Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everybody. Dr. Ben Edwards here. Welcome to another episode of youf're the Cure. I'm excited to have a repeat guest, Joel Salatan. Joel's an amazing crazy farmer. I say crazy with the most love you could imagine in there.
And we're shifting gears a little bit today. We've been talking about lots of different things and lots of measles stuff lately, unfortunately. But we're gonna get back to agriculture. I love ag topics. And we have a whole section on the website veritas wellnessmember.com under resources podcasts. Go to Topical Menu. You can look at vaccines if you want to and heart disease and cholesterol and lots of different topics. And one is agriculture. And Joel's on there from years ago. And there's lots of other good folks on there, too. And why do we talk about that so much? Obviously, because what you eat impacts your health. They didn't teach me that in medical school. I got two hours of nutrition and four years of medical school. And most doctors get zero. And the top nine out of the top 10 causes of death in America are directly related to food. So doctors and farmers should be talking to each other and should be very intricately connected. And we need to get back to ancestral ways of doing things, both in the medicine world and in the agriculture world. And Joel has done that, amazingly. And I've been out to his farm, Poly Face Farm took a tour, me and my family, a few years ago, and it was an amazing experience and I highly recommend it. And Joel's written a number of books and documentaries and different things. So, Joel, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Oh, it's my. It's my privilege and honor, Ben. Thank you.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: And I do need to mention at the top, before I forget, Seeking Whole Health and dot com. That's the website. You can check it out. There's a conference in Wooster, Ohio. This will be May 1st through 3rd. That's a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, at the West Hill Baptist church, seeking whole health.com website. Go check it out. We're actually going to give away a free ticket to that. You can follow us on Instagram, I think is what my guys told me to tell you. Dr. Ben Edwards on Instagram will have a giveaway, so be sure to follow there and check that out. All right. Joel had to get that out of the way.
Joe, for people. We have a lot of new listeners, lots, especially since this measles outbreak recently.
So that's great that more people can learn the truth.
So go back a Little bit. And kind of share a little bit your story. I know you've told it a million times, but bring people up to speed and then we can dive into more recent things, including the recent documentary.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Sure. So our family came to this property in 1961. I was just 4 years old and it was cheap, it was a gullied rock pile. And dad was an accountant, mom was a school teacher. But dad wanted to farm full time. So he sought counsel from both public and private, you know, experts, consultants, you know, how do I make a living on this little farm? And all the advice was we'll use more chemical fertilizers, graze the trees, build silos, borrow more money, plant corn. You know, that was, that was all the advice. And he knew from his own dad growing up. His dad was a, my grandfather was a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening Farming magazine when it came out like 1945.
And so, so dad, you know, grew up with that kind of non chemical mentality. And as an accountant, he saw the chemical, chemical farming as basically a drug addiction. You know, you, you're on a treadmill and nature is adapting to you and you've got to get, you know, more and more toxic, more, you know, aggressive substances to beat the adaptation of nature. You know, that's always trying to, to adapt and catch up. And, and so he, good biblical work, he eschewed that, that path and, and you know, went, went to town to, to work and, and basically turned this farm into a big experimental lab from his, you know, and so then I get to be a teenager. Well, how I want to farm, how do I, how do I start this thing? And so, you know, by, by 19, by the time I was, you know, out of college, you know, we had it, we had 20 years of experiments and we knew, we knew some things that would work, we knew things, we knew some things that would work.
You know, controlled grazing cows, mobile infrastructure, mobile shade, direct marketing. All those were, were little, little experiments. And I won't, you know, go into detail on all those. But, but through those 20 years, the 60s and 70s, we, we had, we had dabbled in all those things. And so, so Teresa and I got married 1980. We remodeled an attic in the farmhouse here. And, and we called it our penthouse. You can call an attic, we call it a penthouse.
And you know, if we didn't grow it, we didn't eat it, we had a big garden. She's the quintessential homemaker. She'd can, I don't know what 800 quarts of stuff a summer. And we drove a $50 car. We didn't have a TV. Still don't have a TV. Never went out to eat, didn't. Never went on vacation. And in two years, we were able to save enough to live for one year without an income. And so I left, I was a journalist, left the newspaper in, in September 24, 1982, and came back to the farm full time. We began, you know, direct marketing our beef, and then we added chicken, and then we added pork and. And it took us three years to act. When I. To exhale, you know, okay, yeah, we're gonna make it. That took three years. But at the end of those three years, we were up and running. And now we employ about 22 of us full time on the farm. And we service thousands and thousands of families. We ship nationwide service restaurants and urban drop points around here. And we've watched this gullied rock pile that was the armpit of the community turn into arguably the most productive, abundant farm in the area. The rocks are now covered up with soil. The gullies, some of them have been bulldozed, some of them have now trees that we planted growing in them big trees. Now, we did that early on, and it's an exciting place, a place of abundance and opportunity.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: Yes, it is. And I've got to step foot on that place and got to go see the pigginess of the pigs. Just being out there rummaging around in those trees, it was so cool. And to see the grass and to see those cows all just bunched together, so. And move, move, move. And describe that a little bit. And even I remember the lady that gave the tour talked about in the wintertime feeding the cows hay under the barn and, and there's straw and I think corn that ferments under the hoof, the hoof and the manure and just all that.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: Yeah, you got a good memory. You must be pretty sharp. So, yeah. So, yeah, so as the experiments began, again, we didn't buy the conventional narrative. And so start looking at nature. Well, you know, how God designed this, how does nature work? And what you see is, well, animals move. I mean, that seems like a simple phrase, but in modern American agriculture, 95% of farmers don't believe animals need to move. They lock them up in factory farms and, you know, in feedlots and chicken houses and pig, you know, pig slatted floors and, and they're not supposed, they're not supposed to move. We believe animals move. Well, as soon as the animals Move then? Well, how do they move? And so when we look at nature, at, at herbivores in nature, we see three things. They're moving and they're mobbed up. They're not spread out. They mob up for predator protection. And then they're mowing. You know, they're not, they're not eating dead cows and chicken manure and feathers and, you know, broken, you know, washing McCall, it's, and little Debbie's ho ho cakes.
