539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin

Speaker 1 We hear a lot of noise about how cows are contributing to global warming, which is an idea that's really struck me as rather specious right from the beginning.

Speaker 1 If you want to talk atmospheric carbon, all it would take is all of our farmland to change 1% in organic matter.

Speaker 1 We call this mobstocking herbivorous solar conversion, lignified carbon, sequestration, fertilization. We spend as much time marketing as we do the entire farm production.

Speaker 1 Really, what you are is a communicator and a network builder. Well, why do I need to be fluent in my communication? Why do I need to write? Why do I need to learn to speak?

Speaker 1 The people who communicate lead their professions. Become a storyteller.
Storytellers are what changed the world. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 So I've been very skeptical about these ideas stemming from the WEF globalist types that there's something pathological about the agricultural sector and

Speaker 1 the dawning concern as well or the building concern about the notion that

Speaker 1 pasture animals like cattle, for example, are bad for the planet. That just seems to me to be absurd on the face of it.

Speaker 1 I'd have to see a lot of data, so to speak, before I would regard that as credible. And

Speaker 1 I'm also interested in

Speaker 1 meat-based diets, for example, because they seem to be very health-promoting and highly nutritious.

Speaker 1 And so one of the things that I've wanted to do for a long time is to spend some time investigating the landscape of so-called regenerative farming.

Speaker 1 And I found someone to talk to, and there's other people who I could talk to as well, named Joel Salatin.

Speaker 1 And Joel has written a number of interesting books, and this will give you a sense of him right off the bat.

Speaker 1 The latest one was Homestead Tsunami, which is a description of, well, the dawning interest in homesteading as a potential choice of life, let's say.

Speaker 1 He's also written Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, which I love as a title.

Speaker 1 You can farm, which is partly what we discussed, and Pastured Poultry Profits, which is a book that documents a particular form of agrarian lifestyle as a solution to the economic problems that young people might be facing.

Speaker 1 So it's a pathway to a

Speaker 1 profitable, sustainable, and socially useful economic future. And so we spent a fair bit of time talking about all of these things to do today.

Speaker 1 And so if you're interested in that, then this is the podcast. for you.

Speaker 1 Well, Mr. Salatin, why don't you start just by telling everybody what you do? Let's start from the beginning.
Sure.

Speaker 1 So we farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, which is in the western part of the state, known historically as the breadbasket of the Confederacy during the Civil War, where Cyrus McCormick invented

Speaker 1 the reaper. And

Speaker 1 that part of the Industrial Revolution really took place in 1837.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 we farm there full-time with a pastured livestock

Speaker 1 operation that doesn't use vaccines, hormones, chemical fertilizers.

Speaker 1 My mom and dad bought the original core property in 1961. So I was four years old.
And we came there and it was a gullied rock pile,

Speaker 1 cheap land.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 dad asked.

Speaker 1 agriculture experts, how do I make a living on this small farm?

Speaker 1 Small being how look what's the size so at that time it was about 100 acres open and 450 in woodland so it's a very much a forest it it it goes up along you know one of those appalachian mountains there and and then you know the the nice the bottom land is out you know from the base and um so 100 acres of of of you know decent usable land uh that was one of the gullies we measured was 16 feet deep 16 feet from the top to the bottom that's a deep gully uh but there were just, you know, the hillsides were just gullies like that, like corrugated roofing from back from erosion, back in, you know, plowing

Speaker 1 in the day.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 large areas, a quarter acre that were just solid rock,

Speaker 1 five to eight feet of topsoil had washed off over the years of tillage.

Speaker 1 And there was no vegetation. I remember as a child being able to walk the whole farm and never setting foot on a piece of vegetation.
It was that barren. It was very, very poor,

Speaker 1 but it was cheap. And so that's worth every penny by the sounds of it.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 so, you know,

Speaker 1 dad says, well, how do I make a living on this farm? And it was, you know, buy chemical fertilizer, plant corn, borrow money, build silos, you know, graze the woods.

Speaker 1 And my grandfather, his dad, had been a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming magazine when it first came out in 1945.

Speaker 1 And so he always, he always aspired to be a farmer, but never got there.

Speaker 1 My dad was an accountant. Mom was a school teacher.
And so

Speaker 1 he saw the chemical approach as a as a

Speaker 1 rat race. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because you're always trying to outrun the, it's like a drug addiction. You're trying to outrun the adaptation of,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 the chemicals, they cannibalize in the soil. There's a lot of things that happen there.
And so you're trying to chase that. You're hoping that human creativity will keep you one step ahead of

Speaker 1 biological adaptation. Right.
Well, you're also an interdependent web with all of the manufacturers that are dependent on as well. Right.

Speaker 1 And they're they're cutting your, they're nibbling away at your profit margin, which of course they have to do as well to survive. Sure.
But right.

Speaker 1 Okay, so your dad and your mom, your dad was an accountant and your mom was a school teacher. Okay, so they don't know anything about farming.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they do. We actually,

Speaker 1 dad was, so dad flew in the Navy in World War II and on G.I. Bill, went to Indiana University, got his degree in economics.
He met mom there. And then he had a dream of farming.

Speaker 1 His dad never farmed full-time, but he wanted to farm. Well, how do, you know, I'm a Midwestern boy, no money, no land.
How do I farm? And at that time, this was 1940s. And he saw, you know,

Speaker 1 atlas shrugged and rand there was a lot of socialism going on

Speaker 1 in in america they're

Speaker 1 world war iiish

Speaker 1 and um he said you know i'm gonna go to a developing country you know it's a it's a really free market small government you know we can do what we want so he got on with texas oil company as a bilingual accountant to venezuela and in seven years was able to save enough money to buy a thousand acre farm in the highlands of venezuela we started raising 1000 acres thousand acres.

Speaker 1 Started raising chickens. And because our chickens were so clean, immediately he took over the local, the local chicken market.

Speaker 1 You know how those Latin American, all the farmers come in with their wares and the middlemen, you know, this is, this is 1950s. And

Speaker 1 so he quickly took over the chicken market because the indigenous chickens had a, they had snot, they had a nasal.

Speaker 1 they were running in open sewers and things like that. And of course, all the farmers accused us of witchcraft and voodoo and

Speaker 1 that. And so when there was a junta.
I thought witchcraft generally means sick chickens, not healthy ones.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 it's amazing what you can come up with

Speaker 1 when you're looking for an excuse. So

Speaker 1 then in 1959, there was the junta of Petus Jimenez there. And when you have anarchy like that, it allows scores to be settled

Speaker 1 that wouldn't be otherwise settled under normal times. And so this gave a way for people to,

Speaker 1 you know, to develop their,

Speaker 1 well, to run us out, if you will. And basically the machine guns came in the front door.
We went out the back door and we spent another eight months.

Speaker 1 Dad met with every minister, you know, the Secretary of Interior, Agriculture, Treasury, trying to get protection.

Speaker 1 And nobody would, it was all bribe, you know, how much you pay me, or they were scared they'd be assassinated.

Speaker 1 And so the only thing to do was to, dad was there 12 years, loved the culture, loved the country and loved the language, loved the people, but we couldn't, we couldn't, we couldn't stay with no protection like that.

Speaker 1 So we came back to the States Easter Sunday, 1961.

Speaker 1 When were you born? So I was born in 1957. So were you ever in Venezuela? Yeah.
You were there too.

Speaker 1 Do you have any memories of it at all? Toward the end, yes, yes.

Speaker 1 There's a big difference between being three years old and four years old yeah and so i don't remember the farm but i remember uh caracas of course i spoke spanish you know as well as english and um and and i remember some of that trauma at the end like dad turning the car around and running away from gorillas and you know things like that right right um and so there was there was some trauma there that was your encounter with socialism yes

Speaker 1 fun fun fun yes and so then your family moved to the states and bought this we came back to the states and and dad was 39, lost everything.

Speaker 1 And I remember when I hit 39 thinking, if I lost it all, would I start over? And he went way up in

Speaker 1 my respect and honor at that point. And so we did.

Speaker 1 The reason that we didn't go back to the Midwest, where both he and mom were from and had family, was because he was still hoping to go back to Venezuela. He was hoping that when things settled,

Speaker 1 we'd get a call from the ambassador. and by being that close to DC,

Speaker 1 you know, we could, we could run up there in hours, sign paperwork and be back to the farm in Venezuela.

Speaker 1 That was his

Speaker 1 interim plan too. This was this interim plan and it ended up not being an interim plan.
He bought 100 acres that were open and 450 woodland. Yeah.
So

Speaker 1 let's let everybody listening and watching know about farm size. So compared to traditional farms, let's say of the 1920s and compared to modern farms, how does the farm that your father purchased,

Speaker 1 how is it configured in terms of size, of comparative size? It would be an average size farm for that area, you know,

Speaker 1 150 acres of open land, you know, usable land with, you know, with a wood lot.

