539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
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What is the best argument against veganism?
We hear a lot of noise about how cows are contributing to global warming, which is an idea that's really struck me as rather specious right from the beginning.
If you want to talk atmospheric carbon, all it would take is all of our farmland to change 1% in organic matter. We call this mob-stalking, herbivorous, solar conversion, lignified carbon, sequestration, fertilization. We spend as much time marketing as we do the entire farm production.
Really what you are is a communicator and a network builder. Well, why do I need to be fluent in my communication? Why do I need to write? Why do I need to learn to speak?
Thank you.
So I've been very skeptical about these ideas stemming from the WEF globalist types that there's something pathological about the agricultural sector and the dawning concern as well or the building concern about the notion that pasture animals like cattle, for example, are bad for the planet. That just seems to me to be absurd on the face of it. I'd have to see a lot of data, so to speak, before I would regard that as credible. I'm also interested in meat-based diets, for example, because they seem to be very health-promoting and highly nutritious. One of the things that I've wanted to do for a long time is to spend some time investigating the landscape of so-called regenerative farming. And I found someone to talk to, and there's other people who I could talk to as well, named Joel Salatin. And Joel has written a number of interesting books, and this will give you a sense of him right off the bat. The latest one was Homestead Tsunami, which is a description of, well, the dawning interest in homesteading as a potential choice of life, let's say.
He's also written, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, which I love as a title, You Can Farm, which is partly what we discussed, and Pastured Poultry Prophets, which is a book that documents a particular form of agrarian lifestyle. as a solution to the economic problems that young people might be facing. So it's a pathway to a profitable, sustainable, and socially useful economic future. And so we spent a fair bit of time talking about all of these things to do today. And so if you're interested in that, then this is the podcast for you. Well, Mr. Selliton, why don't you start just by telling everybody what you do? Let's start from the beginning.
Sure. So we farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, which is in the western part of the state, known historically as the breadbasket of the Confederacy during the Civil War, where Cyrus McCormick invented the the other reaper and that part of the industrial revolution really took place in 1837. And so we farmed there full time with a pastured livestock, operation that doesn't use vaccines, hormones, chemical fertilizers. My mom and dad bought the original core property in 1961. So I was four years old and we came there and it was a gullied rock pile, cheap land. And dad asked agriculture experts, how do I make a living on this small farm? Small being what's the size? So at that time, it was about 100 acres open and 450 in woodland.
So it was very much a forest. It goes up along, you know, one of those Appalachian mountains there. And then, you know, the nice... The bottom land is out, you know, from the base. And so 100 acres of, you know, decent usable land that was one of the gullies we measured was 16 feet deep, 16 feet from the top to the bottom. That's a deep gully. But there were just, you know, the hillsides were just gullies like that, like corrugated roofing from back from erosion back in, you know, plowing in the day. And large areas, a quarter acre that were just solid rock, five to eight feet of topsoil had washed off over the years of tillage. And there was no vegetation. I remember as a child being able to walk the whole farm and never setting foot on a piece of vegetation. It was that barren. It was very, very poor, but it was cheap. And so that's- And worth every penny by the sounds of it. Well, so, you know, dad says, well, how do I make a living on this farm?
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