Return to Regenerative Agriculture: Transforming Health at the Source with Joel Salatin

Welcome back once again everybody. I'm super excited to have the world renowned Joel Salatin. He is probably one of the best known organic farmers in the English speaking world. He's here in Virginia as well my practices. So I'm really excited to talk with him about all things real food, all things nutrition in relation to like using food as medicine and as you know, one of the best known organic farmers in the English speaking world. I feel like he can speak to all those things as well. And we're going to talk about all of his books as well and his personal journey. So after a introduction we're just going to dive into things. So Joel Salatin calls himself the Christian libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic farmer, which is a lot of interesting things all running together. I already mentioned he's one of the most famous farmers in the world. He's also one of the more eclectic thinkers from Virginia potentially since Thomas Jefferson. People who don't like his message. This is actually coming right off his website. So I'm just reading from what he's put out there. Call him a buyer terrorist, Typhoid Mary, A Charlton and a starvation advocate which we might actually talk about how politics play into eating real food, which seems kind of bizarre. He co owns his family farm, Poly Face in Soup, Virginia. He's been featured in New York Times bestseller Omnivore's Dilemma as well as the award winning documentary Food Inc. His farm. I think this is really interesting. His farm services more than 5,000 families, 50 restaurants, 10 retail outlets and a farmer's market with salad bar, beef, pork, pasture, poultry, forestry products, all those things. So he literally is providing for you know, thousands of people's daily substance which is kind of get you back to the earth. He's the editor for the Stockman Stockman Grass farmer which is the granddaddy catalyst for the grass farming movement which is really exciting. He also co hosts a podcast titled Beyond Labels with the co author of the book Beyond Labels, Dr. Sana McCullough. So Joel, I am super excited to have you today to talk to you.

Thank you Dr. Aaron. I'm. I couldn't be more honored and privileged to be with you. Glad to share the time.

Yeah. So one of the things I think, you know, in the introductory, you know how you introduce yourself, I think again this is off your bio from your website. You know, you know, I think part of your journey goes into this. You know, people either love you or they kind of, they have questions, you know, the whole thing. The bioterroris Typhoid Mary Charlton Kind of thing. I want to take a dive a little bit into your family history. Like you are a multi generational farmer. You have a very interesting history going out of the country, coming back, and then where you kind of, your family ended up taking farmland in Virginia that was actually not very good and turning into like amazing farmland. Could you like walk us through that journey? Because I think part of that is just the difficulty. What you went through has a lot to do with like organizations, government regulation, a whole host of things that people I think are now starting to realize affects the food we put on our plates.

Yeah, thank you for the, for the question. So, yeah, we'll start with my dad. Well, actually my grandfather was a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic gardening and Farming magazine when it came out in 1945. You know, the, the country had quite a tension right then, right post World War II as to whether it would go chemical or chemical or compost. You know, those two kind of pathways were really intention at that time. And my grandfather chose the, you know, the biological approach. And dad got that from him. Well, dad wanted a farm. And here he is, you know, no money, no land. Midwest kid. How do you get a farm? And he was enamored of developing countries, saw them as a real open opportunity, cheap land, you know, very little government regulation. And so after he flew in the, in the Navy in World War II, got out GI Bill, went to Indiana University, got his degree in business, went to Middlebury in Vermont and got his Spanish and tested for the civil service exam and passed it first go and went with Texas Oil company as a bilingual accountant on the Wildcat oil drilling that was just the beginning off of Venezuela. And in seven years was able to save enough money to buy a thousand acre farm in the Venezuelan highlands. And by that time he and mom had married and by that time they'd had, you know, they'd had my older brother and then me. So here we are out on the farm. And his dream was milk and chickens. So chickens have a quicker turnaround. So let's start with chickens. So he started growing chickens and quickly, literally took over the local chicken market. You know, this is 1957, 56. 57. And the local chickens were all kind of had a snot, a nasal drip, you know, because they were, they're running through, you know, open sewers and squat pots. Very unsanitary conditions. And they all had these kind of, kind of low lingering, you know, infections in the chickens and in the indigenous chickens. Well, our chickens were clean and so Immediately, dad, you know how those Latin American markets are. You know, the farmers come in the square, you know, and everybody. Well, dad quickly took all the. All the market away from the local farmers. And of course, they immediately accused us of being witches, practicing voodoo and witchcraft. And of course, they never asked, you know, how do you do this? They just figured it was something off normal. And so then in 1959, when there was a junta, a takeover, a rebellion took over. Petusimenus got ousted. And what happens, Dr. Aaron, when a culture goes through catastrophe like that and lawlessness, it allows scores to be settled that wouldn't normally be settled, you know, in normal times. And so this gave cover, if you will, for the. For the, you know, local farmers to exercise their vengeance. And we fled the back door as the machine guns came in the front door and lost everything. Dad was 39, and he met with every, you know, every government agent in Caracas. And nobody would give us the time of day. And so there wasn't anything to do but come back to the US and so we got on the ship and came home. Landed in Philadelphia, Easter Sunday, June. I'm sorry, in 1961. But dad left his heart there. I think that's one of the reasons he died so young. He never got over it. That was his dream. He'd been there 12 years. He loved the culture, loved the people, loved the, you know, how can you not love having bananas, papayas, and pineapples in your backyard? You know? And so anyway, mom and dad were both from the Midwest, but we didn't go back there because dad wanted to be within a day's drive of D.C. so that if things settled, we could be to D.C. in hours, sign papers, and be back to the farm of Venezuela, you know, quickly. So that's why we didn't go back to the Midwest. And he started over here in Virginia, Shenandoah Valley on the. On the most worn out, gullied rock pile in the whole. In the whole area. It was very cheap because it was completely, you know, worn out land. And that's. And that's how we started. So then. So then the next question is, well, so how do I make money on this farm? And so we had different experts, both public and private, come and, and consult and try to tell us. And every one of them said, we'll plant corn, buy chemical fertilizer, graze the wood lot, borrow more money, build silos, you know, do the whole. The whole thing. Well, dad knew that that wasn't. He saw the chemical, the chemical approach as a basically A drug addiction, you know, you got it. You got to get a, to get a hit. It takes more volume or more toxicity and certainly more money for either to get the same hit. And so basically he took an off farm job. Mom took an off farm job. The off farm job. Mom was a schoolteacher, dad was an accountant, and he worked for a firm doing tax work and bookkeeping work. And the off farm jobs paid for the mortgage. Well, I got my first chickens when I was 10 and loved them and I wanted to farm. And so I'm growing up now just loving the farm. Loving the farm. I'm the one, the. There were three of us. My older brother was very mechanical and he wanted to. He wanted to fly airplanes. So he, you know, as soon as he could get away, he got away. My younger sister, you know, was into sales and different things, and so she left as well. And so here I am and I'm. I'm sitting here, you know, in. As a late teen, how do I, how do I start doing this farm thing? And so, you know, after college, I did a couple of years, you know, off farm work, doing the living at home on farm, off farm commute, until finally, September 24, 1982, I walked out of the. I was a investigative reporter at the local newspaper and walked out of the office and came back to the farm full time and never looked back. And so here we are.

