E46: Government Overreach, Local Action, and Real Food Defense | Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms

Joel Salatin is back to share why he’s taking a bold stand against federal overreach—and what really happens when the government comes knocking. From eye-opening bird flu extermination tactics to a surprising call from RFK Jr., Joel breaks down the growing pressure on small farms, who’s profiting, and the natural solutions being ignored. He also challenges the myth of total self-sufficiency and makes a compelling case for building strong, local community ties. Whether you’re in the thick of farming or just passionate about food freedom, this conversation will inspire you to think differently—and take action right where you are!

In this episode, we cover:

Why Joel is taking a hard stand against federal overreach on his farm
The shocking methods used in bird flu extermination
How a sheriff’s bold promise gave Joel the confidence to push back
The surprising call Joel got from RFK Jr. and how it sparked national momentum
Why small farms are getting squeezed out—and who’s profiting most
Natural, non-vaccine treatments for bird flu that no one wants to talk about
The real reason some hatcheries are canceling your meat bird orders
Why building your “farm team” might matter more than being self-sufficient
Practical ways to serve your community now—so they’ll show up when it counts
What really happens when the government shows up without a warrant

Thank you to our Sponsors!

McMurrayHatchery.com | A wide selection of poultry breeds and supplies to assist you with raising your flock

Nutrimill.com | High-quality small kitchen appliance products that function well, are easy to use, and promote healthy eating

About Joel

Joel Salatin calls himself a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer. Others who like him call him the most famous farmer in the world, the high priest of the pasture, and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson. Those who don’t like him call him a bio-terrorist, Typhoid Mary, charlatan, and starvation advocate.

With 12 published books and a thriving multi-generational family farm, he draws on a lifetime of food, farming, and fantasy to entertain and inspire audiences around the world. He’s as comfortable moving cows in a pasture as addressing CEOs at a Wall Street business conference.

He co-owns, with his family, Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia. Featured in the New York Times bestseller Omnivore’s Dilemma and award-winning documentary Food Inc., the farm services more than 5,000 families, 50 restaurants, 10 retail outlets, and a farmers’ market with salad bar beef, pigaerator pork, pastured poultry, and forestry products. When he’s not on the road speaking, he’s at home on the farm, keeping the callouses on his hands and dirt under his fingernails, mentoring young people, inspiring visitors, and promoting local, regenerative food and farming systems.

Salatin is the editor of The Stockman Grass Farmer, granddaddy catalyst for the grass farming movement. He writes the Pitchfork Pulpit column for Mother Earth News, as well as numerous guest articles for ACRES USA and other publications. A frequent guest on radio programs and podcasts targeting preppers, homesteaders, and foodies, Salatin’s practical, can-do solutions tied to passionate soliloquies for sustainability offer everyone food for thought and plans for action.

Resources Mentioned

Watch The Lunatic Farmer by Angel Studios

Connect

Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm | Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

Government Overreach, Local Action, and Real Food Defense Transcript

Amy Fewell Welcome to this month’s Homesteaders of America member live stream. All right, so you guys that are coming on (it looks like there’s already people in here waiting), why don’t you just tell us in the chat where you’re watching from. The chat is for any questions you may have—that’s the perk of being a member. You get to actually talk to us while we’re on here. And I know that Joel’s a busy man, so we’re going to try to not keep him any longer than, you know, six hours today. But Joel, before I really dive into this, because I can never assume that people just know who Joel Salatin is, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Joel Salatin So our family came here to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in 1961. I was just four and with the idea of farming for a living. And dad was an accountant, mom was a school teacher. The outside jobs paid for the farm, paid for the land, the property. And dad sought counsel from everybody, both public and private people, how do I make a living on this small farm? And everything was plant corn, build silos, borrow more money, apply chemical fertilizer. And we had a rock pile, a gullied rock pile here, that was very poor land. So dad kind of abandoned the farming idea and we basically became what I call a glorified homestead. We grew a couple of pigs, we had big garden, we milked a couple cows, we basically went to experimental for 10, 12 years. And dad was a genius and started developing portable mobile systems. So then, you know, I’m in high school now. I’m figuring, how do I get back here to this small farm? And finally, you know, September 24, 1982, I left outside employment and came back to the farm, hoping to make a living, but not really thinking maybe we would, but Teresa and I had saved up. We were living in an attic of the farmhouse, and because we lived cheaply, and she is an amazing homemaker and canned 800 quarts of stuff a summer, and we out of the garden and we just… we had our own firewood and, you know, living in the attic, driving a $50 car, we were able to save half our paychecks and and in two years, we’re able to have enough that we could live one year without an income. And so I left September 24, 1982, came back to the farm and fully expecting to run through the little nest egg we had, but living on 300 bucks a month. And we were able to stretch that, stretch that like the widow’s cruse of oil, you know, it just kept on. And in three years, we finally kind of went over the tip point and realized, okay, now we’re going to make it. And today we do pastured beef, pork, chicken, turkey, rabbit, duck and forestry products. We have a sawmill and the farm supports about 22 full-time salaries. And we’ve been very blessed.