Speaker 1 Compared to most farms, it had a much bigger woodlot, you know, being 450 acres. That's a lot of wood.
Any commercial utility in the wood? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
This is Appalachian hardwoods.

Speaker 1 This is oak and black walnut and poplar. And yeah,

Speaker 1 there's some good timber there. It, it had been timbered, though.
It had been all timbered. So it was primarily, you know, newer growth.

Speaker 1 It wasn't large, you know, it wasn't large trees. And so there was really not much value there.
There was some, but not a lot of value.

Speaker 1 And how much of the land you talked about, the gullies and the rock and the fact there was very little vegetation. How much of the 100 open acres acres was damaged in that way? You're

Speaker 1 planted all of it.

Speaker 1 All of it was poor.

Speaker 1 Some of it was

Speaker 1 poorer than others. It wasn't all rock for sure.
You know, the shale lies in a, it lies like this in the ground. And so, you know,

Speaker 1 you can go down three feet here, and then here you're on rock, and then three feet here, and you're on, you know, it's it's layers, it kind of lays in there like that. So,

Speaker 1 so, you know, that's the way that that's the way the land was.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 dad was a,

Speaker 1 dad was a, he was such a visionary. And

Speaker 1 so, so when,

Speaker 1 when

Speaker 1 we realized the, the, uh,

Speaker 1 the, the system is not acceptable.

Speaker 1 Um, and why did he think that exactly? Like, I mean, lots of people do take that route. Yeah, well, some people make it profitable.

Speaker 1 And so why did your father, why had he decide what was the alternative route precisely and why did he decide to take that especially back then right well a we didn't

Speaker 1 he had a tremendous conservation ethic and these gullies he knew oh i see we we we didn't we couldn't plant corn i mean there wasn't enough that's why we had gullies you know right right so we could see that it had been that mismanaged right oh yeah yeah we we you could tell that it had been very mismanaged so we we started a very aggressive tree planting campaign we planted about 60 acres in trees over those first 10 years.

Speaker 1 So we actually shrunk some of the open land

Speaker 1 and we, you know, we put we put brush down in the gullies and and

Speaker 1 and then we start and he started experimenting. That was to stabilize the soil again

Speaker 1 so to stop at least stop the erosion. And

Speaker 1 one of my most poignant childhood memories was one Sunday, he said, let's take,

Speaker 1 I met this guy, I want to go see him. So we got in the car on a Sunday afternoon, took this drive.

Speaker 1 and i don't remember what the guy had i don't remember whether he had sheep or chickens or pigs or whatever he had all i remember was coming home i was what maybe six or seven i remember coming home and dad just literally levitating as he drove the car this guy had portable animal shelters and dad had never seen anything like that before and it clicked in his head wow portable animal shelters suddenly i don't have to build stationary i don't have to build a barn I can build mobile infrastructure.

Speaker 1 And because he'd already gotten onto this, this moving animals around, some of Andre Voisini was a Frenchman who wrote grass productivity, kind of still the Bible of rotational or controlled grazing.

Speaker 1 And where you mimic

Speaker 1 native choreography, where animals... The animals migrate.
The animals migrate. They move around.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, we don't have wolves and they won't let us do fire very much.

Speaker 1 And so, but we do have electric fence. Electric fence was just coming in.
This is the early 60s.

Speaker 1 And so dad actually invented a portable electric fencing system to where we could start moving the cows around.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know, we moved them, whatever, once every 10 days or so and gradually got better and better and better until by the.

Speaker 1 you know, by the time I was a teenager, we were moving them, you know, every three or four days. Then when I was in college, I put in our basic permanent grid so we could move them every day.

Speaker 1 And that was a quantum leap. That moved us.
When we started moving them every day, everything started to kick in.

Speaker 1 Okay, so walk us through that. So

Speaker 1 a typical farm would have a fenced off area and the cattle will graze there. And the problem with that is they'll graze the the vegetation right down to the ground and then that's not good.
Right.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 And so hypothetically, if you could imagine a huge circle, you could rotate them around the circle at some speed, and they and they wouldn't be able to graze at some of it, and that would grow in behind them.

Speaker 1 And that's right. Then their waste products would also fertilize the land, and the grass would stabilize, be stabilized against erosion.

Speaker 1 Right. And so, okay, so now you said you'd experimented with 10 days and then four and then one.
And gradually got it down to where it was.

Speaker 1 Okay, so how do you how do you build the electric fences and how do you how do they move?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so so the the thing you have to understand from an ecology standpoint is if we had a graph and we charted the way grass, the way vegetation grows, it grows in a sigmoid curve.

Speaker 1 It's just like a person. Now, they start small, little baby, you know, and then they hit teenage years and they grow real fast.
And then they quit growing and eventually go into senescence.

Speaker 1 So I call this diaper grass, teenage grass, and nursing home grass, okay, just to help.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 if you want to accumulate the most biomass possible you want to let it go through that blaze of growth so the whole idea of that's when the cows come of controlled grazing is to hit it at the second break point not this break point not this point down here when it's long enough to graze but it hasn't gone through this this teenage growth spurt

Speaker 1 so that's what the con that's what the electric fence becomes then a a steering wheel an accelerator and a brake on the on the four-legged uh sauerkraut pruner to be able to steer them around the landscape to catch this second growth point all the time.

Speaker 1 And suddenly, what happens is

Speaker 1 by letting the grass go through there, you get a completely different energy flow because now the grass is always at energy equilibrium. It's not.
What do you mean by energy equilibrium?

Speaker 1 What I mean is

Speaker 1 when the forage gets pruned or grazed, I use the word pruning because grazing is now, that's a bad word. Okay.
So pruning, all right.

Speaker 1 When it gets pruned, if it gets pruned too frequently, you actually weaken the plant.

Speaker 1 And so by

Speaker 1 only allowing, by controlling when the pruner can prune strategically,

Speaker 1 you allow that plant to actually accumulate energy and vibrancy and flourish, just like pruning a vineyard or an apple tree or anything else.

Speaker 1 And so, for example, in our area, the average grass. Right, so the optimal amount of grazing in a grassland is not zero.
No. So rather than grazing, you know, 20 times this long,

Speaker 1 we're grazing six times this long, for example. And so in our county, for example, the average cow days per acre, so a cow day is what one cow will eat in a day.

Speaker 1 All right, that's a cow day.

Speaker 1 And in our county, the average is 80 cow days per acre. So an acre will support 80 cows for one day a year or one cow for 80 days a year.
We're averaging almost 400.

Speaker 1 And we started with gullies and rocks and never planted a. 400.
So five times the efficiency. Right.
Because you're allowing them to graze.

Speaker 1 Because we're allowing that forage. Why doesn't everybody do that?

Speaker 1 If there's five times the efficiency gain, it seems self-evident.

Speaker 1 Because they think it's too hard to move cows. Yeah, well, fair enough.
They're big. And they think it's too hard to move cows.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, we have a thousand heads, so we're not a backyard operation by any means.

Speaker 1 But most people, because it's new.

Speaker 1 It's just different. It's new.

Speaker 1 It's not what grandpa did. Yeah, yeah.
And you've got to realize that, you know, with America's average farmer being 60 years old,

Speaker 1 the average farmer is still in grandpa's paradigm. Right.
When land was cheap, fuel was cheap,

Speaker 1 you know, and is still in this 1950s paradigm.

Speaker 1 You know, when we talk about average farmer 60, is 60 years old, which means in the next 15 years, half of all America's agriculture equity is going to change hands.

Speaker 1 Land

Speaker 1 building for a potential transformation. Exactly.
Yeah, or catastrophic failure. Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 And that level of agrarian equity transfer has never happened that fast in any civilization in history, except in conquest. You know, the Huns come up and run over Rome or whatever.

Speaker 1 Now, I'm not saying we're getting ready to have conquest. I am suggesting that we're in a guinea pig time here if we can pull this off at peace and have this level of transfer.

Speaker 1 So, obviously, the question is: well,

Speaker 1 who's going to control this land in 15 years? Is it Black Rock? Is it Bill Gates? Is it the Chinese? Is it, you know, what is it?

Speaker 1 And that's why I'm a bit

Speaker 1 on a tear to

Speaker 1 try to germinate young farmers, so to speak,

Speaker 1 young farmers to jump on this because I think we're in an unprecedented time of opportunity

Speaker 1 in farming because so much is going to become available. Okay, so now you have this land, it's all full of gullies, it's not doing very well, you start planting trees to rehabilitate it.

