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My guest today is a fantastic man. He runs Polly Face Farms, which is a regenerative natural farm. And, you know, that's really what he's into. He's really into regenerative farming and natural farming. And he's got some great advice on how to get started in that and what we can do to fix our food system.

So please welcome the great and powerful Joel Salatin government podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, trained by podcast by night all day.

Good to see you again, sir. Good to be here. Thanks. Thanks for coming back, Matt. Really appreciate it.

This is a perfect time to talk to someone like you about our food. We're in a very strange crisis now, and you just keep hearing time and time again in the news how much ranchers and farmers and people are really suffering right now and how much folks who don't have anything to do with that are now forcing they're being forced to understand the importance of the food supply chain and ranchers and farmers and all the stuff that we've taken for granted for quite a long time now.

Well, they sure have. And what's interesting about it is the juxtaposition between the I'll just call it the industrial. The more, you know, a commercial industrial food sector versus the sector that I'm in, which is a a local centric, you know, direct direct sale branded product, you know, directly from the farm. The pandemic is the best marketing strategy we've ever seen. We're having we're having the best season we've ever had.

And and the same thing was with farmers around the country is I'll talk to them every one that's like us that did not go into the supermarket system, basically that selling in our community. And they're in their region regionally, directly off the farm. Having the best, best year we've ever had, it is the it is the it's the industrial mega system that's cracking.

And so for the first time, we're hearing talk of, well, maybe maybe we need to add resiliency to efficiency.

And so so, yeah, the system that's cracking, there's plenty of food. I mean, plenty of food on farms being produced. But of course, as you know, milk is being dumped, pigs are being euthanized. The problem is not at the farm level.

The problem is in the chain of custody between the farmer and the consumer and primarily in the in the the large scale processing situation.

Yeah, these large meat processing places have been hit hard by the coronavirus.

They have been I mean, if you think about it right now, Joe, probably in in the in the United States, the only place is right now where every day thousands of people.

Come together in crowded conditions. Are these big meat processing plants? I mean, the offices are closed, the theatres are closed, the convention centers are closed. And so the only place where people are coming shoulder to shoulder, thousands every day are in these mega processing facilities, trees. My wife actually code a very small abattoir, a slaughterhouse, a community slaughterhouse. We have 20 employees.

And and the difference is the difference in the vulnerability, in the exposure and risk factor between our little 20 person facility where we do, you know, maybe 50 to 70 beeves a week, 100 hogs versus these mega plants that have, you know, you say beeves, beef, beef beefs.

Yeah, well, I. You said beeves. What? There's no sort of there's no such word as beefs.

It's beeves VVS.

Oh that is what you're saying. Beeves believes that before Jamy. No.

OK, so the plural of beef is not beef's, it's beeves. Oh interesting. I always thought that beef was just the meat. I never thought I would have assumed you would say cows.

Well as a farmer cows are, are females who have had calves.

So it's a very as opposed to steer steers, it would be cattle or bulls which would be intact males, deer noncontact. So as a farmer all this nomenclature is real. You know, it's normal for you. It's real.

Like a theologian teases out, you know, Presbyterians and Methodists and we just say, well, they're Protestants. You so, so so, you know, we do.

We do. It's a it's a small facility. And and, you know, it's been in business for I don't know what sixty years or so.

We've only co owned it now for a little bit less than ten years. But but the difference because we do stuff by hand workstations, you know, the stainless steel work tables are what you know, six, seven, eight feet wide, three feet to four feet deep. And and each one is a workstation. And you've got three guys out on the kill floor. You got two guys out in the you know, the cryovac room. You've got four guys in the boning room.

You got a guy over here running the sausage stuffer or the, you know, the grinder.

It's inherently small scale spread out.

Completely different environment than when you're having, you know, three thousand people in a cool, damp environment from and I don't want to get into a rabbit trail discussion, but but frankly, in these great, great big plants, most of the workers are generally not Americans. They're coming from other countries looking for, you know, the American dream.

And so they're living in crowded conditions because they're trying to save every penny to send home to get, you know, uncle and aunt and other family members here from Ethiopia, Somalia, you know, wherever it is.

And and so they're living in a house that we would live for and a house they're living, you know, 20 and they're eating poorly. They're in a they're in a stressful they're they're they're often separated from their family. There's just a lot of stress in their lives. And and and so then you throw these big processing facilities. They're not they're not eating well. And it's just it's just an incubator. I mean, if you wanted to create an incubator for a virus, there wouldn't be a better place for our small facilities are inherently the workers are spread out.

They tend to come from the community. They tend to be career craft people rather than just, you know, make this cut. Mac, you know, the average poultry processing plant in our area, they say that every job can be learned in 20 minutes. So whereas at our plant we cross, you know, we cross.

Do you know, we cut meat a while and then we go pack a while and you're on the cut floor and then you're you know, you're doing different things.

So it's a real different environment. And so these big plants are very vulnerable. And that's why the recalls come from there. The you know, the microbially come from there. I mean, an average an average fast food hamburger has pieces of 600 animals in it. Wow. When you get a hamburger from us. It's one animal, you know, so just the sheer whatever mixing, you know, so you know for sure we don't know a lot about this virus.

I mean, we're learning every day and. You know, you got to kind of take a little bit of a grain of salt, too, but one of the things we're certainly learning is that there's an advantage that there is a density factor, a people density factor, like an urban rural, you know, spreading out the whole social distance and spreading out.

Thing is, is is.

Seems to be a valuable thing, and so if we take that into the food system.

Wouldn't it be an amazing thing if instead of having 150 to 200 mega processing facilities, doing 98 percent of the nation's meat, if instead that were 200000?

Small scale, community based, ecologically nested facilities, you know, all around the countryside. That would be an incredibly resilient system. It sounds like a much better system, as you were talking before, about your relationship with your customers. It's a direct to farm. I mean, that's really ideal, right? Cut out the middle person. There's you cut out the confusion whether or not the animals are ethically raised or ethically slaughtered, like what are the conditions they're living under?

I mean, you're Polly Face Farms, right? So that whole video that you have that that I've seen, that explains the way you do regenerative farming and you let these animals live the way these animals are supposed to live, they're not confined to cages. They're roaming around. They're eating natural foods. And you get a better product to get a healthier product and you get a better relationship with both the animals and the people that you sell this this food to.

Well, sure.

And and ultimately, what we're looking for is a habitat that allows, you know, each life form, whether it's a plant or an animal, to fully express what we call it, you know, expressing the bigness of the pig or the cheekiness of the chicken.

You could say the tomato ness of the tomato, you know, and and creating a habitat that allows that life, that life to express. It's you know, it's it's what phenotypically and physiological distinctiveness in humans. We would call this self affirmation. You know, that the Thomas of Tom, the Jonás of Joe Wright, it's that affirmation.

And and one of the things that we're seeing as a result as we move into the kind of the social consequences of this whole pandemic is a is what there's a new phrase called the screen New Deal, where everything is going to A.I. We're going to you know, we're dehumanizing.

And so at a very time when people need to be personally affirmed, they're being denied their, you know, their social humanity element.

I mean, you can't even see whether a person smiling or frowning. Yeah, yeah. That's the worst part about this other than the tragedies. The worst part about this is that like people aren't getting hugged, people are scared to shake hands. Everyone is separated from everybody. It's just very strange.

It is. It is. And and, you know, our our our personal energy that we get from each other. You know, I like you.

I'm sure I've done numerous Zoome things lately more than ever.

Zoome conferences, Zoome phone conferences, different things.

And there's just not the energy. There's just, there's just not, you just don't get the energy that you get when you're right in front of each other.

Yeah, I feel the same way about podcasts and you know Jamie, I screwed up. I forgot the nurse. We started early.

Yeah. Composited. Can we I mean, OK, we're going to want to give you a coronavirus test, OK?

You know that. That's fine. We'll pause right here. OK, so we did a little test and found out you have not had it. He didn't fight it off. Bummer. But the doctor did explain to us that there is primary immune system and there's secondary immune system, your primary immune system most likely if you've been in contact with it. And his has you know, his he's the doctor has been around many, many people that have had it.

But your primary immune system, if you're healthy, he was saying, fights it off your secondary immune system is if you have had the infection and your body has developed those antibodies, your second line of defense. So most likely your first line of defense since you have been in contact with people that have had it, the first line of defense beat it. Well, that's cool.

Yeah, well, I work on it. Yeah, we were talking about that and I said, please save this because it's so crazy. You you drink. Explain what you do. Yes. To strengthen your hand.

So you know, in this whole thing like you, I've been, I've been screaming, let's talk about the immune system, you know, so so I literally I literally have not been sick a day basically in twenty years. I mean, not the flu, not a cold, not I mean just nothing and and I'm sixty, sixty three.

So I'm not saying it arrogantly or proudly, I'm saying it gratefully that, that I think there are things that we can do to really build up our immune system.

One of the things that I do that kind of makes all my staff laugh is that I routinely bend down with the cows and drink the drink water out of the cow tank. I don't drink it when it's pond water, although I've drunk pond water. But when it's, you know, when it's when it's like, well, water, you know, when it's fairly clean water, I get down you the cows are drip and saliva and stuff in it, you know, and I just drink right out of it like a cow.

And I'm serious. You know, I believe that that that what it builds your microbiome, you know.

I want all those bugs, all that diversity, we we live in the most amazing microscopic soup.

I mean, it's just it's a soup.

If you could take an electro magnetic photograph of of the air of where we are, I mean, the very I mean, our skin is exuding stuff, you know, our our noses, our our clothes, everything where it would look like a it would look like the the cloud over Pigpen in a Peanuts comic strip, you know, I mean, that's literally what we're living in and and and all of this life, all of, you know, vak, viruses, bacteria, microorganisms, all of this life is is literally having a conversation.

Hey, you know, I'd like to hook on to you in a symbiotic relationship. Hey, man, I'm a parasite. I'm we'll take you down. You know, it's like it's like a drama. It's like a play that's going on inside of us, outside of us.

And the thought that we can somehow, whatever, you know, isolate ourselves and and and extract ourselves from this from this magnificent life conversation that's going on in us, on our skin, our clothes, our hair, our eyes is is it's just silly.

And it's part of how our immune system works. Our immune system. Actually, I need your bugs. My immune system needs your bugs, your immune system, these my bugs.

And and so now does that mean we all run into the nursing homes, you know, and take vulnerable?

No, no, no. There I mean, there are there are certainly people that are very vulnerable. So we want to be careful there. All right. I get that. But for the for the rest of us that are generally healthy going about our daily stuff, I mean, goodness, worry, worry affect your cortisol limits almost more than anything. Worry. You know, I got on a plane yesterday to come out here and thanks for the nice business class ticket, by the way.

You're welcome. And and the lady sitting in front of me. So we're in business class. I'm sitting. So there's four there's an aisle and there's two seats on either side. And so I sit down. There's nobody next to me, Iman, next to the window, a lady in front of me is on the aisle, so she's a little bit diagonal for me in front. A guy sits across from her on aisle on the opposing aisle, and she asks him to move over to the window.

