How to Prepare for a Future Increasingly Defined by Localized Food & Energy

8/4/2019 How to Prepare for a Future Increasingly Defined by Localized Food & Energy

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Transcript for Joel Salatin: How to Prepare for A

Future Increasingly Defined By Localized Food &

Energy

Below is the transcript forJoel Salatin: How to Prepare for A Future Increasingly Defined By Localized Food& Energy:

Chris Martenson: Welcome to another ChrisMartenson.com podcast. I am of course Chris Martenson and

today, we are speaking with Joel Salatin, one of the most visible and influential leaders in the organic food and

sustainable farming movement.His family owns and manages Polyface Farms which has been featuredprominently in such modern food movement masterworks as The Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan,

and the documentary Food, Inc. - if you havent seen it its an incredible eye opener, it was for me. Joelsunconventional but highly innovative farming practices are inspiring millions to increase their nutritional and

community resiliency by seeking out local sources of chemical-free food raised using natural process-based

farming practices.Joel, Im a huge fan of your work and the practices you advocate.

I apply a number of themin the management of my own small homestead in rural Mass.Its a real honor to be speaking with you.

Joel Salatin: Thank you, its an honor to be with you Chris.

Chris Martenson: Well thanks.Could you please give our listeners a short background on what you see asyour mission, what its key tenets are and why what you are doing is so important? Joel Salatin: Sure.Well our mission statement is to develop environmentally, emotionally and economicallyenhanced food prototypes and duplicate their production throughout the world.So its all about these foodproduction prototypes that not only are economically and environmentally beneficial but also have a social - we

say emotional just so we can have three Es - but its a triple bottom line deal and wonderfully, if you get

creative enough, you dont have to sacrifice the ecology in order to have a profitable business and you dont

have to sacrifice profit in order to have an ecological business.So the principles are relatively few, you know itall backs up to biomimicry, for sure.In other words what we want to do is take natural templates and draw acircle around them like a pattern, cut them out and put them on our commercial farming landscape and duplicate

those natural patterns.So what are those natural patterns?Well the things that have been regenerated and builtsoil for centuries are not tillage and annuals, which of course are both things that our culture worships. Rather,they are perennials, both trees and forages and herbivores and periodic disturbance, whether by fire, mob

grazing or other disturbances that are created by predator type things.And then rest periods. Rest periods forrecuperation and to metabolize the disturbance factor.So as soon as you start doing those kinds of things, thatmeans you are going to move the animals, they are not going to stay in one place, its going to be primarily

perennially based, so we are always looking at how can we harvest acorns from the trees into pork for

example.Its going to be perennial grasses, not annual grasses or grains.And its going to be portableinfrastructure, not permanent or non-portable infrastructure which means all of the facilities, the shelters, the

control things like fences and things like that are all going to be light-weight, gentle-footprinted, portable type

things.The fertility is not going to depend on things brought in from across the world but they are going todepend on recycling solar-created biomass onsite, thats the carbon cycle.Sun makes the plants, the plantsgrow, the plants either get eaten or decay and the decay feeds the soil life which makes more plants grow and

that carbon cycle moves in a cyclical pattern onsite not from offsite.So there is always a heavy component ofanimals, perennials, disturbance, rest, portability and real time carbon cycling.Chris Martenson: And so this, youve been doing this for a while, and so you have measurable results that

the soil is being built and that you can do this profitably. I assume at this point we can say its a success? You
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0027BOL4G/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=chrismartenso-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399377&creativeASIN=B0027BOL4Ghttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143038583/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=chrismartenso-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399377&creativeASIN=0143038583http://www.polyfacefarms.com/http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/joel-salatin-how-prepare-future-increasingly-defined-localized-food-energy/61949http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/joel-salatin-how-prepare-future-increasingly-defined-localized-food-energy/61949http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0027BOL4G/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=chrismartenso-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399377&creativeASIN=B0027BOL4Ghttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143038583/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=chrismartenso-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399377&creativeASIN=0143038583http://www.polyfacefarms.com/http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/joel-salatin-how-prepare-future-increasingly-defined-localized-food-energy/61949http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/joel-salatin-how-prepare-future-increasingly-defined-localized-food-energy/61949http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/joel-salatin-how-prepare-future-increasingly-defined-localized-food-energy/61949