Amy Fewell Yeah. You guys, if you have not seen it yet, Angel Studios did a really excellent documentary on Joel and his family. We really enjoyed watching it. So you can learn kind of more in depth if you guys have access to that and if you want to watch it. I loved it. I thought it was educational and inspirational, and I thought they did a good job. So we really enjoyed watching that. But today we’re getting into some fun topic. Let me tell you how this came out. So obviously many of you know that I’m very pregnant and so I’ve just kind of like been in survival mode for the last few months. And so I received a text message from my head of security because we have a security team for HOA for our events, and he said something cryptic like, “By the way, tell Joel that I’ve got his back” or something like that. I’m like, “What in the world are you talking about? What happened to Joel?” And so I reached out to Joel and we had a discussion about all of the craziness that is happening right now in our nation and in the government and when it comes to food freedom. And so, I thought we could talk a little bit about that. Joel, I’d love for you to kind of share (only as much as you want to) the story basically of how your post came about on Polyface website. And then we’ll dive into kind of what I really loved was the email you sent back to me that talked about engaging with government, engaging with your community and not running away. So maybe start from the beginning and we’ll go from there.

Joel Salatin Yeah, well, as you know, the agriculture topic du jour is bird flu. And, you know in 24 months we killed… in fact now it’s higher. I don’t know what the last month has, another 10 million, but it is slowing down—the bird flu exterminations. But in 24 months, we killed 166 million chickens. We all know the whole egg price, the whole thing, has been dominating the conversation. And when you look at the strategy of it from USDA and from the powers that be, it’s pretty draconian, not only in the fact that they kill the healthy ones. You know, of all those 166 million chickens, probably only one to two million were actually sick. The rest of them have been okay. We don’t know whether those birds got it and got over it or whether they just never got it. But that has never been studied because the stamp out policy of the USDA has been if there is a bird that has it, all of its neighbors and everything on that farm, even if there are let’s say, you know, five Tyson chicken houses and only one house has one chicken in it, every bird on that whole farm gets killed. And just describing the killing mechanisms is horrendous. There’s two mechanisms. How do you kill a house of 20,000 chickens? How do you do that efficiently? And how they do it, they have two procedures. One is they turn off all the fans and the chickens get real hot. They just get real hot, there’s no air circulating and the chicken just slowly die of heat suffocation. That’s one way. The second way is they make soap bubbles and they go in with what looks like leaf blowers. Leaf blowers, except they’re blowing out foam. They call it foam but they’re basically soap bubbles. And they just come along and they foam the birds with these soap bubbles and cover them up. It looks like a snowstorm behind. And the bubbles are, you know, whatever, 18 inches high, enough to cover up the chicken’s beaks. And the chickens suffocate and die in the soap bubbles. So that may be more than everybody wants to know, but folks, this is, I mean, it’s insanity that you go in and you’ve got one sick chicken in 20,000 and you kill 100,000. If there’s anything that you want to do when there’s a sickness, you don’t kill the survivors. You keep the survivors, you breed them, and you let… Immunological and biological adaptation, you know… keep up with whatever mutations are happening on the disease side, because on the disease side, there are mutations and adaptations happening too, because, you know, the disease wants to stay alive as well and become more vibrant, more virulent. And so the way we keep up with it is to keep the survivors and to leverage the survivors so that we get more strength. So because of this policy, there is… these guys, they come onto farms without a warrant. They exercise their… If you have one, you now kill all your chickens. And so as we saw this developing, and believe me, they hate outdoor poultry. They hate anything that’s outside. It never occurs to them that maybe if they didn’t have all their chickens cooped up in a concentrated animal operation, maybe they would be healthier. But we began just feeling pinched. I mean, we went through COVID and look at the pressure from COVID. You’re going to lose your job if you don’t get the jab, your kids can’t come to school, all this stuff during COVID. And the same kind of mentality we saw developing on this bird flu front as it continued to get bigger and bigger and so we said, “Well, what are we going to do if, you know, a government agent comes here? And so I went down to our local sheriff (and he’s happy for me sharing this. I’ve checked it with him) who is a good man and went to our sheriff and presented him: how can we respond when a government agent comes and they want to check bird flu? Because we know they hate us. They hate outdoor poultry. They’re looking for a smoking gun in backyards and in pasture situations. So we had a chat and he said, “If anybody comes without a warrant, I’ll send my deputies and we’ll run them off.” So I got that commitment from him, which was a wonderful, wonderful commitment. But then he said, “But now if they come with a warrant, I can’t help you. I can’t protect you.” And he said, “What do you plan to do if they come with a warrant?” And I said, “Well, we will have a showdown at the O.K. Corral. We will contact all of our customers and friends and have them come and block the lane so the federal agents can’t leave. And basically hold them hostage and get media and cameras and let’s get this deal once for all.” These are our chickens, they’re not the government’s chickens, they’re the neighbor’s chickens, they’re not Tyson’s chickens. These are actually God’s chickens that we’re responsible for, and those chickens are expecting us to be a hedge of protection around them against nefarious agendas just like dad has to be a protective hedge around his wife and kids, okay? And so that’s our position. And so when I did my spring newsletter this year for our, we call it, you know, Joel’s Epistle. That’s what it’s come down to. I’ve been doing it forever—40 years. Someday I’m going to put them all in a book so everybody can see the progression of Joel’s epistles for these 40 years. But we do one a year. And so this year we did this bird flu and explained you know, kind of our position, our philosophy and let our customers know that you may get an APB, you know, All-Points Bulletin one day saying, “Hey, we neednsomebody to…” Because this is not a science thing. It’s not a biology thing, it’s not even a disease thing. It’s a political thing. And I don’t want to get into whatever, you know, conspiracies or behind the scenes or Bill Gates or world economic form, all that. I mean, you can go there, but I frankly don’t know. I’m not sure anybody else knows the back door. I will tell you, I think I can share this: that about three weeks ago, I was speaking at a conference somewhere and I got to the hotel room and my cell phone rang, and it was RFK Jr., Bobby Kennedy, and he said, “Joel, give me some talking points. We got to deal with this bird flu thing. What do I do?” And so, you know, that’s a pretty high level. And I took that as a privilege. I took it as a privileged and honor to be able to walk him through some of the, I think, the horrendous things that are being done in this space. And then I kind of got put on a 12 person working group to come up with kind of a white paper for Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, who, if you look between the lines, the extermination policy is beginning to crack just a little bit. And I think some of it is because of the pressure being exerted from this other side, which, by the way, includes medical doctors that were some of the key deplatformed censored doctors under COVID. Folks, it’s the same boat crossing the same river. That was people. This is food. It’s the same thing and so the lines are being drawn in the same political persuasions. And the disease paradigm, the disease idea, the disease theology, if you will, it’s like a cult. It is very, very similar, and so that’s what you have to remember, and that’s where we are. So that’s kind of the background and the short story, Amy.

