3 Ways To Fight The Global Food Crisis | Joel Salatin | Align Podcast #536
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Joel Salatin, thank you for being here. I appreciate you, man. Question to begin things, a nice, light, easy way to start things. Are we on the brink of a global food crisis if things continue going in the direction that they are? And if not, great. If so, what can we do to change things? So

If we are on a food crisis, it will be man-made. It will not be because we run out of water or labor or air or sun. It will be man-made. And there will be pockets. I don't think there will be universal food crises. I think if there are, they will be in pockets. And

they they might be in pockets that surprise you you know it may be that some of the areas of middle africa for example are actually more resilient than a lot of other areas in the world simply because they are not as industrialized and so i also think that for example in the u.s if we have a big issue it will be the cities that collapse uh out here in our area

we don't have to go to the grocery store for a year. And so when I say pockets, I mean it will not be universal. If there is a catastrophe, it won't be universal as much as it will be vulnerable, high-risk spots. What makes those spots so vulnerable and high-risk and how do we get ourselves into that position? So obviously the number one would be urban areas.

you know, urban areas that don't grow the food for themselves. The most resilient will be country areas. Number two, the most resilient spots will be areas that don't depend on as much energy for things like irrigation, you know, energy tillage.

Row cropping, things like that. So anything that's high equipment, high energy, high maintenance will be vulnerable. And then the least vulnerable will be systems that have a very symbiotic diversified portfolio of production and complex relational symbiosis.

and don't depend on chemicals or energy to drive them. For example, when Putin invaded Ukraine and fertilizer shot up 400%, on our farm, we didn't even have a bobble because we don't buy any of that. And so the resilient places will be ones that are highly diversified with a minimum of inputs. Those will be the most resilient pockets.

What are your thoughts on RFK and what are your thoughts on Elon Musk? There's the Doge. There's the elimination of various different agencies. RFK just got put into place. Trump, obviously, is the president. It seems like we are at the cusp of something extreme. And my hope is it's extreme in a positive direction.

What's going on? What are from your perspective as a, as a, the person that you are? Yeah.

Well, uh, I, you know, I have, I have mixed feelings. I mean, in general, I'm, I'm happy. I'm, I'm happy with, uh, you know, those who know my, you know, Christian libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic farmer, uh, mantra know that I, I, I would like to, you know, I would like to slash the federal government by about 90% would suit me fine. So I'd be happy to shut down virtually, you know, the USDA department of education, department of energy, uh,

All these all these things eliminate all foreign aid eliminate every foreign. I'm a Ron Paul eliminate every foreign military base

bring everybody home and basically let's let's hoe our own garden and not try to hoe everybody else's zero foreign aid for anybody as much as i love israel not even for israel nobody if they want to buy stuff let them buy stuff that's great but it's not the government's money to give you can't build charity on a foundation of coercion and if you don't believe

foreign aid, government foreign aid is a coercion. Just try not paying your taxes for a year and see how you get coerced. So, so yeah, I, I am, I am thrilled with, um, with, you know, the basic, uh, the, the, the, the, the finding out, I mean, the discovery process right now is, is every day. I mean, I can't take my eyes off the news every day. There's a new, a new discovery and, um, and, um,

So I'm thrilled. This could be as close to a bloodless revolution as

of anything our country's ever seen. It could be, because this has been a long time coming, this idea that we can just spend trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars with no accountability. They don't even know where the money's going. Nobody's been audited. They can't even find the whatever, hundreds of millions of dollars we sent to Ukraine. They don't know where it went. Zelensky can't tell us what it was spent on. I mean, this is

this is outrageous it's just outrageous and so uh so i'm thrilled that somebody is finally at the helm that's daring to ask some of these uh questions there are there are concerns though um the the whole uh ai uh ai juggernaut is very very concerning um you know digital digital currency the you know the fact that they say that

Medicare, Medicaid, and the Department of Defense can't be touched. Well, that's 70% of the population

you know, of the budget. So, you know, in my view, Medicare and Medicaid should be dismantled as well. I mean, we, and, and, and I'm not, I'm not suggesting a catastrophic thing, but, but I am suggesting, you know, there's a Chinese proverb that says, if you keep going the way you're going, you're going to end up where you're headed. And, and, and, and we simply,

And right now, the interest on the national debt is now the largest line item in the entire budget. You can't keep going this way. No civilization has ever survived going this way. So there's got to be a course correction. And while the other side just, you know, yells and screams at Trump, I want them to tell me, well, what are you going to do to change the trajectory? You know, you just can't. You just can't.

