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[laughter]

What do I have to say for myself?

Man, oh man.

[music]

Our next speaker will be Joel Salatin,

who is a farmer, lecturer, and author.

He describes himself as an evangelical,

Christian, conservative,

environmentalist, lunatic farmer.

He's kind of the godfather, not of just homesteading,

but of sustainable farming

and a lot of these other practices

that he's put into play.

Which contradict this idea that the only way

that we could feed a large-scale population

is through industrial farming.

If it stinks or it looks ugly, it's probably not good farming.

Good farming should be aesthetically

and aromatically, sensually romantic.

Your approach to farming it's so natural and so normal.

And so, in my opinion, non-controversial.

We were branded Luddites and anti-progressives, anti-science.

It's never been like this. What happened?

Regulatory extortion, tyranny.

But yet, you were looked at

as some sort of a wild man out there.

A lunatic!

Woooooaaaeee!

Come on gals.

Woooooaaaeee!

[old country music]

What gets me up in the morning is knowing

that I can walk out that back door,

and I can step in to a physical expression

of God's abundance.

He lets me come alongside Him, as His hands and feet

and work in that tapestry of His grace and abundance.

That's cool.

How can I come alongside God's marvelous creation

and steward it and manage it

to give him a good return on investment?

That's our ministry.

Easter morning ice storm.

That was when we were in college.

Oh my...

There ya go! Look at that pretty girl.

[Teresa] yeah, back when i was skinny.

Oh my...

[Teresa] shoooooo.

Them was the days.

[Teresa] them was the days.

As far as our story here,

I guess I would back up to my grandfather, Frederick.

Always wanted to be a farmer.

He always aspired, but never did.

But he had a great big garden, compost pile, all this stuff.

And dad absolutely got that environmental bent from him.

Dad always from a little child, he wanted to farm.

Midwestern kid, no money, no land,

you know, what do you do? "I'll go to South America."

You know, land's cheap, open commerce,

there aren't very many bureaucrats around.

And in seven years, he saved up enough money

to be able to buy a thousand acre farm

in the highlands of Venezuela.

By that time he'd married mom and they had two of us kids.

But anyway, started farming.

And so the way it worked was

farmers would come into the town square.

You know, you got the banana man,

the pineapple man, the chicken guy.

And at that time, the indigenous chickens

all had snot, post-nasal drip, because it was so filthy.

You know, there were squat pots, open sewers.

And so when dad took our first chickens to the market...

They were dry. Because he kept them clean.

And in no time,

dad cornered the local chicken market.

Well, the other chicken growers

accused us of was witchcraft

and that we were practicing voodoo,

because that's the only way

you can have a chicken this clean.

In 1959, Venezuela had a junta,

change of government, anarchy.

When that happens, when there's a breakdown of

rule of law, it gives license for scores

to be settled that would not be

settled under more normal times.

We were driven out, basically the machine guns

came in the front doors, we fled the back door.

and we lost everything.

We left the country.

We arrived back in the U.S.

in the spring of 1961 on Easter Sunday.

And we looked at farms. and settled on the cheapest

gullied rock pile that was available.

Here, in Shenandoah Valley.

When we first moved here back in 1961,

the soil was like brick.

One gully was 16 feet deep. That's a lot of soil.

And there were large rock galls.

Where three to five feet of topsoil had washed off.

We didn't have enough soil to hold up electric fense stakes.

And electric fence stake is just, you know,

it just goes in the ground yay far,

it just a spike, you know.

We'll just dig down here.

Today, all of those areas have 12 inches of soil on them.

So what you wanna see is what we call "crumbles."

You wanna see this crumble.

It should be like, you know, a good chocolate cake.

It's the fluffiness, it's the air between.

If you go to a regular chemically fertilized farm

growing monocultures, soil will be really hard.

And I mean, it'll feel like brick.

You see, that's just soft, loamy, a lot of air in it.

One handful of healthy soil that has as many

beings in it as there are people on the face of the earth.

Think about that. Nine-billion living organisms in soil.

Right now, as smart as we are, we only have names

for 10% of all those beings in the soil.

90% are unnamed and we don't know what they do.

We know they're there, but we don't know what they do.

And so to come in like a bunch of swashbuckling

pirates and say, "Well, all it needs is

nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus.

All we need is, you know, stick some chemicals in it

and we'll grow stuff."

It completely dishonors the beauty,

the complexity of what this is.

You know, and these fields that could only handle

fifteen cows back in that day now handle one-hundred.

I mean, I'm not bragging.

I'm simply paying humble homage to...

This is not a scarcity planet. It's an abundance planet.

And it's our responsibility to use our mechanical

ability, you know, opposing thumbs,

and our intellectual capacity, not as conquistadors,

but as redemptive healers.

You know, starting over with nothing

and on a piece of incredibly abused land,

it wasn't easy, and he [dad] had

every consultant come in.

And every consultant was, "plant corn."

"Borrow more money."

"Build silos."

"Put in a feed lot."

"Borrow more money."

"Buy chemicals."

