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Chris Martenson: Welcome to another
ChrisMartenson.com podcast. I am of course Chris Martenson and today, we are
speaking with Joel Salatin, one of the most visible and influential leaders
in the organic food and sustainable farming movement. His family owns
and manages Polyface Farms which has been
featured prominently in such modern food movement masterworks as The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and the
documentary Food, Inc. - if you haven’t seen it it’s an incredible
eye opener, it was for me. Joel’s unconventional but highly
innovative farming practices are inspiring millions to increase their
nutritional and community resiliency by seeking out local sources of
chemical-free food raised using natural process-based farming practices. Joel,
I’m a huge fan of your work and the practices you advocate. I
apply a number of them in the management of my own small homestead in rural
Mass. It’s a real honor to be speaking with
you.
Joel Salatin: Thank you, it’s
an honor to be with you Chris.
Chris Martenson: Well
thanks. Could you please give our listeners a short background on what
you see as your mission, what its key tenets are and why what you are doing
is so important?
Joel Salatin: Sure. Well our
mission statement is to develop environmentally, emotionally and economically
enhanced food prototypes and duplicate their production throughout the
world. So its all about these food production prototypes that not only
are economically and environmentally beneficial but also have a social - we
say ‘emotional’ just so we can have three E’s - but
it’s a triple bottom line deal and wonderfully, if you get creative
enough, you don’t have to sacrifice the ecology in order to have a
profitable business and you don’t have to sacrifice profit in order to
have an ecological business. So the principles are relatively few, you
know it all backs up to biomimicry, for sure. In other words what we
want to do is take natural templates and draw a circle around them like a
pattern, cut them out and put them on our commercial farming landscape and
duplicate those natural patterns. So what are those natural
patterns? Well the things that have been regenerated and built soil for
centuries are not tillage and annuals, which of course are both things that
our culture worships. Rather, they are perennials, both trees and
forages and herbivores and periodic disturbance, whether by fire, mob grazing
or other disturbances that are created by predator type things. And then
rest periods. Rest periods for recuperation and to metabolize the disturbance
factor. So as soon as you start doing those kinds of things, that means
you are going to move the animals, they are not going to stay in one place,
its going to be primarily perennially based, so we are always looking at how can
we harvest acorns from the trees into pork for example. It’s going
to be perennial grasses, not annual grasses or grains. And its going to
be portable infrastructure, not permanent or non-portable infrastructure
which means all of the facilities, the shelters, the control things like
fences and things like that are all going to be light-weight,
gentle-footprinted, portable type things. The fertility is not going to
depend on things brought in from across the world but they are going to
depend on recycling solar-created biomass onsite, that’s the carbon
cycle. Sun makes the plants, the plants grow, the plants either get
eaten or decay and the decay feeds the soil life which makes more plants grow
and that carbon cycle moves in a cyclical pattern onsite not from
offsite. So there is always a heavy component of animals, perennials,
disturbance, rest, portability and real time carbon
cycling.
Chris Martenson: And so this,
you’ve been doing this for a while, and so you have measurable results
that the soil is being built and that you can do this profitably. I assume at
this point we can say it’s a success? You can farm this way and it
works?
Joel Salatin: [laugh] Oh,
unquestionably. Our family came here in 1961, which is 50 years ago. Bought
the most run-down, gullied, depleted, mined-out farm in the whole
area. In fact we measured the deepest gully was 16’ deep. And we
had so little soil we couldn’t even hold up electric fence
stakes. Dad poured concrete in old used car tires and then pushed a half
inch pipe, one straight up and down and one on a little bit of an angle and
my brother, who was a little bit older than I, we’d sit on the platform
on the tractor and heave these things
off as Dad drove slowly down the field. He’d come along and put
electric fence stakes in them because we didn’t have enough soil to
hold up electric fence stakes, and it doesn’t take much soil to hold up
electric fence stakes. That’s how we started and we could barely
handle ten cows. Today we usually handle 100 cows. All of those bare rock
places have several inches of soil over them and the gullies, we filled a lot
of the gullies in with silt that we dug out of bottoms to build ponds so we
have ponds built and the gullies filled in and arguably the most productive
farm in the whole area.