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can farm this way and it works?Joel Salatin: [laugh]Oh, unquestionably.Our family came here in 1961, which is 50 years ago. Bought themost run-down, gullied, depleted, mined-out farm in the whole area.In fact we measured the deepest gully was16 deep. And we had so little soil we couldnt even hold up electric fence stakes.Dad poured concrete in oldused car tires and then pushed a half inch pipe, one straight up and down and one on a little bit of an angle and

my brother, who was a little bit older than I, wed sit on the platform on the tractor and heave these things offas Dad drove slowly down the field. Hed come along and put electric fence stakes in them because we didnt

have enough soil to hold up electric fence stakes, and it doesnt take much soil to hold up electric fence

stakes.Thats how we started and we could barely handle ten cows. Today we usually handle 100 cows. All ofthose bare rock places have several inches of soil over them and the gullies, we filled a lot of the gullies in with

silt that we dug out of bottoms to build ponds so we have ponds built and the gullies filled in and arguably the

most productive farm in the whole area.Chris Martenson: And so if this is possible, how many people are following it and of the people who arent

adhering to these sorts of practices, whats going on there? Why arent they?

Joel Salatin: Well our neighbors think we are bioterrorists.Because only a bioterrorist would run chickens outin the field where they can commiserate with red wing blackbirds and indigo buntings and take our diseases to

the science-based types of chicken houses and threaten the planets food supply with disease.So not only arepeople not clamoring to do this but we are being demonized by the mainstream agriculture community and its

pretty serious, including the food police who dont like small scale backyard processing or kitchens or anything

like that, they want everything to go through a multi-million dollar facility with chlorine and fumigants and a lot

of toxic sanitizers to sterilize everything.There are major, major differences of opinion about what properfood is.There is a big difference between sanitation and sterilization. You and I dont have sterile insides: ourinsides have three trillion beings to take this food and make it flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone and we

better be thinking about what that community wants. And that community is far from sterile.Its a very activebacterial, biological community.And so, we live in strange days when Coca Cola, Twinkies and Coco Puffsare considered safe but raw milk, compost-grown tomatoes and Aunt Matildas pickles are considered

hazardous substances.Chris Martenson: Theres a lot to be fighting here, what does the fight center around, is it just as simple as

profits at this point in time or is it frankly just easier to farm with the other practices? Where do you draw theline on that?

Joel Salatin: Well we can start with the philosophical difference that we think that food is fundamentally

biologicaland most of the culture thinks that food is primarily mechanical.And thats why we can pull DNAstructure and genes from a pig and put some in a pepper plant and some in a salmon and have a brand new life

form, thats a parts-oriented thing, like pieces of an engine.But some of us believe that life is fundamentallybiological not mechanical; the difference being that biological systems can heal, they have resiliency, and they

have a reason to be, a reason to exist that demands respect, I call it the pigness of the pig and the cowness of

the cow.And when you disrespect that - for example when the USDA took farmers like me to free dinnersfor 30 years to teach us the new science based feeding of cattle with dead cows, we did not do it because we

didnt like the USDA or because we were luddites or not progressive or hated science, we didnt do it because

there was no pattern or template in nature in which herbivores eat carrion.And so, 30 years later, there is thisbig collective Oops, maybe we shouldnt otta done that.You know, as this mechanical approach toward lifehas caught up to us with bovine spongiform encephalopathy.And in fact, thats exactly what has created, youknow the E.coli, salmonella, all these things are modern mutations and toxic proliferations that have become

mainstream with a mechanical view towards life. Weve even got research now going to try to isolate theporcine stress gene so we can take that stress gene out of the pig and abuse him a little more aggressively but at

least he wont be stressed about it.A culture that views its life with that kind of conquistador, mechanical,disrespectful, manipulative mentality will soon view its citizens the same way and other cultures the same


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way.Chris Martenson: So whats the end of that story if man, woman, humans set themselves apart from nature?

And we do that, when you gaze across the agricultural landscape, what kind of damage are you seeing being

done?Is it a one-way cul-de-sac that ends in famine at some point or what is it that you see in these practicesthat ultimately leads you to very, very strongly eschew them?Joel Salatin: Yes, well what we are seeing is exactly what we are seeing right now.We are seeing childhoodleukemia, we are seeing gluten intolerance, I mean how many people did you know 30 years ago that were

intolerant to gluten in wheat?

