The Coop Episode #10: Homesteading is a Mindset: Health, Purpose, and Resilience with Joel Salatin

Joel Salatin:

If you’re not more excited about your mother’s starter than you are your Netflix subscription, you’re not a homesteader. So I define homesteading as being primarily mental.

Anna Sakawsky:

Are you hopeful for the future?

Joel Salatin:

I’m quite pessimistic about the overall, the way the world’s going, but I’m extremely optimistic about what individuals can do within that context.

Anna Sakawsky:

Well, hello everybody, and welcome to episode number 10 of the Coop. This is a Homestead Living podcast where we host educational and inspirational conversations with the homesteaders and writers that contribute to Homestead Living Magazine. These are the ones who are at the forefront of the modern homestead movement that we are all a part of. My name is Anna Sikowski and I am the editor in chief of Homestead Living Magazine. And today I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to sit down with Joel Saladin, an author, speaker, regenerative farmer, and longtime leader in the modern home setting movement. You probably already know who Joel is, whether it is from one of the many documentaries he’s starred in such as Food Inc. Farmagedden, or more recently The Lunatic Farmer, or maybe it’s from the many books he’s written, including titles like Folks, this Ain’t Normal. Everything I want to do is illegal.

You can Farm, Salad Bar beef, pastured poultry profits, or his most recent book, homestead Tsunami, where he dives into what’s behind the modern home setting movement and why more people than ever are leaving behind modern conveniences for a more purposeful life that home setting offers. Or maybe you’ve heard him on one of the many big name podcasts he’s appeared on or seen him speak at one of the many home setting conferences around the country, or perhaps, and hopefully you’re a regular reader of Homestead Living Magazine and read his regular column that he writes for us. But wherever you may know him from, or even if this is your first introduction, I’m so excited to be here today with Joel for what might be the most important conversation of all related to the modern homesteading movement. And that is why it actually matters in today’s world and how it might just be the solution to many of the problems we’re facing collectively and individually right now.

So before we get started, I want you to know that the Coop is brought to you in part by another Homestead Living podcast, the brand new Plain Values podcast. This is quickly becoming one of the most inspiring and heartfelt shows you’ll ever listen to, hosted by Plain Values Magazine publisher Marlon Miller. The show features faith-based conversations with incredible people like Joel Sale, who was recently a guest, as well as many others who open up about their journeys, struggles and triumphs, and share stories, wisdom and advice that we all need to hear from growing your own food to building beautiful families and friendships. This podcast covers it all. You can subscribe today for free and get it in either audio or video forum. Just head to plain values.com/slash podcast. Again, that’s plain values.com/podcast. Alright, so without further ado, let’s get into it and welcome Mr. Joel s to the show.

Joel Salatin:

Hi, Anna. It’s great to be with you. Thank you.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, it is so good to finally have a chance to sit down and chat with you because we haven’t really had that opportunity before. I have got the opportunity to meet you a couple of times at a couple of the different home setting conferences, and of course you are a regular writer for Homestead Living Magazine, so I get the pleasure of reading your articles every month and you are actually one of the first people that drew me into the home setting movement more than a decade ago now. So you are a well-known figure in this home setting movement, but for some folks that may not know you because there are a few that are still out there, can you just start off by giving us kind of the 50,000 foot view of who you are, what you do, and why you think you become such an influential voice in the modern humping movement?

Joel Salatin:

Well, I’m old, been around the block. I’ve been at this for a long time, so I have a lot of wisdom of failures and it’s in those failures that you actually gain your wisdom. And so anyway, our family came to this property when I was just four years old and it was essentially a glorified homestead. Mom and dad never made a living from the farm. Dad was an accountant, mom was a school teacher, and the all farm jobs paid for the property. I’m sure that nobody identifies with that, but this was in 1961 and property wasn’t quite as expensive then as it is now. Of course, people didn’t make the salaries they make now either, but it took about 10 or 12 years to actually pay for the place. So by the time I’m a rising teenager, the farm is paid for. But those first 20 years, 61 to 81 were years of experimentation.

We didn’t make a living from the farm, but we milked a couple cows. We basically lived out of our garden and from our fields, our livestock heated the house that was, of course the early seventies was the Arab oil embargo. Everybody went to wood stoves like we did. And so we cut our own firewood. So I grew up running the chainsaw, milking the cows and doing the garden. And so it was a 20 year experiment. When Teresa and I got married in 1980, we fixed up the attic of the farmhouse so we could live cheaply in the attic apartment. We called it our penthouse. Anna. We lived on about three or 400 a month.

We drove a $50 car. We never had a television, we never went out to eat. We never went on vacation. We didn’t do anything. I had this burning desire to be here on the farm. And quickly, let me say, I don’t disparage or condescend to anyone who is not farming, not trying to, but I have learned that a lot of homesteaders, if they could figure out how to do it, would love to be there full time if they could. So my story runs that trajectory, a small farm, 90 acres of open land, had a lot of forest, a lot of woods. But basically we’re working with 90 acres and can I make a full-time living on this place? And so I get out of college and I come home and I’m doing the town job thing, working. I’m a reporter at the local newspaper. But here’s the thing, marrying a wife more frugal than I living so cheaply. I mean, I just want you to think about it a minute. We took our honeymoon in a 1965 Dodge Cornet with three speed on the gear, on the up at the steering wheel, and she was okay with that. That’s a big deal. And the older,

Anna Sakawsky:

That’s a woman

Joel Salatin:

That is, we call that an easy keeper when you’re selecting cows, when you’re selecting cows for your cow herd, you want an easy keeper. You don’t want one that’s persnickety all the time. And the older I’ve gotten and the more I’ve seen young couples struggle with expectations of bright shiny objects and what their thing is supposed to look like, I’m just more grateful every day for her. I mean, she would can 800 quarts of stuff out of the garden every summer. And I mean, we ate a lot of green beans because we could grow good green beans. So we had a lot of green beans and of course we had all the dairy, we wanted raw milk and we drank raw milk like water. But anyway, make a long story short, by living that frugally, I was able to save half of my income, half of my paycheck. And so in just two and a half years, we saved enough that at our frugal living, we saved enough that we could live for one year without an income. And so September 24th, 1982, I walked out of the newspaper office. I didn’t think we’d make it. I really didn’t.

Going from part-time to full-time is a big deal and I didn’t think we’d make it, but it was tough touch and go for three years. And at the end of three years, we exhaled, okay, we’re going to make it. And now today the farm generates 22, 22 full-time salaries. It is a significant business and it’s a blessed life. It’s really good. So yeah, humble beginnings, but we look back on it now and we wouldn’t trade. We were just as happy then as we are now, poor church mice, but we were doing what we wanted to do and couldn’t have been happier. And so it is been good.