Chris Martenson: And so if this is
possible, how many people are following it and of the people who aren’t
adhering to these sorts of practices, what’s going on there? Why
aren’t they?
Joel Salatin: Well our neighbors
think we are bioterrorists. Because only a bioterrorist would run
chickens out in the field where they can commiserate with red wing blackbirds
and indigo buntings and take our diseases to the science-based types of
chicken houses and threaten the planet’s food supply with disease. So
not only are people not clamoring to do this but we are being demonized by
the mainstream agriculture community and it’s pretty serious, including
the food police who don’t like small scale backyard processing or
kitchens or anything like that, they want everything to go through a
multi-million dollar facility with chlorine and fumigants and a lot of toxic
sanitizers to sterilize everything. There are major, major differences
of opinion about what ‘proper food’ is. There is a big
difference between sanitation and sterilization. You and I don’t have
sterile insides: our insides have three trillion beings to take this food and
make it flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone and we better be thinking
about what that community wants. And that community is far from sterile. It’s
a very active bacterial, biological community. And so, we live in
strange days when Coca Cola, Twinkies and Coco Puffs are considered safe but
raw milk, compost-grown tomatoes and Aunt Matilda’s pickles are
considered hazardous substances.
Chris Martenson: There’s a lot to
be fighting here, what does the fight center around, is it just as simple as
profits at this point in time or is it frankly just easier to farm with the
other practices? Where do you draw the line on that?
Joel Salatin: Well we can start with
the philosophical difference that we think that food is fundamentally biological and
most of the culture thinks that food is primarily mechanical. And
that’s why we can pull DNA structure and genes from a pig and put some
in a pepper plant and some in a salmon and have a brand new life form,
that’s a parts-oriented thing, like pieces of an engine. But some
of us believe that life is fundamentally biological not mechanical; the
difference being that biological systems can heal, they have resiliency, and
they have a reason to be, a reason to exist that demands respect, I call it
the “pigness of the pig” and the “cowness of the
cow”. And when you disrespect that - for example when the USDA
took farmers like me to free dinners for 30 years to teach us the new science
based feeding of cattle with dead cows, we did not do it because we
didn’t like the USDA or because we were luddites or not progressive or
hated science, we didn’t do it because there was no pattern or template
in nature in which herbivores eat carrion. And so, 30 years later, there
is this big collective “Oops, maybe we shouldn’t otta done
that.” You know, as this mechanical approach toward life has
caught up to us with bovine spongiform encephalopathy. And in fact,
that’s exactly what has created, you know the E.coli, salmonella, all
these things are modern mutations and toxic proliferations that have become
mainstream with a mechanical view towards life. We’ve even
got research now going to try to isolate the porcine stress gene so we can
take that stress gene out of the pig and abuse him a little more aggressively
but at least he won’t be stressed about it. A culture that views
its life with that kind of conquistador, mechanical, disrespectful,
manipulative mentality will soon view its citizens the same way and other
cultures the same way.
Chris Martenson: So what’s the
end of that story if man, woman, humans set themselves apart from nature? And
we do that, when you gaze across the agricultural landscape, what kind of
damage are you seeing being done? Is it a one-way cul-de-sac that ends
in famine at some point or what is it that you see in these practices that
ultimately leads you to very, very strongly eschew
them?
Joel Salatin: Yes, well what we are
seeing is exactly what we are seeing right now. We are seeing childhood
leukemia, we are seeing gluten intolerance, I mean how many people did you
know 30 years ago that were intolerant to gluten in wheat?
Chris Martenson: None.
Joel Salatin: And part of
that’s because, we streamlined the harvesting so fast industrially that
the wheat never gets shocked and never gets any mold in it to break down some
of these enzymes that are real hard for our bodies to break down. And
so, you are seeing Type II diabetes, you are seeing obesity and we are just
seeing a proliferation of these chronic type things that are a result of
bushels of material that is not nutrient-dense or is not nutritionally-based
and its certainly isn’t food that we have been used to eating. Our
bodies, that three trillion member community in our insides, is not meant to
receive substances that you can’t pronounce or you can’t make in
your kitchen. Or that were grown with artificials. Sir Albert
Howard said in 1943 in his foundational work in agricultural testament that
when we use artificial manure (that’s what he called chemical
fertilizers) artificial manures for the soil, then they grow artificial
plants which then make artificial animals which then make artificial humans which
require artificials in order to keep us alive. And if that isn’t a
commentary on where we are today with the drug trade and the pharmaceutical
industry, I don’t know what is. In the last 35 years, our culture
has exchanged an 18% per capita expenditure on food and 9% on health care to
18% on health care and 9% on food. And I would suggest that it
doesn’t take a rocket scientist to think there might be a connection
between the inversion of those two
numbers.
