Why Small Farmers Are Disappearing | Joel Salatin

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW]  Family farms in America are slowly disappearing, with a 2022 USDA census reporting that America lost 142,000 farms over just five years. The average farmer in America is now nearly 60 years old.

But it’s not government subsidies that farmers need to stay afloat, says Joel Salatin. What small farmers really need is the freedom to innovate and sell directly to local consumers—without facing a morass of red tape, regulations, and mandates.

Salatin, co-owner of Polyface Farms in Virginia, is widely recognized as a leading pioneer of sustainable or regenerative farming practices that enrich the land, rather than depleting it.

Over the last half century, Salatin has seen his fair share of what he calls the “food police.” He discovered it was illegal to sell a couple dozen homemade pot pies at the farmers’ market without proving he had a certified $50,000 septic system; illegal to process his own meat without sending it to a licensed butcher; illegal for his 17-year-old apprentices to operate a cordless drill—even though they were legally allowed to drive a car; and illegal to build housing without a permit on his farm—an agricultural zone—for his highly popular farmer apprenticeship program.

The result? Small farmers have to fight for survival, factory farming wins, and America is less healthy, he says.

“In my lifetime I have watched this erosion of farmer access to retail dollars. Meanwhile, we’re seeing farmers go out of business hand over fist,” Salatin says.

What America really needs is a “Food Emancipation Proclamation,” he says.

Salatin is the author of 17 books, including “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front.”

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, it’s so good to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Joel Salatin:

It’s a privilege and an honor to be with you, Jan.

Mr. Jekielek:

We’re here in your milieu. We’re here at Polyface Farm. So let’s see some of the really interesting things you’ve tried to do here at the farm. 

Mr. Salatin:

Sure, let’s take a little tour. Isn’t this a wonderful venue? 

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, look at these guys. They are really beautiful animals. And they’re really in good shape, it’s very clear.

Mr. Salatin:

Yes, no grain whatsoever. 

Mr. Jekielek:

This grass is all they need. This is like the ultimate grass-fed.

Mr. Salatin:

Yes, it’s the ultimate grass-fed. That’s exactly right. That’s what you call happy turkeys right there. Turkeys actually eat about three times as much grass as a chicken. And because of that, they need way more grit. So this group of turkeys is eating 50 pounds of rocks a day for their gizzard. 

We have pans of rocks in there. It’s called grit. But it’s big. It’s the size of a marble. They’re big pieces of rocks. And then they’re incredibly intelligent. And they’re very personable; they’re very people-oriented as opposed to chickens. 

They almost look prehistoric, don’t they? I call them pterodactyls, they’re like the prehistoric pterodactyl bird. They’ll clean every piece of green vegetation here that there is. It really does look like it’s been mowed. These are unvaccinated, unmedicated, no pharmaceuticals, no, no wormers, no grubicides, no Ractopamine, none of that. Do you notice there’s no flies? There’s no smell. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I would say it’s a pleasant smell. It’s a whole different pig world.

Mr. Salatin:

Everything’s eating and being eaten. I mean, a compost pile is all about life, death, decomposition, regeneration. Everything’s being consumed by something else and then essentially regenerating in some other form. What makes the sacrifice of the pig sacred is the respect and honor bestowed during life. That framework, that ethical moral framework hangs on starting to honor the least of these, the animals, the plants, and honoring them to create a moral ethical framework.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s our relationship with the natural world that will translate into our relationship with each other. 

Mr. Salatin:

Exactly. And so is it any wonder that a society that now factory farms their animals, commodifies and disrespects life in a factory farm, will also disrespect the individual desires of a person? So yes, it’s very, very similar.

Mr. Jekielek:

And just watching what happened over the last, you kind of are getting a feeling that we kind of went wrong. And unless we start correcting that, we’re going to have a lot of problems.

Mr. Salatin:

So these guys get moved every four days. We call this the millennium feather net. The house gets moved every two days, you know, within the oval, and then the whole circle gets moved every four days. We can go in and just see how pretty the birds are. We have been hatching our own layers now for about 12 years. 

These are our own genetics. We call it functional genetics. We don’t care how big you are, what color you are, anything. All we care is are you old, are you healthy, are you productive? We’ve been selecting those now for about 12 years, and these are the offspring of that selection process, and they’re pretty good-looking animals. 

This is early in the morning, so they’re just beginning to lay; there is zero smell, no flies. This is the official way to hold a chicken: you put your middle finger between their legs, right? You hold them like this; that way if they want to scratch, they’re just out in the air. People hold them up here like this, then they can scratch. But you hold them like this and just let their breasts sit in your hand, and they get real content. 

These are the roosts. My son Daniel came up with this. When we started with this, we had a hoop house. But the problem with a hoop house is it doesn’t have any structural integrity up high, so you have to put all the bracing down at the ground. Then that becomes something that can catch a chicken, and you can trip over, that sort of thing. 

So Daniel came up with this design that puts all the structural integrity up high, so you never run over a chicken and you don’t have anything to trip on. So it’s on pipe skids, and it just moves. You hook up here with a tractor to the feed buggy; this is all hooked together and it just trains in. So here are a thousand egg layers.

Mr. Jekielek:

And apparently everything you want to be doing here is illegal.

Mr. Salatin:

Yes, just about, and it’s not just food regulations. It’s other things. For example, we have a sawmill. We have 700 acres of Appalachian hardwood forest. This is the valley of oak and black walnut. We can legally cut a tree and mill it into boards, but we can’t legally make it into a chair and sell it because that’s manufacturing and we’re in an agricultural zone. This prohibits manufacturing. We’d love to make chicken pot pies for our customers; you can’t do that without an inspected kitchen.

What do you have to do to get an inspected kitchen? You have to have an approved septic field. You can’t have a composting toilet; you can’t have a porta potty. Now, you’re at $50,000 to put in a certified, you know, septic system in order to have a kitchen that passes compliance so that you can make a chicken pot pie. 

