What A Christian-Libertarian-Environmentalist-Capitalist-Lunatic-Farmer Can Teach You About How...

Yo, what's up?

It's Ben.

I'm back. Turn off this episode right now if you feel like you would be offended by a Christian, libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic farmer. Because that's the dude I have on my show, Joel Salatin. If you've never heard of him, he's actually mind blowingly amazing and smart and.

You should read his book.

Even if you're not a Christian per se, you need to get the book that we talk about. You'll understand why when you listen in. He's a super, super smart guy. Incredibly entertaining too. Today's podcast is brought to you by something that Joel probably doesn't use because he's like a farmer on the sticks, but I use every day. It's called Organifi Green juice and also Organifi red juice. The green juice is the best tasting green superfood blend I've ever gotten my hands on. And it's a lot easier than gnawing on romaine lettuce or juicing copious amounts of kale. And it also has the ayurvedic herb ashwagandha in it, which lowers cortisol. Who doesn't need to lower cortisol? Increases your strength, improves your mental focus. And then they also have their red juice which is basically like Viagra for your whole body. They put all these nootropics and blood builders and blood dopers legally into this.

Stuff called red juice. You put it into a smoothie or.

You just like I've honestly like I'm gross but I just like have dumped the powder into my mouth and it tastes amazing thanks to the sweet fruity flavor. But the non blood spiking flavor of monk fruit, non blood sugar spiking I should say will spike your blood, just won't spike your blood sugar.

So you can get the green juice or you can get the red juice.

Either one. Get them both at BenGreenfieldFitness.com Organifi with an I BenGreenfieldFitness.com organifi and use discount code Ben B E n to get 20% off the green juice, the red juice or or better yet both. This podcast is also brought to you by health gains. Since 2003 2003, freaking a health gains has been around. They specialize in things like anti aging programs making you better at sex.

Meaning literally.

They like will blast your crotch with acoustic sound wave therapy or like inject these healing growth factors into men and women's nether region to do things like increase blood flow and quality of orgasms. And I've done it. Like, I'm just going to shoot straight with you. Pun intended. My orgasm is like, 20 to 30 seconds longer since I went down and did this procedure. Not only that, but I'm horny as hell. Also. They do age management, so they'll do.

Like, hormone replacement therapy.

The guy who runs it, Dr. Gaines, he's super smart. They've got 80 clinics all over the.

U.S. but if you want to go.

To their Aventura Florida clinic, which is where I like to go, because I can just fly to Miami, spend time on the beach, have them do their thing, fly home after I get a little sunshine, just text the word gain to 3131. 31. And when you text the word gain G A I n to 3131. 31, that's going to get you 250 buckaroos off of their HGH services, their testosterone services, their sexual health services, you name it. So text word gain to 31. 31. 31. So now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's go talk to Joel Saladin in this episode of the.

Ben Grief I'm Finished show.

Just imagine what it would do to the emotional equity of a church if they converted a healthy portion of that into gardens and then started using that for, you know, families that were struggling in the church.

Life, death, decomposition, or digestion, and then regeneration in some other form. Life, death, decomposition, regeneration. I mean, is the pillar of physical life, and it's even the pillar of spiritual life. Christ died that we all may live.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Power.

Speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is.

For you, that's the natural movement.

Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Hey, folks, welcome back to the show. And in my podcast today, I'm interviewing a guy who describes himself as a Christian, libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic farmer. His name is Joel Saladin, and Joel is an American farmer. He's a lecturer, he's an author. He has written books that my wife and I have used to set up our own little chicken and goat setup out here in Spokane, Washington. From Salad Bar Beef to Folks this Ain't Normal to Poultry Profit to you can farm to this latest book that he's written called the Marvelous Pigness of Pigs. He is really one of the guys that I look to as a dude who's on the cutting edge of running a farm farm or growing your own food, or caring for the planet in a way that not a lot of other people are doing. You know, if you've heard of something like for example, rotational grazing, that's something that Joel Saladin has actually made popular here in the US he is basically the complete opposite of everything that you'd think of when you think of a huge corporate farm with a bunch of animals and cramped and dark pens and soil not being taken care of and basically the entire creation around us being abused. Joel is a guy who has not only for a very long time defied that whole modern paradigm of agriculture, but he's also written some fantastic books about how we can feed ourselves, how we.

Can farm, and how we can take.

Care of the land. This most recent book that he's written.

It'S got a hilarious name.

The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs was one of the most fantastic books that I've read in the past several. And I've got plenty of pages folded over in this thing. And we are all lucky enough to have Joel right here on the call with us today. So, Joel, welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness show, man.

Thank you, Ben. It's just an honor and great to be with you. Thank you.

Yeah, no worries. And I gotta, I gotta ask you, you know, right off the bat, you call this book the Marvelous Pigness of Pigs. Why did you name this book the Marvelous Pigness of Pigs?

Well, because I wanted to capture the respect and honor for, you know, for life and what more lovable critter could there be, you know, than a pig? And so the whole idea of respecting and honoring the pigness of pigs, you know, it just conjures up. As soon as you hear that, obviously you smile and B, of course, you know, you start thinking about pigs and. But the pigness of pigs conjures up all the elements about their inquisitiveness, their curiosity, their lovability, their being able to dig and plow and all these things that we. So, you know, it's just the idea of bringing a word picture quickly that's light hearted and warm and fuzzy into the mind regarding does pigments matter? That sort of thing.

