Joe Rogan Experience #479 — Joel Salatin Transcript

Transcript

0:00 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! and antibiotics that your approach has sort of revolutionized a lot of the ideas that people my response is that this is not new. You know, I mean, I mean, take, take, take just for example, move, you have to keep them home. You have to be able to move them, you know, in the right place You know, 15,000 chickens in a house, you know, nine laying hens in a 16 by 22 inch cubicle.

3:46 there's going to be at least two species. You're going to encounter multiple things. In fact, It just has a nice ring to it. All we're doing is taking the way buffalo and fire and predators used to move across the landscape with, you know, with periodic disturbance. It needs to be disturbed. And so, you know, actually the ecology is used to having a lot of,

6:52 and are able to fully express their pigness. And what you end up with then is an incredibly put them in a pan of water, measure the displacement, and our pork displaces less water per pound than the industrial pork. So they're denser. So this much more nutrient dense. So your hams would be similar to that. Be inspired. And it's interesting, they built their, they had a kind of a shed shelter where the pigs would go in and eat, like, soured milk and whey and leftovers from, they milked about 20 cows, and so there'd always be leftovers.

11:01 1950 is pretty good. Yes, it is. So this whole idea of, you know, vegetarian-fed chickens is just. darker the yolk is. It's like a dark orange. And, you know, we have a big yard and we keep them and we have a huge house built that's And express their chicken-ness. mechanical? And they don't ask. I mean, I've never seen a research project way and other cultures the same way. That's a very good point. Both points. Yeah, that's a very good point. Do you think that your style of farming, is that possible on a large scale?

14:53 food production, not a single other person would get a meal. People go hungry not because there's in five tons a day and only shipping two tons. I said, what happened to those three tons? Wow. So this food that's going bad, so if we're making twice as much food as people need, the long warehousing and chain of custody between, you know, between field and fork,

18:23 technologically advanced, monospeciated industrial farm. So, for example, we have pasture livestock, so we run the cows across the pasture. Suddenly you don't have pathogens, suddenly you don't have the pathogens because the pathogens So if you put multiple diversity together, it acts as a dead end. And you've designed this sort of chicken house that moves around. It's on like sleds?

22:22 how can we duplicate this pattern on a domestic model? So there's collateral damage, that collateral damage in terms of the area of a thousand micrograms per egg. You know what the official USDA, you know, biologically active soil compared to hydroponic or just, you know, what we call And I'm sure there's probably also financial factors that were resisting the conclusions. Well, exactly. All of that collateral damage

26:56 Let's agree that earthworms are pretty important. What's this business going to do to the earthworms in our community? Because they don't have to be. I mean, just take one example in our lifetime, mad cow disease. And so I just think that we have to appreciate that we are in Western culture, you know, we're a product of, you know, dead cows to cows? Oh, absolutely. Free seminars come out and they've got sponsors, the local agribusiness community and the industrial complex would buy dinner.

32:13 But the idea of making your cows cannibals. At least it's not cows. Yeah, it's a pretty bad way to go. or Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, you know, that was a blockbuster, you know, when it came out. And a lot of factors had to be in place. One was we had to have cheap energy because prior to, until we had cheap energy and cheap transportation. So that really, you know, catapulted this.

35:36 that they live in, that they ingest, is very abrasive to the very tender mucus respiratory membranes. the bloodstream. So that's how it jumps those regular industrial pigs. We're not seeing it out in the countryside in pastured pigs and our sort of Yeah. It's a big deal. Big deal. Our rule of thumb is that good food production, good farming, good food production should be aesthetically and aromatically sensually romantic.

40:28 single designed or single use capital intensive infrastructure, even when it becomes a detriment to society to have that infrastructure, we still have to use it because we're economically and an example, one is that if you go to a composting bedding in an operation, you can ameliorate a lot of the problems. So it takes room for these microorganisms

43:07 life. There is no community of beings, good community of beings. In nature, a lot of people there's a protocol that's been violated so um one of the ways to house animals at least temporarily living composting, uh, bedding. And, um, and you know, and that is a partial answer, compact discs. The Germans tried to do it for a long time, but they couldn't get past

46:57 Avian flu, swine flu, some of the most horrific flus that we've experienced in the past hundred So that, for example, when the industry says, oh, look, E. coli, it's been around forever. Get over it. E. coli is part of a cow's digestion. Well, that's true, but not We are a bunch of dummies, aren't we? Your talk of the live bedding, what that is is nature's own way of dealing with the pathogens instead of pumping

50:26 that's what I found so incredibly fascinating about the idea of continuing to move these So, you know, you get a lot of pain, but there's no danger because you're running like, you know, goodness, a 20th of an amp. dummies and all that, my goodness, we have now innovated the most amazing infrastructure to be able for the first time in human history to caress our earth nest,

52:30 That's unprecedented. We've never been able to do that before. And we can protect them. We can with a four-wheeler, you know, a couple of guys pushing it along, okay? Oh, it builds up your immune system. Wow. I couldn't breathe, you know, on our airplane and stuff because it was, and, you know, I'd get all congested and all this. Anyway, I mean, it's not endorsed by any medical work.

