Joel Salatin's 3 Farming Principles

let's back up here let's back up here for a minute for big-picture stuff there's going to be three M's here those of you there taking notes three M the first one is this is mobile you ask your question ask you a question what's the difference between a piece of land that we call look at that piece of land and say that's a farm as opposed to a piece of land that we say well that's a park a wilderness area a theme park a condominium complex a strip mall why do we call the farm apart what is it that's distinctive about land that we say that's a farm you can grown on a weird area reduction in cleared area well there's blueberries in parks and that's where you play badminton right some will be really I'm gonna be really hard on you here you manage your dissolute management produce food well you know a whole lot of people in the Park Service managing all those parts why do we call it a farm yeah well a lot of environmentalists would say that wilderness areas are more important to sustain us than farms I'm not trying to pick a fight here trust me I'm trying to get you to think to go a place with me anybody want to take another stab at it now you're all gunshot bring us food well a lot of food produced in the the trees have been cut trees have been cut I don't know in places don't have any trees yeah there's no having tree well strip mall gets taxed or privately owned land that's not a farm would get taxed there isn't a difference the fence around have like the house again surrounded fencing outfits around prisons - all right we always know about you ladies want me to tell you a farmer what makes it a farm is what a farmer brings to that piece of property brings to that table absence a farmer it could be any of the other things I described from wilderness area to park to strip mall to expressway to you know one of Donald Trump's casinos whatever all right like just mention people that are in the news lately okay so so if it's a farmer all right and what the average age of America's farmers is sick at 60 depending are you reading work for 62 250 911 let's say 64 second discussion according to all Wall Street business analysts healthy businesses if you measure all of their employees they're the the median age of all the employees of any thriving business there is a axiomatic tipping point in which analysts say that is a business that's in decline when the median age of any business hits this age then it's a business in decline you may know what that age is 35 35 bingo 35 I did a I did a sustainability seminar for Nike corporation up at their headquarters in Beaverton Oregon a few years ago and just for fun I asked the Human Resources gal you know what's your average worldwide all Nike employees you know everybody in Asia all deal worldwide 32 okay and it really brought it home farmers are we're a prehistoric lot okay one of the reasons I would suggest that this has occurred is because well there are numerous reasons but one certainly is that the capital impediments to entry barricade young wannabes penniless young people from being able to enter okay and when the impediments to entry are so huge that young people can't get in old people can't get out so both of them are trapped young people are desperate to get in old people are desperate to get out but nobody can move because its capital intensity to the rescue comes the mobile farm okay because if a farm is what a farmer has done to the land if the farmers contribution is mobile the land becomes inconsequential he can own it Leeson squat on it you know whatever all right you know in Ptolemy's facefx ago the big the big part is mode not with big batwing mowers and a bunch of you know city employees running around on big mowers there are six people that have some agreement now who knows who knows how they got this agreement you know relatives bribes who knows what but anyway I'm not going to go there but anyway six people have an agreement to tether and run their milk cows through the park and that's how the Clarke state mode I think that's really progressive that's really cool you drive down their equivalent of our interstate four-lane expressway in the evening and all along the expressway farmers are going out and getting their Jersey cows taking them in the milk and then they come out and they move the tether state you know 20 feet and she gets that ring and they make sure it's just far enough away so you can't get in the highway right so when you start talking about a mobile farm suddenly the land ownership lessons in priority all you have to do is be able to manage land and according to all the land-grant universities right now because of this age out in the farming community you ready for this this is brand news I mean in the history of civilization in our country in the next 15 years 50 percent of our agricultural equity is going to change them think about that that's never happened in any civilization before only time that's ever happened other civilizations is by conquest you know the Huns came in and took the road whatever okay but it's by conquest it's never been internal demographics that just you know moved at that direction so we're in for some really exciting times and I would suggest we are in we are in some ways in many ways we are light-years in a better situation some people sit and pine for the you know the old homestead ax man little all right Ingalls Wilder and be able to go out there and if you could stay on your hundred acres or 40 acres and a mule you know then you can have it for free and all that well you know I wouldn't need Papa John's Pizza back then water water was walking somewhere with a wooden bucket not a nice plastic five-gallon bucket to it I you know I'll take today all right that's fine but we are entering a time of unprecedented land availability for management at the very time when land cost has completely divorced itself from productive capacity and values okay so there is a lot of opportunity for people who know how to make beautiful landscapes on somebody else's place that once it can be beautiful all right you know how to make a beautiful landscape you will never lack for land to be a part of ever okay and so mobile infrastructure allows you to have complete portability across different kinds of lands of different kinds of places these can go in a suburban backyard it can go in a part they can go in an agricultural easement that the font American Farmland trust or Nature Conservancy has tied up they can go they can go as as partners in a cattle a beef dairy sheep orchard grain farm there's not a not a farm in the country that can't stack this on top of it under the trees and the edge of a field goodness out in Nebraska and Kansas the center-pivot irrigation if you put these in all the corners of the center pivot irrigation you can have a full-time farm salary running this deal all those wasted corners okay mobile okay for the second em modular modular if you want to raise one chicken for Tyson what's the first thing you have to do build a house and it ain't a cheap house it's like a 300 to 500 thousand dollar house I call that an impediment to entry for a young person I mean that makes me that makes a college college loans seem inconsequential doesn't it so one of the so one of the beauties of this is that it's modular so you can start with one and you can cashflow the second one cash flow the third one so you can you can seamlessly scale up or scale down however you want to do it and it doesn't break the bank if it's it's mobile that way in scale so because you can add pod you can add modular all right because these things are cheap and and you can add them as much or little as you want so it's modular make scalability very different and the third M is its management intensive and this of course is where everybody jumps off the car oh yeah yep too much labor too much labor way too much labor well I thought I thought it was good to employ people is that not a good thing get me something meaningful to do you have something I important stuff to do somebody so what we've done here and I'll make no no apologies for it we have traded we have traded capital intensive stationary infrastructure concrete fans you know Tyson chicken houses we have traded that capital intensive infrastructure and energy intensive infrastructure and pharmaceutically dependent infrastructure we have traded that for what West Jackson calls eyes to anchor ratio okay so our observational and managerial expertise displaces the pharmaceuticals and the highly capitalized stationary infrastructure of the industry and I submit that that is a fair trade that is a fair trade so I'm not going to sit here and argue well this takes more labour to raise a chicken than Tyson does but remember here you're seeing all the labor you're not seeing a bunch of pharmaceutical companies and all of the field support team we even process from ourselves you're not seeing all the processing work okay this is a completely self-contained a deal okay except for the chicks from the hatchery but other than that you know it's it's it's fairly self-contained and so yes this does put more workers or labor on the farm but what an office how many people would love to trade their their expressway Dilbert cubicle commute for this I didn't make an altar call you

Channel: Jeff Gray

Views: 246,652

Rating: 4.9262733 out of 5

Keywords: Joel Salatin, Polyface, farm, principles, mobile, modular, management intensive, green, organic, sustainable, polyface farm, organic farming, sustainable farming, regenerative agriculture, regenerative farming, regenerative farming practices, principles of regenerative farming, mig grazing, gabe brown, philosophy of farming, farming philisophy, joel salatin polyface farm, farming, joel salatin farm

Id: vaQ3hXkXVjY

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2015