Why Do We Pay Farmers to Grow Food Nobody Eats? | Joel Salatin

Today, we have four companies controlling 85% of the meat market. These big companies have ensured that the regulatory climate is prejudicial to small operators and not larger ones. Joel Salatin is co-owner of Polyface Farms, a regenerative farm in Virginia. He is author of over a dozen books on sustainable agriculture, local food networks, and homesteading. I'm suggesting let the market speak and let the people that are in that market respond to market forces. Every time the government steps in and puts their finger on this side of the scale, it skews everything else. In this episode, we unpack, to use Joel Salatin's words, the government's war on cows. Why is beef so expensive? What legislation could help small cattle farmers? And what is the Polyface Farms method for local, ethical, If we're going to preserve farmers, and if we're going to preserve market options in the marketplace, what we desperately need is the ability of farmers to be able to value-add this product and for consumers to be able to buy from their neighbors without wrapping it in a $2 million federal inspected facility. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Come on in. One of my favorite stores. Yeah. So you know how much I love the ground beef. I'm going to get a bunch of that for sure, like these singles. Yep. I think I'm going to get 10 of these. All right. There we go. Black horse garlic, yeah. And one more thing. What's that going to be? A beef roast. But this I'd have to cook like in a... Yeah, a slow cooker or an Instant Pot. I mean, this is one of the favorite pieces is eye of round. Let's grab this one. I love it. Perfect. Joel Salatin, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Thank you. It's a privilege and an honor to be with you. I love being at Polyface. I mean, I just come just to sit at this table, cameras or no cameras, and have some of your amazing food. So we're in this bizarre situation when it comes to beef. Where it's expensive to the point where there's an executive order saying it's we're going to make an exemption for imports to lower the price of beef. So explain to me why this is. So why are we short of beef? Yeah. Well, why is it expensive? I mean, OK, you're already answering the question, right? Well, well, there's there's several reasons. So this doesn't just this doesn't just happen. It started about five or six years ago in the tremendous droughts in the in the southern tier of the U.S. Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma. That southern tier of the U.S. back in the 2020, 2021 were were drought devastated. Well, cows are herbivores. They eat grass. If you don't have rain, you don't have grass. And and and grasses, you know, you can make hay, but it's way too bulky and expensive to transport long distances. It's it's not as concentrated as corn or soybeans or something like that or gold. So so so transport becomes difficult. So what happened is a lot of these ranchers and farmers just liquidated. So they didn't have feed. I was in I well remember I was in Mississippi doing a conference and I think it was 2021 and met several farmers there. And I mean, it's horrible. They had actually lost cows that the ground had cracked open so far that cows were stepping in and breaking their legs. Then they'd have to put the cow down because you can't you know, you can't put a splint on a cow leg. And and I mean, it was it was just horrible. So so that that started this this liquidation. Then, as if to add insult to injury, we have the the aging farmer and the average livestock farmer is about 65 years old. The average American farmer is about 60. But, you know, you can do cows pretty gently in the old age. And so so livestock farmers tend to be a little bit older. And there comes a point in your life when if you can get out, you don't want to get back in. You know, you're ready to, you know, go do other things like sit on the beach and visit the grandkids. Then we had the rise of the of the whole protein movement. Keto, paleo, carnivore. These are huge movements. They do conferences. I mean, I've been I've been to meat stock in Tennessee. I mean, the thing is wild. Twelve hundred screaming people that have never eaten, you know, carbohydrates for 20 years, you know. And then most recently, the screw worm that came in from Mexico. And so they shut down the border with Mexico. Well, that shut down a million that shut down a million head of beef, which is generally considered about five percent of the beef slaughtered in America originates in Mexico. And it comes in to American feedlots. So so you have this this this perfect storm of things happening. You have the aging farmer that doesn't want to start or expand or start up. You've got you've got the drought and you've got Mexico border closed. And and the cattle cycle is a long cycle. You know, cow has a calf. If you're going to expand your herd, cow has a calf. It's got to be a heifer calf. That's a female. And then, you know, in a year you can breed it in a year. She births in another two years. You can butcher it. You know, you're in this long. It's not like chickens. You know, you have hatched an egg eight weeks. You've got a chicken. You know, you can butcher a chicken. No, no, it's it's a it's a long cycle. And so when you get into a a difficult situation, you can't just snap your fingers and get out of it. And so one of the things that's that's happening right now, even even as high as the beef price is right now, it has not kept up