56:19 I had a malfunctioning kidney valve. A malfunctioning kidney valve almost died. I mean, this was a long 10 minutes, her machine picked up that, which was, you know, 50 year, a 50 year old, whatever, Yeah. Yeah. i i i have no idea i i purposely try to not know all about it. where the cows are very healthy, I mean, you could drink that raw milk, distiller's grains, because they were without refrigeration.

1:00:22 of milk if you don't respect the cowness of the cow. Exactly. Put a butt on TV and people will watch. government would have any solutions whatsoever to that is pretty ridiculous in the first place, I mean, you're suggesting that the factory farms, there's no retrofit. in production on pasture by about a threefold amount, which is pretty significant.

1:04:19 The fact that we're doing stackable synergistic symbiotic multi-speciated enterprises, Are you with me? So in total, all we're doing is taking all the people that are currently trying to triage the collateral damage of cheap food. And when people say, oh, but a locality can't produce it. rather than a segregated system, becomes far more efficient in the scheme of things,

1:07:23 Why? It's fundamentally overrunning a lot of natural barriers that are there in place to protect beings in our insides, and they're not capable of mutating and assimilating material as fast as our human brains can adulterate the food system. God says, all right, you can do that, donkey on horse, but that's it. You're not going to go any He points out that when Monsanto was doing feeding trials for FDA on, for example, GMO potatoes, they chose for the feeding trial geriatric rats.

1:11:34 you name it, I had all these problems. So, you know, one of the problems with science is eclectic view. How do we really move over here? so that consenting adults could make a voluntary choice of food choice, legalize all drugs, all of them. Because a government that can tell you you can't smoke dope can also tell you I just talked to 200 farmers up in San Jose this weekend, you know.

1:15:48 And if we would free up those of us in the system that are ready to access our neighbors What could possibly happen? What could they do? You're talking about massive societal change. Has that really been argued? in Virginia back about 12 years ago. Burned it up. And both of them said that we are considered a typhoid Mary in the community because, you know, we don't vaccinate,

1:20:10 Well, the insurance company doesn't know anything about agriculture. It's all a big fraternity. He's like, hey, what's up? He wanted to come out and see the pigs. So I took him up to the pigs. He says, you know, I mean, these pigs are just chilling. Right. Oh, yeah, if you're dead. If you, man. I've seen it. They will kill you if you quit moving. They're omnivores, you know. Oh yeah. If you're dead. If you're dead. I tell kindergartners that want to go in and pet them,

1:23:40 you know, coyotes, which have sort of taken them on and mountain lions and all the other Because you can go out and shoot a pig and sell it to a restaurant. You can sell it to a neighbor. They allow, you know, wild shot animals, deer and pigs Yeah, well, maybe you could control it with licenses. day where they showed these pigs running across people's lawns in this normal suburban street

1:26:45 years. And in order to do it, they're going to have to greatly drop the bird size in their houses. Oh, no. So, you know, imagine 400 cows on two acres. You call them? Yeah, it's like a dinner bell. Yeah. It's like a dinner bell. rungs, you know, contract or expand the rungs based on how much grass there is, how many there They just, they just hang around the egg mobile because that's where we're feeding water and nest

1:30:14 I mean, we use the word slang. to go down. So for them, you don't have to worry about that. You just move this giant structure mounted on wheels on an axle or like a trailer. And you just hooked up with, to it with a tractor Oh yeah, they do That's right, it's like dairy and beef. If you're going to eat it, you want an Emmett Smith. Yeah, that's right.

1:33:35 fertilize all of them, but we do have enough roosters so that, you know, kids can watch them crow, and we can—I've had a lot of people say that our transcendentalists are— Yeah, hen-pecked. And they, oh, wow, look at that. Do you? candy bar, I call it candy bar diets, you know, and unnatural feeding regimens. And so Well, he was eight, you know, eight years old is about the time to start an entrepreneur business, you know? And so he said,

1:36:32 And what we've seen in the genetic selection process over that time of not using any crutches and just letting it be kind of a, you know, the first egg she did. I mean, I call it survivor genetics. We're doing that now with our cows. That's the problem. And so we wouldn't No, we wouldn't do it with people. The animals, it's simply their body, their life, their existence, and the way they interact with nature.

