No Chemicals, No Vaccines, No Subsidies: Inside Joel Salatin’s Farming Revolution

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Joel Salatin is one of America’s most revered regenerative farmers. At Polyface Farms, he avoids synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and vaccines. He doesn’t take any government subsidies. And he’s been a major source of inspiration for many seeking to build farms of their own with symbiotic, sustainable ecosystems—ones that enrich rather than deplete the soil.

For decades, he’s been fighting government overregulation of small food producers.

Salatin is featured in multiple documentaries and is the author of 17 books, including “Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front” and “Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Joel Salatin, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Joel Salatin:

It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

Joel, so why are egg prices so high? Give me the rundown.

Mr. Salatin:

The egg prices are high because in the last 24 months, the U.S. has killed 166 million chickens. Most of them have been egg layers. There have been a few meat chickens and a few turkeys, but basically, it’s been egg layers.In the last 24 months, maybe a million of them have been sick. The great majority of them have not been sick. And we don’t even know if they were sick and got better or if their immune system was better and they just didn’t get sick, or if they would have eventually gotten sick. We don’t even ask those kinds of questions because our policy is a stamp-out policy. 

If there’s one chicken in a flock, every chicken dies, even the ones, the survivors. And there’s not been a single flock in the world that has had a 100% sickness rate. Even the worst flocks have only gone to 90%. So 10% have been survivors. As a person, as a farmer, and somebody who cares about genetic adaptation, the worst thing you ever want to do when you have a sickness is kill the survivors. You want to breed them so that you eventually get better immunological function. 

Mr. Jekielek:

We’ve done reporting on this, obviously. I think it was on the front page of our national edition last week. And the response was that there’s a regret in doing the culling, but there just isn’t a better policy. That’s what we’ve heard.

Mr. Salatin:

There are numerous alternatives surfacing. Hypochlorous is one. CDS is one. There are some homeopathic remedies. But the USDA refuses to study any of these because they’re completely beholden to the pharmaceutical companies. This whole thing has made me question just how much power the pharmaceutical companies have when there are efficacious alternatives that can’t even see the light of day.

Mr. Jekielek:

Please explain what these alternatives are.

Mr. Salatin: 

These are antimicrobials, antivirals. They’re used primarily in slaughterhouses. If you’re organic certified, you don’t want to use chlorine and real toxic antimicrobials. These have become darlings in that. This stuff, you can drink it. We’re back to a very similar narrative with Covid when ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were demonized.We’re seeing the same thing with this bird flu. There are other things. 

Interestingly, virtually all the medical doctors who were censored and deplatformed, who dared to question Dr. Fauci during Covid, are all in agreement. As far as I know, everyone I’ve seen, they’re all in agreement that we shouldn’t be killing the survivors. You know, we should be cultivating those and breeding those. There’s a kind of a bird flu working group that’s been convened in kind of high levels, and I’m part of that working group. And one of the things that I’ve brought to that group is not only let’s not kill the survivors, which everybody’s pretty much in agreement on, but the other thing is to allow the owner of the chickens to determine the remedy. 

Right now, if government agents discover bird flu on your premises, even one chicken among 100,000, all the birds, they kind of go out of your hands. And in fact, in our regulatory environment, they talk about my chickens being part of the national flock or my cows being part of the national herd. This is new terminology in the last 20 years that now permeates our government documents as opposed to the farmer’s chickens, the farmer’s cows, or the rancher’s cows. 

Now, we have this kind of collectivist, socialistic lingo permeating the documents. What I’ve suggested is to allow the owner of the chicken to determine the remedy. So I’ve got a bird or birds with bird flu. Maybe I want to ride it out. There’s one or two, but then it doesn’t go any farther, you know, it just doesn’t. 

Mr. Jekielek:

So there are examples of that 

Mr. Salatin:

Absolutely, there’s everything from 5% to 90%. So maybe I want to ride it out. I’ll take the risk and you don’t have to pay me for the dead birds. I’ll take the response, I’ll take the loss. Maybe I want to try one of these alternative antimicrobial antivirals and put them in the drinking water. Maybe I want to try that. Maybe I want to do a homeopathic remedy, something else, but let the owner of the chicken determine what to do. There is zero efficacy for this mass slaughter of healthy birds. There is zero efficacy. 

Here’s the thing, Dr. Zach Bush talks about this a lot: all beings in nature, viruses to microbes, to chickens, to humans, all beings in trees, all beings in nature are adapting. We’re not machines. We’re not, you know, a car. A car doesn’t adapt. With a hot day, a cold day, a thunderstorm, a car doesn’t adapt. It just, you know, it’s a hunk of metal that sits there. Whereas, living things do adapt. We know that from epigenetics and DNA. We know that we adapt. That’s why Eskimos can handle so much more cold than a person in the tropics. The Eskimos come to the tropics, to the equator, and they are hot. So we do adapt, and nature adapts. 

This idea of killing all the surviving birds deprives our chickens of being able to adapt to the virus. In other words, the virus is trying to get stronger. You know, it wants to, it’s a predator, it wants to kill, let’s say, and the chicken, well, it wants to survive. And so you have this, you have this tension. This is the way all things are. You have these tensions and both of them are trying to adapt. 

