[Scpg] Interview/Audio Joel Salatin: How to Prepare for A Future Increasingly Defined By Localized Food & Energy:

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

Transcript for Joel Salatin: How to Prepare for A Future Increasingly 
Defined By Localized Food & Energy
http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/joel-salatin-how-prepare-future-increasingly-defined-localized-food-energy/61949

Below is the transcript for Joel 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 featured prominently in such modern food movement 
masterworks as The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and the 
documentary Food, Inc. If you haven’t seen it, it’s an incredible eye 
opener; it was for me. Joel’s unconventional 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, I’m a 
huge fan of your work and the practices you advocate. I apply a number 
of them in the management of my own small homestead in rural Mass. It’s 
a real honor to be speaking with you.

Joel Salatin: Thank you; it’s an honor to be with you, Chris.

Chris Martenson: Well, thanks. Could you please give our listeners a 
short background on what you see as your 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 economically enhanced food prototypes 
and duplicate their production throughout the world. So its all about 
these food production prototypes that not only are economically and 
environmentally beneficial but also have a social - we say ‘emotional’ 
just so we can have three E’s - but it’s a triple-bottom-line deal. And 
wonderfully, if you get creative enough, you don’t have to sacrifice the 
ecology in order to have a profitable business and you don’t have to 
sacrifice profit in order to have an ecological business. So the 
principles are relatively few; you know it all backs up to biomimicry, 
for sure.

In other words, what we want to do is take natural templates and draw a 
circle 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 built soil for centuries 
are not tillage and annuals, which of course are both things that our 
culture worships. Rather, they are perennials, 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 for recuperation and to metabolize the 
disturbance factor.

So as soon as you start doing those kinds of things, that means you are 
going to move the animals, they are not going to stay in one place, it's 
going to be primarily perennially based, so we are always looking at how 
can we harvest acorns from the trees into pork, for example. It’s going 
to be perennial grasses, not annual grasses or grains. And its going to 
be portable infrastructure, 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 to depend on recycling solar-created biomass onsite; that’s 
the carbon cycle. Sun makes the plants, the plants grow, 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 
of animals, perennials, disturbance, rest, portability, and real-time 
carbon cycling.

Chris Martenson: And so this, you’ve 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 it’s a 
success? You can farm this way and it works?

Joel Salatin: [laugh] Oh, unquestionably. Our family came here in 1961, 
which is 50 years ago. Bought the most run-down, gullied, depleted, 
mined-out farm in the whole area. In fact, we measured the deepest gully 
was 16’ deep. And we had so little soil we couldn’t even hold up 
electric fence stakes. Dad poured concrete in old used 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, we’d sit on the platform on the tractor and heave these things off as 
Dad drove slowly down the field. He’d come along and put electric fence 
stakes in them because we didn’t have enough soil to hold up electric 
fence stakes, and it doesn’t take much soil to hold up electric fence 
stakes. That’s how we started, and we could barely handle ten cows. 
Today we usually handle 100 cows. All of those 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 aren’t adhering to these sorts of 
practices, what’s going on there? Why aren’t they?

Joel Salatin: Well, our neighbors think we are bioterrorists. Because 
only a bioterrorist would run chickens out in 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 
planet’s food supply with disease. So not only are people not clamoring 
to do this, but we are being demonized by the mainstream agriculture 
community, and it’s pretty serious, including the food police, who don’t 
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 ‘proper food’ 
is. There is a big difference between sanitation and sterilization. You 
and I don’t have sterile insides; our insides 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. It’s a very active bacterial, biological 
community. And so we live in strange days when Coca Cola, Twinkies, and 
Coco Puffs are considered safe, but raw milk, compost-grown tomatoes, 
and Aunt Matilda’s pickles are considered hazardous substances.

Chris Martenson: There’s 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 the line on that?

Joel Salatin: Well, we can start with the philosophical difference that 
we think that food is fundamentally biological and most of the culture 
thinks that food is primarily mechanical. And that’s why we can pull DNA 
structure and genes from a pig and put some in a pepper plant and some 
in a salmon and have a brand new life form; that’s a parts-oriented 
thing, like pieces of an engine. But some of us believe that life is 
fundamentally biological 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 dinners for 30 years to teach us the new science-based 
feeding of cattle with dead cows, we did not do it because we didn’t 
like the USDA or because we were Luddites or not progressive or hated 
science; we didn’t do it because there was no pattern or template in 
nature in which herbivores eat carrion. And so, 30 years later, there is 
this big collective “Oops, maybe we shouldn’t oughta done that.” You 
know, as this mechanical approach toward life has caught up to us with 
bovine spongiform encephalopathy. And in fact, that’s exactly what has 
created, you know the E.coli, salmonella, all these things are modern 
mutations and toxic proliferations that have become mainstream with a 
mechanical view towards life. We’ve even got research now going to try 
to isolate the porcine stress gene so we can take that stress gene out 
of the pig and abuse him a little more aggressively, but at least he 
won’t 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 way.

