 Hi again. My name is Nate Rosenberg. And I'm Michele Neistetter. As conference chairs, we're extremely pleased to introduce Joel Salatin this evening. He's a third generation beyond organic farmer, an author whose family produces who owns and operates polyphase farms in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. The farm produces salad bar beef, pork, pastured poultry, forage-based rabbits, and direct markets everything to 40,000 families, 40 restaurants, and 10 retail outlets. Salatin's seven books to date include both how-to and big-picture themes. The farm features prominently in Michael Pollans on the Vore's Dilemma and the award-winning documentary Food Inc. As Nate and I began sketching out our plans for AHS 2012, we embarked on a road trip through the South and ended up at Joel Salatin's farm. And we had an opportunity to see a farm that understands and respects the chickenness of the chicken and the pigness of the pig. What impressed us most was how Joel's farming practices integrate modern technology with a healthy respect for the past. And what results is a much more resilient, powerful, and tastier-than-anything that comes out of America's conventional farms? We know because we've tasted the bacon. This combination, a willingness to embrace innovation while also embracing our heritage, exemplifies what the Ancestral Health Society is all about. Please join us in welcoming Joel Salatin. Thank you. It's really great to be with you. Can everybody here okay? Is this working all right, Mike? Oh, we're good. We're good. Okay. All right. I told them I wanted this because I like to move around a little bit. This is the end of the day, so I've got to keep you awake and keep you excited for the next hour. And so I intend to do that, partly by doing jumping jacks and balance beam routines. So did the US soccer team win? They did. Okay. All right. Well, all right, we got that out of the way. Now, we're good to go. Yeah, I wrote this book, folks. I do a lot of college speaking around the country and we do a lot of tours at the farm. We have a lot of young people at the farm. I run into a lot of young people. And over the last couple of years, this idea really began gelling in my mind of just how abnormal our culture has become. When you look at the continuum of history, there are just an amazing depth and breadth of abnormalities in our culture. All of us are somewhat biopic. We grow up and we assume that whatever is is. I mean, we can't imagine a day without television. You know, we've got a lot of people out here that can't imagine a day without texting a day without Twitter. But if you go back, not very long, can you imagine a day without Belvina cheese? A day without TV dinners? You don't have to actually be very old to remember when some of these things came in. It's profound, the disconnect that we have in our culture, with things that were so viscerally apparent. And it just struck me how abnormal all of this is and what that does. And so I wrote this book, Folks Is St. Normal. And it really came home to me when I was writing along and the book developer called me from New York. She said, you keep, you talk about straw and hay as if those are different is grass and forage that's dried, solar dried in the cows eat it, straw is the residue left after you've harvested small grain. Very, very different. And this is a person who is college educated, Twitter's tweets, texts, has a widescreen TV, knows how to run a GPS signal system and can probably recite to you the latest 10 smash movies from Hollywood and doesn't know the difference between hay and straw. And we say we're educated. I kind of agree with West Jackson, you know, we're not on an information explosion in our culture. We're on an information implosion. You know, I'll say something very sexist here. All of our customers are women, you know, men, men don't, they don't do anything stuff. Look in the refrigerator, they grunt when they look in the refrigerator and they say, honey, I can't find it. And that's all men do. All of our customers are women. And you know, 30 years ago, did you know that you couldn't go to a supermarket and buy boneless skinless breast chicken? If you wanted to skinless boneless breast, you had to buy a whole chicken, take it home, get a knife, imagine that, and carve out the breast, right? Today, 50% of our customers don't even know a chicken has bones. I mean, they think these boneless breasts just kind of, you know, we go out here and pick them up off the ground, you know, and stick them on a shelf. I mean, you got to actually tell people that that chicken nuggets in the shape of D knows the dinosaur is not a muscle group on a chicken is a brand new experiment in human history. We have never been this profoundly disconnected, disinformed about our food where it comes from farming in general. I mean, we've got now twice as many people incarcerated in prisons as we have growing our food. That's never been attempted in the history of humankind. I mean, it's profound. I've written eight books, several of them are how to farming books, you know, and it gives me pause to realize I would actually double my potential client base. If, if instead of writing a book on you can farm, I would write a book on you can be a successful inmate this before. And so what I wanted to do was go back and look at look at history from somebody that's got deep calluses and can't wait to get back home tomorrow to get back on the sawmill to mill out some lumber, you know, as a working farmer who is in the poop daily and massaging earthworms daily and talking to urban people daily as a direct marketer, you know, people that come to me and whisper in my ear, how do you how do you make a hamburger? What? You pull my leg here? How do you make a hamburger? Well, you know, my husband, I've been vegetarian for 15 years. He wants a hamburger. I don't know how to make one. So I deal with this every day. So I'm looking at this and saying, what are these these historical foundations, these glues of civilization, these things, and then because because here's the deal. I'm betting that nature's P&L statement will drive us to a semblance of historical normalcy, that we are not living in some new here's the thing, you know, we got all these young people today that think we're living in this amazing techno glitzy age, that that we're going to be the first culture in human history to be able to extricate ourselves from that that mundane visceral connection to our ecological ability. I don't think we're mutating that fast. And if we look at historical normalcy, what we see emerging are some amazing glues principles that I think that we're going to take. Yes, we're going to take our computers into the future. Yes, we're going to take a lot of our infrastructure, we're going to take, you know, plastic, it might be made out of cornstarch instead of, you know, petroleum, but we're going to take plastic into the future. We're going to take electric fencing and the washer dryer. I'm not talking about going back to hoop skirts, open fires, and washboards. Okay. But what is the future that incorporates the best of technology, but honors the best of these civilizational humankind glues? What does it look like? And so they're just get the book, you'll get them all, but I'll give you a little smattering here. First of all, we're the only culture in history that has universally denied our children meaningful chores. You know, the, the allergen trade association medical doctors deal with allergies that they've endorsed the hygiene hypothesis, I don't know if you've heard of it, where we're actually becoming more and more and more immunologically dysfunctional because we're, because our pendulum has run so far to sterility in our culture. And that actually some splinters and calluses and dirt under their fingernails actually assaults our immune system gently and over time exercises our immune system so that we're actually more functionally able to deal with pollen and dust and, and, and poison ivy and whatever. You know, a long time you can drink goats milk supposedly and goats that drink eat poison ivy and you didn't get goat poison ivy. I mean, today, nobody even knows that they're allergic to poison ivy because we've never even touched it. We've been too busy sending our kids into fantasy world, you know, playing cyberspace exercising their thumbs and putting antimicrobial soap all over them and lathering them up in sterility and their immune system is becoming lethargic. Not only that, but their mental system is becoming pumped up on hubris that that I control life and destiny from my fingertips, you know, you when you're playing on the car game, you know, you're driving this car around and it wrecks, you wait five seconds, the game gives you a new car, you know, that's not life. I mean, you know, if you go 16 and wrap your car around a pole, you don't wait five seconds and get a new car. You might be dead. If you if you if you're playing a you know, one of the war games, you know, and you're in your guy gets killed, you wait five seconds and the game gives you a new one. But if you're going a tomato plant in a garden, like all of our ancestors have, because they didn't have the luxury of being able