Anna Sakawsky:

Well, that’s awesome. And something that I kind of took from that, what you said was that you obviously sacrifice a lot, both Theresa and yourself to make your farming dream reality. And now this is what you’re doing full time and you’re actually farming for a living. And I think a lot of people do have those goals eventually, but you kind of used homesteading as a means to get you to that point. And I presume you’re still doing the homesteading, which I take to be producing for your own consumption. But maybe I’d love to hear your definition of homesteading because I think that it, even in today’s world where it is more popular, I still run into people all the time when I mentioned the term home setting and they don’t know what that means. They’re like, is it farming? Or sometimes people actually still, it’s funny, I looked up the official definition and the Miriam Webster definition is still quote, the act or practice of acquiring, settling on or occupying land under a homestead law. So there’s still this idea that it hearkens back to the Homestead Act, which is not necessarily what it means in modern terms. And then of course farming for a living can be a little bit different. How do you actually define what homesteading means today?

Joel Salatin:

So I define homesteading as being primarily mental. And what that means is, Anna, we live in a culture that is not home centric. We are not a home centric culture. You travel around the world and there are home centric cultures. Ours is not. Ours has become, home is a pit stop. It’s a pit stop just between what’s important in life. And life happens out there somewhere. And so we have these financial systems, educational systems, entertainment systems, informational systems. We have all these other systems in which life actually occurs. And so my take on homesteading is that it is a fundamentally home centric, home oriented view to life, which by the way, as you pursue that at all, it is a disentanglement. It is a disentanglement of society’s conventional systems, whatever those are. I mean, we could go all the way back to Hebrews and say it’s a disentanglement from the three, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.

That’s the conventional mindset, the lust of flesh, lust, the eyes of pride of life and fame, money and promiscuity immorality. And so when you come home, what you’re doing is you are focusing your attention on opting out on disentangling from the dependency and the ment, I don’t know if that’s a word, but being enamored of society’s conventional narrative, whether that’s TikTok the Kardashians or the royal family in Britain or whatever it is. And I’m not disparaging any of that. I’m just saying that is today’s bright shiny object and it really gets in the way of things. So yes, you can homestead in the city. How I know you’re homesteading is there might be a tipped over quart jar of mung bean sprouts on the window sill and a jar of sourdough mother on the cabinet, and there’s actually dried goods in jars. And that’s the kind of mentality and persona that home centricity creates.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, I love that because I think that there are so many people who are maybe at that level still and feel like maybe they have dreams of homesteading, but it feels like it’s out of reach right now because maybe they’re still living in an apartment in the city. And so I like the idea that it’s a mindset first and foremost, and it’s what can I do here? And all those things that you mentioned are things that you can do anywhere. You can be growing throats on your window sill, and you can be making sourdough bread in your tiny apartment kitchen and all that stuff. So I love that it really is a mindset first and foremost, and about taking responsibility for your life rather than outsourcing that.

Joel Salatin:

Yeah, that’s right. And when I wrote the book Homestead Tsunami, the third group of people I wrote for were the folks who had come to this had gotten their little place, and they’re four years into it, and they’re discouraged because the cucumbers have powdery mildew. The tomatoes have blossom in to write, the cow has mastitis, and the neighbor’s dog just got in and ate their chickens, and they’re discouraged. And what I’ve learned in talking to so many thousands of aspiring homestead type folks is that you start where you are with what you have. Because listen, if your 14-year-old, if you can’t get your 14-year-old to gather the eggs from five chickens in your backyard, there’s nothing about going to a homestead, going to the country and having 50 chickens that’s suddenly going to make the 14-year-old want to gather eggs. And I’m not picking on 14 year olds, but I am saying you have to, if you’re not more excited about your mother starter than you are your Netflix subscription, you’re not a homesteader. And that’s what I’m trying to get at.

Anna Sakawsky:

Totally. Yeah. And you’re so right. My husband and I started in a condo in the city, and that’s actually when we first came across you. And it was back in the time when some of those documentaries, food Inc. Farm again, and I think it was around 20 10, 20 12, that era right in there where we started watching a lot of those and we were feeling just kind of not right, just at kind of dis-ease with

Our lifestyle that we were living in the city and being caught up with the rat race. And I was going through some depression and we kind of discovered this, and it to us seemed like, Hey, this is something that could be an antidote to this. This is something that could give us something more to work towards. I think we were just kind of feeling like, is this it? Is this all there is? But we weren’t in a position where we could move out to the country anytime soon. I think we did within a couple of years of that. We did make some moves pretty quick, but that didn’t stop us from starting where we were. Maybe we had a north facing balcony. Our first attempts at growing food were abysmal at best, but I learned how to forge stuff locally and we’d go to the local farms around us and purchase things in season.

I mean, my first attempts at preserving were either just putting stuff in the freezer or I remember trying to preserve some peaches in brandy. I learned that that was a way that you could preserve things. Well, when I tried those peaches later on, of course they tasted like straight brandy. It was awful, right? I didn’t think about the consequence of that. And these are not peaches that are going to be like a fresh peach you want to eat, but everybody gets their start somewhere. And so by learning a little bit there, then when we were ended up, the next place was a rental property, but it was a rental out in the country where we were able to have a little garden and there was an established apple tree. And then we started doing the canning and gardening and then worked our way up from there.

And now we’re only on a quarter acre, but we’re able to do so much here. And yeah, we can’t have dairy cow or there’s certain things that we’re restricted by, but we have our little flock of chickens, we have a large garden. We’re doing a lot right now. And in the stage that we’re at, it’s all we can actually probably handle. And so as much as we would like more at some point, we’re perfectly happy where we’re at right now. So I definitely relate to the idea that you can be doing this anywhere, and we’ve kind of been through all stages of it so far, except for the 10 acres and the milk cow, which hopefully is next at some point. But I’m interested though, we came to this movement about, I guess around 15 years ago now, and that’s when I feel like a lot of people started coming into this modern homesteading movement in its modern context.

Like the first wave I would say, and maybe you have a different view of this, but was around say 15, maybe going back to 20 years ago, I feel like it was when a lot of homesteading bloggers maybe came on the scene, content creators, and then that message started spreading online and these documentaries came out and so on and so forth. And then also in the last five years, especially since COVID, I think we’ve seen another surge in popularity. Let’s first go back to say around 15 years ago, what do you think drove that initial movement towards homesteading? And then have you seen any differences in the past few years since we’ve been made more aware of some of these crises and the COVID pandemic and all that stuff? What was the original reason you think people came to this and what does that look like now?