So that's a. That's a really intriguing story. I think part of that. The thing that really intrigues me is how the place y' all moved in, Shimmer Valley, how the topsoil had eroded away, how. But hundreds of years, and this is something you talk about. I forget where I've heard you talk about this. About the topsoil over there used to be amazing. It used to be this, you know, amazing farmland that got worn away and how you, you rebuilt the soil. Could you talk about that a little bit? Because, you know, later on I want to dive into like, soil health and human health and animal health, which is literally our health is interconnected with the, the ground. It's almost as if we came out of the dirt kind of sort of. Right.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So. So, yeah, so Governor Spotswood in what, you know, 1740, something like that, he's. He's getting colonial, colonial governance. This British, British colonial governor, 1740. And he's in Williamsburg and he's concerned that the, the Scotch Irish and the Germans are coming down from the north down through into the valley, and the British are going to lose the loser, lose The Shenandoah Valley here on the other side of the Blue Ridge. So he has these buddies, about 10 of them, he dubs them the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe. And he dispatched them out to the valley to kind of do a, you know, a bivouac and, you know, tell us what you find. And they wrote back. They said everywhere they rode in the valley, they could take the grass and tie it in a knot above the horse's saddle. It was a magnificent silvopasture maintained by the Native Americans with fire to bring in the bison, the elk, the deer, turkeys and, you know, passenger pigeons and all that. And so here came, you know, here came the Germans, the Scotch Irish and the British. And they were all coming from a very temperate environment, a very arable, temperate, gentle rainfall, you know, foggy kind of environment. And they came into the valley where, you know, our rain in the summer comes in outbursts of, you know, thunderstorms and a lot colder in the winter, a lot hotter in the summer, a lot drier in the summer, and so over. And the Holy Grail was grain, because grain was very, very expensive. That was the Holy Grail. And so they plowed up these deep soils, inverted them, took the, you know, buried the, buried the vegetation and inverted the soil. And now when that, those heavy thunderstorms came, it started to wash away. And by the time we came in 1961, some three to five feet of soil had washed away. And we had large areas here, you know, I mean, large areas. A quarter acre, maybe not half an acre, but certainly quarter acre. Like big, big saucers. Imagine big, you know, tea saucers in the, in the fields that were solid shale. All the, all the soil had washed off. There was no grass, no weeds, no nothing. It was just solid shale. And I remember as a little child being able to walk the fields and never set foot on a piece of vegetation. It was that, it was that barren. And today all those areas have about you know, 14 inches of soil on them now, you know, it's not three feet, okay, but, but, but, but, but the rock, the rocks are now buried under soil. It grows grass and, and the productivity has, has changed dramatically. You know, the fields, you know, what, what used to, what used to be able to feed 10 cows now feeds 80. So, you know, it's a, it's a pretty big, pretty, pretty dramatic change.

Yeah. And one thing about soil health, I think, I feel like a lot of people don't understand is the soil health directly correlates with the health of the animals that eat Whatever grows in the soil as well as. Which includes humans or humans eating cows that eat that stuff. There's a big ecosystem with bacteria, fungus that actually help extract minerals from the soil and put it into the grass and whatnot. Could you talk briefly about. Because building 14 inches of soil is a big. It's hard making soil. It's not like you just go to, you know, Home Depot and grab some stuff. If you make the right stuff, it actually you need, you need the right ph, you need newer, need bacteria. Could you talk about some of the. Because I think one thing we didn't mention you actually went to. I think it was Virginia Tech undergrad or.

No, no, I was, I was an English major. I went to liberal arts college. Bob Jones in South Carolina.

Christ.

Art school. Yeah.

Okay.

I was thinking, yeah, if I, if I'd have gone to Virginia Tech, I might have come out as crazy as the rest of them. But. But I went an alternative route.

That was a long time ago, but like the whole, the whole soil issue with that. Can you talk about. Because ultimately when you make soil, you're doing a lot of carbon capture. So I love it, I love it when you go from farm stuff to science because I really love that. So could you just do a little change hats real quick and talk about the science behind 14 inches?

Sure, absolutely. So the way the planet works, if you will, is you got the sun up there. The sun is beaming down energy, solar energy, and it is captured by photosynthesis, you know, through chlorophyll in plants is captured. And the plant then inhales carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen. It splits off that carbon and turns it into cellulose, into actual material. I still just am completely enamored of the fact that something is as mystical and esoteric as sunbeams can be captured by a plant and turned into something that's measurable, fungible, weighable and physical. So the non physical turns into something physical. Well, that physical then provides the energy for the soil microbial life. And in healthy soil, every handful of healthy soil contains about 9 billion different. That's B, with a B. 9 billion different microbial beings. And those beings, I like to think of it as, you know, in Star wars where, you know, when Luke Skywalker goes up there, he's trying to find a fast, you know, interplanetary vehicle and he runs into Han Solo. And over there in the corner, you know, there's these like two headed, you know, all these aliens, you know, playing in this band in the corner. And I envision the, you know, the soil like that, you got all these billions and billions of beings and they're, they're trading, you know, they come up to the little, to the rhizosphere that is the exudate around the edge of the root hair. And one of them comes up, says, hey, I got, I got some molybdenum in my pocket. I'll trade you some molybdenum for some of that polysaccharide. Lower that sugar, give me some of that sugar, you know. So they make a trade and a plant gets molybdenum and the microbe gets energy and, you know, it goes and trades with something else. So you got these quadrillions and quadrillions of trade relationship, you know, going on in the soil. And so, and it's all driven by the carbon. This is the ultimate carbon economy. And, and so that carbon can either decompose, you know, just decompose by microbes or, or, or it can go through an animal and decompose through an animal. Of course, you know, most of us are familiar with compost, compost piles. That's a very rapid, you know, carbon capture system of microbial system. It works with microbes, the same thing. But, but all of this is if you can, if you can capture and hold that carbon either either through, you know, manure or just, you know, on site, microbial breakdown. If you can hold that carbon on site, over time you build up biomass. That's the way, that's the way it works. Excuse me. And so what we saw was over time, as we began increasing the fertility through direct carbon capture by doing large scale composting, by doing controlled grazing. So we looked around the planet, said, well, how does soil develop? You know, soil doesn't. How did, how did all this rich soil get here? Before there was 10-10-10 chemical fertilizer, you know, and before John Deere tractors and all this stuff. And what you see is the pattern is, is perennials, it's not annuals. So annuals are plants that you got to plant all the time, like tomatoes and peppers and squash. Annuals are plants you don't have to plant all the time, like, you know, rhubarb and asparagus and grass and clover and things like that. So the perennials are the way that all those healthy soils are built. And the healthiest soils on the planet are under prairies where, with herbivores on top, the Serengeti in Africa, the American west, the Shenandoah Valley here. You know, the herbivores because they because grass, grass actually is a more efficient metabolizer of sunbeams into biomass than trees and shrubs. And so the. So the herbivores digest and convert this, you know, rapidly. Just imagine the. Imagine the digestion of a bird or a cow as being a, you know, a very rapid compost pile. You know, it's all digestion, but what happens inside of a. Of a digesting being is, you know, rapid, rapid composting. So over the years, these rock piles, gradually, they were just like a scab. And every year you'd see about 18 inches more, you know, on the edge. The soil comes in 18 more inches next year, 18 more inches next year. And it took about 40 years, but eventually they all. They all filled up with soil and. And it's still thin, but. But very productive.

Yeah. I think one thing that's interesting, what you said there, you talked about with the rhizomes, the plant, the plant roots and bacteria create this, become the air. It's really interesting how in my world, we're using things like fulvic and humic acid now as a, you know, a rare earth mineral trace supplement to help people with chronic health issues. But nature was actually doing the exact same thing because fulfill humic acid are actually, there's some of the acids that are made by these fungi that extract minerals out of the soil. So I think it's really intriguing to me to hear these little snippets and in my scientific brain to connect dots like, oh, maybe that's how fulvic acid and ultimately Shilajit, which is basically this exudate out of the Himalayan mountains, is their version of over there. But ultimately, if you have plants with roots and all this stuff you actual get out from soil. These molybdenum you mentioned, chromium, silica, barium, strontium, all these rare earth minerals that the animals that eat them need. And it's just, it's that just fascinates. Fascinates me. So one thing, and I forget which one of your books you talked about, you know, and you can correct the statistic because I've read this probably 15 years ago, like something like 96 or 98 minerals, rare earth minerals that, that. That ruminators need, the cows need, but yet grains only support something like 60 or 64.

Those.

Could you talk about that briefly about the difference between, you know, allowing a cow to eat what a cow was made to eat versus giving them a grain, just from a micronutrient perspective, like that whole process and what it does to the cow.