to float a food system on cheap fuel to transport vegetables 1500 miles between garden and plate, you learn that if I don't take care of this tomato plant and it dies, I can stand here and wait a day, two days, three days, and that plant still dead. And that creates a humble attitude that there's something bigger in this creation bigger in this world than me. And I don't just control my fingertips. I mean, we thought the conquistadors were fully hubris. Today, we're even worse. Then they were just killing people. Today, we're killing DNA. And buying it selling it and trading it like so much slave traffic, owning life, ever thought of owning life. So, so that's why I'm such a fan of children's gardens. Get them out there and and let them dig in the dirt and lie down and play with worms and learn that life is much more magnificent and special and mystical than just a cyberspace fantasy game. And this empowers young people to be able to to join the adult world with some common sense. And with some understanding. So they don't just grow up as idiots with their whole vision of life seeing how many tattoos and dreadlocks and kinky piercings they can put all over their bodies with a with a dream to actually keep tomato plants alive. Or or gromo earthworms, who's our sacred dreams. Those are dreams that can take a lifetime. Those are dreams that can fundamentally alter the direction of our culture. So kids and chores, you know, we've outlawed everything that they that was meaningful for them to do. Well, the first culture in history that's had cheap grain. You know, grain has always been very, very expensive. You know, why? Because grain is an annual going to get very basic here. Grain is an annual. Okay, that means that you have to till the soil to get rid of the perennial, whether it be forest, or or grass, you have to get rid of the perennial, those those obnoxious perennials that grow without me doing anything. I got to get rid of them and plant an annual in order to have grain. Now, historically, in order to do this tillage required days and laborious days of walking behind a yak or an ox, or a horse, or a mule, or a camel, or a donkey, with a sharp stick in the ground. And when you walk all day, behind, you know, two feet behind the rear end of a big herbivorous heiny, with a sharp stick, it's laborious. At the end of the day, you might have, you know, a tenth of an acre stirred up, then you get to go out and you get to sow. Hopefully, you've got some left over from last year that the rats didn't eat some grain out here. It sprouts. Now we got to keep the weeds out of it. And that pesky perennial sod that keeps wanting to come back. So we hoe it, we till it today, of course, we herbicide it. But anyway, we do all that. And then when we when it gets up here, get some height to it, we can go in with a crude scythe or a sickle, right? And we get to cut it down. And we put it in a shock. We stack it in the field, because in the field, it doesn't get dry enough to be able to store in a in a basket, because it'll mold. So we have to let it dry down some more in the field by getting it off that stalk stacking it. And that dry down period of a couple of weeks in the field actually allows the grain to go through a little bit of fermentation as the dew comes down that gets damp and then the sun comes out and it dries off the dew comes down and get damp and it dries off. And this light fermentation process releases enzymes that make it very digestible for us that are denied to us today. When we go in with a combine and two hours from being cut out of the field is in a natural gas gain grain dryer, you wonder why we've got celiac disease and gluten intolerance, because we're harvesting it so fast now and drying it down that it doesn't go through this gentle fermentation process in the shock in the seed that it always did historically. So now we've got it in a shock. We get everything cut. Now we get to go and we we we maybe pack a floor, maybe a hard clay, maybe we lay some of some wooden planks on it. Maybe we make some crude kind of lime based cement or whatever. But anyway, we've got this we've got this this this hard floor called the threshing floor. And we're going to bring these shocks in these sheaves bringing in the sheaves. And we're going to flail them. And then we're going to use a crude fork and winnow. This is old lexicon, you know, your grandmothers and grandfathers knew all these flail winnow threshing, they knew all of these things. Today, our kids used to say these things and they look at you like you know, you're from Pluto or something. Alright, so we're gonna we're gonna beat it out or we're gonna walk, you know, oxen around in a ring or we're gonna, you know, get all the kindergartners in the community come and you know, play tag and romp in whatever but we're going to stomp out. And what that does is it breaks the the husk off of the grain. It's called threshing. Okay, well, now we've got to separate the heavy seed head barley, rye, oats, wheat, we got to separate this amaranth, we got to separate that seed head from its husk. So we get a crude fork and we go into a to a breezeway and we flee it up in the air. And a breeze comes through and gently blows the chaff away. And the heavy grain falls down to the floor. And at the end of all this process, we get to look on the floor and say, Oh, I've got some grain. And we scoop it up in our hands. And we're, you know, ah, look, you know, we've got some grain. And then, and then in order to have enough to last till next year, what are we going to store it in in a day before sheet metal and mesh wire and butler butler storage buildings and sheet metal. Well, we're going to store it in clay pots. And historically, some of the the crack military might of all historic kingdoms was devoted to the special agents guarding the big clay pots that you had to store it in to keep it away from rats. And of course, the military was not there for the rats. It was there for the people who would come and take something as expensive as grain. In fact, in the Old Testament biblical book of Hosea, it talks about a harlot being sold for nine and a half ethos of barley. That's about two and a half bushels. That's not because harlots were cheap. He was expensive. And it's always been expensive. It was way too precious to feed to animals. And that's why all ancestral diets coalesce around herbivores for nutrient density, whether it's a camel, a yak, you know, a wildebeest, a bison, a cow, herbivores or seafood. Why? Because those were the only nutrient dense foods that could be produced without pillage. The sea was bountiful. If we could make nets, we could harvest it from the sea. It gave its bounty. And herbivore is a four legged portable sauerkraut bag and takes in perennials, annuals too. But if they're not annuals, they're perfectly happy to take in perennials and leaves and all that sort of thing. And they ferment them in a multi stomach chain and develop that into milk and meat materials that you and I can't begin to eat or digest that cover most of the face of the earth without us even planting one. It's a picture of bounty and grace. So this grain has always been expensive. You know why? During the existence of the Pony Express, no native American was ever able to run down and and get a Pony Express writer? Because the Native Americans couldn't afford grain. But the Postal Service could afford to feed one quart of oats per Pony Express horse per day. And that extra octane gave them an edge. Grain has always been expensive. It's fascinating to be talking about this today. What's on the front page of every newspaper in the country today? Expensive grain. Okay, great annuals are always more risky than perennials. Because they have a short growth cycle, and they don't sprout from the ground, they have to be planted. And they depend on, you know, human management, interference, disturbance in order to get planted in order to get harvested in order to get all this done. And so the beauty of the herbivore, I'm not losing you with herbivore, am I? Everybody's with me on herbivore. The beauty of the herbivore is that they can take this perennial carbohydrate and turn it into an extremely protein nutrient dense food item that nobody has to till, nobody has to harvest. Nobody has to store. Nobody has it's just it's just out there. And one of the big differences between a beef cow and a dairy cow is that a beef cow puts her fat on her back. So she can go long periods of time, actually eating very, very poorly. And then suddenly when the rains come, then she eats extra the grass grows and makes what's called compensatory gain. So when I'm eating my birthday dinner, I say I'm on compensatory gain. She makes compensatory gain to make up for those losses. A dairy animal that's been selected for dairy production is an animal that's been selected to put fat in the bucket, not on her back. And so a dairy animal is has a much higher nutritional and attention requirements than a beef animal, because one puts her fat in the bucket and doesn't carry a lot of extra fat on her because she's putting in a bucket every day. And the beef animal puts a fat on her back. And so she kind of carries your bank account with her. And and