And and I'm just watching this play out, of course, I'm trying to, you know, keep my glasses from fogging up with my mask and my face, you know, and I'm thinking. That she's worried, she's fearful. What have we done to ourselves as a culture that every single person we come in contact with is a. Might be my killer. You know, I mean, that's a that's a horrible and was that due to our cortisol boom, you know, and suddenly our immune system is.

Whatever compromised because we're living in this in this fear all the time, I think one of the things he said, though, when you said most of us that are healthy, I think that's not really true. I think most of us are not healthy. And I think that's one of the things we're finding out from this crisis. Yes. Is that when you talk about protecting vulnerable people, there's a lot of us that are vulnerable, maybe not you or me, but a large number of people that are overweight, that we eat poor food and that don't take care of themselves.

And those people are particularly vulnerable. And so they're right to be afraid, but they're wrong to think that the only way to solve this is to make sure that you stay away from everybody. The way to solve this is to stop eating shit and become a healthy person while you're alive. There's always a there's a moment, a chance to be healthier while you're alive.

If you're alive and you're not terribly ill and dying, you could start drinking water, stop drinking soda, stop eating chips, starting fruits and vegetables, start eating lean meats, healthy foods, not even lean meats.

You'd see a good rib eye, steak, pasta, pastured meats yesterday. Food.

Yeah, you're right. Well, you know, whenever I watch a newscast and watch, you know, the daily, like, you know, coronavirus briefing from the White House.

Right. And you've got all these experts standing around and everybody standing there waiting for this magic vaccine. Right. And of course, you know, the CDC gets four point six billion dollars a year selling vaccines. They have, whatever, 20 patent vaccines. And so really, the CDC is a very vested interest in trying to develop a vaccine.

There's there's a lot of money and sickness now. There's a lot of money and sickness.

And so so, you know, we didn't get this this coronavirus because of a lack of vaccine.

We got this coronavirus because something in this in this beautiful life bath that I described was out of whack.

That that, you know, we can. We can. Start discussing where it possibly came from, I think right now that's conjecture. I mean, I think we do know that it came out of Wuhan, but but you know, just how I mean, we're not sure.

But the fact is that there was an imbalance in life. And just like in Europe in our lifetime, Joe, we've learned to say words that when I was a child, did you ever hear the term, you know, salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, food allergy, even?

I mean, how many kids in elementary school did you know that had food allergies? None. None. Nobody.

You have a birthday party. Mom isn't having to email. We didn't even have email back then. But Mom isn't calling all the other mothers saying, oh, now what can your child eat and what can what can your little Mary have, you know? Oh, oh, we better not have any peanuts. And I mean, that didn't exist.

And what's happened the way I look at this is that that humanity that we as collective humanity, we've essentially taken this beautiful, benevolent earth, this benevolent sustainer, partner, mentor, abundant provider.

And taken. It taken his partner to the boxing ring, and instead of caressing this abundant, wonderful partner provider, we've pummeled and pummeled it. We've we've we've pulled the water out of its aquifers. We've we've destroyed it soil. We've we've put a dead zone the size of the Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico.

We've we've used antibiotics in animals and made Mersa and C. diff and superbugs and and and and so nature has been gently, gently. Begging for four relief, as we've essentially, you know, put our foot put our foot on her neck, right.

And she's and she's saying E. coli, salmonella, you know, bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Right.

And including diabetes and, you know, all these other things. And we simply don't listen and continue to pummel. And eventually eventually when our our benevolent nest, whatever, you know, is Kayode, we find out. Oops. Maybe we should have paid attention. Yeah, and I think a real parallel is when you were talking about these large scale meat processing plants are a perfect sort of petri dish for viruses to grow.

So our factory farms, so are these farms where your stuff and pigs next to each other, you're doing all this unnatural stuff, right? It's unnatural for people to be stuffed into a warehouse right next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, working all day. It's unnatural for them to be stuffed in these homes, shoulder to shoulder with bad food and all the things that you would need to keep your body healthy and strong. The same can be said about these factory farms that situations.

One thing that I find so attractive about the way you run your farm is that there's no weirdness in watching these animals during the day. They they seem like animals just doing normal stuff. If you see a chicken wandering around, just pecking at the grass looks normal, see a chicken in a cage getting fed out of a little cup or something.

And it looks all kinds of fucked up, right. It doesn't feel right now. Right now. That's why, you know, we we have the phrase respecting the thickness of the pig, the chickens of the chicken.

And we know that these diseases are all coming from these place. I mean, there's a ton of agricultural diseases, you know, that are based from these factory farm situations where these animals live in these really horrific conditions. And then the bacteria jump and look.

I mean, there look, if you ate in your toilet, it would be like your toilet every day. Right?

That's that's how they eat your their breathing in their fecal particulate matter, which is, you know, putting lesions in their tender respiratory membranes, making making lesions there. And and so when you have those kinds of conditions and they're not getting exercise or not getting fresh air.

And so I mean the the they're not getting salad, they're not getting any vitamin D from the sunshine.

And so what happens is you get an extremely concentrated host host facility for pathogenicity.

That's what happens. You get a very concentrated host facility because there's always a host there close to each other. The pathogen doesn't have to say, wow, boy, I wonder if I can make it that, you know, that half mile over to another. No, you know, they're always right there. And so you're right. It's like it's like an incubator.

And so, you know, if we wanted to sit down, look, if we want to sit down and say, let's say we had a James Bond spiritist, you know, and said we're going to form a committee and and make a pathogen friendly farm, you know, the old James Bond nemesis.

Right. And so we form a committee, say, how can we make a pathogen friendly farm? Well, we would have only one species we'd crowded up. We'd take out the oxygen, the the fresh air, the sunshine. We'd give it we'd give it a minimal a minimalistic diet.

What I've just described is modern, efficient, industrial factory farming. You couldn't design a better system for for conductivity of pathogenicity.

Now, here's the big question. Is it possible to feed all of Los Angeles using your methods? Can you can you feed big urban areas using these regenerative methods?

Sure. Absolutely. So so so two things to realize is the the bottleneck in the food system right now, the reason the supermarket is low on meat is not because there aren't animals in the field. It's because of the the processing is the it's not the trucking. It's not the production. It's not even the it's not even the store shelf. It's it's the processing. So it's the processing. That's the bottleneck. And so, so, so my vision is that so.

So, so we could get the two questions. First of all deal with the production. With the production. Absolutely. If we if we spread out the production, if we if we did, for example, you know, if we took all the confinement chicken houses and put those chickens on pasture.

No problem.

OK, it doesn't take any more land to grow the feed for a chicken on pasture than it does in a confinement house.

Don't you get a lot more loss, though, due to Raptors and things along those lines? No, no, no.

We put it we put them in a little protected shelters. Then we move them every day across the pasture.

Well, yeah, you can get losses from from Raptors, but we use guard geese, their guard dogs, guard llamas. There's all sorts of guard animals there.

There's really cool.

And there's and there's a lot of research being done to jam the radar of, you know, eagles and stuff.

I mean, really. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. They jammed. I didn't even know they had radar. Well, that's figurative, right?

What are they using? When when when eagle. It's just not just their visions. Insanely good, right? Yeah. Eagles in particular.

It really is. It really is. And so, for example, I know one guy that's it's not it's not ready to sell yet, but he claims to have had great success putting reflective coke can bottoms on like a traffic cone, hanging it out with his chickens, and that splays the sunrays all out and messes up the eyesight of the of the Eagles and the Hawks. They they can't zero in. Really? Yeah. In fact, this was exactly one of the defensive measures the U.S. Navy used and still uses for incoming missiles that they they they have a cannon that blows out pieces of aluminum foil, basically, and like graffiti, aluminum foil, graffiti out of there.

And it jams the whatever the you know, the the honing devices of a of a missile.

Mm. The Hawks are the same way.

What I'm getting at is that they're there are we don't lose very much.

We protect them greatly.

There are a lot of things that you can do to, you know, to mitigate that kind of pressure.

But but the fact is the industry loses tons of birds, too, in a flood, in a heat wave, in a whatever, you know.

And and so the idea that these birds in this big confinement house are actually protected from malady. This is simply not is simply not true. And they're going to be much more of them are going to get sick and sure, they might have losses in that way.

Sure. Sure. So so can we produce can we produce the food this way? Absolutely. Now, one of the things that it would require is many more people on farms. So, you know, I thought a lot about, obviously, as unemployment has skyrocketed through this. Right now, sitting here, it's hard for us to imagine what it'll take to bring, you know, to fill football stadiums again to, you know, to fill Caribbean cruises, to fill theaters, you know, music venues, you know, whatever boxing matches.

I mean, right now, it's hard to conceive what it'll take.

People are so terrified. It's hard to. Appreciate how much of this is going to come back, the hospitality industry and all that, so, so, so what's going to happen? So so where are the jobs? What are people going to do? And and I would suggest that one of the things that that people can do is that we can have a lot of these smaller plants and we have way more people actually growing food, participating in food production personally.

Is food going to be more expensive? Maybe so, but. You get to be healthy and we have a healthy planet, and what's that worth and how much more do you think it would cost for? I mean, if you just give a rough percentage, if you're thinking about food production right now, what the current situation. There's a lot of automation, right? A lot of these factory farms, they don't require too many people to be working.

Sure. Sure. You would require much more people. You'd have to manage these animals. You'd have to do it sort of along the lines the way that you do. How many more people you think would be involved in a large scale?

Well, a lot. Lot lot of people I don't have I don't have a number there, but I can tell you that that prices would you know, food prices might go up to what they were 30 years ago.

And it also would it be fair to say that food prices might go to where they should be like a cheeseburger really shouldn't be 99 cents? No, no, absolutely.

As as you're very familiar with the argument of the externalized costs, they don't they don't get captured. What's what's the cost? You know, right now, 50 percent of the cases of diarrhea in the U.S. are caused by food borne bacteria. Well, what's what's a case of diarrhea worth?

I mean, if we start. If you start, yeah, that's good.

But if you start putting dollars on these externalized costs, you know, the Deadzone in the in the Gulf of Mexico, the fact that we have, you know, hundreds of square miles that don't grow shrimp anymore, you know, because it's toxic from the runoff from the Mississippi, from chemical farming.

So there's there's a lot of these externalized costs.

And not only that, but if this actually became normal, the whatever the new way, the new orthodoxy, there would be definitely economies of scale that we don't have right now.

I mean, I'll just give you one example that probably nobody would think of. So we play we pay workman's compensation at our farm. So how do you determine the exposure level, the risk factor of a poultry worker?

I mean, think about if if you have a Tyson Chicken farm and you hire a an employee to be in the chicken house, think about his workman's comp risk. I mean, there's fecal particulate all day long that he's breathing. You've got Augur's chains, feed bins, electrical connections, dust. I mean, it's it's a very it's a high risk situation for us.

A poultry worker goes out in the field and moves to move some chickens in a field.

There's no fecal particulate, there's no dust. There's no you know, there's no organs. There's no no whatever.

Spinning fans, vent shaft, you know, there's none of this.