And a lot of people don't realize that there was

a real battle in this country post-World War II.

Whether we would go the chemical approach...

The chemical preparations are used to kill

insects and to change the growth of plants.

Or I'm going to call it the "carbon approach."

When the compost is ready for use,

it is deposited on the alfalfa field.

Obviously, we know which side won,

the chemical approach won.

But he saw the chemical approach

as being like a drug addiction.

It becomes more and more expensive.

You got to use more and more of it.

He saw the dependency, the dependency on

multinational corporations for fertilizer,

the dependency for energy,

the dependency for equipment.

I mean, we certainly saw it

when Putin invaded Ukraine, you know, here most recently.

Fertilizer went up 400%

because most of it comes from Russia.

The very notion that a farmer has to be dependent

on something on the other side of the world

in order to maintain soil, not only is it incorrect,

it doesn't make intuitive sense that God would set this up

so that in order for me to have healthy soil,

I'm dependent on, you know, on Vladimir Putin.

He saw that dependency as a real economic problem.

So he eschewed all of that professional advice

and took a job in town.

Mom then eventually took a job.

and those off-farm jobs pay the mortgage.

And we basically, for the first twenty years,

had essentially a glorified homestead.

[oldie music]

Didn't really sell much.

You know, but we had a couple milk cows,

had a big garden.

We were canning and eating our own food.

You know, we grew up with our church friends

being a bunch of straight-laced

they go to, you know, when McDonald's came in,

they went to McDonald's. And we didn't.

And instead, we're drinking

"tiger's milk" from Adelle Davis.

Our church friends, they'd ride dad, you know,

and call it, "Hey, is that what they're drinking,

that panther puke again?" They didn't call it tiger milk.

I have older brother, younger sister,

neither of them was interested in the farm.

I was the only one that really liked the farm.

And um...

I started my flock of chickens when I was ten.

But it was a hotbed for experiments

and dad was constantly experimenting.

One of the earliest things that I remember.

It was a Sunday afternoon, we all got in the car.

We've visited a farmer who had

portable shelters out in the field.

All I remember coming home was dad basically levitating

of the idea of mobile infrastructure.

"Why! You don't have to build a barn.

If you don't like it here, you can put it over here!"

So he built a portable shelter to milk cows in.

He built a portable shade-mobile for the cows to be under.

And then, you know, composting

and then the mobile infrastructure

and seeing how confining animals

and moving them along the pasture,

you know, increased the fertility.

So this is the Egg-mobile,

and it follows the cows.

So the cows were here about three, four days ago,

and the chickens follow the cows,

and the chickens then scratch through these cow patties.

They spread out the cow patties so it covers more ground,

and they eat the fly larva

and parasites and things like that,

and act as a biological sanitizer behind the cows.

This is one of the most symbiotic relationships

in nature is the bird-herbivore relationship.

So all we're doing is we're mimicking that

pattern and that keeps the cows healthy

and it makes a wonderful wonderful egg.

And the chickens then are doing that work instead

of us having to put the cows through

the corral and shoot them up with things that

make the meat so bad it kills all the bugs.

It is working within a framework like in Isaiah

where God says, "I am for you."

He says that over and over again. "I am for you.

I am for you. I'm not against you."

If you go to the average farm conference,

90% of the conference is about disease

and pests and sickness.

It's as if nature has it out for me!

And I suggest no.

Alright, now we're going to the cows.

We move the cows every day to a new paddock.

And if it's done well, it actually stimulates production

just like pruning an orchard or a vineyard.

The way God set this up, there are kind of three

things that wild herbivore herds exhibit,

and that is they're constantly moving,

they're mobbed up for predator protection,

and then they're mowing, they're pruning, okay?

Moving, mobbing, mowing.

Those are the three principles.

The problem is that 95% of the

domestic herbivores on the planet violate at least one,

and many of them, all three of those three "M's."

They're not moving, they're not mobbing,

and they're not mowing. They're in a feedlot,

and when you violate moving, mobbing, mowing,

you take something that is a beautiful,

synergistic, soil-growing,

abundance-encouraging thing,

an asset, and turn into a liability.

And so we move the cows every day to a new paddock,

and this keeps that grass in that rapid growth cycle.

So that at the end of the day, in Augusta County,

our average is 80 cow days per acre.

A cow day is what one cow will eat in a day.

So an acre will support one cow for 80 days a year

or 80 cows for one day a year.

And here we average about 400 cow days per acre.

We haven't bought a bag of chemical fertilizer

and we haven't planted a seed in sixty years.

As we stand here, there are tons of different plants.

I mean, here's an Onion,

Fescue,

Orchard Grass,

White Clover,

Dandelion,

Narrow Leaf Plantain,

a Morning Glory vine,

Wide Leaf Plantain,

Chicory coming up right here,

a Cheatgrass here,

this is Bluegrass,

Here's just the beginning of a

Queen Anne's lace coming, wild carrot.

I'm not sure what that is.

There's a little Posy.

So each one of these plants concentrates a

different kind of enzyme,

different vitamins, different minerals.

