Can You Feed the Masses Without Factory Farming? w/Joel Salatin | Joe Rogan

A real parallel is when you were talking about these large scale meat processing plants are a perfect sort of petri dish for viruses to grow. So are factory farms. So are these farms where you're stuffing pigs next to each other. You're doing all this unnatural stuff, right? It's unnatural for people to be stuffed into a warehouse right next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, working all day. It's unnatural for them to be stuffed into these homes, shoulder to shoulder, with bad food and all the things that you would need to keep your body healthy and strong. The same can be said about these factory farm situations. One thing that I find so attractive about the way you run your farm is that there's no weirdness in watching these animals during the day. They seem like animals just doing normal stuff. If you see a chicken wandering around just pecking at the grass, it looks normal. See a chicken in a cage getting fed out of a little cup or something, it looks all kinds of fucked up, right? It doesn't feel right. No, that's why we have the phrase respecting the pigness of the pig and the chickeness of the chicken. And we know that these diseases are all coming from these places. I mean, there's a ton of agricultural diseases that are based from these factory farm situations where these animals live in these really horrific conditions and then the bacteria jump and... Look, I mean, look, if you ate in your toilet every... Yeah, it would be like to eat your toilet every day. Right, exactly. That's how they eat. They're breathing in their fecal particulate matter, which is putting lesions in their tender respiratory membranes, making lesions there. And so when you have those kinds of conditions, and they're not getting exercise, they're not getting fresh air. And so, I mean, they're not getting salad, they're not getting any vitamin D from the sunshine. And so what happens is you get an extremely concentrated host facility for pathogenicity. That's what happens. You get a very concentrated host facility because there's always a host. They're close to each other. The pathogen doesn't have to say, wow, boy, I wonder if I can make it that half mile over to another... No, no, they're always right there. And so you're right. It's like an incubator. And so if we wanted to sit down, look, if we wanted to sit down and say... Let's say we had a James Bond conspiratist and said, we're going to form a committee and make a pathogen-friendly farm. You know, the old James Bond nemesis, right? And so we form a committee and say, how can we make a pathogen-friendly farm? Well, we would have only one species. We'd crowd it up. We'd take out the oxygen, the fresh air, the sunshine. We'd give it a minimalistic diet. What I've just described is modern, efficient, industrial factory farming. You couldn't design a better system for conductivity of pathogenicity. Now, here's the big question. Is it possible to feed all of Los Angeles using your methods? Can you feed big urban areas using these regenerative methods? Sure, absolutely. So two things to realize is the bottleneck in the food system right now, the reason the supermarket is low on meat, is not because there aren't animals in the field. It's because of the processing is the... It's not the trucking. It's not the production. It's not even the store shelf. It's the processing. So it's the processing that's the bottleneck. And so my vision is that... So we get the two questions. First of all, let's deal with the production. Absolutely, if we spread out the production, if we did, for example, if we took all the confinement chicken houses and put those chickens on pasture, no problem. It doesn't take any more land to grow the feed for a chicken on pasture than it does in a confinement house. Don't you get a lot more lost, though, due to raptors and things on those lines? No. No, no, we put them in little protected shelters. Then we move them every day across the pasture. Well, yeah, you can get losses from raptors, but we use guard geese. They're guard dogs, guard llamas. There's all sorts of guard animals. There's really cool. And there's a lot of research being done to jam the radar of eagles and stuff. Really? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They jammed the radar? I didn't even know they had radar. Well, that's figurative. Right. What are they using when an eagle is just not just their vision is insanely good, right? Yeah. Eagles in particular. It really is. It really is. And so, for example, I know one guy that's – it's not ready to sell yet, but he claims to have had great success putting reflective Coke can bottoms on like a traffic cone, hanging it out with his chickens, and that splays the sun rays all out and messes up the eyesight of the eagles and the hawks. They can't zero in. Really? Yeah. In fact, this was exactly one of the defensive measures the U.S. Navy used and still uses for incoming missiles. They have a cannon that blows out pieces of aluminum