Healing the Land One Bite at a Time

Joel Salatin

Thank you, Dr. Schaffner. It’s privilege and an honor to be with you.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

Well, I just so enjoyed my time last year, getting to visit your farm and be part of an amazing event. And you inspired me on so many levels and I came home and I live in an urban environment in Seattle and my husband and my daughter, we made a garden in our little side yard and we grew some kale and some basil and some lettuce and but it just was that really insightful and empowering, like we all can participate, right. And no matter if you’re in rural America or in the city, there’s all sorts of ways for us to reconnect, right? Reconnect to the land, reconnect to the soil. And I’ve just been so inspired by your movement, really this regenerative agriculture movement. And coming back to my office, I felt like I can’t, we can talk about food and nutrition, but this takes it on a whole nother level. And so I guess where to start is you know, what makes Polyface Farms different than the conventional outfit out there?

Joel Salatin

Yeah, so I think the foundation here is that we look at nature as template, nature as teacher. So when you look at nature, A, you don’t see 10-10-10 chemical fertilizer, you don’t see Roundup, you don’t see factory farming houses, industrial, you don’t even see tillage equipment. And when you boil it all down and you really look at nature as pattern as template, it’s really elegantly simple. We humans wanna complicate everything and it’s actually fairly elegantly simple, for one thing, every ecosystem has animals in it and these animals move, animals move. That’s such a simple phrase, but we live in a time when you know, most animals now in industrial agriculture actually don’t move they’re locked up in a, I mean, yeah, they move a foot, but they’re not actually, as I say, they can’t gambol on the pasture. 

They’re locked in. And so when animals move, if the animals are going to move, then we have to have some sort of control to protect and guard them and keep them where they need to be. We need some sort of a shelter and some sort of a portable feed source. So everything about them becomes mobile rather than stationary. So rather than stationary barns, we have mobile shelters, instead of centralized, like water troughs, we have a water system that has access points all over the fields, and you can plug in a water trough here, there, over there. So the mobility is a critical thing. And then another thing that you notice when you look at nature is that it’s primarily perennials and not annuals, now to the folks that I don’t want to talk over or leave anybody, an annual is like squash, watermelons, wheat, barley. 

It’s something that has to be planted every year from seed. A perennial is a plant that flourishes year after year after year from the same root base. And so grasses, clovers, a lot of field herbs, like plantain, dandelion, things like that are perennials. And so nature because it, well nature is primarily focused on perennials, not annuals. And the energy flow is completely different in perennials. And annuals tend to extract soil energy and put it in a big fruit, a big nut, a big seed, and perennials tend to put all their energy in the soil. So that if a drought, a blizzard, a hurricane comes, the plant can regrow from its crown and not from a seed store or a fruit store. So we’re into perennials rather than annuals, which means the primary. Does that mean I don’t like squash? No, we absolutely plant squash and tomatoes and the annuals, but the foundation of the system is grasses. Is this prairie, this multi species prairie. And then I’ve got just two more here quickly. One is that nature, what builds soil is carbon, nature runs on a carbon economy.

Chemical fertilizer does not build soil. So soil is built in nature with obviously solar energy through photosynthesis making biomass, which can either then decompose on site or decompose through the gut or gizzard of an animal and come out as a concentrate known as manure and urine. And so both of those are decomposition, whether it’s pine needles and leaves and grass that fall over and gradually decompose, or whether it goes through digestive process, in either case it’s biomass that decomposes, that’s how soil is built. And so we have a big chipper that we can chip you know, crooked trees, diseased trees, basically weed the wood lot, and take that sea grade woody material and convert it to chips that can be then composted. And that drives the fertility program in the fields. So we have a fundamentally integrated system between forest and open land versus a segregated system where the forest never sees the open and the open never sees the forest. That by the way, creates both a fungal and bacterial microbial community in the soil. 