Right, gotcha. Yeah. And in the book you talk about, you know, how we have this specialness of pigs, you know, and how factory farmed hog houses disrespect and cheapen what should truly be the pigness of a pig, like this animal. It's actually a pretty cool animal that if you walk into the average factory farmed hog house, you know, you see, you see basically animals kept in this violent, confined factory type of environment. And I know that in your book and what we'll delve into today.

You kind of get into the problem with a lot of that. But one of the things that I want to start off with here, Joel, is this idea that we live on a planet that's pretty special and how some of the people who you would expect to take the best care of the planet actually don't. And you say early on in the book, even in the introduction of the book, that Christians, and I'm a Christian, I hang out with a lot of Christians, you say that Christians abuse God's creation. What do you mean by that?

What I mean by that is that the faith community as we know it, the Christian community as we know it.

Does not.

As a group, it pretty much buys the conventional industrial agriculture orthodoxy, that concentrated animal feeding operations are the efficient way to go, that Monsanto is the friend of world hunger, that is the solution for world hunger, that genetically modified organisms are gods, are an expression of, of our dominion and our God given intellectual capacity. You know, these are the common themes. And so as a result, the Christian community finds itself, I believe, on the wrong side of creation stewardship almost every time. You know, the result is that we squander a lot of whatever, you know, cachet equity, emotional equity in the culture by continuing to defend things that are, that are creation hurting and indeed encouraging things that are, you know, that are not appropriate. You know, the question is, is what I believe in the pew showing up on my menu? And that's kind of the stance I took throughout the book is trying to, you know, each chapter is this, you know, one thing versus something else. It's the juxtaposition of what we say, we believe what we believe in good neighbor policy. And then we go get the cheapest chicken from a factory farm that stinks up a neighborhood and puts manure in the water, you know, and the same thing could be said for a lot of things. And so the whole idea here is that we Christians do abuse it. And in fact, you would appreciate this little tidbit. When Faith Words publish the book, they have a whole list of pastors around the country that they send manuscripts to for cover blurbs for. You need to read this book. They sent it to 150 of them. If you'll notice, there's not a single pastor endorsement on the book. I think it's the first one that they've ever done that they couldn't get a single one. And the reason was because the pastors feared their congregation. You know, what do you do if your choir director just gave a praise at a service? My daughter just got a top, you know, research position at Monsanto. You know, what do you do if the head elder, you know, grows Roundup ready soybeans for Cargill or has a factory, you know, has a concentrate animal feeding operation for Tyson?

Yeah.

And I mean, and you get into this in the book as well. I mean, about how if you go to the average potluck dinner, you know, it's Kentucky Fried Chicken, you know, from Tyson chicken houses. And then when you go to children, you know, children's programs, and admittedly even at my church, and I love my church, but it features sugary snacks and genetically modified organism GMO crackers.

And then you go to the average church potluck or parishioner's home, and you get cartons of high fructose corn syrup drinks and candy bars and industrial food and microwavable breaded chicken nuggets with artificial and unpronounceable ingredients and tons and tons of pharmaceuticals, along with Styrofoam plates at the church potluck. And all these things that. That really make you scratch your head about these, you know, yeah, we're supposed to.

Farm and garden and have some amount of dominion, so to speak, over the planet. But, yeah, there's a huge amount of sad abuse going on that you get into the book, and one of the things you talk about in the book is animal rights. And animal rights isn't something I've seen discussed very much in a forthrightly Christian book before. But you say that even the Bible is full of animal rights. What do you mean by that?

Well, what I mean by that is in the Pentateuch, what we call Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, but especially Deuteronomy and numbers that have a lot of the law in them, there's a lot in there about, well, for example, don't. Don't muzzle the ox that treads the corn. In other words, when the corn is. When an ox is working for you, if he wants to reach down and eat a little bit of it in the treading mill, well, let him. You know, don't plow with an ox and a donkey together. You know, the ox is too strong and it pulls the donkey around. There's all sorts of things about, you know, personal responsibility. If you have a, you know, if you have a bull that. That hurts somebody, you're liable. And in fact, if the bull was known to be unruly and the bull actually killed somebody, then you're, you know, it's as if you did the act yourself. There's a very. A very close connection to both the ownership and the relationship, the stewardship over animals. And one of my favorite parts of the book is just the whole discussion about glory. You know, in Christian terms, we have our kind of. Oh, you know, every. Everything has its jargon, and we Christians do, too. One of our jargon words is glory, you know, and of course, you know, the second Catechism talks about the end of man bringing glory to God, but we don't use that word in normal parlance. And yet biblically, it's a very practical, normal word, and it's not relegated to God's glory. You know, we talk about the glory of old men as their gray hair, the glory of young men as their strength, the glory of nations, glory of rulers, glory of stars, glory of the earth. So biblically, this idea that, oh, we have to change our voice to some sacred place to use the word glory because it's only relegated to divine things is completely erroneous. The Bible is very, very practical. And so it led me to ask, well, what does the glory of something mean? And what the glory means is its distinctiveness.

It'S identity. And so when we talk about bringing glory to God, what we're talking about is bringing glory to his holiness and his omniscience and omnipotence and infinity and grace and mercy and all the things that God shows. So what's the glory of a young man's strength, glory of a civilization? You know, is it. Well, you know, Prince Charles says the civilization is known by its architecture, its food, and its religion. You know, that's the glory of a civil. That's the distinctives of a civilization. And, well, what's the glory of a pig? Well, a pig can root and has this big plow on its nose, you know, and it runs around and it sniffs out things and has these wonderful abilities that no other animal does. That's the glory of the pig. And so that discussion of honoring the glory of beings and things in a practical way leads us to a very practical understanding of.