They're actually pruning, they're grazing. So moving, mobbing, mowing. And, and when we mimic, started to mimic that, what that meant was we had to get water and electric fence, portable electric fence and some permanent electric fence to be able to move these animals, move these cows every single day to a new, a new plate, a new paddock. And what that did was it started.
It means that at any one time, only a tiny fraction, you know, whatever, 2%, 1% of your, of your place is actually, is actually being touched by the cows. Everything else is at rest and developing.
And so, you know, grass grows in a sigmoid curve, an S curve. It starts slow, grows real fast, and it slows down in senescence. And I mean most, most biological things are like that. You know, people are like that. And so our goal, so the reason that, you know, flies and predators and, and, and seasonal whatever, you know, monsoons and, and temperatures move herbivores in nature is to keep them moving onto that fresh ground so they don't stay where they pooped and they, and they move on to fresh ground that is the most nutritious. And so we mimic that with the grazing program. We move the cows, you know, every day to a, to a new spot. And, and this me, this over time, this makes the grass thicker. It makes it healthier, it makes it more energy, you know, energetic. So it grows better when conditions are good, grows faster when conditions are marginal. And, and the result is that in our county, the average cow days per acre, so a cow day is what one cow will eat in a day. If I took all your food you eat today, put on a plate, that'd be one person day of food. So a cow day is what one cow will eat in a day. In our county, the average is 80. So in other words, the average cow will eat. The average acre can support, you know, one cow for 80 days a year or eight 80 cows for one day a year, 80 calories an acre. And we average now almost 400 cow days an acre. And we've never planted a seed or bought a Bag of chemical fertilizer. That's not saying, said proudly. It said, it said humbly honoring this, this incredible pattern that, that nature has.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Yeah, and I love that you brought that up. You, you step back and looked at creation. How did God design this thing? That is exactly the parallel in what we're doing in our medical practice. There's a design to this body and it seems to me that we're starting to see a real clear divergence here, a clear distinction between a standard American culture that's relying on processed food like substances, chemical symptom management, modified genetic material injected into people. There's AI and I'm not anti AI guy, but if you don't have a foundation of God created this, there's a design and we need to watch it, observe it and work alongside it in conjunction with it, mimic it, support it, parallel it. Not, not this complete disregard for that. And then let's, in our own intellect as a human try to figure something out and oops, we messed up. And then we're, we're so proud we can't even say oops, we messed up. We let the arrogance in and now we're just going to get way down the road of we're real messed up. And that's where we're at both in medicine and in agriculture, in our culture in general, is how I see it. But you definitely point this out with your ag point of view.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I, I, I couldn't, I couldn't agree more. And, and so there, yeah, there is, there is an order. God's not an chaos. And what we've got is, we've got a, an overriding paradigm in our culture that's a very, you know, Greco Roman, Western, linear reductionist, compartmentalized, segregated, individualized, disconnected kind of thinking that, that basically views life as, as a machine. It's mechanical, you know, like a car. And so we can, you know, if you're, we, we can pull out a bearing and replace the bearing. We can, you know, we, we can change the parts and manipulate the parts.
But actually life is biological and biological is very different than mechanical.
I mean, not, I mean, on the surface it's obvious. I mean you can go and hug the hood of your car and it doesn't care a lick. But if you go out and hug a horse or hug a cow or your dog or your cat, they respond to you.
And so we all understand that, that life is, is not mechanical. It's, it's, you know, it's, it's biological, which means it adapts it responds, it's dynamic exchanges.
We all know that. And yet our overriding kind of paradigm within our food farm sector is that life is really, it's just mechanical. You know, we can just pull this part, add that part. We can, you know, we, we can treat it like a, you know, like a, like a, an automobile. And. Yeah, and, and, and we've been doing that long enough that, that if, when you get as old as I am, you know, you look back and you can remember. I mean, I can remember when nobody ever heard things like Listeria, Camelobacter, Campylobacter, E. Coli, you know, bird flu, food allergy. I mean, there was nobody with food allergy when I was a kid. If you want, if you wanted to have a party of a birthday party for your three year old, you called your buddies and you had a party today. All the moms have to spend a week before the party talking about who's allergic to this and that and the other and what you can serve. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a travesty.
You know, I didn't know, I didn't know anybody that was a diabetic.