with the increase in labor, land costs, input costs, equipment costs, building costs. The price of beef right now has not even kept up with all those other costs from the perspective of the farmer, from the perspective of the farmer. Right. So so we let's just do we really need beef? You know, all these people are saying, hey, well, you know, this is it takes a long time. It's cost intensive. Let's keep the energy in the, you know, in the ground. Maybe chickens will work. How do you respond? Well, the beautiful thing about the herbivore is that it doesn't require tillage to grow it tillage or or or, you know, or chemical herbicides to kill the grass or whatever. The point is, if you're going to raise omnivores, chickens, turkeys, pigs, if you're going to raise omnivores, they can't live on on perennials. They require annuals. Annuals are things that you have to one of them. Annuals are things that you have to plant all the time. You know, watermelon, squash. You know, you think of your garden vegetables, wheat, corn, soybeans. Those are annuals. You plant a seed, you get a crop that year. Perennials are like your lawn, OK? You plant it one time and it lasts forever. And so so nature doesn't actually have very many annuals. It's mainly perennials because nobody's around to to tell those things to till the sod and plant the seeds. All right. There are annuals, but there aren't there aren't that many of them. And so here we are. In my view, if you really if you really want to cut to the chase on our current beef problem, the problem is the subsidies to corn and soybeans. Half of the soybeans America produces are exported. We don't even use them. Almost half the corn we produce goes into ethanol. We don't even eat it. Even animals don't even eat it. And half the alfalfa Americans produce on these big center pivot irrigation systems goes to Japan and Saudi Arabia to feed racehorses. I don't know what the percentage is. I don't know if it's 30 percent, 40 percent, but it is a huge percentage of American agriculture is not in the food business. That's striking to the average person. I thought farmers produced food. No, most of them, a lot of them don't produce food. And so here we have this this, you know, most recent 12 billion dollar bailout to the soybean farmers who supposedly the average soybean farmer lost one hundred dollars an acre last year in 2025 growing soybeans. And instead of instead of having to face the reality, you know, the world doesn't need my soybeans. Well, what what normally happens in the marketplace if you overproduce? Well, the price goes down. And then you say, well, either I'm not going to produce as much or I'm going to produce something else. Where is there a need? And you and you move around to wherever the market is needed. No, the soybean farmers have this this this idea that I'm a soybean farmer, by golly. And and I'm important. I'm an important person because I grow soybeans. And the taxpayers should make sure that I can grow soybeans. And and they're not they're not looking at the, you know, at the at the the flush of soybeans in the world market. In fact, China has a 2030 target to eliminate dependency on on imports. They have historically purchased over 25 percent of the American soybean. Now, Trump just strong armed the Chinese and got them to take some last year after they after they got mad about the tariffs and said, we're not going to take any more, you know, American soybeans. Trump was able to talk them into taking some. This this problem is not going away. And and and bailing out the soybean farmers and the corn farmers, bailing them out with U.S. taxpayer subsidies just because we want to honor our farmers is is is ridiculous. What we need, what we need is beef. And so I actually did a I did a very in-depth economic analysis because I do this kind of thing. I I don't grow crops, but I grow I grow animals. So I know I have a good sense of what of what it costs to to put in a livestock operation. You know, what if we have a what if we have a thousand acres of Nebraska soybeans and we convert that to grass to grow cows? That thousand acres, my hypothetical thousand acres cost three hundred thousand dollars to convert it from soybeans to grass. That's fencing waterline seeds for grass. OK. That's exactly what it costs annually to grow soybeans. So here you have a three hundred thousand dollar. Now, you know, that's not that's not just pocket change. But think about to grow a thousand acres of soybeans. It's going to cost me three hundred thousand dollars of of annual expense to put that crop in and harvest it. I can do a once in a century three hundred thousand dollar investment and return it to perennial prairie polyculture with herbivores, cows, not bison, but cows. They were fine under intensive good grazing management. And and suddenly in my analysis, instead of losing a hundred dollars an acre, you make a thousand dollars an acre. But why doesn't anybody want to do that? Well, a well, with cows, I've got to be there. I can't just plant it and go to Bermuda. Number two, there's no subsidy or crop insurance. So if they fail, I don't get a check. Soybeans, they fail. I get a check. But the economic and ecological and I would even suggest the emotional incentives are all there. I mean, let me tell you, you can walk out in your wheat field. You know, it's nice. Are your soybean field? Yeah, they can brush your knees, but they don't. You go out with your cows and they lean into you and they respond to you, you know. There's an emotional aspect to