If we kill the surviving chickens, we’ve now deprived our poultry of their genetic adaptivity to the virus. So all we hear all the time from the industry is that the virus is mutating. Yes, chickens mutate too. So allowing nature to adapt and be malleable makes a lot more sense than letting the dynamic order and the spontaneity of adaptation of living beings express itself.

Mr. Jekielek:

How many chickens do you have?

Mr. Salatin:

We have about 4,000 layers, which are the most vulnerable based on statistics. And then, you know, we’ll have at any one time, we’ll have somewhere around 4,000 or 5,000 meat chickens as well. This is not a backyard operation, but it’s not a Tyson either. You know, we call ourselves a toddler, you know, we’re bigger than a backyard, but a lot smaller than the industry. The other thing is that many of the tests that the government agents are using is the PCR test, which is dubious at best, but is being used at 45 cycles. 

So think about these cycles as being like a magnifying, 10th grade biology. And you could rotate your little microscope, 50 power, 100 power. So that’s what these cycles are. The Massachusetts Department of Agriculture is the first state to come out to publicly question and impugn the 45 cycle deal. They say 30 cycles is the max. If you go over 30, then you can literally find bird flu detritus. You can find it in your hair, your underwear, on your spoon. You can find it in a feather.

Mr. Jekielek:

Tell me more about your farm. There must be some pigs on the farm as well, given that tie you are wearing.

Mr. Salatin:

Yes, there are. We have pigs. Our farm is in Virginia, Shenandoah Valley, and we’re pasture livestock. What that means is rather than being in a confinement house, our animals are on pasture. So we have grass-finished beef. We have pigaerator pork. That means they’re able to aerate and do things. We have pastured chickens, lamb, rabbit, duck, and turkey. And everything is on pasture and moves daily or almost daily from pasture to pasture. And this keeps them sanitary. It lets them eat green material, some salad, and gives them a clean new place to lounge. So they get their bedding changed every day. 

It’s completely different from a confinement factory house, where the animals don’t get fresh air, they don’t get sunshine, and they’re confined in a psychologically stressful, emotionally deprived situation. And they never get green material. They never get grass. A chicken never gets bugs. A chicken can’t scratch. We believe very strongly that a pig should be able to express its pigness. 

We want to respect the pigness of the pig, the chickeness of the chicken, because that is the ethical, moral foundation on which we hang respecting and honoring the Tomness of Tom and the Maryness of Mary. It’s how we respect and honor the least of these that creates an ethical framework on which we respect and honor the citizenry. A culture that doesn’t ask how to make happy pigs will very soon not ask how to make happy children, happy adults. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Why did they call you a lunatic? 

Mr. Salatin:

I took on that mantra years and years ago because I was getting so much heat from the conventional agriculture system. You know, we use compost, not chemicals. We don’t vaccinate. We don’t medicate. Again, we move the animals around. They get salivary. They have an immune system. And so I was getting so much heat from the conventional system. 

I was called a bioterrorist. I’ve been called Typhoid Mary, a starvation advocate, because we all know that if we quit using chemicals half of us would die. There wouldn’t be enough food. And so after one particularly, whatever, aggressive phone call, I hung up. I remember I was sitting there and I said, I can either be depressed and frustrated about this or have fun with it. Let’s embrace it. Sure, I’m a lunatic. Let’s have fun with it. I just grabbed that mantra and it stuck. 

And now I realize that that was a stroke of genius, because if you Google lunatic farmer, there is not another lunatic farmer on the planet. It’s pretty cool to come up with a moniker that nobody else uses and nobody else has ever come up with. So I have fun with it. Of course I’m a lunatic. And it allows you to enjoy the tension rather than, you know, feel angry, vengeful, sad about it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Your book is titled, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal. It sounds like when you were in the throes of this, you got your moniker.

Mr. Salatin:

Yes, that is also lunacy. With the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins’ recent five-point plan to deal with bird flu, one of those points is to completely shut down or restrict visitors on farms. We believe very strongly that people should be able to go visit their food. Look, if you’ve got to put on a hazmat suit and walk through sheep dip to go visit your food, you might not want to eat it. 

So we have a very open-door policy. We want city people to come and see how we raise chickens. They have to be sprayed off with disinfectant going in and sprayed off with disinfectant going out. This is quite discomforting to a place like ours that has built our brand and our reputation on transparency. If there’s one thing we need in our food and farm sector and our agriculture, it’s not more opaqueness and hiding behind spray trucks and antimicrobials. It’s transparency, letting people come and see, you know, how chickens are raised and see what’s going on. I would suggest that if we had more transparency, maybe we’d have better farming. 

Mr. Jekielek:

One of our staff is a big fan of the Jeremy Clarkson show. And she mentioned to me, actually, that he’s been inspired by you, apparently. Just tell me a bit about your story. 

