Joel Salatin is an American farmer and author. He owns Polyface Farms, which is known for its small scale unconventional farming methods. Months ago I heard Joel on a Joe Rogan podcast and was immediately blown away. It’s not very often that we hear people discuss the gut microbiome on one of the most popular podcasts in the country.

Here’s that podcast. I highly recommend listening to it if you have the time.

Along with discussing the gut microbiome, Joel talked about his farm, Polyface Farms. Polyface Farms is located in Virginia, and they do things a little differently than most. The land that is now Polyface farms was purchased by Joel’s parents in 1961. They’re all about regenerative farming through sustainable practices, like pasture-raised meat, carbon sequestration, and working in a seasonal cycle.

In short, it’s a dream come true for someone like myself who is all about organic eco-friendly agriculture, so naturally, I had to ask Joel a couple of questions.

The older generation is a big fan of talking about life when they were young. My grandfather loves to talk about the fact that he was raised on cow’s milk, and he turned out “just fine.” The difference, of course, is that the milk he was raised on was unpasteurized small scale cows milk. What encouraged you to get into small scale sustainable farming? Does it relate back to how you were raised or did you have some sort of revelation in life? Feel free to comment on how things have changed if you have any thoughts on that.

My paternal grandfather was a charter subscriber to Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine when it came out in the late 1940s.  He always wanted to farm but never did.  He had a very large garden, though, and sold extra produce to neighbors and corner grocers.  My dad received his no-chemical indoctrination, then, from Grandpa, so I’m the third generation in the compost tradition.  My Dad was a financial wizard and did accounting work all his life.  After flying Navy bombers in WWII, he went to Indiana University on the GI bill and then headed off to Venezuela, South America as a bilingual accountant with Texas Oil Company.  His long-range goal was a farm in a developing country and Venezuela seemed as good as any.  After about 7 years he’d saved up enough to buy 1,000 acres in the highlands of Venezuela and began farming.  The goal was dairy and broilers. My older brother and I were born during that time, and things looked bright.  But then came a junta and the ouster of Peres Jimenez and animosity toward anything American; we fled the back door as the machine guns came in the front door; lost everything and after exhausting all attempts at protection, (we) came back to the U.S. Easter Sunday 1961, landing in Philadelphia. Mom grew up in Ohio and Texas and all their family was in Ohio and Indiana, but Dad’s heart was still in Venezuela and he hoped after the political turmoil settled to be able to return to our farm.  

With that in mind, he wanted to be within a day’s drive of Washington D.C. so he could get to the Venezuelan Embassy quickly and easily to do paperwork and return. That never happened, but it’s why we ended up in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.  When I hit 41, I remember thinking: “If I lost it all, would I start over?” That’s what Dad and Mom did in 1961. I was 4.  Dad did his accounting work, and Mom was a high school health and physical ed teacher; that off-farm income paid the mortgage and within 10 years the land was paid off.  Dad combined his ecology with his economic understanding to create some broad principles: animals move; mobile infrastructure; direct marketing; carbon-driven fertility.  I had my first flock of laying hens when I was 10 years old and then added a garden.  By 14 years old, I was our main salesman at the local Curb Market, a Depression-era hold-over that foreshadowed today’s farmers’ markets.  With only 3 vendors, it struggled but after a couple of years, we had a growing and steady clientele for our pastured meats, poultry, eggs, produce, and dairy products (yogurt, butter, cottage cheese). We closed it down when I went off to college and the other two elderly matrons at the market quite as well so by the time I came home, that market and all of its wonderful grandfathered food safety exemptions were gone forever.

I’ve always said we were about 20 years ahead of our time.  Operating that market during my teen years of early 1970s as the nascent back-to-the-land hippie movement germinated was not easy, but the lessons were invaluable when I returned to the farm and started building a clientele on my own in 1980, long before modern farmers’ markets. Teresa and I married in 1980, remodeled the attic of the farmhouse, and lived there for 7 years until Mom and Dad moved out from downstairs to a mobile home parked outside the yard.  My Mom’s mother had lived there for 10 years and passed away, making that spot available.  As an investigative reporter at the local daily newspaper, I realized every business was desperate for people who would show up on time, put in a full days’ work without whining, and actually creatively think through better ways of doing things all made me highly employable.  Living on $300 a month, driving a $50 car, growing all of our own, cutting our own firewood for winter warmth, not having a TV—all these things enabled us even without a high salary to squirrel away half the paycheck.  Within a couple of years we had saved enough to live on for a year.  I walked out of that office Sept. 24, 1982, with a one-year cash nest egg and the jeering of every person I knew”  “He’s throwing his life away.”  “All that talent and he’s going to waste it on a farm.” “Don’t you know you can’t make any money farming?”

