The Plain Values Podcast EP #04 – Joel Salatin on just about everything

Joel Salatin:

And I still get chill bumps every time I tell this story because I did then, because that was an epiphany for me. I realized, wow, here’s the heart and soul. God’s balance sheet does catch up, and you can’t disrespect and abuse life forever. I get all choked up. I’ve still got that little yellow piece of paper in his handwriting where he wrote down these and it was 22. 22 full-time salaries. Isn’t that how many you have right now? Yes. That is how many we have right now

Marlin Miller:

From worm pee to killing 40,000 elephants in Africa to massive green yards in churches. Joel and I talked about all kinds of things about how God’s creation and the soil and everything really plays together, man. Oh man. We had a great conversation about life and farming, and if you want to see a bald goober embarrass himself with the world’s foremost regenerative farmer, you’re going to want to watch this episode. It’s pretty stink and hilarious. So on that note, the audio for the first couple minutes, probably the first 10 minutes is going to sound a little different than after I hit a button. Okay. It’s pretty stinking great, so I hope you guys enjoy it. Thanks. This episode of The Plain Values Podcast is being sponsored by my friends at Azure Standard. My friend Spencer just told me about a new program that they have launched, it’s called Around the Table.

And around the table is this beautiful synergy between Azure and their food and their trucking and the local church. Here’s how it works. You set up a drop, you choose a coordinator, you order your food, and you pick it up, and the church gets a small percentage back to put into any ministry that they want. It is a fantastic opportunity to encourage and help the churches get to know the people in their own backyards. I love it. It’s wonderful. You can call Spencer at nine seven one two hundred eight three five three nine seven one two zero zero eight three five three, or you can shoot him an email at the ta***@***********rd.com and tell ’em Marlon sent you.

Joel Salatin:

What I am seeing are some pretty amazing, I call ’em biological fertilizers, bio forts. Okay. That’s the trade name, bio forts, and for example, last year up at the food summit here in Sugar Creek, a guy always, when I go to these faires, I always look at vendors, see what’s out there, what’s new. And so I went by this guy’s trailer, and maybe you saw him. He was an earthworm guy. He had these IBC tot with worm beds, and he had a spigot at the bottom, training off, I call it word P. It’s the slick, it’s the slick exterior from an earthworm. The slime. The slime, okay. And it drains. When you have a worm bed, it actually drips down.

Marlin Miller:

Oh my.

Joel Salatin:

Yeah, yeah. And I ran into an outfit in Australia called Nutri Soil. I write that down so I forget it. Nutri soil. And that was a big confinement dairy farmer that tried to solve his manure problem. And he started experimenting with worms and worms, worms and basically developed Windrow worm piles with a catchment at the bottom to catch this drainage from these long windrow, I mean, 150 foot long worm piles, 20 of them. I mean, this was serious, okay? All this big 500 cow dairy outfit, and started applying that worm to the soil and worm cast that worm, I call it Worm P. And make a long story short, their brand name is Nutri Soil. And when I was there, I met a family that farmed like 3000 acres of wheat in Western Australia, dry country, whatever, 12 inches of rainfall. And they were buying up sterile crop land for pennies on the dollar that had been chemicalized to death with fertilizer, using this nut nutri soil, buying this from this guy. And in five years, tripling production, no chemical fertilizer, and selling it at 20% above market value. And they were flipping farms, land, land, flipping land, thousands of acres, buying it, pennies. It was abused, buying it on for pennies. This won’t grow anymore. I can’t get anything to grow.

They start putting this on, and within five years it doubles or triples production. There are worms, it looks healthy, and people say, man, I’d like to buy that. And they flip it and they sell it, and then they go buy other. Hold

Marlin Miller:

On. Okay. That’s unbelievable idea.

Joel Salatin:

Yeah, I,

Marlin Miller:

Who’s buying the land and what are they going to do with it? Are they going to just farm it back to death?

Joel Salatin:

This couple, their business was remediating and flipping farmland. Some of it might continue to be bio, others are going to be, it’s going to go back to chemical fertilizer. It’ll go through another 10 year transition and go to pot, and then they’ll come back.

Marlin Miller:

Okay. Are you recording? You know what? No, I’m not, actually, that’s fine, because this audio is actually pretty good, but just hit record and keep going. Joel, this is episode two.

Joel Salatin:

Bear with me. Episode two. I’m so sorry. You’re only young once, and it’s only only first once

Marlin Miller:

Am I red? I feel like the temperature went up about 20 degrees. Okay. Alright. That’s too stinking funny, Seth, thank you for catching that now. Okay. All right. The color will eventually drain back out of my face. Okay, boy. Okay. The question that I had when you were talking

Joel Salatin:

About, I didn’t think we were recording. I figured we were just kind of, this was prepping.

Marlin Miller:

No,

Joel Salatin:

And you’ll guide the discussion, but No,

Marlin Miller:

And I will. No, this is fantastic. So this morning, this morning, we had a whole bunch of rain the last couple days. Big storms went through. Every chance I get, my wife and I, and we’re training our kids slowly to save earthworms every chance we get. They come in the garage, they’re on the concrete, we have a little pad there, we pick ’em up and we throw ’em into the gardens every single time. I somehow got to get rid of the slime. I mean, a big crawler has a bunch of slime on how does that slime work its way through the soil to drain out the bottom? How does that work?

Joel Salatin:

I don’t know how it works. All I know is that when you heap up these beds, when you have a heaped up bed like this, there is drainage in it. And I’ve run into people that are doing this in North Dakota, New Zealand, Australia. This guy near last year at Sugar Creek had these worm things, and he came up to me and he knew who I was, and he comes up to me just as confident as anything and says, I can double your production. He said it to you? To me, to me. Well, I was so intrigued. I looked at his setup and said, this is pretty cool. So I bought his book and read it about earthworm pea and how you could develop this. And so I’ve run into Spain. I mean, a guy in Spain, he has vineyards, and this is his whole program, and he does these bio forts and compost tees and cookery. It’s not heat cookery, but you put a big tea bag, a compost, and you let it simmer. Yeah, just cook down for several days. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I think right now that this Biot movement is the cutting edge of the next generation biological production,

I think it is.