You know, I knew every community had one fat person. You know, you had a, you had the fat guy or the fat lady now, you know, and so all. And autoimmune diseases. I mean, there was nobody with autism. There was no kid in school that was, you know, beating their head against the wall or that sort of thing. And I'm not trying to be disrespectful. I'm just saying that as we have mechanized biology with such disrespect and dishonor, biology fights back. You know, it adapts. Biology doesn't like to be. It's not nice to fool mother Nature, you know, and so here we are, we're facing the consequences of these, you know, couple generations of, of manipulation. You know, where hydrogenated vegetable oil replaced, you know, lard and butter and, and where, you know, the, the food pyramid put, you know, put Cheerios and Fruit Loops on the, on the baseline instead of, instead of meat and maybe, you know, raw milk. Oh, perish the thought, raw milk. Now there's a, there's a hot one.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: So careful there, Joel. You might be thrown in, thrown in jail.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, you might go clear off the, off the reservation there. So, so, you know, that that's where we are. And I couldn't agree more that, that as we as a culture, as we have disregarded the, the magistrate majesty and mystery of Life of and, and, and reduced it to just a bunch of parts.
It stands to reason that we would have a new lexicon of dysfunction that didn't exist 50 years ago.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: Yeah, that's exactly what we're seeing. I mean, medical school teaches us on purpose to disconnect all the parts. If you have a headache, you see the neurologist. If you have a tummy ache, you see the gastroenterologist, something wrong with your skin, you go to the dermatologist, you, you know that is. And actually in those subspecialties, those are the most competitive. That's what everybody wants to be a specialist. And the specialists talk to each other and we just go about this reductionist way of going. And here we are. The worst health outcomes in the world, the highest death rates across the board, from infant to old folk. And we're sickest than any, sicker than anybody. Spend the most money. We're absolutely last place.
And we don't even see that. We think we're the best. But in that back to the agriculture world, you know the kind of argument I hear we got to have a chemical based ag system because we're feeding the world, which is interesting. I was in Seminole this weekend and talking to a Mennonite lady who has a museum there and she told me the whole history of the Mennonites back to the 1500s and how they were asked to go into, I believe is Romania. Don't quote me on that. But there was this area next to the sea that needed to be drained. It was swampland. They let the Mennonites live here because they're being persecuted back home if they drain the swampland. And they built these dikes and, and actually I met a bunch of dykes this weekend and that they came from those, that was their family line, the dike builders. But they built these huge 30 foot by 30 foot earthen dikes, invented the auger. It's amazing story. But her point was as they moved around Europe, the farmland, six foot of topsoil, the grape, the clusters of grapes, all these varieties of grape. The abundance of food production when the topsoil was there was kind of the take home message. So this thought of we got to feed the world and therefore we have to use Roundup.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: Yeah, well, one of the biggest epiphanies for me that as we have as archeology and anthropology has uncovered more, we now know that 500 years ago north America produced more food than it does today.
I mean that, that right there is just something you can stop and think about for a while now. It wasn't all eaten by humans because the population wasn't as big as it is now. But, but there were, there were 200 million beavers for example, that ate more vegetables. Beavers are herbivores. Beavers ate more vegetables. I mean they didn't eat potatoes and carrots, but they ate, you know, roots and biomass and bark and stuff. They ate more, more biomass, more vegetable vegetative material than all the humans in North America today. There were you know, 100 million or more bison that ate the forages obviously the, and, and that's a lot of meat wool. We had 2 million wolves, each of whom needed 20 pounds of meat a day. These wolves we had birds, you know, Ottoman, Ottoman recorded in his diary in, in around 1800 or so that he sat under a tree and couldn't see the sun for three days for the flock of passenger pigeons that flew over. And, and you know, nobody's seen a flock of birds that blocked out the sun for three days. Native American lore, Native American lore has stories, legends of for example, these bird, these big huge flocks of passenger pigeons coming in and landing in a woods. And in the morning all the, they were so heavy that all the limbs broke off. And you wake up in the morning and all you see is a bunch of spires, you know, the trunks of the trees standing up and an inch of poop, bird poop on the ground. And you know, so these are, you know, these are stories, these are stories from, you know, pre European, from antiquity that IND that, that prove that these, that, that these patterns that nature has, they're actually way more productive than the plow, Genetically modified organisms and, and, and, and chemical fertilizers, they're actually, and, and factory farming and you know, Tyson. And so it should give us all pause as you head down this path to realize that pre European North America produced more food. I've got a book here about Cicero back in ancient Rome and the pounds of forage that he talks about getting off the land there in Italy.
It's double anything that I've ever heard of, ever heard of. And so yes, you are exactly right. The sheer productive capacity of the planet is almost incomprehensible. And civilization has actually not moved that production needle forward, it has moved that production needle backward.
[00:21:53] Speaker A: So if you were in charge, how would you move that production needle? What's that first step and what's the long range plan?
[00:22:03] Speaker B: So for me, from a policy stand, if you're looking for a, you know, if I were king for a day and could make farm policy.
Besides eliminating the usda.
The first thing I would do is I would, I would issue a food emancipation proclamation. I know those are strong words, but what we have right now is our food and farm system is shackled and enslaved by a regulatory climate that doesn't let neighbor to neighbor commerce happen.