When we started, we used to have 15 to 16-year-old apprentices, but we can’t have somebody under age 18 running a power tool legally. Now, you can put that 16-year-old behind 3,000 pounds of steel so that they hurdle it 70 miles an hour down the interstate. That’s perfectly safe. But a cordless drill in the hand of a 16-year-old? No, that can’t work.

You just live every day wondering, what infraction did I make today or who do I have to ask permission for today? We really are just suffocated in this morass of regulatory oversight. And the bottom line is you can’t have a successful small business with big government. Big government and small business don’t go together. Big government and big business, that goes together really well. And small government and small business, that goes together really well. But big government and small business don’t go together. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Tell me what you’ve got going here and actually where you started. I mean, because you’ve kind of become the face of this sort of small regenerative agriculture, healthy, minimal kind of external product type operation. And a lot of people gain a lot of inspiration out of that. 

Mr. Salatin:

I’d like to go back to my grandfather, my dad’s dad. He was a charter subscriber to Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming magazine when it came out in1945, right there at the end of World War II. Dad was touched with this non-chemical agriculture. I’ve almost come to where I don’t want to use agriculture, or regenerative agriculture. I just say compost agriculture. But anyway, it’s okay. 

Well, Dad wanted to farm. So after World War II, he was in the Navy in World War II, got discharged, went to Indiana University on the GI Bill, and got on as a bilingual accountant with Texas Oil Company in their wildcat ventures off the coast of Venezuela. And so in seven years, he was able to save enough. He got married and then was able to save enough to buy a thousand-acre farm there in the highlands of Venezuela.  

He said, what do these people need? He said, what they really need is dairy and chicken. They had bananas and pineapples and stuff like that, but animal protein was really, really lacking. Since chicken is a much quicker turnaround than dairy, he said, let’s start with chicken. So we started raising chickens. In 1956, all the indigenous chickens had sub-therapeutic pneumonia. They had snot, nasal drip. 

You know how those Latin American markets are; you know, the farmers come into the village square to their vending spot. And then the middlemen, they don’t, you know, at that time they didn’t have Walmart and Costco. So how did the city señora, mom, get evening dinner?

She bought it from vendors who would buy from the farmers, and one would have the bananas. And so she would have this stream of people, you know, the banana man, the papaya man, the pineapple man, the lentils man, and the bean man. Sure enough, there was enough understanding there that a dry-beaked chicken commanded a high price because they were the healthiest. So chickens were priced based on health, on lack of snot. 

So Dad takes our chickens down. And within three or four months, our chickens were completely dry. Dry beak. No respiratory issues whatsoever. Very quickly, he captured literally the entire local market and, of course, all the other farmers, instead of asking him how he did this, accused us of witchcraft, voodoo, you know, all sorts of things. And so there was a lot of animosity there. 

Then in 1959, when there was a junta and a revolution, what those kinds of things do is create licenses for scores to be settled that wouldn’t be settled otherwise. And so essentially, machine guns came in the back door. We fled the front door. We stayed for about eight months as Dad met with every single federal minister to try to get protection. Nothing. Can’t help you. 

On Easter Sunday in 1961, we arrived back in the U.S. in Philadelphia. Dad was 39-years-old and had lost everything. And he still wanted to go back, which is why we ended up here in Virginia, Shenandoah Valley, and not out in Indiana and Ohio where their families were. He wanted to be within a three-hour drive of DC so that if things settled there and we could get back, within hours we could be at the Venezuelan embassy, get paper stamped, and back to Venezuela. But that never happened. 

We looked at farms from roughly Lancaster, PA, down into the valley here, as far south as Raleigh, North Carolina, in a big arc. Then we settled here on the most worn-out, gullied rock pile. It was cheap, because it was so worn out, and we settled here in 1961. Then Dad says, okay, how do I make a living on this farm? 

We had all these advisors come in, public, private, different ones. Everybody’s advice was put on chemical fertilizer, plow, plant corn, borrow money, build silos, graze the woodlot, you know, the usual, basically absolutely the usual. Dad knew that this was not the right way. He was an accountant, and so he took a job with a local accounting firm. Mom took a job at the local high school, and that paid the mortgage, and we began what I call the decade of experimentation.

We experimented with compost and portable systems. The older I got, the smarter Dad was, so he invented a portable electric fencing system. We started reading about moving animals and carbon decomposition in the soil. How do you build soil? He was also an economist, he understood that as a small farmer, we could never compete at the low-margin commodity level because we couldn’t produce enough commodities. 

We had to become the middleman, the processor, the marketer, the distributor, in addition to the producer, you know, the middleman that makes all the money. We needed to wear those hats so that we could get the full retail dollar because we couldn’t turn enough pounds or widgets or bushels or whatever to compete at a low-margin volume scale. 

So we began direct marketing throughout high school. I got my first chickens at age 10 from Sears and Roebuck and started selling to neighbors and people at church and a couple of restaurants and schools. By the time I was through high school, I had 300 laying hens and had a big garden and was selling produce and different things.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so this was this entrepreneurship that was just pushed right from the beginning.

Mr. Salatin:

Absolutely. Right from the beginning. 

Mr. Jekielek:

So what was the neatest part of the story?

Mr. Salatin:

All right. So the neatest part of the story was that in Stanton,10 miles away, there was a Depression-era leftover of what was called a curb market. It was started during the Depression in the 1930s because farmers had food but no cash. People in town needed food and they had some cash. And so it was started, and goodness, through the 40s, this was like a—it was like a local Walmart.

There was everything from cake to honey, to custard, to smoked ham, to chicken, eggs, pot pie, everything. And it was all local. My wife’s grandmother, on a majestic wood stove in the 30s, would basically not sleep on Friday nights to make about 40 pies to take down to the curb market, and it literally kept them afloat. It was cash flow. And, of course, after the 50s, after the war and everything, and TV dinners and things through the 50s and 60s, it waned down to when I came in 1972, and I was a 14-year-old; it was down to two elderly matriarchs, and then I came.

Every single Saturday from age 14 to 18, I was down there every Saturday selling our stuff. I’ve always said that we were probably 15 years ahead of our time. This is the early 1970s. Organics hadn’t really become a thing yet. And when we used the word organic, people would look at you like, organic, what’s that? That’s a crazy, crazy thing. 