You just can't keep going the way we're going. And we can't keep getting sicker the way we're sicker. I mean, we're last in health in the world. We're last in literacy. Our school, I mean, by lots of metrics, we're last in health.

We're losing our soil. We're losing our water. We're losing our education. We're losing our health. And perhaps that's because our country invented McDonald's and it invented genetically modified organisms and DDT. And, you know, we invented all these things that are that have a they sometimes have a long tail of.

of uh accountability but eventually the accountability does come around and and we're now you know we're now we've sown a whirlwind and now we're reaping a whirlwind where do you go the fact you can't look i'm looking around for example autistic i mean now it's what one in 30 or something like that children is 20 20 26 i think is what i remember here anyways a lot more than it should be the the

Well, the point I'm saying, I mean, when I was growing up,

there was no such thing as autism there there and and it wasn't because it was misdiagnosed because there aren't any 70 year olds that are beating their heads against the wall okay so this is a this is a definitely a brand new uh phenomenon in our culture then you've got you know um bird flu you know we've in the last whatever four years we've killed 150 million chickens so we've got the whole egg collapse situation um you simply

A culture with this level of dysfunctionality, the only way you can take care of the truly hurt is if you have enough wiggle room because most things are running smoothly. Now you got enough wiggle room to take care of the anomalies.

But when everything becomes an anomaly, there's no wiggle room left emotionally, economically, structurally to handle what used to be anomalies. That's where we're going. So the anomaly is becoming average and there's just not enough energy in the system to handle when everything becomes an anomaly.

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If we keep going where we're going, we're going to get where we're going or however the proverb goes. If we were to continue in the direction that we're going, what would be the direction that you would see that being? And would there be a hard stop point where things actually genuinely fall apart in a meaningful way? Where do things fall apart?

well, of the 25 empires throughout the history of humankind, 25 empires, every one of them has gone through, you know, steps of decline. And, you know, you can, there are numerous people who have kind of tried to codify those, you know, steps of decline. But we are in those final steps. And so generally,

this collapse either happens in, you know, in tyranny, you know, dictatorship, tyranny, some strong man, some, you know, top situation, top down, or things splinter and

the civilization just splinters into, into factions, into, you know, you, it just breaks up because it can't stay together. And I, I, I'm not a prophet. I don't, I, you know, I don't, I don't make prophecies, but, but I, what I do know is that you can't continue to squeeze the workers to, to,

provide for the non-workers, there comes a time when that tipping point comes over and there's just not enough time in a day and not enough, you can't earn enough money to take care of all the parasites. Yeah. Is lab-grown meat a solution or a problem? Lab-grown meat is a nothing. So if you read, so...

it it's just yeah i've come to the conclusion that it's a nothing here's why if you read back 10 years ago and look at the billions of dollars that were invested in impossible burger and beyond beef and all these things and looked at their predictions this is the one reason i don't like prophecy so you had these smart people you know bill gates and stuff investing in these things and their predictions were that within five years so i'm going back you know 10 years

If you go back to 2014, basically, and look at their predictions, by 2019, 2020, they were predicting that they would be 30 to 40 percent of the protein market, that farmland would drop by 20 percent because we wouldn't need it, and that the cattle industry would completely collapse because nobody's buying beef.

These were their, I mean, you go back and look at them. I have a file of these, you know, so I keep them and you can look back at them. Well, here we are, you know, five years, five years later and now 10 years later. And not only has none of this happened, you basically don't hear about them anymore. Why? Well, what happened? Well, what happened was that they found out that it's hard to duplicate

the heart, the liver, the bladder, the urinary tract, and the kidneys. And so it turns out that these science fiction vats, you know, that they were going to build these football, these stadium-sized, you know, artificial protein labs to culture stuff in,

The largest vat, are you ready for this? The largest vat that they've been able to culture anything in is a five gallon bucket. Because in order to remove the exhaust, you know, we pee, we poop, okay? A car makes exhaust. I mean, when you're generating energy, there's energy coming in, but then it, you know, then it has to, there's,

byproducts, you know, that have to exhaust out of there. And, and, and what they found, what they found is that without a circulatory system and without kidneys and the liver and, and, and the, the wonderful ways that we have of, of straining out stuff, eliminating waste, the only thing that they can do in these vats is bubble is bubbles and, and actual physical filters. Right.