Chris Martenson: None.

Joel Salatin: And part of thats because, we streamlined the harvesting so fast industrially that the wheat never

gets shocked and never gets any mold in it to break down some of these enzymes that are real hard for our

bodies to break down.And so, you are seeing Type II diabetes, you are seeing obesity and we are just seeing aproliferation of these chronic type things that are a result of bushels of material that is not nutrient-dense or is

not nutritionally-based and its certainly isnt food that we have been used to eating.Our bodies, that threetrillion member community in our insides, is not meant to receive substances that you cant pronounce or you

cant make in your kitchen.Or that were grown with artificials.Sir Albert Howard said in 1943 in hisfoundational work in agricultural testament that when we use artificial manure (thats what he called chemicalfertilizers) artificial manures for the soil, then they grow artificial plants which then make artificial animals

which then make artificial humans which require artificials in order to keep us alive.And if that isnt acommentary on where we are today with the drug trade and the pharmaceutical industry, I dont know what

is.In the last 35 years, our culture has exchanged an 18% per capita expenditure on food and 9% on health careto 18% on health care and 9% on food.And I would suggest that it doesnt take a rocket scientist to think theremight be a connection between the inversion of those two numbers.Chris Martenson: Well, I mean certainly anybody who has seen the obesity maps that I think the NIH has put

out, they are really quite impressive stretching from the 50s to current and just watching the obesity epidemic

spread across - clearly that has to be due to something, we might think food. One of the areas Ive been

focused on for a while because Im very focused on the energy sphere and wondering how energy feeds into

everything and, of course, it feeds into our food system enormously and one area is in nutrient cycling. So ifwe have our typical NPK - nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium - you know those things are mined

somewhere or manufactured and trucked and put in a field and then something is grown and harvested and put

on a plate and then it gets flushed out to sea, never to be seen again in usable quantities.So, this whole idea ofnutrient cycling but those are just the big ones - there are micronutrients as well that are incredibly important.

How does your approach incorporate and deal with the nutrient cycling?

Joel Salatin: Well thats a great question.Well what stimulates the nutrient cycling is the onsite biomassregeneration cycle.Not the least of which of course is the earthworm community. You know its amazing thatearthworms can eat a pound of stuff in their front end and send it through their alimentary canal, bring it out

their back end, the same pound of stuff, and its like three times the calcium, seven times the nitrogen, eleven

times the potassium, fourteen times the phosphorous, plus an elevating of all the whole trace elements, boron,

cobalt, copper, molybdenum - all those things are increased. And whats amazing is that nobody knows howthats done.Its actually not concentrated, its actually acted on by some sort of activity in the earthworm.Somebacteria for example, are free living, they are not rhizomes like legume roots like alfalfa and clover, they are

free-living bacteria that will bring up to 100 lbs. of nitrogen per acre per year out of the atmosphere and put it in

the soil but they only really become active at 4% organic matter and most of our soils are not anywhere close to

4% organic matter anymore. They used to be, back when the buffalo were here and perennial grasses, but they

are not now.I think its fascinating that we actually produced more nutrient density in what is now the U.S.600 years ago, than we actually do today, even with all of our petroleum and everything, So the whole secret of

the nutrient cycling is to tap into the green material to capture more solar energy, put it into green material that


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can de-compose and go into the soil, and the best way to do that is with an herbivore - lamb, goat, cow - some

sort of herbivore, that is what I call the biomass accumulation re-start button to prune that forage off and re-

start the fast biomass accumulation cycle.If you dont have that, what you just have is the bio-mass just goesinto senescence and in senescence simply vaporizes the CO2 off into the atmosphere and it doesnt do anything

any good.So its the animal that recycles, that starts that whole fast metabolism cycle to metabolize the solarenergy into biomass through photosynthetic activity.Chris Martenson: I think you are talking about something really radical here is that our own health is linked

to and part and parcel of the health of the world in which we live, I mean its crazy talk right there dont you