Anyway, then when I went to college, nobody in the family was able to maintain the stand. I sold my chickens, and we shut it all down. Then shortly after that, the two ladies stopped. When I came back from college, it was no longer there.

And I’ve often wondered, what would have happened if I hadn’t gone to college and stayed and kept that open? What kind of battles would we have had? Because we were grandfathered. That curb market started in the Depression, and there was a memorandum of understanding between the food police and the extension service. 

The extension service is the USDA [U. S. Dept. of Agriculture] education branch; 4-H, land-grant universities, and the extension agent in your county that helps farmers solve their problems. That’s all extension service, all educational outreach from agriculture. Of course, the food safety is over here. 

They had an understanding that if a vendor was involved in any kind of extension program, the food safety police would look the other way regarding food issues because they’re getting the best of USDA education. He must be a pretty good guy. He’s not a maverick. He’s not a weirdo. 

They looked the other way. So we were able to sell. The only thing that we couldn’t sell, the only thing we couldn’t sell was raw milk, but we could sell butter, yogurt, cottage cheese, home-processed beef, and home-processed pork. I could cook chicken.

Mr. Jekielek:

You saw what it could be. You saw it and you lived it. You were like, we got to do this. 

Mr. Salatin:

Yes, we did. And you know what’s amazing? Our prices, Jan, our prices were exactly the same as Kroger, as a supermarket. We weren’t jacking them up because it’s organic. No, because we were able to wear all those hats and do it here at home, we didn’t have to put our animals on a trailer and take them up the interstate to get them slaughtered. Guess what? We were able to compete at price with the store because it was so efficient being done here. This is one reason why, in my lifetime, I have watched this erosion of farmer access to retail dollars. 

Meanwhile, we’re seeing farmers go out of business hand over fist. And the average farmer is now 60-years-old. So in the next 15 years, half of all of America’s agriculture equity is going to change hands—the land, equipment, machinery, buildings, is it all going to go to Vanguard, BlackRock, Bill Gates, and the Chinese? Who is going to do this? 

Meanwhile, America has gone to a convenience food addiction. We didn’t take Michelle Obama’s garden, and know your farmer, know your food. We didn’t take that to heart as a nation. Instead, we got Lunchables, hot pockets, and squeezable Velveeta cheese. Then the industrial food complex started putting in MSG and red dye 29. It became the proverbial RFK Jr.’s ultra-processed food with ingredients that you can’t make in your kitchen. 

Well, you can make a chicken pot pie without MSG. It doesn’t need MSG. You can make pickled beets without red dye 29. You can do all of this stuff—convenience food—without any of these questionable additives. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And you can do it economically. And that’s the bottom line. Absolutely. Except that this red tape comes in and knocks it out.

Mr. Salatin:

Yes, exactly. Suddenly, these regulatory practices and requirements make it so prohibitively capital expensive to comply with the infrastructure, the paperwork, the licenses, and the HACCP [Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point] plans to be able to sell legally that the small organization can’t get a seat at the table because you can’t justify spending half a million dollars to make a five-gallon bucket full of charcuterie.

It just doesn’t work. If you’re making tractor-trailer loads of charcuterie, a half a million dollar facility makes sense. And the pushback from the other side is, well, look, you know, if Tyson has to comply with this, or, you know, Little Debbie’s or whatever, then we need a level playing field. We need a level playing field, we need a level playing field, but y’all, we’re not playing the same game. With that kind of thinking, we could have a new mandate in the country. 

All right, we love football. We love football, but you can only play it on an NFL football field. There’s no place else you can play. You have to have a certified referee and a certified field to play it on. These Sunday afternoon pickup games in the backyard where the goalposts are the clothesline and the lilac bush on one end and the five-gallon bucket and the shovel stuck in the ground on the other? No, we can’t do that. It’s going to be regulated. But the fact is, the Sunday afternoon pickup game, we’re not playing the same game. We’re not in the same deal.

Mr. Jekielek:

And there’s another element here, and this is something that has been my own life experience watching things, right? And it’s that, you know, when you’re small, you’re accountable locally, I mean, at least that’s the way it’s been traditionally. You know, now you can do these virtual businesses and so forth, but when you’re big and you’re going all over the place, suddenly you’re kind of shielded from that local accountability, maybe even with a little bit of legal help in our unbelievably legalistic system. So it really isn’t the same game, because that accountability is the critical aspect. If you sold one bad pie or one bad chicken or whatever it was while you were with those two women, people aren’t coming back. So you’re accountable to them. You’re accountable to your community. 

Mr. Salatin:

That’s right. Because people know exactly; they’re looking you in the eye. I mean, you go to Walmart and get something bad. Who do you tell? You can’t tell anybody, but here they know exactly who produced it, who made it, the kitchen it came out of. And it’s a direct line. 

The pushback on it is also about food safety. If we allowed people to have unfettered, unregulated access to their neighbors, people would get dirty farmers and bad food and all this stuff. The fact is our hospitals right now are full of people that have been eating government-approved food.

Mr. Jekielek:

Who are sick because of that food. 

Mr. Salatin:

Yes, absolutely, who are sick because of that food. So to say that if we let people actually transact food business with their neighbor farmers, we’d be sicker than we are now with an agri-industrial complex controlled system, you’re living with your head in the sand. That doesn’t work.

Mr. Jekielek:

And it really comes down to, there have to be systems of accountability, the right incentives set up, right? And right now, it’s just, as you’re talking about this, it’s just, it’s kind of backwards, right? Of course, there are all these regulations and these rules, but the thing is when you’re at scale and you have the right people and you have an army of lawyers, you can actually, the whole purpose of that is to skirt the system, right? If you’re small, you can never skirt the system, right?

Mr. Salatin:

And including the entire veil of protection that a USDA stamp approval does. You know, whenever there’s an E. coli, or some outbreak, the CEO of the company steps to the press conference, steps to the microphone, and the first thing he says is, we comply with all USDA licensing. You know, and the industry has been hiding under the skirts of that USDA stamp forever.