We succeeded. 

While we were watching the podcast you did with Joe Rogan, my dad and I had several “Wow!” moments listening to you. One of us would be in the kitchen, and we would run into the living room where the podcast was playing, and share a look of absolute awe. “This guy is talking about the stuff that we talk about! And he’s on Joe Rogan!” We don’t know many people who talk about gut health the way we do. How did you learn about the importance of the body’s microbiome? Is there a correlation between your knowledge of the microbiome and how you run your farm? 

Perhaps the most profound truth in life is that everything we see floats in an ocean of invisible beings.  With electronic microscopes, we can now see many of these things, but because we can’t see them with the naked eye, they are not in our momentary conscience.  It’s hard to forget the microbes floating in the air, on our skin, in our eyes, nostrils, and intestines.  Our farm’s wellness philosophy stems from Antoine Béchamp, the French contemporary and nemesis of Louis Pasteur.  While Pasteur promoted the germ theory and busied himself destroying and sterilizing, Beauchamp advanced the terrain theory and encouraged people to think about basic immunity.  Rather than sterilization, he encouraged sanitation.  He encouraged folks to get more sleep, drink more and better water (much of the water at that time was putrid) and eat better food.  Along came Sir Albert Howard half a century later adding the soil dimension to this basic wellness premise.

In general, we believe nature’s default position is fundamentally wellness and if it’s not well, we humans probably did something to mess it up.  That’s a far cry from assuming wellness is like catching lightning in a bottle, and some sort of sickness fairy hovers over the planet dropping viral stardust willy nilly.  Sickness and disease, whether in humans, plants, or animals are not the problem in and of themselves; they simply manifest weaknesses developed in the unseen world.  Every sickness or disease we’ve ever had on our farm was our fault.  We may have selected the wrong seedstock, crowded things, created incubators for pathogens.  You can stress things a lot of different ways.  But our assumption when confronted with non-wellness is not to assume we missed a vaccine or a pharmaceutical, but rather to ask “what did we do to break down the immunological function of this plant or animal?”  That leads to far more profound truth than assuming we didn’t select the right connection from the chemistry lab.

The fact that today people actually talk about the microbiome in polite company is a fantastic societal breakthrough. Hopefully, it will continue.

The current “pandemic” resulted in a total collapse of our food chain at big grocery stores. While things have since calmed down and straightened out, many people are now aware of just how weak our food supply chain is. The obvious solution- buy small- scale, buy local. The obvious problem- buying meat the right way, (small scale and local) is expensive. Here where I am in Detroit we’ve got a great meat guy, but a couple of weeks ago I found myself at the Dekalb farmers market in Atlanta. I spent $9 for one pound of organic, grass-fed ground beef. What are your thoughts for people who are concerned about the costs of shopping ethically? On a broader scale, do you have any solutions to this? 

Price; it’s one of the biggest and most common questions.  So let’s tackle it on several fronts.

1.  Whenever someone says they can’t afford our food, I grab them by the arm and say “take me to your house.” Guess what I find there? Take-out, coffee, alcohol, sometimes tobacco, Netflix, People magazine, iPhones, flat-screen TV, tickets to Disney, lottery tickets—you get the drift. Very seldom does “I can’t afford it” carry any weight. We buy what we want, and that includes many folks below the poverty line.  

2.  Buy unprocessed. That $9 ground beef is still less than a fast food meal of equal nutritional value. Domestic culinary skills are the foundation of integrity food systems, and never have we had more techno-gadgetry to make our kitchens efficient. The average American spends fewer than 15 minutes a day in their kitchen. Nearly 80 percent of Americans have no clue at 4 p.m. what’s for dinner. In fact, the new catchphrase for millennials is “what’s dinner?” not “what’s for dinner?” So cooking from scratch is the number one way to reduce costs. Right now you can buy a whole Polyface pastured broiler, world-class, for less a pound than boneless skinless breast Tyson chicken at Wal-Mart. The most expensive heirloom Peruvian blue potato at New York City green markets is less per pound than Lay’s potato chips across the street. It’s about the processing.