so so these nuances have all developed to handle seasonality and to build forgiveness and resilience into the natural system with a minimum of human manipulation and a minimum of human energy and calorie required to make it function. Now we live in a day when another experiment that we've done in our culture is for the first time, we are living under this misguided idea that that we can practice environmentalism by human abandonment. The best thing we could do for the ecology is for all of us to just drop dead today. And then the planet would be very healthy. Thank you very much. Well, you know, and so we talk about going to commune with nature, you know, as if nature is out there somewhere, you got to get on a jet and fly to the Rocky Mountains. So you can go and, you know, and commune with nature as if it's some sort of a segregated existence. Well, I got news for you, we are part of nature. And so I encourage environmentalism by human participation, not by abandonment. But then the question becomes, well, well, so so why do I have this big brain and these opposing thumbs? What's the point? The point is that I am supposed to come to this nature with my creativity, with my human cleverness, with this big brain and opposing thumbs to massage our ecological womb into more capture of solar energy into decomposable biomass than nature would produce in a static state. That was a mouthful. Hope you stayed with me on it. Okay. Our job is to massage our ecological womb with the correct management disturbance, if you will, to stimulate more solar energy converted into decomposable biomass than nature would do in a static state. So let's talk about water, for example, one of the one of the limitations is always water. Again, I stand here today and what's in the front page of the paper, all the big drought in the Midwest. Water becomes an issue. We've got, we've got, you know, the president of Cargill writing that this just shows that we need to make sure that we don't have a policy of food self sufficiency. We need to make sure that we grow, we send our money and our grow food in Africa and all over the world so that we become so that we can take advantage of when it's dry over here, you know, we get rain over here so we can maintain this planetary, you know, and I wonder what they're going to do when the planet gets too small. So what we've done on our farm, we're in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, which is, if you recall your history at all, was the bread basket of the Confederacy during the war of Northern aggression. This valley, this valley was, was maintained by Native Americans for millennia with fire, herbivores, buffalo, elk, antelope, birds, prairie chickens, pheasants, turkeys, grouse, quail were abundant, which we all know what the passenger pigeon was like, right? Okay, so it was maintained with this diversified mega micro flora and fauna as a massive silvo pasture. And when Governor Spotswood took his close friends and he dubbed them, he was British after all, he dubbed them the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe and he sent them over the Blue Ridge to scope out the valley in the early 1700s and tell him, you know, what was over there because the Scotch Irish were coming down from Pennsylvania down through Winchester and starting to squat in there behind the British. And so they had to figure out what was going on back there. And they wrote back letters to the governor and said, everywhere we rode in a valley, we could take the grass and tie it in a knot above the horses saddle. It was a tall grass prairie of the Mid-Atlantic region, maintained by fire and by diversified species. This was not a natural system. It was not a wilderness area. It was not environmentalism by abandonment. It was heavily participatory. The Native Americans would light fires routinely to beat back the brush. The first Europeans read 1493, read an ecological engine and what you'll find is that the first Europeans who came in said they could move an entire European Continental Army everywhere from the east coast of the Mississippi without any roads at all. These deep dark foreboding woods that are written about by, you know, Ichabod Crane and the sleepy hollows and all that and the the last of the Mohegans, those were European created after smallpox and measles decimated the Native American population to a tenth of its size and are just warming up Native Americans to maintain the silvopasters that they've been doing for millennia. Think what our culture would look like if 90% of us died in 100 years. We might be different too. So this grass, when I say grass, you know, people, another thing that's not normal is, you know, we don't have a culture of grass in our culture. When I say grass, you think lawn. You think golf course. That's the only interaction we have with grass. But when I say grass, I'm talking about tying it a knot above a horse's saddle. I'm talking about little house on a prairie, little more Ingalls Wilder. Everybody up with me? Okay. When Ma and Pa Ingalls wouldn't let the girls play beyond the threshold of the Saudi lest they get lost. We say good grief. If we had that around our house, you know, the Community Beautification Committee, the Homeowners Association come and slap a fight on us for, you know, negligent lawn care. One of the most amazing places I've ever been is at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where they maintain with fire a two acre area of native prairie. You ever get a chance? Go. It's in Lincoln, right on the campus, two acres. You walk out in there. I mean, I still get chill bumps every time I've told this story a million times, you walk out in this grass, this grass is 12 feet tall. We're talking about grass almost to the ceiling of this room. The stems are three quarters of an inch thick. It's thick as hair on a dog's back. You walk, they've got some paths covered, you walk out there, and it just envelopes you and to imagine sitting on the front seat of a Conestoga wagon, looking out over literally hundreds of miles of waving 12 foot tall biomass that was all solar generated, that had a root mass and a root web in the prairie that had up to 100 species per acre of everything from flowers to legumes to grasses, all in a cacophony of biological diversity with a related food web underneath because remember a plant maintains bilateral symmetry at the soil horizon. So there's a mirror image, there's just as much biomass below the grounds above the ground. This folks is the wealth of our culture that we have been mining and raping. So in the Shenandoah Valley in 150 years as the Europeans came in and did not sit and ask for indigenous wisdom and say, wow, how have you built these alpha soils? How have you built these eight and 10% organic matter soils? How have you done this? No, they brought their European temperate arable grain worshipping culture behind them, including their idea that water is fundamentally a drainage problem. And in the course of 150 years, sent three to eight feet of topsoil from the 80 mile long 20 mile wide Shenandoah Valley out to the Chesapeake Bay, creating enough turbidity to practically collapse the shellfish and the clam population. See, the tragedy of our time is not that we're lazy. Tragedy is we're working at the wrong things. What if so on our farm, we've been there since 1961. We've built more than a dozen ponds up in the mountains up in the highlands around us on our 500 acre. So now we have a labyrinth of five miles of waterline, black plastic pipe, running over the farm with captured winter snow runoff snow melt up in the mountains. So that today as we sit here, we've got millions of gallons stored up in the valleys surrounding us that don't require electricity. They gravity flow downhill. We have 80 PSI with no pumps, no electricity, no gravity, and millions of gallons stored up there that can irrigate that can water the livestock that can maintain hydration in a park landscape using seasonal water and this blip of petroleum to drive a track a caterpillar a front end loader a track loader to build ponds. What we're doing is creating forgiveness and resilience in that landscape. So that's how the big brain and the opposing thumbs participate in this ecological umbilical as co laborers as team players we come alongside this ecological womb not as a not as a dominator not as a rapist not as a pillager but rather how can I help you? How can I massage and touch the right places to create more resilience more forgiveness because the fact is droughts will come tornadoes will come wind will come and it's part of our mandate to extend this big brain and opposing thumbs into the landscape to create redemptive capacity in this marvelous creation because this creation is not an enemy to be subdued it is a lover to be caressed and it will give back to us way more than we can ever imagine. So when we look at grass, grass grows, grass grows in a sigmoid curve. Everybody see my sigmoid curve? You know, I don't do PowerPoint stuff. I just, you know, everybody got my sigmoid curve. That's curve. Okay. Down here, bottom of the s and you know, most biological cycles have, you know, they're not linear. Very few things biologically are linear, are