Grasses tend to go toward bacterial, forests tend to go toward fungal, but the most fertile soils have both fungus and bacteria. So the integration of the two creates a more fertile soil, a more biodiverse soil. And then the fourth thing on the template is that food sheds, or the the ecosystem tends to be a relatively regional ecosystem without a lot going out real far and a lot going in, now, we’ve always had global trade, especially in salt and spices and specialty items like that. But we’ve never had, we’ve never shipped watermelons a long distance or squash, the watery things. Those have all been very, very close. And then if you’re gonna take a trip, you can take, for example, dehydrated beef, or pemmican, or some sort of high protein, that’s what you can afford to send out, cheese, you don’t ship milk, you ship cheese. 

And so natural food systems and ecosystems thrive on regional stability with their own diversity, preservation and seasonal fluctuations within that kind of regional ecosystem slash food shed. And so we began actually selling to neighbors, we didn’t say, oh, wow, we need to export to Thailand or Bangladesh, we said first let’s take care of our neighbors so that we complete this cycle within the regional shed. And so those are kind of four ideas that we looked at and started developing these pasture based mobile carbon-centric, people-centric localized type of system.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

I love this. And thank you for going through this. And as we had this conversation I really want people to hear, and we’ll dive into why regenerative agriculture is so much healthier for themselves and the planet. And then I love this mirroring of nature because that’s what very much we do in our work as clinicians who are on the summit. And we see that a big part of why people are sick, so sick today is that there is really this disruption in the ecosystem of their body, all of these microbiomes that we’ve been learning about over the years, not only our gut, our skin, our lungs, our brain even has a microbiome. We’re definitely in a low diversity, like overgrowth of opportunistic pathogens, like it’s a mess, that’s what’s creating disease. And so it’s very much mirrored in nature of what’s happening in a conventional farm, right? Low diversity, right? Sterile environments, can you speak to that?

Joel Salatin

And a kind of a simplified biome, as opposed to a complexified, it’s not a word, but-

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

I like it.

Joel Salatin

A complexified biome, and in the work with the microbiome, most of the sicknesses or the disease that we’re starting to tag to microbiome deficiencies are tagged to something that’s missing, a sphere of enzymes, a sphere of bacteria, a family tree, if you will, of microbes that are missing. And, that becomes the issue. And so it’s fascinating to me that well, for example, the Aborigines of Australia are said to have commonly, in a year consumed almost 2,500 different kinds of food.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

Wow.

Joel Salatin

You know, Native Americans here consume something like almost a thousand different kinds of food. and in fact, if you get Dolly Madison, James Madison’s wife, Dolly Madison, she made a cookbook, she was a real gregarious hostess. And then Martha Washington, George Washington’s wife, if you go to Mount Vernon and get their cookbooks, you look in those cookbooks today and 80% of of the ingredients, we don’t even know what they are, quinces and currants, and all this what in the world is that? And so you begin realizing that we, as we have industrialized our food system, we have dropped off this diversity to where the average American now really only eats about 15 or 20 different things. And we don’t eat that 500, 600, 700 type of diversity. 

And so our bodies are simply not getting the kind of microbial diversity that comes in on a highly diversified diet. On that note, let me just say that at our farm, since we have concentrated on perennials in the pasture, and we move the cows every day to a new spot. So you have this mosaic and what it does, it recreates the diversified prairie of yester year. I mean, most archeologists now say that the 

Native American prairie an acre would have more than a hundred species of plants in it, imagine that a hundred. So one of the things that I enjoy doing with visitors is go out in the field and just take a three feet by three feet and say, what can I find? And typically I can find 20. And if I go a little bit farther up to 30 or 40, even 50 different species of plants in an acre, it’s not as diversified as the native prairie, but we’re getting there. We’re getting there, we’re getting more every year, the latent seed bank is there. and what I want to just point out is that when our animals, when our animals are on that diversified pasture, they’re eating some plantain, some yarrow, some chicory, some clover, white clover, alsike clover. And so the animals are getting this incredibly, incredibly diversified diet, not just corn and soybeans. 