The single thing that they found in beef,

for example, that defines nutrient density

is how much variety of plants did the cow take in.

And this kind of grazing stimulates diversity.

It's not a monoculture of just one kind of plant.

In the industry, there's one goal,

faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper.

That has nothing to do with nutritional quality,

with preserving soil, preserving water.

It's not about preserving

acres for future generations.

And below the ground, the roots

mimic what's above the ground.

And so if you let the plant get some length to it,

then it also makes great big long roots.

And so then you're more drought resistant,

you start building organic matter,

all sorts of things.

In our time here, we've gone from 1% organic matter

to 8% organic matter.

And every 1% increase in organic matter increases

water retention by 20,000 gallons per acre.

So we've gone 7%, which is 140,000 gallons of

water per acre that we can hold now today

that we couldn't hold in 1961.

Not only does this feed the world,

it's the only system that can.

Our county average is 80 cow days per acre.

We're averaging almost 400 cow days per acre.

That's five times.

Just be real conservative and say three times.

What if the neighbor did this

and had three times to as many cows?

What if our whole county, what if our whole state?

The fact is there is so much more

abundance here than we can imagine.

The agra-industrial complex views

our resource base from a view of scarcity

that we're running out.

"Population growth and climate change

thats pushing down the productivity that we have

on those farms today.

So this is quite alarming."

Even a reluctant partner that I've got to get you

in a half Nelson and I'm going to

make you grow cherries or

apples or cows or whatever it is.

When actually God has given us.

A loving partner here of abundance that we just

need to caress in the right places.

That's all.

It is appreciating the order

and the pattern that God set up.

and leveraging it to its full potential.

rather than, either dismissing it or adulterating it.

Smithsonian did a working landscape study here.

There were 29 sites and we were the only one

where they were able to find all eight species of

bumblebees known to exist in Virginia.

And I think it's because by moving them like this,

you get a vegetative mosaic, so there's

always something in blossom.

How can I come alongside God's marvelous creation?

And steward it and manage it.

To give Him a good return on investment.

So that what I give back to God as a result of my

living here is more soil,

more health,

more pollinators,

more wildlife,

more earthworms.

That's a return on investment.

It's a pretty nice office to work in.

[laughter]

Alright, it's probably time to go to breakfast.

[laughter]

I haven't seen that.

This thing's been in ponds and cow troughs and it

just keeps on ticking man.

You put it in a bag of rice, you know, and you

dry it out and then baby she just keeps on going.

So my earliest memories as long as I can remember,

I wanted to be a full-time farmer.

I worked off the farm for two and a half years

after college at the local

newspaper as an investigative reporter

so I'm there, you know,

and I'm in the same tension that dad was all his life.

I want to be on the farm, but I got to earn a

living here in town and you have this tension.

And Teresa and I got married.

We remodeled the attic in the farmhouse upstairs

and drove a $50 car.

If we didn't grow it, we didn't eat it.

We lived on $300 a month.

And by living so cheaply, we were

able to save half of our income.

And so within a couple of years, we had enough

saved that we could live for

one year without outside income.

September 24, 1982, I walked out of that office,

I said, "I know we can live for one year."

And as it turned out, we never went back.

I mean, Teresa and I were completely wrapped up in a farm.

She was my tractor driver.

I mean, we were just together all the time.

We lived in the attic.

You know, if there's one

thing that has made me successful,

it's marrying a lady who's more frugal than I am.

You know, as frugal as I am, I'm the spender

Teresa's the saver.

And it was family, we were just together.

We had two kids. Daniel and Rachel.

We didn't have a bunch of toys. We didn't have a TV.

And by this time, we had absolutely embraced the notion

that we were not sending our kids to public school.

We read a lot. Our kids would sit for hours.

And then of course as Daniel got older

he started taking over more and more

of what Teresa had done.

They were good days.

You know, we didn't make much money,

but man, life was rich.

I mean, it was tight. We couldn't afford vet bills,

we couldn't afford sickness.

And so the whole goal was how do we create a

habitat that makes happy animals?

Because happy animals probably aren't going to get sick.

They're getting fed what they want.

They're sanitary, their hygiene,

their social structure,

all this is in a place that gives them no stress.

That was the goal.

Hey, piggles.

Ohhh!

How are ya, piggles?

Hi, piggles.

How you doing? Hmm?

One of my favorite things that ever happened up here,

we had a new chef.

And this new chef, he was pretty young

and he wanted to see the pigs.

He was getting a bunch of pork from us.

So he came up here and he stood out here and he said,

he said, "I'm 28 and I've never seen a live pig."

You know, he's cooked lots of pork

and he's broken down carcasses and all that,

but I've never seen a live pig.

I said, "I don't know anything about him like this,

but I just believe that if I were a pig,

this is the way I'd wanna live."

And that just says it all.

So we move these pigs every five to twelve days

through the paddocks.

So they get their salad bar and they get their feed.

And they get exercise.

There's no smell. There's no flies.