Amy Fewell We’re taking a break from the podcast so I can tell you a little bit about this year’s sponsor, Murray McMurray Hatchery. Murray McMurray officially started his chicken business in 1917. He had always been interested in poultry as a young man and particularly enjoyed showing birds at the local and state fairs. He was in the banking business at the time and sold baby chicks through the bank to area farmers and hobbyists. But now, we know Murray McMurray as one of the top homesteader’s choice hatcheries here in the United States. They have all kinds of birds, from show birds to exotic birds to meat birds, because who doesn’t want every kind of chicken or poultry possible? They have ducks and all kinds of options for you. Here at Homesteaders of America, Murray McMurray Hatchery has supported homesteaders for at least the last eight years (or as long as we’ve been around) and beyond, since 1917. Make sure you check them out at McMurrayHatchery.com to get your orders in for the year.

Amy Fewell Yeah, I’m glad we waited a couple of weeks before we scheduled the live stream because it seems like, you know, Joel, you’re obviously an influential person when it comes to agriculture. And so people are taking note and reading your what you call Ramblings sometimes that are not ramblings. They’re very important writings. And so it’s really interesting to, you know… A lot of people in the farming and homesteading Ag world think, it doesn’t really matter what we say, right? Like we don’t have any influence, but we do. I mean, especially you who’s been doing it for a long time and especially people on a local level. I mean when you just speak up and you make enough noise, people pay attention and that’s what happens, right?

Joel Salatin Yes. Yes. And so what’s happened as I’ve… I mean, I was vocal about COVID very, very early on and got a lot of heat and pushback from that. And now I’m being very vocal on this bird flu situation because somebody has to engage the culture with, you know, with an alternative paradigm, an alternative view. And so I’ve had literally an explosion, Amy, of podcasts and things.

Amy Fewell I’m sure.