to to the livestock element to that, I would argue. But but, you know, the biggest the biggest enemy right now, keeping beef prices high, in my view, is the subsidies to the corn and soybean farmers that are letting them live with, you know, with rose colored glasses, thinking we don't we don't need to look at the market. So if there's it skews the market, you are arguing massively. Yes. Yes. Imagine. Imagine half a dozen soybean farmers sitting. And I know I'm hitting on soybean farmers and I'm sorry. And I don't I don't hate them, but I but but I really don't like bad farming and I don't like my taxes, which I've earned going to stupidity. OK. And so can you imagine six soybean farmers? They're sitting around and they say, you know, we really like electricians. Electricians are important for our country. We should make sure we have electricians. Now, there's a project going on up the road here. That's a big construction project that takes 20 electric. They're going to take 20 to use 20 electricians. Let's go up there and demand that they use 30 electricians because we like electricians and we need electricians. And I know it only takes 20 to do this project, but we think you should do 30 because electricians are important. No soybean farmer would say that. Not the project only takes 20. You know, you're going to take and and our taxes certainly aren't going to help you pay for another one, two or three extras just to have an extra electricians. That's the way they're looking at the soybeans. They're looking at themselves and they're saying, I'm a soybean farmer, you know, and the world should honor me and respect me, and it doesn't need me, doesn't need me. But I'm an important person and I like soybeans and I want to grow soybeans. And you should make sure that I grow soybeans. This is the mentality. Two thoughts. One is, you know, in effect, the government is saying we need soybeans by, you know, that by providing the money. Right. And in fact, that's the skewing that you're talking about. The other part, though, is that if I may. Right. I mean, you're a beef farmer and you think beef farmers are important. I do. But but we don't get a dime of subsidy. We don't get any. We don't get any insurance. And you're not asking. The other part is, though, you're not asking for it either. You know, I'm not asking for it. I'm not asking for it. I'm I'm suggesting, you know, let the market, let the market speak and let the people that are in that market respond to market forces. That's all I'm asking. And every time the government steps in and puts their, you know, puts their finger on this side of the scale, it inherently apes and manipulates what the market would just do. You know, Adam Smith, you know, invisible, invisible hand of the market. It it moves things. It moves people out of surpluses. It moves people into innovation. It just does that. It doesn't require, you know, government intervention. And if we if if beef prices go down, then eventually it'll you know, if too many people come in, eventually it'll drop enough that then some people will get out. And and I've I've watched that in my lifetime. Historically, there's been about a 10 year beef cycle. If you look back to like 1860, when they started measuring these things, it's about a 10 year, 10 to 12 year fluctuation. It's a long cycle. And this one is aberrant. And I think it's because the confluence of the aging, the aging farmer. And then you have the issue of of young people not getting in into farming. That's another whole discussion. When young people can't get in, old people can't get out. And so we have, you know, land costs. We have introductory costs, things like that of getting in. But there are lots of ways to get in. I mean, we just we just had a conference here at the farm last weekend, actually launching young farmers. We had eight that were the slogan was I was 20. I was 20 years old, no land, no money. And I'm full time farming at 40 without government help. And eight of them told their stories. And it was fantastic. So you can still bootstrap, but you don't you know, you don't have to own land. You you can you can rent. Right now, 47 percent of America's farmland, 47 percent is leased. That means whoever's managing that land doesn't own it. 47 percent. That's close to half, close to half. And that's indicative of of the aging farmer. That that that that can't get out because young people can't get in. And so, you know, what we've done here is, I think, provide provide entrance ramps that actually work, that young people can bootstrap their way in. Generally, it doesn't involve buying land, buying where I am right now on that issue is that land ownership is is now more and more toward people who have money and want to keep it as an economic defense. I've got money. I don't want to lose it. So I buy land as a economic defense. Land management is for economic offense. I don't I'm not rich. I don't have enough to buy land, but I can manage it. And as an offensive economic model. And and that's what we that's what we promote here is an economic offense to be able to actually make a living, earn money by managing a farm. And we do it very differently than, you know, conventional thinking. But it works. And the crazy thing is, as you've told me, if I am raising beef or some other animal, I can't actually sell that to my neighbor next door. Like there's actually laws that prevent that. There needs to be some big kind of a government, expensive government inspection that happens before. And it really started in 1906 