And and so as soon as you get over a five gallon in size, over a five gallon bucket, the system begins to break down because you can't percolate, you can't circulate and you can't filter the waste fast enough. So the whole thing just breaks down in toxicity. They throw they throw antibiotics in there. I mean, by the way.

by the gallon, throw the antibiotics in to try to stop the proliferation of the pathogens because you can't filter it out fast enough. And the whole thing just breaks down. So in my view, I mean, you know, again, I could be wrong, but as I've seen this over my, you know, my time here watching this carefully, I think the reason that you don't hear about this anymore is because it's just,

It's just become a non-thing. You can't do this at scale. You can't duplicate a cow, a pig, a living body. You can't duplicate it

Certainly at scale. You can play around the edges and duplicate a toe maybe. So the critics of you or what you would represent in the world would suggest that you can't scale regenerative farming. And it's something that's trendy and it's for rich white people that want to virtue signal and claim that they're supporting saving the world.

um what do you say to that so there there could hardly be anything more wrong uh the the scale i mean one of the things that we're seeing right now is let's look at eggs um you know right now the eggs at our farm are cheaper than what's in the store why because we have chickens with an immune system and aren't worried about bird flu okay

When, again, when Putin invaded Ukraine and fertilizer jumped 400%, it didn't affect us at all. And so our ribeye steaks were cheaper than Costco. All right. So what we're seeing is that when you chase efficiency and only efficiency, you gradually run away from effectiveness. Sustainability. And if you run away from effectiveness...

on your way to efficiency, eventually that balance sheet is going to catch up with you. And that's exactly what we're seeing. So the chemical versus, I'm just going to say, the chemical versus compost approach

is inherently, it's efficient as long as you don't kill all the microbes, you keep all your soil, and you can still get fertilizer from Russia, and you can get potash from Morocco. As long as all that holds, it's okay. But as soon as there's a bobble in that system, it all breaks down. Right.

And so not only can our kind of farming scale, but it's the only system that actually is sustainable at scale. Nothing else is actually sustainable at scale. If we had had a Manhattan project for compost, not only would we have fed the world, we would have done it without three-legged salamanders, infertile frogs, and a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Can you say more about infertile frogs and atrazine and pesticides and the way that certain chemicals are affecting humans and animals? Well, I'm not a great chemist and expert on that. What I will tell you is that these pesticides and chemicals, they have a cumulative effect. And the most interesting thing to me when I just talk to the regular person

When the powers that be check these things for toxicity or pathogenicity or, you know, carcinogenicity, all right, they always check them one at a time. So, you know, they feed atrazine to rats or they feed, you know, Roundup to rats or they feed this. But the truth is farmers don't use these things one at a time. They create cocktails.

a little bit of herbicide a little bit of sex out a little bit of puss they mix them together all right and this is the same this is the same problem with pharmaceuticals you know they test ozempic by itself and then they test benadryl by itself and they test but the average person is taking five six seven eight nine of these in a cocktail and no nobody there's nobody anywhere

or otherwise that's checking, well, what happens when you combine Ozempic with Benadryl and Advil with prednisone and these things? And nobody's asking those questions. And so what we have now is we have a...

You know, we have a stew. We have a stew of these toxins. Nobody knows what they do when they interact with each other. I mean, like, for example, DDT. DDT was outlawed. But did you know that there are right now insecticides that...

that when they're sprayed and when they break down, they start to break down in their first step of breakdown. One of the products is DDT. So, so, you know, we, we, we've done some of this, but we haven't really stopped the whole thing. And, and we, we've got, you know, we've got problems coming. We don't even, we can't even imagine because we've just, we're just, we just spray this stuff all over and, and,

It's not healthy. Is any of the destruction that's arisen as a product of things like pesticides and industrialized farming methods and such irreversible? Or would all of the damage be reversible?

And if, and if so, how, what's the path towards doing that? Yeah. It's fortunately it's all reversible and that's one of the beauties of living things as opposed to mechanical. You know, if you go out and you have it and your bearing goes out and you're frightened, what we fright front right wheel of your car, um,

There's nothing you can do. That bearing is not going to, whatever, scab over, build new tissue and heal. You know, you can ask its forgiveness. You can put oil on it. You can, you know, let it rest and it's still going to be a broken bearing. But living things, all living things have the capacity to heal.