The pigs get to fully express their pigness.

And in the confinement animal feeding operation,

they're just confined in little slatted floor cells

and high stress.

The problem is that we have allowed ourselves

to take a very mechanistic view of biology.

And we inanimate it so that it's no more special,

distinctive, different, than a wheel bearing.

Not only do we disrespect the spontaneity

and livingness character of biology,

but we also erode its specialness

as an expression of God's creative power.

Just as an example of some of the things that are

done in our land grant universities.

Right now, or at least there has been quite a bit,

an effort to take out the stress gene in pigs.

Because when you got 5,000 pigs in a confinement

house and they've got these little cells on slatted floors,

and you've had to cut the tails off so that it's

tender enough that when they try to cannibalize,

they run away from each other.

I mean, and they just run,

they're just under stress all the time.

So there's a lot of effort within the industry

to try to find out, well, what's the gene for stress?

If we take that out...

then we can at least abuse them more

and at least they won't be stressed.

And I would ask anybody,

is that the kind of society we want?

Because it's not very far from there to say,

well, I wonder what the libertarian theme

or what the conservative gene,

you know, is in a person, let's take that out.

That is the kind of thinking, it's this slippery slope.

It's not okay to abuse animals.

It doesn't mean that we don't eat them

because there can be no life without sacrifice.

But what makes a sacrifice sacred

is the honor of respect

bestowed upon the act of sacrifice

prior to slaughter.

There's nothing sacred about slaughtering a Tyson chicken,

that's just sacrilege,

that's just putting it out of its misery.

But one of our chickens, thats out here

in fresh air, sunshine, green grass, bugs,

and not living in fecal particulate all the time.

That becomes a sacred sacrifice

because it is fully honored and respected

the chickenness of the chicken.

One of the things that we've learned from our

chefs over the years, we've supplied a lot of

gourmet restaurants, and one of the things you

learn from chefs like this is nuances of stuff,

because, you know, they cook so much of the same

thing over and over and over again.

So things that we wouldn't pick up, you know, they pick up.

But one of the things that we've picked up from them

is that all of our stuff cooks about 15% to 20%

faster than regular industrial stuff.

We don't officially know why, but our sense is,

is because our animals don't secrete any adrenaline,

because they're not under stress.

And when you secrete adrenaline, your muscles tighten up.

Our animals are happy. They never secrete adrenaline.

And so the meat is real tender and it cooks way faster.

So the question is, can you eat happiness?

Yes, you can eat happiness.

And by the same token, can you eat stress?

Yes, you can eat stress.

I'm not about to suggest that if you eat a

McDonald's hamburger, you're going to hell,

or even that it's sinful, especially for a person

who doesn't know better or hasn't come

to this point of conviction.

The problem I've come up with with Christians is,

don't tell me, don't tell me,

I don't want to know! I don't want to know!

That's the response.

And I think the problem is that the

Christian community, the faith community

has been so emasculated by the Gaea, creation workshipping,

environmentalist, persona that we have allowed ourselves

to believe that stewardship is somehow unchristian.

And that's why I'm suggesting, let's be Jacobs. Let's wrestle.

Let's be willing to wrestle. I don't have all the answers.

But to say that God doesn't care

is skating on pretty thin ice, in my opinion.

There's few things that can bring you more joy

knowing that you're making this many beings happy.

Pigs are pretty cool.

Interestingly, they're the smartest of all the animals

with the poorest eyesight.

So if you combine intelligence with not being able to see,

it means you're never quite sure what's going on.

"What are they doing to me?"

And so they are the hardest of all the animals

to develop trust with.

So that's why all these

paddocks have a wooden gate in them,

because you know the cows, you can open the electric fence

gate and you've seen them, they just come running

right on through, no problem. High trust.

Pigs...

"What are they trying to do? Is that gate up or down?"

You know, they can't tell.

And so, the wooden gates, you open that up

you open that up and they just come right through.

And you don't have a heart attack

and lose your religion.

Trying to chase them around to get 'em in there.

As soon as I came back full-time.

At that point...

All the financials were pretty

much on Teresa and I's shoulders.

It was sink or swim time.

So here we are,

realizing if we were going to make it

we had to brand and direct market.

If you know a farmer at all, you know,

he's always complaining about the middleman.

"Middleman makes all the money.

Middleman makes all the profits."

Because basically you've got four streams

going into the retail dollar.

You've got production, processing,

marketing, and distribution.

The average farmer is only participating over

here in this production end.

That right now across the U.S. that accounts for about

nine cents of the retail dollar.

So 91 cents of the retail dollar comes from

processing, marketing and distribution.

That's a lot.

And so if we can now wear those other hats,

suddenly we get off of that scale treadmill and we're

not hooked to the grain mill. We're not hooked to, you know,

industrial systems.

We can be price makers instead of

just take whatever the, you know,

whatever the industry says we're paying for this.

And so I had to start marketing.

And so I put together a slide program about how to heal land

without chemicals and do it with animals.

And so I would go and do these twenty-minute dinner

programs for these philanthropic organizations.

