➡ The text emphasizes the importance of investing in quality tools and equipment when managing a farm or a piece of land. It suggests not overspending on land or buildings, but rather focusing on essential items like good quality tools, garden hoses, and chainsaws. The text also advises on the importance of strategic planning, like where to place fences, and the need for diversification in farming activities. It recommends feeding oneself first, then considering what the land can yield, and leveraging the climate rather than fighting it.

➡ The text discusses the importance of diversifying products for customers, rather than focusing on one product, to increase customer loyalty and sales. It also talks about the concept of permaculture, a sustainable farming method, and its benefits, but also its challenges, such as the need for financial and business considerations. The text also mentions the use of certain farming techniques like no-till farming, letting cows feed the soils, and using deep wood chip mulch gardening. Lastly, it discusses the importance of practicality in farming, such as arranging plants in rows for easier maintenance and creating high garden beds for easier access.

➡ The speaker discusses the potential role of artificial intelligence (AI) in agriculture, expressing concerns about over-reliance on technology and the loss of natural skills. They also highlight the importance of maintaining a robust immune system in animals to prevent disease outbreaks, attributing past issues to their own management errors. The speaker advocates for local, GMO-free, and glyphosate-free farming practices, suggesting that these methods are less susceptible to issues affecting conventional farming. They encourage people to focus on solutions rather than frustrations to provide hope in challenging times.
➡ Joel visited a meeting where he discussed farming and consultations. After the meeting, he encouraged people to visit canadianpreparedness.com for quality survival gear at good prices, using a discount code for extra savings. He emphasized the importance of being prepared to thrive, not just survive.

We don’t even think about bird flu. We don’t think about all these bogeymen that the industry is concerned about. Our animals are so vibrantly immune. Everything that’s outside conventional channels is going to be less susceptible to whatever attacks conventional channels. All these disease and problems are because there’s something missing, some imbalance in the system. Don’t fight your climate, leverage it. Feed yourself first and then think of what that land is capable of. There’s a lot of things to feel frustrated about right now in our culture. But ultimately our goal needs to be to provide hope and help when the world becomes hopeless and helpless.

World War three is already happening. This is a house of cards and it is in the process of collapsing right now. You’re going to see an economic crash the likes of which we’ve never seen. The number of people who are exiting the system continues to escalate. There’s a yearning, the human soul to do something that’s authentic, that’s meaningful. Disentangle from the financial system, disentangle from the health system, the food system. Feel oppressed. You want to get out from under that. What other mistakes do you see people making when they try to become food self sufficient? Because I myself, and you’re probably going to come out to my place and you’re going to be like, man, you’re putting too much money into this.

You shouldn’t have bought that tractor. You shouldn’t have bought, you know, you should have spent all that money on this greenhouse, you know, because to get a return on these things takes years. What are some of the common mistakes that you see people making when they go on a property? Like what are some of the biggest ones? The biggest mistakes are. So if we say overspending on things lots of times, for example, on equipment you can, you can rent or you can borrow, sometimes your best investment is finding a neighbor with the kind of equipment that you want and having them over for dinner.

Develop a friendship with them. And you go over there, you trade labor and help him with a project and he comes over with his big tractor and front end loader and helps you with yours and you don’t have to buy a tractor or front end loader. I mean, again, Alan Nation, my mentor, always said if you’re not, if you’re not putting a thousand hours a year on a tractor, you shouldn’t own one. And a thousand hours is a lot. I mean, we routinely buy and we’ve got several tractors, but we’re at a scale where the tractor is valuable for us.

But we buy plenty of tractors. In fact, I sat on one at a used equipment dealer just a month ago. This thing was, this thing was 14 years old. It was a 20, it was a 2010 four wheel drive Kubota with a cab and a bucket on it. And it didn’t have more than 200 hours on it. So that’s a, so that’s a, that’s a $40,000 tractor that is now 14 years old that only has 200 hours on it. The, the plastic, the plastic covering on the seat, you know, for when it was new, hadn’t even worn yet.

It still had the plastic on the seat. But you know, this, this guy, he, you know, I just have to have it and, and you know, then he didn’t use it. So over overspending on, on buildings, machinery and fencing is number one. Number two is, is over. What would be the word? Over eagerness or, or doing, you know, starting too fast. Try getting too many things, too many half done projects. Half done and not completing things, trying to do everything at once. And so you’ve got, you’ve got to pace yourself because otherwise if you have several half finished projects where none of them is really efficient, you end up running around putting out fires all the time.