Marlin Miller:

So this leads me to a question down on my list quite a bit. I told you earlier about Gabe Brown and Rick, is it Carter? Yeah, Carter. Rick Carter in Indiana, Indiana. I just watched the documentary called Common Ground, and you’ve seen it, I’m sure

Joel Salatin:

I know about it. Yes. I haven’t looked at the whole thing, but I know the guys. Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

Well, it’s interesting to me. 12 years ago, now, bear with me. This is a little bit of a longer segue into this, but 12 years ago, Alan Savory jumps on a TED Talk, right? Yeah. And I’m assuming you’ve seen that.

Joel Salatin:

Oh, yeah. Where

Marlin Miller:

He talks about numerous times, it’s

Joel Salatin:

Unbelievable.

Marlin Miller:

He’s talking about this whole issue of desertification, and one of the most poignant things in that whole 20 minutes in my mind is where he shares his biggest blunder of his life and his career killing all those elephants. 40,000 elephants. 40,000 elephants. My first question is, what do you do with the carcasses? I mean, that’s a lot of elephant. I mean, I hope they fed the folks around.

Joel Salatin:

I have no idea. Yeah, that’s a lot of

Marlin Miller:

Stuff. So he gets up there and he says 12 years ago, he says, the last best hope of mankind is planned grazing. Okay, that’s 12 years ago. Then in the last couple, 2, 3, 4 years, you’ve got these documentaries, kiss the Ground, common Ground, Woody Harrelson, Jason Momoa coming out, and they’re talking about this. Basically, the last best hope of mankind to save itself is regenerative agriculture. How does it make you feel? What do you think when, because this is the imagery that I see in my head. These guys, these scientists, these ecologist and climatologists are trying to climb the mountain to save the planet, and they get up there and you and Gabe Brown and a bunch of those other guys are sitting there saying, Hey, welcome home.

Joel Salatin:

Right? Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, to be straight up, I feel a little bit like Cinderella. I’ve been in the ashes all my life, and suddenly you get invited to the ball and there’s a seat at the table for you, and that’s a powerful thing in any culture. Theresa and I got invited by a benevolent, wealthy, functional medicine doctor to go to the Maha Ball on the inauguration day in Washington, DC when Trump was inaugurated, they had, what, 29 30 balls, and one of ’em was the Maha, the Make America Healthy Grain, RFK Jr. And so we’ve never been to a ball before. That’s not our thing, but it was pretty nice. And we say, how do you say no to this? So we go to this thing, and there’s 50 tables of 10, there’s 500 people there. And Dale Bigtree, who ran RFK Junior’s campaign, he gets up and he asks, I mean, they had numerous luminaries there, making little dinner remarks, three or four minutes. And he gets up and his deal, he asks, how many of you are parents with vaccine injured children? Mainly autism. But there are other things, autoimmune things, different Things.

And I couldn’t count the hands, but there had to have been a hundred to 150 hands went up. It was a major portion. And I still get chill bumps every time I tell this story, because I did then, because that was an epiphany for me. I realized, wow, here’s the heart and soul of what’s driving this. And these people have been laughed at, pushed to the margins. Oh, you dunno what you’re talking about. They’ve been censored, de platformed pushed to the ashes of society and the energy in that room, just the emotional outpouring that suddenly they had a seat at the table, they had a voice, and they had a champion, was just unbelievable. And so basically, the nonchemical, I’ll just call it the Nonchemical agriculture practice, has been in the same situation.

I’ve been called by farmers in my area. I’ve been called a, I’ve been typhoid Mary. I’ve been called a starvation advocate because we all know compost can’t compete with chemicals. And I’ve been on radio shows, which half of the world do you want to starve because we know we can’t feed ’em your way. I mean, this is my life. I’ve been in this. And now, as the chemical approach has run its course, if you will, I mean, they’re starting to run out of ideas. I just clipped an article out of this week’s economist magazine talking about fungi, and they’re now invading people’s bodies, and they can’t develop chemicals fast enough to stop it, because fungi adapts so quickly to our chemical approaches. We didn’t run this course as fast as many of us that were in the movement early thought we would. I’ll agree with that. But eventually, eventually God’s balance sheet does catch up, and you can’t disrespect and abuse life forever until finally that catches up. And I feel like we’re starting to catch up now. I mean, that balance sheet is starting to come home. And so yeah, those of us who have answers real sustainable answers, long-term answers

That don’t depend on the bank and don’t depend on Monsanto, and we’re now actually being asked to offer some advice, and it’s kind of cool,

Marlin Miller:

Jumping into the details of my rhizome, all that stuff underneath the Ground, That it was an epiphany for me. I, and I forget where, which one of this that I saw it, but I told Joel, I told my wife, I said, dog on it. I have to start doing the rotation on our sheep and our two little cows. I have to do our pasture’s only six or seven Acres, And they’re keeping everything somewhat down, but I’m not letting it, like you say, that teenage grass, that poof, that real shooting up. That’s what I’m not letting the grass do.

Joel Salatin:

That’s right.

Marlin Miller:

And we’ve only got 22 sheep and lambs, whatever. But that’s what makes the roots slough off, and that’s what pushes the carbon into the soil. And you grow your topsoil that way, right?

Joel Salatin:

Yeah. Well, the whole thing here is that as farmers, we’re harvesting the sun. I mean, ultimately, we’re harvesting the sun through photosynthesis, through photosynthesis. The sun. The sun is the driver. And of course, there are wonderful spiritual applications. This is everything drives us. The energy comes from the UN and A spiritual life. Everything comes from SON. Alright? I don’t think that’s a coincidence. But we’re harvesting sun energy. And so for photosynthesis, it grows, and the plants either are decomposed on site or they’re eaten and decomposed. I view the animal as basically a very NASCAR compost pile. In other words, the digestion does in 24 hours what a compost pile does in six months, and they’re

Marlin Miller:

Pooping it right out.