How we're supposed to view the animals, the plants, and the different things. And so they do have a glory. And so we're to honor that glory. And I would just suggest, as I do in the book, I suggest, that a culture that doesn't have a place for honoring the glory of the pig probably doesn't have a place for honoring the glory of Tom or the glory of Mary or the glory of a mathematician, the glory of a stonemason.

So it sounds to me like what you're saying is that when we're, say, out grocery shopping or we're purchasing food for whatever it might be, a church potluck or a church function, or whether it be just putting food in our homes or getting food together for dinner, we're going to have people over when we're looking at the actual labels that we're getting at the grocery store. And we'll talk a little bit later about why perhaps, you know, buying our meat, et cetera, at the grocery store might not be the best way to go versus some other options you present in the book. We should be looking and thinking about whether that animal was raised in a factory farm situation like a Tyson Chicken house or a Smithfield hog factory or an Iowa Beef packers feedlot. And if that is the case, then we might actually be supporting a situation in which there's not only a whole lot of animal abuse going on, but a situation in which we're not actually respecting the glory of an animal. And by the way, I know that for some people, listening in this might sound hypocritical for me to be saying this, because I know I've said this before on the podcast. You know, I'm a hunter. I bow hunt quite a bit. Absolutely. And for me, it's not for me to take an animal out there in the field after stalking it and hunting it for several days. For me, killing that animal and eating it.

In a very honorable fashion is not taking anything away from the glory of that animal. Because the earth and creation, it's all about life and death and the cycle.

Of life and death.

But what you get into in the book quite a bit, Joel, is how what we've got going on, especially in America and all over the world, is a cycle of life and death that puts these animals in these violent pornographic factory type of situations that completely strips the essence of glory completely out of the animal.

Yeah. Well, the truth is that the way you create sacredness in that sacrificial thing, whether it's a deer, a cow, a chicken, or a tomato, the way you create sacredness to that sacrifice of something giving its life so that something else may live, I mean, that is so foundational to ecology. It's both the foundation to ecology and spirit. That in order to give life, something has to die. I mean, Jesus talked about lest a seed die. It can't grow into a plant, you know, and so this idea of something dying in order for something else to live.

Is just ubiquitous in life. As you said, life, death, decomposition or digestion, and then regeneration in some other form. Life, death, decomposition, regeneration. I mean, that is the pillar of.

Physical life, and it's even the pillar of spiritual life. You know, Christ died that we all may live. Right.

But how does that sacrifice become sacred? How do we honor it? How do we elevate it to a place of. Of sanctity and specialness? Well, it's how we honored the life during. When it was living. If we desecrated the life during living, then death is not an honoring thing. It's just an expiration relief.

Well, good. I'm glad that's over. As opposed to being something very special and honoring. And so that's the point here is.

And so a factory farm chicken, they don't ever have a life. They don't express any chickenness. Death is just a termination of a series of disrespects. But a chicken on pasture that you've watched chase grasshoppers and bugs and has true liberty, life, expression, and is expressing chickenness.

That life, that death actually becomes a very sacred honoring thing.

Now, Joel, paint a picture for me. I know this is probably a question that's relatively involved and that's okay, we have time. But paint a picture for me of what a typical farming situation looks like in which we are disrespecting the soil, which we're disrespecting the wonderful world that we've been surrounded with, in which we're disrespecting the glory of the animal. And then compare and contrast that for me with the idea of what you describe like a. Like a more beautiful, more respectful and even a more. We could argue, like a Christian farm and food system would look like.

Yeah, what a great question. All right, well, so, you know, the history, the history of farming, of agriculture, if you will, generally, is a history of environmental degradation as a result of farming and agriculture in the United States. We have less soil, we have less water, we have a lot of undrinkable water. You know, we have, what, 700 dead zones of riparian areas, Arguably, we have dust storms. And in Illinois and Iowa, you know, black snow from the soil dust and erosion. When it snows.

Really? There's black snow?

Well, yeah, I Mean, it's not black. Shortly after it snows, it turns black from the blowing dust. From the blowing soil? No, it's not black. It doesn't come down black. But the top turns black pretty quickly with the blowing soil. My point is that our, our relationship, our.

Balance sheet with the ecology tends to go backwards as a result of what we've done. And I mean on our farm, and I talk about this in the book on our farm, I've seen it so firsthand. We're in the Shenandoah Valley here, which has been actively farmed arguably since about 1740, something like that. And over those first 150 years, 200 years since that time, depending on what archaeologists you talk to, anywhere from 3 and 5ft of topsoil have washed off of our fields into the Chesapeake Bay. And we've got these exposed. We've got rocks out on the hillsides those used to be covered with soil. And then we've got deep gullies and we have, you know, we had them and still have them. They're not all completely full yet. Gullies where we've just got these huge erosion places. And, you know, I asked the question. Well, we say it's God's stuff, right? I mean, we say the earth is the Lord's, the fullness thereof. I mean, we say that all this is God's stuff. Well, if you were God and you. And you had made this and all this soil and plants and animals and everything, and you saw, you know, the erosion. Well, let's just stay with soil for a minute. And you saw the level of erosion where, you know, like right now, what is it? A bushel of corn costs five bushels of soil. Something like that. How would you feel about your property? About what? About your stuff? You know, would you, would you abide somebody treating your stuff that way? Ask in business terms, you know, what's God's return on investment? The opposite of this is he made a sun. The sun up in the sun up in the sky shines down and it's supposed to be turned by photosynthesis into biomass. And this, of course, you know, converts into sugars and carbon and material to feed the earthworms and the actinomycetes in the soil and decompose and actually build soil. You know, soil doesn't deepen. It upens from the decomposing vegetation, manure and all that stuff on the soil surface. So God's. The plan was that the earth was supposed to gain weight all the time. That soil was supposed to get deeper and richer and thicker and more fertile and built. That was the plan.