Think about it. If, let's say, let's say a lady at church, we'll call her, we'll call her Aunt Grace because she's everybody's favorite lady and we all call her Aunt Grace. She's not related to anybody, but, but we call her Aunt Grace because we, you know, we all are. Okay, so she's got it. She's got a, you know, big garden. She's like the quintessential, you know, early homesteader. She got a flock of chickens and, and she makes a chicken pot pie that every, every time there's a church potluck. I mean, everybody makes a beeline to Aunt Grace's pot pies because they know they're the best in the world. Well, her husband dies now she's a widow, and she doesn't have to care for him anymore. And so she's kind of thinking about other things to do. And, and, and, and I've got, I've got cousins coming for a visit next week. So I go to Aunt Grace and, and I've heard her say, you know, man, I wonder, wonder, you know, these pot pies, if I can make some of these, you know, and sell them to, to people. So I go to her, I say, aunt Grace, I will be your first customer. Man, I've got these cousins coming. I don't have time to fix extra meals, but would you make me three or four pot pies for, you know, 20 bucks a piece or whatever charge, whatever you want to. And so I can serve to my, my guests that are coming next week. They don't have time to prepare extra food for.
Now that sounds like a simple transaction, but it's illegal.
It's illegal because Aunt Grace doesn't have a licensed kitchen, HACCP plans, compliance reports, and all the things that she needs to be able to make a pot pie and sell it. And so what we have is a food system and a farming sector that is literally held hostage by these interventionist regulations that, that make it impossible, make it, well, that criminalize direct neighbor to neighbor food commerce. And so I would issue a food emancipation proclamation to free up neighbor to neighbor. I'm not saying to export it. I'm not even saying allow them to sell it at Walmart and Costco. I'm just saying, if you're my neighbor. And as two voluntary, consenting adults, we want to exercise freedom of choice.
We should be able to engage in a food transaction without a bureaucrat being involved and without a bunch of infrastructure and licenses and, and paperwork being required in the middle of that transaction. I mean, our culture, we are that. We are the culture of choice. Now, we got choice in the bedroom, choice in the bathroom. You know, we got choice in the womb. What we don't have is choice in the kitchen.
[00:25:29] Speaker A: Wow. And I would throw in their choice in the medical realm. I mean, we sort of do. There's this complimentary and alternative statute in most state medical board rules, but the education system sure does it and pretty much everything. Everybody thinks it's kind of quackery, hocus pocus.
And that's a whole nother story. We're not here to talk about that.
[00:25:50] Speaker B: But that's, that's one reason, even though I'm plenty beyond old enough, I'm supposed to, you know, be getting Medicare. Now, Teresa and I have refused to go into Medicare because we don't want the government to tell us, you know, who we're going to go see. And so we're, you know, we're still with Samaritan, Samaritan Ministries, which is a faith based medical sharing. They're the only one that doesn't kick you out when you get old enough for Medicare. They, the others, like Medishare and those, they, they, if you're eligible for Medicare, you're done, you know, they kick you out. And, and, and so we really appreciate that about the Samaritan Ministries.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: Yeah, we've had Samaritan on this show. We've interviewed them and listeners. Y'all go back on the podcast archive page on our website and find that and learn more about it.
[00:26:40] Speaker B: But, yeah, yeah, good.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: Yeah, we love them. Okay, so first step, food. Immense Emancipation Proclamation. Step number two. What would you do?
[00:26:50] Speaker B: Well, so, so, so then, yeah, I mean, if I were, if I had a position of, if I had a bully pulpit, as Ross Perot used to say, use the bully pulpit, what I would do then is I would, I would try to whatever, create a vision in the average American of the delight. Literally the delight. And it created a desire for domestic culinary arts. You know, people, it's fun to point fingers, you know. Well, if those people would just do their thing. If those people would do that, those people would do that. And the fact is, 75% of the food that Americans Eat right now is ultra processed, which by def. Ultra processed by definition means that you can't do it in your kitchen. You know, you can't make monosodium glutamate in your kitchen. You can't, you know, you can't make Coca Cola in your kitchen. You can't make lunchables and Hot Pockets and squeezable Velveeta cheese in your kitchen.
You can't make red dye 29. You can't make Doritos in your kitchen. All right? And so 75% of the food Americans eat right now is, is impossible to make in your kitchen. The ingredients are unpronounceable and the ingredients are unmakeable in your kitchen. So I would launch a campaign that would try to utilize. As soon as I say get in your kitchen, you feel the resistance.
No, listen, it has never been easier to cook from scratch than today.
Think about it. I mean, we've got, we've got insta pots, timed bake, bread makers, ice cream makers, blenders, dicers, you know, crock pots. I mean, you know, pressure canners, dehydrators.
We've got every techno glitzy thing that great grandma would have given her eye teeth to have. It's never been easier to cook from scratch, and we've never been more negligent at participating in the food supply. So here's the deal. You can never have an authentic integrity food supply when our kitchens are this viscerally participatory, profoundly abdicated from the responsibility of touching and working with food. You can't have it and you can't have it both ways. You can't say, well, I'm going to subcraft, contract all my food to Tyson and then expect to have authentic food. It's not going to happen. And so somewhere along the line we have to start, you know, taking personal responsibility for those things. I mean, today I'm actually writing a, writing an article for a magazine about, about the consequences and the tension, the tension we have, for example, you know, church, you got prayer meeting. Brother Bill stands up. He's a diet type 2 diabetic. He drinks, you know, three Coca Colas a day, and he has a prayer request for his infected toes that the doctors are getting ready to amputate because he's got, you know, and, and, and, and the, the, the inner turmoil and tension that, that gets in me. I mean, I'm just being very transparent here of, of how do I pray for his healing and for God to intervene and touch him when the guy is chasing down Chick Fil A with Coca Cola. You know it. It's.