Joel Salatin:

Well, people, Anna, people always make changes generally in response to crisis in their life. Most people, as long as the NFL is on TV and there’s beer in a fridge and a roof over your head, life is good. And we tend to not make changes until disturbance comes. And so I would suggest two things. One is when you say 15 years ago, that puts us right about 2008, 2009. Well, if you remember, 2008, nine, that was Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, that was the financial meltdown. Literally, it was a depression in our lifetime, not the big depression, but it was big. A lot of people lost a lot of money and they lost jobs. It was a time of real financial, financial difficulty.

And what happens when financial difficulty happens is you start looking at what true wealth, what is true value? And when you say, what do you really want? What is worth? Whatever, investing in the list gets pretty basic. It’s not bright, shiny objects from China. It’s your health. That’s usually number one. I mean, if things are going to break down, you don’t want to be the guy in the back room in bed that says, Hey, hey, can you carry me with you? You want to be the guy running out the door. So health is one major element.

And then you’ve got ability to get and have food to be able to eat and have water. And there’s an inherent understanding, I think deep down in the soul of almost everybody, that if the wheels fall off, I don’t want to be stuck in the city. I want to be somewhere where I can drink out of a stream, trap, a shoot a deer, build a fire, cut a tree, that basic stuff. And then your other, once you have your health and your food, then you’re looking at skill, being able to be skilled at something. And so for me, I think the new 401k plan is knowing how to build things, fix things, and grow things. If you have a skill, that’s something you can barter, that’s real wealth. And so we’re seeing people cashed in 401k plans to buy a small acreage or instead of investing so much in the stock market, invest in a course on small engine repair or woodworking or refrigeration, mechanics, automobile, something. That is what Rory Groves would call a durable trade.

And so those are real wealth. So the homestead encompasses all of that. You get out there where you can get better food, your food’s more stable, secure, safer, your health, it’s good for your health. You get exercise, you learn how to do things, and that’s skill, and it answers all of those elements, the other thing that happens. So that’s one, I think that financial there around that time, you’re exactly right, it drove a lot of people to reevaluate where their true wealth was. The second thing I think, is that it was a natural progression of the homeschool movement. And I’ve lived long enough. I can tell you back in the eighties and early nineties when we started getting some traction, 75% of the visitors to our farm were liberal tree hugger, earth muffin environmentalists. And as the homeschooling movement developed, the homeschooling movement, which which started in the late sixties, early seventies, was that same thing.

It was primarily liberals who didn’t want, I don’t want my kids having to pray every morning and read a Bible verse at school and all this. And so it was a Woodstock, a hippie beaded, bearded braless response to establishment regimen thought. And so in 1970, if you bet a homeschooler, 90% of ’em were of a more liberal persuasion. But once in the eighties came and the 10 Commandments came down off the classroom walls that flipped and conservative families, the faith community said, whoa, whoa, whoa. And conservative parents started pulling their kids out, and that really launched the homeschool movement that really developed through the nineties. Well, what happens is when you withdraw from conventional thinking and find it satisfying, your next question is to look around and say, well, man, that was fun. What have I been missing? And so what naturally the next kissing cousin to the homeschool movement was the homestead movement.

We’re going to come home for education. What else can come home? Oh, food can come home. Oh, children’s, children’s work can come home things. And so craft can come home. We can start making things. We can make grape vine res, we can start a cut flower operation. We can do honeybees on the roof. There’s all sorts of things. And so I think that that was a natural progression of the homeschool movement. The next thing you saw was a grinding mill on the kitchen table, a little batch of chickens out back, a compost pile and a garden and a hanging herb garden on the porch. And those were natural progressions. So I think both of those things, one was stimulated by fear that made people want to run or seek something different. And one was a natural progression of faith in that I’ve found this, found it good, and what else am I missing? What else can I embrace?

Anna Sakawsky:

And I think it comes back to that idea of just disentangling, right? Whether no matter where you’re coming at it from or what your values or belief system, it’s that, hey, the outside world is not meeting my needs. It’s not living up to the standards that I want to set for myself and my family. So I’m going to take control of that and bring things home, whether it’s bringing my kids home or bringing my food production home. And I think that there’s multiple entry points. It’s funny when you said, I think that homeschooling maybe came first and then home setting. And that can happen in the reverse too. We see a lot of that too, the people that have come to the home setting movement and then go, Hey, now I’ve looked at my food and brought that home. Whoa, what’s going on in the education system? Maybe we need to bring that home as well. So I think it comes back to this idea of being a home centric lifestyle. And I think the reason that it’s home centric is beyond just the fact that home is kind of where we stake our claim. It’s just, it’s our space, but that is where we have control over these things, right?

Joel Salatin:

Yeah. More and more of life. You feel like it’s spinning out of control. I mean, people you used to call and a person picked up the phone. Now a person doesn’t pick up the phone, it’s some robot, press one, press two, press three, and all of us, you can’t fix your car. You got to go in and get somebody that’s got a computer to plug in the computer thing and look at your car. We could just,

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, it’s so funny because as we speak, I’m looking out the window and my husband’s on the bobcat and we’re doing a big project where we’re expanding the garden and everything. And he looked at, because he’s not working right now, he’s at home full-time with our son. Well, we’ve got two kids, but our son’s just two and a half, so somebody needs to care for him. And I do this job. And he was looking at going back to work full time, and we were pricing out what it would actually cost us to hire out for a lot of the projects that we are looking at tackling over the next year. And it was going to cost like five times as much as what he can do it for himself. And I said, it doesn’t actually even make economic sense for you to go back to work because you’d have to work five times the amount, hours to earn the money to outsource those things if those people even show up and do the job, right? So we can save more money by you actually being at home and us doing it in a more frugal way. So we’re a home centric family by default. And I think a lot of people are looking at that too, where just with the economy and things the way they are, in a lot of cases now, it actually makes more sense to be home, even though you’re talking about daycare costs or anything like that. It actually makes better financial sense.

Joel Salatin:

Listen, when you add up, if you can grow half of your food, and that’s very achievable, you don’t need growing. Half of your food is not out of the park. You can still buy your coffee, your bananas stuff, but if you grow half of your food, well, if you have a four person family, that right there is a savings of four to $5,000 a year. And then because the food is better quality, now you’re healthier. So suddenly your doctor visits, your whole medical approach, your pharmaceuticals, all that stuff drops off. There’s another three or 4,000. And then yeah, as you mentioned, daycare, that can easily be eight or 9,000 for a working mom, working family. And then remember, every dollar you save is worth about a dollar 40 because you don’t have to earn it and pay taxes on it. So Theresa and I have always been, we have never asked how much money can we earn? It’s how much money do we need? What’s the minimal amount of money we need to live on? And so we are very much what we call minimalists as opposed to maximalist. And I challenge people to figure out how little you can live on instead of seeing how much money you can earn,

Anna Sakawsky:

Right? The more you earn seems like the more you spend. So, okay. You touched on a few things there when we were talking about what has driven people to the home setting movement. You mentioned health, you mentioned this idea of wanting to take back control of our family’s resources, all that sort of thing, disentangle from the world. So I want to go through some of these things one by one. Let’s start with health. So I mean, obviously many reasons why people are coming back to this, but I think we’re in a unique time in history where we’ve got, again, multiple crises overlapping, and even just with the physical health crisis. We’ll talk about mental health in just a sec, but even just with the physical health crisis, I was looking up some stats before we got on, and this is according to the CDC. So around 75% of adults, this is 18 plus, have at least one chronic disease.

