Joel Salatin on the Potential of Backyard Agriculture

Has anybody ever come to you and said, hey, our community is kind of screwed up. We don't have a good food source here. Would you help us establish something like this? Yeah, I've been... Have you designed these things for folks? Not, I mean, not for a whole community like this. It sounds like that would be a great thing though. Yeah. Especially now when we're realizing that it's difficult when the food supply chain goes down or something goes wrong and it's difficult to get food to people, wouldn't it be great to have... I've always said this, that it would be great if you had the neighborhood had one large plot of land and everyone in the neighborhood lived off that plot of land. Sure. Instead, have a little mini central park in every neighborhood. Right. Right. You're talking my language. I mean, the idea of... I mean, you're familiar with urban agriculture. I mean, we have food deserts, right? Food deserts is a big, big problem. But a lot of times food deserts are in pretty run down parts of the city that have vacant lots and there's a lot of productive capacity in these places. One of the interesting ones I was on was in St. Louis and these three young couples had come together and they had purchased an old... It was an old crack house that the city bulldozed. So there's this vacant lot. It was half an acre. It wasn't very big. Half an acre. And these three couples, they got apartments nearby like within two minutes walk. And it was in a pretty run down area of the city, run down neighborhood. And they just started farming in this half acre and told all the neighbors, bring us your food scraps. They got some chickens. They started making compost. They put up a little greenhouse. They put up a kitchen and very, very simple, poor boy, bootstrap, you know, nothing. And they quickly became a whole community, whatever, place for kids to come because kids were mesmerized by the chickens. They had a worm bed, the plants growing. They cooked stuff. And I was there, you know, I was there with them for a couple of hours and here come kids down the sidewalk, you know, pulling a little red wagon with food scraps in it. And they're feeding the worm beds. And it's fantastic. They were feeding like, you know, 30 families out of this old crack house foundation. That's amazing. And it was just wonderful. And they were doing it as a gift to the inner city, you know, as a gift to the inner city. But I asked them, I said, so how much of St. Louis' food could be produced this way? They said, if you take out the dairy and the beef, you know, the big mega stuff, St. Louis could feed its entire city within the city limits this way. And that's true in Detroit. It's true in Baltimore. It might not be true in LA, but here's the thing. We don't have to solve every single person's problem to start solving some. And our problem is so many times I start down this path and somebody starts throwing at me the most extreme situation. And you know what? I don't have all the answers for the most extreme situation. You know, the single mom of four, minority in a food desert in whatever. OK? I don't have the answer to every single situation. But I'm looking at suburbia. I'm looking at incredible things that people are doing and opportunities. And if we just did what we know, I mean, I ran into a lady in Edmonton, British Columbia, Alberta. Yeah, thank you. And she was 50, single lady, living in a fifth floor condominium, just wanted to farm in a worst way. No money, no land, nothing. And she just had this epiphany one day. She said, I know, I have one friend that has a backyard. She went to this friend with a backyard. She said, would you mind if I grew up like a 10 foot by 10 foot garden in your backyard? I just want to grow something. Friend said, sure, sure, sure. So she gave her a little 10 by 10 plot, started a garden. Well, the lady's neighbor saw the garden and she said, do you think your friend would put a garden in my backyard? And ladies said, well, no, I'll ask. Well, sure. I met this lady 18 months after this initial conversation with her friend. She was farming 18 backyards, had a part time employee, was a full time farmer. Her all of her tools were on the side of her bicycle. She bicycled from spot to spot to spot with all of her tools. She started a business called On Barred Ground and Growing Food. So the thing is, is there creativity? Is there opportunity? Oh, it's up the wazoo if we would become as interested in this as we are the latest dysfunction in the Kardashians or, you know, the latest whatever. And it's not that we don't have time for it, not that we don't have money for it. If there's one really positive thing to come out of this pandemic, I hope that it's a restructuring of what's valuable in life. And if we can, if we can even grab a 30% bump in that value trajectory, it will have been the best thing that ever happened to us. That's a large bump. Thank you.