They’re getting this incredibly diversified diet, which then carries that microbial diversity into our microbiome so that we can vicariously get more diversity. I’m convinced of this. I’m convinced that to the average person, telling them, you need to diversify your diet by about 80 different types of plants. That’s intimidating. Whoa. I don’t even know that many. But one of the quickest ways that you can diversify your intake is getting pasture based meat and poultry and eggs, where a very diversified sward of vegetation has come into that animal. And that animal’s been able to metabolize all that diversity and that then carries through onto your plate. And that is one of the quickest ways to significantly diversify your diet. So you get a little bit of dandelion, you get a little bit of lambs quarters, and chicory and sow thistle and milkweed and fescue and orchard grass and timothy and clover I could just go on and on, but you get a little bit of that. And to me that that’s a very, it’s a very hopeful notion that if we move to a diversified pastor based even animal that we benefit from all that dietary diversity that comes from the pasture.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

I love that. And so well said, what we call this is regenerative agriculture, right? So we kind of ruin our health, ruin the planet, but I mean, it’s amazing mother nature can regenerate. And I think that is really the message that gives me hope. I have a three and a half year old, so I’m always looking for that optimistic, hopeful message of how to change the trajectory. I think that this regenerative and pasture piece, especially to restore our microbiome and the point I think I wanna bring in Joel, is that many people who are listening, like, oh, we have like, it’s a pretty cool group. People are probably pretty educated. They’re eating organic, they’re thinking they’re doing all the right things, but there’s a difference. And so how can people make sure that they’re making the choices that are gonna be more aligned with your farm versus like a green-washed organic choice that doesn’t have all this benefit?

Joel Salatin

Yeah well, one of the, I don’t know, bummers of the whole organic certification system is that it’s kind of been co-opted now by the industry. And so you can now get organic hydroponics, aeroponics, soil-less fruit. Soil-less vegetables and you’re basically getting water and not nutrition. And so the organic certification and most of the the eggs, organic certified eggs are in factory farms, chicken, all organic chicken is organic, big factory farms. And so how do you know? Well, one way I’m a big believer in cultivating the skill of web sleuthing. Now, look, I’m a cave man. I don’t even have a smartphone. but when people ask me this question, well, they often ask me, well, what do you think about this brand? I say, well, let’s look them up on the web. And you look them up on the web, and if you look for meet our farmers and the farmers are, for example, standing in front of factory houses, that’ll tell you something. 

If well, for example, there’s one large distributor that touts themselves as being natural, and they’re the homesteader food system, blah, blah, blah. You go to their homepage, look for their providers. And the background picture of the homepage is five Tyson chicken houses. so all I’m suggesting is you have to be, discerning and some simple web sleuthing do they allow visitors? That’s a big one. You don’t have to go visit, but do they allow visitors? On our farm, we have a 24/7, 365 open door policy. Anyone can come from anywhere in the world at any time to see anything anywhere unannounced. Now I’m not saying it has to be that good. I would say that’s a gold standard. If you want a gold standard, that’s certainly one for transparency, but I’ve heard people say, if you go to farmer’s market and you buy from a farmer three weeks in a row, and he hasn’t invited you to come visit his farm, there’s probably something wrong with that outfit. 