You know, even after the fall of the Garden of Eden, that was still the plan. Now, there were going to be brambles and thistles and other things, but the plan was still that this solar ball up in the sky was going to drive a biomass accumulation soil building program on the Earth. And so on our farm, what we've devoted our lives to is not, well, how can we.

Turn nature's capital, if you will, into cash the fastest by wearing out the soil, but rather, how can we build soil, how can we make more soil so that when we leave our pilgrimage behind our footsteps, we actually have more fertility, more earthworms, more soil than was here when we came. That's a very different picture. And the fact that on our farm, which before we came in 1961, was owned over 200 years by a collection of Protestants from the early Germans, probably Lutherans and Episcopalians, and then the Presbyterians and the Methodists and all this, the fact that it was owned all this time by people who dutifully put their money in the offering plate that was gained by destroying the land and turning the soil into money without regard to the erosion and the gullies and the degradation that was happening is. That's pretty profound, actually. You know, and it should. It should give us. It should give us pause.

Now, there are some assumptions that you outline in the book that especially that the conservative religious right makes when talking about progress in agriculture and some of the things that we accept as being really, really great parts of modern agriculture. Like, for example, annual corn is more productive than perennial prairie or chemical farming is necessary to feed the world. Or you also say another assumption is wildlife proliferation and human dominion are incompatible and herbivores are interesting but inefficient, plants are more productive than animals, and ecosystems do not need animals. You go into some of those things in the book and I'm just curious if you could talk about some of those assumptions and what's actually wrong with some of those assumptions that are made right now and that we kind of accept a status quo in modern agriculture.

Yeah, well, that's a great big question.

Yeah, let's talk about annuals versus perennials, for example. It's a perfect example.

Yeah, annuals versus, yeah, perennials. You know, the, you know, grain. Annual grain has been the holy grail of agriculture for a long, long time. Grain has been extremely expensive, extremely hard to grow because tillage was difficult and it was laborious. And so grain has always been the holy Grail, you know, it's man, if you can grow grain, you've really got something.

And so our culture was no different. And so we just don't appreciate the.

Perennial as an alternative. But the fact is that with modern electric fencing and management and water lines, so that we can actually steer the herbivores, these pruners around the landscape as precisely as a set of pruning shears or a zero turn mower on a golf course can basically hook up steering wheel, an accelerator and a brake on that four legged pruning critter. For the first time in human history, we can now actually steer those pruners across the landscape. And perennials, grasses, perennial forbs, perennial legumes, those are actually more productive per square yard per acre than an acre of corn for an herbivore. Now, not for an omnivore. Omnivores need a higher octane. But you know, the herbivore, which was of course the mainstay of ancient cultures.

As opposed to for example chickens and pigs which were kind of salvage, they were salvagers around the sides. Whether it was salvaging fallen acorns and mast in the woods for pigs or you know, crickets and grasshoppers and kitchen scraps for chicken, they were kind of salvaged. But the mainstay was the herbivore, the sheep, the goat, the camel, the yak, the cow, you know, that was it. And those all ate grasses because grasses are actually more productive over time and actually build soil. Annuals don't build soil.

Right. Annuals annuals being like corn, soybeans, sugar cane, cotton, wheat, rice, everything that we subsidize as taxpayers, those are all annuals. And those basically result in a huge amount of soil abuse.

And they're not as great for the environment versus some of these perennials like trees and grass and asparagus and wild plants and a lot of these things that you think we should be having a big focus on farming instead.

Yes, yes. And the biggest one being grass, grass for herbivores and just you know, shut down the feedlots and you know, honestly, if we, if we really wanted to eat ecologically, you know, we would eat less chicken and more grass. Finished beef, I mean that's, or lamb.

That'S the protein that doesn't require any tillage. I mean, soybeans require some sort of tillage. I mean that's an annual and it's a, it's a soil depleter as opposed to a soil builder like a perennial.

Well, the problem is though, because I mean, you Talk about this in your book. If we did that, it would flip all the power and the position, the prestige of the industrial food system on its head and all the big boys would be bucked off and the minority weirdos would be sitting in the saddle, as you say. So, yeah, I mean, that's the tricky part, is an uphill battle. And that's what I like about some of the things you talk about in the book, Joel, is you kind of get down on the community level. And even though I think a lot of people listening in are familiar with this concept of things like community gardens and maybe going through your local community supported agriculture or your local farmers market to buy food instead of supporting a lot of big agriculture and big farms, like buying your vegetables at the grocery store instead of buying them at the local farmer's market or from a local farmer. What I'm interested in is the part in the book where you get into even the use of actual churches. You talk about, for example, how an actual church could be used to hydrate the landscape.

Explain to me how we could use all these churches we see all over the place in just about every neighborhood. What could we be doing differently with those, aside from just considering the. What's spread out on the church potluck table a little bit more carefully?

Sure. Well, you know, churches do own a lot of land and a lot of roof space. And so how do you hydrate the landscape? Well, what you do is you try to keep the raindrops as close to where they fall for as long as possible. The longer, wherever a raindrop falls, the longer you can keep it there and not have it head downhill, the more that raindrop can be used over and over and over as it goes downhill. And so the whole idea of harvesting roof water from our church buildings and houses and installing cisterns so that the rainwater stays there and doesn't go downstream to create more flooding and reduces the storm drawers, storm drains, and all that stuff.

