completely not appreciate the amount of manipulation that we’ve had over a long period of time that brought us to where we are.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And the beginning of wisdom is calling things by their true name. You’re like, you can’t even have a conversation with — that is capitalism? Should we probably all oppose capitalism then? But then, is that a useful way to describe the thing? I don’t know. You have [unclear].
Christophe Jospe: Word games, pretty quick, I think.
Joel Salatin: Well, I think that the liberals do have a point when they say that capitalism without morality is actually no better than any other system. And I would tend to agree with that. And that’s where this moral capitalism, a moral compass, comes into play, which is where we farmers — if it were a level playing field without all of the, call it the stacked deck against us. Here’s what happens: when I’ve got a neighbor, a neighbor farmer, he’s asking me, you know, what I’m doing, I tell him what I do, and if it were just he and I having a conversation I could pretty much win him over every time. But what’s the next thing that he does after our conversation? He goes and he reads what the land grant universities have said. And the land grant universities, of course, are all basically lackeys of the industrial ag sector. They’re the ones that provide the seed money for the research, the seed money for all of that.
And so what you have is a stacked deck. If it were just he and I being able to have a conversation, without any of these, you know, the USDA and the land grant universities and the research and all that, if it were just he and I having a conversation, I stand a pretty good chance of winning. But because of this inordinate power stacked to promote the orthodoxy, the unorthodox view can hardly get a word in edgewise because of all the verbiage coming from the orthodoxy.
Ross Kenyon: But it seems like you’ve made great progress. I guess we go back to the — what is it called, the grass, grass farming, what does it — Stockman Grass Farmer. So you go back to like the origins of, like, those, like Whole Earth Catalog and something. You crazy. I mean, organic is now mainstream. I know there’s plenty of criticism to go around for big organic and whether or not that’s actually adhering to it.
If you’re not about capitalism — capitalism without morality being a failure — the standard that you’re trying to set is quite high. It seems like you are very passionate about your work and you expect a lot of yourself, and I’m sure people who work with you. It probably is not the easiest job to do, maintain the standard, expecting everyone to say, hey, [unclear], just looking at the label saying if it’s organic, instead of just relying on the government to pass a law. You have to take responsibility for yourself and all of your consumer choices. “I’m busy, I’m too busy to be doing this.” What do you say to someone like that? They just don’t want to deal with it, right?
Joel Salatin: Well, sure. Well, what do I say to somebody like that is, well, good riddance. Good riddance. I mean, at the end of the day, a tribe or a movement is defined by the participants, and there will always be people who would rather, you know, know something about the Kardashians than what will become flesh of their flesh and bone of their bones. And those folks are, you know, they’re just not in my wheelhouse. But there are more and more folks who do question corporate industrial ag. They do question the supermarket fare, the industrial organics. They do question — I’ll just call it the orthodoxy, the orthodoxy of the day. And those people are now being rewarded with more and more farmers, more access and more access to information, I think now, from podcasts like this to the internet to visiting their local farmer.
I mean, this is one of the big reasons why we have 15,000 visitors a year to our farm and want to increase that. Not because we charge them for visiting, necessarily, but we know that getting people to farms is magic. You’ve got to see it, smell it, touch it, taste it. It has to be a visceral experience. If you viscerally participate in a solution, you own and embrace a solution. And if all it is is academic and you read it in a book or you heard it somewhere, it’s never going to be as meaningful or as powerful or as profound as it is, you know, when you’ve actually seen it and touched it.
Ross Kenyon: I definitely think that’s the case. I think we should start wrapping it up, Joel. I think we could speak with you for a very long time and have enjoyed our time with you. It’s very nice to have someone who thinks a little bit differently from our typical guests. If you’re a listener, I hope you feel that we have fairly represented your views, because I imagine we probably [unclear] you a little bit. No matter who you are, I think everyone got a pretty good blasting this episode. We always try to be fair. We think it’s very important, obviously.
Joel Salatin: I’m an equal-opportunity discriminator. I make everybody mad. And that’s what our guard goose — we have a guard goose to guard our chickens against hawks. Our guard goose is our ultimate completely non-discriminatory guard animal, because our guardian dog actually likes people, you can go and pet him. The goose, the goose hates everybody and everything. It hates me, it hates you, it hates the hawk, it hates everything. So the goose is, you know, a non-discriminatory guardian.