they? And so the bottom of the s, I call that diaper grass. The middle of the s is teenage grass. Out here is nursing home grass. Now, if my job is to, is to participate in a way that encourages more solar energy converted to biomass, which can then decompose either in the gut of the cow, or or through the manure or whatever, decompose to build soil to feed the soil earthworms and the azidobacter and the mycorrhizia and all this wonderful soil food life that numbers more beings in a double handful of healthy soil than there are people on the face of the earth. If that's my job of those three areas, where do I want to keep the grass most of the time? Teenage. Thank you. Yes. Teenage. If I if I overgraze it and keep it at diaper stage, the grass is trying to get going and it just gets, it gets, you know, every time the grass grows, you know, a quarter of an inch, some big old cow comes along and you know, bites out of it, right? And so the grass can never get going. It's like the car, like an eight cylinder car running on one cylinder, you know, just can't get going. By the same token, if I don't graze it and let it go into the nursing home phase, what happens? It goes into senescence, dyes turns brown. The photovoltaic cycle stops. Photosynthesis stops. The chlorophyll stops. No more plant growth. And so just like a viticulturist prunes a vineyard for more verdant, healthy, luxurious production. So and an orchard prunes apple trees for more verdant, healthy, luxurious production. So the herbivore is nature's pruner to take what otherwise would be biomass production, prune the plant back to restart the teenage growth cycle with me. So the so this is the big problem with the, you know, the demonization of herbivores around the cows are destroying the planet, whatever. The problem is that that farmers that livestock husbandry has not used the domestic herbivore like it's used in nature with wolves and bison or lions and cake buffalo in Botswana or or or or or you know what lions and wildebeest in the Serengeti where everything moves and is mobbed up and is mowing in our culture. We've decided that the cow is not an herbivore. The cow is just a mechanical inanimate pile of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly we can imagine to manipulate. And so for 3040 years the US Duff treated farmers like me to free dinners to teach us the new science of cattle feeding, which is where we grind up dead cows and we grind up chickens and feathers, and we dump it in the feed, we feed it back to the cows. And we can grow cows better. And everybody followed it, you know, because it was the new science, you know, linings to the sea. Our family didn't buy into it, not because we hated the US Duff, not because we were Luddites, not because we were anti science, not because we were not progressing. We didn't buy into it because try as hard as we could. Looking the world over throughout history, there was no template that we could cut around in which an herbivore ate carrion. That is why you got to have your philosophy right, because our moral science just exalts the cleverness of the human brain without the protection of an ethical moral framework. So you may remember our old Dr. remember the movie Jurassic Park. And remember that your forex scientist, you know, he's developed these raptors, you know, that are cloning and they're growing, you know, and they're eating people in cars and getting ready to destroy civilization as we know it. And he's just you for and the journalist, the protagonist in the movie, you know, he gets right in his face. And he says, but sir, just because we can, should we that? Oh, I got 30 minutes. Okay. All right, thank you. I don't know if you were talking. Okay, good. I got a timer. Good. I'm gonna have a look at the clock. All right, good. Okay, got a timer. Yeah, brings back my whole college debate stuff. All right, good. 30 minutes. Okay, lots of time. So, so the journalist gets in his face and he says, but sir, just because we can, should we? That's a pregnant question. It's one that we should ask every day. Just because we can import organic petunias from legal name of Peru to put in expensive San Francisco boutiques overnight, should we? Just because we can blast DNA apart and create life forms that are part plant, part animal, part human, part whatever, should we? Are there bigger questions to ask? And so, fundamentally, the herbivores of the herbivore or the calmness of the cow becomes this this ethical moral template that protects us from what my dad used to say was cleverness overrunning our headlights. See, we're pretty clever as humans. Remember, we have a big brain on opposing thumbs, right? And we're clever enough to invent things that we can't physically, morally, spiritually, or emotionally metabolize. And so what happens then is we overrun our headlights, and then we have to spend billions of dollars and billions of man hours trying to creatively solve the problems that our our moral creativity developed for us. I say, we do a lot better looking at the historical patterns at nature's patterns to protect us from having to waste all of our time trying to solve the problems that we created overrunning our headlights. You know, wouldn't it be a lot better to keep people out of the hospital rather than seeing how to finance more hospitals? Doesn't that make sense? Sure. And so we look at historical patterns. And we say, well, before Johnson and Pfizer and Merck Pharmaceuticals, how did these herbivores survive without grubbicides and paracetamides and vaccines and all this? And we look at the egret on the rhinos nose, the birds following the cake buffalo. And birds are nature's herbivore sanitizer. They they follow the animals, they stand on them and they pick the bugs out of them and eat the flies. They scratch through the dung and eat the larva and all that. So we follow our cows with eggmobiles, laying chickens that free range out, scratch to the cow pies, spread the dung out into the pasture. So now the pastor doesn't get a localized bellyache from to toxic material and and suddenly covers more ground and the the chickens eat out the fly larva and act as a biological pastor sanitizer and lay tens of thousand dollars worth of eggs as a byproduct of pastor sanitation. So you take what what normally is viewed as a liability and turn it into an asset with the animals doing all the work. We make compost, we use pigs to turn the compost to the the the cows come in on hay in the winter. And again, they're not getting any grain. So we store some because we don't migrate anymore, you know, we have private land rights and all that. So it's hard for us to you know, say, well, we're going to just drive our cows up to somebody else's place. So we got to keep them. And so we make hay for when they run out of stockpiled forage. And and as they're in there, we add a carbonaceous diaper to the bedding pack and the bedding builds up the haygate lifts as the cows, you know, build up on it. So in the spring, we've got you know, three to four feet of this anaerobic bedding pack that we've inoculated with several thousand pounds of whole corn that ferments in this anaerobic bedding pack. The cows come out in the spring, we put in the pig raiders. I don't know if you ever noticed pigs closely, but all of them have a sign on their forehead will work for corn. And so the pigs go in and seek this fermented grain buried in this bedding pack aerated, hence pig aerators, okay, aerated like a big egg beater, it turns from anaerobic to aerobic decomposition, a big aerobic compost pile with animals doing the work. And suddenly, the profit potential and the ecology of all this. You know, we're not using infrastructure that rocks rust and depreciates, we're using appreciating animals to do the work, appreciating the plow that's on the end of their nose, the pigness of the pig, respecting and honoring what the pig loves to do. This is not work the pig doesn't like to do. This is work the pig loves to do. They're born for it. We don't have to turn a, you know, make big windrow compost piles and turn all this, we just let the pigs go in here and the pigs do all that aerating while we go in and read books or go to conferences or whatever, all this is going on, we don't have to pay for a driver, you know? The pigs drive themselves. They all got four wheel drive with a, with a, you know, forklift on the front. I mean, it's amazing. And they do all this wonderful work by respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig. It creates a sacred co-laborer mentality on the farm. So that we don't just view the pig as tenderloin and, you know, an unappreciated bacon, we view the pig as a team player, a co-laborer in this great land healing ministry. You see, a culture that views its pigs as just inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated, however cleverly a mechanistic mind can imagine to manipulate them will view its citizens the same way and other cultures the same way. It is how we respect and honor the least of these that creates an ethical moral framework on how we respect and honor the greatest of these. And so this manipulative idea that we are, that we are not nurturers, but rather dominating manipulers, manipulators, has