Yeah, well, you know, the, the Bionutrient Food association right now is really studying this, this whole question right now. And the one thing that they have found that the single most determining factor on whether an animal is, has the most nutritional density in it is how many different plants did that animal eat? That's the single biggest determine. Because here's the thing, all the plants, they have different enzymes, they have different, different mineral balances, they have different phytochemicals. I mean, you know, dandelion concentrates calcium. You know, there's just all sorts of things. Some of them obviously have deep tap roots, some have spreader roots. Some like it, you know, it's like, some like it hot, some like it cold. So some like it, you know, sunny, some like to grow in the shade. So. So all these plants have very, very different nutrient profiles. And so if we want the highest phytochemicals, then we need to make sure that the animals are getting access to plants, to green plants. That's where the phytochemicals are, what we call the salad bar. The salad bar. And so whether it's our chickens or cows or pigs or whatever, the whole idea is to move them consistently on fresh forages, on fresh green material. So not only do they get moved away from yesterday's excrement because they're not potty trained, so it keeps them cleaner, but they're also moved onto a fresh salad bar every day. So they ingest the greatest variety of all these things. You know, if you get a. If you get a cookbook from like Dolly Madison or, or Martha Washington, George Washington's wife, what you see there is about 80% of the stuff in there. We don't even know what they are. You know, currant berries, you know, all these weird things, because back in the day they didn't have Walmart, and so they had all these. All these different seasoned, you know, fruits and vegetables and things throughout the season that they could eat. I mean, Australian, you know, the aborigines of Australia routinely in a year would eat more than a thousand different kinds of foods. Americans eat about 30, you know, that's it. We just eat about 30. And so one of the quickest ways to get more variety in your diet is to eat an animal that has consumed a lot of variety in its diet. So if a cow's just eating, you know, corn silage, that's a very undiversified diet. But if the cow is eating plantain and chicory and, you know, clover and different grasses and barnyard grass and Johnson Grass and white clover and red clover and, you know, all sorts of different things. That, that complexity, that enzyme and nutrient complexity is going to show up in all that, in all that structure and the same way with the chicken and everything else. And then that what, that's what happens in, with the omega 3, omega 6 balance. And I mean, like, you know, grass finished beef has 300% more riboflavin in it than grain fed. You know, we submitted our eggs to a lab several years ago with 11 other pastured egg producers in the country. The official USDA nutrition label on eggs in the store, that label will say it has 48 micrograms of folic acid per egg. And our eggs averaged 1038 micrograms per egg. Yeah, yeah. And so, and so, and that's just one. I remember there, there were, you know, measured about 10 other things. They're all in the book, folks. This ain't normal. But, but, but the point I'm making is that these, that, that, that that diet of the animal has a direct bearing on the, you know, on the, on the balance and the variety and the strength, if you will, of, you know, the egg, the meat, the, you know, whatever it is. And the same with tomatoes and peppers and everything else. As we simplify everything to just, you know, NPK chemical fertilizer and just, and just a monocrop, a monoculture. When we simplify it, we really reduce our microbiome's ability to access the diversity that it needs. Our microbiome studies now are all showing there's one thing they all agree on. It's, you gotta have diversity. You can't just, you can't just put one thing down there and expect, expect it to work. And, and our animals are the same way.

Yeah. That's really intriguing what you said, that folic acid thing, because a prenatal vitamin that you give to a pregnant female, once someone's getting pregnant, they have 800 to 1,000 micrograms of folic acid in them. And literally your egg has measured more folic acid than a prenatal environment. Which, you know, maybe we don't need to, you know, fortify our food system with folic acid. Maybe we just need to let chickens do their thing and make eggs that have enough folic acid. That's, that's an interesting number. Just to put away my head.

Yeah.

One thing about chickens I want to talk about. You know, my dad's from West Virginia and he grew up on a farm. And I remember listening to him tell stories about, oh, you know, we Put the arsenic in the chicken feed and, but we, we take it out, you know, seven days before they get processed because, you know, well, they're, they're, they're safe then. And the big, the big producers, you know, voluntarily removed arsenic from the feed. You know, what was a 2012. Whatever. Could you talk about that a little bit? Because, like, when I first learned about that, like, all these things went off my head because I remember eating chicken when I was a kid and my dad always overcooked it, but the tendons always had this red streaking to them that now I know, actually, and I thought it was undercooked, but now I know it was actually arsenic deposition in the tissues, which, when you say like, that people like, there's no, you know, you can't make this stuff up, right? Like, could you talk about a little bit about that, you know, a real chicken, about real food, real chicken versus fake chicken. Part of that process, when I talk to patients is a real chicken doesn't have arsenic or macular arsenates or aluminum, basically stuff put in their, Their, Their, their feces to prevent the smell. Could you talk a little bit about, like, how a typical chicken is processed just so people can wrap the brain around it?

Oh, my. Well, if you've ever walked into a, you know, a Tyson chicken factory, you'll never forget it. You know, first of all, you can't breathe. Those chickens are breathing in fecal particulate every single day. They actually are living in their toilet. And of course, and they're way closer to the ground than we are. And so that fecal particulate comes in, and it's like sandpaper in their respiratory tract. So that sandpaper abrades their. Their tender mucous membranes and creates these lesions along the respiratory tract, which then allows the fecal particulate to get right into the bloodstream. And this is how you get, you know, things like, you know, salmonella in eggs. You know, how can it get it in eggs? Egg is removed. The oviduct is removed from bloodstream. But if it gets, if it, if it goes through that biological barrier can actually go right into the egg. So, so, you know that, that's eggs. Course, you know, broilers raised, what, 20,000 in a house, that sort of thing. And, and, and they feed them everything you can imagine. The only, the only question the industry asks is, can we grow them fatter faster, bigger, cheaper? And they, and they view. I think I would be remiss if I didn't just jump on the soapbox a moment and point out that the industrial food system views life as a fundamentally inanimate thing, a mechanical thing, whereas we view life as a fundamentally biological thing and those two different worldviews or ideas. If life is fundamentally mechanical, then, you know, you go down one direction. If life is fundamentally biological, you go down a different direction. And the industrial food system absolutely thinks life is fundamentally mechanical. You know, we can switch around the DNA. We can, you know, we can go into this amazing, you know, mystical thing like a bunch of, you know, conquistadors swashbuckling sailors and, and manipulate it. However, however we want to manipulate it without regard to any, you know, humility of it being fearfully and wonderfully made and way beyond anything that we can imagine. So, you know, that's, that's where we are. And so on our farm, you know, we don't put anything in the feed that's, I mean, we use all genetically modified organism free GMO free local grains. And they get, they get access to the pasture and we move them every day, we move them every day to a new spot on the pasture so that they are stimulated to eat a lot of grass. We either mow or graze with the cows ahead of the shelters. So the grass is short. Chickens like short grass. They don't like long grass. They can't, they can't masticate long grass like a cow. And so, so we want to keep the grass short for the chickens. We do everything. We move them first thing in the morning at daybreak. Chickens are the first animals up. They're hungry and, you know, and, and in the industry, they leave lights on them all night, so the chickens never sleep. They just keep eating and eating and eating and never sleep. We don't have lights on them out in the field, so they actually can sleep. So I think one of the most interesting things that we've learned from the restaurants that we service over the years is that all of our meat and poultry. This is not an advertisement. I'm just telling you a fact because we've done the same. We've found the same thing here when our chefs start telling us about it, that our poultry and meat cooks about 15% faster than what's in the industrial counterpart. And so you say, well, how could that be? Why would that be 15 to 20% faster cooking? And the only thing that we can figure is that our animals don't secrete adrenaline throughout their life. In the industrial system, the animals are a, they're disrespected for their. Nobody's asking how to make a happy pig it's just how can we grow it faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper? And so life is fundamentally disrespected for its distinctive, you know, it's distinctive physiological glory, if you will. And then they're crammed in these spaces, you know, they have to cut the tails off the pigs so they'll be tender. And in these terrible situations, the pigs won't eat each other, they'll run away from each other instead. So everything is stressed, it's socially stressed, it's emotionally stress. And so what happens when you stress, you drip adrenaline. You know, that's how a hundred pound mom can pick a car up off her three year old toddler. Right. What happens is your muscles tense up, you know, when you weight lift or you run a race, you know, your muscles get tense with that adrenaline, the adrenaline that's being secreted. And so in the industry, all the animals are coming in under a very stressful condition and secreting this adrenaline, whereas hours are all happy and unstressed and so they don't have that adrenaline secretion and they cook faster. So the obvious question is, can you eat happiness? And I suggest yes, you can choose to either eat happiness or eat abuse. And without going too far off the rails here, it doesn't seem too far off to me to think that if you're eating, if you're eating food that was disrespected, it might make your microbiome disrespect you and maybe make you disrespect others. And if you're eating food that was respected for its, you know, physiological, you know, difference, that maybe you'll be, you'll, you'll have a little more respectful attitude as well.