when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle and exposed the corruption and the the the animal abuse and filth in the Chicago meatpacking industry. But it progressed until 1967, 68, the Wholesome Foods Act that really shut things down at that time. You know, our county had a dozen small abattoirs, small slaughterhouse operations. Many of them were located on farms, and it was just a farmer who enjoyed doing this or somebody in his family enjoyed doing this. And they would just do it kind of for the community. But but this has all been shut down. You can't sell meat. You can sell a live animal. You can sell a live animal and process it. But you can't sell like a cut, you know, a T-bone steak, a ribeye, a pound of ground beef from an animal, from from any beef, pork, lamb, goat, unless it's processed under federal inspection. So this this has come in over the states. Numerous states have tried to, you know, do work arounds and things. The most recent one is in New Hampshire. And the legislature actually passed a bill saying in the state of New Hampshire, we're going to allow neighbor to neighbor, you know, meat sales. And the governor vetoed it. And so they had an override session, but they couldn't get the votes to override. But the whole goal of that legislation in August of 2026 was actually to force the federal government into court to go to the Supreme Court and determine that intrastate meat commerce is not covered by the cost. That's not a constitutional proclivity of the of the federal government. And so now that it didn't pass, of course, that's not going to happen, but it'll come back. They'll be back next year and they'll be loaded, you know, loaded to go. But this this is what all of the, you know, numerous states, Wyoming and Utah and Indiana, Maine, have these wonderful cottage food laws, you know, for for neighbor to neighbor commerce that allows a person to take to take food and turn it into convenience food, processed food without onerous government inspection. You can do it in your kitchen. The problem comes in the meat. The meat has to be and dairy, but primarily meat has to be inspected, has to be legal. Meat has three things. You can have a custom process that that that is. I have a steer and I take it to a butcher and say, you know, would you kill this slaughter it, fabricate it, put it in a package? That's that's called custom process. In other words, I'm asking for a custom work to be done. I mean, for example, if you if you want to remodel your kitchen, you'd have somebody come in and custom remodel your kitchen. So so in this respect, the custom work, I'm taking an animal to a professional saying, I want you to get this animal, you know, edible for me. OK, that's custom. Now, the loophole that many farmers have used is that they'll sell an animal live. In fact, they can even sell it to four, even up to eight individuals. And those names go on that animal. This, you know, steer number 32 is owned by Jane, Mike, Bill, Amy. OK. All right. And and that can go under this custom, this custom exemption because it was it is technically not selling meat. It's selling a live animal. Anyone can sell a live animal to anyone, anywhere without without any inspection. And so that's the loophole that many small farmers have used for a long, long time. But a lot of people don't want to get a quarter or a half. They don't have a freezer for it. They don't have enough money for it at one time. And so they want two pounds of ground beef. They want three ribeye steaks. They want. All right. And they want to rump roast. And so this loophole is is onerous in that the quantities a person has to buy are, you know, a minimum of a thousand dollars. So this creates a very narrow customer base. So that is why Congressman Thomas Massey, ever since he went to Congress, has been trying to get what he calls the Prime Act. And the Prime Act would allow a state that if a state wants to allow custom processed meat to be sold by the cut, by the piece, that that it's a state prerogative. We want to do this. And the federal says, we'll step aside, then we'll let you do this. Intrastate, not interstate, but intrastate. And and, you know, it still has not passed, but it is gradually gaining, you know, gaining strength. You see, the problem is that the money in food is actually not in production. Today's farmer only gets five point eight cents of the retail dollar. That means ninety four point two cents. It's like a cattle farmer, beef, a beef farmer. Now, fortunately, beef is higher than that. But, you know, you probably heard, well, there's more money in the cardboard or the Wheaties box than there is to the farmer that grew the wheat to make the Wheaties. And that's that's primarily true. So, you know, the average the average spread, the average take of the what we call the farm gate, the farm gate value of food is five is five point eight percent. That I mean, just imagine this, Jan. That means we can have we can have a national policy tomorrow. From now on, we're not going to pay farmers anything. They're just they just work for free. It would only change the price of food. Five point eight percent. That's that's amazing. So where does it all go? 80 years, 80 years ago was 40. It was 40 cents. Where does it all go? It goes to the processors, the distributors, the marketers. Lest anybody think that, you know, it's it's evil corporations that have done this to us. No, the American people have moved from primarily domestic culinary arts, you know, fixing stuff from scratch to now 75 