come down through the, you know, the, the segregated Greco-Roman Western reductionist linear compartmentalized, disconnected, fragmented, systematized, individualized, parts oriented, all about me kind of thinking to our day to where we've decided as a culture that we need to segregate everything. And so what we've got is a fundamentally segregated food system rather than an integrated food system. See, we can never do this before because it was too expensive to transport things. Transportation was very expensive. In 1910, there were 20 million draft animals in the US. Did you know that today, as we sit here, there's not one more pound of domestic animal in the US today than there was in 1910? We don't have the draft animals. And those have been converted to other things. There's no more pounds, even for all of our petroleum, all of our GMOs, all of our hybridization, there are no more animals in pounds of animal today than there were in 1910. In that day, if you wanted to drive somewhere, you had to go saddle up the horse that you'd been viscerally carrying something to you didn't you didn't put a gas pump in his ear, you know, and fill him up. You had to you had to physically pick up fodder, you know, and you needed a gym back then. I think we need to reorganize our lives so that we're so busy gardening and having rooftop gardens and hooking up our gyms to pumps that have cisterns that collect all the stormwater damage, stormwater off the roofs and we can pump the water back up on the tops and reach out the windows and pick cucumbers and watermelons that are growing. And then we don't have to use air conditioners because the the roof is so is so, you know, transpiration glues the atmosphere and we can eliminate the stormwater. And this is an integrated life. You know, we give we give a greenie awards to institutional food services like here at Harvard for for doing something as creative as separating the post dining waste, you know, and putting it in a special barrel that we could put on a diesel truck and send ten miles away from campus into a comp in a segregated composting operation. That's not the way nature ever did. If you really want to be green, if you really want to be normal, you have a chicken house next to the back door of the dining services and all the scraps would go out to the chickens and the chickens would lay the eggs they would go back in and you have a functional integrated circle and nothing has to be segregated or go on a diesel truck. See, that's that's real ecology, but it's ecology by visceral participatory integration. Even in our environmental circles today, we still live primarily as segregationists. One of the biggest ways that we segregate is in this food cycle. You know, 50% of all the human edible food in the world never gets eaten by a human because it spoils or it's blemished or it gets held up by a warlord in some, you know, place that won't let the red... Nobody goes hungry because there's not enough food. You go hungry because of distribution issues. Not because there's not enough food. There's plenty of food. The planet's a wash-in food. Now we can debate how much good it is, but there's plenty of food. So what we need is an integrated approach, which brings me back to the expensive grain. You see, pigs and chickens are omnivores. They're not herbivores. So traditionally, pigs were run in acorns and chestnuts on way left over from, you know, cheese making. They were scavengers around the edge of the farmstead because grain was too expensive to feed them. Chickens were always hooked right up next to the kitchen because they were the garbage disposal. All the kitchen scraps came out to the chickens and that's what fed the chickens. And so every man's food was the herbivore, including horse meat, guinea pigs. I mean, herbivores are like, there's a huge kangaroo. There's a huge amount of herbivore out there, okay, and other cultures have a much more diversified, eclectic diet of herbivores than our culture, which basically just eats boneless, skinless breasts and hamburger. The same with vegetables. You know, we eat, what, like six vegetables, you know, tomatoes and cucumbers and lettuce and iceberg lettuce at that. And we have bred this produce, which is 95% water. I want you to think about it, you know, that all of our plant breeding in the last 40 years has gone into breeding a membrane that's 95% water to withstand a 2,000 mile truck trip from California. I mean, take a tomato, you know. I mean, a tomato's got to sit there and ride in that truck, you know, for 2,000 miles from California to Boston. What's it going to taste like when it gets here? You better make it out of cellulose and carbon and cardboard, or it's going to be pulled by the time it gets here. And so all of our breeding has been, again, assuming that food is not fundamentally biological, but that food is fundamentally mechanical. And I would suggest that that's one of the biggest divisions right now in the orthodoxy of the U.S. Duh. And of this kind of group, this tribe, the orthodoxy is fundamentally different. And that's why they can't abide our success. You know, 30 years ago, we were, you know, 0.01% of the food system. And then this local food tsunami started to hit. People started bailing off the, you know, the Monsanto ship. And now we've arrived at this incredibly market hoarding place of 1.8%. Monsanto's scared. Cargill's scared. And so what they've done is, in a fraternity of ideas, they have colluded with the big industrial foodists, the mechanical foodists that view food as fundamentally mechanical. You know, all they've done, the research and the food processors, is all about how do we make food that doesn't rot? And if it doesn't rot, it won't digest. And food that you can't pronounce. And we're the first culture that's ever tried to eat food that you couldn't pronounce. That's ever tried to eat food that won't rot. You know, take a squirt of Belvita cheese, put it on the table, it'll just sit there in a lump all year. It doesn't mold, doesn't do anything. You put real cheese there and in 48 hours it's got little mold spots on it. Renting the two ladies out in California, fantastic thing, they're doing a garden to school program for middle school out there in district. And the kids, eighth graders come out, they say bring food, so the kids come out and they bring, you know, twizzlers and Snickers and Cheerios and Wonder Bread and all this stuff. And they've got this great big earthworm bed, earthworm box, big box of vermicomposting, worms. And so they have the kids, you know, bury their food over here and then the two farm gals, they bring, you know, an apple and a piece of T-bone steak and a homemade, you know, whole wheat bread, fresh ground, things like that. And they put them in here. The kids come back two weeks later, of course they've been prepped for this, they run back to the box, they open the lid, they start digging over here and they pull out the Wonder Bread, they pull out the Snickers, the Cheerios, you know, it's unscathed. They run over here and they start digging in here and, well, it's gone. And the object lesson is, well, why would you want to eat something? Worms won't even eat. The worms are smarter than we are. A biological thing, you can't get life out of death, life has to be living and then die in us. When we take that living carrot and we bite into it, okay, we're taking the life of that carrot and our enzymes and our three trillion member internal bacterial community of beings gets up from their school board meetings and their, you know, land preservation meetings and their, you know, regulatory meetings and they come and surround these little bits of carrot and they begin converting it that we may live. And when something comes down there that we can't pronounce, something comes down there that's artificial, something comes down there that hasn't ever lived or that's been stabilized with emulsifiers and reconstituted, prostituted, adulterated fecal soup, they say, what is this? And they try to get rid of it. And if they can't get rid of it, they taste it and assist. And if it can't do that, they place it places. And so we have this fundamental orthodoxy in our culture now that has created a great chasm between our heritage based food system, the traditional life system, as opposed to the mechanical, sterile, lifeless system of US DA and F DA orthodoxy. And they have now mounted an inquisition. And if you don't believe it, you haven't been visited by one of these bureaucrats like we have several times. And when they tell you that, you know, it's perfectly safe to feed your kids Twinkies, Cocoa Puffs and Mountain Dew, but it's unsafe to feed them raw milk, compost grown tomatoes, and pastured backyard processed chickens. That is not about food safety. It is about a faith belief system. It is fundamentally a religious expression. And so what happens is we have well meaning Ralph Naderites and consumer advocacy groups paranoid about you and I being trusted with food choice, because we're too stupid to know how to make a choice. And so, you know, it penetrates everywhere. I mean, even to where you have the you know, the president who has planted an organic garden, naming Michael Taylor, the