[00:30:45] Speaker A: I'm tracking. You are speaking my language, Joel.
Oh, yeah. Sowing and reaping. There's something about sewing and reaping.
[00:30:55] Speaker B: Yeah, there is.
[00:30:56] Speaker A: So you're saying the domestic culinary arts need to be encouraged and, and magnified and glorified. Yeah, I agree. 100.
[00:31:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and so that our, our homes. Our homes become kitchen centric and not entertainment centric.
[00:31:17] Speaker A: That's a great, great quote. I'm gonna make the T shirt. You need to make T shirts.
[00:31:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:25] Speaker A: Entertain. We want comfort. We have traded convenience, comfort, entertainment.
[00:31:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:31:31] Speaker A: For health.
[00:31:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, the average American, the statistic moves, you know, from year to year, but, but the average American now literally only spends fewer than 20 minutes a day in their kitchen.
I mean, everything is single, single service packages, microwavable. You know, you just pop it in. We don't even eat together. We, we do this wonderful. You know, we have all these young people here in our stewardship and apprenticeship program. And, and you know, we rotate them through. We get a new, new group every year. And it, my Teresa is, is like the quintessential homemaker. She was a home EC major in college. Okay. She taught, she taught home economics in school. You know, so, so she's, she knows how to set a table. You know, she knows how to do this. And we are amazed at these 18, 19, 20, 25, 25, 30, 26 year old young people that come. You'd be surprised how many don't know how to set a table. Where does the knife go? Where does the fork go? Where does the spoon go? Where does the glass go? They literally don't know. I mean, we're turning into a barbaric culture that just eats when I want to eat and eats alone and eats single service.
My. When people ask me, what's your litmus test? When you know, like, like when you know, you, a person gets it. All right, so my new litmus test, my benchmark is if you eat leftovers, if you eat leftovers, you're, you're pretty far down the road of getting it. Because leftovers mean you probably cooked from scratch, you had overabundance, maybe you ate together as a family, and you've got, and you've got Tupperware. You know, you, you got stuff to put things in and, and now you're going to eat leftovers instead of going to McDonald's for lunch. I mean, these things, these things all intertwine as you Know, they, they intertwine and, and one thing, you know, one good action leads to another, just like one bad action leads to another. The concept.
[00:33:47] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's that divide in the culture that I'm seeing that I was talking about earlier. Exactly. Falls in line with that. And that's why we teach here at our clinic and our wellness program.
And actually it's the wellness program, guys. Veritas wellness member.com. that's where we want you. Those health coaches will get you well. A doctor can't cure you. A doctor can only treat your symptoms, including me. So get back to your wellness navigator, your health coach. But we start with what's called the basics, which is that 20 minute quote you said.
I bet that's the same on sitting. I bet we only, the average person probably only stands up for 20 minutes a day. So just getting up and moving, get off your tush, get some sunshine, get the minerals going, get real food, get in the kitchen. It sees, it's just this, it's a change of culture. But when you do that, then you, you start to see you're not a standard American, medically speaking. Your, your internal mitochondria, your carburetors at the cellular level start to work better with just these very basic steps. But it's hard to change those habits. But there's kind of miracle cures or to be had if you can. So what Joel's talking about is right in line with what we're trying to teach and preach here.
Joe, feel free to comment on any of that, but also want to move into your new documentary.
[00:35:02] Speaker B: Okay, no, go ahead, go ahead.
[00:35:05] Speaker A: And I'm confessing to the audience, I like to come.
[00:35:08] Speaker B: So, yeah, just, just to kind of wrap that up. The most frustrating thing for me is to have a person, is to have a person think that everybody else has to make a change. And if everybody else made the change, then I can see the change in me that I want to see. That doesn't work.
You have to make the change in you that you want to see. You can't put this off on somebody else.
You have to make that change you want to see. And so, so you have to take that responsibility, that personal responsibility and make those changes. And, and, you know, I, I can tell you, you know, so many. I mean, I'm like that all of us don't. We, we fight for. Well, I, I want, I want a different situation here, but I really don't want to change. You know, we all, we all fight that. Let's, let's let's be fair about it. And, and it's a. And it's what, it's what keeps us from. It's what keeps us from making personal progress.
[00:36:12] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. Well, I definitely want to hear about this new documentary, and I already told Joel before we hit record, I apologize for not being prepared and doing my homework and watching it. My plan was to do that this weekend, and I got called away to treat some patients in Seminole, which I was happy to do. So I'm anxious to hear this, actually, myself. So, Joe, and feel free. I mean, your other books we've talked about in the previous interviews, but you can talk about any of your productions you've done, but I'm real curious on this new documentary and what led to it being produced. And, and what's it about?
[00:36:47] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, we've been in, I don't know how many, 20 documentaries or so, but this one was done by Canon.
They're a kind of a small Christian production company, and they had started a series back, I don't know, maybe even a couple of years ago, I don't know how far long back. They started a series called the Master Series. And what they were trying to do was bring to light. They started with artists, painters, sculptors, potters, but, but people who are masters at their craft, who were Christians and, and, and how their faith, their faith kind of whatever bounded. How is your craft kind of a presentation of, of your faith? You know, what, what, where do those intersect and what does that mean for your craft? You know, the kind of painting you do, the kind of sculpting you do, the kind of cinematography you do, the kind of pottery you make, you know, does it, does it, does it. Does your faith.