foil, basically, and like a graffiti, aluminum foil graffiti out in the air, and it jams the – whatever, the honing devices of a missile. The hawks are the same way. What I'm getting at is that there are – we don't lose very much. We protect them greatly. There are a lot of things that you can do to mitigate that kind of pressure. But the fact is, the industry loses tons of birds, too, in a flood, in a heat wave, in a whatever, you know. And so, the idea that these birds in this big confinement house are actually protected from malady is simply not true. And then there are going to be much more of them who are going to get sick. Sure. They might have losses in that way. Sure. Sure. So, can we produce the food this way? Absolutely. Now, one of the things that it would require is many more people on farms. So, you know, I've thought a lot about – obviously, as unemployment has skyrocketed through this – right now, sitting here, it's hard for us to imagine what it will take to bring – you know, to fill football stadiums again, to fill Caribbean cruises, to fill theaters, you know, music venues, you know, whatever. Boxing matches. I mean, right now, it's hard to conceive what it will take. People are so terrified. It's hard to appreciate how much of this is going to come back, the hospitality industry and all that. So, what's going to happen? So, where are the jobs? What are people going to do? And I would suggest that one of the things that people can do is that we can have a lot of these smaller plants, and we have way more people actually growing food, participating in food production, personally. Is food going to be more expensive? Maybe so. But you get to be healthy, and we have a healthy planet. And what's that worth? How much more do you think it would cost? I mean, if you – I just give a rough percentage. If you're thinking about food production right now, with the current situation, there's a lot of automation, right? A lot of these factory farms, they don't require too many people to be working there. Sure, sure. You would require much more people. You'd have to manage these animals. You'd have to do it sort of along the lines of the way that you do. Yeah. How many more people do you think would be involved in a large-scale farm? Well, lots. Lots of people. I don't have a number there, but I can tell you that prices would – food prices might go up to what they were 30 years ago. And it also – would it be fair to say that food prices might go to where they should be? Like, a cheeseburger really shouldn't be 99 cents. No, no, absolutely. As you're very familiar with the argument of the externalized costs, they don't get captured. What's the cost? Right now, 50 percent of the cases of diarrhea in the U.S. are caused by foodborne bacteria. Well, what's a case of diarrhea worth? I mean, if we start – if you start – Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, if you start putting dollars on these externalized costs, you know, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the fact that we have, you know, hundreds of square miles that don't grow shrimp anymore, you know, because it's toxic from the runoff from the Mississippi – from chemical farming. So there's a lot of these externalized costs. And not only that, but if this actually became normative – the new way, the new orthodoxy, there would be definitely economies of scale that we don't have right now. I mean, I'll just give you one example that probably nobody would think of. So we pay workman's compensation at our farm. So how do you determine the exposure level, the risk factor of a poultry worker? I mean, think about if you have a Tyson chicken farm and you hire an employee to be in the chicken house, think about his workman's comp risk. I mean, there's fecal particulate all day long that he's breathing. You've got augers, chains, feed bins, electrical connections, dust. I mean, it's a very – it's a high-risk situation. For us, a poultry worker goes out in the field and moves some chickens in a field. There's no fecal particulate. There's no dust. There's no augers. There's no whatever, spinning fans, vent shafts. There's none of this. And so part of the cost, the reason that our chicken is more expensive than what's in the store, is not only externalized cost, but it is unrecognized savings that we offer that can't be captured in a square peg in a round hole. I see what you're saying. The overall big picture of health for you, health for the food, how much is that worth? Yeah. Right. That's interesting that we're not really taking into consideration these secondary costs that come about from doing it the wrong way. Yeah. We're not. I mean, there's a lot of those – you can – much of our increased cost has nothing to do with actual production cost. It's the non-scalable regulatory overheads. And this, of course, is why we don't have more community small-scale abattoirs around the country. It's not because there's not a demand for them. It's because the paperwork, the HACCP plans, hazardous analysis, critical control point plans, and the