Mr. Salatin:

I’ve been at this a long time, and I’m just grateful and blown away by the number of people I run into now around the world who have read my books. I’ve written 16 books. Number 17 is coming out this year, and I’ve been doing this a long time. My first little pastured poultry manual came out in 1991. It’s hard to believe that it’s been over 30 years since that first manual came out on how to have a small-scale profitable pastured meat chicken enterprise, broilers. 

I travel the world and speak at conferences. The tribe, if I may use the term, is the tribe that is in this space. When I say this space, I mean the space that says, let’s not use chemicals, let’s not use pharmaceuticals, let’s raise animals and plants in a more natural order. That group of people is fairly small. It’s a small tribe. And so what happens when you start down that path, you know, you run into people, the same kind of people. 

I know that my writing and my columns and my speaking have gone far beyond what I could imagine, and I’m just thrilled. I have just so many testimonial letters. I was able to quit my town job and come back to the farm full time, thanks to your teaching and your models. And that’s really gratifying. 

Mr. Jekielek:

When you were describing how you farm, I understand that you’re doing regenerative agriculture, right? These animals are moving, and with that motion they leave something for the others. It’s this whole project. Tell me a little bit about regenerative agriculture, because apparently Jeremy Clarkson has actually started regenerative on his farm now as well.

Mr. Salatin:

I’ve been in this space long enough to have watched the natural farming, sustainable farming, organic farming, now it’s regenerative farming. So about every, whatever, every 10 years, the old buzzword, whatever, wears out, and there’s got to be a new one. So again, I get to be a lunatic. So when people say, what kind of farming do you do? I like to kind of rattle the cage and say, profitable. Profitable. Well, that’s a new concept, profitable farming, without any government subsidies, by the way. And so I have fun with it. But the basic concept is that you’re studying creation’s pattern and order and trying to duplicate that on a domestic scale.

I’ll give you an example. On our farm, we’re asking, what do we notice when we look at animals in nature? Well, they move. They’re not confined in houses, in little cubicles, with their tails cut off and all this. No, they actually move. It’s just the idea of moving animals, that choreography, if you will. Think about the Serengeti. What you see is movement. The animals aren’t sedentary. That’s one of the things that separates them from plants. They move around. As soon as you say, animals move, now we need to provide shelter for them that’s portable. We need to provide water to them that’s portable and feed that’s portable, because Starbucks doesn’t want our cows down in their parking lot. Okay, so we have to keep them home. This is a natural outgrowth of a simple phrase: animals move.

Our creativity and innovation, the egg mobiles, gobbledygooks, and all the things that we’ve done have not happened because we sat around in a room and had a focus group on how to be different. It comes from a very strategic understanding—animals move. Okay, so how do we duplicate that migratory, that movement choreography? And what are the symbiotic relationships? 

For example, in nature, the wildebeest or the Cape buffalo do not get grubicides and parasiticides. How do they stay healthy? Birds. Birds follow them. Birds, like the egret on the rhino’s nose. They pick out the little bugs and they scratch through the dung and spread that out so the sun can solarize it, and it covers more ground. So we follow our cow herd with egg mobiles, which are portable chicken houses. 

The chickens then scratch through the cow patties, eat out the fly larvae, disinfect it for the cows the next time they come through. You have this very natural cycle. While the average farm is shooting their cows up with grubicides and parasiticides, we simply collect thousands of dollars’ worth of eggs as a byproduct of our pasture sanitation program. That’s the way we duplicate these systems.

I can give you a couple more. Let’s take the cow. Cows are herbivores. But you’ve got to realize that for, oh, 20 years maybe, our agriculture experts took farmers like me to free steak dinners to teach us this new way of growing cows where we grind up dead cows and we cook it, and then we feed that back to our cows in their feedlot. And I looked at this, as well as other people that think like I do, and we looked around. We said, where on the planet do herbivores eat carrion? They don’t. They’re herbivores. They’re plant eaters. They don’t eat meat. 

Our farm, as well as others like us, didn’t buy into that narrative, while the rest of the world did. And 30 years after that, we had bovine spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow disease. We didn’t know. I didn’t know that mad cow would happen in 30 years. But I knew that this was chaos. It was not ordered. It did not comport with any pattern that you could see in nature. And so for me, that was enough. 

But we have this Jurassic Park mentality in our agriculture elite circles. If you remember the movie Jurassic Park, the scientist is euphoric over what he’s created with these dinosaurs. They’re eating cars and people. It’s mayhem and they are destroying the planet. 

The journalist, the alter ego in the movie, gets in the face of the scientist and says, but sir, just because we can, should we? That’s a pregnant question. And that should be asked at every technological advance that we make, because we’re really smart. You know, we’re made in the image of God. We’ve got these big brains, okay? And we’re, my dad used to say, we’re so smart, we can overrun our headlights. 

In other words, we can invent things that we can’t spiritually, emotionally, or physically metabolize. We invent this thing, and then we spend two generations trying to figure out how to handle what we invented: the DDT, the monosodium glutamate, the hydrogenated vegetable oil. It would behoove us to come at this gently and not like a bunch of swashbuckling conquistadors walking into sacred ground.