Over 50% have two or more, roughly 70% are on at least one pharmaceutical and 20% have used at least five pharmaceuticals in a 30 day period. Last 30 days, over 40% of adults are considered to be obese, roughly 20% children age two to 19 are obese. And then we could get into more statistics around specific chronic diseases and health issues that we’re facing. But these are some startling numbers as is. So first of all, what do you think is the main driver of these issues in today’s world? And then let’s talk about the different ways that home setting could offer us a tangible solution to this physical health crisis, specifically starting with the actual food that we’re growing, but also some of the other physical health benefits of this lifestyle.

Joel Salatin:

Well, the first one that comes to my mind is just getting out and getting dirt under your nails. Finland leads the world right now in connecting the dots. They’ve done some magnificent double-blind studies comparing rural kids, rural kids, overall health to their city cousins. Sometimes it’s literally cousins and sometimes it’s not. But anyway, what they’re finding, what they’ve found over and over and over is that these little toddlers that grow up putting some cow manure in their mouth, they’re out in the barn. How a toddler, they got to taste everything. Everything goes in the mouth, but they got a lot of slobber to go with it. So that’s a good thing.

And so they’re actually doing this, and that in and of itself creates immunological exercise. There’s a ton of medical doctors and others in the medical professions who signed on years ago to the hygiene hypothesis. And the hygiene hypothesis says that your immune system is essentially like a muscle and it needs periodic exercise. And when you live in a completely sterile antimicrobial, everything’s got to be clean, clean, clean, clean environment. You actually develop a very lethargic immune system that then when it encounters some dust or encounters a virus or anything, then boom, you’re under the sickness. And so I think one of the single biggest reasons for a homestead mentality, and if you don’t live in the country, it’s okay, take your kids to a farm, alright? Forget Disney World. Go visit a farm and let the kids run barefoot in the pasture and walk in the chicken house, gather some.

I mean, we let kids come here and gather eggs out of the nest box. I mean, they love it, but think about that. They’re actually touching. The unseen microbial world is billions and billions and billions, and they’re reaching into a nest box, touching an egg that came out of a chicken. Who knows how many microbes are on that? And of course, people that know me know I drink out of the cow tank all the time. And I do that purposely to keep my immune system robust. And I mean, I could get sick tomorrow, but I just don’t get sick. I’m known as the iron. I just don’t get sick. And so when we talk about health, to me, the number one thing is get out there, get your hands in the dirt, eat a little bit of it, waller in it, and get good and dirty because that is how your immune system actually develops. And that’s number one.

Anna Sakawsky:

Well, it’s so funny because it, it’s so contrary, I guess, to what we are told is good health nowadays, being overly sanitized and the proper hygiene and filtering everything from our water to our air to everything is the way to achieve perfect health. But I always think that too, that when we’re so overly sanitized, you can’t stop from coming into contact with germs or microbes forever. At some point you’re going to come into contact with some sort of sickness. And then if you’re not used to it, then that I feel like is when you’re much more vulnerable. Like you even talking about drinking out of the cow tank or whatever. And we’re not advocating for that. I just disclaimer here, but the reason you’re probably able to do this is because you’ve built up your immunity over time, right? Doing this sort of thing.

Joel Salatin:

I’ve traveled all over the, what’s called the developing world, third world, Mexico, Africa, Latin South America. And people say, don’t drink the water. Don’t drink the water. I’ve drunk the water every place. I’ve never gotten sick. Never gotten sick.

And so, yeah, I think that a lot of this physical problem is that then when you go into obesity, look, you don’t get obese from eating out of the garden. You get obese when you’re chowing down on Doritos and lace potato chips and you’re eating ultra processed food out of the grocery store, those food chemists that are all leftover from the tobacco industry, they know how to manipulate food and make you crave it. They stimulate craving. That’s the whole point. I can’t just eat one. I’ve got to eat 2, 3, 4, and you can’t stop. And so eating without satiation really brings on the, and sugar, I mean, Coke, soft drinks, whatever, you can drink raw milk till the cow, good pun till the cow, you’re not going to get obese drinking raw milk, but five cokes a day might, if it doesn’t make you fat, it’ll at least give you diabetes. So when you get out on a homestead, you encounter nature, you encounter the dirt, you sweat, you’re working, you’re playing outside, you’re in the fresh air, sunshine. I mean, there’s another one exercise. You’re gardening is exercise. You’ve got a hoe and you’re stooping over, you’re bending, you’re keeping yourself flexible, and you’re eating real whole foods. You’re eating full raw stuff.

Anna Sakawsky:

And I feel like so much of it is how we’ve been marketed towards whether it is these guidelines, these health guidelines are being set, saying there was something recently in the past couple of years where they were saying that some lucky charms or something was more nutritious than beef. It just seems crazy. But when people see these things, this is the official guidelines, they believe it. Or raw milk is another one where there’s a lot of controversy. I’m up in Canada and it’s illegal across the board here. And I tell this story that last year when we were on our way back from the modern home setting conference in Idaho, because raw milk is legal there, so I got some, I said, I didn’t get it off some shady dealer on the corner or on the street. I went into a little supermarket and I bought some and brought it home.

And I had mentioned something about it, and I had somebody in my life who was really upset with me and really concerned that I was going to give my children something that was deemed dangerous by the government. And so if they say it’s dangerous, then it’s dangerous, but would not bat an eye. I mean, given my kids a Coke, I mean, yeah, I agree with you. And I think that that’s where so many of certainly the physical health issues stem from. But that’s not the only thing we’re struggling with. We’re struggling with a mental health epidemic as well, right? Yes.