paperwork to be able to launch a business like this require the – are so high, that both time and money are so high that it's very difficult to launch a small business, because you can't spread the overhead of capitalization over – Is there a solution for that? Well, there are a couple solutions. Certainly one, one that's being championed right now by Congressman Thomas Massey called the PRIME Act. He's had it in for five years, and amazingly, it's kind of just floundered for five years. All of a sudden, in the last two months, he's got 18 new co-sponsors because of this. And what the PRIME Act would do, it would allow uninspected, custom-processed meat in state to be sold by the peace. That's not legal right now. Right now, the only way that you can sell a T-bone – if you want to buy a T-bone steak for me, the only way for you to get it is for me to go to a federal-inspected slaughterhouse, get the animal processed, packaged under inspection, and put in for you. Custom houses are where if you want to buy a half a beef, a quarter beef, all right, and it goes in with your name on that quarter, and they're custom-processing it for me, yeah, then I can buy it. And what Congressman Massey is saying with the PRIME Act is, why should we discriminate and only allow people to tap into the lower cost and lower overheads of the custom-processing facility to only those people who can afford to buy a quarter beef at a time? That's very poverty discriminatory. Let's open that up so that people can buy it by the peace. We're not going to ship it interstate. We're not going to sell it at Walmart. Okay, there's – but if you and I as neighbors want to do business together, and I'm using a powerful phrasing here, as consenting adults, if we want to exercise freedom of choice and participate in a consensual relationship of commerce, why should that be a bureaucrat's business between two consenting neighbors? Right. So what you're saying is long – but is the regulatory process in place to make sure that people are using the proper sanitation methods, making sure that the animals are healthy, making sure that all these things are in place so that unscrupulous characters don't take advantage of the system and then screw over the consumer and the consumer gets sick. This is like best-case scenario for the regulation, right, that's there to protect us. Well, that's the assumption, yes. And I would simply ask that at some point when you have a very close transparent relationship, one-on-one, you don't have truckers and warehouses and big slaughterhouses and supermarkets, blah, blah, blah, in between us. There is a lot of protection in that relational transaction that beats all the paperwork you can amass on the industrial scale. We recognize scale in a lot of things in life. For example, in Virginia, where I'm from, if you want to open a – if you want to do daycare, let's say you want to do a work-at-home deal, you know, you want to do a side gig and keep children, you can keep up to three in your home without subjecting yourself to the licensing and compliance of daycare regulations because they know if all you're going to do is keep three in your homes, those parents, you're going to have a close relationship with them. This is not a daycare center, all right? The same thing is true with elder care. My wife's grandmother spent her last year in a lady's home who is allowed to keep three people as elder care. She was an RN. She wanted to not have to go to the hospital every day and started a side gig in her home. She cooked for them. She took care of them, three of them in her home. Does this vary state by state? It does vary state by state. I'm just giving you an example of where it's reasonable to appreciate that a different relationship at scale can create its own safety in that particular thing. Can you keep 100 in your home without a license? No. But three, if you're only going to keep three, you're probably going to see them. You're probably going to have a direct relationship with each of their caregivers, their people that are signing off for them. It's a different relationship. And so all I would say is that from the safety issue, that there needs to be someplace, a point at which we can opt to do business with each other without a bureaucrat involved. May I ask you this? If you wanted to slaughter a cow and then you wanted to give some of the meat away to your neighbor, would you have to bring it to some sort of facility? Perfectly legal. Perfectly legal. So this is not a – yeah, if this were all about safety, you wouldn't be able to do that. So the important thing to realize is that the prohibition here is not on the – in fact, our neighbor can even buy it legally. Oh, really? I just can't sell it. So the prohibition is only on one. Wait a minute. If you can't sell it, how are they going to buy it? Black market. So if I did this under the radar, so I butcher a chicken in my backyard, and the neighbor comes over and buys it from me. It's legal for him. It's legal for him to buy it. It's not legal for me to sell it. But everything