How does your faith reveal itself or impact itself to you in, in your, in your craftsmanship? So they did several of these and, and they, they learned. I don't know where they learned about me, but anyway, somewhere along the line they learned about me and they approached me. You know, could we. We've never done a farmer as craft, but you seem to kind, you know, you fit our, you know, our, our protocol here. Could we come and do a, you know, and do one on you? And, and so of course, we always tell these folks, yes, we, we do give them a few, a few boundaries, you know, and, and so they came, whatever, in 20, 24 in the spring, and we're here for a couple of days filming, and I didn't think a whole lot about it. Okay. You know, this is nice. And, and, and sometimes you know, sometimes things actually.
Projects get abandoned. You know, it just. Whatever. They don't. They don't come to fruition. But these guys, I heard from them then back in early December, I guess it was in September, October. And they wanted Teresa and I to look at the rough cut to. Just to make sure that it was accurate. You know, if it said anything wrong. We watched it and we were.
I think the modern word is gobstruck. We were amazed at how they. They truly captured our essence, our. Our attitude, our spirit, our desire. And. And it was beautiful. Cinematography. Oh, it's just. It's just gorgeous. And the story flowed. There were a couple little things that were wrong. And so we told him, you know, this. This is factually wrong, but. But most of it was. Was right on. And then. And then in early December, they contacted me and say, hey, we worked out a deal.
I think this is the first time it's happened. So they're a very small studio. Canon. Canon. Canon + C. A N O N. Based on the. The canon of scripture, the canon of the Bible. All right. And. And so they worked out a deal with Angel Studios, which, you know, is huge. They've done the. They've done all these, you know, kind of Christian programs, the Taken and all these things. And so they worked out for Angel Studios to release it for roughly six weeks before Canon reverted back to Canon. And so it was supposed to be released right there before Christmas, but it wasn't. They delayed. I don't know what the reasons were. Turns out that two of the executives at Angel Studios are fans of fans of ours. I mean, they read my stuff or seen it or heard it or something. And, and so they wanted to be a part of this. Well, they released it. What about.
Is it. Is it even. I don't think it's even been two months. Hasn't been that long ago they released it and it's had whatever, 40, like 40 million impressions. I mean, it has just gone crazy. And. And it's. It's number three on the platform.
They've made money on it. Both. Both studios have made good money, which I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled that they made good money on it. And so now. Now it's going to be submitted to some film festivals and things like that. We'll see where it goes. But, you know, a lot of documentaries kind of. They kind of lag, you know, part way through. You. Okay, tell your story. You know, how long does it take to tell this story? You know? Yeah, and this one. This one doesn't I mean, it just. It just goes. You're just. Just there. It just flows. They. They really did a fantastic job. And it's not because I'm a great story. It's because they are great. They. They are master craftsmen at their storytelling and cinematography. So, yeah, when you see it, you'll. You'll really like it. I think it's a. It's a powerful, profound, profound piece that. That captures our essence. And it's. And it's gorgeous. I mean, they. They've really done a great, great job capturing the beauty of the farm.
[00:42:20] Speaker A: That's awesome. And how can people find that? What's the name of it?
[00:42:24] Speaker B: It's Lunatic Farmer. That's the. Wow. Yeah. Farmer. Yeah. They, again, they weren't, you know, most people would be afraid to, you know, use that tagline, you know, oh, this is just. It's just too far out there. But they were just so ready.
[00:42:50] Speaker A: To.
[00:42:50] Speaker B: Just tap into my energy. The story.
They just.
Let's just let it unfold. And I'm known.
I mean, I adopted this lunatic farmer thing years and years ago when I felt such huge. Well, felt. I mean, we had such huge backlash in the ag community.
I mean, they. They were threatened by our unvaccinated cattle. I mean, I have been told to my face in the community here that you're a bioterrorist, you're a Typhoid Mary, you're a starvation advocate, because we all know compost can't compete with chemicals, you know, can't feed the world, blah, blah, blah. And so I. So anyway, in one of these, you know, really aggressive exchanges, I walked away from it. I looked at Teresa, I said, you know, I. What am I supposed to do? Am I. Am I supposed to. I'm not going to cave.
I can either be frustrated and angry and depressed about this or.
Or I can just embrace it and have fun with it. Yeah, I'm a lunatic. Course I'm a lunatic. And. And so. So, you know, that's what I decided to do. Just have fun with it instead of be, you know, whatever, frustrated and angry about it. And so I did. And. And, man, that has become.
I mean, you know, it's cool. It's cool to develop a handle that is unique in the entire planet. If you. If you type in Google, lunatic Farmer. There's not two of us. There's only one on a whole planet. And, you know, I've always been a fan. Like, my favorite author fiction is Charles Dickens.
And of course, you know, he wrote the Christmas Carol, and I'VE always just, just thought, I mean, like, of course, you know, I'm a writer as well as a farmer and every writer to imagine inventing something like Scrooge just out of your imagination, that, that is now globally ubiquitous. When you say Scrooge, you can say it in Romania, Thailand, you know, Sri Lanka. You can say Scrooge anywhere and they know what you're talking about. And so, you know, to invent something that is, that is globally unique is not very many people get to do that. Usually somebody else has had a, a similar or close or identical idea. And so this is my Scrooge moment to invent. Lunatic Farmer was my, you know, was my Scrooge moment that I invented something that, that, that, you know, may stand the test of time.