Yeah, I think one thing you've said in one of your books somewhere, again, I read your books quite some time ago, actually over a decade ago. But respecting the callus of a cow or chickenness of the chicken, respecting how they grow in nature and just augmenting that creates better animals. But it was really interesting. I was reading a research article maybe about 12 years ago. I was talking about women who eat chicken have an increased risk of getting urinary tract infections. And when I first read that, I didn't really know how to wrap it around my head. But later on I learned well, with all the E. Coli and the fecal microbial contents from them breathing their own feces, even after they process the chickens and wash them with bleach, there's still so much E. Coli on a chicken that if you eat it and you're a Female, you have an increased risk for getting a urinary tract infection, which I'm like, oh my gosh, that's absolutely bonkers. And we started having our own, our own animals here and getting our own chickens and processing. One of the things I noticed was that you're making bone broth and the bones of the storeball chicken, after one round of bone broth, they just, they fall apart in your hands. And the bones of, you know, pasture chickens are thicker.

Yeah.

Just the structure of the animals, radically different. But I have a quick question for you. And this is actually something one of my patients kind of told me and I did not know the answer to it. But you know, this, this is kind of a country story. But one of the friends, one of, one of the friends was like, you know, you have the big, the big Tyson's, you know, chicken, chicken things, and they're always all white chickens, right? And so it was one of those accidents where the truck crashed and the chickens were everywhere. So he just stopped and grabbed three chickens and took them home because they're like, they're going to be eaten by foxes and you know, whatever. So he took them home and threw them with the rest of his chickens. But over time, the white chickens actually started to get color and actually different, different color developed different colors on their, their feathers and stuff. And so I was really like taken back. I'm like, what, what is it that those chickens were white their entire life and then when they started eating and grazing, their colors changed? Do you have any idea about that or have any insight? Because I'm like, it's gotta be something like either they're eating or not eating or, you know, what would, that just was a bizarre concept to me to think about.

Yeah, that is, that is bizarre. Probably, probably. I think it probably had more to do with age, you know, kind of like graying hair than it did with, with what they were eating. I mean, as far as I know, all, all color is based on, on breed, on, you know, what's the genetics. What, you know, is it red chicken, black chicken, you know, yellow chicken, white chicken. But, but, but a lot of these, these, these fast growing Cornish cross that the industry uses, they actually come, they actually have some buff colored, you know, buff colored in their, in their background and, and as they age, they'll, they'll, their feathers will change. I don't think those white chickens became black.

No, no, no, they, they dealt like.

Yeah, they just, yeah, they just, they just got a little more earth tone. Earth tone color, if you will. And that could have been the difference between your, your hair color and my hair color.

Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's really interesting. You know, we talk about real food. I don't, and I talk to patients about this all the time. They, I don't just the concept of real food sounds super simple, but when you talk about a chicken, all of a sudden we're talking about two, like different creatures. A, you know, a, a natural pastured chicken versus a, you know, a cafe or a contained animal feeding operation type chicken. You know, whether it's the arsenic in the feed which is now taken away, but they still use aluminum, aluminum ash, they'll put down for the first weeks or two of life to minimize ammonia because it would kill the little baby chicks. Like all these things we do ultimately affect the, the quality of the, the meat of the animal that we put in our mouth. I want to talk about cows briefly as well, like the, the cows of a cows. Because I think a lot of people don't quite understand the difference between like, you know, a contained animal feeding operation, standard, you know, Cisco kind of cow versus a grass fed, grass finished cow. I want to talk about that briefly. And then the, one of the things you do is rotational grazing. How having the cow eat like microgreens, which tend to be nutrient. It's like, you know, spring greens, right? It's eating really nutrient dense stuff. You talked briefly about respecting the cows of cow, moving them around because in nature cows will, if they need selenium, they'll find fescue or grass that's got more selenium in it or whatever the mineral they need, they'll actually find it. Could you talk briefly about that respect of how the animals were designed or made and how that affects ultimately the quality of the, the filet, the beef, the hamburgers that we ultimately put in our bodies?

Yeah, sure. So, so what are herbivore? What are herbivores for? Cows are herbivores, so are sheep. And as you know, herbivores have gotten some pretty bad press lately. You know, they're, they're going to burp and fart and we're all going to be dead in 30 years, you know, because, because of these cows. And so you look around and you say, well, you know, what's the role of herbivores? Well, the role of herbivores is to take grass that starts slowly and then speeds up and then goes into senescence. It's to prune it just like a viticulturalist would prune grapevines or an orchardist would prune an apple tree not to kill it, but to stimulate new, fresh, abundant growth. So the pruning of the grass stimulates new, fresh, abundant growth on the grass when it is done at the right time, not when it's too tall, not when it's too low, but at the right time. You know, the gold, the goldilocks point there. And so our, so when you look around the planet, how does this, you know, how does nature control these herbivores? You know, so they don't overgraze or undergraze and they're at the right time. And it does it with basically three ideas. One is the animals are moving all the time. They don't stay in the same place, so they're going on to fresh ground. Number two, they're mobbed up. And that's because of predators. So the predator prey makes the herbivores mob up which then makes them graze more aggressively and they graze less discriminatorily. If they happen to have a, you know, if they get, if they get a weed with the grass, well, okay, I'll just take the weed too because there's a thousand animals behind me that if I don't eat this right now, they're going to eat it. And so you get this much more aggressive, non discriminatory eating. You know, like I like to compare it between, you know, taking your, taking your beloved out to a 10 year anniversary dinner at a nice white tablecloth restaurant. You might sit there, you know, for two hours and enjoy this white, wonderful, nice meal and talk about I wonder where the chicken came from or the wine or all this stuff. As opposed to a bunch of new marine recruits at Camp Lejeune. It just came in off of, you know, off a 10 mile run and they're getting ready to go on the range. They got 20 minutes to eat lunch and nobody's going to ask, I wonder where the, you know, I wonder where the chicken came from, I wonder where the beets came from. Nobody's going to ask, right? And so that's what we're looking for in the herbivores. And it's actually good for them because they actually eat more variety. They eat more diversified by having this. So they're moving, they're mobbed up and then they're mowing. They're not eating, they're not eating all the stuff that is. I mean cows are the dumping ground for broken ho ho cakes and you know, Nestle's chocolate and you know, donuts and all sorts of, you know, bakery Waste and different things are fed to cows as a way to, you know, to clean it up. And so yeah, they're mowing, they're eating forages. And so when we, when we mimic that moving, mobbing, mowing, how do we do that on a domestic scale with, with livestock? We do it with electric fence. So electric fence becomes a steering wheel, accelerator and a brake on that four legged pruning sauerkraut vat. And she moves across the landscape and we can steer her just like a zero turn mower across the landscape so that she and the forages interact at exactly the same time. The point I'm making is that if you violate any one of those three, moving, mobbing or mowing, if you violate any one of those three, you take, you turn the herbivore from an asset and a soil builder and an ecology, you know, an ecology facilitator into a liability. And the ugly truth is that 95% of all the domestic livestock herbivores on the planet violate at least one and some violate all three of them. Which then makes movies like, you know, cowspiracy and what the Health and you know, all those kinds of things and stimulates those kind of movies. So when they're, when they're, when they're disparaging the conventional industrial food system, I'm saying amen. Amen. But the answer is not veganism. The answer is to change the production model so that the animals do respect and honor the moving, mobbing, mowing that we see as a pattern in nature.

