Ep 285 | The Gospel According to a Lunatic Farmer | Joel Salatin | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Summary

---

Podcast Summary

Podcast: The Glenn Beck Program
Episode: Ep 285 | The Gospel According to a Lunatic Farmer | Joel Salatin
Date: April 4, 2026
Guest: Joel Salatin (“Christian, libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic, farmer”)

---

Episode Overview

This episode features a deep-dive conversation between Glenn Beck and renowned farmer and author Joel Salatin, famously known as the “lunatic farmer.” Together, they discuss the intersection of faith, freedom, food integrity, the failures of industrial agriculture, and what it would take to emancipate American food producers from the regulatory shackles of centralized government and corporate oligarchy. The conversation traverses the spiritual, practical, and political challenges of farming, the path toward food sovereignty, and the hope for a new food movement rooted in liberty and regeneration.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Joel Salatin’s Unorthodox Identity and Philosophy

[01:04] – [08:19]

• Joel describes his personal philosophy as “Christian, libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic farmer,” purposefully combining identities that often seem contradictory.
  • Christian: Advocates stewardship, but criticizes the faith community’s alignment with environmental exploitation.
  • Libertarian: Calls for minimal government, but not anarchy — e.g., supports right-to-life, would legalize all drugs, and opposes governmental intrusion into personal choices (like raw milk).
  • Environmentalist: Practices non-chemical farming; stresses the often-neglected importance of earthworms and soil health.
  • Capitalist: Values profit and innovation, but rejects amoral capitalism.
  • Lunatic: Embraces the label in response to repeated attacks from establishment voices who paint his practices (e.g., compost, rejecting chemicals) as “crazy.”

“Yeah, I am a lunatic. Of course I am. We don’t vaccinate our cows. We don’t use chemical fertilizers. So when Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine, and fertilizer jumps 400%? Doesn’t affect me at all.”
— Joel Salatin (06:34)

---

2. Industrialization, Mechanistic Worldview, and Its Consequences

[09:23] – [17:43]

• Discussion around how farming (and society at large) lost connection to the land, life, and health.
• Traces the shift back to 1837: Justus von Liebig’s chemical theory of plant life, Darwin’s evolution theory, and Cyrus McCormick’s reaper mechanized grain harvesting — all removing the “mystery” from life and agriculture.
• Critique of the modern mechanistic/rationalist approach:
  • Overemphasizes efficiency and control, neglects life’s irreducible complexity.
  • Leads to genetic manipulation, loss of reverence, and animal suffering.

“Now, nobody in land grant universities today is asking, ‘How do we grow happy pigs?’ The question is, ‘How do we grow them faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper?’”
— Joel Salatin (16:44)

---

3. The Spiritual Essence of Agriculture

[18:32] – [22:46]

• Salatin introduces his concept of the “glory of the pig” — honoring an animal’s essence by permitting it to behave according to its nature.
• Draws a parallel between respecting animals’ glory and fostering a deeper appreciation of God’s glory.
• Argues that food and faith are interconnected; how we farm influences our spiritual consistency and integrity.

“Glory is the distinctiveness of something. It’s the essence of something. And so the glory of God is holiness… But how do we honor that? Well, so we honor the glory of the pig. What is the glory of the pig? Well, he has a snout, so we let him dig.”
— Joel Salatin (19:00)

---

4. Animal Welfare, Nutritional Value, and Food Quality

[23:17] – [32:37]

• Explains the biological and constitutional differences between livestock (cows, pigs, chickens) and why farming must honor these distinctions for healthy outcomes.
• Details how his farm provides grass, diversity, and natural environments, resulting in lower animal stress and superior food quality.
• Anecdote: His farm’s products cook 15% faster because the animals live free of chronic stress and with “happiness.”

“We’ve determined that the reason everything we do cooks 15% faster is because our animals come happy. They don’t come stressed with adrenaline, they come happy. And so the question then obviously becomes, can we eat happiness? And I suggest, yes, we can eat happiness.”
— Joel Salatin (27:31)

• Critique of the commodification of vegetables and the impact on taste/nutrition.

---

5. Systemic Failures: Regulation, Oligarchy, and Market Distortion

[41:51] – [47:42]

• Glen and Joel discuss monopoly control in the meat industry (“the big four” packers) and how government intervention has enabled their consolidation.
• Historical note: In the early 20th century, consumer backlash (prompted by The Jungle) led companies to seek government certification, which, over time, created regulatory hurdles for small producers.
• Regulation now overwhelmingly favors scale, making it costlier per unit for small producers, leading to the demise of local processors and neighborhood abattoirs.

“Instead of a bailout, instead of Federal Trade Commission…let’s try freedom. We need a food Emancipation Proclamation.”
— Joel Salatin (47:42)

---

6. The Food Emancipation Proclamation: A Vision for Change

[47:43] – [54:41]

• Salatin advocates for a “food emancipation proclamation” to allow direct farm-to-neighbor sales, bypassing industrial and regulatory barriers.
  • Example: Homemade convenience foods (like chicken pot pies) could make small-acreage farming economically viable — if legal.
  • Current regulations prohibit direct local food sales, even when both parties consent.
• Describes retail market access as the critical barrier for new and young farmers.
• Pushback: Beck asks about food safety; Salatin proposes limiting sales to direct transactions between consenting adults, leveraging community trust.

“My ultimate agency is…more intimate than the act of marriage, okay? And so being able to choose that, what gets in…so safety…ultimately, if you start drilling down, it’s actually about controlling market access.”
— Joel Salatin (54:43)

---

7. Barriers to Entry and the Aging Farmer Crisis

[57:21] – [60:44]

• Half of America’s agricultural equity will change hands in 15 years — with few young farmers poised to take over.
• Regulatory and market barriers discourage entry; the allure of meaningful farm work still draws people when pathways exist.
• Salatin shares an anecdote about a New York banker moved to tears by the satisfaction of building something tangible with his hands.

---

8. Cultural Divide and the Importance of Visceral Experience

[60:37] – [64:59]

• The rural/urban divide mirrors a divide in connection to creation:
  • In cities, people are surrounded by human-made things, insulated from the humbling influence of the natural world and community.
  • Farming fosters humility, reliance, connectedness, and gratitude.
• Both hosts reflect on the wisdom and grounding found in rural life.

---

9. Digital Democratization and the Uberization of Food

[68:29] – [73:51]

• The internet has made possible a return to “village vetting” at scale (as seen with Uber, Airbnb).
• Salatin proposes “Uberizing” the food system — using digital reputation, transparency, and reviews to solve trust and safety issues in decentralized food supply.
• Asserts that real food reform will not come from bigger government intervention but from restoring liberty and local community agency.

