Episode Details

Famed farmer Joel Salatin, the co-owner of Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia, joins Julia La Roche on episode 58. 

Joel, featured in the New York Times bestseller The Omnivore's Dilemma and the award-winning documentary Food Inc., has been called "the most famous farmer in America." He calls himself a "Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer."

In this episode, Joel shares how his style of regenerative farming is having a cinderella moment. He also outlines the frailties of a centralized industrial food system and why the decentralized, more democratized model is the way forward. According to Joel, it's the only system that can ultimately feed the world because it's the only system that honors sustainability and regenerative capacity.

Learn more about Polyface and visit the farm here. 

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0:00 Intro

1:10 Big picture 

1:40 Fragilities of centralized, industrial food system

2:35 Prices in the industrial sector have escalated 

3:00 Polyface working with decentralized, democratized suppliers 

3:44 A cinderella moment for Polyface

4:00 Answers, resiliency 

4:50 Didn't have to raise prices as much 

5:58 Ways to buy better with less money

7:55 Use your kitchen 

11:00 How'd we get so far away from where our food comes from?

12:30 No freedom without participation 

14:00 How to get involved 

17:39 The biggest lie 

19:28 Polyface Farms regenerative farming 

20:00 Biomimicry 

24:00 When you fight nature, nature tends to fight back

26:00 The only system that can feed the world 

27:40 Scale not by centralization but by decentralization 

29:40 Production per acre is way above the industry 

37:10 If we had a Manhattan Project in 

39:50 Living things can heal 

43:00 A violation of life principle 

44:00 Stigma of farming 

45:49 The intellectual agrarian 

46:30 The regeneration economy 

48:00 You Can't have a respected farm community and a cheap food policy

49:40 Power is in the consumers' hands 

51:00 80/20 Rule

55:00 Will there be a reckoning of the factory farming model?