Joel Salatin: Ending Monocrops, Repurposing Waste, and Feeding Millions

So one of the things that we're key on because our fertility program is carbon. And that's what feeds the soil, carbon, right? Not 10, 10, 10 chemical fertilizer, carbon. And so at our... Do you use fertilizers at all? No, no, we don't. That's amazing. We don't. So just manure and natural fertilizer. But we have a big industrial chipper. We love this machine. I mean, it's the ultimate boy toy. It's a 120 horsepower diesel engine that can chip 19 inch. You can take a 40 foot tree and just hook it in there and it just whoa, whoa, you know, just chips it. I've seen those online. All right. Well, I mean, they're like the coolest machine. That scares the shit out of me. All right. So, but that's... Remember Fargo? That's our fertilizer factory. Okay. So carbon... So we integrate forest with open land and we integrate the carbon from the forest. So we cut junk trees, dead trees, crooked trees, weak trees and thin the forest. And that enables the good trees, the healthy trees to grow more vigorously better, reduces fire potential because you're thinning it out, taking out all the dead stuff. And that then becomes our carbon base for bedding the animals for, you know, and for all the composting that we do. We do mountains and mountains of compost. Where I'm going with this is when we talk about costs right now, how much is our country spending fighting wildfires and how much are we losing fighting all these... I mean, we're in California, right? I mean, look at the devastation that fires have caused. Imagine if those... If we had thousands of people with chippers thinning the forest, turning them into almost park-like like they were before the Europeans came, the Native Americans kept them going with, you know, with fire. But there were megafauna here. And so we grazed through, we convert a lot of it into, you know, silvopasture, widely spaced trees that are growing unimpeded with grazing animals underneath so that there's no fire damage, there's no buildup of fuel. And suddenly we're producing our own food and we're eliminating the danger of wildfire with technology called chainsaws and chippers. And that carbon becomes the fertility for the vineyards and the agricultural lands. It feeds the soil. So now we have earthworms instead of hard soil. We don't have erosion because our organic matter is up. On our farm, using these principles, we've gone from 1% organic matter to over 8% organic matter in the soil. And every 1% holds another 20,000 gallons of water per acre. Whoa! So, so, if we, so, if we, so, in our 60 years of being there in the Shenandoah Poly Phase, we have gone from 1% to 8, over 8%, let's just say, that's 7 clicks, 7 times 20 is 140,000 gallons of water per acre now that we can hold that we couldn't hold before. And it's because of the grazing, the perennials, and the composting that's building up the organic matter in the soil. That could be done in California. When you start talking about holding water, it's not just about how much rainfall are we getting, it's how much are we actually holding in the sponge to reduce flooding and runoff and things like that. So it sounds like your method could keep from the situation they find with some farms of the rooting topsoil where they have to constantly supplement. But how would you, how do you grow enough corn? Like if you want to have like those monocrop agricultural fields where you see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of acres of corn, just corn, or just soybeans, or just alfalfa, whatever it is. Like if you want to do those monocrop things, how are you going to re-fertilize the soil in the same manner with that part to scale? You don't have them. You don't have those monocrop agricultural solutions. There's, no, corn's an amazing plant, so are soybeans. So I'm not, all I'm saying is that right now our corn crop in the U.S., what is it, 30% goes to alcohol for fuel? Well, that takes more energy than the fuel we get. So ethanol you mean? Ethanol, yeah. We don't need that. Right. Ethanol's a byproduct of what we used to think that we needed ethanol because we thought we were running out of gas. Right. So that's not necessary. Okay. Thank you for fracking. Yeah. So we... That's not good either though. No. So we don't need to grow that corn. Well, you know, come on electric vehicles and that, I mean, that's changing the landscape a lot. But isn't a lot of it for agriculture? Well, yeah. So then the next is to feed cattle. So another huge percentage, like 20%, goes to feed cattle. And then another huge percent goes to hogs and chickens, of course. But one of the problems with the hogs and chickens is that they are not integrated with the food system. So right now, right now, 50%, almost 50%, it's arguable, you know, what statistician again, figures lie in liars figure, but somewhere between 40 and 50% of human edible food on the planet is never eaten by a human. It spoils, it's thrown away, and 75% of everything that goes in the landfills is biodegradable. So when you start matching up the waste, the waste streams and the losses in our food system and our waste streams, what happens is very quickly you start seeing that it's the segregated, it's this single species, single crop, single segregated notion where it's not related, it's not symbiotic, it's not synergistic, that actually creates the problem. A city in Belgium, this was articulated in Pat Foreman's wonderful book, the title is City Chicks. And she talked about urban chickens. A city in Belgium offered three chickens per household to anybody that wanted a chicken. And they had 2,000 families raise their hands, says, yeah, we'll take three chickens. So they got 6,000 chickens, distributed them through this to the city. And in the first month, it dropped 100 tons of food waste to the landfill. What? And so not only did they eliminate the landfill waste, all these people now suddenly had chickens and Pat's done all the math on this and shows that if one in three households had enough chickens to eat your kitchen scraps, there would not be an egg industry in the United States. It would be completely non-essential. Really? So that's the power of integration. That's the power of proximate of actual putting stuff close to each other. So they wouldn't have an egg industry because everybody would be growing their own eggs. And the landfill would get way, way less material. And so then the chickens don't need the corn from the cornfields. So the fields can be turned back into prairie to feed herbivores, which now would be cows, not bison. But that's our herbivore of value. And so now you're at perennials instead of annuals. And perennials instead of annuals, perennials put energy in the soil. Annuals extract energy from the soil. So now suddenly you're producing, instead of producing an annual fertilized with petroleum to feed beef for somebody else, instead you're not growing the corn. You don't need the tractor. You don't need the petroleum. The cows fertilize it themselves, and the perennial builds the soil like it did with the bison, and you have the beef, instead of coming out of a feedlot, it's coming off the prairie like the bison did. And suddenly you're building soils that are losing soil, and your production doesn't change one iota. It doesn't take any more land to produce the beef with what I've described than what it does with corn. It doesn't take any more land. Okay, so you're essentially saying that they have to convert to not just growing corn. That's right. They're going to have to do a different kind of farming. That's right. That's right. Corn is, I mean, that kind of monocrop, monospeciated thing is a complete, I mean, we started the interview talking about standing on nature on her neck, you know. That is a quintessential example of standing on nature's neck. And the reason our farm was so deteriorated when we came to it was because we're in Virginia, Shenandoah Valley, and that was the breadbasket of the Confederacy during the Civil War, if you know your history. And essentially the war was finally won when they burned all the crops in the Shenandoah Valley. And during that time, the valley lost somewhere between three and five feet of soil during that time period. So the soils were worn out, and then we got the westward expansion, and it all moved to Ohio and Indiana, and then finally the Dakotas and, you know, kept heading west. So this head west, young man head west, was partly because our agriculture destroyed the soils. And if we don't start using our agriculture to build soils, we have a lot more to worry about than a COVID-19 deal, a lot more to worry about. If we don't figure out a way to produce food abundantly and grow soil while we're doing it, the pandemic is going to be the least of our concerns. Thank you.