And so transparency is a big deal. how open are they for visitation for actual eyes eyes on the ground. And then another one is just endorsements from people like you. People like me, Sally Fallon, , Tom Cowan And I mean, when these, Joe Mercola, whatever, but when these kind of gurus of our movement, Zach Bush, okay. When these guys and gals, when they’re in the system, they’re hearing the scuttlebutt, right. I mean they’re in this. And so look at what the gurus in the integrity authentic food system are saying, what do they buy? Who do they get from? And those are those are valuable things. And so one of, I’ll just say this, one of the neat things now that’s happened in the last 10 years, is the efficiency in logistics of distribution. So that our, I mean, our farm’s a perfect example. We were cultishly local for many, many years. And then suddenly we started losing market to door to door delivery outfits, and people didn’t wanna drive out here to get stuff and things. And so we finally two and a half years ago, we launched a shipping program, a delivery, and it’s not our biggest thing, but it’s steadily growing. and it gives somebody in New York, in a Manhattan apartment, you can get food that we pack right here at the farm sent directly to you, no middleman, except for UPS, directly to you. 

And so the opportunity for both acquiring, acquiring integrity food, and the ability of rural farmers far away from metropolitan centers to access has fundamentally changed in the last 10 years, as distribution logistics has become more and more streamlined so that we don’t have the cost prejudice that we did even 10 years ago between that option and the bricks and mortar option. So it’s helped both of us. There are a lot of things that are dysfunctional in the world, but the efficiency of logistics has really, really created new opportunities, both for the farmer and the buyer, the urban buyer to be able to hook up with people that they couldn’t have, would’ve been more difficult to hook up with in the past.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

Yeah, no, the silver lining of the technology and-

Joel Salatin

That’s right. That’s right. It’s a silver lining.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

Yeah, bringing your food to know, again, more communities that are not down the street, and I think that’s definitely like thinking about all the other things that we’re shipping around the world, like regenerative foods, please ship them so we need them, right? So and I know this is a point that you talk about and people are listening, there’s always the conversation, of, okay, is this food more expensive? Can I afford this? Should I have to only buy these things organic or regenerative? Do I have to succumb to the foods that are more affordable, and I’d really love your education about access from an affordability standpoint of these, this type of farming and this food.

Joel Salatin

Yeah. So of course price has always been an issue for us and because we’re not making a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the size of the Rhode Island and asking society to pay for it, you know? We’re not making Merca and C. diff from subtherapeutic superbugs, from feeding subtherapeutic antibiotics. so there’s a lot of cost in the system that the supermarket does not capture in the conventional thing, but to go straight to the point, realize that the satiation, the satiation of authentic food is much more concentrated than in bad food. The Bionutrient Food Association just did a test with a spectrometer, it’s this, you know, what Abby has on NCIS, she can put a spot of paint.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

Figuring out what’s in there, yeah.

Joel Salatin

Yeah, right, right, right. Mass spec, you know? They just did this with carrots, for example. And they found that the difference nutritionally, they measured, I think 150 measurable, whatever enzymes, vitamins, minerals. and they found that in order to get the same nutrition that was in the best carrot, you would have to eat something like 20 of the poorest ones to get the same nutrition that was in the first one. And so there’s that much difference in foods. And so we certainly see that in ours, when we do food fairs, we’ll cook a pound of ground beef, for example, and show the difference in the amount of grease that comes off of the store bought one versus ours. You know, the bacon doesn’t shrivel up as much. 

You actually get more because the hormone ionophores that the industry is using actually makes the muscles artificially swell and take on water. So the animal gains weight faster, you buy more pounds of material, but the extra pounds are water. They’re not nutrition. And so the density, we had a chef perform a density function on our pork. For example, he got I don’t know, I guess it was one of our hams and got one from Smithfield and did a displacement test in bus pans of water. So he filled them right up to the brim. And then he put these two identically weighted hunks of pork in there. And ours displaced way less water. In other words, 10 pounds of our pork was several cubic inches less in volume than the Smithfield pork, meaning that it was more dense. And so when you buy a pound of this, you’re not getting fluff, you’re actually getting satiation. So that’s one thing. 

The second thing I would say when anybody says something about price, I’ll say, okay, great, quickly, let’s go to your house. And here’s what we’re not going to see. We’re not going to see lottery tickets, alcohol, cigarettes,, take out. we’re not gonna see designer jeans. We’re not gonna see flat screen TVs. You can go down this line, right? The fact is that many, many people who complain about the price are spending money on something else. the best indicator of this was you probably, you’re probably familiar with the famous documentary “Food Inc”, and “Food Inc”, wonderful documentary. 