percent of what we eat as a nation is prepared, preserved and packaged outside the home. It's convenience food. And so that carries not only a hefty price tag, but the the more the more that's done to food after it leaves the farm gate before it enters the the consumer's plate, the more the more money is involved in that in that what's called value adding and value adding that product. And so if we're going to preserve farmers and if we're going to preserve market options in the marketplace, what we desperately need is the ability of farmers to be able to value add this product and for consumers to be able to buy from their neighbors, you know, without at without wrapping it in a two million dollar federal inspected facility. This is this is the problem. And over the century, the number of of processors has dropped, dropped, dropped, dropped. I mean, in 1906, people were accusing the meat industry of being an oligarchy. And at that time, seven companies controlled 50 percent of the meat supply. Seven controlled 50 percent. That was considered an oligarchy. Today, we have four companies controlling 85 percent of the meat market. And we say that's, you know, free enterprise. Well, it's not free enterprise. It's actual capital, you know, capital cronyism, as these big companies have have ensured that the regulatory climate is prejudicial to small operators and not larger ones. Talking about this prime act, right, which I understand is tucked into a farm bill that is just sort of never passing. But that's a whole whole different discussion. But it's but it's there. It's there. Yeah. Yeah. But it hasn't been taken out. And it passed the house. This could really open things up for selling beef. Right. For like to to to to to kind of reduce that weight. If I write of the cost of beef, tying some things together here. Is that right? And and how and how explain how that would work. OK. So I happen to co-own a small federal inspector slaughterhouse up in Harrisonburg and and complying with the inspection requirements, creating a Hassett plan, hazardous analysis, critical control point, HACCP, Hassett plan, all that licensing. It adds about 30 30 percent to the cost of processing. And not only that, but the Hassett plan in our plant where we do, you know, 50 beef a week is exactly the same as at a Tyson plant that does 5000 a day. So it costs us six hundred dollars. What Tyson does for 150. And if I may jump into something, just strikes me as you're saying this. Right. On the one hand, if you were doing 5000 a day, I think there's some real case to have that regulated at a high level because you can all sorts of things can be kind of sucked through. But if you're doing 50, what is it? Did you say a week, a week, a week? You know, basically, if you're doing something wrong, the people buying around are going to give you a piece of their mind and that'll be fixed pretty quick. Right. So that's part of the difference. Scale. Absolutely. Scale makes a difference. I mean, whether it's classroom size per teacher, whether it's keeping your kitchen clean versus, you know, Jolly Green Giant green bean factory or or an abattoir that's doing 5000 a day versus, you know, 10 a day. All right. Yes. Scale does does have an effect here. The pushback, of course, in these things is always food safety. So it's interesting that the there have been people that under a Freedom of Information Act have asked for the Food Safety Inspection Service, FSIS, Federal Food Safety Inspection Service, for how many people, how many registrants did they had since 1968 that that got sick or had a pathogen, had any problem with custom processed beef? So this is beef produced with no inspector. There's no inspector on site. There's nobody, you know, poking at the liver and, you know, and looking inside or anything. And guess how many? Zero. Not 10, not 100. Since 1968, zero, zero incidents of pathogens, recalls, sickness or whatever from custom. That that affirms your point. These small outfits that do a few and not many, it's easier to keep them clean and they don't have the protection of federal regulators to hide behind. What's the first thing that happens whenever there's some, you know, recall? There's I think lettuce recently. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm thinking I'm thinking meat primarily, you know, whether it's, you know, rat pee in the in the peanut butter down in Georgia or, you know, a meat recall. The first thing the CEO calls a press conference. He stands in front of those microphones with all those microphones. And he says, we have complied with all the government, you know, food safety regulations. OK. That's their first defense. A custom operator can't do that. It's their reputation. It's all on them. And so that personal responsibility. This is what I call uberizing the food system. OK. When you uberize the food system by by putting personal responsibility on the players, both the consumer to to find their their producer and the the processor, they don't want to have something bad coming out of their facility. They don't want to irritate one of their clients that brought them stuff. They don't want to irritate the possible consumer. So there's a there's a real interconnected, relational, entwined intimacy in that transaction that doesn't exist when you go to Costco or Wal-Mart and get and that's why you get zero. I mean, that's actually astonishing, right? It is. It is astonishing. It is astonishing. And and and so the whole food safety. Oh, what are we going to do if, you know, it is simply