Speaker 1 What do you do about the gullies? How do you get grassland to grow? How do you introduce the cows? And then tell me more about the electric fencing and how you learn to move them, move the cattle.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so

Speaker 1 some of the gullies were on gentle land, you know, pasture land.

Speaker 1 And those,

Speaker 1 we actually built, dug ponds, built ponds in low ground and hauled the silt.

Speaker 1 All that silt that had accumulated down in the in the valley, we hauled it up and actually literally filled in those ditches

Speaker 1 with taking the silt that had washed down.

Speaker 1 A lot of the real steep now you you built ponds where you took the silt out of yes yes so so so now so the erosion had washed the soil and you found where that had washed and and we actually found we actually found 100-year-old fence posts buried 10 feet under silt

Speaker 1 okay truck that yes yes and what what trucks and what front end loaders yeah yeah a track track loader you know and a and a and a couple dump trucks and i mean you're just running it whatever you know 200 yards I mean it's close boom boom boom and and so you're flattening everything back out so so we're we're filling in those those gullies are you filling it in with

Speaker 1 do you fill it in with filler first and then topsoil how or what

Speaker 1 you just you just fill it in with the material you're digging to build a pond I see so you're just digging out

Speaker 1 relatively straightforward if you have the machinery yeah yeah that's right and you had enough capital for the machinery well we we hired it we hired excavator yeah yeah yeah yeah But that wasn't done early.

Speaker 1 That was done much, much later. You know,

Speaker 1 we just started

Speaker 1 moving animals around.

Speaker 1 On the land you have. And the choreography of moving them around

Speaker 1 itself was a tremendous healer. And I watched over my lifetime these big quarter acre saucers of bare rock.

Speaker 1 Just like a scab on your hand,

Speaker 1 you know, it heals from the outside in.

Speaker 1 It doesn't heal from the inside out it heals from the outside in you know it gets smaller and smaller and finally that last little you know and you pull it off and you new skin that's exactly the way the soil was on these barren places every year you know 18 inches the soil would come up on the edge 18 inches 18 inches till eventually the rocks were not there today okay and so why did it come back exactly

Speaker 1 because vegetation decomposing if you can get enough decomposing vegetation

Speaker 1 that builds soil right right that that's how you build soil.

Speaker 1 There'd be dead leaves blow along the edges and collect.

Speaker 1 And so by letting the grass grow to this second point where we're getting this, this, you know, Voisine called it the blaze of growth period all the time, we were getting more root structure, more biomass,

Speaker 1 more manure from the animals themselves. So the plants will colonize the rocks.
Yes, and the plants, absolutely.

Speaker 1 And so today, all those areas that when I was a kid, you know, it was bare rock today has, you know, 16 inches of soil on it.

Speaker 1 Okay, now I wanted to ask you specifically about that, too, because we hear a lot of noise about how cows are contributing to global warming, which, you know, is a is an idea that's really struck me as rather specious right from the beginning.

Speaker 1 Because like did the buffalo did that too? Like, I see. So huge herds of grazing animals are bad for the planet.
That strikes me as highly unlikely.

Speaker 1 So, and I know they talk about methane, but you know, people talk about a lot of things. Now,

Speaker 1 you said that you regenerated the

Speaker 1 ground with the cattle and with the careful management of grass, and now you're producing, say, a foot of topsoil on top of this

Speaker 1 rock. I presume that's also a carbon sink.
Yes. Oh, absolutely.
Right. Because carbon, plants take in carbon because they're like made out of carbon.
Right.

Speaker 1 And in fact, when we want to look at that, in 1961, the first soils test that we took, we averaged about 1% organic matter. Organic matter is a kissing cousin to carbon.
Organic matter is something is

Speaker 1 because carbon is life-based.

Speaker 1 Life is carbon-based. Right, right, right.
And so, so, organic matter is something that was living at one time, and now

Speaker 1 it's in some state of decomposition in the soil. It's what gives soil its porosity, its bounce.
It's, you know, it's

Speaker 1 what's what segregates it from sand. Yes,

Speaker 1 yes, yes, or even clay. Right, right, right.
And so

Speaker 1 1%.

Speaker 1 Today,

Speaker 1 we're a little over 8%.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 all it would take, I mean, if you want to talk climate change, you know,

Speaker 1 atmospheric carbon, all it would take is all of our farmland to change 1% in organic matter.

Speaker 1 And we would return to pre-1960 atmospheric carbon levels.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, one of the things that's really struck as incomprehensible about the carbon debate is, so I know, for example, that over the last 30 years, something like that, the planet has greened quite radically, especially in semi-arid areas.

Speaker 1 And that seems to be a consequence of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, some of which is arguably human-made. But the net consequence of that, it's so interesting to see, is immense green.

Speaker 1 It's something like 20% of the Earth's area, which is like, that's a lot.

Speaker 1 And the fact that it's in semi-arid areas means that exactly the desert-like areas that were supposed to expand, according to the climate doomsayers, have actually shrunk.

Speaker 1 And then, and I've been thinking that through

Speaker 1 again, more recently, I talked to Patrick Moore, for example, and he was one of the founders of Greenpeace.

Speaker 1 And Moore has produced these, he's not the only one, but he's produced these graphs of carbon dioxide levels across like 500 million years instead of 250. And we're definitely at a carbon dioxide low.

Speaker 1 And so if we tap it up even a little bit, it makes a big difference. But that's all to say that plants like carbon dioxide a lot.
And then when there's more of it, they grow and sequester it.

Speaker 1 And they do that rapidly. And so, and then I read a paper here recently that indicated that the typical climate model underestimates the rapidity at which plants utilize carbon dioxide by 30%,

Speaker 1 which is like a fairly large margin of error. And so it just seems to me to be self-evident that if we set the preconditions, plants would mop up any excess carbon dioxide in like no time flat.

Speaker 1 And so you're saying that if we improved even our grazing habits so that

Speaker 1 grass was allowed to grow longer before it was grazed on, you don't need much of a percentage in how effective the plants sequester carbon to take whatever excess carbon. That's exactly right.

Speaker 1 as pastures, as perennials, and of course, you know, a lot of North America was a perennial, it was a prairie.

Speaker 1 Okay, that's a perennial prairie, as opposed to an annual, which is corn, soybeans, and crops. Okay, annual crop.
Okay.

Speaker 1 In a healthy perennial.

Speaker 1 So we don't have to plant perennials. They just grow year after year.
That's right. That's right.

Speaker 1 So in a perennial prairie situation, pasture situation, if it's healthy, there's enough methanotrophic bacteria. This is a special kind of

Speaker 1 freestanding bacteria, methanotrophic bacteria. And like its name suggests,

Speaker 1 it's there to pull down methane.

Speaker 1 There's enough there to metabolize into the soil bank

Speaker 1 the methane released from 1,000 cows per acre. Well, you're never going to have 1,000 cows per acre.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 where do these ideas come from then? Given, you know, because we hear follow the science all the time.

Speaker 1 But then if you look into the science, first of all, there's plenty, there's a plethora of opinions, right, at minimum.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and so, and just now and then, you know, when you're looking at data, you kind of have to stand back and use your head a bit.

Speaker 1 And you start from maybe the presumption that any idea that large grazing herds are bad for the planet is to be regarded with extreme skepticism to begin with, because large grazing herds are exactly the sorts of things that the environmental types worship when they're happening naturally in Africa.

Speaker 1 So you can't have it both ways. That's That's right.
And so

Speaker 1 I've just always thought the idea that pastured animals properly pastured being bad for the planet somehow, and that's as bad as equating factory farming with regenerative farming, for example, because they're not the same thing at all.

Speaker 1 No, okay, so your experience on the farm was that carefully managed grazing herds regenerated soil that, well, not even soil.

Speaker 1 They actually made rocky areas into soil that could then be, well, first of all, a carbon sink, if you care about such things, but also productive grazing land. Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 And a big part of the trick there is to manage the grass properly and to move the cattle. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then we began adding the other species. So you've got the cattle.
And so we look around. So, Jordan, a lot of what developed here was

Speaker 1 in the mid-60s, dad looked around and he said, well,

Speaker 1 10, 10, 10 chemical fertilizer doesn't build soil. All right.

Speaker 1 What does build soil? What makes regeneration happen? And it's very simple. You know, there is no animal-less ecology.
So you got to have animals. Well, what about these animals? Well, they move.

Speaker 1 Well, if they move, then we have to give them shelter, water, and control.

Speaker 1 And so all of our

Speaker 1 innovations that we're now famous for

Speaker 1 grew out of not,

Speaker 1 we didn't sit around in a focus group saying, how can we innovate?

Speaker 1 It was strictly, how does nature work? So how do we mimic that on a domestic scale? That was all. We don't know.
So you're basically mimicking migration.

Speaker 1 Mimicking the

Speaker 1 choreography.