And that's the difference between mechanical things and biological things. And fundamentally our earth is biological. Now there are certainly, you know, physical mechanical aspects. There's, there's physics involved, but, but it's fundamentally a biological, a biological system. And so, yes, all of this can be absolutely healed. We've, uh,

You know, how does that happen? Well, in our own bodies, if you've got toxins, obviously, first of all, quit eating toxins. But then secondly, we have this wonderful thing called sweat. You know, we've got sweat, poop, urine, tears, snot. There's all, you know, mucus. There's all sorts of ways that our body has of expelling things.

And so, you know, so that's a, the land is the same way. You know, my favorite story is the Lufke farm in Austria when Chernobyl blew and all that radioactive cloud came down over Belarus and then kind of stopped there over Austria and it fell onto that truck growing region, all those cabbages and Brussels sprouts and stuff there in the truck gardening, vegetable farming area of Austria. Yeah.

All the crops became radioactive, so they had to destroy those. And he went in with Geiger counters and measured the radioactivity in the soil. And in that whole region, and I don't know how many square miles it was, but it was big, there was one farm that didn't have any radioactivity in the soil, and they were able to replant. They lost their crop, standing crop, but they were able to plant the very next day because there wasn't any radioactivity. It was the Lufke farm. And it's because for 20 years, they had been using compost instead

instead of chemical fertilizers, and so their organic matter was so high that the organic matter acted as a fungal microbial sponge that simply ate up and, I don't know, ate up. That's a layman's term, but anyway, it...

it eliminated the radioactivity. And so that's radioactivity. That's not, you know, glyphosate or whatever. So the, I mean, we've watched on our own farming, that's a toxicity issue on our own farm. It was erosion. You know, the soil was gone. How do you, you know, what do you do about that? And so, you know, over half a century now, we've watched big, you know, saucers of rock

where, you know, over a couple of hundred years, the early Europeans had, you know, three to five feet of topsoil washed off through, you know, through tillage, through erosion and

And so when we came, there was these big, you know, just rock, nothing grew, no weeds, no nothing. It was just solid rock. Today we've got, you know, 14 inches of soil on those areas and they grow. Now there's still, it's still thin soil. I got it, but it's soil. It's not rock. And I've been able to watch that in my lifetime. So, so yeah, the, the, the beauty of this. And if I may just say one more thing about, about this, this ability to heal is,

We can be very glad about this with living things on a very personal level. You can say an inappropriate word to your spouse and you can ask forgiveness and it can be healed. You know,

Your car, if you abuse your car and it ends up in a ditch around a utility pole, you can apologize to it all day. I'm sorry I turned the steering wheel wrong. I'm sorry I fell asleep at the wheel. I'm sorry I didn't treat that car. It'll never come out of the ditch. It couldn't care less that you abused it. And so that's...

That's one of the great differences between living things and non-living. How much time is left? I don't know how accurate or inaccurate this is, but I've heard something like, I think the United States only has so many harvests left within the soil system because we've extracted so much of the minerals and such from the soil. I know that I'm not speaking about this very eloquently because I don't know a lot about it.

What's the state of our soil in the United States and also potentially globally or North America? Do we have statistics on all that? How many harvests, if that's correct language, do we have left with things going as they are? And what can we do to make that be something that is truly sustainable? Yeah, well, I tend to...

Take a much more hopeful view to this. Now you've heard that you've heard that though, right? It's like 30 something or something, like terrible. It's like, Oh my God, we're like, we're in a really tight spot. And sometimes it's based on soil. Sometimes it's based on climate change, all these things. Look, um,

Again, I retreat to the, if we keep going the way we're going, we're going to end up where we're headed. The Ogallala Aquifer in the U.S., which provides the irrigation to five states in the Midwest, it powers all those pivot irrigations that you see. It is dropping at about two feet per year. It's dropped over 100 feet in the last 50 years. We're pumping way faster than we're replenishing.

And so this is an example of, you know, in 50 years, it'll be too deep to pump or it'll be too expensive to pump from that deep. Well, then what do you do? Well, then that entire, you know, prairie region of the U.S., that whole five states, suddenly does it turn to desert? Does it, you know, what do you do? And we know that desertification, the drying out of the landscape,

is happening arguably faster in the U.S. than any other country in the world. I'm not sure that's true. I think probably it's happening faster in northern Africa, maybe. Is that from tilling? From defoliation. From defoliation. All right. And so the question is, how do we get

how do we get more full how do we get more foliage what is what is defoliation like clear cutting what is what does that mean uh tillage it's when the ground does not have a growing plant on it when there's bare ground right so that can be from that can be from over grazing which is rampant across the world it can be from deforestation it can be from uh uh

monocropping without cover crops. I mean, go through the Midwest and you see square miles of just plowed, you know, open ground where they've cut the corn, the soybeans off, and there's no cover crop. There's nothing green growing through the winter. So this is being done on a massive, massive scale because of our technology and our equipment now. Humans have never been the largest, the largest,

whatever ecosystem impact on the planet. It's always been something else. It's always been fire or volcanoes or, you know, something else. And now for the first time in history, humans now have the capacity to be the largest, you know, the largest effects, ecological effects,