else in society that we've determined is a hazardous – a controlled substance, a hazardous substance, the prohibition is both on seller and buyer. Right. And I don't want to go down that rabbit hole either of I'm a pretty libertarian drug, let it all go. But without regard to that, the prohibitions are equal on even possession. If you want to have a ton of cocaine in your house, even if you just want it over there in the corner on a pallet, yeah, I've got a ton of cocaine here. What's wrong with that? You can't have that, all right? Right. But when it comes to food products, the prohibitions are only on one side, and they don't include if you give it away. So if it was really dangerous, you shouldn't be able to buy it, you shouldn't be able to possess it, and you shouldn't be able to give it away. I see what you're saying, kind of, but the difference is, first of all, cocaine is illegal, beef's not illegal. And second of all, it's like you're trying – the idea is you're trying to protect the consumer, right? And I think that they have exceptions for these small situations where you're the farmer and this – maybe this guy's growing tomatoes and you trade him some filet mignon for some tomatoes, and you have a good deal there. That makes sense that they – I think it's more reasonable that they step back and let that happen. But it is odd that they can buy unregulated beef, but you can't sell unregulated beef. So it's like, how'd you get that beef? I bought it. Is it regulated? No? All right. They don't even go, who's the criminal selling you the beef? Yeah, it's very strange. Yeah, yeah. So the farmer's the one that's liable. The buyer, the customer is not. But the same thing is true. I mean, the important – let's appreciate, too, for example, wildlife. I mean, right now, you can go out during hunting season, and you can shoot a deer, and you don't have to worry about temperature. You don't have to worry about any inspections. Nothing. Or a wild pig, right? A squirrel. You can bring that home, and there's no inspection, no nothing over that, and you can dress that yourself. I mean, butcher it, package it, whatever. Feed it to your children. You can have a block party, invite all your block, and have a – and feed everybody with that food. It's perfectly legal. But to do a chicken or a pig or a cow on your own and sell that, what is it about selling something that suddenly turns it from benign to hazardous? Well, I think it's just protection for the consumer. And I think it's also like – it'd be fine if it was a small neighborhood where you knew the farmer, and you had a great relationship with him. But they're talking about doing things at scale. When you're talking about selling food to a large city, you can't really just hope the guy did a good job. That's the argument for regulation. The argument for regulation is when things scale up, where you need someone to step in and protect the consumers. Because if there is one bad actor who's not taking care of it, he has the potential of sickening thousands of people. Right, which is the argument – exactly the argument for decentralizing and de- amalgamating as opposed to centralizing and amalgamating. Is it a land issue, though? Like, if you wanted – like, the factory farms that I've ever seen in videos, where they have these pigs, they're stuffed next to each other in this large warehouse. And the same with the chickens. Right. How much space would you need to have the same amount of chickens and the same amount of pigs if you let them free range? Right. Here's my point. What you don't see in those videos is you don't see the hundreds of acres growing corn and soybeans to feed them in that house. The industry wants you to think that this is some sort of an island, you know, where, boy, look, we're cranking this out of this house. They're not showing you the tractor-trailers bringing in the grain, bringing in the – and hauling out the manure and the square miles of fields to spread the manure, okay? They're not showing you how dependent that is on this massive land base. And so, so, in the pastured model, the decentralized pastured model, instead of having 15,000 – I mean, our farm, we're going to raise like 45,000 chickens this summer. We're not backyard by any means. But guess what? Those are in 275 bird shelters that are moved every day across pastures. It doesn't take one more acre to produce the feed or handle the manure, whether the chicken is outside or inside. The difference is when you come and see our operation, you see all the land. When you see the factory farm, you don't see any of the land. But isn't it possible that these factory farms are set up where the farms where the animals are raised are completely separate? It's a separate business from the farms where the soybeans and the corn are raised. Oh, yeah. Well, ours is too. And it's not on the same property. No, it's ours just too. We buy our grain from neighbors. Absolutely. But if they had to grow these animals and grow that food, would they have enough land to do everything together in the