So yeah, I do this because, look, I see the inconsistency in myself, and I’m the first to admit all of us make choices about inconsistencies. And we could do another podcast on what am I inconsistent about, and I would tell you, I’ve chosen this, I’m inconsistent there. I mean, yeah, so we are. But I think it’s fair to say we get a lot farther ahead if we’re honest about it and wrestle with it with humor and respect, rather than just, I’ve got it, you don’t, and that’s the end of the discussion.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I don’t think anyone likes that. And I would rather have someone who didn’t agree with me but was interesting and thoughtful to speak with, than someone who agreed with me but was boorish about it. Yeah, I think life’s too short to have boring intellectual conversations. And there’s so much to read and so much to pull from, and every school of thought illuminates some things and obscures some other things at the same time. So you have to have it like a kaleidoscope, right, to be able to flip between them. I think you’re on the same wavelength with that. Or were you gonna say, Christophe?
Christophe Jospe: I was just gonna ask the question that you had written down but didn’t get to ask, which is: who is the smartest person that you disagree with?
Ross Kenyon: Thank you.
Joel Salatin: It’s a hard one. Well, the smartest person I disagree with. Wow. You know, I would have to think a little while, but probably, probably Michael Pollan comes to mind.
Ross Kenyon: He clearly loves you so much that you’re the hero of that book.
Joel Salatin: Yeah, he does. And it’s the same for me. But we would certainly not vote for the same thing, that’s what I’m just saying, you know. And by the way, I tend to not vote Republican either. I tend to vote libertarian. I’m not a member of the Libertarian Party, but I tend to vote libertarian, partly because I tell my Democrat and Republican friends — have lots of them, love them all — but I say, you guys say you want to be inclusive, you want to be inclusive, but when it comes to the presidential debates you do everything in your power to exclude the Greens, the Socialists, the Constitutionalists, the Libertarians from the debates. Look, if they’re really as wacko as you say they are, let them come and show their wackoness. But if they have an idea, what’s wrong with hearing that, you know? And so for me, as long as they don’t allow the minor parties to participate in the debates, I don’t vote for either one of them. That’s just my stubbornness and my personal whatever integrity, I guess.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s a reasonable perspective. And Michael Pollan, we’re coming for you when you stop tripping. We saw that latest book, it’s on my reading list, if you follow me on Goodreads. But I think, you know, if there’s a moral to the story of this podcast, it’s that innovation happens on the fringes. It happens from the people who have mobile chicken coops that are moving around and, like, the term of the egg-mobile. The egg-mobile — we didn’t get to talk about the egg-mobile. [unclear] This is too much content, we’ve consumed so much of it. Can you just succinctly define, what is an egg-mobile and how does it work?
Joel Salatin: Sure. An egg-mobile is a portable henhouse that follows the cows three days, three days behind the cows. So we’re moving the cows every day to a new paddock, like the migratory bison choreography, and they’re leaving manure out in the field where flies lay eggs and hatch out maggots, which turn into new flies, and that cycle is four days. So we follow the cows with the egg-mobiles, like the egret on the rhino’s nose. Birds symbiotically follow herbivores throughout nature, so we’re biomimicking that pattern in nature, following the cows with the chickens. They act as biological pasture sanitizers, spreading out the cow dung, eating out the fly larvae, eating the newly exposed crickets and grasshoppers, turning them into eggs. So we don’t have to use grubicides and parasiticides in the cows, and we get hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of eggs as a byproduct of pasture sanitation. And this is how Polyface Farms is a three-million-dollar-a-year operation and growing.
Ross Kenyon: So for our listeners, if they want to learn more, where can they go?
Joel Salatin: What we encourage them to do — we have a website, polyfacefarms.com. That’s P-O-L-Y-F-A-C-E, the farm of many faces, Polyface. If you put in “poly” it’ll probably pop up. I mean, it’s that common a prefix, as far as polyglot and polygons. And Polyface is more famous now than polygons and Polly. That is a massive achievement.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] Yes, algorithms have finally won.
Joel Salatin: But anyway, you’re welcome to come there. I also have a very short daily blog that I do called the Musings from the Lunatic Farmer.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we both get that. And yes, you are a lunatic.
Joel Salatin: So yeah, you can find a lot more information.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thank you so much for being here with us, Joel. Thank you for your leadership. And I mean farming this way for carbon farming, independently of climate change, along with climate change, for all the soil health and erosion and water. There’s too many reasons to do what you do. But thank you for sticking your flag in the ground so long ago and being such a huge part of this. I’m not sure what it would look like without you. I imagine it would be a little bit different.
Christophe Jospe: Certainly maybe less boisterous.
Ross Kenyon: Probably so. But thank you so much for being with us, and I look forward to us spending more time together in the future.
Joel Salatin: Thanks for having me. It’s been a delight.
Ross Kenyon: Great. And if you like the show — that was a long one, everyone, it was too good to cut off — but if you like the show, please rate us and review us on iTunes: Reversing Climate Change. Tell your friends, get them out there. Check out our other podcast, Carbon Removal Newsroom. And thanks so much for listening.