I mean, it was culturally a cataclysm in the culture, but they came off on this same narrative. And remember that family that stopped at Burger King and got that great big burger and a big soft drink and big fries. And they said, well, we can’t afford vegetables. And they just spent that, I’m looking at that when it came out, I’m looking at that saying, wait a minute. For the money they spent on on that fast food meal of junk, they could have bought two pounds of our ground beef and cooked it, and there’d be more nutrition in half a pound of our ground beef than in that entire $10 meal. And so a lot of this is simply rearranging our food dollar, our food buying, buying unprocessed, using your kitchen to prepare, preserve, package, food and buying in bulk, not buying processed. And so look, Dr. Schaffner, the biggest lie that people tell themselves is I can change my life and I can change the world, but I don’t have to change.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

Right.

Joel Salatin

I mean, that’s the biggest fraud, right? The fact is if you want a different situation for you and you want a different situation for your granddaughter, you have to make some changes. You have to start being intentional about some of the things you do. I’m not a cultist, I’m the 80/20 rule, get 80% right and you can fudge on on the 20% when your niece has a birthday party and they wanna serve ice cream, enjoy it, don’t be a party pooper and enjoy it. That’s the 20%. But in order for that 20% to work, you’ve gotta be getting about 80% right. The 80/20 rule. And to me that’s doable. That’s something that you don’t have to be an ogre in society. You can still go out with your friends, but most of the time you’re actually looking through your plate at the landscape that plate is creating. And that makes you start being intentional and making some different decisions.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

Yeah. No, I’m totally, I’m aligned with you again, Joel. And I see this in health, right? So I’m a naturopath. And most of what I do is not supported by insurance and we to choose to be cash pay, because to help people, if we were under that scrutiny, we would never be able to help anyone. And so we’re in this like middle of a paradigm shift, but anyone that we see, like if we don’t have our health, you can have all the money in the world, but if you do not have your health, you really don’t have your connection to your soul’s purpose and your life force and your days are not joyful. You know, it’s horrific, and that’s why we’re trying to help as many people who don’t have their health. And so I agree. I think that people need to, like, we all these hidden costs of not making these choices that we see. And so I think that prioritization, right? And to embrace. 

And and this is fun too. I mean, when you like go to a farm like yours and eat the food that you eat like that you produce, I mean, like, why go back? You will never go back, you know? So no, I think it’s, I think people are getting there an understanding that there are so many hidden costs in the cheaper food and definitely prevention is we can’t see prevention, right. So it’s never glamorous, but I know that we prevent a lot of health conditions choosing these foods. And so one thing that my eyes keep opening to, and I’m like, my eyes are getting more aware and I’m still like baffled by it all. But you know, this conversation about cows and livestock and really cows in particular are really destroying the planet are horrific for our health. And it’s a way better option to have like a beyond burger with like fake meat and dyed blood. And I mean, it’s incredible like that we, present these options, you know? so I guess what is your take, are cows really destroying the planet?

Joel Salatin

Great, great question. And so I’ll answer it this way. That if your data points are flawed, then probably your conclusion from the experiment will be flawed. And so the problem is that cow-spiracy and what the health and all these plant based animal livestock aiding, hating kind of outfits do is they go to the dysfunctional system to collect their data. They’re not coming here, they don’t come here. And so I like to say it would be equivalent to, let’s say, you and I were lived on Pluto. And we look down at the Earth that planet way down there. And hey, I wonder what they do for education down there. 