Joel Salatin I just was on… Maybe some folks know, I just was on Jordan Peterson. That was released on Thursday last week, I think. I was just on with Nicole Shanahan, her podcast. She was RFK Jr.’s running mate. I just was down at Glenn Beck’s studios in Dallas. They’re recording there. And so it’s like, I’ve been pushed into this… like the alternative bird flu, you know, spokesman. And so my pitch, if you will, to the culture, is a couple of things. Number one is, first of all, stop the extermination policy. It doesn’t make any sense at all and it just creates shortages. And a lot of times, a lot of times, when you talk to people even in the industry, yeah, you know, 5% went down. They had bird flu. But 95% were perfectly fine. On flocks, for example, that they didn’t get to in time or whatever. And the thing is, the government only indemnifies birds they kill. They don’t indemnify birds that are already dead. And so there’s a huge perverse incentive if you’re an owner as soon as you detect bird flu, have them all exterminated so you can get paid for them. The billions of dollars we’ve already now indemnified into the industry, interestingly, about 80% or more of those billions of dollar have only gone to three companies. Because see, farmers don’t own the chickens. It’s Cargill, Tyson, Purdue, Pilgrim’s Pride, Sanderson Farms, it’s those huge operations that own the chickens. So when you see they’re exterminating these chickens and then they pay a big indemnification check, that money does not go to the farmer. The farmer doesn’t own the chickens. Which brings me to the next point. The next point then is… So number one, stop the automatic stamp out policy. Number two is to allow the owner of the bird to determine the remedy. On our farm and for many of you watching, we’re not vertical integrators. We actually own our own birds. We’re not tied up with Tyson or Cargill or whatever. And so this becomes an extension of personal agency. Do I take the jab, do I not take the jab? Do I vaccinate my kids, not vaccinate my kids? You know, these kinds of huge questions. So we need to allow those of us who don’t want to participate in the government extermination program to be able to say, “No, I’ll take responsibility for these chickens.” And you know what? If they all die, it’s my loss. I’m not asking for a dime of government money. I’ll take the pressure. What this does is there are now several really, really good alternative treatments, and I’m trying to keep up with them all because they’re coming in. It’s pretty amazing. There’s a product called hypochlorous, which is an anti-viral, anti-microbial product. There is, it’s called chlorine dioxide solution, CDS. And both of these hypochlorous and CDS are drinkable. You can actually drink them, and they don’t hurt you, and you can put it in chicken water, and it’ll do it. The Wellness Company has an entire solutions kit that includes some providone, iodide, Tamiflu. I don’t even know how to say all of this, Azthromycin… Anyway, they’ve kind of got this little kit that you can get. And the thing is, these things are showing roughly 100% efficacy, even in birds that have it, or flocks that are showing it and they stop it. There’s a homeopathic protocol, another product that starts with a Q like Quinolin or something like that. Amy, all of these things are out here. They’re very much available and talked about in the unconventional community, but the USDA refuses to even run a test on them. They won’t even run a trial for efficacy.

Amy Fewell Right.

And so the bottom line for me on the whole thing is the whole bird flu experience, in addition to the COVID, has made me realize, I think, just how powerful the pharmaceutical industry is. It is so powerful. It’s just unbelievable. So the only thing that flies conventionally is a vaccine. So, you know, it appears to me… I don’t make predictions because I’m not a prophet and I don’t want to be a false prophet if it doesn’t happen. But the trajectory, here’s where I think the trajectory is going. The trajectory is going to where if they do think they have a vaccine, that hatcheries will be required to use it on all chicks. That they simply will not allow a chick to be sold that doesn’t have the vaccine, which then, you know, puts the onus on all the little independent hatcheries. It puts onus even on people like us that are, you know, we’re hatching laying chickens. We’ll hatch, I don’t know, what, 20,000 this year? And from our own, you know, you’ve been keeping our survivors for 10 years and they’re just really, really robust. So we’ll see where this goes, but it’s a real issue and I don’t want to overstate it, I don’t want to be a Henny Penny, but I also don’t want to stick my head in the sand and say, “Well, I guess it’ll go away on its own.”

Amy Fewell Yeah. Well, and you bring up hatcheries as one question that we’ve gotten previous to this live stream and something we’ve seen. So there’s quite a few hatcheries, of course, smaller, but even larger ones that are not shipping specifically meat birds this year. They’re not able to fulfill their orders. And so, I mean, we’ve gotten several emails from people asking where can they get meat birds because the hatcheries have canceled their orders. And so it seems like they’re keeping maybe the bigger farm orders, you know, the farms that order hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of chickens on up. But the smaller scale homesteader, even somebody only ordering a hundred chickens, has had their orders canceled. And the reason is, well, because of avian influenza, either the chicks aren’t hatching or the hatchery isn’t great or they can’t get access to even hatching eggs to hatch chickens to ship them.