A farmer like me, we can’t hide under that. There’s no skirts to hide under. We’re vulnerable, right to you as a customer. And there’s nothing in between. There’s no Philadelphia attorney on retainer. There’s no lobbyist in D.C. There’s no protection. And so we’re out there placing ourselves vulnerable and saying, we will serve you. And if we, as two voluntary consenting adults, want to exercise freedom of choice, we should be able to do it without the government’s permission.

That’s where I am. If we did that, if we had that freedom again, we would see an explosion of entrepreneurial small farm activity providing safer, more stable, more secure food into our communities. We would chip away pretty dramatically at the oligarchy that Bernie Sanders and AOC keep talking about. Their solution is always a bigger government agency than the oligarchy. Well, we’ve tried that for 100 years, and look where it’s gotten us. Ultimate centralization, consolidation, and control.

Mr. Jekielek:

And, you know, the regulators kind of work with the regulated in ways that really aren’t appropriate. That’s in almost every industry.

Mr. Salatin:

It’s the revolving door. It’s what RFK Jr. calls agency capture. We thought they’d look over the fence and provide accountability. What they did, they climbed over the fence, got wined and dined, and started playing pool with the industry. That’s what actually happened. So what’s really neat is that it creates a moment of opportunity like we haven’t had in a long time. We now have an internet accountability system, what I call Uberization. 

Think about it. In the Middle Ages or, you know, long before industrialization, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker lived in a village. They lived over their stores. They went to the same church. Their kids went to school together. Everybody knew who the scofflaw was. That guy there has a pretty dirty place down there. This guy over here has a clean ship, all right? So it became self-vetting within the context that platform offered. 

With industrialization, the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker didn’t exist anymore. Instead, they became massive conglomerates behind a security fence with security cameras and a guard tower. Nobody could go and visit and see what they are doing over there. So I disagree with it, but I understand people’s fears. I understand people’s fears due to their ignorance of what’s going on behind the fence, which is simulated to be an industrial food police program. I understand it. 

Today, we have the capacity to bring the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker, and bring that village voice down to a democratized global scale with the democratization of information through the internet. If 50 years ago somebody had said, you’re going to go to Calcutta and visit some museum, and you’re going to jump in a car that’s not designated a taxi with a driver that doesn’t have any special training, and you’re going to trust him to take you there, You would say, what? No, I want a taxi. I want a driver that’s been vetted.

But the internet gave us real-time vetting. If we’re a bad passenger, the driver says, don’t pick up that dude. And if he’s a bad driver, the passengers say, don’t go to that driver. And the internet re-embedded the village self-vetting into a system. With Airbnb, it’s the same thing. 

Over 10 years, Airbnb doubled. If you take all the rooms worldwide, Sheraton, Hilton, and Marriott, all their rooms worldwide, Airbnb added that many rooms in 10 years without driving a nail. No government agency, no oversight, no nothing. That is the power of the democratized global voice to self-vet. 

So here we are at this stage of the game, food and farming were the last sectors of the economy to join industrialization. The first one was transportation, you know, the railroads and all that. The second one was communication, telegraph, telephone. Farming was way down that list. Since farming was the last sector of the economy to join industrialization, it will be the last one to exit. 

What we have right now is an industrial oversight model for policing, managing, educating, controlling a system that is desperate to Uberize. We’re ready to Uberize, but you have these industrial regulations and guardrails to keep you from Uberizing. Which is why my thing is we need a food emancipation proclamation. I’m not an abolitionist. I disagree with some of my friends that want to outlaw Monsanto, want to outlaw glyphosate, and outlaw Ractopamine in pork. I don’t like that stuff either. 

But when you look for solutions in a society, a culture that’s got a problem, asking for a regulatory solution is the worst option possible. You want a market solution. That’s what you’re asking. You want liberty. Can we solve this with freedom?  I’m not  necessarily interested in being an abolitionist. What I do want is a viable underground railroad so that those of us who want to escape the shackles of the regulatory system and take ownership of our food choices can do so, and if we did, the price of local food would drop by 30 or 40 percent. 

Suddenly, now really good food is available to non-wealthy people. Food deserts would go away because empty lots could be turned into food sources, and people could make food in their kitchens and offer it in the community. And then there would be an on-ramp for thousands and thousands of young farmers with small acreages to be able to make a full-time living on their farms.

Mr. Jekielek:

And the thing that strikes me about all this, not even talking about Uberization, is that there isn’t really a danger to this large-scale farming system through this, is there? It feels to me like something that can work side by side, and it’ll help them because it will kind of challenge them to become better in ways that maybe they’re not being challenged right now.

Mr. Salatin:

But they don’t want to be challenged to be better. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Like my point is you don’t need to create regulations to stop the big farms from doing what they’re doing. You don’t need to do anything. Let them do their thing. Just let these people do their thing.

Mr. Salatin:

Yes. I buy stuff too. We don’t grow everything that we eat. Food buyers would leave the industrial system en masse if alternatives were cheaper, more available, and more abundant.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, now you’re telling me why they should be scared.

Mr. Salatin:

And they should be, which is why they don’t want this to happen. If they admit, oh, a lot of people are going to buy from these guys, then you have to admit there is a yearning in the marketplace for this that you’re stopping. 

Mr. Jekielek:

They want to keep it simple. They’ve got a system. They’ve got it going. They don’t want trouble. It’s got a good steady stream of cash. And this is disruptive, as Uber obviously was. But at the same time, I think it would be very positive, right, for everybody.

Mr. Salatin:

Oh, well, it would be positive. Let’s look at freedom and liberty. If you really had a liberty-oriented, liberty-centric system, who wins and who loses? Well, the average person wins. Farmers who want to participate win. Who loses? Well, maybe people aren’t as sick anymore, so hospitals lose. People are going to choose chicken that’s not Tyson’s, so Tyson loses. So it’s the entrenched oligarchy, frankly, that loses in a free market system. The ones that win are the ones that offer opportunity and choice to the average person.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and I mean, I would argue that they, these, you know, we call the oligarchs, let’s just say the large-scale operations that are, you know, sort of deep, deep in the system and, you know, providing the food to America as we speak. I mean, it would help them to get better. And I think that’s positive.