And every time I'd get, you know,

two, three, four customers.

You know, we started with the beef, then we added

the chicken, then we added the pork, then we

added the eggs, and then we added the turkey.

Here we are, there's year two with the chickens.

Yeah, we started in and we realized we were over our skis.

Dad and I tore down three barns in the community to get lumber.

Because we didn't have money to buy lumber.

We just let word of mouth. We just kept trying to

service people and do better.

And it was about three years until we kind of, you know,

where we felt like we could exhale.

From day one, dad was, he was stepping back

for me to take control.

And so,

I was making most of the decisions, you know,

on the farm and uh...

he got sick...

There's no spark here. No spark.

There we go.

The writing's on this side.

He got diagnosed with cancer and one of the

reasons I don't go to the doctor is because

I watched him die in a day.

We always milked a couple of Guernsey cows

and he'd gone [in for a] regular checkup

and they said, "Hey, maybe we better

check out this prostate."

And so he'd gone and gotten a biopsy

and he hadn't come home yet and so I went, you know,

he'd milk his cow, I'd milk mine.

Well, he hadn't come so I went ahead and started

milking his and he came in about halfway through

and when he walked in the barn door, I didn't recognize him.

He'd gotten a prognosis,

got the big "C," and that was it.

[soft guitar music]

It took about four years. So, you know,

from 1984 and then he starts going downhill.

And then he got pretty incapacitated.

He passed away in February of 1988.

We put the casket on a hay wagon,

invited all the friends,

I said, "everybody bring a shovel."

And so it was a really unconventional,

unconventional to the last day.

We have a joke around here

you know, my grandfather wanted to farm.

He never did.

Dad wanted to farm full-time, and except for the little

piece in Venezuela, he never did.

And we joked that it took us

three generations to finally get here.

But you know, I stand on the shoulders of greatness.

Most American families today,

live a little bit above their means.

So every generation is getting a little bit

farther and farther in debt.

And our legacy was every generation lives a

little bit below its means.

That way you have a little extra

launch pad for succeeding generations.

Oh, he'd be so thrilled. There's not a...

Sorry.

Not a day goes by that I don't wish that he were here to enjoy

what he put together.

When dad died in 88, about 89...

I finally was able to find a logger.

And we traded thirty acres of timber for roughly two

and a half miles of graded all-weather road.

Because we didn't have any access, there was no road.

It was 300 acres of wilderness up the top of the mountain.

That was a big change.

Because now, now we could start building ponds.

One of the single biggest issues in a farm, of course, is water.

So normally, as soon as you say water

people assume digging a well. Gotta dig a well.

But the problem with digging a well is you're

punching a hole into the aquifer

and you're putting a straw down there

and you're sucking the water out

and you're actually depleting the commons

rather than increasing the commons.

Five-hundred years ago, North America was 8% water.

North America was 8% water. Today we're less than 4%.

We're still less than half of the

water that we had five-hundred years ago.

Where did all that water come from? Beavers.

There were 200 million beavers,

and they built dams all over the place.

And so all this water maintained aquifers,

springs,

streams,

as well as evapotranspiration,

that created consistent cloud formation.

It ameliorated ambient temperatures because water

is a thermal mass heat sink.

Now here's the thing, globally, one third of rain

runs off its surface runoff.

It either comes too fast for absorption,

or it comes too much at one time.

So if you're in a 30-inch rainfall area,

that means 10 inches of rain a year,

becomes surface runoff.

Well, what's an inch of rain?

So one acre, which is about the size of a football field,

one acre inch, so an inch deep covering a football field,

is 30,000 gallons.

So if 10 inches a year runs off,

10 times 30,000 is 300,000 gallons per acre.

So if you own a 10 acre place, 3 million gallons

of water runs off of your place every year.

That's the average.

The fact is we're going to have droughts,

we're going to have floods,

we're going to have blizzards,

we're going to have these things

and so we believe part of our building forgiveness

is to build impoundments that collect surface runoff.

So the cows, this is the water they're drinking.

The chicken's in the pasture,

this is the water they're drinking.

That water there is coming gravity,

gravity from over a mile away.

So that's how we build forgiveness into the landscape.

So that the climatic shocks of a fallen world,

we enable the landscape to absorb.

So that you actually increase hydration

rather than decreasing hydration.

And that, I suggest,

gives God a return on His investment.

Looking back now at that time,

boy, was I glad that we had Daniel soon,

because we didn't know that dad was going to get sick.

And so by the time dad died in 88,

Daniel was already seven.

Well, tell you what, seven year old

that's gung ho and ready to roll,

They can do a lot of things. They can run for a lot of tools.

Teresa and I had to go get a conservation award.

We had to be gone for a couple days when he was eight.

So he stayed with mom, grandma, you know,

and he moved the whole herd at eight by himself.

Same deal, same way, you know.

Boy, you know what that does to self-worth?

I'm not a child psychologist, but if you notice,

every single school shooting, the guy that

did the shooting has some sense of not fitting in.