Joel Salatin:

Yeah, yeah. And it is coming right out in a concentrate form. Since grass grows in a sigmoid curve, it starts slow and then grows real fast. And then as senescent sets in, it starts to slow down. I call the first part diaper grass, then teenage grass, then nursing home grass. That’s just the way I try to present it so people can understand this S curve, this scur. So obviously, if you can keep your grass in that juvenile fast growth stage, you’re going to harvest a lot more solar energy than you would if you keep it either in diaper stage or in nursing home stage. And so the only way to do that is to deny the animal’s access as it enters that juvenile phase and becomes g grable long enough to graze,

To deny them that, so the plant can go through that burst of growth. And so we’ve been doing this now for goodness, 60 years. And we lease, goodness, we lease, I don’t know, 12 properties in the area. And over the 30 years we’ve been doing this, not one single property have we leased, and we get some really poor ones. We get the dregs. It’s kind of like you don’t go to the alternative doctor until you’ve exhausted all the conventional stuff. And so there’s not a single farm legal property that we’ve leased and started grazing that we didn’t double. Its production in the very first season. In the first year, in the first year. And that’s not with any inputs except fencing and water. I mean, so you move these, and so we’ll put 400 head of cattle on three acres for a day, and you just move them. But they’re grazing tall stuff and stuff that’s been allowed to get tall because we’ve denied them access to everything before. And so one of the fun things that I do when I get in crop country is do a side by side budget of corn versus cows.

And I just keep it real easy. And typically I’ll say, well, I don’t grow corn, so you guys help me. I got a room full of old farmers. And of course they start, how much corn are you going to grow? 160 bushels an acre, 180 bushels. Everybody starts. So you come to a consensus, all right, let’s take an average. Alright, we’re going to grow this much. How much are we going to sell it for? Well, they argue, and you get a number and how much seed going to cost and how much fertilizer going to cost and fuel, the harvesting, all that

You made, make a budget and you end up with whatever it is, some whatever, 250, $300 an acre margin. That’s not net profit because you haven’t paid your taxes or things like that, but at least you’ve got a margin. Alright? Then I go over any the other column and I say, alright, well let’s do the same thing on the same land, and we’re going to grow cows. And we do a budget there. And I have done this for decades. Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, I mean the heartland of America. And in different corn fluctuates. Cattle fluctuate. And I have never done this without the cows. Again, under good management. I mean, the reason nobody can imagine this is because nobody manages their animals. Well, not even small farmers, they just have ’em out there in this little patch. In the patch. It just stays two inches tall and it never grows anything. But I know what mob stocking, herbivorous, solar conversion, lignified, carbon sequestration, fertilization can do. So I’m assuming good management. And we make a budget for cows over here on the right side. And I’ve never had it to where the cows don’t beat the corn by 200 to 250, sometimes 300, $400 an acre in

Marlin Miller:

Margin every single time.

Joel Salatin:

Every single time. Been doing this for years and years and years.

Marlin Miller:

Is that then slaughtering the beef and selling it?

Joel Salatin:

No, no. That’s what I typically do is we’re going to buy calves in the spring at the sale barn, and we’re going to keep ’em eight months, 240 days, we’re going to put about three 50 pounds on ’em. They’re going to gain a pound and pound and a half a day and then sell ’em and then sell ’em in the fall. So that’s one of the big arguments of crop farmers. Well, the beauty of this, I can go on the Caribbean in the wintertime, I don’t have, because corn doesn’t jump fences and get out on the road. They

Marlin Miller:

Plant and they

Joel Salatin:

Harvest plant and they harvest and they go to the Caribbean for the winter after they farm the government with subsidies.

Marlin Miller:

And

Joel Salatin:

So I try to make this as apples to apples as possible. That’s why I don’t put any labor in it. I don’t put any labor in it. Alright? The time it takes to harvest and plant and all that stuff, that’s that labor, the labor to move the cows around, that’s that labor they equal out.

Marlin Miller:

And if you’re running cows, you ain’t going to the Caribbean

Joel Salatin:

Theoretically through the winter, through the winter, that’s right. But by buying stockers in the spring and selling ’em in the fall, you don’t have to make any hay. There’s no hay, there’s no equipment. I mean, you have zero equipment.

Marlin Miller:

Look at how much time and money they would save on fuel and tractors and

Joel Salatin:

All of it. Everything. The animals self fertilize. And so you end up with this great positive you. What’s funny is that when crop farmers look at that, they get really squeamish. They start, I’ve done it for Amish, a lot of Amish, they look around and they’re pretty stoic.

Marlin Miller:

So let’s pause right there.

Joel Salatin:

Why

Marlin Miller:

Are not more doing it?

Joel Salatin:

A couple things. One is they’ve never been taught. They’ve never been told, nobody’s ever presented them this vision.

Marlin Miller:

They’ve literally never heard this

Joel Salatin:

Before. Never heard it before, never heard it before. Number two, the only thing they know about cows is, and sheep or animals is that they’re constantly sick. And the continuous grazing, I have friends that have cows, and they don’t run one cow per acre. They run one cow per three or four acres. Well, in our county, our average cow days per acre, a cow day is what one cow will eat in a day. That’s our standard measure. Every vocation requires some sort of standard measure to orchardist. It’s a bushels to a banker, it’s dollars to a carpenter, it’s inches. And for us as graziers, I’m the grazier, the cow is the Razer.

For us, it’s the cow day. It’s what one cow will eat in a day. So we convert everything to a cow equivalent. So you might have a bull, he’s one and a half cows. You might have a two month old calf. Well that’s a fifth of a cow. Alright? You convert everything to a cow equivalent. So you’ve got a standard measure. In a cow day in our county of Virginia, the average cow days per acre in a grazing situation is 80, 80 cow days per acre. In other words, one acre will feed one cow equivalent, one cow for 80 days a year or 80 on one acre, on one acre or 80 cows for one day a year. Are you with me?

Yes. 80 cow days, 80 cow meal days. Okay. Per year. Alright. Per acre. Per acre. On our farm, we average almost 400. And we haven’t bought a bag of chemical fertilizer or planted a seed in 60 years. Alright, I’m not bragging. Hold it. That’s

Marlin Miller:

Unbelievable.

Joel Salatin:

Yeah. Well, it is unbelievable. So when you say, well, why don’t people do this? Is because they are assuming the 80 cow day paradigm, not the 400 cow day paradigm.

Marlin Miller:

And they would get there.

Joel Salatin:

Absolutely. They would get there. And the thing is, cropland is so much more responsive, so much faster to respond than, I mean, most of the people that Alan Savory’s dealing with, you mentioned to him, are in the desert. They’re in low rainfall.

Marlin Miller:

It’s Africa.