non-existent? It's like a canard, basically. That's what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is. It is interesting. So if this legislation passes that allows this intra state sale, you know, of of of cuts. Right. Let's say that does that. It doesn't immediately open things up because basically people have to start up their businesses. But what like are people actually going to do that? Given the realities that you. Yes. Explain to me earlier. Yes. Congressman Thomas Massey told me he said that he knows that within just weeks, if a prime act pass that within weeks, he said, I have a list or something. He knows a thousand a thousand community abattoirs would either reopen or start new because you can open a custom house at a fraction of the cost of a federal inspected facility. So there would be there would be ones who have closed, who have just gotten tired of onerous regulations and new ones that would be built that would start. But a thousand. Now, if those thousand did, you know, let's say they averaged 20 a week, that's 20,000 beef a week at 50 weeks. That's that's a million a year. That's a lot of beef. And somebody can say, oh, but, you know, that's so that's so small. But there's well, when big ag says scale, they're thinking consolidation, centralization and concentration, you know, a bigger plant, a bigger cannery, a bigger slaughter, bigger, you know, it's bigger. But that's not the way nature scales. If nature wants more oak, it doesn't make a great big oak tree. It makes acorns. If nature wants more milk, it doesn't make a great big cow. It makes calves. If nature wants more tomatoes, it doesn't make a great big tomato plant. It plants seeds and makes tomatoes. Nature scales by duplication. And so this whole notion of scale by consolidation, concentration and centralization that we have in big industrial agriculture is a completely anti nature philosophy. It's an anti nature mentality that that doesn't appreciate the duplication of nature, babies, seeds, goodness, discipleship, mentorship. I mean, this is the way nature scales. It must be really expensive, relatively speaking, for you to produce your beef here in this very unique, regenerative way that you do and versus, you know, the factory farm. We substitute management for subsidized corn and soybeans, essentially. So again, you know, when you look at when you look at cost comparisons, we can produce it cheaper. But it's not much. Because when when the feedlot beef goes, it's getting subsidized corn, subsidized soybeans and often questionable labor. We pay an extremely high salary here for our folks. And we don't import them from outside the US. We grow them here at home. And we want so so so we have we have an extensive labor component. So what we have done is we have exchanged energy intensity, pharmaceutical intensity. You know, our cows don't do drugs. We don't vaccine. We don't medicate. We don't any of those things. They you know, they're they're eating grass. There's no plows, no seeds, no herbicides, no chemical fertilizer. You know, when Putin invaded Ukraine and fertilizer went up 400 percent and all the farms, oh, no, we're going to do, you know, fertilizer. It didn't affect us at all because we don't use any of it. And so so interestingly, when that happened, our steaks, ribeye, tenderloin or pork chops from pork, our prices were lower than Costco. We had people coming in our farm store saying, how can this be? Well, it's because we are not we are resilient. We are we are not subject to those yo-yoing ups and downs of sociopolitical, geopolitical, you know, economic stuff. And I'll give you an example. The average farmer in America, 50 percent of their expenses are for diesel fuel. Our percentage is five percent. OK, so diesel could double and we'd be OK. What we put our money in is people. So we exchange all of that pharmaceutical energy, you know, capital intensity, concrete fans, all that stuff. We exchange it for management, which is why we can't necessarily do it cheaper, but we can do it much more resiliently. And resilience is is as important as short term efficiency today. It's the difference between efficiency today and long term effectiveness. So bottom line is it's a bit more expensive, but it's a lot more durable. Is that the is that the bottom line? Yeah, that's a good way to say it. We're not subject. We're not nearly as subject to the ups and downs. And we're certainly not asking Trump for bailouts. Well, and and, you know, I think by many means. And so let's let's talk about this. I mean, I I'm biased here. I buy by beef from you for a whole because I know how you make it. And it's a quality issue, right? It's not just that the animals are treated well. I know that unusually well because of this people component, because of the philosophy. Explain to me why people on the carnivore diet that you go to these giant conferences. First of all, why they pick beef as their number one kind of protein. And I know that that's that's their kind of the main thing that these carnivore people eat is beef over everything else. And number two, from that kind of quality perspective, how the beef would be grown here, those cows, how that's better than what you get off the feedlot. So great, great questions. So so I would like to I know you love history. So let me let me go back a little bit in history to help us all realize that. Antiquity diets, diets of antiquity. The the protein was primarily either herbivore or seafood. If you live next to the ocean, next to a lake, you know, you