And so so part of the cost, the reason that our chicken is more expensive than what's in the store is not only externalized cost, but it is. It is. Unrecognized, unrecognized savings that we offer that can't be captured in a.

Square peg in a round hole. I see what you're saying. You know, the the overall big picture of health for you, health for the food. How much is that worth?

Yeah, right. That's interesting that we're not really taking into consideration these secondary costs that come about from doing it the wrong way. Yeah, we're not.

We're not. I mean, there's there's a lot of those. You can much, much of our increased cost has nothing to do with actual production cost.

It's it's the non scalable regulatory overheads.

And this and this, of course, is why we don't have more community, small scale abattoirs around the country is not because there's not a demand for them. It's because the the the paperwork, the hacerte plants, hazardous analysis, critical control point plans and the paperwork to be able to launch a business like this require the are so high that the both time and money are so high that it's very difficult to launch a small business, you know, because you can't spread the overhead.

Of capitalization over, is there a solution? That is it. Well, there are a couple of solutions. Certainly one one that's that's being championed right now by Congressman Thomas Massie called the Prime Act. He's had it in for five years. And amazingly, it's kind of just floundered for five years. All of a sudden in the last two months, he's got 18 new co-sponsors because of this.

And what the prime act would do, it would allow it would allow uninspected custom processed meat in state to be sold by the piece. That's not legal right now.

Right now, the only way that you can sell a T bone if you want to buy a T bone steak, for me, the only way for you to get it is for me to go to a federal inspector slaughterhouse, get the animal processed, packaged under inspection and put in for you. Custom houses are where if you want to buy a half a beef, a quarter beef.

All right. And it goes in with your name on that quarter and they're custom processing it for me. Yeah. Then, you know, then I can buy it.

And what what Congressman Massie is saying with the Prime Act is why should we discriminate and only allow people to tap into the lower cost and lower lower overheads of the custom processing facility to only those people who can afford to buy a quarter of beef at a time that's that's very poverty discriminatory.

Let's open that up so that people can buy it by the piece. We're not going to ship it interstate. We're not going to sell it at Wal-Mart.

OK, but if you and I as neighbors want to do business together as and I'm using a powerful phrasing here as consenting adults, if we want to exercise freedom of joy of choice and participate in a consensual relationship of commerce, why should that be a bureaucrat's business between, you know, between two consenting neighbors?

Right.

So what you're saying is is long, but is the regulatory process in place to make sure that people are using the proper sanitation methods, making sure that the animals are healthy, making sure that all these things are in place so that unscrupulous characters don't take advantage of the system and then screw over the consumer and the consumer gets sick. Like this is like best case scenario for the regulation, right. That it's there to protect us.

Well, that's that's the that's the assumption. Yes.

And I would simply ask that at some point when you have a very close, transparent relationship, one on one, you don't you don't have, you know, truckers and warehouses and big slaughterhouses and, you know, supermarkets, blah, blah, blah.

In between us there is there is a lot of protection in that relational transaction that beats all the paperwork you can amass on the industrial scale. We we recognize scale in a lot of things in life.

For example, in Virginia, where I'm from, if you want to open a if you want to do day care, let's say you want to do a work at home deal.

You know, you want to do a side gig and keep children, you can keep up to three in your home without subjecting yourself to the licensing and compliance of daycare regulations, because they know if all you're going to do is keep three in your homes, those parents, you're going to have a close relationship with them.

This is not a this is not a daycare center. All right. All right. The same thing is true with elder care.

My wife's grandmother spent her last year in a lady's home who is allowed to keep three people as elder care. She was an R.N. She wanted to not have to go to the hospital every day and started a side gig in her home. She cooked for them. She took care of them, three of them in her home. Does this vary state by state?

It does vary state by state. I'm just giving you an example of where of where we're. Where it's reasonable to appreciate that a different relationship at scale, yes, can create its own safety. In that particular thing, can you keep one hundred in your home without a license? No, but three. If you're only going to keep three, you're probably going to see them, you're probably going to have a direct relationship with each of their of their caregivers.

They're, you know, they're people that are signing off for them. It's a different relationship.

And so all I would say is that from the safety issue, that there needs to be someplace, a point at which.

We can opt to do business with each other without a bureaucrat involved, massive, if you wanted to slaughter a cow and then you wanted to give some of the meat away to your neighbor, would you have to bring it to some perfectly legal.

Perfectly legal. So this is not. Yeah, if it were if this were all about safety. Right. You wouldn't be able to do that. So so the important thing to realize is that the the prohibition here is not on the in fact, our neighbor can even buy it legally. Oh, really? I just can't sell it.

So the prohibition is only one.

If you can't sell it, how are they going to buy it? Black market.

So so if if I, if I if I did this under the radar, OK, so I butcher a chicken in my backyard and the neighbor comes over and buys it from me, OK, it's legal for him.

It's legal for him to buy it. It's not legal for me to sell it. But but everything else in society that we've determined is a hazardous a controlled substance, a hazardous substance. The prohibition is both on seller and buyer. Right. And I don't want to go down that rabbit hole either of I'm a I'm a pretty libertarian, you know, drug. Let it all go.

But but without regard to that, the prohibitions are equal on even possession, if you want to if you want to have a ton of cocaine in your house. Even if you just wandered over there in a corner on a pallet, yeah, I've got a ton of cocaine here. What's wrong with that? You can't have that. All right. Right.

But when it comes to food products, the prohibitions are only on one side and they don't include if you give it away.

So if it was really dangerous, you shouldn't be able to buy it. You shouldn't be able to possess it, and you shouldn't be able to give it away.

I see what you're saying kind of, but the difference is, first of all, cocaine is illegal. Beef's not illegal. And second of all, it's like you're trying the ideas. You're trying to protect the consumer. Right. And I think that they have exceptions for these small situations where you're the farmer and this maybe this guy's growing tomatoes and you trade him some filet mignon for sure, and you have a good deal there that makes sense that they you know, I think it's more reasonable they step back and let that happen.

But it is odd that they can buy unregulated beef, but you can't sell unregulated beef. So it's like, well, how'd you get that beef? I bought it. Is it regulated? No. All right. They don't even know who's who's the criminal selling you the beef? Yeah, it's very strange. Yeah, but yeah.

So the the farmers, the one that's liable, the the the buyer that the customer is not. But the same thing is true. I mean the important let's appreciate to for example, wildlife.

I mean right now you can go out and during hunting season and you can shoot a deer. And you don't have to worry about temperature, you know, you don't have to worry about any inspections, nothing, or a wild pig, right squirrel, you can bring that home and there's there's no inspection, no nothing over that. And you can dress that yourself. I mean, you know, butcher it, package it, whatever, feed it to your children.

You can have a block party, invite all your block and have a and and feed everybody with that food. That's perfectly legal. But to do a chicken or a pig or a cow at all on your own and and sell that, what is what is it about about selling something that suddenly turns it from benign to hazardous?

Well, I think it's just protection for the consumer. And I think it's also like it would be fine if it was a small neighborhood where you knew the farmer and you had a great relationship with them. But they're talking about doing things at scale. When you when you're talking about selling food to, you know, a large city, it's you can't really just hope the guy did a good job. That's the argument for regulation. The argument for regulation is when things scale up, when you need someone to step in and protect the consumers, because if there is one bad actor who's not taking care of it, he has the potential of sickening thousands of people.

Right. Which is which is the argument, exactly. The argument for decentralizing and the amalgamating as opposed to centralizing and amalgamating.

What is it, a land issue, though? Like if you wanted it, like the factory farms that I've seen in videos where they have these pigs, they're stuffed next to each other in his large warehouse. And the same with the chickens. Right. How much space would you need to have the same amount of chickens and the same amount of pigs if you let them free reign?

Right here. Here's my point. What you don't see in those videos is you don't see. The hundreds of acres growing corn and soybeans to feed them in that house.

The industry wants you to think that this is some sort of a, you know, an island, you know, where we're cranking this out of this house. They're not showing you the tractor trailers, bringing in the grain, bringing in the fish and hauling out the manure and the square miles of fields to spread the manure. OK, they're not showing you how dependent that is on this massive land base.

And so so on in the pastured model, the decentralized pastured model, instead of having fifteen thousand I mean, our farm, we're going to raise like forty five thousand chickens this summer. We're not we're not backyard by any means.

But guess what, those are in two hundred seventy five bird shelters that are moved every day across pastures. It doesn't take one more acre to produce the feed or handle the manure, whether the chicken is outside or inside. The difference is when you come and see our operation, you see all the land. When you see the factory farm, you don't see any of the land.

But isn't it possible that these factory farms are set up where the farms where the animals are raised are completely separate? It's a separate business from the farms where the soybeans in the corner. Yeah, well, ours is done on the same property.

No, ours is two. We we bought we buy our grain from neighbors. Absolutely. We don't.

But if they had to grow these animals and grow that food, would they have enough land to do everything together in the same farm? But there's no need to do it on the same farm, I'm a big believer in mutual mutual interdependence, not complete independence. We don't have any intention to grow our own grain. We we don't have the soils for it. We don't have the equipment for it. We don't have the skill set for it. So we buy from neighbors who do GMO free, non genetically modified GMO free grain.

And and we give them more than they would on a commodity, on a commodity scale. And so they love us because we're giving them more per bushel and they have a nice secure buyer and they're local. They're close. You know, we're not getting it from, you know, foreign countries and it's all close. So what happens is in in the kind of situation I'm describing, instead of having a fundamentally segregated food system, you have a fundamentally integrated food system.

So that's what happens, strong relationship with people growing up. So, for example, I mean, you started the discussion with in Los Angeles, you know, is there enough land to feed Los Angeles? You know that. And we and we could discuss whether whether Los Angeles should be as big as it is. I mean, that's a valid discussion, but a very valid discussion. But but but we can go there. But first, let me just say that if California, for example, did not export.

I don't know what the percentage is, but it's huge, you know, almonds all over the world if California centered on feeding California. There's absolutely enough here to feed California, OK, I mean, Iowa, Iowa imports 90 percent. Iowa is probably the most fertile place in the world.

And they only eat only only 10 percent of the food consumed in Iowa is grown in Iowa and processed in Iowa. That's pretty crazy.

It is crazy. Hawaii, only five percent, 95 percent comes from off Hawaii. I mean, they've got ranches. They've got I mean, why would you have to import stuff if you can grow pineapples, pineapples and, you know, macadamia nuts in your backyard?

Come on. You know.

So there's a there's a huge there's a huge disconnect. I mean, the the and this is one of the reasons that we're having this I think this this blowback from nature is that instead of having a fundamentally integrated system, I mean, think of how in Switzerland, you know, the take take the cows up to the mountain pastures they milk and the milk flows down at the end, they make cheese up there.

The way from the cheese goes into the into the pigs. The pigs eat the way. And so instead of transporting milk to a centralized cheesemaker and pigs to a centralized processor, they're actually making the cheese on site. So all they've got to actually transport is cheese and and pork. So they slaughter, they slaughter, you know, contiguous nearby, not on the same farm necessarily, but but nearby. So you don't have all this transportation. What you have is a fundamentally decentralized, we could even say democratized.