Joel Salatin:

Yeah. Well, Africa’s got some pretty good rainfall, but a lot of the people are doing it in the us. They’re in Colorado, they’re in Wyoming and Idaho, Nevada. And so typically, because grain has always been the holy grail of agriculture, always, always, because grain was always expensive

Before. Very See, this idea of cheap grain is very, very recent. Up until the mid 18 hundreds, or well shoot 19 hundreds, we had, once we had petroleum and mechanical harvesting and planting tractors, if you will, grain was expensive. Read Thomas Jefferson’s farm book, Thomas Jefferson’s farm book. If we have an equivalency today in the ratios of values of commodities, in his day, wheat would be $25 a bushel. Oh my goodness. Chicken would be $15 a pound instead of 3, 4, 5. And beef, beef would be $5 a pound. It was the herbivore beef, goat lamb. That was cheap because that could be grazed, that could be grazed on something that didn’t require tillage. And when tillage is walking all day behind an ox with a sharp stick, and then you have to hand plant, you have to sigh and have harvest. You have to flail and winnow, and you end up with a little bit of seed on a hard floor, and you gather it up and you try to put it in a jar that’s protected from rats and mice before Butler buildings come along. It was very, very expensive. So grain was always the holy grail of agriculture because it was the diamond, it was the gemstone of

Marlin Miller:

Agar. It took so

Joel Salatin:

Much. But today, today with cheap energy, mechanization grain for the first time in human history has become cheap. And that has completely skewed. It has skewed the relative value of the different things compared to the eons of history.

Marlin Miller:

This episode is sponsored by my friends at Kentucky Lumber. A few years ago, Lisa and I were looking at redoing the wood flooring on our top floor for the kids’ bedrooms. And she was doing a bunch of research, and she came back one night and she said, Marlon, I found this great company called Kentucky Lumber. We had never heard of them before. And she saw and felt something that really resonated deeply with her. And the more that I learned about Derek and his team, the more I understood why they’re an incredibly giving family. They’ve adopted a couple kids, they fostered a couple kids. They live their life the way we want to live our life and train their kids in the way that the Bible tells us to do to the very best of their ability. And we’ve been able to get to know them. Guys, if you need any kind of wood products from flooring to trim to anything else, you can find th**@***********rs.com. So big question here. In my mind, cheap grain in the last 50 years, a hundred years, you said late eighteens early nineteens, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Could that be part of the gluten issues, all of the health things?

Am I onto something there?

Joel Salatin:

Yeah. Well, also you have the hybridization, the breeding, where what we’ve done is we’ve shortened the stalk. If you go to rye, for example, look at rye grown in 1900. It’s eight feet tall.

Marlin Miller:

Rye was eight feet

Joel Salatin:

Tall. Yes, sir. Yes sir. Yes sir.

Marlin Miller:

It’s two feet tall

Joel Salatin:

Now I know. So what plant breeders have done is they have shortened the stalk and the leaf relative to the amount of grain because it makes it easier to harvest. We don’t need, see, back in the old days when we had draft power horses, oxen, mules, you needed a lot of straw to bed down the animals in their stalls and their stables. And so the straw, the stems and the leaves were very valuable

Marlin Miller:

Because

Joel Salatin:

That’s how you kept the animals healthy in their stalls,

Marlin Miller:

Made perfect sense.

Joel Salatin:

Yeah, absolutely. But as we eliminated animals, we didn’t need stalls. We didn’t need straw anymore. Well, straw just got in the way of the combine. And not only that, but the taller the straw, the thinking was you can’t grow a big heavy grain on a long stall. It can lodge, it can fall over. So you squatty down the shorten down the stem, and you can put a heavier head on that thing, and it’s going to

Marlin Miller:

Hold up in the

Joel Salatin:

Wind. It’s going to hold up in the wind, and you don’t have any straw to fool with to go through the combine. You can cut off these heads and you don’t have any straw. And so if you read, for example, the book Wheat Belly, that’s the whole thesis of that book about gluten intolerance and celiac disease, is that this whole glu has followed the trajectory of changing the grain to plant ratio. Now, there are other people that say it’s caused by the fact that we don’t allow the grain to go through any fermentation anymore. So it used to be you had to put in a shock. And when you put in a shock in the field, de came and there was a drying, drying, we drying wet over a period of 10 days or so, while it dried down enough that you could put it through a threshing machine

And get it in a grain bin, and it wouldn’t mold. Okay? So you got to get it dried down. And that can’t happen on a stalk. It can’t get dry enough on a stalk without shattering. So there’s this fine line, and I know people that, maybe I’m getting into weeds here with grain production that most people don’t realize if you let it dry enough to put it in a bin on the stalk, the sheath, the hull, the husk around the grain gets too brittle. And the grain, actually, it’s called shattering. It actually falls to the ground. You lose it. Alright.

Marlin Miller:

The kernels, the kernels,

Joel Salatin:

The kernels. The kernels, yes. What you eat. Yeah. The kernels fall to the ground. And so the way to not have that happen was to cut it a little bit greenish, put it in a shock so it would dry down and get it and get the capillary action of the stalk connected to the ground done,

Marlin Miller:

Alright. And then dry that out through the stalk.

Joel Salatin:

And that helped to dry out. And then you could go along and you could take those shocks and put ’em through a threshing machine and get your grain out. And so what another big train of thought is that now that we don’t shock it, but we simply green harvest it and dry it down with natural gas. The grain never goes through this dampness, drying, dampness, drying D, which actually is a bit of a fermentation process. The fermentation changes the enzymes within the grain head itself, which affect the gluten

Marlin Miller:

And how it

Joel Salatin:

Is

Marlin Miller:

Going to be received in our

Joel Salatin:

Body, and then how it’s received in our bodies. Yeah. Yeah. That is amazing. And that’s why Western a price foundation, they say, don’t eat any grain that’s not fermented. So you should soak grain, you should make sourdough bread rather than regular grain bread. I mean, there’s all kinds of things. I actually, I’m not a scientist. I don’t know which one of those threads, and it could be a combination of all of ’em that there’s a bit of truth in all of them. But for sure, the plant, plant to grain, the plant to seed ratio has changed two 300% in all the grains, wheat, barley, everything. It’s changed dramatically in the last

Marlin Miller:

That is really, really, really interesting. You drive around here every fall, every fall, and you see the Amish out shock in their wheat shock, and it takes them a long time. And it’s work. Yes,

Joel Salatin:

It’s work. Its work. It’s backbreaking work. It sure is.