Yeah, I think one thing that is interesting about that as well and the whole respecting the callus of a cow thing, you know, when you feed a cow grain, what happens when you give the world's most amazing ruminator that can turn undigestible grass into milk and dairy and all kinds of great things? What happens when you feed them green? They make alcohol and their guts and ultimately that creates a pre diabetic cow. It makes the marbling their muscles worse. People think, oh, marbling. I'm like, if you catch a deer, if you go out and go hunting, you find fat around the liver, you find fat around the kidneys. You don't find, find. Yeah, we have to act. It's, it's not a natural thing to find more in humans. We call that inclusion body disease. We call it fatty liver disease. We call it new term, it's metabolic associated, you know, steatohepatitis, you know, in cows we're like, you yummy? It's like just something simple as the grain Creates a healthy, nutrient dense count. A pre diabetic thing. That's no wonder when you have this. The literature says all red meat's associated with heart disease because you're eating a pre diabetic sick cow.

Yeah. You know, you know, on that score it's interesting that in Argentina where the per capita consumption of red meat is nearly 200 pounds a year, think about that. The average at Uruguay it is 200 pounds a year. Argentina is more like, you know, 160. But anyway, I mean, red meat, I mean the US per capita consumption of red meat is about 50, is about 50, 52 pounds a year. So we're talking about three to four times the red meat consumption that we have here in the US and you know, they say, oh, red meat is going to cause colon cancer and all this stuff. Well, those cultures have, have way less than half the colon cancer rate of the US Even though they're eating all that red meat. Well, why? Because they don't grain feed. They're grass finished, which makes the meat have high levels of, of conjugated linoleic acid. Conjugated linoleic acid, otherwise known as cla, is a structural anti carcinogen, but does a lot of other things too. But it only takes two weeks of grain feeding and herbivore for all the CLA to leave. That's how vulnerable it is. And your grain feeding makes acidosis in the gut. So this is interesting. You know, Cornell, Cornell University did a study several years ago and where they, they took cows in the feedlot, fed them hay. And what they found was that if they, if they took cows off of grain two weeks before slaughter, that they did not have the highly pathogenic E. Coli of their grain fed counterparts. Well, why? Well, because as you, you kind of alluded to, when you feed grain, it raises the ph, the, the acid in the rumen. And so the rumen instead of being neutral, becomes acidic. Well then the E. Coli, which is, which is a digestive microbe, they have to have E. Coli to digest the E. Coli Then instead of being adapted, Adapted to a 7.0, you know, pretty much a balanced ph, it now becomes acclimated to a much more acidic ph. They actually adapt to the, to the different, you know, climatic situation. So then if we happen to ingest some E. Coli because there's a speck of something somewhere that didn't get washed off, if we ingest it, instead of our highly acidic stomach killing that E. Coli, that adapted, that adapted highly acidic E. Coli from the grain fed cow kills us and that's the problem. So Cornell isolated this. They found out, they said, they said basically if we would, if we would only feed cows forage for their last two weeks, there would be no E. Coli problem or contamination in, in the beef supply. And of course, you know, the big, the big grain outfits pooh pooed them, said ah, you know, you messed up the research, blah blah, blah, blah blah. And of course it won't be done. But that's how simple, you know, that's how simple some of this stuff is. And when you realize how we've convoluted these things and instead of just doing that, instead, you know, we, we spray chlorine on the carcasses. We, we miss the slaughterhouse with chlorine. We, you know, all this stuff and then, and then when you get your beef, you got some chlorine on there. I mean, we've had customers that actually get a, get a rash up their arm when they, when they touch, you know, store bought meat because it's got so much chlorine on it. And, and so, you know, we take something that has real easy, you know, very simple, simple answers and we turn it into something that's difficult.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting because you'd mentioned the microbiome, the human microbiome briefly before and the bacteria in the soil. But it's really interesting. There's a, one of the advanced lab tests I do on patients for the risk for heart disease is from Cleveland Heart Labs, and it's a thing called a TMAO lab. If that level is elevated, it's associated with an increased risk for heart disease. Well, the interesting thing is the TMO is created by bacteria in the human GI tract as it breaks down carnitine, which is an amino acid usually found in red meat and eggs. But the issue with the risk for heart disease in humans based on this information is not as much the red meatness per se, but it's actually the bacteria in your gut which ultimately come from what you eat that's either eats the soil or fermented the soil or whatever. So it's this massive circle of like, you know, if you have really healthy soil. There's a book actually called Soil and Health. Sir Robert Howard wrote it. It was a great read, like almost a hundred years ago. It's like healthy sorrel equals healthy animals equals healthy humans. And so just to wrap this section up real quick, you know, it's like when I say real food, we've talked about chickens and cows for like, you know, 40 minutes, right? And great science went around the world, went to Argentina. But when we say real food, it sounds super simple, but it's hard to do today when everything is so processed. Like, you know, just eat real food.

Well, I mean, yes and no. I mean, so what, what. What's the number one thing somebody can do to, you know, to develop their. I mean, besides, you know, besides living a purposeful life and. And forgiving people that you hate, you know, those kind of things. But, you know, once you get past that and you go to diet, you go. You eat what you want to eat is food that you can pronounce. You don't want to eat anything that you can't pronounce. And so, you know, Michael Pollan, when he writes about this, he says, we probably, probably the cutoff point is about 1900. If it wasn't available before 1900, you probably shouldn't eat it. And of course, we can all be thankful that hot dogs were introduced at the 1890 World Fair. You know, so they just crept in under the radar. But, you know, you want to find unprocessed whole foods and get in your kitchen. The biggest lie that people kind of seem to buy into is I can have a different result but not make any changes. And the fact is, you can't have a different result without making changes. So you can't expect to change your health trajectory if you continue eating Happy Meals and takeout. You've got to change your trajectory, and that means participating in the food system. So I'm going to say it right here. Get in your kitchen. You've got to start enjoying domestic culinary arts. Now, fortunately, we live in a very special time where, you know, where you don't have to take a wooden bucket to the spring and dip water. You don't have to put, you know, wood in a stove till you can get hot water. You don't. You know, we've got refrigerators and Time Bake and Insta pots and crock pots and bread makers and ice cream makers and KitchenAid and slicers and dashers and swishers and all sorts of cool stuff. I mean, hot and cold running water. I mean, we got. We got great. Grandma would have given her eye teeth for the kind of gadgetry we have. So use it, enjoy it. You know, cooking. Cooking from scratch has never been easier. Think about what your great grandmother had to do to cook from scratch. I mean, she had to grow it, you know, then she had to, you know, peel it, dice it, take care of it. She had to get. She had to fetch water from the spring, she had to put wood in the cook stove. You know, all my lands, you know, you don't even have to grow it, you can just buy it from good farmers and you're up and running and, and just use your kitchen to prepare, preserve, package and process your own food and come and disentangle from that, you know, systemic, that systemic industrial agenda. And I will say that it's never been good. Food has never been as easy to get. Now I mean, man, when we started back, you know, 50 years ago, there was, there were very few alternatives to the industrial food supply. Now there's community supported agriculture, there's farmers markets, there's, you know, there's people like us that ship around the country. We deliver, we deliver to Richmond, you know, every month. And I mean we, it's, it's very, it's, it's very accessible. Way more accessible now than it was even 20 years ago.