We’ve only cataloged and named 10% of the microorganisms in soil. Think about that. Only 10%. With 90%, we don’t know what they do. We don’t know their names. We don’t know their functions. And yet we come to the soil and say, hey, we’ll just put some intravenous synthetic nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, and voila, you know, we’ll have food. 

Suddenly,  our food is a quarter as nutritious as it was 100 years ago. Our broccoli is less nutritious. Our carrots are less nutritious. We can find these animals in these factory houses. Suddenly, we have this new lexicon. I can remember very well as a child, we never heard the phrase food allergy.

We never heard the phrases, celiac disease, gluten intolerance, listeria, fisteria, campylobacter, E. coli, salmonella. We never heard those words. I would suggest that that new lexicon is nature’s lexicon on its knees begging us, enough, please. You’ve disrespected us, you’ve abused us enough. The question is, are we willing to listen to nature’s voice?

Mr. Jekielek:

The advent of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers spurred this revolution in food production that fed a lot more people. You would agree with that, right? 

Mr. Salatin:

That’s not true. It was essentially cheap energy, petroleum, that allowed us to plant closer. But the actual plant development and the synthetic fertilizer was unnecessary if we had cared for our soil like we should have. But we did not. I did an interesting speech one time on whether Thomas Jefferson would have had a Tyson chicken house. 

He certainly would have because the four pillars of the industrial agriculture system were very much in vogue with Thomas Jefferson. Annuals rather than perennials. Annuals were the holy grail. Grain production gave us something to export. Soil fertility had to come from off-site. You couldn’t generate it on-site. It had to come from off-site. Then you had cheap labor. Of course, they had slave labor. 

Today, a lot of our cheapest labor in the country is labor on farms, farm labor. So you had the development of those pillars of our current industrial food system. But the fact is that the gift of Sir Albert Howard, who gave us scientific aerobic composting over his career from 1920 to 1940, 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. Or I guess it’s the Gulf of America now, isn’t it? 

Mr. Jekielek:

But that’s because of the runoff of fertilizer. That’s what you’re saying, right?

Mr. Salatin:

Yes, because people didn’t, farmers didn’t take care of their soil and they were plowing, you know, steep hillsides, weren’t caring about erosion, and certainly weren’t running a carbon-centric cycle. And so all those things caught up with us in the dust bowl and all this, the devastation of the Depression era and pre-1940. And so it wasn’t that we needed chemical fertilizer or Norman Borlaug to develop a shorter wheat variety. The problem was that we were not farming well for a very, very long time.

Allan Savory, a godfather of holistic management says, agriculture has been destroying land a lot longer than chemicals have been around. I mean, you can look historically at the great empires, Greek and Roman; they start with fertile soils and they end with infertile soils. There were clarion calls in ancient days. One of the best is the Chinese farmers who actually did human manure recycling. They made on the highways, they had little potties and they would actually adorn them with flowers to come and use mine to get the fertility back onto the fields. 

And so that’s one reason why China was able to beat many of the other civilizations for a long time. I mean, they kind of lost the race in the last, you know, half-century. But up until then, they were holding their own quite well, as opposed to a lot of other civilizations, because they recycled all human and animal manure and used the biomass correctly.

There’s a book titled, Farmers of Forty Centuries, that’s where I’m getting this from. Up until about 1930 or so there was the multifunctional rice paddy with ducks, ducks, rice, and Arugula. The Arugula around the edge gave the people greens, and then the ducks ate the snails that ate the rice. And so the ducks laid eggs and made meat from the snails that affected the rice, which then their manure made the rice grow better, and the rice fed the snails to feed the ducks. These were beautiful antiquity systems that were very symbiotic and functional. It should give us all pause to realize that 500 years ago, North America produced more food than it does today. 

Mr. Jekielek:

How do you measure that?

Mr. Salatin: 

You measure it by the number of bodies that were eating food. And so it wasn’t all eaten by people, although we now know by, you know, guns, germs, and steel. There’s been a lot of archaeological and anthropological work done to demonstrate that 500 years ago, Nebraska and Kansas, which are, you know, low populations today, but those two states 500 years ago had as many people in them as they do today. 90% of the North American population, the indigenous population, died between 1492 and 1600, when Jamestown was founded. 90% of the Native American population died. And that’s why it seemed like a big open manifest destiny. It seemed like that, but that had just happened in the last century. 

So there were 1 to 200 million bison. There were 2 million wolves, each eating 20 pounds of meat a day. There were passenger pigeons. Audubon recorded in his diary that he couldn’t see the sun for three days because the flock of birds blocked out the sun. That’s before Tyson and Cargill and factory chicken houses. There were 200 million beavers, and they ate as many vegetables because they’re herbivores. They ate as much vegetable material as all the humans in North America today. I haven’t even talked about elk and deer and bear. 

The Lewis and Clark expedition said they could not go one mile without encountering a bear. Bears have big appetites. They eat a lot of stuff. So imagine every square mile having a couple of bears. That’s a lot of food. And so we need to just kind of, I think, back down from our notion that our human cleverness has somehow outfoxed the provision of nature. I think that’s important to appreciate and to come to this gently and humbly and realize that our heads and our hands that have exploited, and I would even use the word raped, our resource base can now heal it. We can now heal it. 