Chris Martenson: Well, I mean certainly
anybody who has seen the obesity maps that I think the NIH has put out, they
are really quite impressive stretching from the ‘50’s to current
and just watching the obesity epidemic spread across - clearly that has to be
due to something, we might think food. One of the areas I’ve been
focused on for a while because I’m very focused on the energy sphere
and wondering how energy feeds into everything and, of course, it feeds into
our food system enormously and one area is in nutrient cycling. So if we
have our typical NPK - nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium - you know those
things are mined somewhere or manufactured and trucked and put in a field and
then something is grown and harvested and put on a plate and then it gets
flushed out to sea, never to be seen again in usable quantities. So,
this whole idea of nutrient cycling – but those are just the big ones -
there are micronutrients as well that are incredibly important. How does your
approach incorporate and deal with the nutrient cycling?
Joel Salatin: Well that’s a
great question. Well what stimulates the nutrient cycling is the onsite
biomass regeneration cycle. Not the least of which of course is the
earthworm community. You know it’s amazing that earthworms can
eat a pound of stuff in their front end and send it through their alimentary
canal, bring it out their back end, the same pound of stuff, and its like
three times the calcium, seven times the nitrogen, eleven times the
potassium, fourteen times the phosphorous, plus an elevating of all the whole
trace elements, boron, cobalt, copper, molybdenum - all those things are
increased. And what’s amazing is that nobody knows how that’s
done. It’s actually not concentrated, it’s actually acted on
by some sort of activity in the earthworm. Some bacteria for example,
are free living, they are not rhizomes like legume roots like alfalfa and
clover, they are free-living bacteria that will bring up to 100 lbs. of
nitrogen per acre per year out of the atmosphere and put it in the soil but
they only really become active at 4% organic matter and most of our soils are
not anywhere close to 4% organic matter anymore. They used to be, back when
the buffalo were here and perennial grasses, but they are not now. I
think it’s fascinating that we actually produced more nutrient density
in what is now the U.S. 600 years ago, than we actually do today, even with
all of our petroleum and everything, So the whole secret of the nutrient
cycling is to tap into the green material to capture more solar energy, put
it into green material that can de-compose and go into the soil, and the best
way to do that is with an herbivore - lamb, goat, cow - some sort of
herbivore, that is what I call the bio- mass accumulation re-start button to
prune that forage off and re-start the fast biomass accumulation
cycle. If you don’t have that, what you just have is the bio-mass
just goes into senescence and in senescence simply vaporizes the CO2 off into
the atmosphere and it doesn’t do anything any good. So it’s
the animal that recycles, that starts that whole fast metabolism cycle to
metabolize the solar energy into biomass through photosynthetic
activity.
Chris Martenson: I think you are
talking about something really radical here is that our own health is linked
to and part and parcel of the health of the world in which we live, I mean
its crazy talk right there don’t you think?
Joel Salatin: [laugh] Yes. But
that is the only way to only have a regenerative, sustainable
system. Our culture is a kind of product of the Greco, Roman, Western,
linear, reductionist, compartmentalized, fragmented system that ties parts
oriented thinking, in which nothing relates to anything else. And so we
study things by tearing them apart and not seeing how they fit into a whole.
And of course life isn’t like that. And you can’t extract
your living from the hydrology cycle, from the energy cycle, from the biomass
generation cycle, ultimately – what I always tell people is to realize,
it’s a profound thought - that everything that we see is completely and
utterly dependant on an unseen world of beings in the soil that never make it
to the page of a business plan or a bank statement. Nobody asks about this
trillion, multiply trillions and trillions of organisms that live in the soil
and yet, everyone of us is utterly and completely dependent on that
world. And yet we don’t even put it in the business plan as an
important part of what we are doing. We don’t think about it in the
shower in the morning when we are getting ready to go to work “Let’s
see, how are my activities today going to impact this soil web, this
miraculous, mystical, awesome, unseen world that runs all the plants, all the
animals, all the water cycle, all the nutrient cycling? What are my
activities today going to do to that?” We don’t even think about
that in the shower in the
morning.