Chris Martenson: So what’s 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 practices that 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 childhood leukemia, 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 that’s 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 a proliferation 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 isn’t 
food that we have been used to eating.

Our bodies, that three trillion member community in our insides, is not 
meant to receive substances that you can’t pronounce or you can’t make 
in your kitchen. Or that were grown with artificials. Sir Albert Howard 
said in 1943 in his foundational work in agricultural testament that 
when we use artificial manure (that’s what he called chemical 
fertilizers) 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 
isn’t a commentary on where we are today with the drug trade and the 
pharmaceutical industry, I don’t know what is. In the last 35 years, our 
culture has exchanged an 18% per capita expenditure on food and 9% on 
health care to 18% on health care and 9% on food. And I would suggest 
that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to think there might 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 ‘50’s 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 I’ve been focused on for a while 
because I’m 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 if we 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 of nutrient 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 that’s a great question. Well what stimulates the 
nutrient cycling is the onsite biomass regeneration cycle. Not the least 
of which of course is the earthworm community. You know it’s amazing 
that earthworms 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 what’s amazing 
is that nobody knows how that’s done. It’s actually not concentrated, 
it’s actually acted on by some sort of activity in the earthworm. Some 
bacteria 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 it’s 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 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 bio- mass accumulation re-start button to prune 
that forage off and re-start the fast biomass accumulation cycle. If you 
don’t have that, what you just have is the bio-mass just goes into 
senescence and in senescence simply vaporizes the CO2 off into the 
atmosphere and it doesn’t do anything any good. So it’s the animal that 
recycles, that starts that whole fast metabolism cycle to metabolize the 
solar energy 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 
don’t you think?

Joel Salatin: [laugh] Yes. But that is the only way to only have a 
regenerative, sustainable system. Our culture is 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 tearing them apart 
and not seeing how they fit into a whole. And of course life isn’t like 
that. And you can’t extract your living from the hydrology cycle, from 
the energy cycle, from the biomass generation cycle, ultimately – what I 
always tell people is to realize, it’s 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 don’t even put it in the business plan as an important part of 
what we are doing. We don’t think about it in the shower in the morning 
when we are getting ready to go to work “Let’s 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 don’t even think about that in 
the shower in the morning.

Chris Martenson: Right, we’ve 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. 
You know, 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 that will 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. Just to give you an example. On 
our farm, in our county, one of the measures for pasture production is 
in cow days per acre. In other words a ‘cow day’ is what one cow will 
eat in a single day – that’s one cow day. And so in our county, the 
average cow days per acre is currently 80 cow days per acre. That’s what 
an acre of pasture does. On our farm, and I already told you at the top 
of the program what our farm looked like 50 years ago without 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 – that’s five times the county average. And so, the fact is, if 
Monsanto figured out a way to get 1% increase in yields in something it 
would make the front page of the New York Times. I’m telling you ways to 
double and triple production without chemical fertilizer, without even 
planting anything and it doesn’t 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 doesn’t require any tillage. It fertilizes 
itself, and doesn’t require any tillage. As soon as you take that 
herbivore and put it in a feedlot, on an irrigated grain-based system, 
then it all breaks down from an energy standpoint and, of course, that’s 
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 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 all civilizations 
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 chickens and 
pigs require some sort of a grain component which then requires tillage. 
And until cheap energy and cheap machinery, tillage was extremely 
expensive. You know if you had to go out and walk all day with a sharp 
stick behind an ox or a yak or a mule, you couldn’t stir very much soil, 
you had to plant by throwing it out with your hand, 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 -I’m sorry flailing was the first one – this is winnowing. To 
winnow out the chaff and at the end of the day you look on the ground 
and “Oh we’ve 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 eaten by kings 
and poultry and pigs were only grown enough to salvage the waste stream 
from the homestead. The main thing was lamb, goat and cow which was the 
herbivore. That was the main thing - or deer or bison or whatever - 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 last century.