Can we say food, distance, food, food, food, distancing that that creates resiliency in the system, so instead of being tied to these 100 or 150 mega processing facilities. We're decentralized throughout the land base. How much more money do you think it would cost for food? We kind of touched on this earlier, but if you're dealing with this more natural based system and it's more complex, it's going to require more people and it's going to require a complete restructuring of the system that's currently in place.

Sherwood?

I think I don't have a figure for America's food, but I think I think in general it would be probably double what you'd pay at Costco.

Double. Yeah, that's an issue for a lot of folks. Well, but now think about this. Think about this.

You oh, man, where do you start with this? First of all. You're going to you're going to offer a lot of jobs, a lot of people that are going to be looking for jobs right now, so so this offers a lot of job opportunities.

Number two, it's much more healing on the land. Number three, you don't have all the pathogenicity. You know, you don't have to use drugs, antibiotics. I mean, our our our meat doesn't do drugs, OK? Our dinner doesn't do drugs. People don't realize that, you know, two thirds of the drugs used in the country aren't in people. They're in animals. OK, so you don't have those issues.

There are a lot of issues that you that you don't have. And those those add up in the big picture. So I always tell people our food is the cheapest aggregate food there is. We just put all the costs in all our all our costs are in.

OK, and and so we're not we're not asking taxpayers, society, the planet. We're not asking them to pick up the tab for, you know, for cheating, for for cutting, for cutting corners.

And that's what Costco is. And what's what's interesting is that that 40 years ago right now, today, nine percent of the average person's income, nine percent is spent on food. That's our average in our country.

40 years ago, it was 18 mm. 40 years ago, nine percent of our personal income was spent on health care. Today, that's 18 percent.

Oh, isn't that interesting how those of inverted variance, those are converted in rough in roughly 40 years, ever since the US dollar called the U.S. dollar created the food pyramid and put Twinkies and Cocoa Puffs on the bottom as a foundational.

And you can track the diabetes, you can track obesity, you can track all of these things right through from that time.

That's an interesting way to look at costs, right? Look, we're only looking at the cost of meat.

We're not looking at the cost for your health, the cost of health care.

Now, when you see steak at Costco, it's insanely cheap. It almost doesn't. It's almost obscene. It's like, how is a steak that cheap? Like, what are you doing and how is it possible? You know?

Yeah, well, it's you know, there are all sorts of special, you know, whatever fraternal negotiated things to make that happen.

And and the fact is that you don't have to watch the news very much to know that farm suicide is spiking.

You know, there's there are implications.

I mean, the whole the domino effect of dysfunction. There's a reason why rural America has a bigger opioid problem than than urban America. You know, the pandemic has been primarily an urban situation, but the opioid crisis has been primarily a rural situation.

Why? Because folks feel this affirmed. I mean, one of the biggest one of the biggest things that this virus has brought up, you know, they say that the crisis never makes it never makes a trend. It simply accelerates or brings into focus a trend that was already there. And one of the trends that's been happening in this country now for 20 years is a bifurcation of access between rural and urban to the Internet, like on our farm.

You know, we we still you know, we still have hours of the day where we can't get cell phone service, we can't get Internet service. Somebody comes to the store and we can't run our credit card because the Wi-Fi is down. It's very, very slow, very problem. We can't do Skype. We you know, we barely can do it. When I do some calls, it ticks me off about three times every hour right now.

That sounds like a magic place to live. Yes. That's the thing that people are having a hard time with is digital detoxing. Right? I understand too much of it in their lives.

I get that. I get that. But when you're running a business right. Or you're trying to do schoolwork from home. Yeah.

So what's happening is we're now we're now getting a very of a very accelerated urban rural divide of opportunity.

Because because rural, we don't we don't have this this access and, you know, I'm not asking for big government programs, but I am telling you know, I'm telling you that that this this this access.

To broadband Internet, especially now as we start working from home and as we have people there, there are lots of people, I'm sure you probably know some that are saying, I'm getting out of the city and I ain't going back. I mean, right now, New York City, all the movie companies in New York, they're warehouses are stuck full of people who called them and said, I fled the city with from the coronavirus. I want you to clean out my apartment, put it in a warehouse, and I'll tell you where to send it when I get myself situated.

I mean, that's a phenomenon that's already happening. Well, where are those people going to go? I mean, ideally, they would we would actually spread out and create a more, you know, spread out population on the on the landscape.

Well, people realize the hazards of living on top of each other like that, not just because of virus. And the things spread like wildfire through the population, but also when you have to get out of something goes down and you've got to get out of there and you realize, I don't even have a car. I can't what am I going to do, carry my bed on my back? Like, what are you going to do? Yeah. And people realize, like, hey, maybe this isn't the best idea to live like this.

And then when they look at the prospects of New York City going back to normal, like what it was five months ago, boy, that's a long road. You might be two years from now before it's like that again.

Right. That's right. And it might not happen at all is the other thing. I was watching this this documentary on the construction of viruses, this piece, and they were talking about like this, that when they give an 18 month window for creating a vaccine for this virus, like but maybe not, right? Yeah. They're like maybe maybe they don't come up with one that's effective.

No, that's possible, too.

We've been 40 years with the flu. Still don't have a flu vaccine.

What is the flu shot then? There's a flu shot. Well, that's that's supposedly to help the flu, but there's many strains of it. And they never hit the right strain. I mean, the actual the actual efficacy of the flu shot has not been determined.

It is a vaccine, though. It is. It is. But Peter Hotez on who is an expert in vaccines and infectious diseases and tropical diseases. And one of the things that he was saying that if you get the flu shot, even if it's not for the correct strain, there's still enough pieces of this that will protect you from getting really bad sickness from the flu strain, even if it's the wrong strain.

That's one opinion I'm not on. I don't agree with that opinion. I think when you're out there drinking with cows. Absolutely. Yeah, I am.

I mean, when this when this all broke, we sent we sent a letter out to our customers saying, hey, come to the farm, take off your shoes, walk barefoot through the pasture. We've got a nice big compost pile. Stick your hands in the compost pile.

You feed your microbiome to anybody, take you up on that offer.

Oh, yeah. Oh, so much of freaks out there. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It's great to take their hand and put. Yeah it's yeah it's great. It's great. And, and so you check on them, see if they're OK a couple of weeks later. I don't think anybody's gotten sick from it Jack. But yeah.

But I think, I think that that in general we need to be asking as a nation. I mean I'm still waiting for when they do the daily briefs up there in the White House, I'm still waiting for somebody up there, anybody somebody to step to the microphone and say, look, folks, let's talk about immunity.

Yeah. Let's talk about how you build immunity and the fact that we're in the middle of this and we've still got the Coke trucks running up and down the road.

And and and look, I like a Coke, you know, once a year, twice a year. But but there's a big difference between doing that and three times a day where what are we eating?

Are we eating, you know, comfort food, taco chips? Look, I like chocolate, but enough is enough, you know, and and are we in our kitchens? Are we are we actually getting good food or are we are we hydrating all of us or. Most of us are dehydrated because the water tastes bad? Well, let's let's make sure we each drink half a gallon a day. Let's let's start there. How about sleep? Are you getting, you know, eight and a half hours a night or you staying up watching Netflix because you're depressed, eating, you know, chips and drinking soda because you're depressed and you get six hours of sleep.

All of that builds up. Hey, how about how about have you forgiven everybody?

You know, resentment, resentment, each you I mean, it eats you up resentment, you know, vengeance, resentment and some guilt.

Yes, guilt and whatever you stole, give it back. Yeah. Yeah. And if you've got if you've got a bad situation with somebody, you call them up. Apologize. You're fucked up. Yeah. I'll be the first to be the first. Yeah.

Let it go. Let it go. Let it go. And I just think I just think that those simple like, you know, six or seven immutability get exercise, go get outside, run around in the sun.

All right. Those kinds of things, if we I mean, you know, Michelle Obama had the Let's Move campaign. It was a great campaign. She was she was right on, OK? And I'm not trying to be political. I'm just she was she was right.

And now, I mean, my my driver that picked me up from the airport last night, you know, he said he said.

You know, this is my first this is my first job for a month. And he said, All I've been doing is inside the house watching Netflix. Well. That's not going to build your immune system. He needs to get out and go stick his hand and boom, don't you think that I mean, I don't know if this is true, but I would imagine that the immune system is like your cardiovascular system and needs a workout.

It does. And many people believe this.

In fact, there's an entire school of thought, the, you know, this hypoallergenic thing where a lot of the allergies we have today are because we're so sterile. I mean, this was part of the part of the kind of unspoken part of the book, Guns, Germs and Steel.

You know, that was a fascinating book. And it talked about the ascendancy of the Europeans who kept livestock in their house, and that's why they were immune to smallpox and all these things that were devastating to the other people that didn't have nearby livestock. And so we want our customers to come out and pet a calf, go in the breeder and pick up a chick and hold a chicken. And we think that that's really, really that's not just.

That's not just whatever nostalgic I would be interested to see what's going on, I'm sorry, but what's going to happen when people do go back to normal life with these compromised immune systems from being inside all the time, whether or not just regular common cold kicks in on a larger scale?

Well, there are medical doctors. I can't give you names right now, but I'm like you. I'm sleuthing all this different material. And I can tell you there are are numerous medical doctors who are saying that as we come out of this, we're going to see a spate of exactly colds, flu, different things, because we haven't been exercising our immune systems, you know, in the soup.

And in fact, Governor Cuomo was it was interesting, his reaction the other day when he got the report, the data now there's, you know, more data coming out every day.

And one of the reports that just came out last week was that in New York, the people who continued working actually had less, less whatever positives to the virus than the people who sheltered.

Across the demographic, including front line hospital workers. Which, you know, you look at that and you say, well. You know, the people who were sheltering. They were dwelling on I mean, they were watching news all day, if you watch the media all day, you are you are scared to death, OK?

And rightly so. That's what you're feeding your mind. But if you're if you're working and you're building and you're creating and you're doing you're doing your things, sure. You might think about the virus once in a while. But I mean, literally in my day, I don't think about it. But a few minutes a day, it's only when I come in and turn on the news or look at podcasts that I'm besieged with. I'm I'm interested in it.

But but I'm out there busy and and there's something that happens, I think, psychosomatic when you just consider when your mind is consumed every day with.

With fear. Yeah, for sure. Well, it's the media's played into it and and also people are hearing they're hearing terrible stories about emergency rooms, particularly in New York City and places where it's stuffed full of people and the hospitals are overrun. The ice user on overrun. Thank goodness that that is sort of calmed down even in New York City. Cuomo basically said today that they're back to where they were when the pandemic exploded. So it's nice that they've sort of leveled that out.

But what's going to happen when you just let people out again? Are they going to start getting sick like crazy again? I mean, is it going to be another spread? There's a real worry about that. And we're worry that during this time we haven't been encouraging people to build up their immune system. We have been encouraging them to exercise. We've just been feeding them fear.

Yes, that's right. It's been it's been a feeling of fear.

And so, you know, interestingly, I've just I've got a book that's actually will have had had May in whatever ten days, a new book coming out.