We can put gray water systems, churches could put gray water systems in so that they're not using potable water in their toilets and so that the dishwater down in the kitchen is cycled back through the toilets. You can drop your water consumption by almost half. And not to mention the whole idea of landscape swales and all sorts of neat little pond techniques to create terraces and slow water down in order to increase infiltration and increase long term use. One of the beauties of this kind of thinking is that it increases the commons.

Christians, at least in the circles that I run in.

I never hear Christians using the word commons. That's what you hear at Sierra Club meetings and nature conservancy meetings.

Commons.

The commons, yeah, the commons. You know, that's the word of kind of greeny weenies.

And the faith community kind of views the commons as something to exploit. God put it here for us to use.

And so the idea of actually increasing the commons so that a community actually has more water, more water than it had.

Than it had in a static state, that's where we bring our mechanical ability and intellectual capacity as God's servants and stewards to the landscape. I would even suggest that.

The notion that.

We can't touch the landscape because however.

All the landscape fell together after whatever, the last flood or the last earthquake or volcano or the hand of God or whatever, however the landscape fell together is only the best way. We can't put a pond or we can't make a swale, we can't make a diverse.

Is nonsense. This is part of bringing, this is part of participatory ecology. To bring our intellectual capacity and mechanical ability to the landscape, to actually bring redemptive capacity to it so that it holds more water than it did before we came, so that it has more soil than it did before we came. I mean, that's, that's all about return on investment for God's ownership as far as I'm concerned.

Hey, I want to interrupt today's show to tell you about one of the favorite little boxes that gets delivered to my house each week.

It's this company called Blue Apron.

So what they do is they source all their seafood sustainably. They get their beef, their chicken and pork from responsibly raised animals. Their produce is sourced from farms that practice regenerative farming. They take all this stuff, they produce.

These amazing recipes like shrimp marinara with.

Spinach and parsley, maple gravy covered pork chops with stewed collard greens and sweet potatoes and spiced cauliflower with jasmine rice and cilantro yogurt sauce is what's going to be showing up at my home tonight. I can cook this in like 20, 30 minutes using their little ingredient cards. Even my wife's not home to hold my hand. I can do it. My kids can do it. My nine year old boys cook these meals. It's less than ten bucks per person per meal. It comes with a freshness guarantee. Step by step, easy to follow recipe card, Blue Apron fricking rocks.

And you get your first three meals.

Free with free shipping. You just go to Blueapron dot Com. You guessed it, Ben. Blueapron.com Ben and you get your first three meals free. So just like eat for free this week. Go to blueapron.com Ben this podcast is also brought to you by ZipRecruiter.

So if you're in need of some.

Good talent for your business and you.

Don'T want to get lost in this.

Huge paper stack full of resumes sitting on your desk. Who even uses a resume these days anyways? I don't know. I just send people my LinkedIn profile file. Not that I'm constantly searching for a job. But either way, what ZipRecruiter does is they make hiring so much easier because they have this special dashboard where you can post your job to over a hundred of the web's leading job boards.

With just one click.

Then they put their smart matching technology to work, which means they notify qualified candidates about your job within literally minutes after you post. So 80% of people who post on Zipper Recruiter get a quality candidate through the site in just one day. That's why they call it ZipRecruiter. The smartest way to hire. Smartest way to hire. So if you're Smart, you use ZipRecruiter. If you're dumb, you'll get a huge stack of resumes on your desk. You make the decision. Green pill, red pill. Anyways, if you want the green pill, just go to ziprecruiter.com green as in greenfield. Ziprecruiter.com green and that will let you try ZipRecruiter for not three, not two, not one dollar, but count them free. Ziprecruiter.com Green Check it out and get your hiring on.

What are some other ways we could use church property? I mean, like, it can, like, could we do gardens? Could we do some type of, like a. Like a. A vertical gardening set up? What are some other examples that you've thought of as a way that we could make a bigger difference in our communities as far as feeding our communities with the way we have our churches set up?

Yeah. Well, we could certainly build ponds and things like that on church farms. We could certainly make gardens there.

We could try to PA Yeomans, the Australian water guru, said we should strive to achieve zero runoff. Now, some church properties are pretty good size, and so when you think about zero surface runoff.

There'S a million ways. I mean, you can certainly do.

Imagine under the eaves of a building.

You can have a hugelkultur bed. Hugelkultur is a German idea where you Use wood and you cover it with soil and you can grow things. And so you take advantage of water places where water runs, places where there's excess water, and you build into them. Catchments. Whether it's a sunken catchment like a pond, or whether it's.

A windrow, a spongy windrow, either one will hold a lot more water. Goodness. You can make a pond and float gardens on it on a raft. Certainly anything that increases the organic matter will reduce surface runoff. I mean, all you got to do is increase organic matter 1% and you've just saved, you've just increased water holding capacity. 25,000 gallons per acre. That's a lot of water. And so.

Dumping, instead of using chemical fertilizer.

Using compost, for example, as the lawn soil amendment.

Yeah. It is interesting how you get into this fact that we have these giant, many, many churches on their landscape, for example, giant fertilized lawns that are full of fertilizer and weed killer and lawnmowers versus gardens that could be feeding the poor or water ponds that we could be using to collect water and create this zero runoff type of situation that you're talking about. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that, that we could do, you know, in, in addition to, you know, harvesting sweet potatoes or, or you know, potatoes from, from a local farmer and you know, getting our hands on some perennial crops and having those be the feature of something like a church potluck vs. Fritos and cookies and, and cakes and you know, and, and casseroles that use all these GMO foods and basically support all the grain and the wheat and the soybeans that you talk about.