Amy Fewell So the broiler… So you got to realize there’s a tremendous bifurcation in the poultry industry. You’ve got meat birds and you’ve got laying birds. And it used to be, you know, 80 years ago that you had dual-purpose birds. You know, the old Barred Rock, the White Rock, the Buff Orpington, were called dual-purpose birds and the cockerels became, you know, meat broilers. I mean, Teresa’s grandmother always said that back when she was a little girl growing up in 1910, that if they wanted chicken for the 4th of July, they had to set a hen January 1 in order to hatch an egg, which was good because that was after the December 21st Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. And so by the first of January, egg production started coming up, because you got more light. And so then you had a couple extra eggs. Finally, after Christmas baking and all that, now we’ve got some extra eggs so we can let a setting hen set on some. And then they’ll hatch sometime in mid-February. And then by July 4th, you know, we can have meat chickens to eat. And that whole dual-purpose idea, just like the dual-purpose milk cow, is kind of gone with the segregation of the, you now, of the egg versus the meat movement. And most of the chickens that have been killed have not been broilers, they have not been young chickens, they’ve been the egg-laying chickens. I will put in a plug here for the American Pastured Poultry Producers Association. They are still finding meat chickens, meat chicks, for people. And so I urge folks to get on the American Pastured Poultry Producers Association, that’s APPPA, website. And they are the, should I say that the counterculture? In the chicken movement and you might, you very possibly, will pick up something there.

Amy Fewell Okay. I’ll post that for people to check out. Okay. So going back to farm stuff and really community. You know, it’s funny because the last time we had you on the live stream, we had you and John Moody and that was a discussion about kind of the same thing, but a little bit different, you know? What if your farm gets raided? What are the things that you do? What’s the process? But this is a little bit different. This is little bit more obviously than just raiding your farm. And so one of the lingering questions from that live stream, which I know is transferring over into this live stream is, you know, the first thing is, when is enough enough? Which, I think you’ve addressed that, right? Like render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Those chickens aren’t Caesar’s, they’re yours, right?

Joel Salatin Right.

Amy Fewell And so from a biblical standpoint, no, you, you can’t have my chickens. On the other hand, how do you even go about pulling together a community and engaging with your community so that people actually will show up. And so I had this conversation with a guy on Instagram who was actually very mad that you posted about this and you got attention, but if he posts something like that, he would not get attention. And I had whole conversation with him. I said, “You have to be a servant in your homesteading community before you can expect to be served.” And do you have relationship with people in your farm community? Do you have a relationship with people locally? And so I wonder if you might talk to that a little bit more. Obviously you’re Joel Salatin, everybody knows who Joel Salatin is. But on the other hand of that, there’s so many smaller farmers who wouldn’t even know where to begin. How do you engage with your community? How do properly engage with the government?

Joel Salatin Wow. What a great question. I wish I had a clean recipe. You know, your team, I’m going to use the word team rather than community. Your team is you, I mean the people that are there on your place, physically, but also your team includes everyone within your sphere of influence. People you go to church with, your mechanic, your small engine repair mechanic, your feed store, your hardware store, and so what we have done over the years is every time we have some overage. Normally it’s eggs in the spring, okay? Everybody’s got eggs, “What do you do with all these eggs?” Years and years, decades really, in the spring, we’ll have extra eggs. We take eggs into our bank, where we bank, and say, you know, “Merry Christmas,” in the Spring, “Everybody, take a couple dozen eggs home.” We go into the place that fixes our car tires, our flat tires. We got a lot of, you know… Look, everything at our farm is on wheels. You know, we’ve got like 250 tires, you know. We take it to the tire place and those guys take a couple dozen eggs home. We take them to the place that fixes our tractor, take it to church, whatever. If you are participating in your local community, all these people can be considered part of your team and I realize that a lot of these intricate relationships that we used to develop are gone now because you just jump on Amazon.com and order it and it comes. Okay, well your U.P.S. Driver, have you ever given him a couple dozen eggs? Thank you, you know? I mean, I could go down a big list for us, but we’re not a backyard operation anymore. So I’m thinking of everything from, you know, the people that bring our feed, the guy that brings our ice to the farm, we had just had the ice truck this morning. We’ve had porta-potties. The porta-potty guy. Our woodchips. The guys that bring wood chips for us. Asplundh. Asplunda Utility Right-of-Way Cleaners. We’ve got a couple arborists who bring us wood chips. We give them a turkey at Thanksgiving that we butcher. We give him eggs in the spring. You don’t have to give them stuff all the time, but people really, really warm up to… Our culture is so starved for just a modicum of appreciation. That when you just smile, say thank you, and offer a couple dozen eggs to somebody, they will be your friends for life. And that will give you emotional equity like you can’t imagine. You know, go down to the government office, goodness, you can take them to the government… Give them to the land use taxation folks, the building inspectors, you know, take some stuff in there. I mean, build these kinds of emotional equity relational conduits. Amy, so many times people come to homesteading and they view it as a kind of hermit existence. They’re done with society. I’m done with education. I’m done with the bankers. I’m done with… And we’re going to come in, we’re going to circle the wagons and it’s going to be Matilda and me and nobody else. And you live and die by that. If that’s going to be your situation, you’re going live and die by that. I mean, even neighbors, neighbors, you know, we take stuff to neighbors. We interact with them. If a neighbor has something, we’ll go, you know, go to the shindig, go to the whatever it is and take some deviled eggs. You can eat deviled eggs anytime.