think?Joel Salatin: [laugh]Yes.But that is the only way to only have a regenerative, sustainable system.Our cultureis a kind of product of the Greco, Roman, Western, linear, reductionist, compartmentalized, fragmented system

that ties parts oriented thinking, in which nothing relates to anything else.And so we study things by tearingthem apart and not seeing how they fit into a whole. And of course life isnt like that.And you cant extractyour living from the hydrology cycle, from the energy cycle, from the biomass generation cycle, ultimately

what I always tell people is to realize, its a profound thought - that everything that we see is completely and

utterly dependant on an unseen world of beings in the soil that never make it to the page of a business plan or a

bank statement. Nobody asks about this trillion, multiply trillions and trillions of organisms that live in the soil

and yet, everyone of us is utterly and completely dependent on that world.And yet we dont even put it in thebusiness plan as an important part of what we are doing. We dont think about it in the shower in the morning

when we are getting ready to go to work Lets see, how are my activities today going to impact this soil web,

this miraculous, mystical, awesome, unseen world that runs all the plants, all the animals, all the water cycle, all

the nutrient cycling?What are my activities today going to do to that?We dont even think about that in theshower in the morning.Chris Martenson: Right, weve got the U.N. projecting through their population studies they have a branch

that has projected that by 2050 we are going to have to basically double food output across the globe. Youknow, obviously our oceans are pretty well tapped out and it turns out that a lot of the gains, the productivity

gains that we experienced in the so-called green revolution - yes there were some neat variety tinkering in

genetics and stuff in there, but mostly that was irrigation and the application of the artificial fertilizers and all of

that.In your mind, can the type of farming practices that you are talking about, can those be the gateway thatwill allow us to actually increase our food production to levels that are being talked about or is even that just

silly talk at this point in time we are going to have to fine some other way to adjust here?Joel Salatin: Oh, there is no question, absolutely no question, that these systems are far more productive. Justto give you an example.On our farm, in our county, one of the measures for pasture production is in cow daysper acre.In other words a cow day is what one cow will eat in a single day thats one cow day.And so inour county, the average cow days per acre is currently 80 cow days per acre. Thats what an acre of pasturedoes.On our farm, and I already told you at the top of the program what our farm looked like 50 years agowithout a single chemical fertilizer and without planting a seed, we own no plow and no disc, and in 50 years,

we have moved this farm to average 400 cow days per acre thats five times the county average. And so, thefact is, if Monsanto figured out a way to get 1% increase in yields in something it would make the front page of

theNew York Times. Im telling you ways to double and triple production without chemical fertilizer, without

even planting anything and it doesnt make the obitituary page.

So yes, these systems work. And the way they work is to go back to historically well the way nature built

soils in the first place; which was with primarily herbivores. So if you really want to eat on a low energy

system, quit eating chicken and quit eating so much pork and eat grass-finished beef because grass-finished

herbivore is the most nutrient dense substance that doesnt require any tillage.It fertilizes itself, and doesntrequire any tillage.As soon as you take that herbivore and put it in a feedlot, on an irrigated grain-basedsystem, then it all breaks down from an energy standpoint and, of course, thats where a lot of the studies that

impugn livestock come from. But throughout the world, the great prairies and the great soil building regions of


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the world, from the Serengetti in Africa to the plains of America with buffalo to the Australian continent 200

years ago that had 10 marsupial species to do the disturbance, all of those were built with herbivores,

disturbances, and rest and perennials.Those are the four cornerstones of a system that works. The reason allcivilizations throughout history have been built around the herbivore, lamb, goat or cow is because the

herbivore is the only domestic animal that can harvest non-tilled, non-planted material.Omnivores like chickensand pigs require some sort of a grain component which then requires tillage.And until cheap energy and cheapmachinery, tillage was extremely expensive.You know if you had to go out and walk all day with a sharp stickbehind an ox or a yak or a mule, you couldnt stir very much soil, you had to plant by throwing it out with yourhand, then you had to hand weed and you had to hand scythe, shock it up and bring it in to a hard floor where

you could beat it to separate the grain from the husk then you had to take a crude wooden pitchfork and fling it

up in the air in a breeze to -Im sorry flailing was the first one this is winnowing.To winnow out the chaffand at the end of the day you look on the ground and Oh weve got some grain here and now we are going to