Speaker 1 We call this mob stalking, herbivorous, solar conversion, lignified carbon, sequestration, fertilization. And I knew you would enjoy that.

Speaker 1 Say that again. And I did practice that in front of you.
Okay, let's hear it again.

Speaker 1 Mob stalking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration. Oh, yes.
Yes. All right.
Well, that sounds plenty scientific. Yeah, plenty scientific.

Speaker 1 So then we say, well, well,

Speaker 1 how does this maintain sanitation? You got all this manure and dirt and stuff. And well, birds, birds follow herbivores.
So we built eggmobiles. for laying chickens and they follow the cow herd.

Speaker 1 The chickens scratch through the cow pies, eat out the fly larvae, scratch the cow patties into the ground, stimulating the fertility, eating the grasshoppers and crickets that compete with the cows for the vegetation.

Speaker 1 And instead of where most farmers would shoot the cow. So the chickens chase the cows.
Are they moved too? Yes, yes. So they're in eggmobiles.
That's what we're eggmobiles. Okay, so

Speaker 1 the chickens follow the... the cattle and you move the chickens as well.
Yeah, so like the egret on the rhinos nose.

Speaker 1 I mean, look at any herd, wildebeest in nature, and you'll see these flocks of birds following, and they're the sanitizers with the herbivores. So

Speaker 1 instead of shooting the cows up with parasiticides and grubbicides and things like that, we just collect $100,000 worth of eggs as a byproduct of the pasture sanitation program and the fertility program.

Speaker 1 So this then allows. So why sanitation exactly? Delve into that a bit more because while the cows are manuring the land as they graze, and the sanitation problem,

Speaker 1 it doesn't decompose rapidly enough without the birds. Like

Speaker 1 What exact role do the birds? Well, I mean, there are dung beetles, but the sanitation is that the manure is what carries the cattle parasites. That's where the parasites live

Speaker 1 and propagate to reinfect the cows when they come back through.

Speaker 1 So when the cows scatter them,

Speaker 1 the sun and now not having

Speaker 1 enough of a pie to

Speaker 1 procreate in,

Speaker 1 to live in,

Speaker 1 then

Speaker 1 they don't live for another time.

Speaker 1 Okay, so you move the cattle for two reasons, then, actually, one is to allow the grass to maximize in terms of density, but also to allow the land to clean so that when the cows come back, they're eating grass rather than their own waste product.

Speaker 1 That's right. And the chickens help with that.
And then you collect the eggs. Okay, so now the problem comes down to essentially how do you move the cattle, right? That's okay.
Yeah, so we move the

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 we move the cows every day around four o'clock. We like the afternoon move best for a number of reasons.
But it's electric fence, one strand of electric fence. Cows are very smart.

Speaker 1 They don't want to get shocked. And so we just go out and

Speaker 1 open a cross fence. So imagine a ladder with rungs.
And so our permanent wires, our permanent fence is the stringers on the outside. Our portables are the rungs on the inside.

Speaker 1 And we can expand and contract those based on how big the herd is, how much grass there is, you know, all sorts of factors as to how

Speaker 1 much we're going to expand. So let's get an idea of the...
So

Speaker 1 let's say we have a field and you want to move the cows.

Speaker 1 What do you have that's permanent that's fencing exactly? Well, the edges, the edges. The edges define like between the field and the forest.
or the field and a and a creek, field and a pond.

Speaker 1 All right. So you

Speaker 1 can see. That's permanent.

Speaker 1 And then you simply run, you know, you had a little reel, okay, with a polywire on it, and you run that across from side to side, and that gives, that then gives

Speaker 1 demarcates an area, and you're simply, you're simply giving those cows a segment of that, you know, we call it a paddock

Speaker 1 every day.

Speaker 1 And the beauty is that

Speaker 1 in no time,

Speaker 1 the cows respond to you coming. I mean, think about your dog or your cat.

Speaker 1 When you bang bang the bang the dish, they come running. They know what that is.
Well, the cows, when we go out to move them, roughly, you know, we try to do it as close to four as possible.

Speaker 1 You know, if you got called every day at four o'clock for a bowl of ice cream, about 3.45, you know, your tail would wag and your ears would wiggle too.

Speaker 1 And so the cows are ready and we go out and we just call them, come on, cows. And they just, they just come running through.
We close behind them. Why?

Speaker 1 Why do they, because they know the food will be because they're because, yes, because they're they've got a new salad, okay? So they've learned that they've got a new salad.

Speaker 1 They've learned that, and then and then it doesn't take them long to learn that. They learn that very, very quickly.

Speaker 1 And so they just, so you don't have to herd them, you know, you don't have another advantage to doing it the same time every day because you established a habit animals love routine, animals love routine, so do people, as it turns out, yes, yes, even though they think they don't, yeah, yeah, oh, no, we, we, we're, we are creatures of routine, so uh, so that's so the moving them,

Speaker 1 but you have to understand, you know, why do you need the fences at all then? Why do you need the fences at all? I mean, it stops them from going back.

Speaker 1 It stops them from going into

Speaker 1 tomorrow's dinner. So basically,

Speaker 1 we're giving them one day's plate of menu every day. Right.

Speaker 1 One plateful.

Speaker 1 If somebody came and gave you, you know, five platefuls of food for five days, you'd probably just pick out the good stuff and leave the stuff you didn't want and you know you'd be a lot more right so they have enough

Speaker 1 yeah and and and they actually change their behavior to eat more aggressively and and with less prejudice on the liver and onions if you will

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 uh

Speaker 1 and so so this actually is healthy for the cows to actually you know, increase their palatability index to eat things that they wouldn't.

Speaker 1 So they'll eat thistles and they'll eat all sorts of, you know, things that are actually good for them that they wouldn't eat. If they had more choice.
If they had a lot, if they had all the choice.

Speaker 1 So how did you figure out what to plant as well? I mean, we never planted anything. Oh, so this is net.
Oh, this is natural seed bank.

Speaker 1 Whatever's there grows. And so

Speaker 1 the management affects the type of vegetation you have. Okay, so

Speaker 1 how did that get started then? I mean, because we were talking about the gullies and stuff. Because there's a seed bank already in nature.
There's a seed bank in nature.

Speaker 1 It comes in on bird wings, deer hide, possums waddle across.

Speaker 1 The ability of nature to spread seeds is almost incomprehensible.

Speaker 1 It's almost incomprehensible. Well, all the plants that weren't good at that don't exist.

Speaker 1 Right, right. So that's crucial.

Speaker 1 So the seed bank. So the seeds will come all by themselves.
So

Speaker 1 the key is for us to create

Speaker 1 a habitat that will allow as many different kinds of plants to flourish as possible.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 that's what revegetated these fields.

Speaker 1 And why

Speaker 1 as many different kinds of plants as possible?

Speaker 1 Because each one of them creates

Speaker 1 a different enzyme, a different...

Speaker 1 It makes it more resilient.

Speaker 1 Some have spreader roots, some have tap roots, some like sun, some like shade.

Speaker 1 So they take advantage of all the available sun resources if you have a diversity of and not only that, but the but the research being done by the uh bio-nutrient food association right now, uh, they're two years into this uh beef study, uh, it's being done at the University of Utah, uh, the lab,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 they're measuring 150 uh different uh nutrients in beef

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 what makes one have more than the other?

Speaker 1 What makes beef different nutritively? And interestingly, there's no difference in organic.

Speaker 1 There's no difference in breed, no difference in age.

Speaker 1 The only metric that is that makes a big difference in the amount of riboflavin, the amount of

Speaker 1 niacin, whatever, you know, 150 nutrients. The only thing that makes a big difference is how many different types of plants did the animal eat.
Right, right.

Speaker 1 So that means, oh, so that's so cool because that means that you can. So the diversity.
Right. So you can maximize for biodiversity at the plant level.
Yes.

Speaker 1 And that means that you have a mix of plants that can take advantage of different kinds of soil and different growing conditions. Yes.
And your pasture is resilient because there's multiple species.

Speaker 1 And so some will grow better in dry years and some will grow better in wet years and cold versus warm. And so

Speaker 1 your plants are resilient. And then the animals, because they have a varied diet, can derive from that variation the balance of nutrients that will make them grow best and be healthy.

Speaker 1 And that makes them more that gives them a higher nutritional value. That's correct.
So that's a good deal. And you don't have to plant.

Speaker 1 Okay, well, let's go back to the planting idea just for a minute. I mean, are there ways that you could augment the

Speaker 1 productive quality of your pasturing by doing some planting or is it just better to leave it natural?

Speaker 1 Jury's out on that. I mean, there are certainly people who have planted things

Speaker 1 in their fields. In general, if I'm going to convert, for example, a cornfield into pasture, I'm going to plant.