Actually intensive gardening, including multi stage gardening like vines up above and shade tolerant things underneath. This whole intensive gardening, it simply uses a lot more moisture than just a typical lawn, simply by creating gardens with succulent plants that are, that are actively tended. That alone is a way to convert the raindrops that fall on that church property into something more useful than lawn clippings.

Yep. Yeah.

And look, I don't think it's a sin to have a little corner of lawn. So you can have a volleyball court or a badminton net or you know, play some croquet or whatever. But I mean, do we really need.

Do we really need three and four acre lawns out there? Just imagine what it would do to the emotional equity of a church if they converted a healthy portion of that into gardens and then started using that for families that were struggling in the church. Start at home and turn the kitchen into a cannery, you know, and actually create.

An integrated visceral.

Ecology and economy within the faith group. I mean, anybody that did that would make the front page of the next week's paper.

And the way that you talk about it in the book is it makes sense from a community standpoint as well. I mean, you say the more community feeds itself from the bounty of its own proximate resources, the more vibrant and stable that community is going to be. So basically, if we set things up so that we are developing community that's able to feed itself, and if we, for example, take all these churches sprinkled all over every single neighborhood and turn them into these places where we can grow food and we can harvest water and we can even produce energy. I mean, look at even the potential for the rooftop of every church to become some kind of a solarium or something like that. I mean, you all of a sudden are making a lot of change in a community. Now. One of the things, though, that you talk about in the book that I think is kind of controversial is this idea of GMOs for you as a Christian, looking at this from the standpoint of dominion over the planet, that type of thing, and genetic alteration of foods. Where do you stand on genetically modified organization organisms, Joel?

Well, as the old, as the Snuffy Smith cartoon says, you know, I'm agin it.

Gmo. The problem with GMO is that it violates, or maybe violates is not the right word.

It hurdles all the barriers that God's design put in to make sure that it didn't happen.

About the only thing that cross speciates in nature.

Is a horse and a donkey and it makes a mule, which interestingly enough, is sterile. It's almost like God says, you can go that far, but no more. And so this whole GMO thing where you actually override the sexual plumbing, the genetic makeup, the DNA, to actually create completely new life forms that are combinations of things that would never be able to procreate by themselves.

Is a big problem. I mean, in Genesis, God set down a couple patterns. He says, I'm going to make all these plants. They're going to bear seed, and they're going to bear seed after their kind. And if you look up after their kind in a, in a concordance, you'll see it mentioned numerous times. The whole typing of kind from male and female to species, kind to righteous and unrighteous. I mean, there's a. In Isaiah, it talks about standing on the wall, blowing with a certain sound from a trumpet, not with an uncertain sound. That's the same idea of an equivocating sound. And so, you know, God is. He's interested in kinds.

And so in Genesis, when he made the creation, he set it up so the plants would make seed, they'd make it after their own kind. And in gmo, not only do a lot of the plants not even make seed, but they are viable seed. They certainly don't make it after their own kind. And so it's an abrogation of both of those Genesis kind of boundaries, or rules, if you will, for life.

And you're not talking about selective breeding of plants, because I know the tomato, for example, we've made through specific breeding patterns. What you're talking about is actually genetically modifying by, for example, inserting a sterilizing gene.

Or selectively inserting genetic material into a plant that blasts the DNA with gene cannons. That's what you're talking about.

Yeah, inserting.

A nightshade DNA. Pepper plants and tomato plants are in the nightshade family nightshade into a salmon, a fish. That's what I'm talking about. No. And that's when people laugh at me and say, oh, come on. This is. Is just all part of genetic selection, like we've been doing forever. This is Mendel's peas all over again. It's not Mendel's peas. Mendel's peas were peas on peas. He wasn't putting corn and pigs on peas. He was putting peas on peas.

Jacob, in the Old Testament, we still don't actually understand all that was going on there with the speckled and spotted sheep. But he was basically hybridizing. He was breeding up a flock of sheep that were stronger and better than his father in law Laban's. And this is just good animal husbandry. All of us that do animal husbandry do this or plant or anything else. This is part of what creative human intellectual capacity brings to our living world is this. That's just good stewardship selection. You select the good ones. But GMO is. It overrides all the protective, all the protective things to maintain similar kinds and speciation. So it doesn't all just become one great big hodgepodge of centaurs and.

Half horse, half people and half tomatoes, half watermelons. I mean, the whole protection here is this kindness.

So it sounds to me like what you're saying is if we can show that gmo, and I know you've got a little bit of evidence in your book about the link between GMO and, for example, like leaky gut and food allergies. And if we can say that it's going to cause harm to a human or it's actually harming that food or that animal by, for example, rendering it sterile, then it probably is not something that would fall into the ethical category.

Of something we should be doing to the planet.

That's exactly right. And it certainly doesn't fall into God's parameters of patterns of life as established. And again, I'm quick in the book and I say it several times, I don't have all the answers. And I'm not trying to put myself up as some sort of a cult leader or anything like that. I'm trying to at least get the faith community to think about these things. The problem is, in the average church, if you dare to question, should we have, you know, styrofoam plates at the potluck or should we have, you know, Kentucky Fried Chicken at the potluck? If you dare to even ask the question.

You know, you get this kind of disdainful look like, where'd you come from, you tree hugging, cosmic worshiping, nirvana greenie weenie? You know, are you one of them? And we can't even have a conversation because to mention that brands you as some sort of a raving earth nut.