I've written with a with a nutritionist, biochemist, Dr. Seina McCullough. And the title of the book is Beyond Labels. And it's it's a it's a doctor and a farmer lead you to a place of food empowerment.

You know, when you stand in front of a bunch of labels and you see everything from organic certified to fair trade to, you know, natural.

They're very confusing there, and what happens is when you have when you're faced with. So much choice of of label information, you tend to just shut down, you get paralyzed, you say forget it, you know, it's too complicated.

It's too it's too difficult. And so so we've written this book, Hirshey, from this timestream standpoint, me from a farmer's standpoint, trying to cut through this and so people can be empowered to actually to actually make food decisions that will.

And we talk a lot about immunity, like feeding your microbiome to build that up so that you have a diversified enough exercise and enough immune system that you can withstand this. And and so I think that I think that developing a robust immune system. Think about if that occupied your mind. How am I going to developing a robust immune system? Just think about. Dwelling on that, as opposed to, oh, no, am I going to get it?

Am I going to get it right?

I don't think we've scratched the surface as to what thinking I'm going to build my immune system. Let's be let's let's go get them.

OK, let's just just the mind body connection, what that does to your body to suddenly get a burst of hope as opposed to a constant diet of of despair.

Well, it has to have a big factor. It just I mean, that kind of stress plays a big factor with people's immune systems all the time. If people are stressed out, they always get sick. It's real, real common. It just makes sense. And I think this kind of fear, particularly I mean, the way I was experiencing it when the when the lockdown was first ordered and everyone was at the supermarket, no one was wearing masks yet, but everyone was stockpiling food.

And, you know, we were nervous. We were real nervous because we didn't know what this was going to be like. And we were also I was nervous, particularly because I feel like the information we were getting out of China was not correct. And I was worried that when you see those videos of them spraying disinfectant on houses and buildings, it's like maybe this is way worse than we think it is. And it's going to hit America really hard because we've been lied to by the Chinese.

There was a lot of fear. So I remember lying in bed at night and like testing my breath, like maybe I have it now. I was going to get worse. You know, there's a lot of that. There's a lot of that. I didn't sleep real good at all for maybe the first few days of lockdown till I sort of calmed down and realized I'm not going anywhere. I can't get it, you know? And then I got tested.

I'm like, OK, well, this is nice to know that I don't have it currently. Like, maybe if I just keep doing what I'm doing, I won't get it. But then, you know, I'd have days where half the day I think this is all bullshit. But we need to do is tell people how to strengthen our immune system. And then you read some crazy story about some new inflammatory syndrome. They're on, you know, some patients where, you know, their feet are swelling about blue toes.

All this. Yeah. You get scared again. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm totally with you. And I think that that brings up the issue of how our society now views death.

I read an interesting article just in the last couple of days about how how as we have left, it used to be when we were kids.

We used the term somebody drop dead, remember that, you know, they just drop dead. Old days old they aren't. Well, today, we don't say they drop dead. We say apparently medicine failed them or the hospital.

I mean, it's like it's like instead of just people. Yeah, we do drop dead.

Instead, every death is some sort of a failure of our techno sophisticated cryogenic, you know, system that's supposed to keep everybody, you know, beautiful and perfect forever, perfect forever.

And the fact the fact is, you know, and I think that's an advantage of on the farm where we are. I mean, we we see death every day. I mean, we know that things and and in fact, in fact, death makes room.

I mean, a compost pile is is death and life. I mean, it's you've got microbes eating stuff that was living and then and then that makes new life.

And of course, my family knows that when I go they're supposed to put me in a compost pile, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. Put me in the compost pile.

I mean, is that legal, though? Don't they have to cremate you? I think I think they have to at least put me in the ground or something. But that's my joke.

I don't think they're allowed to just put you in the ground. I think they have to pump you up with chemicals.

Oh, no, no, no, no. My dad. My dad. Nothing. Nothing. No, in the ground. That was it. Did you have to sign paperwork saying that you didn't kill your dad or anything? Because, you know. No, no.

What we did have to get was a special use permit for a family graveyard.

So we've got we've got ten we've got permission for ten spots.

So we're good for college. You don't have to use formaldehyde. Oh, no, but nothing everywhere else you do, though, correct? You either cremate or else formaldehyde. And I think these formaldehyde before they cremate.

Well, there's there are now bourgeoning around the country. There are natural cemeteries, really. Yeah. And they're they're specially permitted cemeteries where there's, you know, nothing, nothing is is used but problematize.

They can't Exuma. Anybody. Right. Is in your bones I guess.

Yeah. About the bones would stay for a good while. We know the bones lasts a long time.

But you know my my thing is that look, I don't want I don't want a bunch of people to die, but but the fact is that that death is is transformative.

And I don't to get all too mystical and spiritual. But whatever your your spiritual tradition is, mine happens to be Judeo-Christian ethic. So I think there is an afterlife. But but but even even if even if there's nothing, even if you say, well, I'm dead and there's no spirit and I'm gone, even so, that makes room.

For tomorrow's babies, it makes room for new ideas, new things, I mean, you can't you can't have you can't have life without the regenerative regenerative capacity of death.

And and the foundation of ecology is life, death, decomposition, regeneration, life, death, not regeneration might be looked like something else.

OK, but but that's that's that's our digestion. It's compost.

It's you know, it's everything.

And when and when we get sterilized and and and move away from that. I think we lose the beauty of the transformative capacity. Of that part of life, yeah, I think it speaks to what you were talking about earlier, that they look at death as some sort of a failure instead of just a part of the natural cycle. I was reading about one of the you know, they try to find new ways of the coronavirus looks terrible and in articles.

And one thing they were saying was it takes between two and 10 years off the life of life expectancy of the average person who gets it. OK, well, how did you come to that conclusion? Well, they came to that conclusion because they looked at old people who got it that might have possibly lived, you know, seven, eight years, five years or more. And they just started doing these random calculations based on how old people normally die.

But then the problem with that is if you look at the overall numbers, the average age that people die from coronavirus is actually older than the average age people die, which is like, well, what do you say in that? Like, it's taking years of some people's lives, but everything does. If you fall down, it takes years off your life. If you're old, right, you die from falling that fall. Should we stop all falling if you get sick, much younger.

Yes. Well, that's a big one. Right. And that's one that's killing people at almost the same numbers as the coronavirus was at the peak. I remember there was like a graph. That coronavirus has passed heart attacks. But wait a minute, how many goddamn heart attacks are there is just nothing we could do about heart attacks. Forget about that. Now, this is a pandemic. Yeah. I mean, cigarette's No one even touched with a ten foot pole because Secours is killing people at four and five times the rate coronavirus was.

And no one was saying anything of it because it's an elective thing. You're allowed to do it. It's a freedom. People enjoy it. You're grown adults here, but stay home, stay home and wear a mask and don't touch anything and stay home and you're going to lose your job. But stay home because you're not really grown adult. You're going to smoke cigarettes at home. How about that?

You feel better now? Yeah, well, I think I think a couple things. One is that, you know, our country has never told people when we talk about, you know, personal self-worth and your own personal affirmation in a climate of fear and worry. The worst thing you can do is tell lots of people you're not important, you're not essential, you know, right.

Yeah. You know what you've been doing all your life, what you do every day, it's it's not I say, well, what what a faster way to whatever d affirm firm.

Yeah. A person than to tell them you're not essential. I mean, I just think it's horrible.

And and now we have the data and again these data points mean we've all become, I think through this, more wary of statisticians. Yeah, but but one that I just saw again this week was that every every percent increase in unemployment equals 30000 deaths in our country annually, every one percent unemployment, economic suicide, depression, whatever.

That's a really important statistic. Yeah, it is. So, so so we've gone now from, you know, that that white hot three and a half percent unemployment to now, what, eighteen and a half. That's 15, 15 percent. I'm frankly, I'm frankly actually amazed that we're at only 18 percent right now. But I think that's only because a lot of people have been furloughed and are not unemployed.

So so, you know, if all those people go back to work that have been furloughed, you restaurants and things like that, it'll be OK.

But anyway, we've increased in the last 60 days, 15 percent in unemployment if that 30000 figure is actually correct.

That's an additional four hundred and fifty thousand people a year. You know, a dying from from external ramifications of being unwanted and this is in line with what you said earlier about costs.

Right, right. Like we were you're talking about the cost of food. But and then look at the cost of health care when the cost of food is higher and food is higher quality. Look at that. The cost of health care drops in an equal number. Right. And I think this is this is along those lines. We're looking at deaths through the coronavirus, but we're saying, oh, you're putting dollars over lives. You're saying the economy is more important than people's lives?

No, we're saying you need a nuanced perspective, because if you ignore the economy, it actually cost lives and it costs a staggering number of lives and in a horrible way, suicide, drug addiction, depression. Right.

And if I if I may go a little just one other little thread on this whole thing, again, thinking about, well, where are you? How how can we employ all the people?

I mean, if if our if our discretionary spending if this is going to make people more careful about discretionary spending, you know, flying to Paris, going on a Caribbean cruise, going to the sandals, I don't know how cheap those Caribbean cruises.

Jamie, I've been going over this. It's basically cheaper than being homeless. You could be on a cruise for like five to seven nights for one hundred and five bucks with all you can eat. Wow.

Where are you going to get that kind of food? That's right. You're not going to. So if I was a homeless person, I would just get me a constant stream of cruise ship rides. You get a figure of one hundred five thousand bucks a year. Yeah, right. A little bit more than 5000 bucks a year. You live like a king. Wow. You're in a little spot. See, they want you to pay for booze.

I think pretty pretty sure that's what it is. That's where they make their money. Yeah. It's like the money. Ridiculous, cheap beer.

Kind of like gas stations make their money on on jerky and, you know, and soft drinks before.

Yeah. They don't make their money on gas.

But anyway, so so one of the things that that we're key on because our fertility program is carbon and that's what feeds the soil carbon.

Right. Not to intent and chemical fertilizer, carbon.

And so our use fertilizers at all. No, no, we don't. It's amazing. We don't.

So just manure and now but we have a big industrial chipper. You love this machine.

I mean, it's the ultimate, you know, boy toy. You know, it's a it's one hundred and twenty horsepower diesel engine that can that can chip nineteen inch. You can take a 40 foot tree and just hook it in there.

And it just, you know, just I've seen those online. All right. Well, I mean, they're like the coolest machine that scares the shit out of me.

All right.

So so but that's Demmer Fargo. That's our fertilizer factory. OK, so carbon.

So so we integrate forest with open land and and we integrate the carbon from the forest. So we cut junk trees, dead trees, crooked trees, weak trees and thin the forest.

And that enables the good trees, the healthy trees to grow more vigorously, better reduces fire potential because, you know, your thinning it out, taking out all the dead stuff, and that then becomes our carbon base for bedding, the animals for, you know, and for all the composting that we do. And we do, you know, mountains and mountains of compost.

Where I'm going with this is when we talk about costs right now. How much is our country spending fighting wildfires and how much are we losing, fighting all these? I mean, we're in California, right? I mean, look at the devastation that fires have caused.