Marlin Miller:

My dad grew up doing that as a kid. I think Gene Logston talks a lot about shocking in his books.

Joel Salatin:

Yes. And he talks a lot about, he has a whole book on this stable bedding and how the static bedding historically, I mean, listen in our

Marlin Miller:

Feet rye. I’m sorry.

Joel Salatin:

Yeah, yeah. Well, I ran into a guy, we do this large scale composting. When we feed hay, we feed under an awning, just a shed roof. And we use wood chips and junky hay and corn fodder and things to soak up all the 50 pounds of sloppy goop coming out the back end of a cow every day, which is gold for us.

And so we add corn to it, the corn ferments, the cows are making it anaerobic by trumping out the oxygen. And then we put pigs in the pigs, then seek the fermented corn, aerate it, and inject oxygen. It turns from anaerobic to aerobic compost. And we spread that on the fields. One of the biggest reasons farmers don’t like to do large scale composting is because they don’t want to fool with all the carbon and the turning, but with pigs turning it. So I ran to a dairy farmer in Ontario, actually, who didn’t have any woods on his place, but he totally bought into this composting pig rating, deep bedding system. And so he grew two acres of ancient long stemmed rye, eight feet tall. He let the grain get almost ripe in it. So the stalks are now, they’re brown, they’re not green anymore. And with that long stem rye, he said, I can make 800 small square bales an acre.

Marlin Miller:

Oh my goodness.

Joel Salatin:

Yeah. I’m sorry. No, 600, 600. Because he made a total of 1200, 1200 bales of this straw. And he just bailed it with the seeds in it. So when he used it for bedding, the seeds for the pigs were already in it,

Marlin Miller:

And they could eat it,

Joel Salatin:

And they could go in. So usually used corn, he was using rye. And same thing.

Marlin Miller:

Same thing.

Joel Salatin:

And the beauty is, if you’ve ever mucked out stalls under straw, you know, can break some handles trying to pry that. The beauty of the pigs doing this is the pigs rip it all up and tear it all up. And so when you shovel it, it’s just compost. It’s just beautiful, beautiful material. And so he figured out his own approach to doing the compost approach, and it was wonderful. Wow.

Marlin Miller:

Oh, that’s brilliant. Let’s talk about your dad. I want to talk about your dad.

Joel Salatin:

Okay.

Marlin Miller:

You told a story here a long time ago about your dad driving an old, was it a station wagon where he ripped the seats out? He didn’t have any doors. I’ve tried to share that story on your behalf a couple times, and I know that I’ve gotten the details wrong, but tell us about your dad.

Joel Salatin:

So my dad was, I mean, one of the next to the Lord, the biggest busing in my life was growing up in a home that didn’t run away from being different. Both mom and dad had no peer dependency. They didn’t care what anybody else said.

Marlin Miller:

And they embraced it.

Joel Salatin:

And they embraced it. It wasn’t reluctant. And so is it any wonder that I’m now the lunatic farmer and I embraced the lunatic farmer, and that’s become my handle. It was pretty cool to come up with a handle that is unique in the world. If you Google lunatic farmer, there is nobody else in the world. That’s right. It’s me. It’s pretty cool. So anyway, so dad was very much, the older I get, the smarter he was. I mean, sometimes you have that Happen. And so early sixties, we get on a farm and we need a vehicle to haul cabs and chickens and feed and different things around. And so most self-respecting farmers would get a pickup truck. I mean, that’s what you’re supposed to get. It’s a pickup Truck. And he said, but a pickup truck, he said, that’s a kind of a single use thing. I can’t take all the kids with three kids, can’t take the kids with me and all that. And so he bought a neighbor, had an old 19 57, 4 door Plymouth car. He bought this thing for a hundred dollars, took all the doors out, took all the seats out. Well, that makes a pretty big room in there. I mean, all the way back to the back of the

Marlin Miller:

Trunk.

Joel Salatin:

I mean, it’s almost 12 feet.

Marlin Miller:

It’s long.

Joel Salatin:

It’s long. Yeah. Yeah. You got a big room in there. And this was before auto inspections, it it, and seatbelt laws mandatory.

So he just averted an old one of these old galvanized buckets, turned

Marlin Miller:

It around

Joel Salatin:

And put it on where the seat was and sat. Did you

Marlin Miller:

Weld it down?

Joel Salatin:

No, no, no, no. It just sat there,

Marlin Miller:

Sat there, sitting there.

Joel Salatin:

So imagine this. No doors, no seats. And he drove this. He had an accounting job. He was an accountant, and he drove this to clients. He’d put on his suit and his bow tie and have this, back in those days you had this 50 pound adding machine. There wasn’t any Texas Instruments little calculator.

He’d take that and he’d go, but then he could stop by the auction barn and buy a couple baby calves. He could go get

Marlin Miller:

In the suit and tie,

Joel Salatin:

And us kids, we could sit on chicken crates that’s kind of shorter for kids. Or sit in ’em, sit on ’em with our feet inside the chicken crate. And that was our multi-use machine. So is it any wonder that today self-respecting farmers we’re supposed to have, supposed to have ATVs side-by-sides, four wheelers, that sort of thing. And so since I’m not a self-respecting farmer, I get to have, and these things are expensive. They’re 20, 21, 20 $2,000. They’re up there. I mean, John Deere Gator. These are expensive things.

And so what I have is a $3,000 Jeep Cherokee high mileage. It’s got 200,000 miles on it, but it’s cheap. Millions of ’em made easy to work on. I’ve got a windshield and a roof and four wheel drive. The thing will climb up a tree and I can carry four people besides me, all my farm junk, my tote box with insulators and all tools. All your fencing tools. Yeah. Stuff and all that. And I’ve got a heater in the cold. I can turn on a heater. So anyway, so that apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Wow.

Marlin Miller:

That reminds me of Louis Bromfield.

Joel Salatin:

Yes,

Marlin Miller:

Absolutely. Driving around Mali Bar and his old Willies, right?