And what you're saying is we should instead, like at the average, again, not to kick the church potluck horse to death, but we should be asking who cooked this food and where did the potatoes come from? And do you, you know, the farmer who grew the chicken? And was this particular dish created in a format that respects animals and that respects agriculture and that respects soil versus did we just buy this because it was convenient at the grocery store without giving so much of a thought as to whether or not it actually is essentially causing folks to abuse creation?

Yeah, exactly. You said it extremely well. And you know, Michael Pollan, writing in Omnivore's Dilemma, used the term. He said, we actually eat thoughtlessly. And boy, the longer I live, the more I realize that. Just nailed it. We eat thoughtlessly. Now, let me, you know, as a Christian, would you read thoughtlessly? No. There are some things you read and some things you wouldn't read, like pornography. Things like, well, I guess you don't read it, you look at it. But anyway, you know what I'm saying, there are entertainment.

I don't know if you've ever read Shades of Grey, Shades of Gray, you can read it too.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. My point is that is there anything else in life that we would say it's fine to be thoughtless toward that. Thoughtless toward entertainment, thoughtless toward recreation, thoughtless toward. Toward education. Thought. No thought was toward selecting a pastor or doctrine or music. Okay?

We view all these things as under this kind of biblical moral mandate of thoughtfulness. And Paul tells us to wrestle. Wrestle with truth and let these things be. But, boy, when it comes to food, when it comes to food, that's. That's in some sort of a segregated category over here. That is some sort of an amoral dimension in our life. And yet.

Look how much food is referenced in the scripture. I mean, even the sacrament of the Last Supper, communion.

Is through food. And Paul says, I wanted you to eat meat, but you're still on milk. I mean, the whole physical spiritual integration in the Bible is just profound if you're looking for it, including farming and spirituality. Now, realize, you know, the Israelites were shepherding. They were an agrarian culture. And we could even argue, well, maybe there's a reason for that. Maybe that gave a lot more, you know, good grist for Jesus, parable mill, if you will. If they had been simply. Of course, Jesus was a carpenter. He was not a shepherd. So, you know, they had craft and all that stuff. I mean, they had a whole culture. But what I'm getting at is that this segregation we have in our minds, this compartmentalization, that there are these. This whole realm of our human existence that has an amoral nobody cares written over it. That's an extremely dangerous place to put something in the Christian life.

Yeah, I hear you. Tell me a little bit about your son Daniel and this project that he did with the 4H. Because you talk about, you know, farming with faith versus farming with fear. And I think this story is kind of a perfect example to kind of. Kind of bring together some of the concepts that you lay out in this.

Part of the book about faith versus fear.

You tell a story about your son Daniel when he was 13 and he took his first 4H illustrated talk to the senior contest at VTech.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. He was down at the state. He took his first. First 4H presentation at the state. I think it was titled Symbiosis and Synergy in the Rabbitry or something like that. And these four, you know.

Veterinarians were the. I'm sorry, three. Three veterinarians were the judges of this. He was in the animal. He was in the livestock.

Part of the competition. And he talked about the chickens, the chickens underneath the rabbits, and the whole. We have a rack in house rabbit Chickens, combination of permaculture stacking kind of idea.

What is that? What's the permaculture stacking idea?

Yeah. Well, what that is is that rather than having a rabbitry and a chicken house, we combine them so the rabbits are up above, the chickens are underneath. And so as the rabbits drop stuff down, we have deep carbon on the. On the floor there, litter. And as the rabbits urinate and poop and of course, the rabbits get some forage and hay and stuff along and they drop those down, the chickens are underneath, and they're scratching through that and aerating it. So it's composting. And so the whole place just smells beautiful, like humus, you know, Just a very wonderful odor. There's. And the rabbits are healthier. The chickens get to enjoy the extra bugs that the rabbit urine and manure is helping to create underneath. It's a very hospitable environment because in the rabbit droppings, they get composted by the chickens with their scratching, eliminate their pathogenicity through the composting process. So the point is that both the rabbits and the chickens benefit from each other's proximity and the things that both of them bring to the table. And so he does this little speech, illustrated talk. He had posters and stuff on this. And of course, when he got done.

The vet professors just couldn't stand it because they're coming from this very rigid, linear, segregated, compartmentalized idea where we, you know, we never mix animals. I mean, we have the chickens over here, the cows over here, the pigs over here, and the rabbits over here. We never mix them. And so one of them, during question and answer, after Daniel was done, they had to ask a few questions. And they're usually, you know, pretty softball questions. I mean, these are kids at 13, you know, and so everybody. They're not there to bird dog somebody. This isn't defending your doctoral thesis. This is kids program. And this one he just couldn't stand. He said, well, aren't you concerned about.

Sickness and disease in here with all these different kinds of animals close? And Daniel never batted an eye. He just looked and he said, well, we've learned that. That most pathogens don't cross speciate. And those three guys sat back, you could see them.

They wanted to laugh, but they couldn't. They were just blown away and funny. Daniel and I hadn't even practiced this answer. We had done a little bit of role playing, so he'd be ready, but we certainly hadn't practiced a question like that.

And it just showed the, you know, I'm from Mars, you're from Pluto kind of thing. How big a gulf it was.

In this whole thinking, the paradigm, you know, between the segregated thinking versus the integrated and that our faith. We don't assume that wellness comes out of a bottle or a vaccination needle or anything like that. We assume that nature is fundamentally well, and if there's a sickness, we made it. And so by faith, by faith, we're saying the default position is proper immunological function.