On the planet. So this is, this is a very sobering thought, but it's also an extremely hopeful thought that we can, if we, if we changed what we're doing and, and went to cover cropping and poly cropping and, and proper grazing management and, and,

uh and and biomass control and eliminated the fires for example in in the u.s with chippers and composting and building soil uh we could reverse this very very quickly so i don't i don't ascribe to the you know in in 50 years we're all you know dead um uh i

I think that we are, as you mentioned at the very top of the program, are we at some sort of a tipping point, a realignment? And the whole Maha movement. I mean, who would have guessed 10 years ago that RFK Jr. would be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, somebody that actually questions 70 vaccines per kid before they're 15 years old. Yeah.

I mean, that's a very, very, that's a very big change. And I think what's happened is that this young generation, you know, people under 25 are growing up watching their grandparents as the sickest generation in history. You know, the U.S. is now the sickest country in the world. And so these young people are growing up with,

a diabetic, an amputee, you know, a cancer, some sort, you know, of my generation, baby boomers, grandparents, okay, and we're completely breaking down in this health crisis because, you know, our generation started eating McDonald's and squeezable Velveeta cheese and Lunchables and Hot Pockets, and these young people coming up are watching the

this, this, this health dysfunction in their grandparents. And it's, it's an awakening. And I think this is part of what's driving the Maha movement is, you know, Hey, we don't want to end up in that ditch. We want to make something different. And that's why I do not ascribe to the doomsday to the doomsday thing. I think we can actually, you know, pull ourselves out of the ditch and get back on the road.

It's amazing how adaptable humans are and that we have, I think, generally normalized sickness and normalized disease and like the make America healthy again. The idea, the pop-up to mine is like making healthy normal again, like normalizing healthy. Yes. I mean, it's literally weird. It's actually a strange thing to be healthy in the United States, which is wild.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm getting ready to this summer. We'll be we'll be hosting here at our farm, actually. My high school 50th 50th reunion, a high school class, graduating class, 50th reunion, 19 1975. And when I look when I look at my classmates, I mean, not only have have goodness, a quarter of us have already died.

i mean think about that a quarter of us have already died and and most that are only only about 20 percent are what i would consider relatively healthy you know we we're not on a bunch of medications we look at but that that's a staggering that's a staggering thought that in in a group of people that's just shy of 70 years old that three quarters of them are either dead

or are in some sort of chronic and chronic non-infectious morbidity situation that is that that's got them on, you know, half a dozen medications. It's yeah, it's it's unbelievable. And now our children, you know, fatty liver disease and all this that's affecting our kids. You know, it's going deeper and deeper and deeper. I mean, when I was when I was growing up, I mean,

there was no such thing as food allergy. I mean, that phrase didn't even exist in the culture. Um, you, you didn't know anybody with diabetes. You know, we, we had, I knew one, one fat person. Uh, she was a neighbor up here a couple of miles and, you know, she was the local fat lady, you know, I mean, I mean, it was just, everybody knew who she was, you know, and it was only one in the whole, you know, in the whole community. Uh,

And so, so we are, we are, I mean, and this is what's driven, you know, this is what's driving the Maha movement. And, and it's a, it's a wonderful thing to watch.

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I, a kind of stony metaphysical question came to mind that I hope, I hope, you know, you don't find to be too out there, but I don't think you will. From your perception, is the planet earth, a sentient being? The reason I say that is, as you're talking about like scraping the earth and the effects that that has and, and, um,

What is it called? Deforestization? What is it called when you... Deforestation. Deforestation, yeah. So when we're scraping the Earth, it seems to me as though it's like we're scraping something with sentience, and it's a bioelectric being, and it has circulation, and it has energy. So how would you take that thought of the sentience of planet Earth? Is the Earth a sentient being?