Amy Fewell Right! Yes, exactly.

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Amy Fewell Yeah, I think one of the biggest detriments to the homesteading community is the thought of being self-sufficient. And we talk about this a lot, that my family and I are going to live off the grid. We don’t like anybody. We don’t want to talk to anybody. We don’t want to serve anybody. And the reality is that that is not at all—one, the way we were created to live, and two, it’s just, like you said, you live and die by that. And you know, we have certainly had groups of people who, the opposite of that, is they want to create groups, right? And that’s fine, but they only want their kind of people in that group. And the reality is that when you have everybody that is bullheaded like you are, then that can be a problem too, you know? And so there has to be some diversity. We do exactly what you’re saying, too. You know, when we have extra raw milk, of course in the state of Virginia, you cannot sell raw milk, but we give it away. You know, if there’s somebody who needs milk, we have multiple families in our sphere that we just give milk to every week because they have lots of kids and, you know, they want raw milk, but, you know, maybe can’t afford a herd share. And so we have created this community mindset of servanthood, right? Like we’re not just here to collect people’s money. We’re here to truly change the culture that’s around us. And you don’t do that just by not interacting with people. You have to engage with people, you have to engage with your community. Of course, you can be wise about it. Like the Lord gives us discernment and wisdom to use and not everyone should be in your camp, right? But at the end of the day, I mean, again, you can’t serve fear either. You’re serving fear if you’re giving the vaccinations for avian influenza and killing birds, or you’re serving fear by isolating yourself in your own home and not interacting with your community at all. And so one of the greatest things is just serving others in your community. And those people will show up. I mean, we know without a doubt, you know, and we’ve had this happen before, like the fires that happened last year. You probably don’t remember because you’re not up here. But, you know, we had fires right here beside our farm and the people that are in our community just all jumped into action because there were cows that needed to be moved. There were homes that were going to get blown away by fire. And if you don’t have a community that you’ve truly cultivated, mostly just because of your character… When I was talking to this guy… You can just tell with people who just want, they just want. Like there’s people who just want, you know? But they don’t ever want to give anything. And it was like that, like, dude, you’re oozing this… Like you just want someone to take care of you and show up for you, but that’s not how this works either. And so I just encourage all of you listening to really be that servant first and not fear the engagement in your community and your neighbors. And yep, even sometimes the people you don’t like, we do that too. There are certainly people we I don’t care for that we still serve.

Joel Salatin Yeah, I mean, there are people in that that are on a completely different political trajectory than us. But like you said, you know, when push comes to shove and there are issues, if they’re on your side, they’re on your side. One of the best things that happened to us—when I look at kind of important breakthroughs—was when we were looking for apprentice housing here. And we didn’t want to go through a special use permit and get accused of having a pharmadisney and all the stuff that we knew that would develop if people knew we were going to build a dormitory for apprentices. And so I actually went to our elected board of supervisor and our local economic development guy. And I said, “Look, here’s what we need,” and they actually came up with this hunt camp idea that we have, and we built a hunt camp. The law doesn’t say what you have to be hunting, so at Polyface Hunt Camp, we’re hunting for the truth. And that’s been our apprentice housing, you know, from day one. But they also had, you know, if it floats in a pond, so a houseboat, it doesn’t have any rate. I asked them, “What can we build that doesn’t require any inspection or permits?” And so they sleuthed it for me and came back. I actually, I think both of them, looking back on it, were probably politically on the more liberal end of the spectrum, but both of them appreciated what we were trying to do and appreciated the need to try to germinate young farmers, so both of him came to bat for us. You know, it was real cool. So sometimes, you know, common issues make strange bedfellows, but you’ve got to cultivate sometimes the strange bedfellows to get a comprehensive—