Joel Salatin:

Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

He had an

Joel Salatin:

Old Willy’s. Yeah, an old Willy’s Jeep. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And so this thing, even if it doesn’t last more than three years, well, so what? You buy another one and you’re only a thousand dollars a year, you get a four wheeler. I mean, they’re expensive to buy. They’re expensive to work on, they’re expensive to maintain. And those are sophisticated machines.

Marlin Miller:

Well, they’re all computerized.

Joel Salatin:

Yeah. But my old Jeep Cherokee, it’s a workhorse.

Marlin Miller:

I love it. I love it. It’s tough. So let me go back. I actually looked up when you and I started communicating.

Joel Salatin:

Oh, okay.

Marlin Miller:

It was in the summer of 2016, and I think it was in the spring or the early summer of that year. That was the first time that I ever heard of Joel Ton. And then you came to a local event here for the Amish folks, thousands of people. And I watched you on that stage, and you told the story about how your cows love when you go out to the field and they know there’s a fresh paddock of grass coming. They know. And I watched you tell the stories, and I listened to the Amish people laughing their back ends off. And you had such a great way with just being a storyteller. And I remember I told my wife later, I said, that is a guy that I’m going to get to know. And so you and I started talking back and forth, and then eventually you ended up writing for plain values for a long time. I mean, it’s probably pushing 10 years now.

Joel Salatin:

Yeah. Wow. Has it been that long? Time goes fast. And you’re having fun.

Marlin Miller:

Well, Joel, you chose the title for the column is The Confessions of a Steward.

Joel Salatin:

Right?

Marlin Miller:

Talk about where that came from as far as

Joel Salatin:

The

Marlin Miller:

Ideas behind it.

Joel Salatin:

Sure. The ideas. So confessions of a steward. Yeah. So ultimately, Marlon, we don’t own this stuff. It’s all God’s stuff. I mean, God owns the water, the birds, the trees, the cows, the cattle on. I mean,

The courthouse says we own it. Courthouse even says we own the land. But you and I both know that God actually owns it, and we’re on a pilgrimage, and we just get to, in our pilgrimage, step in to his stuff and use it for a while. And we either abuse it or wede it. And so the confessions of a Steward, I developed that column, whatever title, because A, I’ve got plenty to confess. We don’t always do it. But I also have a lot of positive to confess, to add to the discussion. And the steward part is absolutely that I don’t own it. I’m just a steward of these resources. So, so that was the impetus of it. It’s a very, I mean, people ask, well, what keeps you going? And my favorite thing is that I have the honor and privilege to step out that back porch every morning when I’m home at least, and step into God’s, God’s provision for humanity in his creation.

And he could take care of all this world with the breadth of his voice. He could do it with angels, he could do it with cherubim. I mean, he could do it with any number of things. But he’s chosen us. He’s chosen us to be his hands and feet to represent him in caretaking this. And so I dare to ask, well, if it were my stuff, and I gave a gift of good land, it was all good. And now it’s coming back deserted, low aquifers, poison water, a dead zone, the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico, three-legged frogs, infertile salamanders. I’d say, Hey, hey, somebody messed up my stuff. You got my backpack and you messed it up. And so that’s always in my mind as I’m, in other words, look, I’m not in dower about this. I’m excited about the opportunity to partake, to participate, viscerally, participate in this providence that God has given us. I view all physical creation as an object lesson of spiritual truth. So I want people, when they come and visit the farm, I want them to drive out the lane and say, oh, so that’s what forgiveness looks like. Oh, that’s what abundance looks like. Oh, that’s what mercy looks like. Oh, that’s what respecting and honoring life looks like. That’s what I want them to think. And it will drive them.

Marlin Miller:

It’s easy. This is a bit of a left turn here, but it’s easy at times to think about being pro-life as one thing. It’s just about the abortion issue. And it’s so much more, I think pro-life goes, it goes into this world. It goes into end of life care. It goes into all these other aspects. And to actually be sincerely, pro-life is so much more than just fighting for the unborn.

Is wonderfully important.

Joel Salatin:

Of course. Yeah. Listen, Marlin, most of my career, and I do a lot of traveling and speaking around the world, and most of my career doing this, I have been with greenies tree hugger, earth buff, I mean wonderful people, but a more liberal environmental

Mindset. And I can tell you the amount of time I’ve spent in that world and on college campuses with these folks, when they, alright, let’s back up. We as believers, we meet these people and they’re willing to chain themselves to a tree so the loggers can’t cut it or risk their lives out in a little dingy on the ocean, trying to rescue a baby seal from some hunter. And they have no compunction at all of a squirming hearing, baby in the womb a minute before birth, ripping its arms and legs off and pulling it out. And we see that what we call hypocrisy contradiction. I call it philosophical schizophrenia. And we’re just speechless. We can’t, that contradiction is just unspeakable for us. I can tell you, I can tell you, and this will be a shock to those of us, most people in the faith community, I can tell you that when I’m around them and they look at me and say, yeah, and when you guys go to your right to life and your sanctity of life rallies and stop for Happy meals at McDonald’s on your way home, that’s just as contradictory.

Marlin Miller:

Get out.

Joel Salatin:

Yes sir. Yes, sir. Most people have no clue. Most people in the faith community have no clue that when we stand up on our righteous indignation platform and then serve Twizzlers and gummy bears in the nursery

Marlin Miller:

On styrofoam.

Joel Salatin:

Yes, sir. On styrofoam. They view us with the same level of unspeakable hypocrisy as we view them. My favorite story on this was when I went to uc, Berkeley in California. I’ve been there twice and spoken uc, Berkeley. Let’s agree.

Marlin Miller:

That’s intense.

Joel Salatin:

Oh, that’s intense. I mean, that represents the heart, if you will, of everything. All the tree hugger, all

Marlin Miller:

That, everything.

Joel Salatin:

So I go there, I go there, and two professors had me come and speak, and I did my slide program. I had, I dunno, 300 students there. It was a graduate studies program. And I did my normal creation. God, I mean, that’s not what I was there to talk about, but it just comes out in my farm talk presentation. I don’t hide it.