If you don’t strategically, for example, get your, get your water pipe in, then you’re going to spend all your time hauling water, carrying water and you’re not going to be able to get your other projects done. So there has to be. One of the things I do when I do consulting is I try to do a project roadmap. I do, I do a capital roadmap and a project roadmap so that, so that there’s a real clear path. Here’s what you need to buy, here’s what you don’t need to buy. Here’s what you need to do. Here’s what you don’t need to do from a project standpoint.

Because sometimes, sometimes, well, many times, not just many times, we, we get in our heads, well, I’ve got to do this. Well, no, you actually don’t have to do that. You need to do these other three things over here way before that. But we get it in our heads, you know, well, I need to do this and that’s, that’s where we run. And next thing you know, you’re, you’re, you’re fixated on something that’s non essential, but you think you told yourself it’s essential on my acreage. And the reason why I’m referencing it so much because it’s all I really, you know, have to, to understand this through.

But you know, I have a geothermal system which is incredibly complex and one of the things that keeps me up at night is I’m integrating all these systems that are incredibly sophisticated nowadays. It’s great to have these. But to call it off grid is somewhat of a misnomer because, you know, these things I, I have to have a, you know, a few guys coming out every other month to kind of tinker with these things. And what, what a lot of people call off grid nowadays really isn’t in the sense that it is so like there’s so many semiconductors inside my geothermal system.

I mean I was just looking at the thing gives me a panic attack knowing that if this thing shut off in the dead of winter, I’m pretty much screwed. Now fortunately, we have a fireplace, so. But it’s incredible to see what is reported as off grid becoming so crazily complex that. Yeah, yeah, it actually, it actually takes a lot of babysitting. So you know, we have, we have, we have a solar, we have three solar installations here on roofs and, and it’s not enough to run the whole farm by any means, but it is enough to run, you know, run the well and the, and the circulating pump for the outdoor wood furnace.

So you know, it can run and got battery backup, but it takes a lot of babysitting. I mean you got to cycle those batteries every month and all that. This is not a turn off. Yeah, yeah, it is, it is sophisticated. We just, we just by the way, had a benefactor that he’s, he’s into climate change and all sorts of different things and he wanted to, wanted to, he wanted to move forward with a electric tractor. He said if I got you one, would you use it? And so we spent four years looking for an electric tractor.

We now have the first electric tractor in Virginia and it’s the second one in the US From Connect. It’s a, it’s a Netherlands company, came, came through Ontario. There’s not a, there’s not a US Distributor right now. The only distributors in Canada and, and, and so you know, that, that was on our list of things that was one of our things. You can’t get fuel or electricity, but with our, with our solar array now we could actually charge the electric tractor so we can keep a tractor going even if we don’t have fuel. You know, so these are little, little incredible little things that you can do to try to, to try to reduce your, you know, your dependency.

But yeah, you’re right. A lot of these technical systems are so sophisticated. The average person just, you know, you’re just not going to fool with it. It’s too, it’s too complicated. Yeah, you’re definitely describing, you know, some of the, the things that I’ve encountered, you know, wanting to get all these things off the go because there’s a certain urgency to this, I think with especially people within the preparedness space, that we want to get it done sooner than later. But is it safe to say then that this should, you should go into this thinking it’s a multi year process in order.

Like if you’re being realistic about it, unless you have dozens of laborers and lot of money to throw out the problem, it’s going to take you a few years to really get established. Yeah, yeah, no question, no question. It’s a multi year process. And you know, and biology, you know, biological systems, trees, grapevines, you know, all these things, they, they don’t just grow in a year, you know, they, they take time to develop. You know, so your first thing is to, to get, to get on site. And, and that doesn’t have to be a Taj Mahal, you know, that can be a yurt, it can be a, an RV to save your money.

So you have the capital to do other things. What a lot of people do is they, they take, they have this little nest egg and they buy too big, too big a piece of land, build too valuable a house, and then, and then suddenly they’re out of money and don’t have enough leftover to capitalize the projects to get livestock or, or install fencing or a corral or have, have, you know, a cattle trailer to move stuff around or a good, a good chainsaw. You know, you end up buying a $300 chainsaw instead of the really good thousand dollar chainsaws.