Amy Fewell Okay, let’s go back to where you were saying you’re not going to let the agents leave your farm and all that fun stuff because, you know, that’s what everybody loves. “Yeah, let us go.” And then I’ll let you go after that. So one of the things that you guys talked about in the last live stream (which by the way, we’ll try to link that for the replay of this because that was a really great live stream too) was basically what you just said is” “if federal agents are coming to your property, what do you do?” And in this situation, it’s kind of like, enough is enough. And so one of the things that you guys have always talked about is basically exposing these people. You know, if you stick a camera in their face, if you call them out, if you get their names—you know, these people have families, too. And at the end of the day, they don’t necessarily want to be there in the news, you know, making a scene, although I’m sure some of them would love it. So I wonder if you might talk about that a little bit more in depth and kind of how do you navigate something like that? I mean, obviously my head of security is gung-ho and he’s like, guns blazing, “Let’s go!” But on the other hand, let’s start with the decrease and then increase from there.

Joel Salatin Yeah, well, the first thing is you can demand that they have to go get a warrant. 15 years ago, Amy, we had a huge bird flu outbreak here in the Shenandoah Valley in Harrisonburg. I’m sure you don’t remember it. You’re way too young for that. But they killed, they incinerated. I don’t know how many turkeys and chickens they killed, but it was millions here. And they sent 30 federal vets out here to round things up and run the the extermination program. And during that time, we actually had federal agents come to take blood samples from our chickens. They drove into the lane here and they drove right up in the yard on a Friday evening at 6:00. Unannounced, nothing, you know, drove right up. And we were actually having a picnic and a guy came and got me from the backyard and said, “You probably need to come out and meet these guys.” So I went around the front and they were here to take blood samples and they hadn’t gotten out of the car yet, fortunately. And I said, “Oh no, you’re not. You not coming back without a warrant.” And they said, “Okay.” And they never got out of car. They just started to back up, backed up and left. I fully expected them to come Monday morning and we had developed a protocol in which we would push that pretty hard. I was going to get arrested and, you know, and blah, blah, blah. I mean, so I was gonna demand that the sample could not could not leave my site because I didn’t trust them because we had inside information from the state lab that they were finagling with the samples to get positive samples. So anyway, they didn’t come back and as I’ve thought a lot about that incident, the fact that they left so almost eagerly, it’s almost like exactly what you said. They didn’t really want to be here.

Amy Fewell Yeah.

Joel Salatin They had a director, they had to go visit this farm, they checked the box, they visited, and they left. So they got to check the box and they didn’t have a confrontation. And so that’s helpful. So I’d encourage people to realize, you don’t have to answer questions, you don’t to speak, and you don t have to let them have access without a warrant. That’s number one. Number two is don’t chit chat with them. Listen, they are just drilling for information, drilling for stuff, and they do this every day. You don’t. And you will incriminate yourself faster… Something will be used against you. You can’t imagine what these guys can construe to use against you if they have a nefarious agenda. They want to do you harm. So the other thing that we do is we do not talk to them. If they come with a warrant, we do not discuss with them, we do no talk with them. We might say hi, but that’s it. We do the fifth, we don’t have to answer any questions, we don’t to say anything, and if you want to say anything, you send it to us in writing. And as soon as you say, “Put it in writing,” that slows everything by about 12 months, because they know if they put something in writing, now suddenly it’s admissible in court. Now they have to run it by the attorney general’s office and it just slows everything down. What you’re doing is you’re using their own system against them. You’re putting their own thing into their own meat grinder and their own bureaucracy and it slows everything down. So those are kind of two things that we have developed here as a protocol that we have told our whole team here on the farm. You cannot engage them in conversation. I don’t encourage people to shoot them or, you know, or do any physical stuff like that, but you don’t have to bow either. That’s what I’m encouraging. There’s a lot of latitude between bowing and acquiescing. You’ve got a lot of freedom between those two extremes, and so those are my two main things is the warrant and then the non-engagement, put everything in writing.