3.  Buy bulk. Get a freeze and buy half a beef or 20 chickens at a time.  Buy a bushel of green beans and can them.  We buy 10 bushels of apples every fall and spend two days making applesauce; it’s cheaper than watery junk at the supermarket and is real food.  That’s not a waste of time; it’s kitchen camaraderie.  On our farm, we give big price breaks for volume purchasing because it’s simply more efficient to handle a $500 transaction than 25 $20 transactions.  This means, of course, that you must have a savings plan.  Half of all Americans can’t put their hands on $400 in cash.  That’s not an expensive food problem; that’s an endemic and profound failure to plan

Q: Here at OLM we’re a big fan of systems. We also have 10,000 square foot urban farm right in our back yard and are getting chickens very soon. Developing a farm feels a bit like an optimal opportunity to create the “perfect” system. I’m curious as to how the farm is systemized to be self-sustainable. I’m wondering if the farm is carbon neutral or carbon negative? Do you let your chickens work on your compost pile? Do you monitor cow grazing for optimum carbon sequestration? What advice do you have for the many people including us, who have just started growing our food after the current crisis?

Perhaps the starting point is to think of integration rather than segregation.  How many different species of things can you hook together for symbiosis?  So we follow the cows with the laying hens in Eggmobiles to scratch through the cow dung, spread out the manure as fertilizer, and eat the fly larvae out of the cowpats (this mimics the way birds always follow herbivores in nature).  We build compost with pigs (we call them pig aerators).  We have chickens underneath rabbit cages, generating $10,000 a year in a space the size of a 2-car garage and making the most superb compost in the world.  We see trees as carbon sinks to integrate with open land; industrial commercial chippers enable us to chip crooked, diseased, and dying trees for compost carbon.  The kitchen and gardening scraps go to the chickens.  Hoop houses for rabbits, pigs, and chickens in the winter double up as vegetable production in the spring, summer, and fall, creating pathogen dead-ends for the plants and animals growing there at different times of the year.  Integration is everything.

In half a century, we’ve moved our soil organic matter from 1 percent to 8.2 percent.  I don’t know if we’re overall carbon-neutral, but we’ve done this without buying an ounce of chemical fertilizer and using 800 percent less depreciable infrastructure per gross income dollar than the average U.S. farm.  That creates resilience.  Over the years we’ve installed 8 miles of waterlines from permaculture style high ponds that catch surface run-off and gravity feed to the farmland below.  And the rocks and gullies now grow vegetation where none grew before.  This is not pride; it’s a humble acknowledgment of a Creator’s benevolent and abundant design; it’s our responsibility to caress this magnificent womb.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, there have been inconsistencies in the reporting of COVID-19 cases. Hospitals have been incentivized to mark deaths as COVID deaths, even in cases where it may not be the primary cause of death. Hospitals were paid $13,000 per person who was admitted as a COVID case, and another $39,000 for every patient put on a ventilator.

Minnesota state senator and family physician, Scott Jenson, has critiqued the CDC’s prevention guidelines on how doctors are certifying COVID-19 deaths on death certificates. He pointed out that the current system could easily cause the disease to appear deadlier than it actually is.

Related: Data Shows How to Protect Against Coronavirus and We Address Conspiracy Theories

“In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID cannot be made but is suspected or likely (e.g. the circumstances are compelling with a reasonable degree of certainty) it is acceptable to report COVID-19 on a death certificate as ‘probable’ or ‘presumed.'”

CDC Admits Hospital Incentives Drove Up COVID-19 Deaths

Under the current CDC guidelines, a patient who is hit by a bus, and then tests positive for COVID-19, would be marked as a COVID death, despite injuries from the bus accident.

In Florida, a man died in a motorcycle accident, tested positive for COVID-19, and was then marked down as a COVID death. The same thing was seen in the case of a man who died of a gunshot wound, and a man who died of Parkinson’s disease.

Related: Coronavirus Supplement Review

The media consistently reports the number of positive test results instead of actual case numbers, making the virus seem much more deadly than it actually is. A positive coronavirus test does not mean that you have the disease of COVID-19, it generally means you are infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. To have a case of COVID-19, one needs to show symptoms of the virus. A case of COVID-19 and a positive coronavirus test result are not the same thing.

CDC director, Robert Redfield has admitted that the financial policies put in place could have resulted in elevated hospitalization rates and death toll statistics. Brett Grior with the U.S Health and Human Services Department has also said he believes that financial incentivization could have resulted in higher COVID-19 death rates.

This is not to say that COVID-19 is all a big hoax. COVID-19 is very much real and can be dangerous to some people. If you’re worried about COVID-19, your primary focus should be living a healthy lifestyle that promotes a healthy gut. A healthy gut is the best way to prevent all diseases.