But what I'm hearing you say, it just takes the people being engaged, people need to learn, people need to look. One of the things I tell my patients often I say when I interview, I'm interviewed other places, it took me like a year and when I started down this journey, it took me about a year and a half to like to source all my stuff because I didn't know where to buy. Now, now obviously, you know, we have thing called Fall Line Farms here in central Virginia that we just do, do, I mean order stuff every week and you know, you have your drop off enrichment once a month. But you know, you make some really good pork by the way. Especially, especially, especially your bacon is really, you're really yummy. It's really good stuff. I want to transition right here a little bit. You know, real food, eat real food, you know, drop this little statistic. 80% of chronic disease in our country can directly be related to dating process food. So literally eating real food has the potential to eliminate 80% of chronic illnesses in our country. But there's a bigger issue and part of that is the food industry. And I think I want to, you know, your book you wrote, everything I want to do is illegal. I think, you know, really hits the point of how the government, how laws and regulations limit, you know, someone selling things they raise, you know, raw milk in Virginia is still illegal. Yeah, the raw milk that I, that I get, that I used to make homemade yogurt with and kefir and you know, is, it's actually illegal for me. My wife's actually in LA right now at a conference and she sent me a picture of raw milk she could get in California, you know, we in Virginia. So on that. Kind of strange, right?

Yeah.

But the thing is that, let's talk about, you know, I'm going to use the book, you know, Everything I Want to do is illegal because it's a great title.

Yeah.

About things, challenges you've run into, whether it's the chickens, you know, the way you process chickens. You know, can we talk about some of the limitations that were placed on you that you had to overcome just in order to do to create good quality food for people to eat?

Yeah. So one of the, one of the big battles that we had that we eventually won, but it was, it was a battle nonetheless was, you know, to maintain our open air chicken processing. We, you know, we process chickens, you know, during the summer, not in the winter. And we do it two or three days a week in an open air shed with a concrete floor and a, you know, a big holding tank to handle the processing water and everything. And the government came in and said that was illegal, we couldn't do it that way. And interestingly, we had a, we had just had a lab report of colony forming units of bacteria per milliliter from our chicken. And we had done, we had taken chlorine drenched chicken out of the supermarket and had it done at the same lab at the same time. So we'd have real good comparison. And the store bought, the federal inspected chicken averaged 3,600 colony forming units of bacteria per milliliter. Ours averaged 133. So we were 25 times cleaner than what was in the store. And these inspectors are standing there saying, you know, this is inherently unsanitary. It's, oh, you can't, you can't open air. If you butcher any open air, you know, it's unsanitary and a fly might come in, blah, blah, blah. And I'm showing this report, well, what do you, do we really want clean food or do we want a bunch of concrete and stainless steel and paperwork? And so, you know, so these are the kinds of things that when people say, oh, we need more inspectors, we know, no, no, no, no, no, no. What I call the food police. The food regulations are extremely scale prejudicial. They're much easier to jump through if you're big than if you're small. And I say that that's an inherently unfair regulation. If it's easier to comply when you're big than when you're small, it's inherently unfair. And so, you know, you would think that if our chickens were 25 times cleaner than what was in the store, when they were harassing us, they would have. They would have said, hey, hey, you know, let's stop the presses, you know, hold the processing plants. We're gonna. Virginia, we're gonna, you know, stop all this until, you know, people can really get good food or get cleaner chicken. But no, I said, well, what, you know, what else are you interested in besides just whether it's clean or not? Well, you got to have bathrooms. I said, bathrooms. I got two in my house. Mom's got two in her house. They're 50 and 60ft away. If I want to go number one, I just step behind the tractor. You know, what's the big deal? And they say, well, you know, you got to have changing lockers for your employees. And back at the time, I don't have any employees. You know, it's just us. We're right out in the back. And so these are the kinds of things that just that stymie. So when people complain about centralized food systems and the fact that four companies control 85% of America's meat supply, think about that. Four companies, four brands control 85% of America's meat supply. And when people wonder about the centralization, that centralization is there not because there aren't a bunch of people like me that would like to access the market or produce it differently. It's because complying with the food police, the food regulations are so onerously expensive that it's extremely difficult for an entrepreneur to launch a competitor into the marketplace. You know, young new businesses have to be launched embryonically. You know, babies are born little. They're not born as adults. You know, and if a baby's too big, it's too big to be birthed. And this is the problem is with all this, all this regulatory requirement around being able to make food, you can't do it. We tried. We had a great gal here. She was a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, and she wanted to do chicken pot pies. We had customers, you know, our customers would love to have, you know, more convenient, more really good convenience food. One of our jokes is that what our customers really want is real food, Hot Pockets, you know, if they could do that, that's really. So I'm saying, hey, let's do chicken pot pie. So, you know, we start looking into it, and the first thing we need is an inspected kitchen. Well, inspected kitchen has to have an inspected bathroom. The inspected bathroom has to have an inspected leach. Field, it can't be a composting toilet. And if the cook wants to walk to our house and use our bathroom, that's unacceptable. It has to be attached. And before you know it, you're into $100,000, $200,000 just in minimal infrastructure, just to be able to have a structure where you can make chicken pot pies. Well, you know, it's one thing to have that kind of requirement if you're gonna, if you're making, you know, a million dollars worth of pot pies. It's another thing if you're trying to launch, you don't know if they're gonna sell. You don't know if you can make money on it. It's all an experiment. It's a trial. But in order to experiment, you've got to lay out all this for the infrastructure and the, and the, and the regulatory compliance. And so I could go on at length. I wrote a book documenting all this. Everything I want to do is illegal documenting the kind of things that we either don't do or wish we could do. Because the entry level requirement is so scale prejudicial that at an embryonic stage, at a stage that could actually birth competition in the marketplace, it's not big enough to pay for all of the, all of the prejudicial requirements.

Yeah, I remember. And I might, I don't actually. This might be from our. Because we actually get raw milk. And it was really interesting because the whole colony forming units, just for a quick little snippet, like when, as a medical doctor, that's one of the ways we actually measure infections. Like someone has a uti, we'll do a urine culture, and the things are fed back in colony forming units. And so it was really interesting that that 3,000. The, the number you get 3,600 number you gave is, you know, for you. For urinary tract infection, the number is, you know, 10,000 or above is considered to be elevated. Unless, you know, there's some nuances to that. But like 3600 is not much below 10,000. Right. And that's just. And that's after it's been bleached in the store. And with, with raw milk. It was interesting. Our local farmer, they had something very similar that got shut down. Da, da, da. And, and their raw milk had these things called somatic cell counts, and they had like less than 100 in their raw milk. Would you want to talk about that a little bit? Because I feel like that's something else that people don't realize that My wife lovingly calls it pus milk, which is the stuff you get in the store versus, you know, the stuff you get from your farmer. Like how?