Imagine imagine if those if we had thousands of people. With Chipper's thinning the forest. Turning them into almost parklike like they were before the Europeans came, the Native Americans kept them going with, you know, with fire, but there were there was megafauna here, megafauna.

And so we graze through. We convert a lot of it into, you know, Silvo pasture, widely spaced trees that are growing unimpeded with with grazing animals underneath so that there's no fire damage, there's no buildup of fuel. And suddenly we're producing our own food and we're eliminating the danger of wild fire with technology called chainsaws and Chipper's. And that carbon becomes the fertility for the vineyards and the and the the agricultural lands. It feeds the soil. So now we have earthworms instead of hard soil.

We don't have erosion because our organic matter is up on our farm using these principles. We've gone in we've gone from one percent organic matter to over eight percent organic matter in the soil and every one percent holds another 20 thousand gallons of water per acre.

Whoa, so so. If we so if so, in our 60 years of being there in polyphasic, we have gone from one percent to eight over eight percent, let's just say that's seven clicks, seven times twenty is one hundred and forty thousand gallons of water per acre. Now that we can hold that we couldn't hold before. And it's because of the grazing, the perennials and the composting that's building up the organic matter in the soil that could be done in California.

When you start talking about holding water, it's not just about how much rainfall are we getting, it's how much are we actually holding in the sponge trying to reduce flooding and runoff and things like that.

So it sounds like your method could keep from the situation they find with some farms of the eroding topsoil where they have to constantly supplement. Right. But how would you how do you grow enough corn? Like if you want to have, like, those mono crop agricultural fields where you see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of acres of corn, just corn or just soybeans or just alfalfa, whatever it is like, if you want to do those mono crop things, how are you going to re fertilize the soil in the same manner with that?

You don't have to scale. You don't have them. You don't have crop agricultural solutions.

There's no corn, an amazing plant. So our soybeans. So I'm not all I'm saying is that right now our corn crop in the US, what is 30 percent goes to goes to alcohol for fuel.

Well, that takes more energy than the than the fuel we get.

So ethanol. I mean, ethanol. Yeah, we don't need that.

Ethanol is a byproduct of what we used to think that we needed ethanol exist without running out of gas.

Right. Right. So so that's not that's not necessary. OK, so you fracking.

Yeah. So, so, so that's not good either, you know. So we don't need we don't need to grow that corn. Well, you know, you know, come on. Electric vehicles and that. I mean all that's changing the landscape a lot.

But there's a lot of it for agriculture. Well yeah. So, so, so, so then the next is to feed, to feed cattle.

So another huge percentage like twenty percent goes to feed cattle and then another huge percent goes to hogs and chickens of course.

But one of the problems with the hogs and chickens is that they are not integrated with the food system. So right now. Right now.

Fifty percent, almost 50 percent, it's arguable, you know what a statistician again, figures lie and liars figure, but somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of human edible food on the planet is never eaten by a human. It spoils that's thrown away. And 75 percent of everything that goes in landfills is biodegradable. So when you start matching up the waste, the waste streams and the loss of losses in our food system and our waste streams, what happens is very quickly you start seeing that it's the segregated, it's this it's this single species, single crop, single segregated notion where it's not related, it's not symbiotic, it's not synergistic.

That actually creates the problem. A city in Belgium, this was this was articulated in Pat Foremans wonderful book. The title is City ChiX. And she talks you talk about urban chickens.

A city in Belgium offered three chickens per household to anybody that wanted a chicken and they had two thousand families raise their hand, says, yeah, we'll take three chickens. So they got six thousand chickens distributed through this the city.

And in the first month it dropped 100 hundred tons of food waste to the landfill.

What? And so not only did they eliminate the landfill waste, all these people now suddenly had chickens and passed, done all the math on this and shows that if one in three households had enough chickens to eat your kitchen scraps, there would not be a there would not be an egg industry in the United States.

It would be completely nonessential. Really? So that's the power of integration, that's the power of of of proximity, of actual putting stuff close, you know, so they wouldn't have an egg industry because everyone would be grown.

Everybody have their own eggs. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And the landfills, that landfill would get way, way less material.

And so so then so then the chickens don't need the corn from the cornfields so the fields can be turned back into prairie to feed herbivores, which now would be cows, not bison. But that's our that's our herbivore of of value. And so now you're at perennials instead of annuals and perennials instead of annuals, perennials put energy in the soil, annuals extract energy from the soil.

So now suddenly you're producing you're instead of producing an annual fertilized with petroleum to feed beef for somebody else, instead, you're not growing the corn. You don't need the tractor. You don't need the petroleum. The cows fertilize it themselves and the perennial builds the soil like it did with the bison. And you have. The beef, instead of coming out of a feedlot, it's coming off the prairie like the bison did, and suddenly you're building soils that are losing soil and your production doesn't change one iota.

It doesn't take any more land to produce the beef with what I've described than what it does with corn. Don't take any more land.

OK, so you're you're you're essentially saying that they have to convert to not just growing corn? That's right. They're going to have to do a different kind of farming, right? That's right.

Corn corn is I mean, that kind of mono crop, mono speciate. Odd thing is, is a complete I mean, we we started the interview talking about standing on nature on her neck.

You know, that is a quintessential example of standing on nature's neck. And, you know, the reason our farm was so deteriorated when we came to it was because we're in we're in Virginia, Shenandoah Valley.

And, you know, that was the breadbasket of the Confederacy during the Civil War, if you know your history. And and essentially, the war was finally won when when they burned all the crops in the Shenandoah Valley. And and and during that time, the valley lost somewhere between three and five feet of soil. During that that time period, so the soils are worn out and then we got the westward expansion and all moved to Ohio and Indiana and then finally the Dakotas and, you know, kept heading west.

So this does head west, head west, young man head west was partly because our agriculture destroyed the soils. And if we don't if we don't start using our agriculture to build soils. We have a lot more to worry about than a than a covid-19 deal, a lot more to worry about if we don't figure out a way to produce food abundantly and grow soil while we're doing it. The pandemic is going to be the least of our concerns. There's a thing that keeps getting repeated and it's that we only have 60 more seasons left in our top soil.

This is a thing that gets repeated almost as if there's no solution to this, that because we have to feed so many people, we're we're doomed. And what you're saying is, no, we just can't do it this way because this way's unsustainable. It's unnatural to begin with. That's exactly right.

So so we have to fundamentally change.

We have to we have to we have to use our carbon, our biomass strategically, which includes food scraps. By the way, you use everything.

You can't just throw stuff away. This is this is this is sunlight that's supposed to be decomposed.

I mean, the fact that landfills get get green environmental awards for poking methane, methane tubes in the landfill and running running the the excavation equipment on the methane from the decomposing material in a landfill.

It's it's it's shouldn't be in there.

No, no. It's unconscionable. Now, what we need to do is hook up. We need hook ups. We need to where the waste streams like they move right into the the streams. And you have circles, not linear, not linear thinking. And I mean just another one, for example, is is pontes. A lot of people don't realize that before the Europeans came to North America, North America was eight percent water. Today we're less than one percent.

I mean I mean, surface area. Think about the United States being 80 percent water, including eight percent.

Right. Eight I'm sorry, eight percent, eight percent water. I mean, think about that in in Utah, Nevada, New Mexico. All right.

Where all that water come from, Beaver's massive, massive beaver populations. I mean, there were 200 million beavers. And we now know archaeologically digging up skeletons. Some of them were as big as a Volkswagen car.

Really, these were big, big. The megafauna the megafauna is incredible. I mean, it's the same as the wombats in Australia. You know, now these wombats are like, you know, 80 pounds or little, you know, cute little wombats. Well, they know by digging up skeletons, they used to have nine foot wombats in Australia, nine foot wombats. So so when we look at the megafauna that was here, you know, the fact is that the planet used to have more animal weight on it than it does today with all the animals, all the factory farms and all the people.

So it's not people and animals that are messing up the planet.

It's it's it's the human management of the ecosystem.

It's messing up.

The abundance here is is through the roof. So so imagine imagine if if we end this, what we would doing on our farm is every time we get a few extra dollars, we build another pond. Now we're not beavers.

But but we have you know, we have excavation equipment that we can go in and build ponds so that when we have a flood and and everything is flooding, we're actually trapping a lot of that, not all of it, but trapping a lot of it up on high ground permaculture style that we can then dispense for irrigation in a dry time so that we never pump from an aquifer. That's the comments.

When you pump from an aquifer, you're depleting the commons. But if you're if you're reducing flooding and using that in a drought to keep vegetation growing when there's so much sunlight, then you're actually increasing the commons. And we believe very strongly that as a result of our farming, we should not be depleting the Commons. We should be increasing the commons. As a result, there should be more soil, more water, more breathable air, more you know, more wildlife, more pollinators, more.

There's also been a false narrative that it attributes. Most of our greenhouse gases are a significant number, a significant percentage of our greenhouse gases coming from cows and cow agriculture. And one of the things that they've found through using satellite imaging and when they're trying to detect methane, they're finding it's landfills, that these landfills are a huge, huge problem in terms of greenhouse gases. Yeah, that this the the totally wrong way of approaching it. The way you were saying burying this biological material in the ground instead of using it as compost is actually not just counterproductive, but it's actually detrimental.

Yes. It's not the wrong way to do it because it doesn't serve the soil. It actually fucks up the air.

It's not a zero. It's a negative.

It's a negative the same amount of biological material. It's just managed incorrectly, which is. Really crazy when you stop and think about it, is if if all if all the biomass that we have, what's the word non leveraged or thrown away?

If all the biomass we've thrown away in the last, you know, 100 years, if it had instead been leveraged for soil, building, feeding chickens, I mean, whatever, you know, today.

We would not have all that methane and today we would have soils that were that would be a lot richer and we would have, you know, better earthworm populations, you know, we'd have a tremendous amount of of soil maintain soil, abundant fertility. And the beautiful thing is that this this is not that difficult to bring back. I mean, I've been preaching this message, you know, all my life. And it's exciting to now suddenly have people stepping back and realize, wow, you know, we just kind of put a pause button.

And there are now, you know, dolphins in Venice. Again, there's, you know, in Shanghai, you can see across the street, you know, there's about L.A..

Yeah.

L.A., I mean, amazing, amazing pictures. So so when people say, let's get back to normal.

Look, I don't I don't want I don't want the the whatever the tragedy that we're having, but I also don't want to go back to normal because normal was this foot on nature's neck saying, you know, we're going to. So so that's where you start saying, well, you know what? What does the future look what what could a future look like? And that's where we start talking about decentralisation, integration, you know, integrating our all of our streams and large scale change.

Oh, really very large.

Very, very, very disruptive. Very disruptive, but. Everybody has a job, everybody has a new thing. I mean, my thing about the carbon economy, of course, you know, we're there in that hardwood region of Virginia, you know, near the Blue Ridge Parkway, Shenandoah National Park, all that stuff. And and the federal forests are atrocious.

I mean, dead trees. The fuel buildup is fuel buildup is just ridiculous. You know, wouldn't it be cool if if mommy or daddy could come home and their six year old says, you know, what did you do today?