And when I got done, these kids jumped kids, young people jumped up standing ovation. I mean, they went nuts over it. So we get done. I finish doing the chitchat that you do after you do a speech and we go out for ice cream. It’s dark. And I’m an ice cream aholic, so the two professors are going to take me out for ice cream. So fine. So we get outside the campus or the building and it’s dark and under street lamp. They stopped turn around and kind of stopped me on the sidewalk and said, we have a confession to make. And I thought, okay. I said, this is different. I’m not Roman Catholic. This is kind of, yeah, the confession to make. I said, oh, what? They said, we were scared to death for you. He said, we wanted you to come to present your story. But they said, during the Vietnam era, this is where the Vietnam protests were launched at uc, Berkeley. And at that time, the students began starting a ritual that if a speaker came on campus and said something they didn’t like, the audience would hiss. This is very hospitable, Marlon, but this is uc, Berkeley, after all. But that’s the way they would utter their contempt

To the speaker of whatever the speaker had said. They said, combine the two of us have been here, whatever it was, 20, 25 years, something like that. They said, this is the first time we have ever, ever seen a speaker come to campus and use the word God reverently. Now if you want to swear, that’s fine. If you want to use it in vain, that’s great. No hissing there. No. But the first time I’ve ever heard somebody use the word God reverently and not be hissed ever, ever. That was an epiphany for me. It struck me. This is the problem. This is our blind spot. As a faith community. We don’t realize our inconsistencies in creation, stewardship. They view us as a bunch of dominion, exploitive, conquistador, crusader. I mean, look at our legacy. Look what I’m using. We fairly loosely and collectively, but look what the faith community has done throughout history in the name of God,

Marlin Miller:

All the crusades,

Joel Salatin:

Everything conquistador in the name of the Queen. We kill you Incas. And what struck me was, and this was the conclusion for the first time in these students’ history, they found a true believer who, I didn’t have all the answers, but who was willing to wrestle with the stewardship implications of it’s really God’s stuff, not mine. And so here I came with an environmental talk from a creator worshiping mandate that I take care of this because it is, I don’t worship Romans one. I don’t worship the creation, which is what they do. I worship the creator. But part of that worship is in stewarding his stuff the way he would want it to be

Marlin Miller:

Done. And it made sense to them,

Joel Salatin:

And it made sense to them. And they were willing to forgive the six day earth thing. They were willing to forgive creation. They were willing to forgive God because here’s a guy that’s willing to wrestle with that issue

Marlin Miller:

And having the hard conversations about the styrofoam

Joel Salatin:

And all of those things. Absolutely. I mean, in the average church in America, that’s amazing. If you go in and dare to ask at a potluck, how about we use paper instead of styrofoam? Or better yet, how about we go down salvation to the on thrift store. We’ll buy a bunch of mismatched plates and stuff and we’ll wash ’em at the end.

Marlin Miller:

The hissing comes out.

Joel Salatin:

Yeah, yeah. The elders, the deacons, what you some kind of tree hugger, earth muffin com pinko know. And you can’t even have the conversation because environmental stewardship has been branded with a liberal engine. And I think that in the faith community, we have squandered so much equity, so much emotional equity with the world by being perceived as a bunch. Oh, it’s good. You all going to burn up anyway. Who cares? I mean, you hear this kind of stuff and Rush Limbaugh with the machine guns in the jungle shooting up the monkeys. That’s not funny. I’m sorry. It’s not funny. And it absolutely impugns our equity, our relational equity with the greater culture.

Marlin Miller:

Oh boy. I could park there for a long time. Boy, that is absolutely fascinating. One thing that really gets under my skin is when I see churches and even big estates and big homes, and they are mowing five and 10 acre yards. I get it. But like you said, they’re missing this unbelievable opportunity to invite the community in and help, Hey, help us grow a garden.

Joel Salatin:

Take our church kitchens, turn ’em into commissaries, turn ’em into co-packing for entrepreneurs that want to use an inspected kitchen to offer bone broth whatever to the community. Chicken pot. It’s limitless. It’s limitless. It’s absolutely limitless what you could do on that land. And not only that, Marlon, we need, especially our mega churches, we have lots of, I’m saying we’re the church. I try not to use the church building is not, but we have mega fellowships of hundreds and thousands of people. Why not that congregation adopt six or seven farmers and they’re driving somewhere anyway. Well, instead of driving to Walmart, how about while you’re, when you leave the fellowship, everybody’s got their box of vegetables and meat and whatever, food from local farmers. You could actually let half a dozen, 10, I mean a big congregation of something between 500 and a thousand people. There’s a lot of those. A lot of those around the, they could literally support half a dozen, 10 farmers. And those farmers could quit their town job. They could come home and be with their families. They’re desperate for just a couple more customers. But we don’t integrate anything in this country. Marlon. We segregate everything. We segregate education. We segregate healthcare. We segregate manure from cows. We don’t integrate anything. We are a complete Greco-Roman. Segregated, compartmentalized, individualized, disconnected,

Marlin Miller:

Highly specialized.

Joel Salatin:

Highly specialized. Yes. And we don’t integrate anything. And so yeah, these are things that are very, very doable. And if a group of Christians, of a group of faith-based people would do some of these things, suddenly all of that finger wagging and you bunch of hypocrites would go away and we would suddenly get people to come in that had never heard of it before.

Marlin Miller:

That’s amazing. Let me bring this down to an end here. I am so looking forward to meeting your dad. I just can’t wait. I just can’t wait to meet your dad. What is it like for you? You are 68 years old. You are the second generation of your dad’s genius and visionary approach to farming. Daniel is now probably, I’m 48, he’s probably close to my age. Right? 44. 44.

Joel Salatin:

Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

So you are watching him and his children take on the farm. What does it mean? What do you think of and feel when you look at where your dad started and then what you see in your kids and your grandkids? And not to mention all the unbelievable interns that you have working there,

Joel Salatin:

Right? Yeah. Well, our grandkids haven’t formed their final, and we don’t know where they’re going to. And some of them, one of ’em might come, one of ’em might not. But fortunately we have all these young people that even if it’s not family, it’ll still go forward.