Speaker 1 I don't have time. I don't have time to wait.
I don't have time to wait. In 20 years, yes, it'll be a pasture, but I don't want to wait 20 years.
So in that case, I would certainly plant.

Speaker 1 You would plant what? Alfalfa, maybe? What do you plan?

Speaker 1 No, I would plant a cocktail, you know, two clovers, three grasses, um, some uh plantain, some you know, some you just sprinkle that together, yeah.

Speaker 1 I see, so you'd make an artificial diversity, an artificial cocktail, yeah, yeah, okay. Um,

Speaker 1 and and then, and then it'll gradually diversify, you know, over time.

Speaker 1 Okay, how does the dollar return on your cattle say compare to what you could make while using the land for other purposes if you had a monoculture, for example, if you planted corn?

Speaker 1 I'm very curious about the economics of this because farming is famously a very low margin, high labor enterprise, very difficult enterprise. And so there's a variety of things you can do with land.

Speaker 1 And obviously, many people plant massive monocultures and they use chemicals and they use chemical herbicides. And I'm not

Speaker 1 a priori critiquing that. You decided to go with cattle and chickens.
And what else did the raise?

Speaker 1 More than that, we went two things. One, we went multi-species.
So we have cows,

Speaker 1 chickens, both meat and eggs,

Speaker 1 pigs, lamb,

Speaker 1 rabbit,

Speaker 1 duck.

Speaker 1 So multi-species. Okay, right.
That's the ponds, the ducks, I presume?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, I mean, well, well, it's for eggs and meat.

Speaker 1 That's a small,

Speaker 1 we won't do a lot of those.

Speaker 1 Our main is beef, pork, and chicken. I mean,

Speaker 1 that's our main state. Rabbit, duck, lamb, those are all kind of peripheral things.

Speaker 1 But the other part of this is that we elected to direct market. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 So remember, dad was an accountant, and he understood very early on that as a small farm, the commodity margin, the commodity business,

Speaker 1 the whole goal is to become the least cost producer. Yeah.

Speaker 1 At high scale. At high scale.
Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Right. And as a small farm, he understood we can't compete at that.
So I'm sure you've heard farmers say, well, the middleman makes all the money.

Speaker 1 Yeah, of course. Well, that's typical for many, many, many enterprises.
Exactly. So, so.

Speaker 1 He realized, well, in order for us to compete to actually make a living on this small farm,

Speaker 1 we need to become a middleman yeah we need to own that so basically the retail dollar is divided into producer processor marketer distributor those four basic say that again producer producer farmer processor processor marketer and distributor right the marketer is the one who lets everybody know that the products exist which is very important and then the last one is distributor right so so it's got to it's got to get to the the retail interface somehow okay so so the retail dollar is divided those four ways and different commodities.

Speaker 1 There are different rate percentages in each of those four categories.

Speaker 1 And tremendous competition between them. Yes, tremendous competition.

Speaker 1 The farmer,

Speaker 1 there's only one part of that that is subject to what I call the four horsemen of the apocalypse, which is weather, price, pestilence, and disease. Right.

Speaker 1 That's production. Right.
So he takes all the risks and he naturally

Speaker 1 risks. Yeah.
Yeah. Whereas, you know, when the grasshoppers come, they don't eat the tires on your delivery vehicle.

Speaker 1 When the drought comes, it doesn't eliminate your Wi-Fi connection to your customers.

Speaker 1 So, so these other three, the three, the processing, marketing, and distribution, are relatively immune from weather price pestilence. But they're also not dependent on any single farmer.

Speaker 1 That's right. That's right.
So their risk is distributed. That's right.
Right. So we began

Speaker 1 when

Speaker 1 we

Speaker 1 headed into this, we established a direct direct marketing persona.

Speaker 1 Eventually became our brand, Polyface, P-O-L-Y-F-A-C, Poly Face Farm, Farm of Many Faces.

Speaker 1 That became our brand. And we now sell to restaurants, institutions, boutique groceries.

Speaker 1 We ship nationwide. We have a farm store.
We

Speaker 1 direct sell into about 35 drop points in the urban sector around Northern Virginia, D.C.,

Speaker 1 Richmond, Virginia Beach, Williamsburg. And those are those drops.
Tell me about those

Speaker 1 urban drop points. Farmers markets or no? No, no, no.

Speaker 1 We're not involved in any farmers' markets. Oh, you're not.

Speaker 1 And I'm not opposed to farmers' markets.

Speaker 1 But I just don't think, in general, they're not a very efficient interface because they're primarily social circles. Yeah.
They're primarily social clubs. Relatively low volume, I would say.

Speaker 1 So they're like a boutique product. Yeah, because most of the people who go are there to show their support of local food and assuage their guilt from taking

Speaker 1 off their newly coffed little poodle dog, you know, that they had done so they can only buy a little baby food jar with a pink ribbon on it of kimchi or

Speaker 1 some you know special thing. They're not buying bushels of green beans or bushels of apples or things.
And so we just found farmers markets a very inefficient.

Speaker 1 How did you build your customer network?

Speaker 1 That's work, man. Yeah, it is.
It is. We spend as much time marketing as we do the entire farm production.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, marketing is such a funny enterprise because people, first of all, it's not even named very well because what you're doing when you're a marketer, really what you are is a communicator and a network builder.

Speaker 1 And, you know, people say things like, well, if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a pass to your door. And that's a lie.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. It's just not true.
Because,

Speaker 1 first of all, it isn't obvious they want a a better mousetrap and they're pretty set in their mousetrap habits. And plus, they don't know your damn mousetrap exists.
And they actually don't care.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, one of the things that shocked me when I started making consumer products, which was like 30 years ago, was, see, because I thought I'd invented this.

Speaker 1 process with my colleagues that helped people identify and hire more effective employers, employees.

Speaker 1 And the first error I made was thinking that large companies companies actually cared about that, which they don't at all, which is quite a shock.

Speaker 1 They say they do, but they actually don't when it comes down to it. But then, but more than that, I also realized that

Speaker 1 if you have something new, that's actually

Speaker 1 a risk and not an advantage because most people are so risk averse, they won't try anything new. They want to know that many other people are using this and haven't died because of it.
And then

Speaker 1 no one knows your damn product exists.

Speaker 1 And so I would say, for the average enterprise, you tell me what you think about this with regard to your enterprise, the product is 5% of the problem, and communication about the product is 90% of the problem.

Speaker 1 I know that leaves 5% for noise, but like it's exactly the opposite of what most people would think. Marketing is communication, and it really matters.
So you guys figured that out.

Speaker 1 Messaging is everything.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 and the messaging always has to be in terms of the possible buyer. Right.
In other words, it's not about you. No, no, no.
It's about their need. Yeah.
Describing their needs. What's their problem?

Speaker 1 What's their need? What can I fix for you? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 And that's a hard thing when

Speaker 1 I'm not like my normal consumer. Right, definitely.
I have a big garden. I have, I walk out the back door.
I've got eggs. I've got cows.

Speaker 1 I've got, you know, so you don't even exist in the landscape where the problem is. Exactly.

Speaker 1 So you so so for me for me i almost have to get into some sort of a you know a yen position or something to to to okay uh

Speaker 1 how do i think when how do i have these how do i think like my consumer yeah like my customer very difficult yeah very very difficult but when you can get into that position you can absolutely uh message it okay well tell me how you guys did that that's and i'd like to know more about the details of your network you you talked about many inroads for sales.

Speaker 1 So remember when we started,

Speaker 1 so I came back to the farm full time September 24, 1982. Okay, 1982.
I left, I was a, um, I was a reporter, investigative reporter at the local newspaper for two and a half years after college.

Speaker 1 So, you know, so here, here, now I'm wanting to come back to the farm full time. Now I'm working in the, in the, in town, you know, trying to, how do I come back to the farm full time?

Speaker 1 Teresa and I got married. We remodeled the, uh, the attic of the old farmhouse.
We didn't call it the attic. We called it our penthouse.
And

Speaker 1 we lived on, we drove a $50 car,

Speaker 1 lived on $300 a month. And within two years, we were able to save enough that we could live for one year without an income.

Speaker 1 And so September 24, 1982, I walked out of the office. I didn't think we'd make it.

Speaker 1 Why the hell was your wife on board with this? Like, why did she think?

Speaker 1 Because I married the greatest gal in the world, man i mean she is she is the ultimate home economist she cans 800 quarts of stuff a summer she can sew clothes make i see i see she was interested in doing all of that oh yeah yeah yeah she yeah she um yeah i mean she she thought i was pretty sharp no so but you were working i still know you was you were working as a reporter and she was working as what Well,

Speaker 1 we had Daniel. So

Speaker 1 she worked at a fabric store for a little bit, clerking, but Daniel came very early, and so she stayed at home, and I'm working at the newspaper. Okay, but both of you wanted to go have a farm life.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, why did she want that?