Chris Martenson: I’m 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 oil’s 
arrival. You know after all fossil fuel energy inputs vastly exceed the 
caloric output of most so-called modern farms. So our view is you we 
cannot really increasingly use a limited resource forever. Our view is 
that most people alive today will experience a decline of oil firsthand, 
not meaning it runs out but we have slightly less and less. And it’s a 
huge, huge implication behind that. And we also focus on helping people 
develop personal resiliency, 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 to people, 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. It’s a broad span, I would say 
number one – find your kitchen. I mean, a processed food is heavily 
packaged, packaging is extremely expensive: it’s 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. And so my first advice to 
anybody, is buy unprocessed, raw, and fix it in your kitchen. That will 
drop the energy footprint 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 are selling - from farmer’s 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 a thousand miles away doesn’t get 
the job done. It’s just as energy intensive as anything else and so we 
want.. that’s 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 be grown within 100 miles of you. And 
just think about going down to the supermarket, walk through the isles 
and say, how much of this could be grown with 100 miles? And in northern 
climes if we take off citrus and coffee and tea and sugar, it can almost 
all be grown there. And so, its arguable, I think this is a fascinating 
thing, 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 the common 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 the situation 
that we’ve gotten ourselves into is a result of any one person’s doing – 
it’s a collective accumulation of a new societal protocol, which I would 
suggest is very historically abnormal. So first of all, find your 
kitchen, then source your food locally, and then grow some yourself. For 
example, to just show how disintegrated our thinking is, we’ve got now 
for example, in New England we’ve 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 that’s necessary in a 
confinement dairy operation. What we need to be doing is shutting down 
the confinement dairy operation, 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 let’s take a college that figures 
out “let’s take 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 don’t 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 
don’t even have to have concentrated animal feeding operations for 
chickens anymore and the Humane Society can rejoice that we don’t have 
any battery egg production. You don’t 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 it’s a beautiful, beautiful circle. That is 
the kind of integration - you know we talk about 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 – I’ll 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 wouldn’t have to run any of those trucks, we wouldn’t 
have to build any of those roads, we wouldn’t have to use any of that 
energy to do that. And that becomes, see, that’s an integrated holistic 
approach rather than some sort of “I’m going to continue to eat my 
California-introduced mesculen mix in February in New York City. Hang 
the system and let’s 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, I’m personally shocked and 
sometimes dismayed at how far we still seem to need to go. For instance 
in my local 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 central location. 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 in time, I don’t think 
really deserves any green plaques, hasn’t really thought it through and 
doesn’t understand much about what they are trying to solve.

Joel Salatin: Yes, I couldn’t agree with you more. Now, to be sure, I am 
certainly a friend of biomass and I’m not interested in cutting down all 
the forest, but it is a very, very renewable resource. In fact in 
Austria, I’m told that virtually all of the urban homes are heated by 
wood pellets. So like here in the U.S. where we have the propane or fuel 
oil truck that goes along and fuels people’s fuel oil tanks and propane 
tanks. There the same kind 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 that biomass 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, let’s strategically cut 
but apply good sylvacultural practices and there’s enough wood out there 
to supply everything. Anytime a Scandinavian comes here for a visit – 
they just go into epileptic seizures about how terribly inefficient 
Americans are with their forests. And I couldn’t agree more. We’ve got a 
build-up of waste, of junk wood oxidizing on the forest floor and 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 they 
are not community appropriate. When I think of energy, I think of 
community-scaled. The thing is, in a given community, 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 of really high-quality 
well-growing trees on our farm, our forest. They need to be culled and 
thinned and that sort of thing, maybe we could have a little steam 
engine. And another neighbor with real good bottom land, maybe he wants 
to grow some corn and run a little alcohol electric generation thing. 
Maybe somebody else sits on a hilltop and has wind so he puts up a wind 
generator. The point I’m making, is that when all of us plug into the 
grid, 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 we’ll get 
there, is my view. But I think it’s going to require 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 you have a level of disturbance. And 
certainly expensive fuel is becoming a societal disturbance right now. 
And you 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 we’d maybe become a lot more clever 
about what we are doing. My mechanic - and I’m sure you have heard this 
and I’ve collected these kinds of clippings for my lifetime - says that 
even in the late 1960’s 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 it’s just absolutely 
unspeakable, unconscionable, that we would have buried technology that 
would have allowed us to quadruple our miles per gallon for that long. I 
think it’s obscene.

Chris Martenson: Well there is a lot to be said for these disruptions 
you are talking about, it’s 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 that’s correct. The title is Folks, This Ain’t Normal. 
And it actually contains some of the things I’ve 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, the mechanics 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 can’t just decide to eat what we want to 
eat. These are all unprecedented trials in the history of civilization 
and I think anybody under 50 today just can’t 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 don’t 
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 
had to eat something, which means you had to have a patch of grass 
somewhere to feed that horse which meant you had 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, we’ve been able 
to extricate ourselves 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 so the 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 accounting of these ecological principles. And so those are 
the kind of themes and the arguments I’ve put in the book. There is a 
lot of satire, lot of humor and the title is Folks, This Ain’t Normal.

Chris Martenson: Great title, I get a lot from the title alone. So if we 
were to summarize here: we have basically a lot of unsustainable 
practices that just energetically don’t make sense, maybe ecologically 
don’t make sense from a sustainability standpoint. Obviously we’d love 
to be sustainable in this world because I’d like to think in a thousand 
years, there will still be people here doing wonderful things. And at 
the same time we note that disruptions are the way things change and so 
anything that is unsustainable, the definition is it will someday stop. 
Certainly there are warning signs abundantly strewn about the landscape 
for anybody who cares to look. A lot of people are, that’s 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 ain’t normal.”

Joel Salatin: Well said, well said, I couldn’t agree more.

Chris Martenson: Well, Joel it’s been a real pleasure talking to you and 
I want to think you for this opportunity and wish you all the best.

Joel Salatin: Thank you Chris, it’s been an honor to be with you. Thank 
you.

Chris Martenson: Goodbye.

Joel Salatin: Bye.