It’ll last you, you know, many, many years. So, you know, where, where I want to spend money is in, is in really good tools. Good garden hose. Oh, that’s a, you know, don’t buy the cheap garden hose. Get, get the garden hose that you can inherit to your kids. Yeah, I didn’t know they existed anymore because I go through those things like water. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you, you can get good ones. Rubber, you know, good rubber, rubber garden hose. That’s a hot, cold, you know, it’ll cost you, it’ll cost you a dollar a foot. But, but it’s, it’s definitely worth it to get, you know, good garden hose, good tools, heavy tools.

You know, one of our favorites is AM Leonard. They’ve got really good heavy tools like a, you know, a shovel. You don’t want a cheap shovel from Lowe’s or Home Depot. Those things, they just break up and you want to shovel that’s got some heft and some weight to it. So you’re. So your tool does the work instead of you having to do the work. And is there any place you recommend to get that heirloom quality stuff? Not to, yeah. Advertise or anything, but. Well, a.m. leonard. A.m. leonard is, is really good forestry suppliers. Is good for.

They’re out of Mississippi or something like that. I’m not sure where AM Leonard is located, but those are, those are two, those are two pretty good, pretty good outfits for those kind of, you know, hardware. Hardware tools, those kind of, those kind of things. So yeah, it is definitely a multi year and, and you don’t want to get over your skis and have to tear up stuff. For example. Let’s take fencing, for example. My rule of thumb on fencing is if you’re not sure where to put fencing, don’t make anything permanent for three years. Use nothing but electric and then whatever, you don’t move in three years, make that permanent.

That way you let, that way you let function drive your form. And that’s a, that can be a game changer. Yeah, I mean, I guess fencing is dual purpose because it’s not only for keeping cattle in, it might be for keeping like quarters and things like that out. Yeah, where I live, you know, that’s a common problem is people trespassing. So, yeah, I’m in the process of setting up fencing as well. Trespassing where you live? What. Yeah, there’s, there’s people out here, believe it or not. Saskatchewan. Who’s, who’s, who’s coming after you? You’d be surprised at how many people have snowmobiles and quads and things of that nature.

Yeah, mostly in hunting season. I live in a, in a prime hunting property where there’s elk, moose, deer, you know, bear, all kinds of things that come through the yard. And is this a consideration that some people have when you do consulting security? Is that a consideration for you or are you primarily concerned about keeping the animals in? Yeah, I’m primarily concerned about keeping animals in. I’m not sure I’ve been on a place where, where they’re concerned about that kind of thing. That, that’s why, that’s why it piqued my interest a little bit. I’m not sure now.

Now, certainly predators, predators are Certainly an issue. And they, and they always have been. But the only place I’ve had were security were, you know, people security is an issue is in, is in Africa and, and, and Africa primarily, but also a lot of other countries, former Eastern Eastern Europe countries, you know, the old Soviet Union areas. Securities issue. Latin America and South America are both big places. You really, you really learn a lot to appreciate the kind of the, the U. S. Canadian, you know, British, British Judeo Christian ethic, at least there’s this underlying thing about property and, and you know, protection of that you get in some of these other places.

I mean, I worked with a group that did a bunch of pastured poultry enterprise in Zimbabwe and, and it was, it was a women’s, it was a women’s mission outfit and it was great that they, they had a great market for the chickens they could get feed. It was wonderful. But they could not get ahead of the roving bands of, of males, men that would, it would steal them. And so they just couldn’t get ahead of the security for the, for the, these folks that would come and steal it. And, and so, I mean, that’s, that’s why in like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, those areas, you know, they bring their chickens into their house at night because they, they can’t, they can’t even leave them in the yard or just outside the door.

Somebody will come and steal them. So, you know, this, this whole cultural ethics thing is. It’s a big deal. Yeah. Which, which if everything collapses here and breaks down, I think we’re going to see it. You know, we would see a lot of that here. Well, I think that’s what the prepper mindset is kind of fixated on. You know, there is definitely rural crime issues up here. Where I live, a lot of these communities who, who are no longer farming but were once farming communities, there’s not a lot of opportunities in these places. So a lot of people go to drugs.