Glyphosate is one of the most toxic, widely used weed-killers today. Glyphosate has been linked to changes in the gut microbiome, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, kidney disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and hormone disruption. While the International Agency for Research on Cancer has labeled glyphosate a probable carcinogen, the EPA maintains that it does not pose a threat to public health.

Glyphosate also poses an environmental threat. Studies have shown that glyphosate could pose a threat to the honey bee population, damaging their specialized bacteria in their gut. The damages caused to the bees have also shown to make the bees more susceptible to harmful pathogens, and affect their migration patterns.

This is likely just the tip of the iceberg. The effects of glyphosate on the environment and surrounding ecosystems are largely unknown, as not enough research has been conducted.

A new study has shown that going organic can reduce the levels of glyphosate, in both children and adults, by more than 70% after 5 days of eating organic.

It’s egregious that our government is allowing pesticide corporations to profit off of poisoning us when we know that organic farming works. These are chemicals that do not need to be in our bodies,” Klein said. “An entire system is invested in continuing pesticide intensive agriculture, while our farmers are fighting for pennies to do the research they need to support them to expand organic farming.

– Organic diets quickly reduce the amount of glyphosate in people’s bodies

Out of a total of 158 urine samples, 94% and 97% of samples tested positive for Glyphosate and AMPA, respectively. Children were shown to have nearly 5 times more glyphosate in their bodies than adults.

Related: Foods Most Likely to Contain Glyphosate

While glyphosate levels dropped radically after days on an all-organic diet, glyphosate can remain in the body through bone and bone marrow.

Additionally, the family’s organic diets were all varied and were essentially just organic versions of what they already ate. Imagine what their glyphosate levels would have looked like had they seen an increase in organic vegetable consumption, and were actively trying to detoxify from glyphosate.

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Glyphosate can still be found in organic food. There is glyphosate everywhere, in yards, school grounds, and parks all over the world. It’s unavoidable. If you’re concerned about your exposure to glyphosate, you should be living a lifestyle that promotes detoxification on a regular basis. We start off every day with a big salad, with lots of diversity, and drink lots of cranberry lemonade

One of the largest contributors to the declining bee population in recent years has been linked to neonicotinoids, an insecticide not unlike nicotine. At this point, it is well known that bees are absolutely critical to our survival, as they are responsible for pollinating upwards of 70% of the crops that make up 90% of our diet.

In addition to the damage done to the bee population, a new study in Nature Sustainability has shown that neonicotinoids are also causing a drop in the bird population.

While bird populations have been steadily dropping anyway — the authors note that the bird population in the United States has dropped by an estimated 29 percent since 1970 — the researchers were able to separate out the general drop in bird biodiversity from the specific drop that appeared to be due to neonicotinoid spraying. 

The pesticide that caused bee colonies to collapse is killing birds now

Neonicotinoids are used at a much lower rate than non-neonicotinoids, but they are radically more toxic to the environment. Birds are able to ingest neonicotinoids when they eat crop seeds or insects, and there is a correlation between the consumption of the pesticide and a decline in bird populations.

The study found that a 100kg increase in neonicotinoid use per county resulted in a 2.2% decrease in grassland bird population, and a 1.4% decrease in non-grassland bird population as well as a 1.6% decrease in insectivorous bird population and 1.5% decrease in non-insectivorous birds. The effects of these pesticides become larger over time as there are fewer and fewer birds able to mate and reproduce.

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As further evidence, scientists also found a positive correlation between a decrease in neonicotinoid usage and the bird population.

After ingesting the pesticide, birds lost weight and waited longer to migrate. Neonicotinoids have also had a negative effect on the reproduction of both birds and bees.

As I’m sure you can imagine, any chemical that is toxic to birds and bees, and other insect life, is also toxic to humans.

California Appeals Court rejected Monsanto’s effort to overturn a trial victory by California school groundskeeper, Dewayne Johnson, who developed cancer after continual use of Monsanto’s product Round-Up. Glyphosate, among other ingredients in Round-Up, is known to cause non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

Image: BENOIT TESSIER / REUTERS

Johnson is entitled to $10.25 million in compensatory damages and another $10.25 million in punitive damages. The appeals court stated that Johnson was entitled to punitive damages because Monsanto acted with “willful and conscious disregard of others safety” Johnson’s lawyers presented the courts with internal emails and other records clearly showing Monsanto scientists discussing ghostwriting scientific papers to support the safety of Monsanto’s products as well as plans to discredit critics.