1:40:13 fragility. You know, Sir Albert Howard, who, of course, you know, developed the scientific aerobic Wasn't that prescient? We were just really beginning Yes, absolutely. I mean, mineral deficiency is a major problem in nature. Fortunately, you know, predators and herbivores. Guess which one is the most efficient acid to use, carbonic acid. How do you destroy a decomposition cycle? You do it when you don't feed this, when you don't have a

1:45:41 and so in genetic in genetic breeding and selection, what we've done And now we don't have that carbon decomposition cycle. It can absolutely all be done in-house. Is it possible to get that old wheat back? They're available. And I'm not talking about hoop skirts, hearth cooking, washboards, you know, barefoot pregnant We've got Cuisinarts. That's interesting.

1:49:35 And, of course, you know, it's a powerful movie, very profound. So when somebody says they can't afford it, the first thing I do is I want to grab them and say, You can make $800 worth of bread from a $6 bushel of wheat. What it means is you have to participate And you cannot have an integrity economic sector of anything, automobiles, food, clothes, entertainment. You cannot have an integrity

1:52:38 In my view, you know, we should just not eat from the supermarket. Who's ever heard that word? that's cheaper than the processed stuff in the supermarket. He had them in little, little, you know, box cubbies, you know, in this beautiful wooden slanted display. you can get the most expensive potato in america and it's half the price of potato chips. But potato chips is not food.

1:55:24 When someone buys a bag of chips, they're not going to go to the store and get a potato Mother Earth News, this issue actually has a um a big spreadsheet in a very nice way but it's impractical when you're talking about feeding a nation of 300 pigs as an example. We run pigs in the woods, and they eat acorns and bugs and weeds and things like that untouched. Yes. So the factory farm system that we have, the amount of food that they produce,

2:00:21 when Governor Tim Kaine came to visit our farm toward the end of his gubernatorial time in Virginia, he really got it. lack of disturbance in their ecosystem. We don't have the buffalo, we don't have the fires anymore. I mean, it would be, well, I mean, it's unspeakable. they are a direct result of overrunning our nest's ability to handle our mechanistic creativity.

2:04:00 so the idea of whose land are we using here? these healthy environments, these healthy growing environments is to have sort of a symbiotic and protocols for where you grow grain in perennial First of all, if you quit feeding herbivores grain, you tremendously reduce the amount of grain that has to be produced. Then you go to perennials. That's a very good point. That's a

2:07:48 Well, a perennial is a plant you don't have to plant every year. An annual is a plant you have So our official ag incentivization is to incentivize the very thing that destroys soil. Oh, it's so, it's wonderfully marbled. like, listen, if every kitchen had enough chickens to eat its kitchen scraps, I mean, I mean, if you had them three feet by two feet, it would be fine for two chickens.

2:10:49 You just throw your scraps in there, and then the compost feeds your little pot garden. Anyway, that becomes your fertilizer for your house. Anyway, if you take the pig and the chicken and you use them as their salvage operation, then you cut even more grain. So you take off the herbivore grain, you take off Yeah. And you have to understand in context, don't be too hard on the ancestors,

2:13:44 You know, because he just ran through the woods and they had their babies and you know you kind of No, they weren't fenced in because there was no fence that would keep them in. He had several slave boys that their job was to keep the livestock out of the gardens. onto a par with the grain model. And the beauty of that is that the pasture-based non-tillage model is a soil-building engine

2:16:46 The amount of population growth that we have today And I'm a pretty incorrigible optimist overall. I don't think, though, You know, we're going to outlaw outdoor flocks of 3,000 chickens or more. I'm getting ready to go to the Netherlands and do a week of seminars in the Netherlands. What we're seeing is what Joel Arthur Barker said when he wrote the book Paradigms 40 years ago,

2:20:59 where has that been established? Don Huber. I mean, have him on your show. Don Huber, collateral damage of GMOs. The idea that GMOs are actually more productive is pretty much we see, you know, uh, uh, listeria, campylobacter, um, uh, salmonella, E. coli, but I hope people out there in the world of agriculture every single community is surrounded by really integrity farmers now.

2:25:11 They'll use, you know, than ever of where their food is coming from. The term organic, I mean, never even heard that a It was really fun. But the ones that people need to know about would be The Folks This Ain't Normal, as well well as the sheer ecstasy of being a lunatic Go to Stamps.com, enter in the code word JRE, Miami, Florida.