“The answer is liberty. The answer is open up the market for these…that are chafing at the bit to just offer an alternative to the oligarchy to our friends and neighbors, people at church.”
— Joel Salatin (73:24)

---

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “A government that can tell you you can’t take cocaine can also tell you you can’t drink raw milk.”
  — Joel Salatin ([03:02])

• “What is unseen in the culture — the health of the earthworm — is more important than the health of Wall Street.”
  — Joel Salatin ([03:55])

• “If we want our kids to honor the glory of God…It starts with an object lesson. And that object lesson inculcates into us, then a discovery process. What is your glory?”
  — Joel Salatin ([21:06])

• “The distrust now that’s ubiquitous…is just glorious. It really is glorious.”
  — Joel Salatin ([37:14])

• “If you want to get lost, go to the city. If you want to find community, go to the country.”
  — J. Salatin paraphrasing Schumacher ([63:30])

• “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.”
  — Title of Joel Salatin’s previous book ([74:01])

---

Important Timestamps

• [01:04] Joel’s self-description: “Christian, libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic, farmer”
• [06:34] Embracing the “lunatic” label
• [11:41] Explanation of how mechanistic, disconnected thinking overtook Western agriculture (history lesson)
• [16:44] Animal welfare, industrial farming, and the problem with reductionism
• [19:00] “The glory of the pig” and spiritual lessons from farming
• [27:31] “Can we eat happiness?” The effect of low-stress farming on food quality
• [47:42] Call for a “food Emancipation proclamation”
• [54:43] Political and philosophical case for direct farm-to-table food freedom
• [63:30] Rural community vs urban anonymity
• [68:29] The “Uberization” of food and using the internet for transparent community vetting
• [73:51] Preview of Salatin’s forthcoming book: "Food: Unshackling America's Sustenance"

---

Flow and Tone

The conversation is candid, passionate, and deeply personal — with both Beck and Salatin sharing not just criticism of modern food systems and regulation, but also hope in the resilience, ingenuity, and heart of American farmers. The tone navigates between frustrated, inspirational, humorous (embracing the “lunatic” moniker), and, above all, urgent in its call for systemic change via freedom and local connection.

---

Takeaways for Listeners

• The modern American food system is structurally distorted, favoring industrial giants through government-enabled monopoly and regulation.
• Regenerative, decentralized, community-connected farming delivers healthier land, animals, food — and people.
• The internet and “Uberization” can restore community trust and enable direct farmer-to-consumer food economies.
• America faces a critical transition in agriculture as the farming population ages; removing regulatory shackles could spark a renaissance for young farmers.
• Food is not merely a product — it’s spiritual, community-rooted, and essential to liberty.

---

Transcript

[Glenn Beck]

Hello, America. You know, we've been fighting every single day. We push back against the lies, the censorship, the nonsense of the mainstream media that they're trying to feed you. We work tirelessly to bring you the unfiltered truth because you deserve it. But to keep this fight going, we need you right now. Would you take a moment and rate and review the Glenn Beck podcast? Give us five stars and leave a comment. Because every single review helps us break through Big Tech's algorithm to. To reach more Americans who need to hear the truth. This isn't a podcast. This is a movement. And you're part of it, a big part of it. So if you believe in what we're doing, you want more people to wake up, help us push this podcast to the top rate, review, share. Together, we'll make a difference. And thanks for standing with us. Now, let's get to work.

[Joel Salatin]

Bernie Sanders, who walks around the country. Gotta stop the oligarchy. Gotta stop the oligarchy. He's right. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Weather, price, pestilence and disease.

[Glenn Beck]

Exactly right.

[Joel Salatin]

That's what every farmer sits on the back of his pickup truck and. And complains about. Yeah, yeah, I am a lunatic. Course I am.

[Glenn Beck]

I always thought people who were talking about, you know, our food is poison, blah, blah, I just thought they were crazy. And in the last 10 or 15 years, I don't think that. Okay, so, Joel, you call yourself, I want to get this right. Christian, libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic, farmer. Can you break that down one word at a time? Cause some of those words don't seem to go together.

[Joel Salatin]

That's right, and that's on purpose. Because the whole idea is, don't put me in a box. And so the Christian is fairly straightforward. But my problem with the Christian folks, my Christian friends, is that in general, if the church is having a potluck and you say, you know, let's not use Styrofoam, why don't we go to the Salvation army and get a bunch of mismatched plates and we'll wash dishes when it's over and there won't be any trash to take out in the average church. What are you, some sort of greenie weenie, commie, pinko, earth muffin, you know? And so in general, the faith community is identified with dominance, exploitation. Conquistador, you know, look what the Spaniards did in the name of God and the queen. And so each of these has a plus and a minus for me, which is why I've done jumble them together. So Christian, libertarian, politically I'm quite libertarian. I think the government should be about 10% of its size.

[Glenn Beck]

That big, huh?

[Joel Salatin]

Maybe smaller.

[Glenn Beck]

We can debate that.

[Joel Salatin]

We can debate that, maybe smaller. But anyway, that essentially one of the reasons that things have become so acrimonious and partisan in our country is because we have, we have elevated to the federal level the 50 state experiment. And so we have a K Street because everything's for sale. My problem with the libertarians, I'm not an anarchist. I'm very much a right to lifer. I think protecting the unborn is a big deal and. But in general I'm a very libertarian oriented. I would legalize all drugs, all of them. A government that can tell you you can't take cocaine can also tell you you can't drink raw milk. So I say when the government gets between my lips and my throat, that's an invasion of privacy. So Christian, libertarian, environmentalist. I am a rabid non chemical farmer. We compost, we don't use chemicals, vaccines, GMOs, all of those things. And I do think that it matters that there's a dead zone the size of Rhode island in the Gulf of Mexico and we have infertile frogs and three legged salamanders. And I think actually the health of earthworms is probably more important than the health of Wall street as a society.

[Glenn Beck]

I don't think I've heard the health of the earthworm thing before. Are they sick?

[Joel Salatin]

No. Well, chemicals kill them.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah.

[Joel Salatin]

Okay. And of course tillage kills them a lot too. But it's just a way to express when's the last time you went in with a business plan and a baker says, yeah, this is a great business plan, but what's it going to do to the earthworms in our community? And let's agree that that unseen world, that is 10 billion individuals per double handful of healthy soil, that that unseen invisible community is not as important culturally as Wall Street. And I'm not an enemy of Wall Street. These are balance.

[Glenn Beck]

It's so crazy. Environmentalists, you follow that with capitalists.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah, yeah, capitalists. So yeah, I do believe that businesses should be profitable and that, and that we do need capital to invest, to develop, to do new things. But I'm not an amoral capitalist. I think amoral capitalism is probably no better or worse than any other amoral economic system from socialism to whatever. And so that's just my appreciation of. Yeah, I do believe that business is important and, and the best thing to do for the environment is not to abandon it. We have this environmentalism by abandonment. And let's agree that a lot of what we've done environmentally has not been good. But the answer to that is not abandonment. And, okay, humans can't come here. It's to repent in sackcloth and ashes first, and then dust yourself off and take your mechanical ability and your intellectual ability, and let's now redeem and remediate everything we've heard. And then finally, the lunatic part came after a particularly acrimonious phone call with a guy, and he called me a bioterrorist and a Typhoid Mary and a starvation advocate, because we all know compost can't compete with chemicals. And this was not the first time. It's happened numerous times. And I got off the phone. Teresa was standing there, my wife. And I said, I can either be frustrated about this and depressed, you know, Rodney Dangerfield, oh, nobody loves me, everybody hates me, or I can play with. Let's have fun with it. Yeah, Yeah, I am a lunatic. Of course I am. We don't vaccinate our cows. We, you know, we don't use chemical fertilizers. You know, so when Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine, a fertilizer jumps 400%. Doesn't affect me at all. Yeah, I'm a lunatic. And it's been exciting. If you Google lunatic farmer, I'm the only one on the planet.

[Glenn Beck]

I beg to differ.

[Joel Salatin]

It's cool to create a handle that's truly unique in the world. I mean, people live and die to try to create that. So Christian, libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic farmer has kind of become my handle so that when I walk in a room, I developed this over years because as a quote, unquote, organic farmer, legally, I can't use the term because I'm not certified by the government. But, you know, I would speak at a lot of conferences around the world, and I'd be introduced as organic farmer or environmental farmer, whatever. And it was always assumed, oh, well, he must be for the Teachers Union agenda. Abortion, higher taxes, government, you know, Bernie Sanders, whatever. And I just got really tired of it. And so I created, literally created this moniker for my bio so that when I walk in a room, A, people wouldn't put me in a box, and B, I could, with a smile, diplomatically, take that tension, that awkwardness, and just dispel it. And it's been very, very effective.