That’s what we’ve done at our farm. We came in 1961, and I was just four-years-old. Dad and mom got the farm; it was nothing but a gullied rock pile. We had big areas, you know, a quarter, half an acre that were just nothing but rock where three to five feet of topsoil had washed off over 150 years of plowing. 

Governor Spotswood of Virginia, in 1740, had these buddies. He called them the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe. He was concerned about some Germans coming into the Shenandoah Valley behind the Blue Ridge Mountains. He was afraid the British were going to lose that at the time. 

At the time, Virginia went all the way to the Mississippi River because we didn’t know what was out there. And so he sent these buddies, Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, out to the valley to scope it out. They spent about not quite two weeks, and they wrote that everywhere they rode, they could take the grass and tie it in a knot above the horse’s saddle. It was a magnificent silvopasture maintained by the Native Americans with strategic fire. 

When the Europeans came in and began settling that with the plow and inverted that deep, that huge vegetative canopy protective canopy over the soil, the Europeans who came from a more temperate area where there was more rainfall and the rain fell gently, you know, Great Britain, misty on misty moisty mornings when foggy was the weather. All right, and so you had a more temperate environment which is gentler on the soil where we are in Virginia and much of the mid-Atlantic region in the U.S. where, you know, rain comes in the summer in thunderstorms, you know, an inch in 30 minutes and pounds. 

You want this vegetative cover to protect the soil. But anyway, it washed off. Here we are 65 years later, and those solid rock areas now have, you know, 12 to 14 to 16 inches of soil on them that have happened in my lifetime. That’s how dramatic the healing can be. This is not a lost cause, and that’s the ultimate hope of our day.

Mr. Jekielek:

The term stewardship of the land comes to mind. You did say we have to be more humble. I was thinking about that, that there can be a kind of hubris with our incredible technological prowess. And just because you know how to do something doesn’t mean you should do something; the combination of that and that there are some things to be learned from the traditional ways. Yes, not only are you into, I guess you know changing things in terms of how farming is done, but in terms of how people deal with food. Just that very idea. I mean, you’re, I don’t know, the author of the Food Emancipation Proclamation. Are you the primary evangelist? Tell me about this. What does that even mean? 

Mr. Salatin:

The Food Safety Inspection Service [FSIS] was put in by Teddy Roosevelt in 1908, after Upton Sinclair 1906 book, The Jungle, which exposed the abuses in the Chicago butchering slaughterhouses. Since we’ve had the FSIS, there’s been an incremental move by government regulatory agents to criminalize and prohibit direct neighbor-to-neighbor food commerce. All right. 

Let me give you an example. We have a lady in our church. We all call her Aunt Grace. We love this lady. She’s got a big garden, some chickens, and she loves cooking. And so at every church potluck, she brings a chicken pot pie; it’s the first thing gone at every buffet, and we all love her to death. Well, next week we’ve got visitors coming, some family coming. They’re coming for two or three days. Well, we’re busy; we don’t have time to cook some special food for them. 

We want to go to Aunt Grace and say, would you cook a couple of these pot pies that we love so dearly? We’ll pay you 20 bucks a piece. By the way, she just became a widow. She just lost her husband. So she’s kind of looking for, you know, some things to, you know, keep her occupied, purpose, a new life, and monetize this love of domestic culinary arts, okay? So we go to her and ask, “Would you make us a couple of pot pies so we have food for these guests that are coming because we’re too busy to make it for them?” 

We go to church together. We’ve been in her house together. She babysat our kids. No, that’s illegal. It’s illegal for her to make a pot pie for us to feed our guests. Now, that’s wrong. We should be able to engage in a freedom of choice as consenting adults in a transaction with Aunt Grace without a government agent in between. I’m not suggesting that she should be free to sell them to Sri Lanka or put them in Walmart or Costco, okay? 

But I am suggesting that neighbor to neighbor, friend to friend, we should be able to engage in a consensual relationship—and I’m using powerful words because it’s important to understand—in our country right now, we love freedom of choice. We have choice in the bathroom, choice in the bedroom, choice in the womb, but no choice in the kitchen. People say, “I go to Walmart; look at all the choices I have.” Yes, but that’s a very narrow funnel. All that food comes through an industrial funnel with bureaucrat oversight that doesn’t allow for the kind of localized, customized, non-MSG ingredients. 

Right now, for example, we shoot several deer every year during deer season. We can take these deer up. There’s an Amish Mennonite outfit near us, and we can take that deer up, add a little bit of pork to it, and they can make the best summer sausage. I could live on this. I could just live on this the rest of my life. It is the best summer sausage in the world, but they can’t do one pound of beef because it’s illegal. 

They can do a million pounds of venison because that’s not in commerce, but because beef is a commercial product, they can’t do beef. So what we have right now is many people that want clean food, safe food, stable, secure food from their neighbors and can’t get it because of prohibitive regulatory infrastructure and paperwork requirements. We have farmers desperate to be able to get a retail dollar, you know, to stay in business.