Chris Martenson: Right, we’ve got
the U.N. projecting through their population studies – they have a
branch that has projected that by 2050 we are going to have to basically
double food output across the globe. You know, obviously our oceans are
pretty well tapped out and it turns out that a lot of the gains, the
productivity gains that we experienced in the so-called “green
revolution” - yes there were some neat variety tinkering in genetics
and stuff in there, but mostly that was irrigation and the application of the
artificial fertilizers and all of that. In your mind, can the type of
farming practices that you are talking about, can those be the gateway that
will allow us to actually increase our food production to levels that are
being talked about or is even that just silly talk at this point in time
– we are going to have to fine some other way to adjust
here?
Joel Salatin: Oh, there is no
question, absolutely no question, that these systems are far more
productive. Just to give you an example. On our farm, in our
county, one of the measures for pasture production is in cow days per
acre. In other words a ‘cow day’ is what one cow will eat in
a single day – that’s one cow day. And so in our county, the
average cow days per acre is currently 80 cow days per
acre. That’s what an acre of pasture does. On our farm, and I
already told you at the top of the program what our farm looked like 50 years
ago without a single chemical fertilizer and without planting a seed, we own
no plow and no disc, and in 50 years, we have moved this farm to average 400
cow days per acre – that’s five times the county
average. And so, the fact is, if Monsanto figured out a way to get 1%
increase in yields in something it would make the front page of the New
York Times. I’m telling you ways to double and triple production
without chemical fertilizer, without even planting anything and it
doesn’t make the obitituary page.
So yes, these systems work.
And the way they work is to go back to historically – well the way
nature built soils in the first place; which was with primarily herbivores.
So if you really want to eat on a low energy system, quit eating chicken and
quit eating so much pork and eat grass-finished beef because grass-finished
herbivore is the most nutrient dense substance that doesn’t require any
tillage. It fertilizes itself, and doesn’t require any
tillage. As soon as you take that herbivore and put it in a feedlot, on
an irrigated grain-based system, then it all breaks down from an energy
standpoint and, of course, that’s where a lot of the studies that
impugn livestock come from. But throughout the world, the great prairies and
the great soil building regions of the world, from the Serengetti in Africa
to the plains of America with buffalo to the Australian continent 200 years
ago that had 10 marsupial species to do the disturbance, all of those were
built with herbivores, disturbances, and rest and perennials. Those are
the four cornerstones of a system that works. The reason all
civilizations throughout history have been built around the herbivore, lamb,
goat or cow is because the herbivore is the only domestic animal that can
harvest non-tilled, non-planted material. Omnivores like chickens and
pigs require some sort of a grain component which then requires
tillage. And until cheap energy and cheap machinery, tillage was
extremely expensive. You know if you had to go out and walk all day with
a sharp stick behind an ox or a yak or a mule, you couldn’t stir very much
soil, you had to plant by throwing it out with your hand, then you had to
hand weed and you had to hand scythe, shock it up and bring it in to a hard
floor where you could beat it to separate the grain from the husk then you
had to take a crude wooden pitchfork and fling it up in the air in a breeze
to -I’m sorry flailing was the first one – this is
winnowing. To winnow out the chaff and at the end of the day you look on
the ground and “Oh we’ve got some grain here and now we are going
to try and store it in something away from the mice and the rats for a
year.” .. before the time of sheet metal and mesh
wire. Historically, grain was extremely expensive and hard come by which
is why poultry was only eaten by kings and poultry and pigs were only grown
enough to salvage the waste stream from the homestead. The main thing
was lamb, goat and cow which was the herbivore. That was the main thing
- or deer or bison or whatever - but the point is, that those herbivorous
creatures can do or are made to do very well without any tillage
whatsoever. And tillage has only actually been doable on a large, grand
scale just in the last
century.