This is a big thing that we’re talking about nowadays. So again, I looked at some of the numbers, and so roughly 13% of the overall population, so this is an average, this is 12 and up have reported a major depressive episode. That number is even higher in kids or adolescents age 12 to 17 with over 20% having had a major depressive episode. And this is major depressive, and this is the things that are reported. Anxiety is also growing. There was that book that recently came out that I read, the Anxious Generation and how our smartphones and technology and everything is causing anxiety, especially in our kids. We are also facing something called our many are calling the loneliness epidemic, or that’s affecting folks across the board, all age ranges, races, ethnicities, both females and males pretty equally, where people are feeling isolated and alone. Plus, we’ve now got people increasingly reporting feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness having a lack of purpose. And this is now kind of culminating in this whole advent of AI technology taking over people’s jobs. And there’s a lot of talk this too about how well people aren’t going to have a reason to get up in the morning. People aren’t going to have any purpose if AI takes their jobs. How do you think homesteading fits into this kind of poly crisis of mental health issues? How can homesteading be a solution to some of these mental health issues that we’re facing right now?

Joel Salatin:

Two things, things. I would say number one on self-worth, and you mentioned a bunch of this stuff that broadly is about self-worth. How do I view myself the number one need of the human? I mean, people can say it’s to be loved, but I don’t think it’s to be loved. I think it’s to be needed. Number one, the thing that keeps us going is to be needed. I mean, how many studies have shown that geriatric people with a pet on average live like two years longer than their counterparts without a pet? Why I got to get up and feed the cat? I mean, so being needed is really critical. And so what that leads to then is if being needed is the number one whatever catalyst for wanting to get up another day, then self-worth or being worth something because I’m needed is part and parcel of that. So I think that self-worth comes from successfully accomplishing meaningful tasks. All four of those words are important, successfully accomplishing meaningful tasks. And the beauty of a homestead is that there are a lot of meaningful tasks that need to be done, and you’ll fail at some, but you’ll be successful at a bunch.

All the tomato plants aren’t going to die. If you plant 20 seeds, 18 of ’em are going to sprout. All the chickens aren’t going to die. Some of ’em are going to lay eggs, all the cooking from scratch, you’re not going to burn everything.

Anna Sakawsky:

Going to have some successes in

Joel Salatin:

There, you’re going to have some success. And I think you’re exactly right, especially with the teen suicide epidemic we have right now. It’s always, well, I’m not needed. I’m not good for anything. And what we’ve done is we’ve raised this kind of, everybody gets an a generation with where we look at our kids and we say, well, Johnny’s a good boy. Amy’s a good girl. And the natural question is when the child gets patted on the head and says, you’re a good little boy. You’re a good little girl, is well good. Well, good for that’s the natural next thing, good for what can I do? How do I feel a need? How do I feel a niche? And so self-worth is part, I think of this ability to know how to gut a chicken, how to fry an egg, how to prune a peach tree.

I mean, these are basic, visceral, participatory skills that make a person feel like they’re worth something. I’m worth something. I know how to do this, that or the other. So that’s number one. Number two is that when you’re on a homestead and you’re dealing with plants and animals, you are encountering unconditional love. Now, I know this is a stretch for some people to think about. A tomato plant loves you, but when you go tend that tomato plant, that tomato plant doesn’t say you’ve got big ears. It doesn’t say you’ve got acne. It doesn’t say you are not pretty.

Now the tomato doesn’t speak audibly, but the tomato plant responds to you and to your care unconditionally. And of course, when you move to animals, I’m a livestock guy, we have our garden, but I’m a livestock guy. One of the most amazing things about animals is they’re unconditional love. I’ve never gone out to move the cows and the cows look at me and say, I don’t want to move today. No, I mean, they’d sw their tails, their ears perk up. And they come, when I call, oh boy, we get a new pasture today. I’ve never moved a shelter full of chickens. And the chickens all sit back hovered in the back saying, well, I don’t want to go to a new spot. There’s crickets and grasshoppers there. I don’t want those things. No. People ask me, why are you so happy? One of the reasons you’re so happy all the time. I say, I get up every morning and I get to make all these beings happy. How many people get to viscerally make this many beings happy every day? I mean, they dance for you.

And so the cow never complains. The pig is always happy to get a belly rub, and that is unconditional love, which also when you work with animals is that you learn how to move gently. And you learn that if you’re loud and abusive, they run away from you. And if you want them to cuddle up and come to you, you’re gentle and you speak loving things. You don’t censor them, you don’t de platform them. These life threads go through everything. And it breaks my heart that so many children don’t ever encounter the response of, for example, chicks. When you put new feed in the feeder, all of them, they come. And to see that kind of response. I mean, our son, Daniel, whom of course Teresa and I went to get a conservation award. He was eight years old. I remember it like yesterday. He was eight.

We had to leave the farm for a couple of days and we left him here with my mom. Dad had passed away. Mom was here and we had a hundred cows. He was eight. He handled the farm and moved that herd of a hundred cows by himself while we were gone. And to go out there as an 8-year-old, make the call and watch a hundred thousand pounds of animals voluntarily come to you in your call, that’s a big deal. That is a big embrace. That’s a big embrace. So my two things from the mental standpoint are a successfully accomplishing meaningful tasks where you actually develop, I’m needed, I’m important, and I know how to do things, meaningful things, not just video games. And the second part is this encountering, and I’m using that very, very broadly, plants, animals, just nature’s unconditional love and its response to our participatory involvement.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think of that often when I hear people talk about this idea of AI is going to take people’s jobs and they’re not going to have purpose. And I always think, well, with the lifestyle that we’re living it, yeah, it would matter maybe economically if I lost my job or whatever. But we would still have so much purpose. There’s so many reasons to still get up in the morning because we’re engaged and involved in growing our food and all the things that we’re doing. And I think maybe we need to change our mentality around what is purposeful, because I think that we’ve gotten, because everything is just, we’re in the age of convenience and we can outsource everything and order Uber Eats and all that stuff, that the only purposeful thing that a lot of folks have in their lives is the job they have to get up and go to.

And even that for a lot of people is not super meaningful or maybe working jobs that they feel like, well, it wouldn’t matter if I was doing this or the next guy or whatever. And then if you take that away, then what do they have? And I always think, well, this could be a solution to that. Maybe it’s not necessarily even going to earn you an income, but it still gives you something to do. Same with retirement. And you see so many people that retire nowadays, and they end up going back to get another job just because bored, I can’t even imagine being bored. We’re so busy. There’s so many hobbies, so much stuff that we have going on. So I mean, I think that speaks to a lot of this idea of purpose and finding meaning. What about connection and this idea of loneliness?

And I mean, you spoke to this a little bit about having connection with the animals in our care and the plants and the things we’re doing, but home setting can sometimes be a little bit isolationist in nature depending on how we approach it. There’s often an idea, especially with people that are just starting out or who are maybe like, Hey, I want to disentangle from the system. I’m going to go off in the woods and build myself a cabin and do this all by myself, and I’m never going to need anybody or see anybody ever again. So how do you think connection plays into this and what is maybe the right approach to home setting so that we don’t get too isolated?