Mr. Salatin:

Oh, absolutely, I do too. Yes, philosophically, absolutely. If they were suddenly pressured by a hundred thousand little competitors, you’d better believe we would see changes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Very fast. And this is really the best part of capitalism, isn’t it? This is where it works because people will vote with their feet. And if you can provide something people will want, they will like it. You know, it’s not, it seems simple and wonderful, actually, doesn’t it? 

Mr. Salatin:

Yes, it does. 

Mr. Jekielek:

So on your farm, just lay out for me, like, where have been the biggest roadblocks that you faced? You mentioned the sawmill problem and you can’t make a chair and stuff like that. But just, you know, personally, you’ve obviously overcome quite a number of these because here we are, right? And part of it is these tours, which we’re taking part in. We’re going to have a lot of fun. So where would the biggest roadblocks be? And maybe give me one example of a roadblock and one example of the innovative solution that you managed to enact.

Mr. Salatin:

Okay. So it’s not always about food. For example, we started almost 30 years ago. We had young people that were wanting to come and learn. I want to come and learn. I can’t learn this in school anywhere. I need to come.  So 30 years ago, we began a formal apprentice program. Young people come for a year. This is a proper apprenticeship, very formal, and a year minimum. You have to come for a year, not six months, not eight months, but a year. 

But the problem is we couldn’t build a house in an agricultural zone.  A family member can build a house, but you can’t have worker housing. You can’t have student housing. You can’t, you know, in fact, you can’t have a school in an agriculture zone. It’s illegal for me to write my books from my desk at the house because a publishing business is prohibited in an agricultural zone.

Now, I do it anyway, and nobody’s complaining about it, but this is how tight the stipulations read. It’s absurd. So anyway, we’ve got to build an apprentice cottage. They’ve got to live here, but we can’t build a legal structure. What do we do? 

I went down to the scrap metal yard and got a couple of big I-beams, welded them together, and we put a structure on these two I-beams on four pillars and called it a farm machine because it doesn’t have a—it’s just bolted down with bolts. And so it’s not, it doesn’t actually have a foundation. We could actually push a hay wagon under there, jack it up, put a couple of blocks and drop it down and move it. And so we called it a farm machine. And it’s not real estate; it’s a farm machine. So those are things. 

Then when the program grew and grew, we started the stewardship program more like, you know, 20 years ago. Well, these guys want to live here. We need more housing. So I actually called our elected supervisor and the economic development guy in our county. I had the two of them out here. I said, look, we need apprentice and stewardship housing. 

I don’t want to do something that’s permitted because if I have to go through a special use permit, the community is going to go crazy because they’re thinking we’re building a university and there’s going to be cars. So I said, I need to know what we can build without a permit. They said, give us 30 days. All right. On day 28, they called and said, we’ve got answers. Good. So they came down and they sat down and said, all right, here’s what you can build without a permit in Augusta County. 

You can build a farm building, so you know, a barn, shed, whatever. You can build a tree house like Swiss Family Robinson, if you’ve got a big enough tree. If it floats, a houseboat. So one of the reasons to have a pond is to have water so you can. We came this close to putting floating houses on the ponds. So if it floats.

Number four, if it has a chassis, so like an RV, okay? And number five is a hunt camp. So we have the Polyface Hunt Camp. Now, interestingly, the law doesn’t say what you have to hunt. So we have the Polyface Hunt Camp. We’re hunting for the truth. 

Now, we haven’t figured out how to get around everything, but there are workarounds for numerous things. And I always challenge my friends. Look, if those of us on the liberty side can’t figure out how to circumvent a bureaucrat, well, shame on us. There has to be a way to go around it. I haven’t figured them all out yet, but those are some.

Mr. Jekielek:

There’s a certain sort of comedy to all of it, isn’t there? 

Mr. Salatin:

Oh, yes. Our biggest showdown was we were addressing these chickens. Early on, I’m in my 20s, and we’re starting this pastured poultry thing. We’re selling to local people; they’re coming out here to the farm to get their chickens. They walk right. We process them in the morning, we clean up, they come and they walk right into where we process them. It can’t be dirty. These are people buying their food right here. 

Then the state came in and said, that’s illegal. It never occurred to me that it would be. That’s how naive I was. What do you mean? I’m a voluntary farmer. They’re a voluntary buyer. We’re neighbors. What do you mean we can’t butcher a chicken here and sell it to them? 

They said, the air is unsanitary. And I figure they never go on a picnic, you know, really. And they said, if one fly enters your processing area, then it’s an adulterated chicken and inedible. Here was the way they were trying to get me: your windows have to be covered with fly impregnable mesh. Their interpretation was that it assumed you had a wall. I said, no, it doesn’t say I have to have a wall. It says if I have a wall and there are windows, they have to be screened. This became the crux of the showdown.

And they’re saying this is all illegal. We’re going to shut you down because you have to have a wall. I said, it doesn’t say I have to have a wall. It just says if there is a wall, it’s got windows in it. So we went around and around and around. We finally went through the federal inspection. 

We got our senator and our delegate and our attorney involved. Anyway, three months later, we won; we won that, but it was a knockdown, drag-out fight. It was our livelihood. They were going to eliminate our farm and eliminate all of our customers from getting vaccine antibiotic-free chicken, which at that time was very unusual.It’s a little more usual now; more people have come to it. But at that time, it was extremely unusual to be able to find antibiotic-free, vaccine-free chicken. And so we won that.

But that’s the kind of stuff they do. They came in, they said, so you have to have changing lockers for your employees. I said, we don’t have any employees. They said, you have to have nine changing lockers. I said, our house is 30 feet from where we’re doing the chicken. We do the chickens in the backyard, you know? 