You know, he's not worth anything.

He's either been bullied, he's been told he's

weird, you know, all this.

And I believe that self-worth comes from

successfully accomplishing meaningful tasks.

You can't get self-worth by saying,

"Johnny, you're a good little boy," or "Amy, you're

a good little girl."

Good for what? You've got to be good for something.

And that's where doing something meaningful,

not just video games and screen time, is critical.

I gotta get the salt box here.

And so we were direct marketing,

we started getting these customers, you know,

they were just so appreciative

and we're actually attracting media attention.

The phone started ringing.

People all over the country, you know,

"Tell me about this chicken thing.

Tell me about this chicken thing."

And it just got to be a burden.

I'd come in from out on the farm all day,

have supper, and I'd have

six to ten phone calls at night. "Okay, calling

you back about this chicken thing. Take a piece of paper,

draw a rectangle. It's 10 feet by 12 feet

by 2 feet high." You know, and I told Teresa,

I said, "I can't do this," you know, and I said,

"We got to make a little manual," and took out

our savings to print the book.

"Pastured Poultry Profits," in 93.

And that changed our lives.

Then in 95, I wrote, "Salad Bar Beef."

Then in 97, "You Can Farm."

Well then, you know, we're in the National Geographic,

Smithsonian Magazine.

You know, this idea of a small family farm

actually making a profit was a big deal.

That's when things... I don't know...

started going out of control.

We got a knock on the door. And there was this guy

and he pulls out his badge like the FBI.

But it's not the FBI,

it's the Food Safety Inspection Service.

And he says, you've been selling illegal meat

and we've confiscated it all down at the slaughterhouse.

And at that time,

that was basically half of our farm income.

And then around that same time,

the state came in and said we couldn't process

chickens in an open-air facility.

You know, we were just at that point where...

A lot of people were, they were counting on our story

to give them courage to proceed with their own.

As all this seems to be just coming in on me,

I'm out there in the morning. Moving chicken shelters.

I'm just in consternation of soul.

You know, Lord, if we lose this thing,

what do you have in mind here?

And it wasn't an audible voice,

except that it was just as clear,

it was like just out of the sky came—

"For such a time as this."

"For such a time as this."

And if you'll recall, Esther, she cannot approach the king

without his invitation. That's death.

And so she's in this quandary, you know,

okay, I want to save my people. She was Jewish.

But if I go before the king without his invitation,

he'll kill me.

And Mordecai says, "Esther, for such a time as this."

And she comes in. Of course, we know the story.

She saved her people.

But that, "for such a time as this," hit me.

It's gonna be okay. This is what you're put here for.

You're put here to produce good food,

to show people how to do it,

to pave the way for other people to do it,

and to stand in this gap.

So here we were with this terrible situation.

As divine intervention would have it,

before the chicken thing developed,

we had a couple biology

majors at James Madison University come,

and they'd taken samples of our chickens,

where they'd taken our chickens and

chickens from the supermarket. They cultured them for bacteria,

and the ones from the store averaged 3,600

colony-forming units of bacteria per milliliter

to the second permutation.

And I've already told you more than I understand.

I'm just telling you, that's the way they write it, Ok?

Ours—133. So we were 25 times cleaner

than what was in the store, drenched in chlorine.

And they had the audacity to walk in here and tell us

that this was unsanitary and adulterated.

See, the law says that the chicken has to be

processed in a sanitary and unadulterated way.

That's all it says.

Which, as you know, that's very subjective.

Another thing that happened, we were down here eating supper.

Knock on the front door, I go up,

and there's a guy at the front door,

he's standing there holding his wife in his arms,

she looks like she's maybe 80, 85 pounds.

She just looks like a skeleton. He says, "The doctor says,

if we don't get toxin-free, chemical-free meat,

my wife is gonna die, can you help me?"

I said, "Absolutely." So they bought a bunch of stuff.

So here's the inspectors out here telling me

that they're gonna close me down.

And I've told them the story that this guy had showed up,

and I just looked at those guys, I said, "You know what?

She's gonna get our meat.

Now, you can either make this difficult,

or you can make it simple. If you take me to jail,

you know how much stuff I can write if I'm in jail?

I can write a lot of stuff."

And you could just see their faces melt.

Next calls I make are to my elected,

my delegate, my congressman, our state senator.

For the Republicans, I said,

"they're trying to shut down an entrepreneur."

For the Democrats, I said,

"they're trying to shut down an environmentalist."

So now we've got our senator and delegate

calling the inspection service,

and they said, "Well, could you write up

an explanation of why you think you're legal?"

Haha oh! Debator man.

Hey, boy! Give me a first affirmative case, you know?

And they accepted it at the federal level.

They pulled the tape, released everything,

and that was a major thing,

and it brought us a lot of notoriety

within the regulatory system as the junkyard dog.

Don't mess with the junkyard dog.

I don't wanna be proud about this.

I mean, they could show up tomorrow

and we'd be back in trouble.

And we've had numerous, that wasn't the last.