try and store it in something away from the mice and the rats for a year. .. before the time of sheet metal and

mesh wire.Historically, grain was extremely expensive and hard come by which is why poultry was only eatenby kings and poultry and pigs were only grown enough to salvage the waste stream from the homestead. Themain thing was lamb, goat and cow which was the herbivore.That was the main thing - or deer or bison orwhatever - but the point is, that those herbivorous creatures can do or are made to do very well without any

tillage whatsoever.And tillage has only actually been doable on a large, grand scale just in the lastcentury.Chris Martenson: Im glad you mentioned the energy portion of the cycle. At ChrisMartenson.com we spend

a lot of time on energy, we look at the food supply as being critically vulnerable to the impact of peak oils

arrival.You know after all fossil fuel energy inputs vastly exceed the caloric output of most so-called modernfarms. So our view is you we cannot really increasingly use a limited resource forever. Our view is that mostpeople alive today will experience a decline of oil firsthand, not meaning it runs out but we have slightly less

and less.And its a huge, huge implication behind that.And we also focus on helping people develop personalresiliency, starting with food: storing food, finding local suppliers, even growing at least a small percentage of

their calories so they can be connected to the food supply more personally.What guidance are you offering topeople, to our listeners in terms of how they should be or might begin to think about interacting with their food

supply?Joel Salatin: Oh such a great question.

Its a broad span, I would say number one find your kitchen.

Imean, a processed food is heavily packaged, packaging is extremely expensive: its essentially stored for a long

time and it has a long distribution cycle.I mean fifteen hundred miles per morsel is kind of the average. Andso my first advice to anybody, is buy unprocessed, raw, and fix it in your kitchen. That will drop the energyfootprint way, way, way down and as soon as we do that, then of course, the next step is to either grow some

or buy it locally.There are thousands of high quality, nutrient-dense ecologically-encouraging farms that areselling - from farmers markets to community supported agriculture to on-arm stands to metropolitan buying

clubs to retail boutiques, whatever but there are plenty of these kinds of things.Buying organic from athousand miles away doesnt get the job done.Its just as energy intensive as anything else and so we want..thats part of this whole local food awareness.Now, can a locality feed itself?Absolutely, think about the amount of food, the kinds of food that can begrown within 100 miles of you.And just think about going down to the supermarket, walk through the islesand say, how much of this could be grown with 100 miles? And in northern climes if we take off citrus andcoffee and tea and sugar, it can almost all be grown there.And so, its arguable, I think this is a fascinatingthing, its really arguable right now, whether a culture which has incarcerated twice as many people in prisons

as it has farmers growing its food whether a culture is that disconnected from its ecological umbilical can

even survive?So, I think here again, we have to approach this from an integrated holistic standpoint.If thecommon temptation is for you and I to say, Well you gotta do something, you gotta do something different,

you need to do this and that and the other.And we fail to realize that we are part of the issue.And none of thesituation that weve gotten ourselves into is a result of any one persons doing its a collective accumulation

of a new societal protocol, which I would suggest is very historically abnormal.So first of all, find your


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kitchen, then source your food locally, and then grow some yourself. For example, to just show howdisintegrated our thinking is, weve got now for example, in New England weve got confinement dairies who

20 years ago got environmental awards for taking taxpayer money to put in manure lagoons as a manure

management program; now they are getting taxpayer sponsored money to cover those lagoons with rubber

bladders to capture the methane so they are getting little green environmental awards for being green and

capturing methane so they can run all of the expensive fans and machinery and buildings and equipment thats

necessary in a confinement dairy operation.What we need to be doing is shutting down the confinement dairyoperation, turning the herbivores back out on the perennials, like they were meant to be, letting them self-harvest, self-fertilize and shut down the entire concentrated animal feeding operations, with all of its intendant

energy requirements.Same thing goes for example, for restaurants or lets take a college that figures out letstake all of our kitchen scraps and send them up the road ten miles to the composing outfit and then the dining

services coordinator gets a nice plaque and a little award for being green because now they are composing their

kitchen scraps. What we need to be doing is building a little chicken house adjoining the back door of the

kitchen so all the kitchen scraps can go right out into the chickens, the chickens then can eat that and produce