And so you have, you know, a pretty significant rural crime element that presents itself. Yeah, but like, as you say, you know, when times are great, everybody’s getting along and you have a larger operation, so you kind of have a bit of safety in numbers. But you know, for the average person, that might be a consideration in terms of like the most productive uses of the land in terms of crops. And I guess this is going to vary depending on, you know, one’s plant hardiness zone. Is there like a focus, would you say? Like, is. Are chickens better than cows? Are fruit trees better than, you know, I don’t Know, pick your crop of, of choice.

Where would like, if a person was just getting started. And this is a very multivariate question because, of course, it really depends on where you’re starting and what, you know, the land will yield. For me, for example, I live in a place where you can grow a lot of grain and cattle feed and canola, but you can’t really grow peaches, you can’t grow citrus, you can’t grow a lot of things unless it’s 3B, you know, proof Plant hardiness zone. I’m referring to. What would you recommend? Yeah, well, obviously you’ve got to go with your climate. I mean, leverage your climate.

Don’t fight your climate. Leverage it. What does do well there? And there certainly are places where, you know, where it’s warmer or colder or those sorts of things. So go with the flow on that is my opinion. But the other thing then is feed yourself first. Whatever that is, feed yourself first and then think of what that land is capable of. I mean, you said you have. I think I wrote it down, 90 acres of prairie and. 90 acres of prairie. Well, prairie is far more productive through livestock, through an herbivore, than it is through grain.

Now, that’s counterintuitive because most people would say, oh, goodness, grain always beats herbivores, but not under good management. Under. If you’re, if you’re moving those cows every day and you’re doing good rotational grazing management, there’s no way grain will ever compete with that. So now you suddenly don’t have to have any equipment because you don’t have to plant it, you know, harvest it, store it, and. And you just have, you know, cows or sheep or something out there grazing it, you know, pastured poultry. I’m such a huge believer in pastured poultry now, you know, you’re gonna probably, you’re gonna buy your grain in from a place.

But again, in Saskatchewan, where grain is cheap, grain is probably 30% cheaper there than it is here. The advantage I have here is I’m close to a metropolitan area, so we’ve got markets. And so the advantage you have is grain is cheap, but you’re not as close to markets. So it tends. It tends to even out. The main thing, I will say is what you want is a balance of numerous things. You don’t want to put all your, all your enterprises. You don’t want to just have one enterprise. You want multiple enterprises so that you have a diversified.

A diversified portfolio both to eat and to sell. So, you know, there are people that have come to Us. Oh, you need to be the pastured egg producer of the Mid Atlantic region. Well, we don’t want to just be an egg farm. And so we want our beef and pork and chicken and turkey, all that, we want all that to kind of come up in a balance so that we can take the customer that we have and that customer can buy a more diversified portfolio. Could we, could we grow more chickens? Do we have land? Yes, we do, we can, but we don’t want to overrun everything else and just become a chicken place.

And, and so the, because then, then what we’d have is we’d have a bunch of customers that only buy chicken and don’t buy anything else. And then to get a new customer that can only get one thing, that’s a high cost of getting a customer versus what you can sell the customer. What you want the customer to do is be a multi enterprise purchaser where the customer can buy ideally vegetables and fruit and meat and dairy and all from the same place. Because getting the customer is the hard work. Once you have a loyal customer, you know, you, supplying a loyal customer is, is easy, is easy to turn that hundred dollar customer into a thousand dollar customer if you have more items in your portfolio to be able to sell.

So, so I, I’m not as keen on how much can I grow per square foot on this as I am on what, what, what is the cumulative marketability? What’s the cumulative marketability of what I’m doing? And a lot of times some diversity is, is so important. Like for us, for example, eggs. Eggs are our most price sensitive product because that’s every man food, people have it every day. Turkey is our least price sensitive. So we balance a little bit. We have some turkey and we have, we have eggs as what we call a gateway product because everybody eats eggs.

And then turkey becomes a little bit of a specialty product where you can increase your margin so you have a little bit of lower margin on your eggs, have higher margin on your turkey, but you’ve got the same customer that gets them both. And so that’s how you balance out your portfolio. So it’ so you’re not having to chase customers for just, you know, one to try to sell them one item. Do you believe in permaculture or is it a bit of myth that you can build systems that are largely self sustaining and independent? Is there a solution, a natural solution for every problem? I mean there’s pests, there’s weeds, there’s all of these, you know, challenges that unforeseen for many People who are just getting into this.