Speaker 1 I mean, did she come from a farming background? She wanted to be with me, okay. Oh, well, fair enough.
I mean, is that fair enough? But did she come back?

Speaker 1 Yeah, but still,

Speaker 1 she grew up on a farm, okay, okay.

Speaker 1 So, she had some familiarity with that, yeah, yeah, okay, and she had she'd bought into the idea that you had put forward, and she was enthusiastic about it because that's important.

Speaker 1 I mean, you want your, you want your wife to be seriously on board

Speaker 1 work the single biggest reason farms fail is incom is is um incons

Speaker 1 is con contradictory um uh visions right of husband wife well that's probably the biggest reasons marriage fails all things considered but right but i can see it being particularly acute yeah with a project like this because it's all you're undermining you're you're you don't go to work every day you know you're you're with each other yeah and so uh so yeah those that you've got the four horsemen of the apocalypse nipping at your heels all the time.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes, exactly.

Speaker 1 So, so we

Speaker 1 so I came back to the farm full time. Now I'm 82.
Right. In 82.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it took us three years, Jordan, until we could, until I say, well, we could exhale. I think we're going to make it.
It took us three years. Yeah.
But, but that little.

Speaker 1 Well, that's not too bad to start a new business. No, that's right.
That's right. A lot of new businesses fail.

Speaker 1 And the first part of it, when you're not making any money and you've got no network, that's right. What do they say? Getting from zero to one, that's very hard.
That's right.

Speaker 1 One to two is still hard. Two to three is getting a little better.
Yeah, but 10 to 11 is a lot easier. Yeah, right.
Right, right. So

Speaker 1 what I did at that time,

Speaker 1 fortunately, I was blessed with and have been blessed with a bit of a

Speaker 1 gift of gab communication. I'm an extrovert.

Speaker 1 And in high school, college, I was in, I did interscholastic, intercollegiate debate. I've got a room full of debate trophies and did theater, drama, plays, public speaking, all that.

Speaker 1 I didn't do the athletic thing. I was not.

Speaker 1 I was a late bloomer.

Speaker 1 The best thing that ever happened to me was getting cut from the seventh grade basketball team. My mother was a health and phys ed teacher.
So she was extremely athletic.

Speaker 1 Older brother was very athletic. And here I come along.
Well, you know, I've got to be athletic, right? In order to, you know, you got to

Speaker 1 join the family brand after all. And so

Speaker 1 I'm a pudgy, you know, 14-year-old, you know, late bloomer, and I get cut from the seventh grade baseball team. I get cut from the eighth grade basketball team.
In other words, I don't make the teams.

Speaker 1 Not I'm on the team and get cut. I mean, I didn't even make the tryouts.
Okay. I didn't make.

Speaker 1 And I remember like yesterday in eighth grade looking and not seeing my name on that roster and making a mental decision. Okay,

Speaker 1 athletics is done.

Speaker 1 I'm a great communicator. You know, I win spelling Bs.

Speaker 1 I win whatever, you know, speaking speaking contests i'm going to put all my attention on that so i tell kids i say you be thankful for what you fail at early because that helps you determine your path in life

Speaker 1 well there's another issue there that you're highlighting that's extremely relevant with regard to our discussion of marketing it's like One of the things that people don't understand, and this might be more true of people who, like, let's say, have an interest in practical matters like trades or even engineering.

Speaker 1 It's like, well, why do I need to be

Speaker 1 fluent in my communication? Why do I need to write? Why do I need to learn to speak? It's like, well, if 75% of your business problem is communication, and it certainly is, right?

Speaker 1 What are you selling? What do you have to offer? How do you talk to people? You find out what... Your employees? That's right.
How do you negotiate? How do you make contracts? All of that. It's like

Speaker 1 there isn't anything more worthwhile than you can learn to do than how to get command of the language.

Speaker 1 And that's so interesting in your situation because you might think, well, that might be true, except for farming. Now, I know you shouldn't think that, but it's just not true.
No.

Speaker 1 Because communication is so crucial. The people who communicate lead their professions

Speaker 1 across the board.

Speaker 1 Exactly. And I have moms come up to me with their little, you know, 10-year-old in tow.
My son wants to be a farmer or daughter wants to be a farmer. What would you suggest to them?

Speaker 1 I say, find your local amateur theater group, enroll them. Right, right, right, right.
Right. Get them, get them.

Speaker 1 So counterintuitive. Yes.
And they look at me like, yeah. I say, become a storyteller.
Become a story. Storytellers are what changed the world.
Yeah, right. That's exactly right.

Speaker 1 And so, and so we obviously 82, this is before computers, before, you know, internet, any of this stuff. And so we basically did a three-pronged approach.

Speaker 1 I put together a slide program, you know, the old Kodak carousel, you know, a slide projector.

Speaker 1 And at that time, every city had a very vibrant kind of, you know, philanthropic, you know, Rotary Club, Ruratan, Kiwanis,

Speaker 1 Toastmasters, Elks, Moose, right.

Speaker 1 And they do, you know, weekly or monthly dinner meetings, and they're always looking for an interesting program.

Speaker 1 And so I put together a carousel program, how we can heal the planet with pastor-based livestock.

Speaker 1 And it was the beginning of this. This was when did you do this? In 82.
Oh, yeah. So, okay.
So this was just the beginning.

Speaker 1 You know, Tom Brokov, Peter Jennings were just beginning to once in a while put in a tidbit about cow burps. And, you know, it was just the beginning of this kind of demonization of livestock.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so anyway, I put this together. And at the end, I would say, now, if you'd like to participate in this, I'll be glad to add your name to

Speaker 1 our

Speaker 1 customer list. You'll get a newsletter and, you know, order blank.
And, you know, we can, and each one of those would, would yield, you know, two, three, four people, you know.

Speaker 1 So that was one thing I did. The second thing I did.
Okay, so that's, that's also something that we shouldn't skip over lightly. So

Speaker 1 I think the most valuable, I have millions of social media followers, and I don't know how many, 20 million, some lots. Right, right.
The most valuable of all the things we own are our mailing lists.

Speaker 1 And I think, I don't know what my mailing list has on it, 350,000 people, something like that, which is a pretty small fraction of the total social media network.

Speaker 1 But it's by far like if we're trying to advertise for tickets for a lecture. So you're going out there and you're collecting individual people who are interesting.

Speaker 1 Like how many people interested in what you're doing? How many people like that did you need before you were successful? How many did you have to collect?

Speaker 1 Fortunately, at that time, you know, we, with our low expenses and all that, we didn't need more more than, goodness,

Speaker 1 100 families, 100, 200. Right, okay, okay, so that's really worth knowing.
So you put together this slide presentation and you collect 150 avid customers. Yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 1 And if you've got 100 people that are spending $1,000 a year with you, that's that's significant. Right, right.
And so that's. Especially if they're loyal and they also talk to other people.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Because word of mouth really matters. Okay.

Speaker 1 So the next thing we did was when somebody would call us and say, hey i you know i i heard about you i want your stuff you're you're you're you're tempted to say oh good good well what do you want you know you want five chickens and and three t-bone steaks

Speaker 1 uh my first question was where did you hear about us for before i where did you hear about us oh i had dinner over at you know mary jane's yeah and so then i'd go to the customer box and i'd put a post-a-note at mary jane's to remind me the next time mary jane came out and picked up something mary jane thank you i'd just hug her slobber all over her say thank you for spreading the word.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And tell you what, go over and

Speaker 1 take a dozen eggs home with you for free. Absolutely.
And

Speaker 1 people are starved for appreciation. They're starved for love.
They're starved for appreciation.

Speaker 1 They will jump off a cliff for you.

Speaker 1 So you just said something like with both those that's unbelievably worth noting because one of the things you can do in your family, Well, even for yourself, to promote positive change that's unbelievably effective.

Speaker 1 I'll give you an example of this. So there's a famous psychologist, B.F.
Skinner. And B.F.
Skinner was the father of reinforcement learning theory. And that's a big deal.

Speaker 1 These large language models, these new AI systems, they're trained with reinforcement theory. So like this was a major deal.
And B.F. Skinner was a master of this.
And he could... He in

Speaker 1 World War II, he trained pigeons to guide missiles by pecking on photographs as they were flying across the sky, right? So Skinner could train animals to do anything.

Speaker 1 Now, he noted that you could, you could use threat and punishment to shape an animal's behavior, but the best thing to use was targeted reward.

Speaker 1 And so what he would do is he'd, his animals were hungry because they had to be motivated to work for food pellets. And so he'd have a hungry animal.