And Mommy and daddy are able to say, well, we we stewarded.

You know, five acres up on Jack Mountain and and kept it from having a fuel load to burn and took that biomass so that a farmer could feed his earthworms so there'd be soil for your future. There will be abundance and soil for your future. I mean, what an affirming, sacred, righteous. Vocation, that would be, and and it would affirm people who want to work outside and have calluses and blisters on their hands, you know, we've spent we've spent a couple of generations marginalizing what we call blue collar people.

And and one of the big issues right now is we go to an A.I., you know, a techno future is what do we do with people that. Liked to work outside with their hands and and sweat, you know, the Michael row, you know, the dirty jobs. I'm suggesting that a carbon economy is one of many, many. Pathway's.

To actually envisioning a future where thousands and thousands of people would be employed in healing ministries so that we'd be caressing our nest, you know, so many times the the idea in agriculture on the farming community is that nature is a nature's a a reluctant partner, that we've got to you know, we got to get them in a wrestling hole.

We got to dominate. And Conquistador aren't going to make you you know, we're going to push you when actually nature is a benevolent lover that just wants to be caressed.

And we haven't and we haven't put attention on caressing in the right places for a long time.

Isn't it also that when you say the word we got, there's so many of us and so many people are already invested in doing these jobs that are actually counterproductive for nature.

Right. Like these people that run these mono crop farms. Sure. Soybeans or what have you. Sure. Like, boy, that's a battleship. That's going to be difficult to turn around. It is.

But the power so so you say, well, where do you start? What you start. At your at your dinner plate, and that's why at our farm, our little moniker on our little, you know, our little cooler bags is healing the land one bite at a time.

We want our people to know that that what's on your plate. When it's multiplied a billion times, you know, that actually creates the legacy. The legacy ecology you're leaving for your grandchildren, that that somehow that. That has to be made and people have to understand that, and I think that the the wake up call, the shock, the jar, the the emotional jarring of this pandemic, I mean.

We're seeing for the first time. People who never would have darkened our door or asked us for anything. They're asking us, and that's why, you know, that's why I see and I wrote this book Beyond Labels, and we started this a year ago, we had no idea that it would launch in the middle of this. But but we realize this this is a timely thing we're having. I mean, we're having people call me, can I go by land near you that you'll manage?

So I have a bunker, you know, when things go wonky.

I mean, for for the first time, I've never heard this before, but it's happening around the country. People like us, we're getting calls. How can I get on your first class list? How can I get on your business class? In other words, for the first time in our history, we've been in business now for, you know, half a century. We were in it before.

Organic was cool. You know, we were we were one of those early, you know, very, very early. And for, you know, for 30 years, we were the only game in town that was fun.

All right. And twenty years ago, things as people started, you know, awareness and farmer's markets and all, you know, all this.

And so so now we're not by any means the game, that game in town. But so for the first time in half a century, we're actually rationing. We don't have enough we've got way more demand. I did a post the other day.

You know, that pandemic is the best marketing strategy we ever had for you, for us, for us.

OK, and so we're just, you know, we're rationing here. And so now our people are getting scared. And so there are farmers like us that are actually talking about starting kind of an insurance premium.

You want to get on our business class list, so you always have a seat, pay us five hundred dollars a year in premium and you're our top ten percenter.

So, you know, give you money so that they would have definite access to food, deftest different access for food first.

Yeah. Yeah. How much could you scale up your business.

Oh it's it has limits but our, our ability to scale is only based on personnel, you know, how many people and land base. And we've got to we've got to have enough land base to scale and we need we need a bigger team. But no, I mean our principles.

But but see, we don't scale. I mean, let me explain it this way. There's a guy there's a guy, David Schafer, and he he he does a cool thing. As you know, our country is now a repository for shipping containers, you know, metal shipping containers. We've got millions. You can buy them cheap scrap metal because China makes everything chips at here and we don't ship anything back, but, you know, microchips.

So they don't take very many shipping containers.

So we're building up these mountains of shipping containers. So this guy has figured out how to take a shipping container and simply refurbish it into a very small expectable poultry processing mobile poultry processing facility. Hmm.

So I can call him and and for one hundred thousand dollars. He'll customize it to what I want, put a chassy under it, drive it to my place, put it on four pillars, it's not even a building, so no building permit required. Put it on four pillars. And I've got a little federal perspective processing facility that I can do, you know, one hundred and fifty thousand chickens a year, OK? So. For me, when you say, how do you scale up for me, it's not well, I'm going to if we hit one hundred and fifty and overrun the ability of this little facility, it's called Platen a box, PIB and his his his pot.

His blog is thinking inside the box because this thing is black in a box instead of if we had sales for over 150000 chickens.

Well, then you don't you don't expand this and make it bigger. You duplicate it. So your expansion is by duplication, not by concentration and scale on site. Then what happens? There's a sweet spot here.

There's a sweet spot if you if you don't overrun your your ecology. So we're going to set this thing. You set this thing on a piece on a on farm.

So. The acreage is enough to handle the processing water and you compost all the guts on site now you don't have to run a sewage treatment plant.

You don't have to truck your guts to a rendering plant. They become fertilizer on site called his fertigation. And and it's a sweet spot that the industry doesn't have. And so there's no reason why we can't produce a million chickens. And you just have eight of these scattered, you know, five miles apart. Six miles apart. And once you get them processed and are in a bag, you can put them in a tractor trailer and ship them anywhere, OK, that's not the bottleneck.

The bottleneck is integrating the processing with the production. That's the bottleneck right now in our in our fragile system.

And so if we can if we can do an integrative approach and and have a democratized, decentralized approach. Then suddenly we have an ecological, humane, people, friendly, community friendly, nutrient friendly system.

Has anybody ever come to you and said, hey, our community is kind of screwed up, we don't have a good food source here? Would you help us establish something like this?

Yeah, I've been. Have you designed these things for folks?

Not I mean, not for a whole community like this.

It sounds like there'll be a great thing, though, and especially now when we're realizing that it's difficult when there's the food supply chain goes down or something goes wrong and it's difficult to get food to people. Wouldn't it be great to have me? I've always said this, that it would be great if you had, like, the neighborhood had like one large plot of land and everyone in the neighborhood lived off that plot of land. Sure. They'd have a little mini Central Park in every neighborhood.

Right.

Right. You're talking my language. I mean, the idea of of. Well, I mean, you're familiar with urban agriculture. I mean, we have food deserts, right?

Food deserts is a big, big problem. But a lot of times food deserts are in pretty rundown parts of the city that have vacant lots.

And there's there's a lot of productive capacity in these places.

I was one of the interesting ones I was on was in St. Louis. And these three young couples had come together and they had they had purchased an old it was an old crack house that the city bulldozed. So there's this vacant lot. It was, you know, half an acre. It wasn't very big, half an acre. And these three couples.

They got apartments nearby, like within, you know, two minutes walk, and it was in a pretty rundown area of the city rundown neighborhood and they just started farming in this in this half acre and told all the neighbors, brings you food scraps. They got some chickens. They started making compost. They put up a little greenhouse. They put up a kitchen and very, very simple, poor boy, bootstrap, you know, nothing.

And they quickly became a whole community of whatever.

A place for kids to come because kids were mesmerized by the chickens, they had a worm bed, the plants growing, they cooked stuff. And I was there, you know, I was there with them for a couple of hours.

And here, come here her come kids down the sidewalk, you know, pulling a little red wagon with food scraps in it. And and they're feeding the worm beds. And it's it's fantastic. They were feeding like, you know, 30 families out of this old crack house foundation.

That's amazing. And it was just wonderful. And they were doing it as a as a gift to the inner city, you know, as a as a gift to the inner city. But I asked them. I said so. So how much of St. Louis is food could be produced this way?

They said, if you take out the dairy and the beef, you know, the big the big mega stuff, St. Louis. Could feed its entire city within the city limits this way. Wow. And that's true in Detroit. It's true in Baltimore. It might not be true in L.A., but but but here's the thing.

We don't have to solve every single person's problem to start solving some. And our problem is so many times I start down this path and somebody starts throwing at me the most extreme situation. And you know what, I don't have all the answers for the most extreme situation, you know, the the single mom of four minority in a food desert and whatever, OK, I don't have the answer to every single situation, but I'm looking at suburbia.

I'm looking at at incredible things that people are doing and opportunities. And if we just did what we know, I mean, I ran into a lady in in in Edmonton, Alberta.

Yeah. Thank you. And she was 50 single lady living in a fifth floor condominium.

Just wanted to wanted to farm in the worst way. She had no money, no land, nothing. And she just had this epiphany one day she said, I know I have one friend that has a backyard. She went to this friend with a backyard.

She said, Would you mind if I grew up like a 10 foot by 10 foot garden in your backyard? I just want to grow something for instead. Sure, sure. Sure. So she did, but then plot started a garden. Well, the ladies neighbor saw the garden and she said, do you think your friend would put a garden in my backyard? And I said, Well, no, I'll ask.

Well, sure. I met this lady 18 months after this initial conversation with her friend.

She was farming 18 backyards, had a part time employee, was a full time farmer. Her, her all of her tools were on the side of her bicycle.

She bicycled from spot to spot the spot with all of her tools and her she started a business called On Borrowed Ground and growing food.

So the thing is, is their creativity is their opportunity. Oh, it's up the wazoo.

If we would become as interested in this as we are the latest dysfunction in the Kardashians or, you know, the latest whatever.

And it's not that we don't have time for it. It's not that we don't have money for it. If there's one really positive thing to come out of this pandemic, I hope that it's a restructuring of what's valuable in life.

And if we can if we can even grab a 30 percent. Bump in that value trajectory. It will have been the best thing that ever happened. That's a large bump, but yeah, if we can restructure what's valuable to us, it's very important. And as you're talking about earlier, what are these essential businesses? What what is essential and non-essential? It's so arbitrary and strange. And this is something that politicians really aren't supposed to have the power to dictate what we can and can't do in that way.

And they're not doing it in a smart way. Like, here's a perfect example. Liquor stores are an essential business. You know, it's non-essential business, Alcoholics Anonymous. So Alcoholics Anonymous are not allowed to have their meetings, but liquor stores are open because they're essential. That is ass backwards thinking. That doesn't make any sense.

Absolutely. I mean, yeah, in Virginia, I mean, yeah, we've got ours in Virginia as well. You know, they open the liquor stores and closed the churches. Yeah. They they open Wal-Mart and close the farmer's market.

I mean, it's asinine. It is. It's absolutely asinine. And and and I would even argue that they don't have the constitutional authority to do that.

Most would most would examine it.

That would be my argument. But but, boy, fear.

You know, fear. Fear spawns things that we can't even imagine, what is it like where you are in Virginia, as are restaurants open? No, no, no.

So we're so on May 15th, we we entered what's called phase one. And so so churches are allowed to to meet again. Not that the government could have ever taken that away, but anyway, that's that's that's the lesson there.

That's the narrative. That's the narrative. Churches can meet again.

We're still at the ten person rule for four gatherings, gatherings, but a church, as long as they're at 50 percent capacity, they're OK.