Our mandate is to figure out how immunological function can be helped not from outside, but. But from inside using.

These ecological patterns that we see in nature, which is diversity and complex relationships among animals.

Not segregation, but integration.

And so what you're saying is that if we do integrate a lot of these natural farming concepts versus an industrial farming concept concept, we won't see what we'd see in industrial farm. Like, we don't see antimicrobial shoe dips and shower in, shower out, and plastic, you know, hazmat suits and whole industry paranoid about biosecurity because they're fearful, because they think the animals are fragile and the plants are fragile. And you, you have to have a refrigerator full of vaccines and pharmaceuticals on the farm. And what you're saying is that instead, you know, we, we have a farm that instead has faith in the fact that if we take care of the soil and we plant a lot of perennials versus annuals, and we treat the animals like they're actual real living beings that require respect and honor, that a pattern of immunity and a pattern of natural wellness will follow versus the pattern of sickness and illness and all the other issues that we see in a typical factory farming or industrial farming scenario.

Exactly. Which moves us from a place of fear and paranoia about, oh no, what's going to get sick tomorrow, oh no, I hope I have enough meds in the refrigerator. I mean, the average farmer is just almost paranoid about sickness and disease and all these things, whereas we don't even think about it. I mean, it happens so infrequently that.

We don't get up in the morning wondering, oh, no, wonder what's sick today. We don't even think about it. And that is a life.

That is just nice, solid faith. I mean, it's like the difference between, you know.

Wondering if Jesus loves me, you know, I mean, again, this whole paranoia about, where am I going when I die? Why am I here? What am I doing in this great identity problem. But for the believer, we know why we're here. We're to Honor God. We know where we're headed. We know that we're loved. And there's this wonderful, solid, resilient, strong foundation. And it's the foundation of faith as opposed to fear.

Yeah.

And for people listening in, whether you're somebody who goes to church or you don't, whether you're somebody who has a little farm or garden or you don't, there are things that you can do. When you're picking a box of cereal off the shelf, for example, and you decide to put it back because you realize that you're not quite sure how all that wheat and grain was grown and what it actually did to the soil. When you're grabbing your package of burger from the grocery store meat aisle, maybe you should give second thought as to how that cow or how that pig or how that chicken was actually raised and what it did to the planet and what it did to that animal. And when you start to make little decisions like this, they add up. You don't have to necessarily start off by planting a huge garden in your community and trying to feed everybody, but you should begin to think about how we can affect change at a community level and how every little decision that you make can affect change. And, you know, for those of you listening in, too.

What I would recommend, and this is what I would like for everyone to do, if you do happen to be someone who goes to church or someone who has a pastor or someone who is a member of some type of religious organization that's able to affect change of the community, I would encourage you to go out and grab this book and give it to whoever you identify as the leader in your community, because they need to read this book. I think every pastor should read this book. I think every youth group leader should read this book. I think every freaking Christian farmer should read this book. And I really think that anybody who cares about taking care of the planet the way that the planet was meant to be taken care of should give this book a read. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to link to Joel's Amazon page as well as this book over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com PigOneSoft pigs. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com PignesSofPigs and Joel, I have a question for you. You ever think about taking everything that you have in this book and just turn it into just like a frigging curriculum? You know that for six or eight or ten weeks, you could bring, like, a group at a church through or like a Community group through to learn some of these concepts.

Yes, actually the publisher, when they first saw the manuscript, that was their first request. But I was so, you know, I'm a farmer. I mean, I'm a farmer who writes. I'm not a writer who farms. And boy, you know, these books, they take time. I mean, you know, you don't just sit down in a couple of evenings and slap it out. I was so whatever. You know, it takes so much time and energy to get the book out that the thought of. Right at that point of creating a six to eight week like a Sunday school curriculum just was daunting. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. But absolutely, as interest increases, I'm doing my first big church workshop actually in Indianapolis this fall coming up. So as I do a little more of this, I think very possibly I could do something like that. And it would definitely add a little more.

Gravitas, if you will, to the idea just.

To facilitate the discussion. Because most people in the Christian community, I don't think we know the questions to ask. I don't think we know where to start because a lot of this is pretty foreign to us and.

We just don't know where to start.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Well, I mean, for me personally, this whole idea of stepping back and looking at things from a very big standpoint of optimizing not just the mind but also the body and most importantly the spirit, comes down to making choices that affect not only yourself, but also the, the planet and those around you. And this idea of living with conscientiousness and this idea of living with regard and mindfulness for what's going on around you, what's going on with the food that you're putting into your mouth and the grass and the water and everything else that you should be taking into consideration. It's sad that the people who should be doing this the most.

In my opinion, Christians who should believe in this country concept of honoring the planet the most are still ripping open bags of chips and Wonder Bread at the church potluck and spraying fertilizer on the church lawns and running the sprinklers willy nilly and not really caring for the planet in the way that it should be taken care of. And a big kudos to you, Joel, for writing a book that's going to give a lot of people, I think, a lot of pause about this, the choices they're making in that community. And again, even if you're not a Christian, for example, I still think this book is a fantastic one to read when it comes to gaining a perspective on how you really, truly should care not just for your body, but also for the planet, for your community, for those around you, and for the good old pig. So, Joel, thanks for coming on the thanks for coming on the show today and sharing all this stuff with us, man.

Been an honor, Ben. Thank you very much.

Well, folks, thanks for listening in. And again, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com PinGasOfPigs to grab Joel's book along with the show notes and to leave any comments or questions that you might have. And until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Joel Saladin signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.

Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.