[Glenn Beck]

That's good. So let's talk about, you know, I have a ranch, and when I say I'm a farmer, somebody suggested I say I'm a gentleman farmer. And I'm like, I'm neither a gentleman nor a farmer. I don't know exactly. I own a ranch and I own a farm.

[Joel Salatin]

Sure.

[Glenn Beck]

And what I have found is that farmers, real farmers that have been doing it for long time, they're the biggest environmentalists out there. The people who are going and hunting, you know, animals for food. They are the biggest environmentalists out there because they know how delicate this is. And you can be the best farmer in the world, but if you don't have a connection, if you're not, all you can do is pray and do everything right. And my crops will fail because I didn't get the rain. I got too much rain, whatever it is.

[Joel Salatin]

Well, the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Weather, price, pestilence and disease.

[Glenn Beck]

Exactly right.

[Joel Salatin]

That's what every farmer sits on the back of his pickup truck and complains about.

[Glenn Beck]

So what happened to us? How did we get to this place, to where we are? Just. I never thought this, you know, I always thought, I always thought people who were talking about, you know, our food is poison, blah, blah, blah. I just thought they were crazy. And in the last 10 or 15 years, I don't think that anymore. I think it is the source of almost all of our problems.

[Joel Salatin]

Yes, yes. Well, I mean, the Maha movement is real.

[Glenn Beck]

It is.

[Joel Salatin]

And when I was at the MAHA inaugural ball in D.C. a, a wealthy friend invited Teresa and I to go. Probably be our only chance to go to an inaugural ball. So we went and it was an epiphany for me. The moment that Del Big Tree stood up and asked. There were 500 of us there. There were 50 tables of 10. So I know it was 500 people. And he asked, how many of you have vaccine injured children? And I couldn't count the hands. But just being there and seeing it, probably 150 hands of the 500 people there went up and you could feel. I get teary and chill bumps even speaking about it, because you could feel the tension. Here were people who for 5, 10, 15, 20 years had a child with all the hopes and dreams that come with a child. You think, when are they going to walk? When are they going to talk? When are they going to go to the first day of school, have their first romance, their first job, what college are they going to? You have all these dreams and hopes and suddenly there's no dreams and hopes. They're gone and these people are ridiculed. Oh, it's all in your head. There's nothing here. And suddenly they had a champion RFK junior. I don't agree with everything that he says or does, honestly.

[Glenn Beck]

And I mean this sincerely, I don't mean this as a slam. I'm not sure he does.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah, I think he's discovering literally unpeeling the onion daily. Kind of like the Twitter files were. It was, well, a little. And then. Whoo.

[Glenn Beck]

Whoa.

[Joel Salatin]

What is this? This is deeper. And so I think that where we've gotten is the result of a philosophy that life is fundamentally mechanical. And this started in 1837 with the Austrian biochemist Justus von Liebig, who, with these vacuum tubes, he was trying what is plant? What is that? What are we made of? And he deduced that we were made of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus. Up until then, life had always had some mystery. Now whether it was Judeo, Christian, you know, Irish folklore, pagan, whatever. There was always this kind of divine reverence. Spiritual. Yes, yes. Suddenly he reduced it to all of Life is simply a rearrangement. A rearrangement and ratio of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus that was earth shattering. And it went around the world along with, you know, at the same time. 1837 is when the beagle sailed and we suddenly heard.

[Glenn Beck]

The beagle.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah, Charles Darwin.

[Glenn Beck]

Oh, okay.

[Joel Salatin]

Charles Darwin, the beagle. Okay.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah.

[Joel Salatin]

And he went on his down to the Galapagos Islands and all this and formulated the theory of evolution that this really isn't a God made thing. It just all kind. And so I think it's fascinating that 1837 is the year that we were told we're all just npk. God didn't have anything to do with it. And Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper, which is the official beginning of the Industrial Revolution, 1837, which threw out the scythe. So before then, the only way to cut grass or grain or whatever was a scythe. And the reaper mechanized that. That's the official beginning of the. And all that happened in 1837, all at the same time. And so since then, our Western, our Greco Roman, Western, reductionist, disconnected, you know, fragmented, linear, reductionist kind of society took that and went farther and farther with it. And our technology enabled us to do things. And then cheap energy came, the petroleum came. So we didn't have to worry. We didn't have to rely on draft power anymore, you know, horses and mules and all that oxen. And it liberated us from the alleged constraints of biology, of life. And we were able to take this mechanistic view toward life to its extreme point to where now? Well, you're just some DNA. We can take a little bit of salmon and a tomato And a little bit of a poison ivy plant and we can make something new. Genesis starts. Everything will be made to bear seed after its kind. There is an order and when you start. And there are a lot of boundaries in life to make sure that things don't jump the traces. Look, if you see if the sexual organs don't match up, that's like a, that's like a, it's a boundary. It's a boundary God established, you know. And so we have been able now to override that and create life forms that didn't occur because we take a very mechanistic view. But as you know, life is not. There are mechanics, I mean, you know, there's physics, but you know, you can go out and love on your, on your Maserati all day and it's still a hunk of steel. But if you go out and love on your milk cow or even your tomato plant for that matter, we know that there is communicative capacity, there is response, dynamism. I mean, there's plenty of plants respond to classical music. They don't like punk rock, you know,

[Glenn Beck]

I mean, have you seen the, the thing. I think it's from Japan, the scientist that did a study where he said nice things to water and horrible things.

[Joel Salatin]

Water. Yep, yep, yeah, absolutely.

[Glenn Beck]

I mean, it's insane.

[Joel Salatin]

It is. It blows your mind. It blows your mind. And the problem with that is going too far down that to where you start viewing life as a God rather than life as an expression of God's fearfully and wonderfully matedness. So for me, physical creation is an object lesson of spiritual truth. So when people come to my farm, I want them to drive out the lane saying, oh, oh, that's what mercy looks like. Oh, that's what provision looks like. Oh, that's what redemption looks like. It's not just an assortment of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated, however cleverly the human mind can imagine to manipulate it. Nobody in land grant universities today is asking how do we grow happy pigs? The question is, how do we grow them faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper. And so if our procedure makes stress on pigs, well, I mean, right now there's research. How do we find the stress DNA, the poor science stress DNA to extract it so that we can abuse pigs more, but they won't be stressed about it.

[Glenn Beck]

Jeez.

[Joel Salatin]

A society that views life from that kind of dominant, manipulative standpoint, who doesn't ask what's the essence of pig and how to make a happy pig, will soon not ask how to make A happy citizen or how to have a Tom and a Mary that fully express their physiological and phenotypical distinctiveness.

[Glenn Beck]

Talk about the pig again, because you wrote an article, what was it called? The Case for. They got it here someplace. But you wrote this great article about where you talked about how if we don't pay attention to our animals. Gosh, I don't know where it is, but. But you talk. The glory of a pig.

[Joel Salatin]

The glory of a pig.

[Glenn Beck]

Glory of a pig. And the way you worded just the headline there, the glory of the pig tells a lot.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah. So, yeah. Interest. You know, we have. I mean, you're a spiritual person. I know. So we have what we call kind of a church. Speak words that we use in the faith community that you don't use. You don't hear the word glory on the street much.

[Glenn Beck]

No, you don't.