They said, we have to have bathrooms. I said, bathrooms? Why? I said, I’ve got two in our house, two in mom’s house. They’re 40 and 50 feet away, and if I want to go number one, I just step behind the tractor. You know, what are we going to do about that? 

When we had the showdown, our minority leader in the House of Delegates in Virginia came as legislative aide to our elected guy. She’s sitting there with these guys, and she’s got her little half-moon glasses. She looks up at our living room, and then she looks up at them and says, gentlemen, is it possible that somebody in Richmond created these rules who could not have conceived of a place like Polyface? And of course, they had to say yes, they could not. 

Interestingly, at that time, we had just had a microbiology lab run a test on our swab tests on our chicken. They’d gone to the store and bought chicken, they’d come here and get chicken, and send them to a lab to test for bacteria. Our cultures averaged 133 colony-forming units of bacteria per milliliter to the second permutation.

I already don’t know what I’m just saying, but that’s the way they write it: 133. The store-bought birds had 40 chlorine baths; ours had no antimicrobials. The store-bought birds averaged 3,600 vs. 133. I said, so if it’s clean, who cares if it’s outside, inside, or in the kitchen? If it’s clean, it’s clean. They said, that’s not all we’re concerned about. I said, well, what else can you be concerned about? That’s when they started with the bathrooms and changing tables, all this, you know, and so this was the progression of the thing.

Fortunately, I had five years of high school debate and four years of college intercollegiate debate under my belt, so I wasn’t a milquetoast, okay? But most farmers are not gifted with that level of debate, and they just roll over. So this is where we are. 

We’ve had numerous things come up over the years, and that’s why I wrote the book, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, because I wanted to document what some of those are. When people ask, why isn’t your stuff more available, or why aren’t there more farmers that have your kind of food, or all those kinds of questions, it’s not that there aren’t farmers.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s a battle.

Mr. Salatin:

It’s not that there aren’t people who want to buy it. It’s not that there aren’t farmers willing to produce it. You have this bureaucracy that becomes a bit of a nightmare between the two consenting adults who want to engage in a food transaction.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, I keep thinking about how all of this really started from a grandfather’s passion for organic, or non-chemical or however it’s called, you know? There’s something beautiful about that. It sort of got infused into a young debater.

Mr. Salatin:

Yes. And if there are young people listening to this or young parents with kids, you know, I like to tell the story that was pivotal in my early childhood. My mom was a health and phys ed teacher before Title IX—girls’ phys ed, very athletic. My older brother, very athletic, played football, gymnastics. Then here I come; I’m this pudgy late bloomer. But yes, I’ve got  a mom that’s health and phys ed, and an older brother that’s this standout athlete. 

So I hit seventh grade. I’m going to go out for the baseball team at school. So I go out for the baseball team, and I don’t make it. Okay. And that year, there was a forensics meet—public speaking, poetry reading, prose, you know, and I entered that and won it. And the next year, then I go on up to high school. I’m in eighth grade. I’ll go out for the basketball team. They have an eighth-grade basketball team, so I go out for the basketball team. I still remember today looking at that list, and my name’s not there. 

At that moment, I said okay, hang it. I’m good at talking, writing, and communicating. I’m going to put all my energy into that. So I joined the debate team and I was in theater. I tell this to children that sometimes are struggling with something and trying to meet somebody else’s expectations or things that they feel like they should do—take those early failures happily. Embrace them because they help you know what you’re good at and what you’re not good at.

There is an entire business program called StrengthsFinder. I’m sure you’re familiar with it. Their whole premise is you hear people say, you need to work on your weaknesses. You’re weak there; you need to work on that. No, actually, their whole model is forget your weakness; partner or hire somebody you know that does your weakness and instead leverage your strength. You’ll go farther leveraging your strength than trying to overcome your weakness, and I just think that’s profound. And I know in my own life, it was pivotal in me moving. 

So I didn’t play sports in high school; I was on stage. And I honed that communication capacity. And the truth is, today, a lot of our success is my ability to tell stories, to communicate. Because communicators always lead their vocation. When moms come up to me with little eight, nine, ten-year-old Joey in tow, and say, my little Janie or Joey say they want to be a farmer, what should I do? I said, get them involved in a local theater troupe, learn to tell stories, be a storyteller, and people will come to hear you.

Mr. Jekielek:

No, that’s, I mean, absolutely amazing advice, actually, and I think the strength leveraging is something, I mean, I’m kind of learning about this later in life.

Mr. Salatin:

Most of us want to be good at everything. We don’t want to say, I’m just not good at that. But that is a very liberating thing to say, I’m just not good at that. Recently, I’ve been asked to run for office or be involved in a political thing, and I’m not good at committee stuff. I’m an entrepreneur; go get it, make the sawdust chips fly, and ask if we should have cut the tree later, you know? But let’s get her done, and I don’t function in committees and focus groups, and sitting around and let’s spend the day yakking just drives me nuts, okay? 

I’ve told these folks, if I’ve got time to do that, then I’d rather write another book or do a podcast. And so being able to be honest with yourself and say, I’m not good at this; I don’t like this, I think is a very, very freeing thing to be able to put all your attention on, you know, where you thrive, where you flourish.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, so something you’re very excited about, you mentioned earlier, I want to kind of get out the details of this because it’s important, is this Food Emancipation Proclamation. So explain that to me. What does that mean? And again, I think it’s not supposed to be something that’s terribly threatening, right? It’s supposed to be something that’s helpful.

Mr. Salatin:

Yes, just like Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was in 1863. And I know I’m using colorful language, but I’m doing it on purpose because most people don’t realize how enslaved our food system is. They say, well, I go to Walmart and look at all the labels, look at all the pretty, you know, the pretty cartons and things. What do you mean there’s no choice? 

Well, have you ever noticed the press release of a food recall of any type? It’ll give the brands, it’ll lift the list of the brands. There’s like 25 brands of ground beef or whatever. Well, it all came out of the same chute, you know? I mean, they slap a different label on it, but it all came out of the same chute, the same funnel. And so people don’t realize how little choice we have. 