Chris Martenson: I’m glad you
mentioned the energy portion of the cycle. At ChrisMartenson.com we spend a lot
of time on energy, we look at the food supply as being critically vulnerable
to the impact of peak oil’s arrival. You know after all fossil
fuel energy inputs vastly exceed the caloric output of most so-called modern
farms. So our view is you we cannot really increasingly use a limited
resource forever. Our view is that most people alive today will
experience a decline of oil firsthand, not meaning it runs out but we have
slightly less and less. And it’s a huge, huge implication behind
that. And we also focus on helping people develop personal resiliency,
starting with food: storing food, finding local suppliers, even growing at
least a small percentage of their calories so they can be connected to the
food supply more personally. What guidance are you offering to people,
to our listeners in terms of how they should be or might begin to think about
interacting with their food
supply?
Joel Salatin: Oh – such a
great question. It’s a broad span, I would say number one –
find your kitchen. I mean, a processed food is heavily packaged,
packaging is extremely expensive: it’s essentially stored for a long
time and it has a long distribution cycle. I mean fifteen hundred miles
per morsel is kind of the average. And so my first advice to
anybody, is buy unprocessed, raw, and fix it in your kitchen. That will
drop the energy footprint way, way, way down and as soon as we do that, then
of course, the next step is to either grow some or buy it locally. There
are thousands of high quality, nutrient-dense ecologically-encouraging farms
that are selling - from farmer’s markets to community supported
agriculture to on-arm stands to metropolitan buying clubs to retail
boutiques, whatever but there are plenty of these kinds of
things. Buying organic from a thousand miles away doesn’t get the
job done. It’s just as energy intensive as anything else and so we
want.. that’s part of this whole local food awareness.
Now, can a locality feed
itself? Absolutely, think about the amount of food, the kinds of food
that can be grown within 100 miles of you. And just think about going
down to the supermarket, walk through the isles and say, how much of this
could be grown with 100 miles? And in northern climes if we take off citrus
and coffee and tea and sugar, it can almost all be grown there. And so,
its arguable, I think this is a fascinating thing, its really arguable right
now, whether a culture which has incarcerated twice as many people in prisons
as it has farmers growing its food – whether a culture is that
disconnected from its ecological umbilical can even survive? So, I think
here again, we have to approach this from an integrated holistic
standpoint. If the common temptation is for you and I to say,
“Well you gotta do something, you gotta do something different, you
need to do this and that and the other.” And we fail to realize
that we are part of the issue. And none of the situation that
we’ve gotten ourselves into is a result of any one person’s doing
– it’s a collective accumulation of a new societal protocol, which
I would suggest is very historically abnormal. So first of all, find
your kitchen, then source your food locally, and then grow some
yourself. For example, to just show how disintegrated our thinking is,
we’ve got now for example, in New England we’ve got confinement
dairies who 20 years ago got environmental awards for taking taxpayer money
to put in manure lagoons as a manure management program; now they are getting
taxpayer sponsored money to cover those lagoons with rubber bladders to
capture the methane so they are getting little green environmental awards for
being green and capturing methane so they can run all of the expensive fans
and machinery and buildings and equipment that’s necessary in a
confinement dairy operation. What we need to be doing is shutting down
the confinement dairy operation, turning the herbivores back out on the
perennials, like they were meant to be, letting them self-harvest,
self-fertilize and shut down the entire concentrated animal feeding
operations, with all of its intendant energy requirements. Same thing
goes for example, for restaurants or let’s take a college that figures
out “let’s take all of our kitchen scraps and send them up the
road ten miles to the composing outfit” and then the dining services
coordinator gets a nice plaque and a little award for being green because now
they are composing their kitchen scraps. What we need to be doing is building
a little chicken house adjoining the back door of the kitchen so all the
kitchen scraps can go right out into the chickens, the chickens then can eat
that and produce eggs, now we don’t have to grow any grain, till the
grain - chickens resume their historically normal cycle which was the
homestead salvage operation to take all the kitchen scraps and whey scraps
and cheese scraps and all that and convert it into eggs. Now we don’t
even have to have concentrated animal feeding operations for chickens anymore
and the Humane Society can rejoice that we don’t have any battery egg
production. You don’t have to truck those eggs into the city, into the
college, and eggs go right to the dining services and the kitchen scraps go
out and it’s a beautiful, beautiful circle. That is the kind of
integration - you know we talk about windmills, and getting energy and stuff,
my goodness - if we would take, if we would take on every southern exposure
of every house and office building and school whatever, if we would just take
wire mesh or cattle panels and just tip up a frame and cover it with plastic
to make a simple solarium, 8’ out from the southern side of every
building we could virtually heat all the buildings without any energy and
grow our mesculen mix and shut down all the trucks bringing California
produce to New England over the wintertime. If all the diesel fuel being put through
refrigerated trucks to bring unseasonable produce to New England and Virginia
– I’ll call it the northern tier – if all that diesel fuel
was converted into plastic to make coop houses, season extensions and
solariums on the south side of buildings, we wouldn’t have to run any
of those trucks, we wouldn’t have to build any of those roads, we
wouldn’t have to use any of that energy to do that. And that
becomes, see, that’s an integrated holistic approach rather than some sort
of “I’m going to continue to eat my California-introduced
mesculen mix in February in New York City. Hang the system and let’s
figure out how to make more cheap
fuel.”