fished. All right. But if you lived away, then it was the herbivore, whether it was, you know, kangaroo, wildebeest, bison, llama, alpaca, goat, lamb, camel. OK. You know, when you when you look at at animals that have been eaten historically, it hasn't been chicken and it hasn't been pork. Now there have been chicken and pork around. OK. I mean, chicken kind of developed in the in the jungles, in the tropics. And and and pigs came along, especially in Europe and Italy. But what was early on was both milk and meat from the herbivore. Why? Well, because the herbivore didn't require tillage, didn't require grain production. Think, I mean, if you look at Thomas Jefferson's farm book, if we had the same spread of prices today as Thomas Jefferson had in his day, corn and wheat would be thirty dollars a bushel instead of, you know, three fifty nine or four or five dollars. Well, as soon as grain becomes expensive, the omnivore becomes expensive. The chicken and the pork, because they can't just live on grass. And so the diets of antiquity were either seafood or herbivore, because that's what didn't require planting grains. Grain has been the holy grail of civilization because it was always expensive. The idea of cheap grain that we've enjoyed in the last century in this country is because we've had cheap energy mechanics and we've come to a land that had legacy soil built from herbivores and perennials for millennia. OK, that we are still exploiting today. There was so that was such a huge resource bank account that we still haven't depleted at all. We're trying. Well, and we have some technological innovation to be fair. Oh, absolutely. I said equipment, equipment and cheap energy. Absolutely. All that has has enabled us to to for the first time in human history. I mean, literally, that was a blip in geopolitical time to have cheap grain. It's never been possible in human history, but now we have it. And so the carnivore diet is going back to an antiquity. What they're saying is we are far closer to our ancestors of 5000 years ago, metabolically, metabolically than we are to Spock in Star Trek drinking, you know, some sort of little, you know, artificial lab synthesized nutrients. And so that's why the herbivore features so strongly in this is because it is the it is the the herbivore is the nutrient dense component of all these diets of antiquity. Now, what's interesting is so so so what you know, what's the difference between, you know, one steak and another steak, depending on how it's raised. So the the Bionutrient Food Association, founded by Dan Kittredge up in Massachusetts, has now spent almost a decade looking at looking at nutrients in in various foods. And what they're trying to do is come up with a handheld wand using light that you could wand over food and it would give you green light, yellow light, red light, you know, with different relative amounts of like 150 nutrients. OK, the first one they did was, I think, carrots. And they found that in order to get the nutrition of the best carrot, you would have to eat like 50 of the poorest carrot. So it's a massive range that we don't expect, basically. You couldn't you couldn't tell it by looking at them. Yeah. And in fact, it was so far different. They thought something was wrong with their machinery. So they did broccoli. Let's try broccoli. Same thing. A 50 fold difference. So the next one they did was beef. And they've they've done, I don't know, 500 samples of beef. And and again, huge, you know, huge differences. But here's the interesting thing. Out of all their data, they they they they asked the question, what is the single most consistent litmus test for whether this steak is better than this steak? I mean, nutritionally, nutrition had nothing to do with breed. You know, all the breeds, all Angus is better. Shorthorn is better. You know, they all had nothing to do with breed, nothing to do with climate, nothing to do with age. The only consistent factor in making this steak more nutritional than this steak was how many different plants did the animal eat? And so on our farm, we haven't planted a seed in 65 years. I mean, we haven't planted a seed. We let grow whatever is going to grow. We love to see these variety of plants in our fields. And the cows will they will select like they're on a smorgasbord. They will select different things at different times of the year and in different. Every plant has a palatability moment and then it maybe gets too mature. And so we move the cows every day to a fresh what we call a salad bar, which indicates this variety that they get and they get to to choose that salad bar and what we call mob stocking, herbivorous, solar conversion, lignified carbon, sequestration, fertilization. That's farming, basically. Yeah. OK, listen, this has been a wonderful conversation. I can't wait to to eat some of your beef. Quick final thought as we finish. Generally, all the things that we find frustrating, people step up and and solve, fix those fix those issues and they fix them sooner when the government doesn't pick the winners and people are actually able to exercise their freedom of choice as as voluntary, you know, participants in the great drama of life to be able to bring to whatever the frustration is, their own innovation, their own ideas and their own free thoughts. That's the way they get solved. Well, Joe Salatin, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. It's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Joe Salatin and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.