They can’t sell it. And we have a rural-urban divide that desperately needs the connectivity of direct food commerce to occur. The idea of a food emancipation proclamation is to be able to unfetter, unshackle, de-enslave our food system from this federal bureaucratic regulatory intervention so that you and I can engage in a transaction voluntarily to choose our fuel for our microbiome, so we can choose our fuel to go shoot, pray, and preach. Those are guaranteed to us in the Bill of Rights, but what good is it to have the freedom to go shoot, pray, preach, and assemble if I can’t choose my body’s fuel to give me the energy to go, you know, do these things? 

The ability to transact a food interaction without a bureaucrat involved is, I think, foundational to solving multiple threads: the rural economy, entrepreneurial agriculture, food choice, food stability— all those things happen when we de-enslave. In 1906, when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, seven companies controlled 50% of America’s meat supply. Today, four companies control 85%. That’s how much centralization and concentration there is in the food industry, which we saw manifested in 2020 when store shelves went empty. 

Just think about it. If we had had 300,000 neighborhood community processing facilities, abattoirs functioning instead of 3,000 mega-facilities, would we have had as big a hiccup in 2020? Of course not. Another element of this in our country is that hazardous substances are controlled on all levels: the buyer, the seller, and the user. In other words, I can’t use fentanyl. I can’t use methamphetamine. Prescription drugs, I can’t buy them. I can’t sell them. I can’t use them without a prescription. So you have this pretty broad umbrella over these hazardous things. 

But in food, it’s only on the seller. I can give you raw milk. I can give you homemade charcuterie, bologna, and my chicken pot pie. She could give these to me. That’s perfect. I can feed them to my children. In fact, I can even buy them if she’s willing to be a criminal and sell them. So there’s no prohibition on buying it. There’s no prohibition on using it, and no prohibition on feeding it to my children. The only prohibition is on selling it. 

So if it’s really that hazardous, if raw milk is really that hazardous, if Aunt Grace’s pot pie is really that hazardous, she shouldn’t be able to give it away. I shouldn’t be able to eat it, and I certainly shouldn’t be able to feed it to my children. This shows the great hypocrisy and inconsistency of the food police, that they’re only taking the prohibitory side against the seller and not any other user. So is it really dangerous? No, it’s not dangerous. This is about regulating market access. It’s not about protecting people. It’s about regulating market access. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Perhaps the philosophy is that we’re doing this just to be extra safe, right? We’re doing this to be extra safe on the off chance that the pot pie might be problematic or whatever it is that’s being sold. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen. We’re on the off chance that all these chickens will die and you know it will spread. We’re going to cull all the chickens. I don’t know if that would be the smartest way to think about things, but that strikes me as a comment. 

Mr. Salatin:

It’s fair, and you’re exactly encapsulating the mentality of the people who would disagree with my view, which is fair. My response would simply be, is the food that we’re eating now safe? This is the MAHA movement, all right? 75% of all the food Americans eat now is ultra-processed, which by definition means you can’t make it in your kitchen, and you can’t pronounce the ingredients. In 1940, America consumed 1 million pounds of monosodium glutamate, a known carcinogen. Today, we’re consuming 300 million pounds of monosodium glutamate, all with the blessing of the, you know, the food police. 

This is Robert F. Kennedy’s mantra. The U.S. allows 10,000 food additives. The European Union only allows 400. I suggest that with the government-sanctioned American food, the track record is horrendous. The government told us to quit eating butter and eat hydrogenated vegetable oil for how many decades? The government gave us a food pyramid in 1979 that put Cheerios and Twinkies on the bottom as foundational. 

They absolutely did not use their bully pulpit like they could have to differentiate the nutritional differences between the calories of Cheerios vs. a whole sourdough grain bread, for example. If we want to be as charitable as we can be, we’ll say that was a gross oversight, okay? We won’t say there was a nefarious agenda; we will just say it was a gross oversight. 

But the thing I’m suggesting is that while the food safety aspect is the quick pushback of many people, I would suggest that America right now has probably the most unsafe food in the world. We’ve got MRSA and C. diff, which are directly a result of sub-therapeutic antibiotic use. in the animal industry. Right now, with all the drugs that are used in this country, still way more than half of them are used in livestock. The question is, who’s drugging your dinner? And so we have these other issues. 

Here’s the real crux of the question, though. Are you willing to let me try? Are you willing to let me experiment? Right now, if my county or my city wanted to have a food and medicine proxy proclamation and just let’s try it. We can’t even try it because the federal, you know, bureaucrats will come in quickly and prohibit it, put people in jail. We can’t even try it. I think that the very notion that Aunt Grace is less trustworthy than a federal government agency creates a philosophical situation in your head that people that I have a relationship with and local business people somehow are less trustworthy than a nameless, faceless Washington bureaucrat. I just don’t think that makes sense philosophically. 

Transparency wins over opaqueness. It beats opaqueness every day. And not only that, but risk is subjective. I mean, I think people subject themselves to risk every day. I mean, drinking Coca-Cola, that’s risky behavior. But you can drink, you know, it’s perfectly fine to feed your child, you know, four cans of Coca-Cola a day, but one teaspoon of raw milk, you know, that might kill them. How do we develop a culture in which we exercise decision-making muscle? Discernment is like a muscle. How do we get people to be wise, to make discerning decisions? 