[Joel Salatin]

No, that's reserved for the cathedral and the church. But the Bible isn't like that. It talks about the glory of old men, the glory of young men, the glory of nations, the glory of things terrestrial, the glory of things celestial, the glory of nations, the glory of kings, the glory of trees. I mean, it uses the word glory in a very visceral way. It doesn't just spiritualize it into some sort of a Bible study focus group. And so this is consistent with my idea that physical creation is an object lesson of spiritual truth. So God's saying, how do I get them to understand to honor my glory? Well, glory is the distinctiveness of something. It's the essence of something. And so the glory of God is holiness, you know, mercy, forgiveness, omnipresence, omniscience. All right, those great big doctrines, but how do we get somebody to honor that? Well, so we honor the glory of the pig. What is the glory of the pig? Well, he has a snout, so we let him dig. He's got a short tail. He eats a certain way, he wants to live in a certain way. And so, you know, imagine having Sunday dinner with your kids and little Amy says, mommy, why are we eating this pork chop? Well, we're eating these pork chops because, remember we went to Farmer John's place and we saw the pigs out running and rooting, and they were in the sunshine and they had fresh air and they had grass to eat and worms to dig up and a feeder, and they were living in this wonderful place, exhibiting their uniqueness and their distinctiveness, their glory. Well, it's because of that that we're eating these pork chops and not those pork chops, not the ones from someplace else that were raised in a way that doesn't honor.

[Glenn Beck]

Why is that important?

[Joel Salatin]

Why is that important? Because if we want our kids to honor the glory of God and understand his distinctiveness, and how do we honor his omniscience and. And divine attributes into our life? It starts with an object lesson. And that object lesson inculcates into us, then a discovery process. What is about? What's your glory? How can I help you find your ultimate Glenn Ness? Okay. And then we look at God, say, God, how can I help you find yourself, ultimate majesty? Are you with me? And so the problem is that we humans, our big problem is we're hypocrites, aren't we? We're not consistent in our philosophy and our practice. And we, you know, so we have this line of thinking over here, and then we get into the job or we get into other situations, and we kind of, you know, we change our thinking. And I think my call is to bring us back to a consistent, you know, a consistent thought pattern. And I'm not consistent either. Okay. I can tell you my hypocrisies. Okay. But we strive. Don't we strive? We wrestle for it. We wrestle to it. And that's a good thing.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah. That's why I like the beginning of the Constitution. In order to form a more perfect nation. Perfect never will be. No. But. No, we want to strive for that.

[Joel Salatin]

Strive for it.

[Credit Karma Ad Voice]

Not sure how to tackle your taxes? Are you sweating the small print? You may be experiencing FOMO, the fear of messing up the answer using TurboTax on Intuit credit Karma. They help you get your biggest refund, and then we help you do more with it with a personalized plan designed to help you hit your money goals. It's time to take your taxes to the max. Start filing today in the Credit Karma app.

[Glenn Beck]

I have. I've heard, though, that if you allow the animal its glory to be the animal live the way it's supposed to, it's actually healthier in the end for us.

[Joel Salatin]

Oh, no question. So if you think about what's distinctive about. Well, for example, let's take an herbivore, a cow. Okay. Cows have a totally different digestive system than an omnivore, a pig, or a chicken. Chickens don't even have a stomach. They don't even pee. What?

[Glenn Beck]

What?

[Joel Salatin]

Chickens don't have a stomach. They eat something. It goes into a crop, a craw. Okay. And ferments in this wet bag, and then it moves into the gizzard, which is a grinder. It's a physical. It's a muscle that just sits there and grinds and grinds. That's why they eat rocks and stones. So they got grinders, and it goes straight into the intestine. The chicken doesn't have a stomach and they don't pee. That's why chicken manure is so hot,

[Glenn Beck]

because the older chickens, the older roosters don't have to get up six times a night, which is really nice. They got it made. Should have been born a rooster.

[Joel Salatin]

I don't know how that all works in the chicken world, but what I'm getting at, yeah, the same diet, habitat, environment for a chicken would not be the same you'd have for a pig or a cow or whatever. That's the idea. So when we raise these animals, we're in livestock. We're in pastured livestock farming. So when we raise these animals, our first question is, well, what is unique and distinctive about this critter? How can we create a habitat that allows it to express its, you know, its distinctiveness? Its uniqueness. And so, for example, cows. We don't feed cows any grain. The herbivore in nature, yes, it picks some seeds off, you know, seeded out grasses or whatever, but it doesn't eat grain as a large percentage of its diet at all. And so we grass finish. So we're in the grass finished business. And what's interesting is the Bionutrient Food association has just completed basically two years of study where they're looking at what is the single most common denominator that determines the nutrient density of beef. They started with carrots, then they did broccoli, and now they're doing beef. And more important than climate, weather, breed, you know, rancher, farmer, any of those things, the number one determinant is how many different plants did the cow eat? Its variety, its diversity of sward, we now know on the American plains. When the bison were there, before the Europeans came, There were roughly 60 species of grass and some over 1,000 species of forbs, which we would call weeds. But they were edible. You know, flowers. I mean, from plantain to chicory to whatever. And so that variety was a huge distinctive. And so on our farm, we're doing everything we can to facilitate more diversity and variety within the sward to create this diverse ingestion. We could go on with the pigs and the chickens, the chickens, we move them every day to a fresh spot. The pigs, they run through paddocks of grass and forest and acorns and stuff along with feed as well. But what's interesting is over the years, we've been in this now for half a century on our farm, and we've serviced a lot of very, very upscale restaurants. Oh, I bet we don't sell to McDonald's.

[Glenn Beck]

I wouldn't assume you did. You provide meat.

[Joel Salatin]

We service a lot of these upscale restaurants, and what we've learned from them is that over time is that all of our stuff cooks 15% faster than regular supermarket stuff. Well, why is that? Well, because in a concentrated animal feeding operation, you know, a big confinement chicken house or a piggery or a beef feedlot, whatever, the social and dietary aspects of that are stressful on the animal. There aren't supposed to be 20,000 chickens in one house breathing fecal particulate all day, blocked out from fresh air and sunshine. That's not the way a chicken is supposed to be raised. And so in that stress, what happens when you're under stress? You tighten up, don't you? I mean, that's how a hundred pound mom can pick up a car off her toddler, you know, if it falls. But after that she's shaking and all tense. So you tend to stress. You secrete adrenaline cortisols and they tighten you up. Whereas when you're relaxed and happy, you know, you relax. And so we've determined that the reason everything we do cooks 15% faster is because our animals come happy. They don't come stressed with adrenaline, they come happy. And so the question then obviously becomes, can we eat happiness? And I suggest, yes, we can eat happiness. Now, I don't want to go down there too far, be really, granted a kook, but I do think realize our microbiome of billions and billions of microbes, they are very close cousins to everything that's outside of us. And our mouth is a gateway. And everything, our gut, our microbiome, everything it knows about the world, it knows by what comes through our mouth. You know, here it comes in, you know, is it monosodium glutamate? Is it high fructose corn syrup? Oh, no, this is grass finished beef. You know, I mean, I. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can play with it, but you can imagine the drama. Okay. And I just can imagine, you know, my, you know, your microbiome when something really, you know, good comes in. Oh, hi, cousin. You know, it's been good because really, when you, when you profile the human gut and healthy soil, they're almost indistinguishable as like a cutaway. All right? And so if what we're ingesting is grown under Stress with adrenaline drips, then our microbiome is going to assume, wow, that's a vicious bad world out there. As opposed to bringing in loved beef, loved tomatoes, loved things. And you know, when we look at produce, basically the benchmark of cultivar selection for the last 70 to 80 years, certainly the last 50, has been shippability and spoilability. You know, can a, you know, will this tomato, you know, sit in the back of a truck and bounce for 1,000 miles across the country to the supermarket without turning to jell? Oh, and when you do that, you essentially cardboardize vegetables. You got to give them more structure and less juice and less nutrients. And so one of the reasons kids don't like vegetables is because they're all like cardboard, because they've been selected for non spoilability and shippability. And when something doesn't rot as fast or structurally break down as fast, then it won't digest as fast. And basically our guts are a compost pile on steroids. And so you take squeezable cheese, put it on the table, you can walk away and it can just sit there for a year. But if you put real cheese on the table, in three days it gets fuzzy, and in a week it sprouts legs and walks off the table. I mean, that's the difference between living food and, and, and, and inanimate protoplasmic structure we have.