chief of Monsanto, the attorney who brought GMOs to the world as the head of the Food Modernization Act, which will determine for us what is safe to eat or not. And guess what it'll be? It won't be compost grown tomatoes or pastured chickens or raw milk. And this is a fundamental divide in our country. We have to understand those of us in this room, we want to live in teepees. We want to go to the medicine man. We want to teach our children how to run and trap and fish and garden and play and the seventh cavalry is still wanting to annihilate us. So one of my challenges to these kinds of groups is to realize that the legacy that we're leaving is the hope of food choice for our grandchildren, because if we don't step up to this plate, if we don't put our finger in the den, use whatever metaphor you want to. But if we don't preserve this food choice in our culture, our little ones are growing and grow up in a time where their only choice will be amalgamated irradiated prostituted adulterated fecal soup from Archdangel's Middle. And so it's imperative that we step up and do that. How's the best way to step up and do that? The best way, this is going to strike you as funny. The best way is to get in the kitchen. You didn't think I was going to say that, did you? Get in the kitchen. See, I've talked to so many people and they just, they know that things are out of whack. They want a different world. They want cleaner air, cleaner water, nutrient dense food. They don't want to be sick. They want to feel better. They don't want, they want Monsanto to go, you know, jump off a cliff somewhere. I mean they, you know, they, they know that things are wrong but different. I just want to be different. And, you know, if we just elected an honest politician, you know, as if that's a possibility, you know, if we just, if we just had, you know, if we just had honest regulators, if we just had blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, and they're just all, there's a ring in their hands and all this stuff and they want to do everything except participate. I wish I could snap my fingers and it would all be wonderful and we'd all be eating grass-finished beef and our, you know, and, and, and nutrient dense carrots and cabbage and, and have edible landscapes and rooftop gardens and cisterns and no waste water and gray water recycling systems and so we don't put potable water down our toilets, you know. I wish, I wish I could snap my fingers and do all this stuff but you know, we didn't get where we are in a day and we won't get out of it in a day. Where we are today is the cumulative effect of trillions and trillions of multi-year, even multi-generational decisions made and we will get out of it the same way with the way we make our own decisions. So the number one thing that we can do is get in our kitchens and buy direct from a farmer, break the supermarket addiction, I mean so many people bring their hands and say when is your food going to be at the supermarket? I don't want a supermarket! They've only been here since 1946. You know, with the internet today we can probably get, you know, coffee over the internet. Who needs to even, you know, it used to be you had to go, you know, for state, Laura Ingalls Wilding, they had to go for staples. Now you just get staples over the internet, you don't even need a supermarket. We need to treat that like a bad habit, like some sort of a drug addiction. Just kick the supermarket out, okay? And get in our kitchens and take what we have subcontracted to people with an agenda that's not about health and quit patronizing them and take the food preparation, packaging and preserving back home. Fundamentally, these issues that we address here are about becoming home-centered rather than life being everything that happens outside of home. Homes have become a place where we just change clothes between all the activities in life that dominate our thinking rather than home being the nucleus of where the real meaningful things happen and everything else is ancillary. That's a fundamental shift in thinking in the culture. And kitchens are great places. I mean, you can blow stuff up. You can over-boil them. You can watch, you know, chemical reactions. You can learn fractions with half a tablespoon and a third of a teaspoon. I mean, it's a fantastic learning arena. All sorts of neat things happen there. And we then can restore our larder. We don't even use that term anymore. Larder. Who's ever here with a larder? I want you to think about it. If you ever go to the Palatine Village in Williamsburg, near Jamestown, Native American Village there, you know, you go in, you've got this hut and they took these saplings and they bent them and then they covered them up with buffalo skins and they lasted about 15 years and then they would compost. I think that's a pretty good idea for a house. I think a house that composts about every 15 years is pretty good. I mean, think about it, you get married, you just need a little house and then your kids come along, you need a bigger house. And then the kids go, you want a bigger, little house again. So about 15 year cycles, you know, is about right for, you know, your domestic needs, your house. So a house that composts every 15 years is pretty cool. But anyway, you go in there and of course, up in the lattice work, up in the top where the smoke collected, which was not very healthy. You didn't have chimneys and so that was not a good thing. But the smoke collected up there in that lattice work and you look up in there and there's corn and there's squash and there's oysters and venison and strips of buffalo jerky and all this stuff hanging up in that lattice work. And I can just imagine, you know, lying down with my beloved at night looking up at the earth's provision to be that viscerally, not only appreciative of the abundance of earth, but also appreciative of my dependence. This is it. There's no cost co warehouse. This is it. And so when we turn off the TV, throw away the Caribbean cruise tickets, quit reading people magazine. When we live in a culture in which the average American is far more passionately interested and knowledgeable about the latest belly button piercing in Hollywood celebrity culture than they are what's going to become flesh of their flesh and bone of their bones at six o'clock. We're far more interested in the purity of the gasoline for our car than we are the purity of our food that we're going to eat. But when we begin to unplug from all that extraneous consumerism and recreation and entertainment and move to a historically normal, passionate desire for a visceral relationship with this ecological umbilical that we're utterly and completely dependent upon, whether we want to be or not, we will begin to connect to our food shed and we will find that there is tremendous abundance, bounty and there are struggling entrepreneurial, artisanal, earth-loving masseuses out here, okay, that we can patronize and we can take that money and shift it to them. There is plenty of money in the system and when we can begin building our larder and when we go to bed with our beloved know that a few steps away there is a larder. We don't have to worry about the power outage. We don't have to worry about the teamsters going on strike. We don't have to worry about a drought. We've got a larder and we have a relationship with our food shed that is more than business that we know we can go to farmer John and he's going to have lamb for us. We know we can go to farmer Jane and she's going to have milk for us and we know them and it creates a web of security that is the historically normal secure thing. The beauty is that today we have our technology. We have everything from electric fencing to internet to Craigslist to electronically aggregated food shed farmers markets. I mean, we have so many cool things today to take over the hurdles of the past. We have dozers that we can build ponds in to create water. If we had been building ponds with all that soil that we had tilled for those years, if we had instead taken all that energy and built ponds like we have at our farm in the last 50 years and built ponds up in these valleys around the Shenandoah Valley today, we would be flood proof and drought proof and we would have pre-created food. The same thing could be done in the Midwest. The same thing could be done in Arizona, New Mexico. You go down there and you see these huge dry arroyos and you know, a bridge 100 feet long and you ask the person that's driving you say, what's all, you know, is that a special sunken trail for ATVs and, you know, off-road vehicles? You know, you can see them running up now. No, no, no, no. About 10 days a year, those arroyos are clear full of running muddy water. What if we caught all that? What if the rain drops fell to where our big brain and our opposing thumbs are full? And so, as we approach our future tomorrow, there are a lot of things that we can do, very visceral, practical things. We can get in the kitchen. We can know a farmer. We can get in touch with our food. We can forget recreating like Hollywood says and take all that investment and invest it in a visceral appreciation and relationship with this ecological and bellical. Now, I know this is daunting and it's asking things that are out there that are, oh, man, I don't know if I can pull it off. I don't know if I can do this. Well, let me tell you something. We've all got this voice in the back of our heads where somebody says usually a grandpa or a grandma. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. You ever heard that? We're doing right, right? You know what? Grandma was wrong. The truth is, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly first. Think about it. Thanksgiving comes along. The families around the Thanksgiving dinner and everybody's talking and yacking. And the latest member of the family, little Janie, she's maybe seven months older or something, eight months. And she's crawling around on the floor. And she comes over here. Everybody's, the adults are all yacking. She comes over here. She gets on a chair leg. She kind of pulls herself up on a chair leg. She kind of looks around. Got this terrified look. And then suddenly her mom probably sees her and says, oh, look. You know, Janie, look at Janie. She's just starting to walk. It's the first time she's ever picked herself up. And then Janie realizes she's the center of attention, right? So then she starts, she loses her focus, loses her grip, and plop down on her diaper. Now, what happens in that moment? What happens is, all the adults, right, jump up, come around to Janie and say, well, Janie, if you can't walk any better than that, just quit. Is that what they say? No. They say, oh, come to adulthood, though. The voice of it's worth doing is worth doing, right? And we become paranoid of embracing innovation in our own life, of the disturbance that is necessary for successional change. And we become paralyzed. So I want to leave you with this thought. I want to leave you with the thought that when you go home from here, and I know many of you here feel like a prophet in the wilderness. Nobody in your community thinks like this. They all think you're a wacko, right? And your friends at church, or civic club, or Montessori school, and so many of them, man, he's off the deep end. And you're going to watch her boy. She's going, ooh. I want you to look in the mirror. And I want you to say, I'm going to hike up my diapers. And if it's worth doing, right, if it's worth doing, if it's worth doing poorly first, because that's the way change is made. And we all need to be realizing whatever sphere of our influence is, that we can make those changes. And it's OK to fail. And it's OK to fall. We just got to hike up our diaper and say, I'm going to climb up this chair leg. Can you do that for me? Hike up your diaper, climb up this chair leg. And it'll be that leadership that will become a burning bush that will attract family, friends, and neighbors, because your countenance will glow with truth. And that attracts anybody in any religion and any culture and any society. God helps us to do it. And now, may all of your carrots grow long and straight. May your beets be large and not pithy. May your culinary experiments be delectable. May the rain fall gently on your edible landscapes. The wind be always bit your back. Your children rise up and call you blessed. And may we all make the world a better place than we found it. Thank you so much for letting me listen to you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Joel, we have time for a little bit of questions. Question and answer. But just a quick announcement for speakers. We're going to be meeting right down here, down the stairs at 7.45. So that's for all speakers. So what do you want to do? Ten minutes? Ten minutes sounds fair. I know people have plans. I mean, you probably have, you know, big, you know, white tablecloth five-star restaurants to get to. So 10, yeah, leave if you want to, but those, the die-hards just hang in here and we'll go ten minutes. All right, let's die hard. You're up. Okay, yeah. First of all, thanks, Joel. That was awesome. The idea, the concept of sort of overpopulation has been talked about earlier today. So I was wondering if you could speak about sort of the feasibility on a global basis of everybody eating paleo and eating, you know, grass-fed beef and sort of what you think about that. Great. Great question. Overpopulation. Yeah, can we really feed the world? This is nice because the world is three to five times more productive per square foot than any industrial, monoculture, monospeciated field of any kind, anywhere, any stripe, okay? The U.S. has 36, 35 million acres of lawn. We have 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses. That's 71 million acres and I haven't even gotten enough leaves. That's enough to feed the entire country without a single farm. When you when you tap in like we have to this what we call mob stocking herbivorous solar conversion, dignified carbon sequestration, fertilization, using high-tech electric fencing, computer microchip energizers where we can actually mimic the natural nature's template of herbivore perennial interaction even better than it can be done with wolves and, you know, with predators in our management tool. In our county, the average cow days per acre is 80 cow days per acre. A cow day is about one cow will eat in a day. On our farm, we average more than 400 cow days per acre and we've never in the 50 years we've never planted a seed or bought a bag of chemical fertilizer. That's five times the county average, okay? That could be duplicated everywhere in the country tomorrow, all right? There is so much food production capacity that the idea of population is not even on my radar. Not even on my radar. Our problem is not money, it's not resource, it's not people. Our problem is constipation of imagination. That's our problem. And so, we know how to do these things. We don't. I mean, we subsidize corn. We have policies that keep this kind of innovation from occurring. So, yeah, this is very, very productive. Synergistic, symbiotic, multi-speciation is always more productive for square yard than, you know, the monospeciation. Okay, yes? I'm curious how people who believe in abandonment environmentalism respond to what you say. People like Bill McKibbin, for example. Yeah, he loves me. You know, I think that the problem is that there are way too few people who really viscerally and humbly get this land massage idea on a commercial scale. Most of the environmental talk in this country is cerebral, academic, you know, institutional alphabet soup named people, with pilot higher and deeper behind the net, all sorts of things. And so what happens is that you just get this really weird data. I mean, for example, you know, the UN's Long Shadow Report, which is, you know, demonized livestock, especially herbivores. You know, all of that data presupposes a grain-based, annual-based herbivore. As soon as you go to peridially-based, all the data is junk. The omnivores, the same problem there, is as soon as you get the waste food stream out of landfills and feed it to omnivores, like historically normal, suddenly their Long Shadow, they become an asset instead of a liability. So, I think that there are just way too few voices that are able to articulate a visceral place, a really positive place, a practical place for historical normalcy. I just think we're so far. I mean, the data, I mean, I've debated Dennis Avery, did anybody know him, saving the planet with pesticides and plastics? He's been on 60 minutes, like 30 times. He's the darling of, you know, John Stossel and whatever. And I've debated him three times in the public arena. And he's never heard of controlled grazing. Never heard of it. And when I shared it with him, he said, wow, that really makes sense. But they've never heard about positive alternatives. All they're doing is they're taking the current status quo, which is itself abnormal, they're taking the current status quo and extrapolating the data from it, and there it is. So I can assure you that if we put ponds all around and biodiversified our landscape, wildlife would explode. It explodes at our farm. We've got all, we've got 10 times more wildlife there than we did 50 years ago. So, you know, the beauty of these things is you don't have to sacrifice one for the other. Yes? Do you artificially inseminate your animals? We do not artificially inseminate our animals. That was a short answer. One of the reasons, one of the reasons is that artificial insemination, which is, you know, let's talk about cows, for example, they take one ejaculation and make 100 straws out of it. Okay? Well, that means that if that ejaculation was supposed to create one calf, you've just created 99 calves from semen that lost, or that would have lost. And so my problem with artificial insemination is that it over time, it genetically reduces the potency and the vibrancy and the strength of whatever the animal is because you're creating all of these animals from semen that would have lost. And we haven't even gotten to the enjoyment of the cow yet, but anyway, that's another ball game. Or the enjoyment of the bull, for that matter. Good. Another question. How do you handle predators on your farm? How do we handle predators? Great question. This is a great, it's an important issue because what we have right now are a lot of