Speaker 1 Maybe you're trying to, so imagine there's a rat in a cage and there's a little ladder and you want the rat to

Speaker 1 go up on the ladder and then walk across and go down the other side. It's pretty complicated behavior.

Speaker 1 So here's how Skinner would do it: he would just watch that rat, and as soon as it got near, as soon as it made a move near the ladder, he'd give it a food pellet, and then it would start hanging around the ladder.

Speaker 1 And when it was hanging around close to the bottom of the ladder, now and then it would put a paw up and he'd give it a food pellet.

Speaker 1 And then, now the rat was doing this quite a bit, and then now and then it would do this food pellet. And so, it would, but the key issue was that he was observing,

Speaker 1 and then when he got an increment of behavior in the direction he wanted, he signified that. Well, that's what you're doing with your customers is you're paying very careful attention.

Speaker 1 And then one of your customers does something that you'd really like them to do more of,

Speaker 1 you notice,

Speaker 1 you tell them, you reward them for it. And then now the other thing you said that was very cool was that people are dying for this.
It's like if you watch people, you'll see that

Speaker 1 They kind of do, they do some tentative good things kind of secretly. It's like they're hoping that someone will notice, but generally people don't.

Speaker 1 And so they'll do something good that's a little bit extra. They'll do this with their boss or with their wife.
And generally people are kind of opaque to that. But if you notice that, you say, ha,

Speaker 1 with kids, you see this. With kids, you see, like, I see that you spent a little extra time like putting away your Legos today.
And like, you. moved all those Legos from there to there.

Speaker 1 And that was really good. I'd like to see more of that.
The kid is just like, if you can catch them in the art,

Speaker 1 oh man, they're so happy about that. That's right.
And so that's, so now you've got your hundred people who are on your side and you're watching them very carefully.

Speaker 1 And if they do, if they put in a good word for you, which they don't have to do, by the way, yeah, you want to say, we saw that. We appreciate it.
Here's a little gift. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 That's all. You don't have to say, please keep doing it.

Speaker 1 That's right. That gets that exchange going, right? And those, those person-to-person, like one of the things we're very careful on tour, for example, I mean, I see thousands of people.

Speaker 1 Hey, my, my staff know this particularly the rule for my staff is do not ever annoy any of the people who are interested in coming up to me or being at the shows because yeah yeah because that's if you annoy one person

Speaker 1 they will tell a thousand people if you annoy a hundred people

Speaker 1 Enough so they start talking about it, you're done. Your business is done.
Let's turn the scale. Stephen Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Affected People, you know, talks about emotional equity.

Speaker 1 And he says,

Speaker 1 it takes roughly 10 positives, 10 praises to cancel out one. To take one criticism.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 That's probably an underestimate.

Speaker 1 Well, and also people remember the negative. Oh, we're hardwired to remember.
Nobody comes back from town and says, honey, I hit five go lights. We hit stop lights.
We never call them go lights.

Speaker 1 Even though they let us go, we never think about them letting us go. We think about them making us stop.
Yes, yeah. yeah.

Speaker 1 So, so we, so we, we, I did the, you know, I did the slide program, kind of what I call infotainment. Yeah, and the story, the story is so important.

Speaker 1 Infotaine of interest is exactly the story, exactly the story. And, and people, listen, people

Speaker 1 still love to feel like they're a part of a great cause, yeah, of a great nation. And so, so, so, the whole theme here is you can participate in

Speaker 1 healing the planet, making vegetation, building soil, clean water, clean air. You can participate with what you eat.

Speaker 1 Here's how you do it. And so people love, they're drawn, they're attracted to this.
What?

Speaker 1 You know, our little, all of our little bags at the farm store, our little slogan is healing the planet, healing the land one bite at a time.

Speaker 1 We're trying to connect what you're eating to the

Speaker 1 landscape. We're actually doing it.
And we're actually doing it. All right.

Speaker 1 Important detail as well. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 thing I love most is when people come to visit the farm, we have a 24-7, 365 open-door policy. Anyone can come from anywhere in the world to see anything, anytime, anywhere, unannounced.

Speaker 1 That's our dedication to transparency. And we love to hear people come and say, wow, it was better than I imagined.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 that's good. Yeah.
That's good stuff. Yeah.
So, so, so we did that. And then the other thing we did was that

Speaker 1 when

Speaker 1 somebody was interested, we gave them a sample. samples work if you've got a good product or you've got good content samples work

Speaker 1 and so we we tease them with a sample you know give them a chicken give them a dozen eggs give them a t-bone steak give them a pound of ground beef or a you know a pound of bacon or something and um and and be because for the very reason that you said earlier, nobody's looking for something new.

Speaker 1 Nobody goes down the shampoo aisle and says, you know,

Speaker 1 I've been a head and shoulders guy all my life, but today, for some reason, I've got a hankering for something else, Pantene Pro-V. You know, nobody does that.
You don't want the decision cost even.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no, no, or the risk. Nobody wants to decision.
Well, the incremental benefit is basically zero. The risk that you,

Speaker 1 first of all, it's difficult. You know, there's a whole consumer literature on this, hey? So imagine you might think that if you went into a shop

Speaker 1 and here's your options, you have 200 shampoos to pick from or four. Yeah.
Okay. Or one.
Okay. People don't like one because there's no choice.
Yeah. But they don't like 200 either.

Speaker 1 And part of the reason for that is imagine there's the best one in 200. Okay.
What's your chance you're going to pick that? I'm going to pick the best one. One in 200.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's called paralysis of choice. Exactly.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 And so maybe you want four. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, something like that. That's exactly right.
So, so

Speaker 1 we'd give a sample so that they could try something new with no risk. Right.

Speaker 1 And what we found was a lot of times people are naturally intuitively prejudiced to a gift more than they are something that they bought. Because when you buy something, you have buyer's remorse.

Speaker 1 When somebody gives you something, there's no remorse. And so you have this feel-good thing.
Even if they're equal, the one you were given, you tend to have more

Speaker 1 positive emotion for than what you had to buy.

Speaker 1 And so I'm not saying our stuff wasn't as good. I'm just saying.
But you are saying if it was equally good, that would be good enough.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you tap into

Speaker 1 these emotional things. So that was kind of our three-pronged approach early on to, you know, to kind of start and

Speaker 1 build a patron base. In fact, we don't call them customers.
We call them patrons. We call them patron saints, and we address them as patron saints.

Speaker 1 This is all about.

Speaker 1 Well, a customer is often someone whose eyes you want to pull wool over.

Speaker 1 Whereas if you have patrons, let's say, you know,

Speaker 1 then you treat them properly and you treat them hospitably and you're damn happy they exist and you want them to know that and you remember it. Yes.
Yes. And

Speaker 1 we call this relationship marketing. Yeah.
We're really marketing a relationship because they're not buying it because it's a label.

Speaker 1 They're buying it because they trust us.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Because they trust us.

Speaker 1 And now with food choice and, you know, labeling confusion and what is a cage-free, natural,

Speaker 1 all this stuff, what is all this stuff? We've now presented ourselves as

Speaker 1 our patrons food coach.

Speaker 1 You don't ever have to be confused again. Just buy it from us and you'll know it's the best and it doesn't matter.
Right. So that's another example of you identifying the problem that people have.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
So the problem. Because every mom is scared to death.
Am I buying the best for my kid? Am I buying the best for my kid?

Speaker 1 So I just come in straight away and say, you never have to be concerned about that at all. I'll solve that.

Speaker 1 Get it from us and you never have to worry about that. Right.
So here's some, here's, we're hospitable. Here's some evidence.
You can trust us. Try our product.
You'll see it's high quality.

Speaker 1 Now, because you can trust us, there's a whole bunch of problems you don't have. That's right.
Right. So you can solve them all at one.
in one fell swoop.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, and you said earlier, and this is very useful for everybody who's watching and listening to know, it's like, well, how do you sell effectively?

Speaker 1 Well, you know, the crooked used car salesman approach to that is sell junk to idiots and laugh at them when you pull the wool over their eyes. And that'll work once, right? But you make an enemy.

Speaker 1 And if you do that 50 times and they tell a thousand people, you have 50,000 enemies and you're done. And so what you want to do instead is tell people the truth and develop that relationship.
Right.

Speaker 1 And so, and you also pointed out that

Speaker 1 you want to tell stories to people so that they're interested in what you're doing and so they can come along in an adventure, but you also want to listen to them

Speaker 1 so you know what their problem is. And so, that's a really good way of thinking about sales is when you go out to sell, you're actually seeing if you can establish a partnership.

Speaker 1 And you can't establish a partnership if you have nothing to offer. And you have nothing to offer unless the solution you have matches the person's problem.
Exactly. Right.