[Glenn Beck]

That's why in theory, I, I've not done it, and because I just don't drink milk and my kids are out of the house. But, you know, having milk right from the cow makes all the sense in the world. I mean, we don't, we don't need to pasteurize anymore. No, those are for the days when cleanliness was not possible. At scale at least. We don't need to do that. And yet we're burning everything out. They just turned the food pyramid, turned it upside down.

[Joel Salatin]

That's unbelievable.

[Glenn Beck]

The government has just admitted everything we told you is 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

[Joel Salatin]

Suddenly eggs are better than Cheerios. Imagine that. Who would have thought that? So, yeah, I'm telling you, I've been in this space all my life. And the changes we've seen in the last year, I never thought I'd ever see in my lifetime. I mean, just the recognition that we've gotten everything upside down. And it's frankly quite exciting. It really is exciting.

[Glenn Beck]

It's really an exciting. It's a scary, It's a scary time to be alive in some ways, but it's a really Exciting time to be alive.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah, it is. I mean, think of what RFK Jr. Has brought to the American public. I mean, I felt like I was fairly informed, but I didn't know that $12 billion of SNAP benefits went to Coca Cola. I didn't know that eight months ago, nine months ago, I didn't know. I knew there were a lot of food additives, but I didn't know that America, that the FDA allowed 10,000 and the EU only allows 400. I mean, that's incredible. And so the man, for all of his flaws and imperfections, has just peeled off this truth. And I can tell you having. I mean, we ship nationwide from our farm as well. And all my life I've gotten up every morning and, okay, who can I sell to today? Who can I take a sample to? You know, marketing, marketing, marketing. How do we. And in the last 24 months, suddenly,

[Glenn Beck]

you don't need to do that.

[Joel Salatin]

No, no, it's just yanking us. It's hard to keep up. And it's the same, you know, for my friends in this space. I'm seeing essentially the same thing. And it's very, very exciting because the logistics of distribution have plummeted. FedEx, UPS, doorstep delivery, that cost has plummeted. And the cost of bricks and mortar retail interface has escalated. The cost of a cashier, the cost of insurance to make sure the snow is swept off of the walkout front so nobody breaks and sues you. So as the one cost has soared, the other cost has dropped. And so we can. You ready for this? From our farm. If you told me this two years ago, I said you were crazy. From our farm right now, at the end of a little pothole dirt road in rural Virginia, we can ship four dozen eggs to any city in America cheaper than they can get them at farmer's Market.

[Glenn Beck]

You gotta be kidding me.

[Joel Salatin]

Because cities are expensive places to do business, defund the police, crime, high taxes, high regulation. I mean, they're all blue, right? And I mean, look at the map of the us it's red. But you've got these. They're all urban centers, and those are expensive to do business in. And so here we are, kind of an inversion of the old. I feel almost like a voluntary colonialist. You know, here we are in a low tax, low regulation, basically conservative little pocket. Leave us alone. And if we can get stuff on a UPS truck, literally the food system can completely circumvent the supermarket system. And that's the first time that's been possible at cost and at scale.

[Glenn Beck]

Make you nervous at all? What we learned at Covid, though.

[Joel Salatin]

Oh. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Yeah. While I, you know, and I. For the record, I didn't take the jab neared.

[Glenn Beck]

I. Good for you.

[Joel Salatin]

Good. Yeah, yeah. But. But that. That, you know, I would. I would like to think that if that rears its ugly head again, you know, World Economic Forum and what. I don't want to get all conspiratorial.

[Glenn Beck]

Consp. There's a conspiracy theory and a conspiracy fact. That's a conspiracy fact.

[Joel Salatin]

The difference in the two is six months. Is that right?

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah, it's exactly right. It's exactly right.

[Joel Salatin]

So that really was an emperor has no clothes moment, I think, in our culture. And the distrust now that's ubiquitous in the cult, the distrust of government institutions, the distrust of the big food, what I call the chemical industrial food complex, the distrust of the colleges, the elitists, the mainstream narrative, if you will, is just glorious. It really is glorious.

[Glenn Beck]

If we can fix it and not just burn it down to the ground.

[Joel Salatin]

Right, right.

[Glenn Beck]

You know, that's the scary part because there's some, you know, there's some good things that. That we. We need. We just need to re. We just need to rethink this. And, you know, people are, you know, these companies are making billions and billions and billions of dollars, and nobody's interested in retooling unless they absolutely have to. And.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

And they, you know, they'd much rather throw money at it and. Can you protect. Make this go away?

[Joel Salatin]

Look at. Look at Trump right now. And, you know, and I'm. I'm. For the record, I'm happier Trump's in there than Kamala. Okay. I mean, just. But, I mean, here he is throwing $12 billion again at the soybean farmers to, you know, two years ago, they got another $12 billion bailout.

[Glenn Beck]

And the soybean, we don't use soy.

[Joel Salatin]

Half of the soybeans produced in the US Are exported. Half of them. The world is awash in soybeans. We don't need that many soybeans. And almost half of the corn we grow in the US Goes into ethanol.

[Glenn Beck]

Just.

[Joel Salatin]

So here we are subsidizing these six things. Well, crop insurance, it's changed. Crop insurance. Now, it sounds a little better than subsidy, but here we are subsidizing rice, sugar cane, wheat, corn, soybeans that we have an overabundance of. Meanwhile, were way short on beef. You know, beef prices have. I mean, if you follow that, you know, the beef herd is lower than it's been since 1950.

[Glenn Beck]

Wow. Who would have seen this coming? We're all getting older and I don't know about you, but I have definitely felt the aches and pains that come along with that sort of thing. I used to suffer from really horrible pain in my hands pretty much all the time. You'll notice. I said I used to, I tried everything. I went to some of the best doctors in the world and nothing, nothing that we tried worked until that day. That something actually did. And I have to thank my wife and Relief factor. My wife said I'm not going to listen to you wine anymore unless you try everything. And I didn't think Relief factor would work. It's a daily 100% drug free supplement that just doesn't mask your pain for a short time. It actually helps your body eliminate it for good. It works with your body, uses a unique formula, all natural ingredients. It helps support your body's natural response to inflammation. Over a million people have tried relief factor. Two out of three keep taking it. And I'm one of the two out of three give relief factor a try. Their three week quick start 1995 less than a dollar a day 1, 800 for relief relieffactor.com Starting a business can

[Shopify Ad Voice]

seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into sign up for your $1 per month [e-mail] specialoffer so

[Glenn Beck]

let's talk about beef for a second.

[Joel Salatin]

Okay.

[Glenn Beck]

I raise about 100 head of cattle and you know, it's all organic, you know, grass fed. We just bring them out to the pastures, let them eat. And I've learned a lot by raising beef. I think where we went wrong as a nation is when we stopped putting our hands in the dirt. You know, so many things just answer themselves. You know, you're better people, you're, you rely on your neighbor, all of this stuff. But then when you get to the place to where you're auctioning off your beef, I believe that the, the big production houses, the, the.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah, the big packers.

[Glenn Beck]

The big. Yeah, the big packers.