Well, we give them the opportunity to make a decision and then live through the consequences of that decision. That’s how we develop discernment muscles. And what’s happened is, since every morsel of food has to have a government stamp on it, we have reduced nutritional discernment in the culture to a new nadir of ignorance because, oh, the government says it’s okay. It must be fine. So I don’t have to think about this anymore. We send our kid to school and say, I don’t have to think about my kid’s education. They’re in school. That’s just fine. Then suddenly, Covid comes and the kids are home and we’re looking over their shoulders saying, what? They’re teaching that in school? 

We have a Northern Virginia revolt that happened in 2020 in the last gubernatorial election. And so giving people decision-making capacity by allowing the lunatic fringe freedom to bring creativity and innovation to the culture is the very foundation of how you punch through status quo problems. Status quo problems never get solved from the status quo, from the top down. They always come percolating from the bottom up from people whose livelihoods and relationships and equity are not tied in to keeping the mothership, to keeping the status quo in place. That’s how true innovation happens. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Here are some quotes from Jeremy Clarkson. If you agree or disagree, you’re welcome to comment. Number one, “I’m not a farmer. I’m a man who’s been told what to do by a government that couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery.” 

Mr. Salatin:

I think he’s pretty much on target there, which is why I don’t participate in any government programs. None. I’m not trying to say this spitefully, because I don’t hate. We’re building a parallel universe. The universe that the USDA agenda has built is not the universe I want to live in. I desperately need the freedom to build a parallel universe. 

When Governor Tim Kaine was governor of Virginia, toward the end of his gubernatorial run, he wanted to come out and visit the farm. He’s now Senator Tim Kaine. He came out with his big security detail. I put him on a hay wagon. Daniel, our son, drove the tractor and I sat with him so I could tell him what was going on. It was a wonderful visit. 

He’s an environmentalist, and he totally got it. He bought into the whole thing, the chickens following the cows and the cows moving from pasture to pasture every day and all the pollinators and the bird species. We have all that, and he totally got it. We got done with the tour, and he said, what can I do to help you? 

I said, governor, your responsibility is the same as every single other elected official, and that is to make sure that I have wiggle room to experiment and innovate and try in our culture. You’ve been elected, so you’re the majority. I get it, okay? We might not agree on everything. You’re in the majority, that’s fine. But your responsibility problems don’t come from the majority view. 

Hey, they’re in charge. They’re ruling the roost. They’re making the money. They’re in power. Answers to society’s problems always come from the minority view, which is why censorship, deplatforming, those kinds of things are so devastating to a culture when new proposals, new protocols, new ideas can’t see the light of day.

Mr. Jekielek:

We keep hearing this mantra that the states are the laboratories of democracy, right? What you were describing at the local scale could also be applied to the states. Perhaps the state could enact the Emancipation Proclamation in a smaller state and see what happens and then have something to work with. Let me try another one. Number two, “Farming is just like driving around all day in a tractor looking at things that aren’t growing and swearing a lot.”

Mr. Salatin:

Oh, I disagree completely. No, I’m sorry, Jeremy, you have to eat some humus here. People ask, what drives you? What really drives you? What drives me is being able to step out of that back door every day, step into this object lesson of God’s abundant provision. He could decide to take care of it with angels or with cherubims or the power of his voice or whatever, but he’s chosen me, my hand, my intellect as his hands and feet to caress, to massage, and to touch. And so I get to create as a steward a return on investment, an ROI for him to bring more soil, more pollinators, more water, more breathable air, more beauty than I started with. That’s a privilege.

Mr. Jekielek:

All right, quote number three, “You don’t need skill to farm these days. You need a computer science degree to understand the sat-nav on a tractor.” 

Mr. Salatin:

Oh, wow. Again, he has a shock factor, but we don’t use any computers on our tractors. I have become like Wendell Berry. Wendell Berry says, in order to love, you have to know, and you can only know so much. In order to love the land, I have to know the land, where the wet spots are, where does the wind blow, where does it get dry? You know, what wants to grow grapes and what doesn’t want to grow grapes? And you can only know so much of that. 

I’ve lived long enough to watch AI really change that. When I grew up, AI was artificial insemination. Then it became avian influenza. Now it’s artificial intelligence. I don’t want to subcontract the decision-making on my farm, where I’m going, what I’m going to do. I don’t want to create that decision-making power over somebody who doesn’t know my land and who doesn’t love my land. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Here’s another quote, “If you grow it yourself and sell it yourself, you cut out the middleman, and the middleman’s the one who buggers everything up. 

Mr. Salatin:

I couldn’t agree more. That’s exactly right. We have watched since about 1940, the average amount that a farmer got from the retail dollar in about 1940 was almost 50%. In other words, when a consumer bought a dozen eggs or a pound of radishes or whatever, roughly half of the retail dollar went to the farmer. Today, depending on who you read, it’s somewhere between 8% and 11% and trending down, down, down. 