eggs, now we dont have to grow any grain, till the grain - chickens resume their historically normal cycle

which was the homestead salvage operation to take all the kitchen scraps and whey scraps and cheese scraps

and all that and convert it into eggs. Now we dont even have to have concentrated animal feeding operations

for chickens anymore and the Humane Society can rejoice that we dont have any battery egg production. You

dont have to truck those eggs into the city, into the college, and eggs go right to the dining services and the

kitchen scraps go out and its a beautiful, beautiful circle.That is the kind of integration - you know we talkabout windmills, and getting energy and stuff, my goodness - if we would take, if we would take on every

southern exposure of every house and office building and school whatever, if we would just take wire mesh or

cattle panels and just tip up a frame and cover it with plastic to make a simple solarium, 8 out from the

southern side of every building we could virtually heat all the buildings without any energy and grow our

mesculen mix and shut down all the trucks bringing California produce to New England over the wintertime. If

all the diesel fuel being put through refrigerated trucks to bring unseasonable produce to New England and

Virginia Ill call it the northern tier if all that diesel fuel was converted into plastic to make coop houses,

season extensions and solariums on the south side of buildings, we wouldnt have to run any of those trucks,

we wouldnt have to build any of those roads, we wouldnt have to use any of that energy to do that.And thatbecomes, see, thats an integrated holistic approach rather than some sort of Im going to continue to eat my

California-introduced mesculen mix in February in New York City. Hang the system and lets figure out how

to make more cheap fuel.Chris Martenson: Just thinking about the issues before us and maybe trying to find clever ways around it,

Im personally shocked and sometimes dismayed at how far we still seem to need to go.For instance in mylocal area, in Greenfield, Mass they are proposing a bio-mass plant, it sounds all green and everything

right?But its going to require five or six hundred thousand tons of forest to be cut down, trucked to the centrallocation. And they are building it with the intent that they need to do something with the waste heat so there is

all this piping that they are going to have to put in.Anybody who treats heat as a waste stream at this point intime, I dont think really deserves any green plaques, hasnt really thought it through and doesnt understand

much about what they are trying to solve.Joel Salatin: Yes, I couldnt agree with you more. Now, to be sure, I am certainly a friend of biomass and Im

not interested in cutting down all the forest, but it is a very, very renewable resource. In fact in Austria, Im told

that virtually all of the urban homes are heated by wood pellets.So like here in the U.S. where we have thepropane or fuel oil truck that goes along and fuels peoples fuel oil tanks and propane tanks.There the samekind of truck goes along with a little auger in it and stops at your basement window and augers your bin full of

wood pellets and you know goes on down the street to the next house. So you know, I absolutely think thatbiomass certainly has a role to play and I think that we have created some real problems by not cutting crooked

and diseased trees and things like that. Our national forests are in deplorable shape. The Yellowstone fires were

caused because of a no-cut policy.Well instead of having a no-cut policy, lets strategically cut but apply goodsylvacultural practices and theres enough wood out there to supply everything.Anytime a Scandinavian comeshere for a visit they just go into epileptic seizures about how terribly inefficient Americans are with their


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forests.And I couldnt agree more.Weve got a build-up of waste, of junk wood oxidizing on the forest floorand that certainly needs to be used and we need to cull and we need to weed our forests just like anything

else.But yes, unfortunately many of these things are, again, they are so industrial scaled and so sized that theyare not community appropriate.When I think of energy, I think of community-scaled.The thing is, in a givencommunity, there might be a creek with a lot of fall in it. Well whoever is on that creek can put in a little Pelton

wheel to run a hydro project.Maybe somebody else like us for example we have hundreds of acres ofreally high-quality well-growing trees on our farm, our forest.They need to be culled and thinned and that sortof thing, maybe we could have a little steam engine. And another neighbor with real good bottom land, maybehe wants to grow some corn and run a little alcohol electric generation thing.Maybe somebody else sits on ahilltop and has wind so he puts up a wind generator. The point Im making, is that when all of us plug into thegrid, with what we can offer, suddenly the community has power but its completely decentralized, its

autonomous to the community, and its and all the facilities are at a scale that nests into the ecological womb of

the village.And that I think makes sense.Chris Martenson: It does, it makes a lot of sense. I think well get there, is my view. But I think its going torequire a bit of a crisis first for some reason. We seem to be unable to get there on our own terms. So we will

get there by some other terms at some point.