[Joel Salatin]

The big four.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah, they seem more like the big one and they are. They have been screwing our farmers and our beef farmers for a very long time. I brought it up to the President before I've brought it up to rfk. Somebody's got to break that up because we are, we have such a shortage of beef and I'd like you to talk about that for a second. But at the same time, beef farmers are barely making it. Yes, beef is at an all time high, but they're not getting paid for it.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah, yeah, well. And when Trump came on there two months ago, berating farmers for their high prices, feeder cattle were, you know, four bucks a pound there. It really angered a lot of farmers because nobody's, nobody's helped beef farmers when the price has been under, you know, under profit. So.

[Glenn Beck]

So it's still close. It's not, but it's not. Beef farmers are not. They're just. Every year they just squeak by.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've just opened up the door for my crusade is a bad word, but it's as good a word as

[Glenn Beck]

I know right now for I'll put my helmet on, let's go for my thing.

[Joel Salatin]

And that is so Bernie Sanders who walks around the country. Got to stop the oligarchy. Got to stop the oligarchy. He's right. Okay? The problem is that the liberal class, their only solution to the oligarchy is a bigger government bully, you know, antitrust, whatever, to come in and break them up.

[Glenn Beck]

The problem is the oligarchy is in bed with the government. They become one.

[Joel Salatin]

Exactly. In 1906, when Teddy Rosavelsky, I call him Rooseveltsky.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah, good for you.

[Joel Salatin]

When Teddy Rozavelsky got, at that time, in 1906, after Thompson Sinclair wrote the Jungle, within six months, those seven companies, the seven packers, Swift Armour, that controlled, at that time, seven companies, controlled 50% of America's meat supply in 1906. They lost 50% of their sales in six months after that book was published. That's the power of an informed citizenry. People will make good decisions if they get the truth, but if they don't get the truth, they can't make a decision. And so the seven big companies came to Teddy Rosavelsky. They said, please help us. We've got to get credibility with the American consumer again. Set up an agency to put a stamp on our products so that the American public will say, okay, this is okay. And he should have said, you made your bed, now go lie in it. And if he had independent certifiers would have, you know, AAA for beef or whatever, okay. But no, he gave them the Food Safety inspection service in 1908. And since the inception of the Food Safety Inspection Service, fsis. There's been a steady march of additional regulatory structure within the food and especially the meat industry that has added, added, added scale, prejudicial regulations that make it easy for big guys to succeed and hard for little guys to succeed.

[Glenn Beck]

Yes.

[Joel Salatin]

So we have lost the neighborhood abattoir. We have lost this entire infrastructure of our, of our country. I mean, does anybody think that the supermarket shelves in 2020, in April 2020, would we have been, would we have had as big a, you know, hiccup in our especially meat supply had the country been nourished by 300,000 neighborhood abattoirs as opposed to 300 megaprocessing facilities around the country? It's a rhetorical question. There's an easy answer. You know, when you're in rocky waters, you want to be in a speedboat, a little speedboat you can turn around. Not an aircraft carrier that takes 12 miles to turn around. In, you know, the business book, it's not the big that eat the small, it's the fast that eat the slow. And when you're a bureaucratic, a large bureaucratic institution, movement is very, very difficult. When you're small like we are, you're in a little speedboat. Hey, you know, we can adjust. And the little slaughterhouse that we co own, you know, we got 25 employees. You know, we didn't miss a lick, we didn't miss a day of work. We didn't miss anything. And in fact, on our farm, we sold six months worth of inventory in six weeks in the spring of 2020. It was the best economic thing that ever happened to us. Even though we lost almost a million dollars of restaurant sales because they all closed, but we picked it up on the retail end. So what do we do about this oligarchy? About the fact that now, 120 years after FSIS was started, we now don't have seven companies controlling 50%. We have four companies control 85%. This is not a free market.

[Glenn Beck]

Not at all.

[Joel Salatin]

It has been an intervented, metaled federal program from the beginning. So here's my solution. Instead of a bailout, instead of Federal Trade Commission, instead of Smoot Hartley. I mean, whatever, okay? Instead of any of that, let's try freedom. Let's try liberty. We need a.

[Glenn Beck]

You are a lunatic.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah. We need a food Emancipation proclamation.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah.

[Joel Salatin]

And I am not abashed to say I am using every bit of whatever political equity I have to get a 30 minute audience with Trump to pitch him a food Emancipation Proclamation. We need to take the Shackles off of a farmer so that the farmer can sell to his neighbor. Right? Now, if you came to my farm and said, man, you make a great chicken pot pie, I've got guests coming next week. Could you make me five? I'll buy them so I can set my guests. I'm busy. Illegal. You got two Guernsey cows. Oh, man, I'd love some raw milk. Could you sell. Nope, can't sell it to you. What's happened since 1906 is convenience food. Back then, people cooked in their kitchens. You didn't have TV dinners, you didn't have squeezable cheese, and you certainly didn't have lunchables and Hot Pockets, okay? So today, 75%, and this is again uncovered by RFK Jr. 75% of America's food is convenience food. We watch cooking shows, but we don't cook. Never has a culture been so techno sophisticated, gadgetized in our culinary kitchens, but not used it. And so 75%, and this has literally been an epiphany for me, literally in the last 12 months. I have preached all my life. I do a lot of urban stuff, you know, urban foodie, you know, presentations and stuff and people. What can I do? I always say, get in your kitchen. The best thing you can do is get in your kitchen, get real food. You know, get a butternut squash, peel it and fix it, cook it, you know, And I've realized I've become a Don Quixote on that. That horse left the stable. Americans are. I hope we will eventually. But right now, the answer is not get in your kitchen. Because we are so far removed from our kitchens now that when I say get in your kitchen, it's offensive to the average person. They don't even know how to boil an egg.

[Glenn Beck]

I know.

[Joel Salatin]

And so instead of being offensive, what we need to do is say, okay, you're getting convenience food. We need you to be able to get good convenience food. A chicken pot pie does not have to have MSG and glycerin in it or red dye 29 or whatever it is they put in, okay? A good chicken pot pie can be made in your kitchen with nothing like that. And it's frozen, and it's wonderful. And I love chicken pot pies or a quiche or shepherd's pie or any of these convenience type foods can be made like this. I speak, Glenn, I speak at 2000s, maybe hundreds of thousands, because there are a lot of homestead festivals around the country. And these are big, you know, four, five, six, 7,000 people. And these are Small holders, you know, they might have 5, 10, 15, 20 acres. They would love to make a living on their farm. So right now, our farm supplies a local restaurant with chicken that they make a chicken pot pie. It's on the menu. Poly face pastured chicken pot pie. It's their signature dish. Comes in a wonderful little cast iron skillet, you know, oh, it's just fabulous. They take a $20 chicken and turn it into $405. Okay, now if we take off 205 of that because it's a restaurant and say I could do that and make. Because I don't have a waitress, I don't have all the overheads. So I can make $200 worth of pot pies out of that. That's a tenfold dollar 20 chickens. $200. Okay. So we cover an acre with 600. We move them every day chickens across the pasture. They're in little floorless shelters to protect them from predators. Move them across the pasture every day and 600 birds cover one acre in the course of several weeks that they're out there. These are meat chickens, not laying chickens. And so if you had 2 acres and you could raise 1200 of these and you could sell chicken pot pie to your neighbors as a convenience food, you could take those 1200 chickens times 200 is $240,000. You can make a living on two acres selling a convenience food straight out of your home kitchen.

[Glenn Beck]

And really good living.

[Joel Salatin]

A good living. If we had a food emancipation proclamation. The problem is farmers, entrepreneurial farmers who are ready to value add. You know, these are not commodity farmers. These are people, I mean, some big farmers, little farmers, all in between that view themselves as entrepreneurs as opposed to just, you know, raising corn for the man. All right, I run in. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of them around this country that are ready to access their neighborhoods with well made, unadulterated convenience food. But it's. But it's illegal.