I wonder what their school systems like. And so we jump in our flying saucer and we we tool it down to Earth and we happen to land in the school yard that has the worst school superintendent for the region, the worst principal, the worst school, we go visit the worst teacher in the worst classroom. And we spend two days, we write our report, we go back and they say, at Pluto, they say, well, what’d you find, what’d you find, what would we say? We’d say my goodness, They’d be better if they didn’t even have any education. And that’s where we are right now in this cow thing is, when they start off the damage and the terrible and the overgrazing and all, I’m saying, man, preach it. That’s great. But then when they say the answer is, get rid of all the cows, I said, well, whoa, wait a minute. 

The tool that can harm can also heal, you know? And so here, for example, on our farm in 60 years, we’ve gone, I’ll just give you one little point. We’ve from 1% organic matter to over 8% organic matter. Now, organic matter is sequestered. It’s not exactly sequestered carbon, but it’s a kissing cousin. It’s a co-conspirator, a comrade of carbon. So organic matter. So we’ve gone from 1% to 8% organic matter. If we took all the agricultural land in the US and moved it only one percentage point in organic matter, just one, not seven, like we’ve done, but one, we would draw down all the atmospheric carbon to pre-1960 levels. That’s all it would take. And so, I mean you can measure the gigatons and all this stuff of that, but this whole carbon issue is missing the soil component that that carbon is supposed to be in the soil. And so yes. Have we overgrazed and desertified, and planted corn and made deserts and destroyed aquifers? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But realize that 500 years ago, North America produced more nutrition than it does today. Now, it wasn’t all eaten by people. 

You know, there were 200 million beavers that ate more vegetables than all the humans in North America today. There were two million wolves that needed 20 pounds of meat a day so it wasn’t all being eaten by people, but the abundance was there. And so to me, that always gives me pause any time somebody heads down this direction, I say, wait, wait, wait a minute. Let’s not demonize the animal. Let’s instead point the finger at the management of the animal and say, if we can get back to the templates of nature, we can bring back the abundance. We can bring back the atmosphere. We can bring back the ecological balance that was here prior to us messing it up. And so the answer is that these hands, if you will, these hands who have hurt, can also heal. And that’s where we need to be.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

Mm. I love it. I mean, I think, yeah, you’ve taught me and as we have had throughout this conversation, it’s like the cows and the livestock need to be part of the healing equation. We need to completely transform, how we’re doing things and they can help us recover the soil. So it’s just only going to, if we take them out of the equation completely, then we’re only gonna be in more dire straights, you know? And so I guess, you’re so in this world, and you’re so knowledgeable and you have all of this experience, it’s kind of probably how I dream of like the new hospital and what that would look like, it’s like how do you see, and there are people, there’s a tipping point, but what do you think? How do you think it’s possible to get this? You know, let’s just start with North America, cause we can put our head, like how do we start transitioning these conventional farms and regenerating?

Joel Salatin

Yeah, I would like to start with Swoope, my little village here can we start there? You are so right. And yes, we can, you and I, in our specialty, we can build this paradise, right? We can build this fantasy paradise in our head. You can see it. I can see it. It seems so simple, so obvious to us. And yet we have this system that look, if people, if what we did became the new normal, it would completely invert the power, position, prestige and profits of the entire food and farming system in the world. That’s a big ship to turn around. It’s a big ship to turn around. So what you, for me, what I’ve come down to is, I’m responsible for what I can touch, what I can influence. I’ll get ulcers if I get frustrated about the slowness or the recalcitrance, or whatever you wanna call it.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

You name it.

Joel Salatin

Yeah, you name it. The sheer negligence, refusal to see what’s obvious, whatever, it pulls you down. You’re stressed. That’s no good. And so I think one of the most, whatever, liberating things is to just let that go and just concentrate on, well, as Steven Covey said, in “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, he said, stay within your sphere of influence. And so he drew these concentric circles. He said, this close one is things that are in your sphere of influence. And then you have this stuff that’s beyond your control. And what most people do is spend all their lives railing and demonstrating and carrying on about this that’s outside their control, beyond their control. And they fail to actually leverage what’s within their control. His point is that if you put your attention on what is within your control, your actual sphere of influence increases, if you put all your attention on what’s out there beyond your control, your sphere of influence actually shrinks. 