Joel Salatin:

Yeah. Well, I think in general, our sense of isolation has come from screen time. We don’t know how to carry on a conversation anymore. And screen time is not the same as being around a person or being in something. When Aldi Huxley wrote Brave New World in whatever it was, 1939, it was interesting in that brave new world, the whole goal of society was to keep everybody distracted, keep ’em all distracted, so they never have to think. And so you either had your job or you were entertained, you were in front of the TV or whatever. At that 1939, he didn’t envision the internet, I don’t think, but the concept, so everybody was always involved going down to the theater, the play, the movie house or whatever, in Brave New World. But the idea of everybody’s got to stay distracted, so they don’t think with intentionality. And actually, I think that our society is starved for what I call true isolation, true think time, true meditation, time, true being by yourself time.

And we don’t do that anymore in our society. Now, a homestead is a very, you have impose hermit hood on you because you’re always going to need help with something. You’re going to need help fixing the chainsaw, loading some cows, borrowing a trailer, borrowing a front end loader. There’s always going to be something. And so homesteaders by and large, or not friendless, they cultivate relationships and friendships just to survive, to be able to develop this, what I call a friendship economy. But beyond that, let me just say this about this whole loneliness and connection thing.

There are a few things as exciting as trapping a raccoon that’s been in your chickens. And you go out there in the morning and there’s that raccoon, that infernal raccoon. He’s got his leg in a trap. And I mean, you talk about excitement that’s better than any rollercoaster ride, Disney, vacation, whatever it is, when you catch that critter. And so on the homestead, there are all these amazing other places of recreation and entertainment and excitement that the average person doesn’t think about, whether it’s the birth of a calf, the garden coming to life and this inert area, and suddenly it’s got lettuce and peas and green beans, and then the butterflies come and the honeybees come and they’re all over the flowers. And I mean, it is an incredible place of excitement, entertainment, just being in nature and the vibrancy, the life vibrancy of nature. And so I can tell you, I love being by myself. I’m out. I’m watching the birds, I’m watching the cows. I’m thinking about things. I’m looking at that crooked tree, that man, I should get the chainsaw, take that crooked tree out so the straight one behind it can grow better. And I mean, there’s a ton of things that bring you excitement and purpose and needfulness in that arena

Anna Sakawsky:

And connection to something bigger, I’d say, too. Right, exactly.

Joel Salatin:

That’s why I love children and gardens, because when you’re playing a video game, I’ll pick on video games. When you’re playing a video game and you’re driving your car and your car wrecks in about two seconds, the game gives you a new car, you jump in your car, you go on. And nature’s not like that. You plant that tomato and it gets a disease and wilts falls over the garden doesn’t give you another tomato plant. And I think that’s so vital for children to understand as you connect, that it’s not all just fun and roses. It’s not all fun and games. And that includes encountering death, whether it’s butchering animals for food or whether it’s encountering the death of plants that get sick in the garden or whatever, to actually encounter death. That’s all part of creating emotional immunological functionality emotionally to handle hardship and to handle the not fun days

Anna Sakawsky:

And emotional intelligence even. Right. Just yeah, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, what about the connection with other human beings? Because that is important too. And I think you say, well, I’m happy to be alone, and I feel the same way. And I think a lot of people in that are in this kind of home setting movement feel. Similarly, I think a lot of us would maybe be self-described introverts and enjoy our own company, but there is this feeling sometimes of lacking a larger community or especially with people that are new to home setting, where they deal with this pushback maybe from people in their life going, well, you’re crazy, and what are you doing? And they almost feel like a bit of an outsider and they don’t have a support system around them. What would you tell those people and where might they find some of this community? We are out here, clearly, we’re

Joel Salatin:

Here. Absolutely. Well, in order to have friends, you’ve got to show yourself friendly. And so if you sit around sucking your thumb and waiting for the world to come beat on your doorstep, you’re probably going to be a little bit of a hermit and maybe a little bit lonely. But if you pick up the phone, go down the road, take a dozen eggs down to the neighbor and say, Hey, come up for dinner, you’d be surprised what’s out there. So yeah, I think, man, of all the homesteading problems to solve, I think this is probably the easiest solved. And the one that I think generally the homestead loneliness issue or lack of socialization is perpetrated more by people who aren’t homesteaders than people who are, at least in my experience. Because once you make that jump, you’re excited and you meet other people that have made that jump. And next thing you know, your kids are playing together and you’re doing play dates, and the boys are building forts and be sexist here. But anyway, the kids are playing together, and the next thing you know, you’re best buddies. And that happens generally. I think the idea of lack of socialization is primarily a construct of people who actually haven’t made the jump and are trying to justify to themselves why they shouldn’t and using that fear as a way to stay in their rut.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, it is interesting. It makes me think of, we are in a little neighborhood, like I say, we’re on a quarter acre and we’re kind of just rural, but we’re still in a little cul-de-sac area. And I grew up in the city where we are literally on top of our neighbors and didn’t know each other. Yeah. So even in a crowd, you can be lonely. But what I have found is that by growing food and doing things like that, it’s actually offered us kind of, I don’t know if I want to say an excuse, but a means to connect with others. So if I bake a loaf of sourdough bread, I got an extra one, whatever, I’ll bring it over to the neighbors, or here’s some tomatoes from the garden. Technically, we’re not supposed to have roosters on under an acre here. And we hatch some chicks this spring.

And to this day, we actually still have two roosters, which we’re not supposed to have, but we’ve brought all the neighbors some eggs and said, thanks. We haven’t quite dealt with them yet. And actually, it’s funny because all the neighbors, every single one of them has said, oh no, it’s no big deal. We actually love hearing them, and we’ve just offered the eggs just as a thank you. But in return, we haven’t expect anything in return. But almost every single one of those neighbors, first of all, has given us something in return just, Hey, I make some soap. Here’s some soap. Hey, here’s some bulbs out of the garden, whatever. But beyond that, it’s allowed us a way to connect that maybe I wouldn’t have gone and knocked on someone’s door just to say hi, but when I can say hi with a carton of eggs, almost gives you a reason to go break the ice. Right? You’ve got something tangible.