same farm? There's no need to do it on the same farm. I'm a big believer in mutual interdependence, not complete independence. We don't have any intention to grow our own grain. We don't have the soils for it. We don't have the equipment for it. We don't have the skill set for it. So we buy from neighbors who do GMO-free, non-genetically modified, GMO-free grain. And we give them more than they would on a commodity scale. And so they love us because we're giving them more per bushel, and they have a nice, secure buyer, and they're local. They're close. You know, we're not getting it from foreign countries, and it's all closed. So what happens is in the kind of situation I'm describing, instead of having a fundamentally segregated food system, you have a fundamentally integrated food system. I see what you're saying. So you have a strong relationship with people growing that grain. So for example, I mean, you started the discussion with, is there enough land to feed Los Angeles? And we could discuss where the Los Angeles should be as big as it is. I mean, that's a valid discussion. It's a very valid discussion. But we can go there. But first, let me just say that if California, for example, did not export – I don't know what the percentage is, but it's huge – almonds all over the world. If California centered on feeding California, there's absolutely enough here to feed California. Okay? I mean, Iowa imports 90 percent. Iowa is probably the most fertile place in the world. And they only eat – only 10 percent of the food consumed in Iowa is grown in Iowa and processed in Iowa. That's pretty crazy. It is crazy. Hawaii, only 5 percent. Ninety-five percent comes from off – Hawaii, I mean, they've got ranches. They've got – I mean, why would you have to import stuff if you can grow pineapples and, you know, macadamia nuts in your backyard? Come on, you know. So there's a huge disconnect. I mean, the – and this is one of the reasons that we're having this – I think this blowback from nature is that instead of having a fundamentally integrated system – I mean, think of how in Switzerland, you know, they take the cows up to the mountain pastures. They milk, and the milk flows down – and they make cheese up there. The hui from the cheese goes into the pigs. The pigs eat the hui. And so instead of transporting milk to a centralized cheese maker and pigs to a centralized processor, they're actually making the cheese on site. So all they've got to actually transport is cheese and pork. So they slaughter – they slaughter, you know, contiguous nearby – not on the same farm necessarily, but nearby. So you don't have all this transportation. What you have is a fundamentally decentralized – we could even say democratized – could we say food distancing? That creates resiliency in the system. So instead of being tied to these 100 or 150 mega-processing facilities, we're decentralized throughout the land base. How much more money do you think it would cost for food? We kind of touched on this earlier, but if you're dealing with this more natural-based system, and it's more complex, it's going to require more people, and it's going to require complete restructuring of the system that's currently in place. Sure it would. I think I don't have a figure for – I mean, I'm not a scientist. Do you think food would be 10% more? I think in general it would be probably double what you'd pay at Costco. Double. Yeah, that's an issue for a lot of folks, though, right? Well, but now think about this. Think about this. Oh, man, where do you start with this? First of all, you're going to offer a lot of jobs. There are a lot of people that are going to be looking for jobs right now. So this offers a lot of job opportunities. Number two, it's much more healing on the land. Number three, you don't have all the pathogenicity. You don't have to use drugs, antibiotics. I mean, our meat doesn't do drugs, okay? Our dinner doesn't do drugs. People don't realize that two-thirds of the drugs used in the country aren't in people. They're in animals, okay? So you don't have those issues. There are a lot of issues that you don't have, and those add up in the big picture. So I always tell people our food is the cheapest aggregate food there is. We just put all the costs in. All our costs are in, okay? And so we're not asking taxpayers, society, the planet. We're not asking them to pick up the tab for cheating, for cutting corners. And that's what Costco is. And what's interesting is that 40 years ago, right now today, 9% of the average person's income, 9% is spent on food. That's our average in our country. 40 years ago, it was 18. 40 years ago, 9% of our personal income was spent on healthcare. Today, that's 18%. Isn't that interesting how those have inverted? Those have inverted in roughly 40 years. Ever since the U.S. Duh, called the U.S. Duh, created the food pyramid and put Twinkies and Cocoa Puffs on the bottom as a foundational. You can track the diabetes. You can track obesity. You can track all of these things right through from that time. Thank you.