The Food Emancipation Proclamation grew out of how we can create benefits on lots of different levels using freedom and no government agency to accomplish it. So when you think of the benefits of a food emancipation proclamation, which basically says you and I can engage in a food transaction without the government’s permission, that’s not the way it would be written, but you get the idea. In other words, I’m not saying I want the freedom to sell to Walmart or export to Vietnam. Okay, let that system go.

On my own blog, I’ve had people say, oh, I’d be scared to death to buy food from a farmer. I’m going to go to the grocery store where the government has regulated. That’s fine. I’m okay. I’m not going to go and, you know, be an activist and dump manure at McDonald’s. Okay? It’s fine for McDonald’s to exist. But what I want is for those of us who want to take an underground railroad to be able to do so without sending the hounds after us. 

And I would suggest that if the underground railroad had not had a fugitive slave law and hounds and everything else, a whole lot of people would have taken it if it hadn’t been so fearful. And I’m not trying to be any kind of racial here at all; I’m just speaking to how people make decisions. 

And I can assure you that sitting around those slave quarters, when one guy or one woman or one couple or family said, we’re leaving, you could just see the others thinking, what if you get lost? What if you starve? What if the dogs find you? What if you can’t find work? There are all these what ifs. We’ve had those things in the past. 

Probably the closest parallel, besides the slave situation, is the early days of homeschooling in our culture. When Teresa and I decided to homeschool, this was in 1981. All right, this is before the Homeschool Legal Defense Association. This is before homeschool laws.

At that time, the state would send truancy officers to your house, take your children away, and put them in foster care to protect them from negligent parenting. So we pulled the blinds. We didn’t ask. We didn’t tell. You know, you just hunkered down in this bunker. 

The academics were saying, oh, if we let homeschooling go, we won’t be able to build psych wards fast enough to handle the socially neglected children, and all this stuff. Now, how many colleges actually give scholarships for homeschooled kids? Because they tend to think for themselves. They’re not peer dependent. They’re highly socialized.

Well, the industrial academic community equated being socialized with being sociable. Socialized means I want to do what everybody else does. Being sociable means, yes ma’am, no ma’am, yes sir, no sir, open the door. Sociable is the grace we want our kids to have. We don’t want them to be little socialists.

Mr. Jekielek:

No, but socialized, I mean just, you know, able to function in the world. Sociable in a way that isn’t, you know, that you’re not somehow, you know, kind of—there isn’t a massive barrier. Yes, you can be different; you could have some different ideas, but you know how to work in the world. 

Mr. Salatin:

I guarantee you right now, right now, TikTok and screen media are doing way more to make our children unsociable than homeschooling ever could have imagined. That’s my sense.

Mr. Jekielek:

I think there’s a lot of research that would back up what you’re saying.

Mr. Salatin:

We want our kids to be like us: kind, gentle, respectful. Do you learn that in school? No, you learn to be a bully, protect yourself, fight back. You know, I’m being broad-brushed here, but, you know, how many people send their little five-year-old, nice little child off to school, and they come back saying words and spewing ideas that make you ask, where did that come from?

Mr. Jekielek:

Is that the reason you decided to take this kind of radical position at the time?

Mr. Salatin:

Yes, absolutely. We had Daniel born, and we were looking. We were both homeschooled and we knew we didn’t want that, but we didn’t have enough money for private school. Correspondence school just hadn’t grown to where it is today because of the computer and stuff. But back then, it just wasn’t there. So we were really in a quandary, and it was like a bolt of lightning. 

Daniel was six weeks old; it was our first outing since he was born. We’re going to go on a day trip to this conference. We got in the car, turned on the radio, and you get mid-sentence sometimes. It’s nine o’clock, Dobson’s on, Focus on the Family. And it said, homeschool. I looked at Teresa. I remember it like yesterday. It was like a bolt of lightning. I looked at her and said, I’ve never heard of that. I don’t know what it is, but that’s what we’re doing. Just like that. 

So we listened to the rest of the broadcast and then wrote for the books, got all the books, read them all. It was a done deal. It was a done deal. So here’s the thing. As the academic elite tried to demonize, criminalize the homeschool alternative choice in that day, we are in that same day in our food system today. We’re on that same day in our food system.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so there’s hope. I mean, basically, this is the right thing.

Mr. Salatin:

Absolutely. There’s hope. In the last three years, everybody I know that’s in our space is just having a banner year. People are leaving. They’re leaving the industrial food system as fast as they can. And I mean, all my life, we have just, you got to sell, you got to market, you got to sell, you got to market. Oh, we got to build up inventory over here. Oh man, what are we going to do with this? 

You know, it’s hitting sales by that, and suddenly here we are, you know, we’re running a 14-day complete inventory turnaround. We’re 40 percent under production. I mean, we’re, you know, we got to beat them away, and that’s a good thing. That’s a good thing. It is a good problem to have, as people say. 

But you can have people that get angry. They say, I thought I’d get pork chops from you, and I can’t get them from you. But yes, I’ll take that problem any day over having a stack of pork chops worth $5,000 going bad in the freezer. 

So yes, it is a wonderful thing. And it shows me there is a growing yearning to opt out, to—well, the phrase I hear every day is disentangle. This is part of the disentanglement. I’m going to disentangle from the healthcare system. If I’m going to disentangle from the healthcare system, I’ve got to get healthy. If I’m going to get healthy, I’ve got to quit eating chemicals. If I’m going to quit eating chemicals, I’ve got to eat something that doesn’t have that. And you march down the line. And I think that this is a natural permutation, kind of a grad school of homeschool. 

Mr. Jekielek:

If I may jump in, okay? I’m just remembering something a detractor called it, which is the MAHA rabbit hole.

Mr. Salatin:

I would say the domino effect. Okay, you push over one domino, and it moves you to this. It was 35 years ago when we were starting to get a little bit of traction and media attention and 75 percent of the visitors here were liberal greenie earth muffin tree huggers. Then the homeschool movement kicked in, and suddenly it turned 50-50, and now it’s 75-25 the other direction. 