Yeah, no, I don't ascribe to the earth being a sentient being by any means. I believe it was created by God as an object lesson of spiritual truth so that we would actually have a physical manifestation of provision, abundance, mercy, forgiveness, accountability, and all the things that are spiritually germane, but we don't have a way to

we don't have a way to, uh, to describe them, you know, uh, metaphysically, uh, it's hard to, it's hard to sit in a focus group and talk about love. If there's no object to love and no being to love and, and, and no, and no thing to love, uh, love, love requires an object, if you will. And so, and so, um, so that's where I am now, that being said, that being said,

I would suggest that like a being, like a person, like any of us, there are ramifications to wounds. All right? So if I'm emotionally wounded, that can manifest itself in some pretty serious sickness, you know, stress. I mean, just stress, okay? So when we stress things,

a body, a thing, it has consequences when we stress something. You know, one of the things that we notice here is, we've learned this from all of our chefs, our good chefs, tell us, you're, because we don't buy, we don't buy junk meat. So we, you know, we grow our own

and all of our chefs tell us that all of our meat cooks about 15% faster than anything raised conventionally. And we thought about that a lot. Well, why would our pork and chicken, why would it cook 15% faster than anything else? In other words, it's more tender. And what we've come up with is,

that they're happy. They're not stressed. What happens when you're stressed? You secrete adrenaline. You know, that's how a hundred pound mom can pick a car up off her three-year-old toddler, right? But it makes your muscles taut. When you run a race, you know, your muscles get tawny and taut and you got to stretch and get ready. And then, whew, you know, you release this spring, this taut spring. Well, in conventional agriculture, all the plants and all the animals

which are disrespected from their living beingness, their pigness, their tomato-ness, their greatness, when they're dishonored that way, they live in a life of stress.

And, and so they're secreting adrenalines and that adrenaline comes through. And so when you have happy ones, they're tender, you know, because they're not, they don't have all this adrenaline. And so, so just the, to me, the answer is, I don't think the earth is a sentient being, but like us, like anything, it, it, it responds well.

with consequences to wounding, whether that wounding is soil erosion, toxicity, you know, eliminating all the vegetation, making the soil naked instead of covered with plants, eliminating photosynthetic activity and all that energy cycle, you know, all of that

It is a wound and then has, you know, has ramifications. I mean, Walter Yenny, the Australian climatologist who is, in my view, he is, as they say, he's the man, all right? Walter Yenny, his whole deal about

climate change is that the atmosphere is like a radiator. The water condensation is like a radiator for the planet, but water vapor cannot condense unless it has a particle to condense on. And so foliage, which is constantly exuding little microscopic microbes that

into the atmosphere that gives evapotranspiration vapors something to condense on and makes clouds. So when you, when you overgraze and you eliminate or you over till, or you, you take all the plants down and you,

and you eliminate that vegetation, now there's no bacteria exuding into the atmosphere to create particles for vapor to condense on, therefore no clouds, therefore no rain, therefore it dries out. And what does have foliage gets double time, so you have drying out over here and bigger wet storms, rain events over here,

Because that's where the foliage is. And I think he's just a genius. I think he's on to something. And I think, for me, it explains a lot of the anomalies that we're seeing. You know, drier over here and wetter over here. Well, how can it... Well, it's because the rains are going where the vegetation is. What are your thoughts on climate change? And is it arrogant to believe that humans are impacting climate change? So...

I'm not a big climate change guy.

How much of this, you know, if you go back and you take core samples and you use dendrology to look at the tree cycles and you look at the little ice age, you got to realize I grew up in the 70s in high school. And at that time, we were bombarded. Every science, you know, every few weeks in a science class, we saw a film about how by this time, by, you know, by the 2020s, we would be in an ice age, a planetary ice age.

and everything was going to be... And we were scared. I can tell you the average person at that time was scared to death of freezing. And Paul Ehrlich, the biologist, was saying, we're going to run out of oil by 1980. And

and we're all going to be dead by 1990. I mean, these, these were the, these were the elite, you know, predictions. So I grew up and I've lived now long enough to see virtually all of that debunked. And so I, I just, I just don't put a lot of credibility in, in whatever the, the elite,

Now, that being said, that doesn't mean that we just don't care about air pollution and about all these things.

And so I'm not out here trying to spew a bunch of stuff into the air. That's not beneficial. It seems whether we're affecting it or not, it would be advantageous to believe that we are, even if it's just an illusion. Because if there's a belief that we are, at least maybe we might proceed in such a way that we do support things like regenerative farming and maybe we ride our bikes more often and walk more often and things of the sort.