[00:45:35] Speaker A: Yeah, you're one of a kind for sure, Joe.
I'm going to have to ask my marketing team about calling me the Lunatic Doctor, maybe.
[00:45:44] Speaker B: Yeah, there you go. There you go.
[00:45:46] Speaker A: Did so. Good for you. Well, We've got about 10 minutes left in this show. What's the future hold for you? You mentioned you your, your age at one point. When you've lived as long as you have, you have some experience under your belt. But I know you're a man of vision and aspiration. So what's on the horizon? What's in the future and where do you see things going? Even maybe from the policy standpoint versus no, there's a whole nother culture, a whole other system arising. The policy institutional people are just going to do what they do. And I know there's been some change recently and hopefully we'll see some fruit from that. But kind of just in the future where you see things going personally and as a country.
[00:46:23] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, I'm not a prophet. One thing I don't do is prophesy. I actually collect crazy prophecies. You know, like Tom Watson, the CEO of IBM in 1966 when he said the world market for computers is about six. And this was the president of IBM in 1966. But I collect these, so. So I try to stay out of prophecy. But here's what I will say. I will say, and literally I just came up with this this morning on another conversation. It just, you know, most of these things just kind of happen when you're in discussions and the discussion was about bird flu.
You know, it's in the headlines, it's a big deal right now. And, and what I told this guy was that I think bird flu right now. I mean, Covid was a bit of a of a, of a cultural experiment from a lot of different angles, you know, world economic form. I mean, I mean, again, I don't want to get all into conspiracy theory, but man, you can't look at those dry runs done by the World economic forum in 2019 about what would happen if we had a pandemic. You know, you can't, you can't look at that without just being awestruck at how, at how the pandemic, you know, six months later went, right, according to, you know, the press releases, the, the, the response of the, whatever the governments and everything was, was identical. So I think that we're in that spot right now with bird flu and maybe measles, but let's just stay with bird flu for now. That I think that we're in a clash of. We're almost in an okay corral showdown over paradigm pragmatism and policy in how we're going to respond and what we're going to, and what we're going to think about things. So this, this bird flu is running the COVID It's from the government standpoint, it's running the COVID agenda straight out. It's using the PCR tests at over cycled, over cycled magnification.
It's using an extermination policy rather than, well, let's see who survives. And you know, and, and kind of let, let immunity run its course. You know, the thing people don't realize is we've killed 166 million chickens in the last 24 months.
Probably only 2 or 3,000 have even been tested for bird flu. And, and probably 164 million have not been sick.
They've not been tested, they're not even sick. But they've been in proximity to a bird that was tested and was sick. And so everybody on the farm, everybody, all the chickens in proximity get killed, get exterminated.
And so this from a policy and a pragmatism standpoint and a, and a, and a mentality, a paradigm, I think that we're in a, we're in a, a showdown, if you will, over this. And it'll be interesting to see how we come out the other side. There is so, so you wonder, you wonder what has to happen to crack, you know, to crack the paradigm that, that wellness comes out of a needle or wellness comes out of a pill.
And you realize, goodness, half of the commercials on television are sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. I had a guy last week, give me a thought. I never even thought of this. He said, they're not Trying to get people to buy Ozempic. They just want the media to know we own you.
So you touch us and we're going to bury you.
And I think that the average person doesn't have a clue.
The power of these big pharmaceutical companies, the power financially, the power to shape the message, to shape the narrative, and even power over agriculture, you know, to, to, to scare everybody in. If you don't take this, you know you're going to die. Which, which is exactly what happened with COVID If you don't take this, you're going to die. And 30, 36% of Americans said, I don't believe you. You know, and so right now, right now, what we have is. I know, I know he's retired and gone, but what we have is a resurrection of the Anthony Fauci spirit running our bird flu program. You know, he's, he's, he's not there in person, but, but the attitude and the philosophy. He's there in spirit running the bird flu program. And so what's in the, you know, what, what, what is in the future? You know, it depends on, on the, on how people are willing to follow down. You know, we say sheeple, sheeple, you know, like sheep. How far are we willing to go down, down this path? And, and the positive thing about COVID is that, you know, 36% didn't take the jab. And I'll bet you, I'll bet you that somewhere close to 50% of the people who did now wish they hadn't.
I don't know if that's 40% or what, but, but, but, but it's big. The point is that I believe half of Americans.
Half of Americans, if you ask them today, do you believe, you know, if Anthony Fauci said something today, would you believe him? I think half of Americans would say no.
And, and that's, that, that's a, that's a great indicator, that's a great indicator of moving forward. I mean, the, the trust, the, the, that these polls that they're where they're, they're measuring trust. Trust in institutions, trust in agencies, trust in doctors, trust in me. I mean, you know, you've seen them, they've dropped from 70% to 30%. All of them, they're all way, way, way down. And so does this, does this mean that the system is getting ready to unleash a last gasp, a last gasp tyranny, you know, on society as they see their grasp loosening, or does it mean that, that we're ready to storm the bastille you know, that we're, that we're ready to put Marie Antoinette under the guillotine. You know, what does this actually look like? And you know, that that's what we don't know. We don't know a timetable, we don't know what that looks like. But I can tell you that, that, I mean, from my perspective, my message is, is just everybody wants to hear this. I mean, I'm on, I'm on. I mean, a couple weeks ago, I did, I did 14 podcasts in two days. I mean, I'm, I'm. Which. This is the new media, right? This is where people are getting their information. You're not going to get it from cnn, msnbc, you're not even going to get it from the American Medical Association. You're going to get it from places like this. And so the alternative media, I heard a, I heard Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk say that history will record that Elon Musk's buying of X and releasing it as a, as a basis of, of uncensored information spread will go down in history at some time in the future.