So so that's up and running. Hairdressers are back to work.

A lot of the like the personal hygiene, barbers, hairdressers, you know, you know, small, very small scale kind of things like that are back.

But it's a it's a slow you know, it's a very, very slow process.

Yeah, it is. In some Texas is pretty wide open. Texas restaurants, hotels, everything's back up. Phoenix is the same way. Right. Right. Places are opening up comedy clubs again at half capacity. Right.

Right. So, I mean, we're having our we canceled our first two farm tours. We do a we do what we call the lunatic farm tour at the farm. One hundred people on hay wagons. Obviously, we can't social distance on hay wagons. You can't get people. Right. So we're having our first one, May 30th.

It sold out. Not a single person has complained. We've told him there won't be social distancing. You're on a hay wagon.

If you're if you're uncomfortable, then you can walk the tour and we don't drive fast.

You know, we've got people on hay wagons. We're not you know, we're not driving at road speed. So you can walk it if you want to. But our impression of the feedback we've gotten is just, oh, relief.

Finally, I can go somewhere. I can be with people I can you know, that's the plus side.

We're going to appreciate what it's like to to do stuff, to be able to go outside, to go to a restaurant, to go to a public gathering and have a picnic.

Yes. That kind of stuff. Yes. Yes. I think all of our of our historically normal social interactions are going to be much sweeter than they have been in the past because we're social beings, we're not hermits.

A few of us are hermits, but not very many. Most of us, you know, like to see people. And if there's one time when you want to be together, it's in hard times.

Yes. Who wants to go through hard times alone? And when I see these World War two vets dying alone because their family can't be around them. Got you know, he's dying.

Who cares, you know, if son and daughter and grandkids want to come and be around him, I just well, the fear is that they'll get it and they'll give it to someone else and someone else will wind up in a terminal as well.

Understand, one of our problems is that we haven't done controls. You know, I wish there had been one state that said we're not going to do anything so that there could be one control.

Right. But the problem is nobody's done a control. So so we really we really don't know. Well, there's been places that have less restrictions than others. And then also there's been countries that have less restrictions in Sweden. Yeah. So and you're getting it's it's really difficult to pass the information. Right. And get a straight answer on it. Is this is a good thing or a bad thing ultimately over the course of time, particularly what you were talking about with the unemployment rate equaling, you know, one percent equaling 30000 lives over the course of a year.

Right. I mean, we really don't know what that number is going to look like here. And it could be absolutely devastating. It is.

I mean, we already know that, you know, suicides are up. Yeah. Child abuse is up. Spousal abuse is up.

We know that just from police report. So, you know, that's serious. And there are so many demographics that we don't know. Like like Sweden, for example, 50, 55 percent of all households in Sweden are single single person must be really all agreeable people.

That's crazy. Fifty five percent.

Yeah. Yeah. So just swinger's. Yeah.

In in Italy. In Italy it's it's only I think eight, 18 or 20 percent, something like that.

So, so there are a lot of multigenerational households in Italy. So Italy is a much older, older demographic and and more people in a household, probably a lot more small.

Swedo. Yes. Italy. Oh yes. Oh yes. How much they smoke. Same thing in Spain. Spain. A lot. A lot of smoke. And they got hit hard as well, right?

Yes. And you got to imagine that that's going to lead to a compromised immune system. So you've got all the people living together. You've got a large percentage of folks that are older, and then you got the cigarettes and the no exercise, not the gyms that I found when I was in Italy. Like, what in the fuck is this gym? You know, it's been nice hotel. What a pathetic gym. Yeah. Yeah. This is somebody working out over there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. That's true.

And as you know, as we go forward with this thing, I, I look at this and say, well let's let's let's at least wipe ourselves off and say, OK, what can I learn from this, what can we learn from this going forward and.

Culturally, obviously, we can learn what we need to we need to decentralize and diversify our food processing system. I mean, for me that's like number one and and then four for the average consumer, though, I mean, that's that's a macro thing. But for the average consumer, what can you do to facilitate a secure food system and your own secure food system?

And one one is to simply start stockpiling more food.

I mean, have more food in the house. You don't have to go to the grocery store three times a week, buy in bulk, go to the go to the farmer's market, buy from a farmer. You can get you can get 20 pound bags of oatmeal. You know, you don't have to get a little, you know, a cup full of Quaker Oats. You can get you can get rolled crimped oats by the 50 pound bag.

It's it's it's pennies on the dollar. I mean, this is how you save money. You buy. And I mean, we talk about price, interestingly, our our whole chicken price. At face is cheaper than boneless, skinless breast from Tyson at Wal-Mart. So the way to save money is to get unprocessed. Mm, that's that's how you eat.

Well, OK, you know, the famous movie Food Inc, the documentary Food Inc, you know, wonderful movie. But they they presented the same thing. Remember that family went to the fast food place and they said they couldn't afford tomatoes. Well, a pound of our ground beef is cheaper than that burger, soft drink and and massive fries that he got. And it's probably more nutrition in a half a pound of our ground meat than that whole meal.

But you can buy two pounds of our ground meat for the price of that whole meal. The fact is that junk food is not cheap, junk food is expensive. I mean, you start talking about nutrition. I mean, a Snickers bar, Snickers Bars is twice as expensive per pound as as our grass finished world class ground beef.

OK, so when you start looking at these kinds of things, you start realizing, oh, OK. So so really, I just need to I just need to adjust where my money's going and how it's being so, so spent.

So, so spend a bulk, buy bulk, buy unprocessed.

Get in your kitchen. Yes. And you know develop a.

A love for domestic culinary arts. OK, and kitchens are a great place to teach your kids science, you know, fractions, a quarter teaspoon.

Great place to teach your kids. So math, math, fractions of stuff, science. You know what happens when you put baking soda with vinegar and all the stuff? I mean, you know, kitchen's a great first learning place. And what you're saying is great on paper.

The problem is people are addicted to eating terrible foods. Yeah. And it's it's a real issue, particularly with highly sweetened, highly processed foods that are the things they crave there and also their gut biome. You were talking about this doctor. What does push Dr. Zack Bush exactly? The doctors that push and that he's a biome expert? I'm glad we brought this up as well, because that's an issue with people that have their bodies accustomed to eating this terrible food.

They're biome is accustomed to that terrible food. So it starts craving those Twinkies.

And, oh, listen, the food, the food processing scientists, they ain't dumb. No. Yeah, they know.

They know what our you know what our our primitive, you know, hot buttons are and.

Yeah. Salty sweetie. I mean, boy, they know exactly what it is so. Yeah. So Zach, Dr. Zach Bush has been actually developing microbiome, bolstering concoctions to try to diversify your microbiome. You know, one of the things that that farmers like me that that direct market to people, one of our concerns, I mean, I don't I don't talk a lot about it, but one of our concerns is that our that our food, for example, our chicken, we don't immerse it in chlorine, you know, so it actually has its living food and.

And sometimes. People are so sterile in their microbiome. That they actually have to eat a little bit of unprocessed, you know, real food a little bit at a time to build it up. I mean, the other morning I was out in the garden picking asparagus. And I have a knife and I was cutting it off, of course, I love fresh I mean, fresh garden. I mean, there's nothing like a cool morning and a big old fat asparagus, you know, an inch thick.

And I just eat it fresh. It's got some soil on it. Eat the soil. You know, just grandma used to say you're supposed to eat a half, eat a pound of dirt before you're 12.

Right. Remember, I mean, I had a different grandma and a different. Oh, man.

But, you know, how do we develop immune systems in babies?

We don't put them in plastic wrap, bubble wrap. We put them around the floor. And the next thing we know, they're there, you know, gnawing on the dog toy and they've got a dust bunny in their mouth. And right. This is how you build an immune system.

Kids kind of know her nature, knows that. At least nature knows that. Yeah.

I mean, Richard Louv writes about this in Nature Deficit Disorder, which is, of course, an iconic book about the importance of of touching nature and breathing in nature. I mean, just the the the bacteria that exudes from vegetation and the ecology of plants.

Powerful thing, you know, and we're told there posh things down as soon as you get them because they don't have pesticides on them. Yeah. You got to clean up all the car. That's why they co live from the spinach. That's why you get food from people that don't use pesticides. Yeah. And and you say, well there's not enough of that produced.

Well as you said, it would be wonderful if this broadcast went into every single household in the world. And tomorrow everybody. Said we're going to do different, I think a lot of people are trying to do different because this pandemic might I would imagine the number of gardens has grown up. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I know a lot of people have looked into hunting. You know, I know that.

And edible, you know, hunting, edible, wild things. What can I eat? You know, dandelions, lamb's quarters, mushrooms.

Yup, yup, yup. It's a wonderful thing. So, yes, this is really this is really a good thing.

And the whole who we call the Homestead Arts, there's a there's a big conference that happens every year in the East. They're hoping that they can still have it. It's in October, the Homesteaders of America conference.

And and two weeks ago, they had 10000 new email sign ups for their postings in one day. Hmm. I mean, that gets your attention. That's huge. And it's and it's people that are looking on how to how to garden. I mean, the number of gardening questions just like.

And seats, I mean, seat companies are out all the seat companies basically did like a three or four day moratorium this spring, you know, because it ran out. So this summer was going to be in short supply. Canning supplies are going to be short dehydrator, I'm sure, you know, produced dehydrator are going to be hard to get in our area right now. You cannot get a freezer now until August. Everything's back ordered clear to the middle of August.

Everybody stocked up the freezers to be able to stockpile. So that was one of the things I was saying. You know, how do we how do we go forward?

Well, you you you do more for yourself.

And in our book beyond beyond labels, and I end up the last couple chapters are about moving to a place where you actually are producing some of your own food, a backyard, flock of chickens, a little garden, a little herb garden, you know, and we have the technology now, Mother Earth news magazine.

I mean, they've led the let this thing forever. And you go to a Mother Earth news fair. And we were going to have the first one on a farm this year at our place expecting 10000 people. We had to cancel is in July. So it's rolled over now to next year.

But there's every kind of like, you know, like patio tube, herb garden with little pockets in it, you know, and you grow all of your own herbs, beehives on your house, roof.

There's so much there's so much that you can do. And so I encourage people to jump in and just caress the mystery of life. And it's it's good for your nutrition, it's good for your soul, it's good for your spirit in a time where everybody's concerned about death, surround yourself with something that's growing. It's a great thing, you know, I think that's a great point and maybe a great way to end this. Joel, thank you very much.

I really appreciate you and appreciate your message. And and it's just you really epitomize the best example of that sort of regenerative farming. And I really wish you would be more widespread.

Thank you, Joe. Thank you. With your help, it will be my pleasure. All right. Bye, everybody. Thank you, friends, for tuning in to the show. And thank you to our sponsors. Thank you to Zipp recruiter. If you're looking for a job, Zipp recruiters going to find you a job faster. And if you're looking for someone to hire, ZIP recruiter will invite candidates to apply to your most urgent roles, making it faster and easier to reach people that you need by connecting people who need jobs and companies that need people, zip recruiters working with all of us so that we can keep moving forward.

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