Joel Salatin: Well, disturbance is always a precursor to innovation.You never really have innovation until youhave a level of disturbance.And certainly expensive fuel is becoming a societal disturbance right now.Andyou know if we would quit trying to build empires around the world that would love us enough to continue our

flow of oil and keep all that money at home and let the fuel go to wherever it needs to be, it would create a little

more disturbance and wed maybe become a lot more clever about what we are doing.My mechanic - and Imsure you have heard this and Ive collected these kinds of clippings for my lifetime - says that even in the late

1960s there was plenty of technology to build 100 mile per gallon carburetors but the auto companies kept

buying up these backyard entrepreneur innovators, their patents and their products and these things never saw

the market.And I think its just absolutely unspeakable, unconscionable, that we would have buried technologythat would have allowed us to quadruple our miles per gallon for that long. I think its obscene.

Chris Martenson: Well there is a lot to be said for these disruptions you are talking about, its our view that

perhaps some are coming up.Joel, I understand you have a book coming out this fall. Is that right?Joel Salatin: Yes thats correct.The title is Folks, This Aint Normal.And it actually contains some of thethings Ive just been talking about.When we talk about historical normalcy, high fuel prices and the herbivore,the biomass cycle, all these kinds of things.This whole century of cheap fuel, indiscriminate antibiotic use, themechanics that went along with it, unpronounceable food, and you know no chores for children

[laughs].These are amazing times, including the whole food police thing where you and I cant just decide toeat what we want to eat.These are all unprecedented trials in the history of civilization and I think anybodyunder 50 today just cant even fathom a time where there were no TV dinners, no supermarkets, when we

actually ate seasonally, when 50% of all the vegetables were produced in backyard gardens, when homes

actually still had functioning larders - we dont even use the term larder today.

What we view today as normal I argue is simply not normal. Just think about if you wanted to go to town 100

or 120 years ago, if you wanted to go to town you actually had to go out and hook up a horse. That horse hadto eat something, which means you had to have a patch of grass somewhere to feed that horse which meant youhad to take care of some perennial in order to feed that horse in order to go to town. And so you had,throughout history, you had these kinds of what I call inherent boundaries or brakes on how much a single

human could abuse the ecology.And today, during this period of cheap energy, weve been able to extricateourselves from that entire umbilical, if you will, and just run willy-nilly as if there is no constraint or

restraint.And now we are starting to see some of the outcome of that boundless, untied progression.And sothe chances are, the way to bet, is that in the future we are going to see more food localization, we are going to

see more energy localization, we are going to see more personal responsibility in ecological lifestyle decisions

because its going to be forced on us to survive economically we are going to have to start taking some


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accounting of these ecological principles.And so those are the kind of themes and the arguments Ive put in thebook. There is a lot of satire, lot of humor and the title is Folks, This Aint Normal.Chris Martenson: Great title, I get a lot from the title alone.So if we were to summarize here: we havebasically a lot of unsustainable practices that just energetically dont make sense, maybe ecologically dont

make sense from a sustainability standpoint. Obviously wed love to be sustainable in this world because Id

like to think in a thousand years, there will still be people here doing wonderful things.And at the same timewe note that disruptions are the way things change and so anything that is unsustainable, the definition is it willsomeday stop.Certainly there are warning signs abundantly strewn about the landscape for anybody who caresto look.A lot of people are, thats the good news.And the other good news that I get from your message is that integrated approaches and integrated

understandings of how these pieces fit together are well within our grasp. In fact there are working practices

out there, your farm being an example, or set of nested examples.So this is all something that is not beyond us.We can do this but we are just going to have to start with the understanding of where we are living today is:

folks, it aint normal.Joel Salatin: Well said, well said, I couldnt agree more.Chris Martenson: Well, Joel its been a real pleasure talking to you and I want to think you for thisopportunity and wish you all the best.

Joel Salatin: Thank you Chris, its been an honor to be with you. Thank you.Chris Martenson: Goodbye.

Joel Salatin: Bye.

Documents

How to Prepare for a Future Increasingly Defined by Localized Food & Energy