Documents also showed plans to suppress the government’s evaluation of the toxicity of glyphosate. Monsanto anticipated that the International Agency for Research on Cancer would classify glyphosate as a probable or possible human carcinogen.

Related: How To Heal Your Gut 

Tens’s of thousands of plaintiffs have filed lawsuits against Monsanto, with 2 trials taking place after Johnson’s, both resulting in verdicts against Monsanto. Bayer, which finalized purchased of Monsanto in 2018, stands behind the safety of Round-up.

The appeal court’s decision to reduce the compensatory and punitive damages is a step in the right direction, but we continue to believe that the jury’s verdict and damage awards are inconsistent with the evidence at trial and the law. Monsanto will consider its legal options, including filing an appeal with the Supreme Court of California.

Appeals Court Upholds Groundskeeper’s Roundup Cancer Trial Win over Monsanto

A new study done by UNICEF and Pure Earth shows that 1 in 3 children have dangerous levels of lead in their bloodstream. In the study, 800 million children had lead levels of 5 micrograms per deciliter, or more, in their bloodstream.

Lead pollution can cause mental and physical damage and can impair development of the nervous system, the brain, and many vital organs. The longer lead is undetected in the bloodstream, the more dangerous it becomes.

The unequivocal conclusion of this research is that children around the world are being poisoned by lead on a massive and previously unrecognized scale.

Nearly one in three children have dangerous amounts of lead in bloodstream: study

The CDC, as well as the WHO, have cited inadequate battery recycling as well as open-air smelters as large contributors to lead pollution. The study, in addition to the disposal of lead batteries, pointed to peeling paint with lead in it, electronic waste dumps laced with lead, and food contamination from lead glazed pottery.

Related: How to Detox From Plastics and Other Endocrine Disruptors

Lead batteries are likely one of the biggest contributors, nearly 85% of all lead used going into battery production. Europe and the U.S recycle more than 95% of their batteries. Unfortunately, developing countries don’t always have the funds or facilities to properly recycle batteries.

If you’re looking for a way to detox from toxins such as lead, check out this article on how to detox cheap and easy without fasting.

Many Americans are awaiting what they consider a return to normal as other countries around the world slowly begin to open back up.

David L. Ryan/Boston Globe via Getty Images

Unfortunately for us, it doesn’t look like that will be happening here anytime soon. With the initial poor handling of the pandemic, many states are having to reimpose restrictions due to a spike in cases, meaning we’re actually moving backward instead of forward.

The CDC said we could get COVID-19 under control if everyone just wore masks for 6-8 weeks. The problem is, we did that… and it didn’t work. The government essentially said, “…stay home! We’ll take care of you!…” and they didn’t do that either.

Related: The Open Air Method: What We Might Be Missing To Treating COVID-19

So now, here we are, desperately wanting to return to normal but being seemingly unable to get things under control. America is a bit of a unique case. The CDC lied to American citizens initially, saying they did not need masks because they were in low supply. The CDC later came out and said that we did need masks to slow the spread. It’s a little difficult to instill trust in the government after they lie to their people, and of course, no one wants to listen to the government when they know the government won’t take care of them.

It seems many are relying on a vaccine to be available before returning to normal. Unfortunately, it’ll probably be awhile on that as well. A vaccine generally takes 10 years to develop, and millions of dollars. Between the research, and the funding as well as the testing, it’s a pretty lengthy process.

Producing enough vaccine for only, say, the 100 million most vulnerable Americans would itself take a few months. You also have the obstacle of distributing it and actually vaccinating people, as well as dealing with anti-vaxxer sentiments, so add another few months. That brings us into the start of 2022 on a highly optimistic timeline.

Bad News about the Pandemic: We’re Not Getting Back to Normal Any Time Soon

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All that aside, COVID-19 is a Sars virus similar to the common cold that can be particularly difficult to vaccinate against. It’s likely we’ll end up with a flu vaccine like scenario where the vaccine is not nearly as effective as others. Some health officials have reported that they could have a vaccine available as early as 2021. This, however, is an extremely optimistic guess and is highly unlikely, and of course, vaccines are toxic under the best of circumstances. Who knows what kind of problems could be caused by a vaccine that is produced as quickly as health officials are hoping.

If you’re worried about COVID-19 we recommend making sure you have a healthy diet and a healthy gut. A healthy gut is the best way to build a strong immune system and prevent diseases.