[Credit Karma Ad Voice]

Introducing Home Care Plus, a new subscription service from Lowe's that helps make life easier by giving members a hand with home maintenance. Let Lowe's tackle the tasks you keep meaning to do, like electric dryer, vent cleaning, replacing hard to reach light bulbs, and more. Subscribe to Home Care plus for just $99 a year.

[Joel Salatin]

Year.

[Credit Karma Ad Voice]

And consider your to do list done. Members get more at Lowe's. Available in select zip codes only. Cancel anytime. Non refundable fee. Product purchase required terms and service restrictions apply. Details@lowe's.com Terms subject to change.

[Glenn Beck]

Here's the. Here's the pushback on that. The reason why they'll say, well, no, because you got. You got to check for safety. You got to make sure those kitchens are clean. You got to make sure xyz. And to some degree, that's true. You don't. I mean, there are going to be people that are doing really nasty stuff.

[Joel Salatin]

Absolutely.

[Glenn Beck]

There always are. So how do you solve for that?

[Joel Salatin]

So you solve it. You solve it by limiting it to direct sale. In other words, I can't sell this to Walmart. I can't sell it to a third party. You and I have to, as two consenting adults exercising freedom of choice for our microbiome. We should be able to engage in a food transaction of provenance without asking the government's permission.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah, that's absolutely right.

[Joel Salatin]

I mean, we. What good is it to be able to assemble, pray, preach, if we can't choose our body's fuel to give us the energy to go, pray, preach and assemble? I mean, it's such a fundamental human right. I mean, we talk about human agency. My ultimate agency is. I mean, it's more intimate than the act of marriage, okay? And so being able to choose that what gets in. So safety. Here's the thing. All the other thing. All the other parts of our culture where there's hazardous material, like drugs, prescription drugs, whatever, the prohibitions are across the board. You can't use it, you can't give it. You can't give it away, you can't take it, you can't sell it, you can't buy it, you can't sell it, you can't give it away. You can't. All right, except in food. In food, I can give you a pot pie. You can feed it to your friends all day. Perfectly safe. What is it about exchanging money that suddenly turns it from a benevolent thing to a hazardous substance? I can give you a glass of milk. In fact, you can feed it to your children. In fact, you can buy it. I just can't sell it. Nobody ever gets taken to court for buying illegal food. Who gets taken to court is the farmer or the value adder who produced it, who created it. So the ultimate hypocrisy of this is that all other hazardous substances that can go between our lips, the prohibition is, everything is everything but food. It's only on the seller. And so it's not about safety. I mean, they will say it's about safety, but ultimately, if you start drilling down, it's actually about controlling market access. And so what we have right now is we have a Real problem in American agriculture in our aging farmer. Our farmers are now 60 years old. In the next 15 years, that's 1 5, 15 years, half of all America's agriculture equity will change hands. That's never happened in any civilization in peace. It's only happened in conquest. You know, the Huns come in and take over Rome, the Polynesians come.

[Glenn Beck]

Okay, but I can make the case that is happening, that it is the industrial farmer that has made conditions so bad that the young farmers, the ones who are watching their mom and dad, they work this hard, barely make it every year. I don't want to work like that.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah, well, the problem is that when old people can't get out, or when young people can't get in, old people can't get out.

[Glenn Beck]

Yes.

[Joel Salatin]

And so these farmers continue to age, age, age. And you're right, the ultimate. We hear the word regenerative farming now over and over and over again. Well, when somebody asked me about regenerative farming, they're thinking soil and earthworms and all that stuff. My first reaction is, is it attractive to young people?

[Glenn Beck]

Does your third generation farmer, Right.

[Joel Salatin]

Well, I'm second generation. Our son now is third generation. He operates it, but it doesn't have to be family. I mean, we have, I mean, we run a very formal stewardship and apprenticeship program on our farm. And we just had, we just had 135 applicants for 11 spots. And these, and these are Americans. They're not. I mean, I don't want to get down that rabbit trail, but these are many times college educated, articulate, sharp, well spoken. And a lot of these young people, they get five, six years into their Dilbert cubicle career and suddenly they're sitting there, you know, at their screen and they're looking and say, man, I really would rather be out running that zero turn mower with the landscape crew at the corporate headquarters. And they start yearning for something that's visceral, that they can touch. We had the most amazing. We had a guy come from Chase Manhattan Bank. He worked in the Belly of the Beast in New York. He came as an apprentice. And he came in one day for supper and he was almost in tears. He was visibly, you know, moved. I said, what? You know, what's the deal? He said, well, he said, he said, my career has been working, you know, at this cubicle with, you know, three team members. One's in Tokyo, one's in Shanghai, one's in London and me. And we build these, you know, we build these electronic, you know, whatever skeleton you Know, financial skeletons in cyberspace push a button at the end of the day, it goes who knows where. And we do the same thing tomorrow, tomorrow. And he said, today, you know, with the team, we built a Millennium Feather Net. That's what we call our portable laying structure. Millennium Feather Net, named after the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars. And I knew you'd like that, the Millennium Feather Net. And he said, we worked on it all day and we pounded nails, we cut boards, we put the screws in. And he said, and he just got all teary. He said, and tomorrow, he said, and my team, we talked, we joked, I could see them, we could, we could touch, we held things for each other. And tomorrow morning I'm going to wake up and go out there and it's still going to be there. And he was just, you know, and this tactile, tactile visceral encounter with life,

[Glenn Beck]

nothing, nothing has meaning anymore or substance and it's own that is only going to get worse. Nothing.

[Joel Salatin]

That's right.

[Glenn Beck]

And I know I bought my ranch when I was in New York City and I just wanted to get out of the city. And what I didn't realize, the first day we were there, we started a campfire, sat around the campfire and there's no light pollution there. Yeah. And the campfire started to die down and we all sat there as a family. We looked up at the sky and we did what I hadn't done in years. Wow, we are small, are we? When you're living in the cities, you don't see the moon. All you see are things that man has created, especially New York City. And you don't have those. And then I didn't have to talk to my kids about how the birds and the bees were. They saw the cattle, they saw the

[Joel Salatin]

animals, they know where the calves come from.

[Glenn Beck]

Right. They know exactly what is happening. Yeah. You know, it's just that that experience, you know, my son, who really does not like to work hard, works hard on the ranch and every time he says, I feel so good. Yeah, of course you do.

[Joel Salatin]

That's right.

[Glenn Beck]

Because you're working, you're creating something with your own hands and it's real and you're worn out at the end of the day.

[Joel Salatin]

We see that in our culture in the bifurcation of the red and blue, in that the red tends to be rural and the blue is urban. And I've concluded that part of the reason is because the rural areas, I'm just being very general here, a rural area, we are immersed every Day, as you've just described in the magnificence of creation, the smallness of people. And we're immersed in something that divinity created. You know, God makes the trees, he makes the grass. He makes. I mean, ultimately. And so. So we're immersed in divine expression in our world. In the city, you're immersed in human made everything. Cars, roads, honking street lights. Everything is man made, even success.

[Glenn Beck]

I mean, I know, because my crops pay for the cattle, for the whole. You know what I mean?

[Joel Salatin]

Right.

