#058 'Lunatic Farmer' Joel Salatin On The Only System That Can Ultimately Feed The World

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?