You talked initially about doing one thing at a time. And you know, I, I think what the problem that I’ve encountered in trying to put out too many fires is just that, is that there are all of these challenges that present and they’re always creeping, you know, they’re always increasing. And so if you focus on one thing, then you can kind of manage that one thing. But do you believe in the permaculture philosophy or is it somewhat romanticized? I think both things, yes. Am I a fan of permaculture? Absolutely. I think in general, the, the basic tenants, the basic tenets of stacking, hydration, biomass accumulation, perennials over annuals, those kinds of things are absolutely.

I think they’re immutable. I mean, they just are. They’re axioms that are immutable, unfortunately, as permaculture. So I love permaculture. And of course, you know, I, I’ve been a fan ever since I was a teenager basically of permaculture where, where permaculture, I think, has gotten maybe a bad rap or is that too many of the practitioners have romanticized it to an altruistic place where they haven’t really put attention on the financial and the business aspects of the thing. So most, most of the permaculture leaders, gurus, actually make their money teaching permaculture, not actually doing permaculture. Right.

And, and, and this is given it, unfortunately, given a bad reputation. But that’s, that’s not a disparagement of permaculture conceptually. It’s just kind of the way, it’s, the way it’s done. Maybe it’s because it’s attracted people that, you know, that, that enjoy teaching. I don’t know. I mean, it’s, it’s a wonderful, remarkable thing. But I, I do think that you can again, you can over complicate, you can over complicate design as well. And, and so part of your thing is like permaculture on a bigger scale. Like, you talk about no till farming. You talk about letting the cows kind of, you know, feed the soils and all of these things.

So there is a commercial component, but it’s just, you have to get it to a certain scale that it’s workable. And you know, I’m thinking of a food forest, syntropic food forest that I tried to build and I eventually just put it in rows because there’s no way to maintain it otherwise. You know, it’s like, you know, there has to be a degree of linearity and, and symmetry to it for it to be manageable, which is typically not in line with what nature would do. Yeah, yeah, I’m totally with you. I have a interesting little tidbit on that.

So I’ve got these, these current tomatoes that we put in over 30 years ago, one of our hoop houses. So we have hoop houses for chickens in the winter. So the hoop houses are full of animals. In the winter, animals come out. We can grow vegetables in there in the summer. And so we got these current tomatoes. They’re an heirloom, supposedly the original cultivar of all the tomato varieties in the world. And we put them in and we have never replanted them in 30 years. They just, they just volunteer. The seeds are so powerful and you never can pick them all and so you always lose some.

And so, so in the, in the bedding of this hoop house, they’re always there and they’ve come back every single year for 30 years. They have no pests. They don’t need any water. They’re just, they’re just bulletproof. And, and so, so when they come up volunteers in the spring, I go out and you know what I do? I, I pull, I pull out, I select the ones I want to keep, but they’re in rows. I, you know, I, I, I, I, I select when I’m, by the time I’m done, I’ve got about five rows of tomatoes and I’ve pulled all the volunteers out between the ones I selected, but they’re in rows.

Why? Well, because you can step in between them. You can, you know, you can get in there with it. Yeah, you can work with it. Yeah, yeah. So, so I’m totally with you there, there is a, you know, there’s a tension between, you know, between just the haphazard kind of let it go and listen, I’m a believer in, in the Back to Eden. Back to Eden. You know, deep, deep chip wood chip mulch gardening. We’re so, we’ve made our garden beds this year. Theresa and I are getting to the point where we don’t like to stoop over as much.

So we’ve made 30 inch high garden beds with old, old reused galvanized roofing. Cut it, you know, 30 inches and we put locust. We just went to the woods and cut some locust posts and made an out outside frame. And these things are, and incorporating hugelkultur. So we take the sawmill, sawmill slabs, we put the sawmill slabs underneath and covered up with dirt and compost and we have these Wonderful, wonderful garden beds that are, that are, that we’ve incorporated the deep wood chip mulching kind of thing with. But you know, they’re certainly not just a haphazard thing.