And for the homestead movement—I wrote a book, Homestead Tsunami. There are these homestead conventions that are massive now, thousands and thousands of people at these things. In my view, it’s a natural permutation. The first thing to go is the education system. We’re going to opt out of education. We don’t like what the schools are doing to our kids. We’re going to opt out of that. 

Well, you opt out of that, and what happens is when you disentangle from one aspect of a culture and find it soul-satisfying. The next question is, what else have I been missing? Homeschooling was the tip of the iceberg. And as people moved into homeschooling, next thing you know, they’re starting to question vaccines or the entire vaccine regimen.

The next thing you know, they’re starting to drink raw milk. And then you see a flour mill on the kitchen counter where they’re getting bags of GMO-free barley, and then you see a sourdough mother starter on the windowsill, some mung bean sprouts over here, an herb garden out back, and it’s just a natural progression of disentangling from a system to where we feel completely deprived of personal agency.

Here’s what you’re going to learn in school, and here’s your health regimen, here’s your school regimen, here’s your work regimen. In my view, the system, what it does is it gradually erodes and destroys our ability to dream. Little children, they dream. And they go to school and they learn that the only thing worth learning is what the teacher says, and you’re only supposed to be interested in it until the bell rings. 

This is John Taylor Gatto writing about the dumbing down of America. The children try to please their parents, they try to please their teacher, try to please their coach, and as they get older, then they get a job, they try to please their employer, then they try to please their spouse. And by the time they’re in their mid-20s, I’ll say we are in our mid-20s, our life is so consumed with trying to meet the expectations and please the expectations of the other people in our life that we’ve lost the ability to dream. 

When I do seminars to help young people get into farming, I have a list of about five things. And one of them is I start with, and one of them is I give you permission to dream. Don’t worry about what anybody else thinks right now. My mentor Allan Nation used to say, if you want to know what your real dream is, go back to age 10. At 10 years old, you have become yourself. You know your personality, your interests, you know stuff, but you don’t have any responsibility yet. You know you have to make a living, but you don’t have to do that yet, so age 10 is generally the purest form of you there is. 

So if you’re 25, 30, 40, or 50, you have to get in a room and get into a yoga position and whatever, and just meditate, and ask, what was it like at 10? What did you dream about? What floated your boat? What did you wish for? And that’s probably the truest part of you. 

I got my first chickens when I was 10-years-old, and I walked into that basement. This box came from Sears and Roebuck. I dumped those little chickens out, and those little fluffy balls, you know, they were in a box with a heat lamp over them so they’d stay warm, and I’ve never gotten over it. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I think there must be a lot of people out there right now, especially, you know, with this newfound enthusiasm through the MAHA movement, through these changes being fostered through HHS. There must be a lot of young people looking to perhaps have that kind of experience and just kind of go down that road. And so, you know, and your whole thing right now seems to be to make it simpler for people to actually go down this road, to actually have something at a small scale that they can be proud of, that they can, you know, build an entrepreneurial business with. If you had one piece of advice, we have, the government is here, right? It’s doing a thing. We have the government here, doing a thing. What is the simplest, best thing they could do at this point to help foster that? 

Mr. Salatin:

Do one thing. Don’t make a list of things that you would like to do. What’s one thing that you could do, whether it’s start a sourdough, sprout mungbeans, have a little hanging herb pot on your front porch, a beehive on the roof, a chicken coop out back? For some people, it would just be to go visit a couple of local farms. And what can you get locally? Maybe even go to a farmer’s market. 

But there is something that you can do that invests in a better world, in a better culture, in earthworms, for crying out loud. What can you do today that would be positive for earthworms, that would honor earthworms? I mean, that’s about as simple as it gets. The kind of food, fixing something from scratch, whatever, and just do that one thing. And that’s the way life is. 

You don’t know a year from now, but you can make a decision for an hour from now. You get there an hour from then. Life is not mapped out to where we make a 10-year map. You know, life, the end of life is an accumulation of all the, what should I do next hour? And if you do all those correctly at the end, it’ll be right.

Mr. Jekielek: 

Is there a simple thing that, say, the USDA or some other government agency is deeply involved in this, uh, you know, in everything you’re doing here and that your desire to foster this relationship, right? Is there something simple that they could do to help make that happen in your mind?

Mr. Salatin:

I really don’t see anything the government can do that’s helpful. I, you know, I’ve been, and I, you know, I have friends that just hate it when I say that. But all our life, we have just not found much help. In fact, we’ve had a lot of hurt from government agencies. So I just don’t look to them. I just don’t think that the government is capable of actually innovating.  

When 51 percent of the people want this, then the government steps in. Almost by definition, what the government does has to be wanted by 51 percent of the people. Well, that automatically puts it out of innovation because innovation is out on the lunatic fringe. Innovation, by definition, is what most people don’t want. That’s where innovation happens.  

And so looking to the government for an answer, for help, for when the government finally endorses a certain procedure of sustainability, of natural farming or whatever.  What we find is it’s always 10 years, after we’ve been doing it for 10 years. Always. Because they have to double-blind test it. 

And so I’ve always told the extension agents, the educational branch of USDA, if you guys really want to help, quit doing your research and just become a forum, a platform to codify and put out there what interesting things people are doing. You don’t have to say, we endorse this. You don’t have to say this works. 

Just that Farmer X has tried this over here. Here’s what he found. Farmer Y tried this over here, and here’s what she found. And just codified. That was actually done before the USDA existed. President Abraham Lincoln started the USDA. Before him, in the 1800s, up through that time, Jefferson’s Day, James Madison’s Day, there were massive farmer organizations. 

Farmers would present papers. Hey, I’ve done this experiment for five years. And it was an honor to be asked to address, you know, a thousand farmers at this convention of what you’ve done. That was where farmers got their cutting-edge information.

Mr. Jekielek:

So it’s just basically you’re saying, you know, if you want to do something, you know, foster the communication, foster the community, foster the sharing of good ideas.

Mr. Salatin:

That’s right. 

Mr. Jekielek:

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

Mr. Salatin:

It’s been a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

 

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.