Amy Fewell Yeah, one of the things that we’ve learned very quickly, just from knowing people within the government or retired government, and even people who we have met who have had alternative agendas that we caught on to very quickly, is they love to talk. And seemingly, in the beginning, it’s all very nice. It’s all fluffy stuff, you know, let’s let’s act like we’re on the same team here and I want to help you. But in the long run, if you really pay attention, they start asking really weird questions that really actually don’t seem weird, but they really are when you think about them. And so they will literally do these circle conversations that have nothing to do with anything, but could kind of have something to do with what they’re there for and they’ll trap you in that. If they can talk enough and they can get you to talk enough, they will absolutely trap you. And so I love that point that you just made is not to talk to them and get everything in writing. It’s really sad, right? It’s so sad that we have to even think about these things, but there really is a war on food. And like you said, we could go into the whole, you know, WEF, New World Order, all of that stuff, and we could talk for days and days and days about that. But I think the reality is that most people in farming and homesteading spheres, at least in our spheres, are not inept to the fact that there is something happening. And the reality is that, yes, my prayer is it’s going to get better with the current administration and yes, you should vote in your local, you know… When all of these things come up in your politics and even more so, maybe even run for political positions. I mean, the reality is that there’s not a lot of farmers running for these political positions and maybe there should be more. But really preparing. I mean seeing these things that the writing is on the wall and things might get better for a few years and then they might go really, really downhill. And so my thing is, you know, start cultivating these communities now. Start learning different options now. If you’re concerned about, you know, avian influenza, not being able to hatch chicks or not being able to order from hatcheries, what can you do on your farm now to combat that in the years that are to come? At the end of the day, obviously, just like you, I can make predictions just based on what you see happening in the world and what the history of the world is, but I’m sure there will be a much broader attack. I mean, we’re kind of seen it, right? Like these little things that are happening, it’s almost like they’re just prods. You know, let’s prod here. Let’s poke this and see how far we can get. Let’s do the COVID thing again. See how far… It’s ridiculous how they still are trying to do that whole thing and now it’s animals and, you know, alien influenza wasn’t just chickens, like they really tried to push the milk thing too.

Amy Fewell Right. Oh yeah.

Amy Fewell And so, you know, raw milk and even pasteurized milk. And so it’s clear there’s an agenda. And now more than ever, we just really have to be diligent in all of these aspects—community, being involved in government, engaging in government and getting just infrastructure set up to where you can have a farm and still make a living and care for your community.

Joel Salatin There’s a lot of money to be made in dependency, and you know when Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, when his henchman, Harari, said that, “You will own no land and still be happy,” the unspoken part of that is that somebody will own that land. And so, you know, there’s a lot of money to be made in disempowerment and disenfranchisement and dependency. There’s a lot of money there. And I think what Homesteaders of America and those of us in this whole, you know, side of the culture believe is that we’re trying to claw back and insulate these graspy things from becoming any worse than they are. And that’s all part of our responsibility and our response to what we see that we don’t like. We can either be just whatever, angry and frustrated, or we can take all that angst, all that energy and turn it into something very positive by building local alliances and friendships and relationships so we can have some strength.

Amy Fewell Yeah, I agree. A friend of ours was looking for a land out here where we are and she had sent me a GIS map of this farm that she was looking at purchasing and literally thousands of acres around this farm belong to some random foreign LLC that we can’t even find any information about. And so it’s like people don’t think about it if they’re not doing research, but it’s true, like there’s so much farmland that’s already owned by these large companies that homesteaders and farmers couldn’t even begin to afford, right? And they’re paying millions of dollars for these properties, but I do believe in the blessing and favor of the Lord. I truly do, and I’ve seen so many farmers and homestedders get access to land and farms and start really restoring them and redeeming them for the time that we’re in and the times that we are going into. And so I still encourage everyone listening to not give up. There’s stuff out there. There is.

Joel Salatin Yeah, absolutely.

Amy Fewell Yeah, but that’s a whole nother story for a whole other day we could get on, but Joel. Anything else you want to say before I let you go because I’ve kept you for about an hour.

Joel Salatin No, I appreciate the platform. And of course, we all just love you to death, Amy. And thank you for your leadership and your prescience to peer over the brink, if you will, and help so many folks prepare and, well, just do better. Take more empowerment for their own situation. And so, yeah, it’s great. We can write up a list of things to be upset about, but at the end of the day, it’s all about taking all these things and looking in the mirror and say, well, I have influence over this one, this one, this one, this one, this one. I don’t have influence over this, so I’m going to let that go, but I do have influence over this this, this, this. And so we take advantage of that. We leverage it. So that when everything becomes hopeless and helpless, we can offer the world hope and help.

Amy Fewell Yeah, I have a friend who always says, “We can look at all the crazy things happening in the world, but what’s the solution?” There’s always a solution. What’s the solution? And ultimately, we’re part of that solution. And so if you’re complaining about everything, but you’re not doing anything, then you’re part the problem. Let’s try to be part of the solution. So thank you, Joel, for coming on here. Thank you for being transparent. Thank you for being an advocate in farming and homesteading and food. And just being a mentor to so many that you don’t even know, right? You probably haven’t even met all of these people that you have mentored in your life. So we appreciate you and I just bless you and honor you today, and thank you for coming on here. So, all right. Awesome. Well, thank you, Joel, and thank everybody for joining us. We hope that you have a great week.