They’re on centers, they’re flared so I can dump stuff in with a front end loader of the tractor and don’t have to shovel it all in. I mean, we’ve made these very careful. But I’ll tell you what, they’re, they’re fun to take care of. They’re 4 by 8 and they’re 30 inches high. And they’re just, they’re like our latest gardening permutation in the last two years. And we think they’re gonna, they’re gonna take us into, into our old age. You know, they’re gonna really, I mean we’re, we’re both almost 70 and I haven’t been as excited about the garden for a long time.

But to have something that, that, that stable and works and is that tall, I don’t have to bend over is really, is really a fun thing. So. But, but it’s not just scatter stuff on the ground, you know, kind of permaculture style and let whatever happens happens. Or do you, what kind of irrigation do you do for your gardens? Do you do in ground or you do like a drip system or are you just relying on, you know, top watering? Yeah, we do have some sprinkler heads, you know, that we can run, run, you know, sprinkler heads.

But mainly, you know, we have the pond nearby, we have a good pump and we can just hand water if necessary. But again, with this real, real deep mulch, you, you almost don’t have to water, you know, it, it’s a, it’s, you know, it’s half, half the watering of, of normal. In the hoop houses we run drip, drip. Drip lines. Yeah, we run drip lines in the hoop houses. Yeah, good stuff. Now, in terms of like, I’d like to ask you some questions just about AI, because obviously this is going to play a big role in agriculture in the future.

What role do you think it’s going to play? And is it something that you’re averse to employing or will it be something that you incorporate into your systems? Yeah, I think the jury’s out still on this. I mean, is there some stuff that, that we would, from a research standpoint like to do? Probably, you know, what we’ve used so far is gps, you know, terrain stuff and elevation things for, for water design and stuff like that. But AI, you know, we’re definitely not, we’re definitely not going to use it to correspond with our customers. We’re not going to use it to answer the phone.

It’s being used more in diagnostics and there’s lots of apps that will tell you, you know, what’s wrong with the plant, what’s wrong with an animal. I guess there’s a risk that those natural abilities in people will diminish if they become overly reliant on, you know, a tractor that knows what part of the land to mow. And you just push a button and it goes and does it. Right, right. Well, well, I don’t, I don’t have a smartphone. Okay, step one, I’m, I’m still, I’m still on the, on, on the flip phone. So, so, yeah, I don’t, I don’t know where, where AI is going to go.

I’ll just say this about AI. The, the, the algorithms are going to be relatively conventional. In other words, nobody’s going to plug in a bird flu and have the algorithm say, oh, you have bird flu. You should get your chickens out on grass and pasture and they’ll get healthier. I can’t envision an AI application that would give that kind of advice. So my concern with AI, it’s going to have little mini terminators that go and call all the chickens. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Mini terminators. You’re right. And it’s never going to say, you know, your field is infertile, you should apply, you know, compost.

It’s going to say this amount of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, sorts of things. And so from that standpoint, I’m very concerned about it. But I do appreciate, from a data collection standpoint, to be able to assimilate data. For example, if we, if we put a GPS tracker on a chicken, let’s say we’ve, we’ve got 10 chickens and we put a GPS tracker on them and find out how much time they spend outside and how many bugs they eat in a day. And you start breeding, you breed the one that spends the most time outside eating the most bugs instead of the one that hangs in, around the feeder, for example.

That I can imagine over time you would have a much more robust, you know, pasture aggressive type, you know, grazing, grazing chicken. And so that kind of thing I can really appreciate. I have about five more minutes and I’m going to have to. Sure. Well, I want to get one more question then, because I know one of your big things is factory farming. What are the risks of and pandemics. I know, like myself, you were skeptical of how that was managed, but is there a risk that a real pandemic could emerge from big agricultural processes? What an interesting question.

Like just with monoculture and. I suppose theoretically, yes, but practically, practically no, simply because our animals are, are so vibrantly immune. They have such a good immune system. See. Are you talking about your animals or animals in general? No, my animals here, for example, we don’t even, we don’t even think about bird flu. We don’t think about all these things that, you know, these, these bogey men that the industry is concerned about. Do we ever have a disease? Yeah, yeah, once in a while we have a, I mean, got as many animals as we’ve got. You know, something’s going to die once in a while, but it’s not anything to be concerned about.