Marlin Miller:

It’s an extended,

Joel Salatin:

Yeah. And actually it goes clear to my grandfather who always wanted to farm. He was a charter subscriber to Dale’s Organic Gardening and Farming magazine when it came out in what, 1945. He never did. Dad tried. And so in our family, we always joke, it took us three generations until we could. But that legacy of all those predecessors who lived a life a little bit under their means to create a launchpad for something better. Most Americans today, modern Americans are living above their means. 50% ,

Yeah, 50% of Americans right now, half of all American households cannot put their hands on $400. Other words, if you needed four,

Marlin Miller:

400,

Joel Salatin:

$400, if you had something you needed $400 for right now, half of American households can’t put their hands on $400.

Marlin Miller:

Boy, that’s sad.

Joel Salatin:

That’s remarkable. So I come from this rich legacy of where generations before me lived a little bit under their means. And people that know me know, I’ve always said, how little can I live on? Not how much can I make, but how little can I live on? I mean, imagine if that became the mantra in the average Christian family. And I’m not about building up wealth here, but when you look at historical, where wealth developed, it’s in living below your means. You don’t have to buy every silver bobble that comes on. And so for me, and in fact, one of the dad and I didn’t have many disagreements. We had one, I remember it was when I came back to the farm, fulltime, we were going to name it, we needed a brand. And so he was an accountant. Oh, well, we just call it salad and incorporated it. That’s what people do. Ford Motor Company. I, and I put my foot down. I said, no, dad. I said, there might be a day when a skeleton isn’t running this, and this is way bigger than us, bigger than our family, bigger than any

Marlin Miller:

Of us. You saw that back then?

Joel Salatin:

Yes, yes. I saw that in that moment. Really? Yes. And I said, no. I said, it’s going to, it’s not going to have our name in it. And so we toyed around with stuff and came up with Polyface, the farm of many faces. And just to show you his vision. So he died at 66, which is really young to me now, but from his sick bed one day. So I’d only been, I came back to the farm full-time, September 24th, 1982. And there and I, we got married, we fixed up the attic in the farmhouse. We drove a $50 car, we saved half our paychecks. And within two years we saved up enough we could live for a year without outside income. No kidding. In two years. And of course she quit working soon when Daniel came.

And so we were at one paycheck. But I mean, we haven’t talked about her, but she’s just amazing. She can sew, cook can clean drive, tractors. I mean, she’s just, the quintessential farm wife helped meet. I made the break September 24th, 1982. It took three years before, as I say that we could exhale. We’re going to make it alright. It took three years. Well, so now we’re at 85. Dad died in February of 88. So he only really saw it three years after. We kind tipped over that I think we’re going to make it. And so I don’t know what it was, maybe 87, he calls me from his sick bed and he says, come in, bring a pencil paper. So I go in and he says, let’s write down how many salaries we could generate on this place. I mean, Teresa and I had just turned, we were just making a living. It was just us. He’s looking down there. I mean, I get all choked up. He’s looking down. He saw them and on, I’ve still got that little yellow piece of paper in his handwriting where he wrote down these and it was 22, 22 full-time salaries from a little place.

Marlin Miller:

Isn’t that how many you have right now?

Joel Salatin:

Yes. That is how many we have right now. That’s how many salaries are being generated. And if I did that exercise today, it would probably be a hundred. Okay. So this, my goodness, when you think about the average farmer is just immersed daily in scarcity. Oh, we call it the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Weather, price, pestilence, and disease. And that’s what everybody leans on their buggy or their, I’m in Amish country, so I got to use a buggy or pickup truck and complains about all day, right? Weather, price, pestilence and disease. And dad was just so far out there that this is not scarcity, this is abundance. And if we tap into God’s patterns and the synergies of relational, multis, speciation strategies, there’s no end to this. And that’s exactly where we are. And it’s really been fun. So to see that vision and that legacy now present itself is truly remarkable.

Marlin Miller:

That’s amazing. That is amazing. Last question. How can we pray for you and your family? How’s your mom, by the way?

Joel Salatin:

So mom is 101. And she’s failing. She’s definitely failing. But she drove until 97.

And our joke is that we took the keys away from her in February of 2020. So our joke in the family is COVID came as a cosmic reaction to us taking mom’s keys away from the car. And so here she is, she, she’s at 1 0 1 and she’s definitely failing. I mean, we’re seeing a decline every week. I don’t know how long she’ll go. She’s tough. She lives 40 feet or 30 feet outside of our house, still lives on her own, but she doesn’t do anything on her own much Theresa, every mother would want a wife, a daughter-in-law like my wife Theresa bathes her cuts her, depends off when she has an accident. I mean, yeah, I’m going. But listen, it’s just heart. I mean, she’s a saint and so yeah, she’s still there. But her mind, she’s mentally, she’s, she’s not there. She’s not home.

She’s not home. And so we just pray that God just takes her. I mean that she just doesn’t wake up one morning. That’d be the ideal. We really don’t want her to get bed fast. I mean, that would just be tough. But there she is, so to pray for. So I think for us, what’s happened now is there is a wave now that is moving. There is a moving in the country, the Maha movement. I mean, I was just on Jordan Peterson just did a long interview. It just aired last week. Epoch Times. I was just down at Glen Becks in Dallas and two weeks ago I did I think 14 podcasts in two days.

Marlin Miller:

Oh my goodness.

Joel Salatin:

And so I’m becoming a spokesman, if you will, in this wellness space. Wellness of land, wellness of people, wellness of culture, wellness of families, the whole space. And so the prayer is that we be able to metabolize this, that it not metabolize is the only word that comes to mind. Documentary, the Lunatic Farmer just was released by Angel Studios. It’s had 50 million impressions. And so we’re just seeing this wave of interest and just God’s place to me here and I want to be. So the prayer is that I be faithful. I be faithful in metabolizing the platform and the articulation where God has placed me right now.

Marlin Miller:

Well, I hope you know how much we appreciate you, Theresa, and your whole family. Everything you guys do, and we have talked, I think you have a motor on your back end. I don’t know exactly how you do it, all the things you write and all the, so just thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Marlon. This has been fantastic.

Joel Salatin:

Great. It’s been a delight.

Marlin Miller:

This episode is brought to you by Homestead Living Magazine. Homestead Living is a monthly print magazine that interviews all the big names in the homesteading world and they focus and educate in a wonderful way. You can learn more and su*******@*************ng.com. So home. If you got anything out of this podcast, you will probably love plain values in print. You can go to plain values.com to learn more and check it out. Please like, subscribe and leave us a review. Guys, love you all. Thanks so much.