environmentalists by abandonment creating, you know, warm fuzzy environmental laws who want to eat the kind of food we produce, but the laws make it impossible for me to inject myself in nature. I mean, the Native Americans used to hunt and trap tons of hawks and eagles for ceremonial headdresses and feathers, right? Kept a check on that population so they'd have a few rabbits and, you know, turkeys could survive and, okay? So this, if there's one thing we've learned from Guns, Germs and Steel in 1491 and 1493 and an ecological engine and Fire in America and all these wonderful books that we have now, it is that there is no wilderness area. It doesn't exist. So how do we deal with predators? On number one, we have a lot of people on our farm. You know, we, as a culture, we applaud ourselves for having so few farmers as if this is a wonderful thing. You know, as if, you know, the GPS-guided John Deere tractor out there going through the field with a robot can love the land as much as loving stewards or even be aware of the nuances of wet spots, dry spots, the terrain, the, okay? Wendell Berry says this eloquently. He says, your ability to love a thing is directly proportional to its size and that is directly proportional to your knowledge. You know, a man with 10 wives has a real hard time knowing any of them really well enough to love them. So I find that one's plenty. And the same thing is true with land. There's a size there that you can love and the size that you can't. And so we have a lot of young people and we think farms should be crawling with loving stewards. So when we go to the farm at two o'clock in the afternoon and honk the horn, you know, everybody's not working their town job to maintain their farm addiction. Rather, they're all out here loving the land. So we have a lot of activity, a lot of things going on. All right? Number two, we fence out the riparian areas and the forestal areas, so they grow a lot of chipmunks and squirrels and bulls and bulls and things to feed the carnivorous predator population. Very well. Okay? Number three, we have a guard dog. Okay? An octbosh, a Turkish nocturnal guard dog who roams the place and he is a killer. He kills minks and raccoons and possums and we love him to death. We should go out there and kill. You know, that's great. That's part of the ecosystem. We have guard geese that fight off aerial predators. Waterfowl never sleep. And so the geese will actually fight off, you know, great horned owls and hawks and things like that. I don't know what happens, you know, an endangered species that can your guardian kill an endangered species. But anyway, that's the point. And finally, if we have an habitual offender, we deal with it. Joel, can you speak to some of the specific hassles and threats from authorities and regulatory bodies that you're dealing with to kind of make it real practical and visible? Real practical. Threats from authoritative bodies. Boy, if you want the skinny on this, just get my book Everything I Want to Do is Illegal. And it'll give you our lifetime of stories of our run-ins with bureaucrats. And they're not just always food related. I mean, internship. What's an intern? A student or an employee? We don't have we don't have boxes in our culture to take these gray things, you know. And so there are farmers who are facing $50,000 fines because their intern housing, for example, didn't meet labor there, okay. Well, our interns would sleep in a tent all summer. This is, these are consenting adults for crying out loud. I mean, nobody's putting a gun to their head saying come here and this is our problem with our government penetration in the marketplace is because when the government decides what we can eat, who we can hire, how much we have to pay them and all of these things, what happens is it's a one size fits all and so anybody that starts to deviate at all from that becomes swallowed up in this morass of little boxes to check. For example, workman's compensation. You know, we're mandated to pay that. So we have to fill out, you know, is this person, you cannot have a worker who does both poultry or beef cattle. You have to, because it's a segregated system based for the industry where you have chicken farms or cattle farms. You don't have both. So of course where we are, we do everything. Our interns do everything. They don't want to be, and not only that, but the actuarials are based on a Tyson chicken house with fecal particulate in the area. You got to put on a hazmat suit and walk through sheep dip to go take care of the animal and fans and electricity and all this stuff. For us, chickens is out in the field. You know, there's no fecal particulate. There's no electricity. There's no fans. There's no nothing. And so what we have are just a, get the book. I mean, it's just all this stuff. I mean, a sawmill is illegal in an agricultural zone because a sawmill is a commercial activity. What better place to cut the trees than near where they grew? It just goes on and on and on. It hasn't gone away then since I last saw you. Oh, well, it's far worse. It's far worse today. I mean, just last year, we got kicked out of a restaurant. A health inspector said you can't sell your eggs here. And I said, well, they're not USDA inspectors. We don't have to be USDA inspectors. So of course, the chef called me in a panic. And so I got the name. I got the code she cited and immediately picked up the phone and called Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund. Everybody that values your food needs to join Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund because that is 24-7 attorneys on retainer that are going to bat for. So I just called them up, talked to Pete Kennedy. I said, you know, here's the code. Here's the name of the person. Here's the restaurant. Here's the deal. 24 hours. So he called them. He looked at the research of the code, called them 24 hours later. Health Department apologized. Oh, we were wrong. Now, what do you think? How do you think I would have fared dumb farmer going against them? And so, no, we've got SWAT team raids. I mean, you'd probably fall in the Rawlsom Dairy Ray. Rawlsom Food Dairy. We've got private clubs. Look, ultimately, this is about who owns me. I think it's pretty amazing that, you know, we have a culture that allows us to have guns and worship and speak and assemble. But what good is it to have those freedoms if we can't choose the food to give us, to feed our 3 trillion member internal community of beings to give us the fuel to go shoot, pray, and preach? I mean, that is the most fundamental human right of anything, is the right to feed my own intestinal. So that's why I promote a food emancipation proclamation in this country. I think we need a food emancipation proclamation that allows any person and any farmer to buy and sell food of their choice without any bureaucrat whatsoever so that we preserve an ability to opt out. See, the problem is, I know we're out of time, but see, the problem is, innovation. Innovation starts small, embryonicly, prototypically. You don't start with a full-fledged deal. You start prototypically. And innovation prototypes are always disturbing to the entrenched status quo. All right? And so, and so that's why this orthodoxy is so important, because, I mean, I can tell you, my neighbors actually view me as a bioterrorist because my chickens commune with red-winged blackbirds and indigo buntings and therefore take my diseases that I haven't vaccinated for to the science-based, environmentally controlled types of chicken houses and threaten the planet's food supply. So they can go sit in a Presbyterian church and feel really good about the fact that they're trying to protect the world from menaces like me. I mean, you know, and I'm a Christian, I mean, I can play this on myself. And the point is that until you allow a lunatic fringe to participate in a culture, you can't have innovation. The only way that you can make sure there's innovation, and I would suggest antidotes to our current system, is to allow a ragged edge. You know what? If you want a government-sanctioned, you know, license on everything you eat, that's fine. You know, that's fine. But the same token. If you want to say, I own my body and I'll take that risk and opt out, we need to preserve the freedom for people who want to take that risk and opt out in order that this food can remain. So yeah, it's a big deal. And my prediction is that it's going to get a lot worse and better. I mean, if they're already jumping up and down and going this crazy at 1.8% of the food system, what are they going to do if we hit 3% or 4% or 5%? And then they're going to be ballistic. And that's another reason why all of us need to devote ourselves to this, be aggressive about it, read up on it, be articulate about it, and remember, every time you ask for government intervention in the food system, it always hurts me. Every single time. Because the Tyson's and the Monsanto's and the Cargill's are big enough to handle the overheads and the regulatory environment. Very fine. Thank you very much. It's us that have the problems. Yeah. So I hate to leave you on a negative note. So the thing is, go out there and don't worry about if it's legal or not.