Yeah. You know, what's interesting to me is that back at that time, the reason we were all going to freeze to death and go into an ice age was because the because the atmosphere had too much carbon in it and it was going to, you know, block out the sun.

And so the solution, I mean, I've got books on my shelf from back in the 70s and 80s from the weather prognosticators. The answer is organic matter in the soil. We've got to pull this carbon out of the atmosphere and get it in the soil. Okay? Interestingly, today, we're all going to burn up

Because we let the organic matter go out of the soil and it's in the atmosphere, okay? So when I look at this stuff, I look at commonalities. And the commonality between the ice agers and the crispy critters, folks, is carbon in the soil. So I am all about carbon in the soil. Let's get our organic matter up. On our farm in half a century now, we've gone from 1% organic matter to 8.2% organic matter today.

if, if we just took our farmland in America and went from, from, from its percentage and added 1%, we've added 7% here, but if we just added 1%, it would take us back to pre 1960 atmospheric carbon levels. That's how simple this is. And so, yes, I am. I am absolutely a crusader. And I mean that in the best sense, not the worst sense. Uh,

I am eager to see that carbon go back in the soil. Is industrialized farming something I did before this? I actually am using AI, and I'm not really using it much for this, but I asked it what would be the most provocative questions to ask Joel Salatin to whatever. And one of the questions that came up

I've only kind of, you know, I used a couple influences that I haven't actually asked any direct questions. But one question that I had on there is, are industrialized, are the industrial farming practices that dominate the world today nothing more than modern day slavery of land, animals, and workers? What do you think about that? Obviously, that's an AI question. What do you think about that? No, no, I, that's a pretty short answer for me.

I think so. In fact, in fact, if you want a real provocative question, I spoke at the Thomas Jefferson. They have they have an annual big Thomas Jefferson Remembrance Day. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation. We live not too far from Charlottesville. And so they asked me to come and speak one time. And I did a speech on would Thomas Jefferson have had a Tyson chicken house? And.

I shocked them because these were all, you know, sophisticated academic blue hairs, you know. And I shocked them by saying, absolutely, he would have. Because the colonial agriculture system, the plantation system, was predicated on the four pillars of today's industrial agriculture. One, the key is exports.

Not domestic feeding, but what can we export? That's what absolutely drives agriculture, exports. Number two, grain. Grain is the holy grail. We've got to grow all this grain. Annuals, not perennials. So we disregard trees. We disregard perennials and grasses, and we go to tillage and grains. Number three is fertility comes from somewhere else.

so the old you know go west young man go west we we burn out the land here there's no way to maintain fertility in situ we've constantly got to go find virgin land to go you know uh start new agricultural lands elsewhere or we have to bring something in from outside and of course you know between 1820 and 1840 um centuries and centuries of

pelican, cormorant, and booby guano off of the coast of Peru was shipped to UK and America, you know, for fertility and used up. So fertility offsite. And then the fourth one, four pillars, you know, one is exports, two is grains, three is offsite fertilizer, offsite soil fertility, and number four, cheap labor, slavery.

And those are the four pillars of modern industrial agriculture. So we have plenty of generations to repent for, okay? As much as I appreciate Thomas Jefferson, I'm not trying to throw him under the bus and say he's a bad person. I'm just suggesting that this Western segregated reductionist, Greco-Roman disconnected, you know, linear mentality has been with us

us a long time. I want to take a moment and share about something I have found to be pretty interesting technology to prevent and offset some of the negative effects of non-native EMFs. Those tricky frequencies that we're getting exposed to with our cell phones and with our computers and Wi-Fi and 5G and all the different things. I find Leela quite

quantum tech to be pretty interesting to this stuff. I am generally pretty suspicious of things that suggest mitigating EMF and things like, but what I like about Lila Quantum is they have a ton of research around it. Actually, we've also done a podcast with the founder of the company. So you tune back and listen to that. I'm going to read off some of the research that they have that I find interesting. Lila Quantum's tech blocks can boost

ATP, which is known as the energy currency in our bodies, production by 20 to 29%. Associate professor at the University of Tulsa, Dr. Robert Schiff performed three randomized double-blind studies, placebo controlled and found that ATP production rates consistently jumped by up to 20 to 29% in all treated groups.

which by itself is a medical breakthrough. He has also found an acceleration of wound healing of 85 to 100% in human cells. Super interesting. They have 59 studies done, which are third party. And I'm just very intrigued by this technology. I think that there's some interesting stuff here. I think it's worth checking out. I really like the necklace, the heel necklace they use. They also have blocks, they have clothing, they have a lot of really interesting stuff.