Chris Martenson: Just thinking about the
issues before us and maybe trying to find clever ways around it, I’m
personally shocked and sometimes dismayed at how far we still seem to need to
go. For instance in my local area, in Greenfield, Mass they are proposing
a bio-mass plant, it sounds all green and everything right? But its
going to require five or six hundred thousand tons of forest to be cut down,
trucked to the central location. And they are building it with the intent
that they need to do something with the waste heat so there is all this
piping that they are going to have to put in. Anybody who treats heat as
a ‘waste stream’ at this point in time, I don’t think
really deserves any green plaques, hasn’t really thought it through and
doesn’t understand much about what they are trying to
solve.
Joel Salatin: Yes, I couldn’t
agree with you more. Now, to be sure, I am certainly a friend of biomass and
I’m not interested in cutting down all the forest, but it is a very,
very renewable resource. In fact in Austria, I’m told that virtually
all of the urban homes are heated by wood pellets. So like here in the
U.S. where we have the propane or fuel oil truck that goes along and fuels
people’s fuel oil tanks and propane tanks. There the same kind of
truck goes along with a little auger in it and stops at your basement window
and augers your bin full of wood pellets and you know goes on down the street
to the next house. So you know, I absolutely think that biomass
certainly has a role to play and I think that we have created some real
problems by not cutting crooked and diseased trees and things like that. Our
national forests are in deplorable shape. The Yellowstone fires were caused
because of a no-cut policy. Well instead of having a no-cut policy,
let’s strategically cut but apply good sylvacultural practices and
there’s enough wood out there to supply everything. Anytime a
Scandinavian comes here for a visit – they just go into epileptic
seizures about how terribly inefficient Americans are with their forests. And
I couldn’t agree more. We’ve got a build-up of waste, of
junk wood oxidizing on the forest floor and that certainly needs to be used
and we need to cull and we need to weed our forests just like anything
else. But yes, unfortunately many of these things are, again, they are
so industrial scaled and so sized that they are not community
appropriate. When I think of energy, I think of
community-scaled. The thing is, in a given community, there might be a
creek with a lot of fall in it. Well whoever is on that creek can put in a
little Pelton wheel to run a hydro project. Maybe somebody else –
like us for example – we have hundreds of acres of really high-quality
well-growing trees on our farm, our forest. They need to be culled and
thinned and that sort of thing, maybe we could have a little steam engine.
And another neighbor with real good bottom land, maybe he wants to grow some
corn and run a little alcohol electric generation thing. Maybe somebody
else sits on a hilltop and has wind so he puts up a wind generator. The
point I’m making, is that when all of us plug into the grid, with what
we can offer, suddenly the community has power but its completely
decentralized, its autonomous to the community, and its and all the
facilities are at a scale that nests into the ecological womb of the
village. And that I think makes
sense.
Chris Martenson: It does, it makes a
lot of sense. I think we’ll get there, is my view. But I think
it’s going to require a bit of a crisis first for some reason. We seem
to be unable to get there on our own terms. So we will get there by some
other terms at some point.