Yeah, well, just, just remember the somatic cell count is a measure of, of the kind of mammary infection, if you will. And, and so somatic cells are like our, I guess, white blood cells or whatever, they indicate that the body's fighting an infection here. And so the dairy industry has somatic cell count benchmarks that you know, that you have, that you have to meet. But the beauty, but the beauty of pasteurization is your somatic cell count can be pretty high and you just cook them out and you kill them. So you're, you know, you're eating, you're drinking a bunch of pus from, you know, from the killed somatic cells. Whereas in a raw milk deal, in a raw milk deal, they're not killed. And so the somatic cell counts are way, way, way, way lower than they are in a, in a pasteurized setting where you have this, this, this cooking, this what's called a kill step. A kill step in order to sterilize everything. Just remember, I think this may be a good point to bring out. Food should not be sterile. It should not be sterile. If food won't decompose, it won't digest. And so, you know, if you go into your, you know, into your kitchen and you take squeezable, squeezable Velveeta cheese and you squeeze it on the table, it'll sit there for a year. It won't change, it won't do anything, it'll just sit there for a year. But if you put real cheese on your table, in two days it'll get fuzzy and in a week it'll sprout legs and walk off your table. You know, that is a decomposable material. And what we've done to our food system, we're so antimicrobial and we're so paranoid of living things that we have, that we have bathed everything in sterility so that it comes to us in a non composable thing, I mean, ultra processed. What's the whole point, what's the whole point of the industrial food system is to extend shelf life. How long can we keep this on a shelf? And that includes special, you know, special coverings for fresh produce and all sorts of things. How long can we preserve this? And what that does, all of that mentality has the consequence of reducing its ability to rot. If food won't rot, it won't digest. And I got to tell you this story. I was out in California doing a presentation for a school system for a bunch of middle schoolers. And this school district had procured a farm. They had these two farm ladies that were running this farm. It was like a three acre farm, small, but they incorporated the farm into the, you know, the biology and the science curriculum. I think even the English teachers. It was a very comprehensive program. It was wonderful. So I got to go out and visit the farm. They told me this story. They were trying to introduce the students to worms and how wonderful worms are. So they made up. They made a worm box. You know, it was like 8ft long, 3ft wide, 3ft deep, you know, oversized coffin kind of thing. And they had all this compost, all these red wiggler worms in there. And so they had an assignment for the kids. They said, okay, tomorrow I want you all to bring food. So the next day the kids brought food. They brought, you know, red, red. They brought, you know, gummy bears and, you know, whatever, you know, refined sugar snacks and bleach, flour, bread. And they put. And so the ladies, they put that in one side. And the two farm ladies, they put in an apple and a little piece of, you know, t bone steak and, you know, these things. Next, next week the kids come out. You know, they've been all prepped for this. They run up the hill, they open the box and they open it up and there's their, you know, Cheerios and gummy bears and all their foods over here. The worms hadn't touched it. Over here on this end where the ladies had put in their, you know, real food. It was all digested. And so the obvious question for the kids that the teachers asked was, well, why would you want to eat something worms won't even eat? And I mean, it was like a, like a bomb went off in those kids heads. They realized, oh, you know, worms are, you know, worms know a lot more than I do. And it was a really poignant, you know, a poignant learning lesson.

Actually, in college I inadvertently did a similar, similar experiment when I was, I believe, a junior. Our apartment was pretty messy and we had some wonder bread from the Wonder Bread factory, which is, which is right downtown from where I went to school at vcu. And it was left out. And over a month, the bread was still there. It did not disappear. It didn't mold, Nothing ate it. And then we had also a bowl of beans and they basically got flies and got worn. That bowl actually disappeared over a month. And it was kind of like you know, really kind of intriguing, but I want to talk about seed oils really briefly because I think, you know, in our food system, you know, seed oils has become popular and people are talking about how, you know, seed oils are, you know, how they're bad for your metabolism, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't think people realize that seed oils and hydrogenated orals and partially solidified orals, actually part of what they do is they block the degradation product of the degradation process of food. Like, they don't rot, like you said. And one of the things that happens when you ingest this stuff, it actually messes up our own metabolism and our own gut microbiome, which is really important for our health. Could you talk about oils a little bit like processed orals, really? Because ultimately cows make healthy saturated fat. They make butyrate. They actually make these things that are actually healthy for us versus processed oils. How those interplay with health.

Yeah, well, for sure. And that's one of the reasons why one of the best things that you can do on a. You might have a disagreement. But when you have something that's like a. A result of chronic toxicity is to fast. Just let your body just wash it out, you know, clean it out. So the seed, the. A couple things. One is, one is that as. As we feed, let's take soybean meal. There's a big difference between, for example, whole roasted soybeans that maintain all the oils in them and the fats versus soybean meal. If you're going to feed an animal and it's like saying, well, I'm not going to eat corn on the cob because we make high fructose corn syrup out of corn. Things happen when you break it apart, when you press it. When you press it, you break it apart for, you know, for the hydrogenated oils, for cooking oils and that sort of thing. So as you know, there is a difference in a hierarchy. Like, the worst oil in the world is like canola oil. Canola was developed by the Germans as a lubricant for diesel engines. Okay. And then we decided to make margarine out of it and start eating it. And you go along and then you got your peanut oil, coconut oil, palm oil, and you have your better ones, so different ones, and then, you know, olive oil, all that. So I think that the key here is if you're feeding, if you're feeding grains like we do in a commercial livestock, in an omnivore, cows aren't getting grain, but birds and pork, they do need the carbohydrate, they're omnivores. They have a, they have a totally different digestive system than an herbivore. And so they do get grain, but the key there is whole grains and obviously it helps to have them GMO free and a lot of green material. It is the green material that carries in the body's ability, the phytochemicals, the carotenes, to be able to balance out, you know, the Omega 3, Omega 6 in the, in the Greek, the Greek poultry systems. You know, there have been numerous studies showing the difference between when a chicken, when a chicken, for example, can get green material and when a chicken can't get green material. And when you take away fresh air, sunshine and exercise too, and you don't let them have a salad bar. It's a completely sedentary thing. So just, just think about it. We say you are what you eat, but you also are what you eat, eats and you become like what you eat. So here we are in these massive confinement animal feeding operations, denying fresh air, denying exercise, denying sunlight, and then denying any green material. Well, is it any wonder that that is going to come to us as a food item? I love your, you know, it's, it's not real. It's not an authentic food item. There's nothing about that that represents the chickenness of the chicken. It's all a disrespectful adulteration of the chickenness of the chicken. And we're now eating that and, and we're adulterating ourselves. You know, it's like you quoted Sir Albert Howard earlier. You know, he wrote in an agricultural testament, he said when you use artificial manures, that's what he called chemical fertilizers. Artificial manures that makes artificial plants that make, that grow artificial animals that make artificial people that can only be kept alive by using artificials. Boy, and that was written in 1950. You know, talk about precinct, huh?

Well, I mean, I guess, you know, right now with all the pharmaceutical stuff and drug stuff and all things going on, those, those are artificials, those are synthetic things are making alive. That's, that's, that's very prophetic in that way.

Wow. Yeah.

Yeah, I didn't realize he said that. Point. That's cool. So one of the things I realized, and this is going back a little bit there, this was during when President Obama was, was president. And some people may remember this, the Taxageddon that was this big. You know, there's always a big thing going on in D.C. and one of the things that was going to happen is the farm bill wasn't going to go through and they were starting to talk about, oh my gosh, you know, milk will be. And this was, whatever. This was a long time ago. This is like maybe at this stage, maybe 12 years ago, you know, eggs are gonna be $6 a dozen a gallon, milk is gonna be $8 a gallon. And this light bulb went off my head. I'm like, wait a second. That's kind of what I'm paying now for my stuff. My local farmer and I had this. And. And when the. Right. And when the, when the pandemic hit, I never ran out of eggs, I never ran out of beef, I never ran out stuff because I was already sourcing it from, you know, within the central Virginia area and getting stuff from Virginia, basically. Could you talk a little bit about things like the farm bill and how these government plans actually make it one harder for you to do your job and provide, but also decreases people's access to real food because we only want to buy the cheapest of the cheapest cheap, which basically is government subsidized food. So it's basically we're eating government food. When you subsidize soy, corn, it affects the animals, affects eggs, it affects literally an entire food system.