And so we rely on a good immune system just like we do with people. We don’t sit here and wonder, you know, am I going to catch a cold? Am I going to, you know, catch the flu, whatever. We eat well, we play well, we, you know, try to stay. We don’t eat, drink Coke and eat Cheerios for breakfast. And so, you know, we, we maintain a pretty rob. And I, I drink, I drink out of the cow trough, you know, from time to time with cows to keep my, keep my microbiome up and running. And, and you know, our hands are in manure and they’re in the dirt and, and there’s a lot of things that we’re doing.

So in theory, yes, a hoof and mouth or whatever could come through. But Sir Albert Howard showed in, in the, in the 1930s, they had a big hoof and mouth outbreak in India. And he proved that it was dietary, it was nutrition. The cows that he actually ran side by side studies where he put, you know, carriers in with the group. And one got fed chemical fertilized grass, one got fed compost fertilized grass and the compost fertilized grass. Cows never got hoof and mouth. And the ones that had the chemical fertilized grass got hoof and mouth.

And, and so I tend to think that almost all these disease and problems are, are because there’s something missing, some imbalance, some, some mismanagement in the system. It’s not that there’s nefarious fairies out here. Let’s affect farmer John stuff today. There’s a reason for it. We’ve had in our history here, 60 years here, we have had about four outbreaks of disease where we had serious Outbreak of disease. And every single time it was my fault. I either let things get dirty, I wasn’t feeding properly, I put the animals in a compromised situation, but every single time it was my fault.

And so I just believe all these things ultimately come down to management fault. They’re not, they’re not nefarious, you know, things out there just waiting to pounce. Right. I mean your approach and your animals, you as a person, you know, I’ve been able to establish more immunity perhaps than the better part of what’s out there that people are eating though. Right. Like, so the majority of cows and chickens are not raised in such a way. So I guess, you know, you make an argument for having these, the type of system that’s, that is more resilient. But I guess what I’m asking is, could this lead to a supply chain shock if these, the majority of vulnerable animals in Big Agra are exposed to something that.

Oh, no question, absolutely. I mean, I mean bird flu is the latest example, but. Yeah. Could there be, could there be an Irish potato famine for example? Those kinds of things and, and I think it’s possible. Yeah, I do think it’s possible. And you think the best way to prepare for that is to just keep that biodiversity and. Yeah, yeah. And I mean we, so you know, our, our, all of our feedback that we buy for the chicken, for the omnivores, chickens, turkeys and pigs, we get from local sources that’s GMO free. So they’re not, it’s not genetically modified, so it’s not susceptible to whatever, you know, could or might affect all of that most.

It’s all checked for glyphosate free. There’s no glyphosate or roundup on, you know, on these grains. It’s local. And so although we don’t grow it all, there’s a, there’s a pretty close, a pretty close chain of custody. And, and these farmers are outside the conventional channels just like we’re just like our chickens are outside conventional channels. And so, so everything that’s outside conventional channels is going to be less susceptible to whatever attacks conventional channels. Okay, Okay, I have one, one last thing. We’re going to wrap this up because I know you got to go. If there’s one principle you can think of to keep people on, focused on this type of lifestyle and just keep things stable, you know, no matter what may come.

What is one principle? You go by one motivating word or phrase in your head that you ruminate on to keep you motivated. Yeah. So, so for me, it’s, there’s a lot of things to feel frustrated about right now. In our, in our culture, we can make a list of things that we’re, we even be angry about, you know, that. Why don’t they do that? Why don’t they. You can make a list. It’s okay. Make a list that might be, you know, cathartic to make a list of these things. But, but ultimately our goal needs to be to invert all those frustrations that dysfunction, bring solutions to the table so that we provide hope and help when the world becomes hopeless and helpless.

Excellent. Thank you very much, sir. It’s been a pleasure to have you on today. And where can people find more information about you? Polyface Farms. P O L Y F A C E Polyface Farms, that’s our website. And I don’t have any personal social media. I mean I do a blog, I do podcasts and things but, but, but it’s all run through the, through the Poly Face Farms. I don’t have a personal social media presence. It’s all run through the, through the Poly Face Farms website. Great stuff. Well, we are going to drop those links in the description below and stick around after the meeting’s over because I have a question about consultation.

Thanks a lot for coming out, Joel. Thank you for having me. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up@canadianpreparedness.com where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices. No junk and no gimmicks. Use discount code prepping gear for 10% off. Don’t forget the strong survive but the prepared thrive. Stay safe.
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