and you can try it yourself, see what you think, see if you notice a difference and you get 10% off by going to leelaq.com slash align. That's L-E-E-L-A-Q.com slash align. I really appreciate you, man. I really enjoyed getting to have conversations like this and bending my mind.

is it okay if I ask you one more, one more thing? Do you, do you got to run? I know we're at the top of the hour. I've got, I've got just, I've got just a minute here. Yeah. Okay. Um, well then I won't ask, I won't ask the question I was going to ask. Is there anything that would be supportive to leave people with, uh, from here? If there's like final, final, final words, like what, what can people do?

because all this stuff is really interesting and some sounds scary and some sounds exciting as an individual person that maybe, you know, makes $75,000 a year and is at their house and they have two kids and they're, you know, working on getting by. Like what can that person listening do to actually make a difference?

Yeah, so I've got a three-part recipe for that very quickly. Number one, get in your kitchen. Quit buying processed food. It's never been easier to cook from scratch. Scratch is cheap compared to convenience foods.

It does, you know, 70% of the food Americans eat now is ultra-processed. You shouldn't eat any ultra-processed food. There should not be Coke, Dr. Pepper, Lunchables, Hot Pockets, and squeezable Velveeta cheese in your house, okay? So, so, so...

Now we have hot and cold running water. We've got refrigerators, time bank, Instapots, crockpots, bread makers, ice cream makers. There's no reason why you can't fix food from scratch. It's never been easier. So get in your kitchen. We cannot have a we cannot have a food system with integrity and this and be this profoundly detached from it.

Okay. That's number one, get in your kitchen. Number two, do something yourself, touch the mystery and majesty of life yourself. Even if it's a, if it's an under sink, uh, Verma composting kit, you throw your, you know, kitchen scraps in, even if it's just, uh, a quart jar of mung bean sprouts on the windowsill. Okay. Just, just viscerally touch the, the amazing, um, um,

you know, world of life in your fingers and, you know, smell it, taste it, you know, viscerally touch it. It's amazing. And so get in your kitchen, do something yourself. And then number three, put your attention on

on vetting and sleuthing and finding your provenance, okay? Do all you can to eliminate the grocery store. You might surf some websites. You might go visit some local farms. You might go to farmer's market. But somehow put attention to

Invest time and attention. Most of the time, this doesn't take money. It just takes time. So shut down Netflix, forget the Caribbean cruise, and put some attention on vetting your provenance. I mean, in this country, we are way more concerned about the purity of the gasoline in our car than we are the fuel for our microbiome. That has to change. And the

the, the, the silliest thing in the world is people who, who, who want, who want everything to change except themselves. You know, uh, God, God changed the world out there, but I don't have to do anything. No, no. If you want the world to change, you've got to start being the change you want to see in the world. And so get in your kitchen, do something yourself,

and invest in your provenance. Those, that's my, that's my three-part recipe. And my final thought, you know, if I can leave everybody with an encouraging thing is if you want to look at the current system and get whatever, angry, frustrated, depressed, disturbed about where we are, you know, in the world, in the country, and, you know, the culture, you can make a list. That's fine. Make it, write it down. Okay. But then, but then what you have to do is invert that

to solutions. Yeah. And you turn all that energy from anger into creativity and innovation so that at the end, we become hope and help when everybody else is hopeless and helpless. Yeah.

Yeah, being in the problem and not in the solution typically is just a way to stay in victimization because it's typically out of fear and confusion. And it's like, well, I don't want this to be my responsibility. Yeah, that's right. Thanks so much. And you can, people can, I think, visit your farm. They can buy food from your farm. How does that work? How can people find you and what about you? Yeah.

Yeah, our website is polyfacefarms, P-O-L-Y-F-A-C-E. If you put in poly, the rest will pop up. Polyface Farms, the farm of many faces. And we do ship nationwide. We have open houses. We do seminars. We have farm tours in the season, not right now. And we have an open door policy 24-7, 365. Anybody's welcome to come and visit anytime, anywhere.

to see anything anywhere unannounced. That's our dedication to transparency. So yeah, Polyface Farms, and you're welcome to peruse that. You'll see where I'm speaking, what's going on, seminars, everything else that's going on. I wonder if like Monsanto might have an open door policy one of these days.

Not on your life. Monsanto is listening. Open the doors. All right. Thank you. I appreciate you. Thank you all for tuning in. That's it. That's all. See you next week.