Joel Salatin:

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. When EF Schumacher wrote Small is Beautiful, that’s an iconic book from several decades back. He said, if you want to get lost, go to the city. If you want anonymity, go to the city. That’s where you can get lost. But he said, if you go to the country, he said, everybody knows the car you drive. They know your routine, they know where you are, and they’re watching out. And if they don’t see the car for three days, they come over looking for you. You can’t be anonymous in the country, but you can be anonymous in the city.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, for sure. Okay, so let’s talk about the third crisis, if you want to call it that we’re in. And again, I would call it a poly crisis because it’s many different things working together. And that is this kind of overarching notion that we are in living in precarious times, right? We’re facing the real possibility of everything from wars to environmental catastrophes, to supply chain issues, economic uncertainty, government overreach, and control of every aspect of our lives. So you touched on this a little bit earlier when we talked about what you think has been driving people into the home setting movement and wanting to disentangle. But a lot of people still, when we think about solving these global problems or these existential threats, people still look to governments, corporations, technology as our savior. Many people feel powerless in the face of these large scale crises, thinking that I’m only one person, I can’t make a real difference. And a lot of people think, so what’s the point? But you kind of argue that real change starts at home, happens on a household level. So why do you think that what we do in our homes and on a personal scale is so powerful? And do you think it only benefits us and our families and maybe those close to us, or does it have a larger ripple effect outward?

Joel Salatin:

Well, that’s loading the deck. Of course, I’m going to say it has a larger ripple effect. Probably one of the most eloquent writers on this particular topic is Wendell Berry and Wendell Berry. He talks about there are no global issues, there are only local issues. And of course you have the Chinese proverb that if everybody sweeps in front of their own house, the whole world would be clean. And then you have the other little proverb about the guy walking along the beach, and there’s all these crabs that have washed up on the beach and they’re dying. And he reaches down, picks up one, throws it into the ocean, and the guy walking with him chis him and says, there’s thousands of crabs here. What difference does it make if you throw one back in? And a guy looked at him and said, well, it made a difference to that crab.

We’ve got all sorts of really neat little wise, profound anecdotes, thoughts, but the biggest probably lie in the world is the Kevin Costner lie, that if you build it, they will come and you have to compel them. I mean, Jesus even said, go into the hedges and highways and compel them to come in. And so what we have to do is build our homestead, do what we want to do, but then preach it, promote it, explain to people the satisfaction, the satisfaction that comes with what I’m doing. Why do I milking this cow? Look, if you’re walking around saying, oh man, I got all these chores. I got the cow to milk eggs together. I got to weed the green beans. Boy, that’s going to attract a lot of people. But if you come at it from a man, have you had raw milk? Have you had home canned green beans?

Have you had, and you start promoting this among people, it’s a big deal. And so The biggest lie is that everything can change, but I don’t have to. And we point our fingers well, if those people over there would just do what’s the right thing, and those people over there would just do the right thing, and those people over there would not be corrupt and whatever, and we’re finger pointing all around all these things. Meanwhile, we’re chowing down on Coca-Cola and Doritos, squeezable Cheese, Lunchables, and Hot Pockets. Nothing’s going to change. And so the cumulative effect of lots of individuals doing the right thing has a massive effect on society. I mean, I’m thinking of, for example, in 2020 when a million backyard flocks of chickens started a million flocks of backyard chickens. Now let’s say the average flock was six chickens. I did a computation, I blogged about this once.

I can’t remember my numbers, but anyway, it came out to something like 8% of the egg market in the us. Well, well, you say, well, 8%, that’s not much. Actually, it’s huge because the margins are so tiny in the conventional food system. I mean, Kroger’s operates on about a 1.3% margin profit margin. The margins are so tiny that just a very small change. Sally Fallon, the Western A Price Foundation, talks about this all the time. She says, we don’t need to convince 50% of the people to make a change. All we need is 10%. If we have 10%, the whole house of cards with conventional agriculture would collapse. Just imagine if for one week sales at McDonald’s Burger King Hardee’s dropped off by 10%. It would make national news. I mean, it would be the topic of discussion of the whole thing. So we don’t have to think big, think small and think, and the contribution that you can make and the encouragement and inspiration you can be to somebody else, that’s the way discipleship works.

That’s duplication. We have this notion that if it can’t be done big, I just shouldn’t even try. And nature’s not like that. Nature doesn’t say, if we need more tomatoes, let’s make a great, great big monster Eiffel Tower size tomato plant. It says, let’s grow some more tomatoes. If nature wants more cows, it doesn’t say, let’s make a great, great big cow. Well, let’s make some calves. It births duplication for how things in nature, the way things scale is through duplication, not consolidation and centralization and concentration. And so that’s the industrial model. And we’ve been sold a bill of goods, I think as techno sophisticated industrial developed countries or cultures that we’re always thinking, well, if it can’t be big, it is not worth anything. Or if I can’t do this big, I shouldn’t start when actually the opposite is true. The way to start, the way to move the needle is with embryonic prototypes that are small enough to be birthed. The problem with largeness is it’s too big to be birthed, so it has all sorts of birthing problems being birthed. And so if we want new ideas, new paradigms, new infrastructure, new ideas to be birthed, they have to be birthed as small as possible. And that means it’s up to you and me to birth those ideas at our scale, our small scale, and then see them duplicate throughout the culture.

Anna Sakawsky:

That even makes me think that so many things came up for me while you were talking about that, but just the idea of a seed. One tiny seed grows a plant that then produces thousands of seeds, and then those thousands produce thousands more, and it becomes exponentially bigger than how it started out. And I think that this idea that, well, I’m just one person, but you’re one person in a collective of many, and so each one person matters and their decisions matter, and you never know when you’re going to be the tipping point or you are going to inadvertently spur something in somebody else who then pays that forward and so on and so forth. So yeah, I totally agree that it is, and it’s something that is tangible. I think things can feel out of our control and much bigger than what we’re capable of when we look at things on a macro scale. But when we bring it home to, but what can I do? What can I do today right here that is contrary to this is the world I don’t want to see. So how can my actions be contrary to that so that I can create a world? I do want to see,

Joel Salatin:

Yeah, we live in this time of defunding. We want to defund this, defund that. Well, we can defund stuff that we don’t like, and that creates market pressure, market power. So right now, right now, I can tell you that anybody, now, this is not specifically homesteading, but anyone who is in the alternative wellness thread, nature of paths, functional medical doctors, homeopaths, acupuncture, everything that I call it, the quack medical community, everything that’s in, they are all busy as can be. They’re all just why? Because people have lost trust in medical doctors through COVID. And so there’s an exodus just like there’s a homestead exodus from cities, there’s an exodus from the typical medical narrative. And people for the first time are starting to question the 70 vaccines you’re supposed to get before you’re 18 and all of these things. And it’s the same thing with food.