Joel Salatin: Well, disturbance is
always a precursor to innovation. You never really have innovation until
you have a level of disturbance. And certainly expensive fuel is
becoming a societal disturbance right now. And you know if we would quit
trying to build empires around the world that would love us enough to
continue our flow of oil and keep all that money at home and let the fuel go
to wherever it needs to be, it would create a little more disturbance and
we’d maybe become a lot more clever about what we are doing. My
mechanic - and I’m sure you have heard this and I’ve collected
these kinds of clippings for my lifetime - says that even in the late
1960’s there was plenty of technology to build 100 mile per gallon
carburetors but the auto companies kept buying up these backyard entrepreneur
innovators, their patents and their products and these things never saw the
market. And I think it’s just absolutely unspeakable,
unconscionable, that we would have buried technology that would have allowed
us to quadruple our miles per gallon for that long. I think it’s
obscene.
Chris Martenson: Well there is a lot to
be said for these disruptions you are talking about, it’s our view that
perhaps some are coming up. Joel, I understand you have a book coming
out this fall. Is that right?
Joel Salatin: Yes that’s
correct. The title is Folks, This Ain’t Normal. And
it actually contains some of the things I’ve just been talking
about. When we talk about historical normalcy, high fuel prices and the
herbivore, the biomass cycle, all these kinds of things. This whole
century of cheap fuel, indiscriminate antibiotic use, the mechanics that went
along with it, unpronounceable food, and you know no chores for children
[laughs]. These are amazing times, including the whole food police thing
where you and I can’t just decide to eat what we want to
eat. These are all unprecedented trials in the history of civilization
and I think anybody under 50 today just can’t even fathom a time where
there were no TV dinners, no supermarkets, when we actually ate seasonally,
when 50% of all the vegetables were produced in backyard gardens, when homes
actually still had functioning larders - we don’t even use the term
larder today.
What we view today as normal
I argue is simply not normal. Just think about if you wanted to go to town
100 or 120 years ago, if you wanted to go to town you actually had to go out
and hook up a horse. That horse had to eat something, which means you
had to have a patch of grass somewhere to feed that horse which meant you had
to take care of some perennial in order to feed that horse in order to go to
town. And so you had, throughout history, you had these kinds of what I
call ‘inherent boundaries’ or brakes on how much a single human
could abuse the ecology. And today, during this period of cheap energy,
we’ve been able to extricate ourselves from that entire umbilical, if
you will, and just run willy-nilly as if there is no constraint or
restraint. And now we are starting to see some of the outcome of that
boundless, untied progression. And so the chances are, the way to bet,
is that in the future we are going to see more food localization, we are going
to see more energy localization, we are going to see more personal
responsibility in ecological lifestyle decisions because its going to be
forced on us to survive economically we are going to have to start taking
some accounting of these ecological principles. And so those are the
kind of themes and the arguments I’ve put in the book. There is a lot
of satire, lot of humor and the title is Folks, This Ain’t
Normal.
Chris Martenson: Great title, I get a
lot from the title alone. So if we were to summarize here: we have
basically a lot of unsustainable practices that just energetically
don’t make sense, maybe ecologically don’t make sense from a
sustainability standpoint. Obviously we’d love to be sustainable in
this world because I’d like to think in a thousand years, there will
still be people here doing wonderful things. And at the same time we
note that disruptions are the way things change and so anything that is
unsustainable, the definition is it will someday stop. Certainly there are
warning signs abundantly strewn about the landscape for anybody who cares to
look. A lot of people are, that’s the good news.
And the other good news that
I get from your message is that integrated approaches and integrated
understandings of how these pieces fit together are well within our grasp. In
fact there are working practices out there, your farm being an example, or
set of nested examples. So this is all something that is not beyond us.
We can do this but we are just going to have to start with the understanding
of where we are living today is: “folks, it ain’t
normal.”
Joel Salatin: Well said, well said,
I couldn’t agree more.
Chris Martenson: Well, Joel it’s
been a real pleasure talking to you and I want to think you for this
opportunity and wish you all the best.
Joel Salatin: Thank you Chris,
it’s been an honor to be with you. Thank you.
Chris Martenson: Goodbye.
Joel Salatin: Bye.
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