Yeah, yeah. Well, just realize, I mean, you just mentioned the, you know, the other foodstuffs and just realize that there are six things. Six things that the farm that are. That the federal government. There are six things the federal government has decided to subsidize and protect and ensure. Six things. Corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, sugar cane, and cotton. Now, five of those are edibles and one, unless you want to eat cotton, but you know, cotton is the only non edible one. The other five are edible, but when those get special subsidy, concession, protection, whatever you want to call completely skews the marketplace, the actual value in the marketplace. And then when you have all these food regulations that incentivize Tyson and deincentivize somebody like us, it makes competition very difficult in a marketplace. In fact, a lot of the cost of smaller scale local food is not because it's more expensive to grow it that way. It's because the compliance to the, to the one size fits all food police is inordinately more expensive because you don't, you know, you don't move around as many things like, you know, we co own a small federal inspected slaughterhouse here where we do our pigs and pigs and chickens and I mean pigs and cows and lambs. And it costs US roughly $600 to do to for example, a steer carcass to fabricate it, you know, get it into packages. Cost us $600 to do what JBS or Tyson does for less than $100. We actually pay our people very well. It's a small plant, but we have the same compliance paperwork. We have this as a plant that's, you know, a thousand times our size. And so we can't spread those overheads across as many pounds of material. So that creates an inordinate price. And then you have the whole, you know, cheapness in the, in the marketplace or in the production phase where you know, you cram all these animals in a house and you, you know, you give them antibiotics and everything to keep them alive. And I don't know whether you, you know, that, you know, Chick Fil A had a, had an eight year old. We're going to go antibiotic free, you know, in eight years. That was about six years ago. And three months ago they just announced, can't be done. We're not doing it. We're abandoning that, that pathway. And so, so what happens is you can't have things in as, as toxic an environment as we raise our animals, you know, without, without MRNA's vaccinations, medications, all these other things. And so those, and those are cheaper than the labor it takes to manage so you have healthy animals and don't have to use that stuff. And so that creates an inordinate price structure at the cash register. So interestingly, when Putin invaded Ukraine and fertilizer went up 400%, we didn't even miss a beat because we don't buy any of it. And they're there for a while. Actually our, our top end beef, you know, ribeye steaks, tenderloin, you know, T bone steaks, New York strip. Our top end beef steaks were cheaper than at Costco for, for a couple months, you know, because of, because of the, the hiccup in the system. And so if we really want safe food, stable food and secure food, if we want food security, safety and stability, what we want to do is shorten the chain, the food chain and reduce the dependency on, on far away. I'm just gonna say far away. I'm not gonna say foreign, I'm just gonna say far away things. I mean now we're dealing with a dock workers strike and stuff. So any bobble in that chain really upsets everything. And so if we, if we buy locally and we, or buy directly from somebody we know, you know, who is producing, if the production is from, you know, geographically proximate. And of course, you know, our beef is all, you know, they're born here, we raise them here. It's all solar driven. You know, it's all right here. You reduce the, you know, the vulnerability to some nefarious agenda to affect the production equation.

Plus, the food just tastes way better. Oh, yeah, it tastes much better. It makes great sandwiches and steak and ribeye. So as we get towards the end, because I feel like we keep on talking for a long time, you know, if there's like five things, you know, you're, you're, you're a farmer, you've gone through this, you've kind of worked through the. Again, everything you want to do is illegal kind of stuff. Work through all this process. You know, if there's five, four or five major things you feel like could change change, you know, something. I think in order to change things for our country, it has to start locally. It's not going to be, you know, finding the next Cisco or Tyson, you know, for the United States, I feel it's going to be like, find individuals like you and empowering them and having, you know, 50 Joel salons in the 50 states and, you know, whatever. Right. Like, yeah, if you were to say, like, if you want to change the system, so to speak, you know what, There are four or five things that you feel like from a basic. From whether it's government saying taking their hands off or from take my hands off, take your hands off my food. Right. I think that was sign. Right. But from them and. Or a personal level, what are like five, maybe three for the government, three for people that you think could make a massive difference to get real food to people that's going to change their health and actually make it and actually induce entrepreneurs to actually have this lifestyle, which is actually not a lot of people actually would like to be outside working with their hands for a living, you know.

Sure, sure. So the number one thing from a government policy standpoint would be the constitutional amendment that Congressman Thomas Massie has already put in. And what it says is the right of the people to grow. I'm reading it here off my wall. The right of the people to grow food and to purchase food from the source of their choice shall not be infringed. So it's obviously modeled after shall make no law infringing. So it uses that same terminology. But the problem right now is that if you want to come to my farm, smell around, ask around, look around, and we as two consenting adults, voluntarily engage in a Food transaction that is not legal. And you don't have a right, you don't have a right to procure the food for me and I don't have any right to sell it to you. And so what we have to do is put food on an equal standing with the right to assembly, the right to worship, the right to speak as a fundamental human right to be able to choose my food. I, most people have no clue that we don't have that right in our country. And federal justices, judges have ruled from the bench. You got to, I mean, I'm quoting. American citizens do not have a right to choose their food. That is not a fundamental right. And I would suggest that that should change, probably an oversight on the part of the founders to include, of course, you know, when the country was founded, they couldn't have imagined a day when, when I couldn't go over to neighbor and buy a glass of milk. They couldn't have imagined that. So here we are. So that's the number one thing. And if we did that within a day of that happening, there would be thousands and thousands and thousands of neighborhood neighbor to neighbor food transactions that are currently illegal. So that's the number one thing, kind of on the policy standpoint.

On the.

Personal standpoint, the number one thing I'm going to say is you got to get in your kitchen, start enjoying your kitchen. We've got a million recipes and cookbooks and everything else. You've got every gadget at your disposal. Think about convenience foods. I'll give you an example. So one of our convenience foods, so you say, well, you know, I can't always cook every day. Well, let me, let me. Number one, to me, the number one litmus test of somebody that gets the food situation is are you eating leftovers? Because if you're eating leftovers, it means you're not grazing in single service compartments. You know, you're actually eating together, you're having a common serving bowl, blah, blah, blah. But one of the most, the cool things that we do. So, you know, we have these cull hens, these are spent, spent egg layers, egg layers that have finished their, you know, productive life. So we, you know, we process them, butcher them and, and we'll put, you know, they're not that, they're not huge. So we'll put, you know, six or seven in a great big roaster pan in the oven, three, 350 for four hours and they just fall apart. We pick all the meat off course, pour all the broth off. Now you've got broth and we've got the picked off chicken. We cut it up in little pieces, put it in quart containers and freeze it in the freezer. Now you have pre cooked chicken. So when it's 4 o' clock and oh no, the kids brought friends for dinner, boom, you're ready to go with pre cooked chicken. You can make a wonderful casserole in no time with pre cooked chicken. So those are the kinds of things you begin doing as you participate. It's like any skill, you don't get good at it when you don't get in the game. The only way you get good at is get in the game. And this is what I say. You know, the greatest lie is that I can change my life without changing my life. You can't change your life without changing your life. If I had a way for you to change your life without changing your life, I probably would be doing something else. But you can't. And so on the government side, it's food choice freedom, and on the personal side, it's participation. Those are my two main things. Cool.

Well, Joel, this has been a great, great conversation. You had mentioned that your stuff was available across the country. So if you guys tell. People want to learn about you, they want to buy your food, they want to. I had no idea. Actually, you shipped across state lines actually was a new thing to me. So I'm actually. I would love you to share that information. Obviously. We, I live like, I actually grew up in the Shander Valley in Harrisonburg, so I'm very familiar.

Yeah, I'm seeing that, that McGacheysville right there behind you.

That's where my grand. That's where my grandmother's from. Her family was there actually. German, German, Scotch, Irish that moved down in the valley.

Yeah. Okay.

Late 1700s, right? Yeah.

There you are, exactly where we're talking about. So, yeah. So our website is Polyface Farms. P O L Y F A C E. And you get on our website and there's everything there from, you know, the seminars that we do, where I'm speaking, books I've written, you know, social media and of course, where you can buy things, buy all of our food. We have beef, pork, chicken, lamb, turkey, eggs and you know, if you have a friend somewhere that doesn't know where to go, you know, lives in a city and. Well, I don't know where a farmer is. Well, start here. We'll ship it right to their door. We ship every week nationwide and that's just continuing to grow and grow. And we don't advertise, we don't make a great big deal, but it just continues to go up and we'd be glad to service anybody. The logistics of distribution have changed dramatically in the last 10 to 15 years. And it's enabling people like us to touch, well, frankly, to touch people in the big cities that are now scared to go out of their houses because they might get mugged or, you know, shot at. And now we can ship it ups right to their doorstep. They can grab their food and they're up and running with the best, best food in the world. So visit us our website, Poly Face Farms, and glad to. Glad to help you.

Yeah, if they get a instant pot, they can take your bones and make some amazing bone broth out of it as well.

That's right. That's exactly right.

Joel, thanks for your time. I really appreciate it. Thanks for being gracious and just giving us about an hour and a half your time just to pick your brain and share with my community. So thanks a lot.

Thank you, doctor. It's been a great privilege to be with you.

Take care. You too.