I mean, we've had other, not those issues,

but other issues, different things, over the years.

And we have just been, uh, very aggressive, very aggressive.

And I think that that is a, I think that's a good approach.

So after that showdown,

you know, we started getting some traction,

fame and different things, and we wanted Daniel to...

everybody says, "Well, you know, your kids,

if they're gonna take over the family business,

they need to go work for somebody else for a while."

Well, we homeschooled,

and so even when Daniel was 13, 14, 15,

don't tell the government,

but we had good friends that were in construction,

and different things

and so we'd send him with work crews,

you know, for a week,

so he could learn other skills and work for somebody else.

But he never had any

desire to actually, you know, go to college.

And so, you know, we just rocked along.

Well, you know, by the time he gets about 22, 23,

something like that. I passed the baton to him.

And that's something that I learned from dad

and you don't see in farmers very much.

Dad, he was wanting to put me on the stage,

"Here, I'll come back here and pull the curtains.

You know, you get out on the stage."

Man! that is so unusual in farming.

You never hear about the older

farmer wanting to get out of the way.

I mean, they want to take the tractor lugs to

wherever they're going, with them.

And the hardest thing is for the new generation

to feel like they have responsibility,

like they can make decisions.

And so I've taken that and used it with Daniel.

[soft guitar]

And he took over daily operations.

He's just run with it and he is fantastic.

As we progressed, I started writing more.

Then I was in Michael Pollan, that was a big deal,

"The Omnivore's Dilemma."

He acted, less like a cowboy than a maître d'.

He just kind of opened the door,

and the cattle moved from one to another.

And then of course on the heels of that

was the documentary "Food Inc."

"The idea would be to have such nutritionally dense food

that people actually felt better,

had more energy, and weren't sick as much!"

It's first run sold out.

The movie offers an alternative vision

of how we should be producing and eating food.

You know, here we were on the periphery,

for all this period of time as we were building

this reputation, this brand, these systems,

and then millions of people caught up with us.

[rock music]

Demand for organically grown food is at an all time high.

The organic food movement has grown substantially.

Tthe organic food business is booming.

It's been exciting for us

having been in it for these many decades,

to actually see the awareness grow.

It grows not only from people who are looking for better food,

but also just from the lack of

trust in the industrial food system.

You couldn't hide the negative consequences of junk anymore.

So often we have this idea that if we actually

eat local, that that's not really a credible food system.

We can't really feed the world with local food.

And I'll try to debunk that this evening.

Buying local is the big draw.

The number of farmers markets explodes.

Nationwide, that number has

grown 64% in the last five years.

And I would suggest right now that that wave has

almost morphed from buying food to producing food

in the Homestead Movement.

That really got rolling after 2020.

The breaking news stay at home, that is the order tonight

from four state governors as the coronavirus pandemic spreads.

When those supermarket shelves were empty

and people walked in here and realized,

"whoa, it's actually fragile.

There's no food in the store. What are we gonna eat?"

You know, in 2020,

one million backyard flocks of chicken started up.

You know, the number one Googled food item

in October, 2020 was how to make sourdough mother

for sourdough bread. There's just this

incredible interest in the country right now.

In food authenticity

and in actually having a safe, secure, stable food system.

And then you've got the black swan of Putin invading Ukraine.

Suddenly the corporate system can't get fertilizer.

You've got Palestine.

We've been disturbed. And we'd better wake up and be ready.

[rock music]

Whenever there is dysfunction and disturbance in a society,

you don't want to be in an aircraft carrier.

You want to be in a little speed boat.

Compare a smaller food production

and processing business, but lots of them

compared to centralized mega facilities.

Here's the obvious question. If in the spring of 2020,

if instead of the U.S. being fed

by 300 mega-production and processing

and distribution organizations, if instead the U.S. had been fed

by 300,000 community-oriented,

smaller scale producers, processors,

would we have had as big a hiccup as we did?

Of course not.

On our farm, we didn't have a hiccup at all.

Oh, yes. Haha, COVID. Woo, boy, that was a year.

I mean, I do a blog.

And I knew I was pretty healthy, so some of my

very first stuff was, "I want it, I want it now!"

Knowing that your immune system actually gets stronger.

And of course people just went nuts on me.

Then I knew the whole thing was a sham

the day the governor closed churches

and farmers markets

and kept ABC stores, Costco, Walmart, and all that open.

And started calling workers "non-essential."

You know how demeaning it is to tell a person

you have a non-essential job? I mean, I can't...

well, I guess I would tell a bunch

of bureaucrats that, but in general, I mean,

I can't imagine telling a person that he's non-essential.

We lost restaurants, we lost customers,

you know, the health department called

because we weren't demanding masks in our farm store.

We had to sign,

"Masks, your body, your health, your choice."

Nine out of ten of our folks who come in,

they'd take pictures of it

and then they put it on social media.

Well, then that inflamed the health department.

They went ballistic.

And we were getting phone calls here,

"We're gonna get a group together

and come and burn down your barns.

We're gonna come and shoot your cows."