And I think I’m a prime example of that. I don’t get all political. I just, I wanna be faithful to the earthworms out here. I wanna be faithful to the cows and the tomatoes. And I find that if I can, that is within my influence. And if I put all my attention there, it’s a burning bush. It’s a burning bush that the world wants to come and see. And my dad used to say to us, every bush is a burning bush, you know, Moses and the burning bush. And so that’s kind of where I am and true, man, I want to go back to the impossible burger, beyond burger, impossible meat, just for a moment. And to realize when we talk about food freedom, food security, food freedom, anyone who’s into this non-fake, fake meat stuff. I’d just like to ask them, do you really think it’s a more food security system if the material that you’re eating can’t be grown in your backyard or made in your kitchen, that you are now dependent on obligated to a laboratory and a bunch of technicians creating a substance that you’re going to have to buy. Animals, an egg laid in your backyard, you don’t have to ask permission for it.

You don’t have to know anything. The chicken knows all she needs to know to be a successful egg layer. You don’t have to know anything except how to keep the chicken happy and she will give you eggs. One of the most complete foods that there is. And you can do that right in your own yard proximate to you, there is tremendous food security and freedom in being able to grow food proximate to where you live, whether it’s the backyard or the farmer down the road, or whatever, there’s tremendous security in us, in democratizing the food production system, rather than centralizing it in big fancy laboratories with sophisticated apparatus, technicians to run it, so that we’re all dependent on soil and green.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

Yeah. I know, like, talk about like the furthest thing from nature as our blueprint it’s like how can we ever think that that is the gold standard? So no, I so appreciate you saying that, and we get in this busy life, right. We get busy, we look for convenience, we make choices, but I think there’s this movement that you really have been at the root in heart of inspiring is like, we look at reconnecting, right. Reconnecting with the land, looking at the natural rhythms and the natural cycles. And I often say, Joel, when I’m treating what I see in the office, that I feel like our bodies are a microcosm of the macrocosm. And the more that we understand that, yes, we see this David and Goliath thing, but we also see this ripple effect that we can have within our families, our communities, our villages. 

And I think that’s the way out. I think that you’re right on. And I’ll bring kind of a new concept that I’m sure you’re well aware of, but I think you probably heard me at our talk about Roland Macready and heart math, and he’s really into studying like how the heart affects the body. And then he does all of these studies around how our intention and our heart can affect mother Earth. And he measures my magnetic fields of the Earth when people are praying or in intention. And so it brings that kind of, I kind of see this weaving of these ideas of like the more intentional we are with our food, with the land with mother Earth, the earth responds, right? And we respond and we’re not gonna be God, and know how this story ends, but that’s that’s good. Maybe that’s good enough and that’s where the healing happens I think in my opinion.

Joel Salatin

Yeah. I think you’re right. The fact is that all of life is pulsating with adaptation and response. So in our, as you know this, in our bodies, there are how many quadrillion decisions being made in our bodies every second within all the microbes, when the cells, and this is all voluntary trading of information and spontaneous responses to, I’ve got some molybdenum, do you have some polysaccharide, I mean, it literally is this kind of-

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

Exchange.

Joel Salatin

Biological cafe, if you will. And it’s that way in our cells in our bodies and in the larger world, I mean, plants, we know plants respond to violin music. I can tell you being among animals, it makes all the difference in the world, if you walk into a flock or a herd, and you’re upset about something versus you’re calm about something, the animals, everything responds to this, just like your spouse responds to you. Your spouse knows when you’re in a a funky mood and your children do okay. And I think that we don’t just as Westerners, Greco Roman Western reductionist, individualized, compartmentalized, disconnected we don’t appreciate the holism and the connectedness of kind of Eastern thought, at least I don’t, I’ve worked at it. But come to appreciate that the tree does respond to the kind of energy that we’re, the tree responds to to the wind. And it’s not just chemical.

