Farmer Joel Salatin Talks Food Supply Chain Interruption from Coronavirus | Joe Rogan

Thanks for coming back man, I really appreciate it. This is a perfect time to talk to someone like you about our food. We're in a very strange crisis now and you just keep hearing time and time again in the news how much ranchers and farmers and people are really suffering right now and how much folks who don't have anything to do with that are now forcing, they're being forced to understand the importance of the food supply chain and ranchers and farmers and all the stuff that we've taken for granted for quite a long time now. Well they sure have and what's interesting about it is the juxtaposition between the, I'll just call it the industrial, the more, you know, a commercial industrial food sector versus the sector that I'm in which is a local centric, you know, direct sale branded product directly from the farm. The pandemic is the best marketing strategy we've ever seen. We're having the best season we've ever had and the same thing with farmers around the country as I talk to them, everyone that's like us that did not go into the supermarket system basically, that's selling in their community and in their region regionally directly off the farm, having the best year we've ever had. It is the industrial mega system that's cracking and so for the first time we're hearing talk of well maybe we need to add resiliency to efficiency. So yeah, the system that's cracking, there's plenty of food, I mean plenty of food on farms being produced but of course as you know milk is being dumped, pigs are being euthanized. The problem is not at the farm level. The problem is in the chain of custody between the farmer and the consumer and primarily in the large scale processing situation. Yeah, these large meat processing places, they've been hit hard by the coronavirus. They have been. Think about it right now Joe, probably in the United States, the only places right now where every day thousands of people come together in crowded conditions are these big meat processing plants. I mean the offices are closed, the theaters are closed, the convention centers are closed and so the only place where people are coming shoulder to shoulder, thousands every day are in these mega processing facilities. Theresa and I, my wife, actually co-own a very small abattoir slaughterhouse, community slaughterhouse. We have 20 employees and the differences, the difference in the vulnerability, in the exposure and risk factor between our little 20 person facility where we do you know maybe 50 to 70 beaves a week, 100 hogs versus these mega plants that have... When you say beaves? Beaves. What is that? Beef. Beefs. Oh, beefs. Yeah. Well, I thought you said beaves. Well, there's no such word as beefs. It's beaves, B-E-E-V-E-S. Oh, okay. That is what you're saying. Okay. Yeah, beaves. Have you heard that before Jamie? No, okay. So the plural of beef is not beefs, it's beaves. Oh, interesting. I always thought that beef was just the meat. I never thought I would have assumed you would say cows. Well, as a farmer, cows are females who have had calves. So it's a very...as opposed to steers... Steers, right. ...or bulls, which would be intact males, steers, non-intact. So as a farmer, all this nomenclature is real... Yes, normal for you. Like a theologian teases out Presbyterians and Methodists, and we just say, well, they're Protestants. So, you know, we do. We do. It's a small facility, and it's been in business for, I don't know what, 60 years or so. We've only co-owned it now for a little bit less than 10 years. But the difference, because we do stuff by hand, workstations...you know, these stainless steel worktables are what, you know, six, seven, eight feet wide, three feet to four feet deep. And each one is a workstation. And you've got three guys out on the kill floor. You got two guys out in the, you know, the cryovac room. You've got four guys in the boning room. You got a guy over here running the sausage stuffer or the, you know, the grinder. It's inherently small scale, spread out, completely different environment than when you're having, you know, 3,000 people in a cool, damp environment from...and I don't want to get into a rabbit trail discussion, but frankly, in these great, great, big plants, most of the workers are generally not Americans. They're coming from other countries looking for, you know, the American dream. And so they're living in crowded conditions because they're trying to save everybody to send home to get, you know, uncle and aunt and other family members here from Ethiopia, Somalia, you know, wherever it is. And so they're living in a house that we would live for in a house. They're living, you know, 20 and they're eating poorly. They're in a stressful, they're often separated from their family. There's just a lot of stress in their lives. And so then you throw these big processing facilities. They're not eating well. And it's just an incubator. If you wanted to create an incubator for a virus, there wouldn't be a better place. Whereas small facilities are inherently the workers are spread out. They tend to come from the community. They tend to be career craft people rather than just, you know, make this cut, Mac. The average poultry processing plant in our area, they say that every job can be learned in 20 minutes. So whereas at our plant, we cross, you know, we cross do, you know, we cut meat a while and then we go pack a while and you're on the cut floor and then you're, you know, you're doing different things. So it's a real different environment. And so these big plants are very vulnerable. And that's why the recalls come from there. The you know, the microbials come from there. I mean, an average, an average fast food hamburger has pieces of 600 animals in it. Wow. When you get a hamburger from us, it's one animal, you know. So just the sheer whatever mixing, you know. So you know, for sure, we don't know a lot about this virus. I mean, we're learning every day and you know, you got to kind of take a little bit of grain of salt too. But one of the things we're certainly learning is that there's an advantage that there is a density factor, a people density factor, like an urban rural, you know, spreading out the whole social distancing spreading out thing is, seems to be a valuable thing. And so if we take that into the food system, wouldn't it be an amazing thing if instead of having 150 to 200 mega processing facilities doing 98% of the nation's meat, if instead that were 200,000 small scale community based ecologically nested facilities, you know, all around the countryside, that would be an incredibly resilient system.