We were on edge there for a while,

and it's not a, it's okay.

What I've found is that every time

something fairly big like that happens,

then five doors open the other direction.

I think that if you say you're a Christian

and you have not faced some real stiff opposition,

not every day by any means, but, you know, along, routinely,

you're either hiding your light under a bushel

or you're a wimp or you're too blind to see what's going on.

We're known for our pastured livestock,

but anyone who really knows me

knows that my favorite tool is a chainsaw

and I get really excited when I get in the woods.

So here's where we want to stop.

"This grass is just wispy and soft!"

Yeah, and you know what? Nobody knows what this grass is.

Not me. Not the NRCS. Nobody.

They've never seen it before.

"Really?"

No, what it is, it's ancient pre-European grass.

It's what was here when the bison were here.

So I don't know where you, pick a spot

and I'd just like to sit and talk about this a minute.

Okay. You ready? "Yep."

So this is a pig silvopasture.

[soft banjo playing]

We started with woods.

This was just regular woods, just like over here.

This is what happens if you just walk away and leave it.

And we open it up, cut the big trees.

And we put in the pigs and we let them disturb

the ground and move them strategically.

And when the pigs disturb the ground just right

with enough rest in between,

forages started coming up and that disturbance

awakened the latent seed bank.

I mean, notice there's a bunch of different kinds here,

and we've had NRCS agents out, who know their forages.

"What are these? I've never seen these before!"

And so we believe that we're tapping

into the pre-European seed bank that was here

when the bison and the Native Americans

were here and to think that

these seeds have been unexpressed,

waiting for three-hundred years to germinate.

Using pigs as a management tool, but awakening a

latent seed bank that was here waiting for a new steward.

That's pretty cool.

[soft country music]

So we go from here. And it turns into this.

You know permaculture has the saying,

"We need more forests and fewer trees."

And we have to realize that the dense forests of

North America are a European creation.

The Native Americans didn't like dense forests

because you can't see

you know, somebody might sneak up on you.

So they wanted not only open for safety,

but it brought the bison and the elk

and the birds and all that.

And in fact, the first Europeans who came to

America wrote back in their diaries,

they said, "we could take a European continental army

and march it from the Atlantic Ocean

to the Mississippi without any roads."

One of the reasons people don't take care of

their forests and their woods

and trees are so neglected in America

is because the only value on that land is lumber.

Here, we're getting $10,000 an acre per year from the pigs

while growing the next forest.

This is one of my favorite places to bring my

radical environmentalist friends

that view the only credible way for us to interact

with the environment is to abandon it.

We've got to lock it up in a park,

Bureau of Land Management, or a wilderness area.

Our sense is we want

environmentalism by participation.

That's the juxtaposition.

Do we have environmentalism by abandonment

or do we have environmentalism by participation?

And I suggest that the participation

is the one that pleases God

because that runs to His creation,

not away from His creation.

So here we are.

[soft country music]

My dream is here, okay,

so Teresa and I got a piece of raw land.

It was not a business. It was not a going concern at all.

We stood on the shoulders of greatness. We had a launch.

You know, God blessed us and we built this thing,

and we don't know what God has for us.

But we believe and we trust that this will simply

launch the next half-century way beyond us.

And so I've been backing away for Daniel.

He runs the farm.

When I go home,

he tells me what I'm supposed to do till I, you know,

before I leave.

And he is fantastic team building

and developing these young people.

One of my sweetest memories.

Dad was going downhill

and he calls me into the bedroom on day,

he said, "Bring a piece of paper."

He said, "Let's make a list of all the salaries

that we can generate here."

Most farmers, who would think? They're all down in the dumps,

"I can't even make one salary here!"

You know, I mean, it's all scarcity

and can't, and won't, and don't, and all that.

So we sat there and brainstormed and came up,

I think it was twenty-two,

twenty-two salaries at that time.

And today,

we generate twenty-two salaries on the farm.

And if we did that exercise today, it'd probably be eighty.

I mean, this is the thing about God's grace.

It doesn't quit. It doesn't give up.

You know, I think about that with Israel.

He said, "from this mountain to this creek to this

hill to this mountain to this rock."

He gave them a very clear boundary.

Here's your promise land.

Here's where you're going to be blessed.

"Now be fruitful and multiply."

Well the average person thinks,

"well, that's a recipe for famine!"

Not in God's economy.

God's economy, you know, your stewardship,

your innovation,

your pond building,

your composting,

it's more. You never scratched the surface,

and so we have a saying around here,

"fill it up."

"Fill it up!"

I've never been on a farm in the world, including this one,

that's anywhere close to being filled up.

You can always add a hive of bees.

You can add a flower garden. You can do so many other things.

And so I want, when people come to visit the farm,

I want them to exit and I want them to say,

"Oh, we just saw abundance."

"Oh, we just saw redemption."

"Oh, we just saw forgiveness."

So we just keep experimenting and keep serving our customers.

And how big it is, how little it is, what it does,

that's not necessarily up to us to decide.

What's ours to decide is today, today, be faithful.