Speaker 1 So, you go and say, the first thing you want to know from someone new is, well, what's your problem? Yeah. What do you need? Yeah.
What are you looking for? What are you looking for?

Speaker 1 And if the answer has nothing to do with what you're selling, you should find someone else to talk to.

Speaker 1 You might be able to say, well, I know some people who could help you with that, but they're actually not someone you should partner with because your offering and their problem don't match.

Speaker 1 And then if you force that by convincing them or lying to them, even then,

Speaker 1 Well, they're not satisfied because you didn't solve their problem. Plus, they're annoyed at you.

Speaker 1 Plus, even worse, if you do have a partnership with them, they're going to bend you towards their problem. And that's definitely not something you want.
So

Speaker 1 you've got to think of the first sales approach as an investigation.

Speaker 1 Well, you also have to think about it as persuasion

Speaker 1 that people don't move too far too fast. People move incrementally.

Speaker 1 So one of the things

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 we deal with all the time is on a scale of say one to 10, one being your food comes from the gas station.

Speaker 1 And let's say we're a 10, okay.

Speaker 1 You irritate somebody if you try to move them from a one to a 10. Yeah.
They're not

Speaker 1 everything that you do. That's right.
That's right.

Speaker 1 But if we can move them,

Speaker 1 if... as a result of a discussion, a friendly discussion,

Speaker 1 a non-aggressive discussion, we can move them from a one to a two.

Speaker 1 Well, they're on their way.

Speaker 1 And they might not buy from us but now instead of buying from the you know from the gas station they're going to the whatever organic section of the supermarket or something okay and and you gradually you know move them up and so too many times in persuasion people try to move people too fast yeah and and people resist being moved too fast

Speaker 1 definitely and that's why you have to start with a with a

Speaker 1 with a question that moves you to common ground quickly if you're going to if you're going to make progress because if you if you move too fast then you lose them yeah and now there's now there's no there's no discussion yeah well they can't see a way to bridge the gap right plus you're criticizing their whole lifestyle right by so so in in marketing one of the things that that we you know teach and promote you know through our team is

Speaker 1 No sale is an end to itself. Every sale is a springboard for the next sale.
Right.

Speaker 1 You cannot stay in business finding new customers.

Speaker 1 The only way you stay in business is to please the customers you have

Speaker 1 enough that they buzz and tell people about it and bring them back. And that's a long-term relationship.
It's akin to a friendship.

Speaker 1 You don't want to play with someone with a lot of people. Which is why you don't want to irritate somebody

Speaker 1 at your lectures or your presentation. Yeah, because they're already in the camp.

Speaker 1 Right. They're the last people you want to hear.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Exactly.
Yeah, yeah. They've done all backflips.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you need to do backflips to make them happy and

Speaker 1 meet their. All right.
Well, look, this has gone by very rapidly. So let me do two things.
I'm going to tell everybody what we're going to do on the Daily Wire side.

Speaker 1 It's something I would have liked to have done on the YouTube side here, too. I would like to talk to you a little bit about how people can,

Speaker 1 I would like to talk about.

Speaker 1 the practical steps that people could take if they're interested in knowing more about this just conceptually or as a lifestyle, right? So let's do that on the Daily Wire side.

Speaker 1 I want to recapitulate what we've discussed and then give you an opportunity to add anything that you might want to this broader audience while you have the opportunity.

Speaker 1 So, you talked about the fact that,

Speaker 1 and there's so many things we could have touched on still, that there is an agricultural enterprise, which is roughly termed now something approximating regenerative farming, which

Speaker 1 requires the use of multiple species and a particular approach to pasture management.

Speaker 1 The pasture management is a diverse natural landscape, multiple plants that's grazed upon by herbivores that move like they do when they're migrating, that you mimic artificially.

Speaker 1 You use multiple species to fill in the ecological niches. You use birds to track the herbivores, the cows, and to sanitize the ground that they've grazed on.

Speaker 1 You rotate the the cattle around your through the use of paddocks around your land you maximize the amount of product that your grasslands are producing so that that's hyper-efficient you regenerate the soil so it gets thicker that sequesters carbon you produce high quality meat and you can do that profitably while you're pursuing a lifestyle that's enjoyable and serving a dedicated and committed customer base that's about that

Speaker 1 Anything else?

Speaker 1 That's pretty good. It is pretty good.
It is pretty good. It is pretty good.
And it's a good deal for everybody. And so.
It is. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so you're still an enthusiastic advocate of this after 40 years as well. Yes, indeed.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 1 Why is that? I'll tell you something.

Speaker 1 Most farmers my age, and I'm almost 70. Most farmers my age are lonelier than they've ever been in their lives.

Speaker 1 Their kids are gone. And they've had enough.
The kids are gone.

Speaker 1 It's Matilda and I by ourselves.

Speaker 1 And boy, I can't get up

Speaker 1 and down off that tractor as well as I used to.

Speaker 1 And for me, Jordan, creating

Speaker 1 this model, this farm

Speaker 1 that, yes, the multi-speciation

Speaker 1 makes it different every day. You know, you're different animals, different things.
The diversity of ecology, you know, we've built 20 ponds. So

Speaker 1 there's ducks and there's wood ducks and they're deer and they're bear and and there's wildlife and pollinators. And so there's just there's just vibrant life and earthworms.
And

Speaker 1 so you have all of that. You have that aesthetic and aromatic sensual beauty and attractiveness.
And then you add the component of the social element, the people, our customers.

Speaker 1 In other words, we're not just out here hauling grain to a cargill grain bin. You have a social media.

Speaker 1 Every day there are people at the farm saying, I so thank you for what you do.

Speaker 1 You're just, our family depends on you. Thank you.

Speaker 1 You know, from our day one, our kids grow up, you know, with our customers pinching them on the cheek, saying, we just think your parents are the coolest in the world.

Speaker 1 And thank you for being a part of this. And so here I am, you know, 22 of us now basically earn a full-time living from the farm.

Speaker 1 And I'm surrounded now by these 20s and 30s year old, you know, the oldest ones are in their early 40s now, but these team and these young people that are just

Speaker 1 can't wait to do what I've done.

Speaker 1 And every day,

Speaker 1 they think I'm cool, you know, and they want to do this.

Speaker 1 And so, I mean,

Speaker 1 I just break down in tears when

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 explain the blessing and the gratitude that I have that at this stage in my life, I'm surrounded by this youthful enthusiasm. Yep.
Yeah, yeah. To understand,

Speaker 1 to appreciate what I've spent a lifetime carving out, and they will now take it to new heights that I never dreamed of. Yeah, well, and we didn't.

Speaker 1 There's so many things that are advantageous to this that we didn't even discuss, too, because the approach that you're taking, if that was duplicated at a larger scale, also makes for a much healthier, healthier livestock with a much higher quality life and much more resilient farms and more decentralized food production and less reliance on chemicals and

Speaker 1 both fertilizers and pesticides and

Speaker 1 pharmaceuticals and pharmaceuticals.

Speaker 1 Well, right. And no antibiotic overutilization, which, you know, which is a very major thing.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
And regeneration of the soil and carbon sequestration. And yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 So, you know, we hear all this nonsense at high levels among the globalists about the fact that agriculture is a net pollutant and that we have to radically cut back, for example, on our meat consumption, which is something that's like, oh, I see.

Speaker 1 So everybody's going to have a little brain because they eat nothing but plants. That's your damn theory, right? And so, you know, you hear about these rejections.

Speaker 1 Well, if we're all eating beans, that might solve the gas problem. Yeah, well, that's also, well, apparently Bill Gates has a solution to that that's pharmaceutical.
Yeah, some

Speaker 1 bovira or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, exactly, exactly.
There's a putting the cart before the horse.

Speaker 1 And so it's very optimistic to hear hear about such approaches because they seem to be producing a variety of social goods simultaneously in a truly resilient and sustainable way.

Speaker 1 So, well, thank you very much, sir, for coming to talk to. us today.
And we'll turn to the Daily Wire side.

Speaker 1 And I think we'll go more into the nuts and bolts of this, maybe talk a little bit more about the issues of resilience and sustainability as well.

Speaker 1 But if you're looking for a practical guide to how this sort of lifestyle might be, well, at least participated in, but possibly pursued, then join us on the Daily Wire side.

Speaker 1 And thank you very much to the film crew here. Where are we today? Evanston,

Speaker 1 Evansville. Sorry, sorry to everybody in Evansville.
Evansville, Indiana. Yeah, yeah.
And so I had a show here last night. And so it's a lovely place.
And we've been happy to be here.

Speaker 1 And it was very good to meet you, sir. It was wonderful.
Thank you very much for the conversation. Thanks to all of you on the YouTube side.

Speaker 1 And join us over on the Daily Wire side for a continuation of this conversation.