[Glenn Beck]

And. And we'd have a perfect. We did everything right. We did everything right. And then it rains in the city. You're like, you know, this isn't fair. This isn't fair. And you blame it on somebody. There is no one to blame but God. You know what I mean? And so you're like, crap. And that forces your neighbors to see you and go, thank God it didn't happen to me this year, but it did happen two years ago. I'm helping them out because I'm gonna need them to help me out when I'm like. And the whole thing just works. Everything just works.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah. Schumacher, you know, talked about anonymity in Small is beautiful in his iconic book, and he talked about, if you want to get lost, go to the city. If you want to find community, go to the country. Because in the country, everybody knows your car. They know when you go out, when you come in, oh, he didn't go out. What's the deal? You know? But in the city, it's anonymous. People don't even know the person across the room. And so, yeah, I think you're exactly right. So one of the pathways. One of the pathways of entry, you know, if we say that if we're going to save agriculture, we need to create pathways of entry for young people. The quickest way to enter is to be able to capture the retail dollar that's in your neighborhood. That's the quickest way to enter because you don't have to own 1,000 acres. You don't have to buy a ranch. You can get 2, 3, 4, 5 acres, a little homestead, if you will, and you can make a living. And so that's why this idea of a food emancipation proclamation is funny. People say, well, do you think it's legal? And I said, I don't think Trump cares. I think if he thinks it's right, he'll do it and then let the court sort it out. And I think nothing could be more Trumpian than a food emancipation proclamation. I mean, it's just so Trumpian.

[Glenn Beck]

But I bet he has not. I bet it's been a very long

[Joel Salatin]

time

[Glenn Beck]

since he has cracked an egg and seen how vibrant that yolk is. And then the next time you go to the store and you're like, okay, well that's an egg. What is. My first response was, what is wrong with that egg? No, no, no, what's wrong with the eggs you're buying at the store? And when you see that, Then it just becomes, oh, I get it.

[Joel Salatin]

And most people have never tasted the kind of food that we produce. They don't know what it is. I mean, we had a lad, very small, very small, six year old boy, clearly was struggling a little bit. She says he's such a picky eater, he won't eat anything. And she got a couple dozen eggs. She called me two days later, she says, he's eating six eggs a day. His body was starved for nutrition. He was eating stuff, but it wasn't nutritional. And so many people, many people trust what they see in the store anymore, but they don't know where to turn. And I'm telling you, based on the thousands of farmers and homesteaders that I encounter every year, if we had a food Emancipation proclamation, there would be an atomic explosion of value added convenience opportunity in neighborhoods all over this country and suddenly that good food would be affordable because all food regulations are scale prejudicial. It's easier to comply if you're big than if you're small. We own a small federal inspected slaughterhouse up in Harrisonburg. It costs US$600 to do what JBS, one of the big four meat packers, what it cost them $150 to do because we have the same HACCP plan, the same paperwork, you know, but we spread our inspector and bathroom and all these special, you know, inspection overheads. We spread it over 50 beef a week, they spread it over 5,000 a day. And it's exactly the same. And so when people accuse me of being, well, you're elitist, you know, your prices are high, all that. They don't have to be. They're only high because we're trying to squeeze. We don't have a food emancipation Proclamation, so we're trying to squeeze our low volume through this industrial spread.

[Glenn Beck]

Right? So, but that I think has been all done at first. I think, I don't think people in the government cared or cared to figure it out or look into it and really understand it. They were just like, oh, well, that's what the big guys say, it needs to happen. So we gotta do that.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah, well, when people blame. So where I differ with a lot of my friends is they view, well, the Big guy are trying to run people like us out of business. No, no, no, no, no. It's the consumer advocates, the Ralph Naderites that are asking for government intervention to protect them. They're asking for a safety net, a security, you know, something. They as, as food industrialized and went behind big, you know, screens with, you know, no trespassing signs. They say we need a bigger bully to look over the fence to protect our interests. What they didn't realize was their bully was going to go to bed with

[Glenn Beck]

what was on the other side of the fist.

[Joel Salatin]

And that's the oligarchy. That's Bernie. He's right. That's what happened. And so where we are now is we now have the ability to Uberize our food system. 60 years ago, if I said, I'm going to Calcutta, I'm going to jump in a car that doesn't even have a taxi thing on it, I don't know if the driver's been vetted or not, and he's going to take me to the museum, I'd say, what are you crazy? You can be kidnapped. Why does Uber work? Well, because the Internet has democratized vetting. It has democratized vetting to the point where we can have real time sleuthing of a global voice to vet the butcher, baker and candlestick maker that 500 years ago were embedded in the village. Everybody know who the Scoflaws were. Everybody knew who knew who the good one was because they all went to church, the kids played together, they lived above their shops. Everybody knew who the good ones were and who the bad ones were that got corrupted or dimmed. It became opaque. Let's just say that in the Industrial Revolution, with scale and with opaqueness, and suddenly the Internet has blown this open to re embed the butcher, baker, candlestick maker observations and democratize everybody's view of them so that we've been able to have Uber. I mean, that's how Uber worked. I mean, think about this. This launched in a place that, yeah, we got to make sure these guys can drive, that the car is acceptable. Blah, blah, blah. Circumvented everything. Talk about safety. Uber circumvented everything. Airbnb, you know, think about that. In 10 years, Airbnb launched. In 10 years, the globe got double. It doubled the hospitality rooms of Marriott, Sheraton and Hilton. Those three conglomerates combined, Marriott, Sheraton and Hilton doubled the number of rooms without Pounding a nail. What, you're going to go stay in somebody's house? How do you know they. Maybe they have a bomb there. Maybe they're trying to hurt you. You know all this nothing.

[Glenn Beck]

Why?

[Joel Salatin]

Because of the Internet has re embedded the village vetting voice in a global situation. So agriculture and food were the last to join the industrial revolution. I mean the beginning, yeah, I said it was Cyrus McCormick's reaper. But technology really went, you know, communication, transportation, okay, all that. Farming and food were kind of the last to join that technological revolution. And because of that it will be the last to exit. And so I say the food Emancipation Proclamation. I'm also happy to say we need to uberize our food system. I mean you can come at this from numerous threads and in fact I've just finished the rough draft of my 18th book just literally this morning as I was waiting to come here, I had another thought for another chapter and hopefully it will be out this summer. And the title is Food Unshackling America's Sustenance. And I want to present these arguments as an idea, as a liberty, freedom oriented idea to what has been the foodies, the food, the environmental food movement. If we just broadly environmental food movement has been on the liberal side of the spectrum and the problem is wonderful people. And of course I have deep, deep friendships all through that realm. But the thought that we can beat the oligarchy with freedom and not with a bigger government agency, a bigger government hammer is never enters their mind. The answer is always, you know, and I agree. I don't know who said it. You probably know some famous said that the only way there can be a monopoly is with collusion with the government In a free market. Monopolies can't exist because there are too many eager beavers yapping at the heels of an outfit. And so I tend to agree with that. And so if we want to chip away, if we want to actually create movement, a a pathway of entry for new young farmers which enables an exit for old farmers, a pathway into healthy food by people who want to get healthy food and to chip away at the power of the oligarchy, the answer is liberty. The answer is open up the market for these. All these friends of mine, plus me that are chafing at the bit to just offer an alternative to the oligarchy to our friends and neighbors, people at church.

[Glenn Beck]

You're fabulous. I can't wait for your book to come out.

[Joel Salatin]

Thank you.

[Glenn Beck]

And I got to get a copy because if I see the president I will pass it on to him. I think you're onto something.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah. One of my previous books written 15 years ago is the title is Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal. And that articulates many of the frustrations that we've got abandoned about today. But this one, this one is going to be the solution.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah, that's good. Thank you.

[Joel Salatin]

Thank you.

[Glenn Beck]

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

[Mint Mobile Ad Voice]

Ryan Reynolds here from IT Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying doing. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to [e-mail]

[Shopify Ad Voice]

Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to 15 per month required Intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees, extra fee, full [e-mail].