It’s actually there’s a sentient understanding there within the structure, the Acacia trees in the Serengeti when the giraffes come eating on them, the Acacia trees emit a pheromone that goes on the wind to make the up wind leaves more bitter. people always wondered why do the giraffes always graze up wind? They all go up wind. Well, why, it’s because they’re trying to beat the bitter leaves because the pheromones don’t go on the up wind very well. They go down wind. And so this is a defensive mechanism by the tree to make their leaves less palatable to the giraffes. It’s a defensive mechanism. And so the giraffes are grazing into the wind to try to beat these pheromones that are telling, hey, look out, look out, you’re getting ready to get eaten.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

Oh, wow.

Joel Salatin

I mean, if that isn’t sentience and understanding and responding I don’t know what is, and I think we just sell our womb, this ecological womb. We sell it short in that level of response.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

Oh, so beautiful. Like we’re so interconnected. And often we just need to step out of the way and observe and follow what’s been given. And the guidance is there. And I see that with your work. And I try to see that with the work that I do, like facilitating peoples health and just like, how do we get out of the way and get the things outta the way? So nature does what this intelligent force, that we’re all a part of knows how to move us towards health and healing. And so Joel, I could talk to you all day long and you’ve inspired me on more ways than you could imagine. And I would love for you to, as we just wrap the interview, like, is there anything else on your heart or your mind that you wanna wanna share with the community that’s listening?

Joel Salatin

Thank you. I would say the only thing that I would like to share with everybody is this whole idea of actual viscerally embracing intentionality can be pretty intimidating. Those are all big words and all that. And I would just encourage everybody that we participate, whether we want to or not, I’ve never seen a frog, I’ve never walked around the pond and seen a frog look up at me and say, you know what, I’m not gonna participate today. I’m just gonna take the day off. And you know what, we can’t take the day off. we are eating, we are thinking, we are doing. And as much as you might want to just take the day off and chill out and not do anything, we are willing or unwilling participants.

And so my encouragement is to just appreciate what people say, what floats your boat, what floats my boat is I can walk out that back door every day and immerse myself in the privilege and honor, and responsibility of being hands and feet that can nurture a benevolent womb umbilical. And, it’s a privilege. It’s not a chore. It’s not a oh man, I gotta, no, it’s a privilege. And so I would just encourage everybody that whatever, your part, your food dollar, the way you interact, what you do, what you spend your money on, what you recreate on, how you do things, all of these are part of your and my participation checklist that we go through in a day. And so my question is at the end of the week, looking back, 80/20 rule, 80/20, this is not a cult. Looking back 80/20, have as a result, have I healed or hurt in the last week?

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

Mm.

Joel Salatin

And that’s good enough.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

So wise, Joel. No, thank you. I’m gonna teach my daughter that. So, well, no, thank you so much for your wisdom that you’re sharing with us today and every day on the summit. And can you just share any links for people to find out more about you, more about Polyface Farms, if they wanna order your food, how can they connect with you?

Joel Salatin

Sure. So we’re Polyface, P-O-L-Y-F-A-C-E. It’s the farm of many faces. So Polyface Farm. We have a website, it has everything from, where to order things to my travel speaking engagements, where I’ll be, if you want to come and hear me yak somewhere. Gatherings, we’re having here at the farm, like you were a part of last year. And we’re not having you back. Not because we don’t love you, but because we’re trying to bring new, a rotation of new, fresh faces, but we do farm tours, anyway, the website has it all, and we’re glad for you to see what you find there.

Christine Schaffner, M.D.

Thank you. We’ll have that in the notes. And thank you so much for being part of the summit and all the incredible work you do. So thank you.

Joel Salatin

Thank you. Thank you.