Similarly to the power of the Gutenberg Press, which in its day allowed leaflets to be printed and people to begin reading that created the Reformation, the abuse of the Roman Catholic Church at that time was now, you know, public knowledge. And so, you know, so podcasters, this whole alternative media mechanism and the ability to share and, you know, people, when they finish this program, they can now ping it to their friends, you know, and this networking interchange, if you will, in this new media is a game changer. And so, you know, can we, can those of us in this alternative tribe, can we hang on long enough and can we coalesce enough that we withstand? Because I can assure you that if there is a fall of the system, it will not go down gently. They will not want to walk quietly into the night. And whether it's regulatory, mandatory surveillance, whatever it is, that, that the system, the claw Schwab's of the world are not going to give up control easily if we, you know, if we push back. So, you know, we'll see where it is. But I do, I do think that we're in, I mean, Trump's election, I don't want to get partisan, but Trump's election was part of this, of this, this, this fight for, this fight for, for the future. And, and, you know, it's an exciting time to be here, and I'm hoping that all these alternative media like this will, will gradually penetrate the, you know, the mind of, of the average person. And they will do something besides sit on the couch with their beer and watch the football game.
[00:56:44] Speaker A: Yep, you're exactly right. I had actually CNN approached me yesterday and I asked him to turn off the camera and turn off the microphone. And then I, we sat down with the three of their folks and I gave them a point of view that they didn't know about.
[00:57:05] Speaker B: Huh.
[00:57:06] Speaker A: And the reason I asked them to turn off the microphone and camera is because. And I told them this. I can't trust that this full story I'm telling you, I'm sharing with you now, y'all know it. You have to sleep with this truth. I just told you that almost brought him to tears, actually.
[00:57:21] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:57:22] Speaker A: And I said, you know, you're not going to be able to share this. You know it and I know it. And therefore, really, I'm not going to risk the little clip you're going to snip out and then that's going to put fuel to the fire and potentially hurt these little kids that are still in the hospital. Potentially. That's another story that I'll get into later. But I'm just saying to, to your point, I don't care if you're cnn. In fact, I care. All right? I can't trust you and neither can the public. I looked it up. Media congress was the lowest, I think 10. Media was like 12 or 15 doctors are 30. So I mean, we're still.
[00:57:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:58:00] Speaker A: But yeah, that's where it is. It is the okay Corral. It's his fight. The people are waking up. They're seeing it. There's more to this story. There's more to the measles story. There's more to the, the vaccine story. I mean, there's just so much more. And it's coming to light the truth. The light is coming to the darkness. It's being revealed and the people are waking up and saying, aha, I see this thing. So, yeah, I'm with you. An exciting time to be here. And if we keep loving our neighbor and loving God, we stay right there.
[00:58:30] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:58:31] Speaker A: We, we can have, we can bring down the arrogance and pride. We can confess, repent, apologize, and put others before ourselves. We'll be all right. That's not what the other side's. And I'm talking the Klaus Schwab's right, there's this orphan self centered mentality and this poverty and lack mentality. And we're at the end of the show, so can't get into all that, but you nailed it. On the head. We're in the battle.
[00:58:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, we are.
[00:58:57] Speaker A: And we know who wins it. Joel, thank you so much for spending an hour with us. Thank you for all you've done for humanity, for the pigs and for everybody. Thank you for being the lunatic that you are. What's the best way people can follow you? Find you, come see you.
[00:59:11] Speaker B: Yeah. So, so I, I do a weekly podcast called beyond labels with Dr. Cena McCullough and do a blog called Musings from the Lunatic Farmer. And, and of course, I don't have a personal social media. I don't have a smartphone, I don't do Instagram, all that. But everything is through Poly Face. Poly Face Farm. P O, L Y F A C E. It's our farm. And you can see where I'll be traveling, where I'll be speaking. You can see seminars that we do here at the farm. And of course you can get food if you want to get. If you want to get good food. So, yeah, that's a comprehensive website. Go, go park yourself there for five minutes and, and poke around.
[00:59:50] Speaker A: Polyface farms.com awesome polyfacefarms.com guy. Go check it out. I have, I've gotten the food there to go. The farm. It's an awesome farm tour. I highly recommend it. Seeking whole health.com that's the conference. Joel will be speaking out and so will I. May 1st through 3rd. And we're going to do a ticket giveaway on our Instagram page. Dr. Ben Edwards on Instagram. You can follow that, guys. Veritas wellnessmember.com with this show will be archived there with all our other agriculture related shows. So check that out and of course, all the podcast platforms. And we'll be back next week with another great show. Joel, thanks again for being here. Appreciate you.
[01:00:27] Speaker B: Thank you, Ben. It's been an honor.
[01:00:29] Speaker A: All right, bye.