And so this is why the Food Emancipation Proclamation is so important, because it allows a farmer to be not only the producer, but the processor, marketer, and distributor and get those middleman dollars and actually not get on this scale treadmill where we’ve got to grow bigger and bigger and bigger and faster and faster and faster all the time to outrun the diminishing margin return on commodity wholesale pricing.

 Mr. Jekielek:

There are roadside, self-serve stands outside farms. Are you telling me those are illegal?

Mr. Salatin:

No, they’re not illegal if they’re selling produce. So you can sell squash and cabbages, but as soon as you get into dairy, poultry, meat, everything changes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, here’s another quote. “Everyone bangs on about regenerative farming as if it’s some hippie magic, but it’s actually just hard graft with extra mud.

Mr. Salatin:

He’s in the ballpark there. I would generally agree with that. People say, your kind of farming takes more people on the farm. Yes, it does. You know what it doesn’t take? It doesn’t take any drugs. It doesn’t take any DEQ officials cleaning up poisoned rivers. It doesn’t take any doctors dealing with the 50% of diarrhea cases caused by foodborne bacteria.I can go on, but we’ll stop with the diarrhea. My point is that while this puts more people on the farm, it doesn’t require a lot of the externalized costs that de-peopling the farm creates to pick up the slack that’s created by not loving your land and loving your food and loving your customers.

Mr. Jekielek:

This one’s a gift because it’s a lot of what we’ve been talking about this whole time, “I’d love to sell my spuds directly to people, but the government’s decided that’s too dangerous. Apparently, a potato is a weapon of mass destruction.”

Mr. Salatin:

He’s on target there. In America, you can sell spuds; you can sell potatoes without a government license, but you can’t mash them. You can sell a watermelon, but you can’t slice it because it is a manufactured product. If it’s a manufactured product, then it comes under food safety regulations. In the U.S., there have been a lot of farmer’s market blow-ups where people grow honeydew melons, muskmelons, watermelons, and want to give them as samples and let people come by and taste a little sliver. The health department said, no, you can’t give samples because as soon as you cut into it, now it’s a culinary product.

Mr. Jekielek:

But I get samples all the time at farmer’s markets. So you’re telling me that’s illegal?

Mr. Salatin:

It all depends on who the inspector happens to be. That’s why a blanket food emancipation proclamation would just eliminate that. No, we can interact here without anybody. There’s a lot of subjectivity. You know how big the bureaucracy is. You have some that are amenable, and you have some that are a little bit tyrannical, and it runs the whole gamut. 

As a farmer, let me give you an example. About 20 years ago, we serviced a bunch of restaurants in Charlottesville, Virginia. About 20 years ago, one of our chefs called us, and he was in a panic. He said the health department was just here, and they threw out all your eggs. He said they were illegal. I said, really? He said, yeah. Of course, we serviced about 20 restaurants in Charlottesville. If they’re illegal there, they’re going to be illegal everywhere. 

I said, give me the name of the lady or the inspector and the code violation. He got her card, gave me the name and number, and the alleged code violation. I hung up with him and immediately called Pete Kennedy at the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which is like a homeschool legal defense fund for direct market farmers like us. Pete answered the phone. I said, hey, Pete, here’s what happened. He said, give me the name. I gave him the name and the violation. 

Within 24 hours, we had an apology from the health department. You’re right. We were wrong. This was a new inspector who overstepped her bounds. Everything’s fine. How long do you think it would have taken me to get that as a stupid farmer from the bureaucracy? It took an attorney, you know, like talking to an attorney to make that happen. Fortunately, I was a member of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, and they covered me; they blanketed me on that. Those are the kinds of things that happen because the codes are thousands of pages written in legalese. 

That’s why we have so many intern attorneys, right, to decipher all this stuff. It’s not objective; it’s not empirical. It’s not just, well, anybody can understand this. No, is it off green or a little off gray or a little bit chartreuse? These things are very subjective. All of us farmers out here trying to serve our patron base, every day we’re dealing with this plethora of regulatory intervention that varies greatly from one locale, one state, one jurisdiction to another, and literally from one personality to another. 

Mr. Jekielek:

This has been a great conversation. If someone wants to learn more about regenerative agriculture, the Emancipation Proclamation, or wants to enact some of this approach, how do they learn more? 

Mr. Salatin:

Unfortunately, there’s not really a national clearinghouse coalition, but it is an evolving thing. There is the Weston A. Price Foundation, which is not a farm organization per se, but it is a fraternity that’s definitely nurturing this entire food choice, food freedom idea. There’s the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund. In Virginia, we have the Virginia Independent Consumers and Farmers Association. 

Since 2020, we have run a semi-annual Rogue Food Conference, where we showcase people who have legally circumvented a lot of this stuff. Very innovative ideas. We’re trying to showcase that. Of course, you can come to our website, polyfacefarms.com, and you can keep up with me and my writing. That’ll put you as much into the lunatic fringe as you might want to be for now.

Mr. Jekielek:

Joel Salatin, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Salatin:

Thank you. It has been a delight to be here.