We are living in a crisis of trust right now. Every basic institution is now not trusted. And so if you can’t trust Del Monte to grow your green beans, well, what do you do? You either grow ’em yourself or you find a farmer to grow them. All of that is a homestead mentality because you are bringing out of the industrial sector something that used to be done in the home, and that is ultimately home centric, which is consistent with the idea of a homesteading mentality. We’re coming home instead home instead of going to the industry instead.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah. And it’s this idea of, okay, I’m going to produce this for myself so I don’t have to turn to this corporation or this institution to take care of me or produce what I need. But it also, like you say, it kind of creates this market pressure as well because when you’re taking those funds away, then from those companies that you would be supporting buying those goods from, and you’re producing them yourself, and then more and more people do that, then that hopefully does have a ripple effect that’s much greater where they go, Hey, we’re losing a lot of dollars here, and so we need to make a change in how we’re producing things too. I think that that’s probably one of the most powerful tools we have. Absolutely. Is our voting with our dollars essentially, right? Who we’re supporting and who we’re not supporting.

Joel Salatin:

That’s right. That’s right. Voting with your dollars is absolutely, I mean, for those of us that are libertarian free marketers, that is ultimately the way to change. And probably the best example of that in our culture was when in 1906, I know that’s been a while back. None us was alive back then. But historically, just to put the footnote in 1906 when Upton Sinclair wrote the jungle about the filth and the corruption within the meat packing industry, at that time, seven companies controlled 50% of the American meat market. At that time, seven companies controlled 50%, and within six months of him writing that book, and there was no government inspection, there was no government meat inspection, nothing. Okay? It was all in the private sector. But within six months of writing that book, those seven companies lost half of their sales. Americans left those companies in droves and went to their neighborhood butcher shops. It was the biggest exodus of away from industrial food in history.

Anna Sakawsky:

And

Joel Salatin:

Of course, if Teddy rki, I say Rki because he was really a communist. If Teddy Rki had looked at those seven executives and said, Hey, you guys made your bed now, lie in it. Fix it yourself. We’d have a completely different world right now. But instead by 1908, he gave them the food safety inspection service to bring credibility back to the American consumer. Now, the government stamps that it’s okay, and now it’s been so successful that now four companies control 85% of our meat supply, and we dare to call that the free market. So yeah, a free market, I mean, the market does respond if people get information and if they’re not censored and platformed and told to go sit in the corner, information does affect the way people make decisions. Absolutely.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah. Well, we’re definitely in an age where more and more people are waking up to this, and I think that more people are taking things into their own hands. Last question. In a world that does feel like it’s unraveling at times, are you hopeful for the future? What do you see on the horizon that maybe gives you confidence that the home saying movement can actually change our world for the better? And where do you see things going?

Joel Salatin:

Well, I’m a bit of a plus minus here, a yin yang or whatever you want to call it, because what I see is a juggernaut heading toward increased what I think is terrible stuff in our food system. I mean, now we’re replacing antibiotics in factory farming with mRNA vaccines, and we all know from COVID that there are some real repercussions from mRNA. And so well, this is a great talk about change in one thing for another. So we’ve got that going on. We’ve got, of course, a tremendous amount of precision agriculture, chemically based, I mean, we’ve got the effort right now. Right now as we record this, there’s a huge effort going on in DC to absolve all chemical companies of liability as long as the EPA says that the chemical is safe. And of course, this is initiated by Bayer who bought Monsanto, who still has billions of dollars of unsettled settlement claims from people that alleged they got Parkinson’s, or I’m sorry, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma from glyphosate.

Anyway, I won’t believe the point. The point is that there is the World Economic Forum, and that group has not surrendered or said, ah, I think let’s do compost instead of chemicals. So I see that element just marching on very, very aggressively. At the same time, I see the Homestead living movement, the freedom, the food freedom movement. I see it gaining steam. I mean, I was just in West Virginia yesterday, I’m sorry, Saturday and West Virginia, I think it might’ve been the first state to pass a raw milk law with no stipulations. In other words, no stipulations, number of cows, no stipulations of sales point, no stipulations of government oversight, nothing. Raw milk is legal in West Virginia. I mean, that is incredible. And so we’re seeing cottage, cottage food laws and things. These things are developing a step at a time. A county in California, actually I think it was Orange County, if I’m not mistaken. I just saw the article in Wall Street Journal. They’ve just okayed to allow people to sell uninspected processed meals out of their home kitchen without government oversight

Anna Sakawsky:

In California of all places. So that offers some hope in

Joel Salatin:

California. Now they can’t eat it in your home or then you’re a restaurant, so you can’t set up a table for them to eat in your home. But for takeout, we need to celebrate this. This is incredible that the government would say, you know what? If you want to go to somebody’s house and pay them to fix you dinner, you shouldn’t have to ask the government’s permission to do that. Let’s just let that happen. And so that’s a major thing. So I see that on the other end of the spectrum as, and what drives it is in cultural adaptation and evolution in culture, what you often have are these two elements balancing each other out. As you become more and more atrocious on the one side, you have the atrocities on this side, germinate the backlash on this side. And so where do I see things going?

I mean, I see things continuing in this direction for a while, and who’s going to get the ascendancy? I don’t know, in the final analysis. So I’d close with, I finish it with this. I’m actually pretty pessimistic about the way the world’s going. I mean, revelation is still in the Bible, and so I’m quite pessimistic about the overall, the way the world’s going, but I’m extremely optimistic about what individuals can do within that context. That’s what the homesteading movement is all about. That is coming out outside the camp, come out from among them and be separate sayeth the Lord. It’s building our alternative lives within a destructive, destructive context and building a life of flourishing outside the camp in our own tribe, in a parallel, in a parallel Abundancy versus the Pal Mel dysfunction and destruction. I think that’s heading in the overall place. So don’t depend on your 401k, put your money in skills and in relationships and in land and in trees and gardens and chickens, and processing equipment and woodworking equipment and chainsaws and things that are actually physical that actually have intrinsic wealth, not paper wealth. And if we start doing that on a pretty dramatic scale, there will be more and more support and help for folks who come a little bit later.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, that’s fantastic. Wise words. Well, Joel, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. This conversation has been a grounding reminder that home setting isn’t just about growing food or raising animals. It’s about growing people. It’s about growing resiliency. It’s about growing connection to something bigger, meaning purpose, all those things. I know listeners are going to walk away inspired to take the next step no matter where they are. So thank you again for being here. It’s been a real pleasure.

Joel Salatin:

Thank you, Anna. It’s great to be with you.

Anna Sakawsky:

Awesome. And if you like this episode of The Coop, you love Homestead Living magazine, so much more than just a gorgeous home setting magazine. It is your always available home setting mentor in print, written for homesteaders by homesteaders homestead. Living is filled with the advice, wisdom, and inspiration you need to make your homesteading dreams a reality. So you can start your subscription to Homestead Living today by visiting homestead living.com/subscribe, and I’ll see you all next time on the Coop.