539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin

Regenerative farming pioneer Joel Salatin joins Dr. Jordan B. Peterson to challenge the myth that cows are bad for the planet. They explore how pasture-based farming restores ecosystems, the dangers of industrial agriculture, and why storytelling matters in the fight for the future of food. Joel Salatin, dubbed the "Lunatic Farmer," is a Christian libertarian environmentalist and one of the most outspoken voices in regenerative agriculture. Co-owner of Polyface Farm in Virginia, he supplies thousands with pasture-raised meats and teaches sustainable farming worldwide. With 16 books, such as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma," countless columns, and a wildly engaging speaking style, Salatin blends mischief, grit, and deep cultural insight to challenge how we think about food, freedom, and stewardship of the land. This episode was filmed on March, 10th, 2025. | Links | For Joel Salatin: On X https://x.com/joelsalatin?lang=en Polyface Farms website https://polyfacefarms.com/ Read “Homestead Tsunami: Good for Country, Critters, and Kids” https://a.co/d/5gg3vAV Read “You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise” https://a.co/d/fX8wSWF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  We hear a lot of noise about how cows are contributing to global warming, which is an idea that's really struck me as rather specious right from the beginning.

• 2:57Speaker 05

  If you want to talk atmospheric carbon, all it would take is all of our farmland to change 1% in organic matter. We call this mobstalking, herbivorous, solar conversion, lignified carbon, sequestration, fertilization. We spend as much time marketing as we do the entire farm production.

• 3:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Really, what you are is a communicator and a network builder. Well, why do I need to be fluent in my communication? Why do I need to write? Why do I need to learn to speak?

• 3:26Speaker 05

  The people who communicate lead their professions.

• 3:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Become a storyteller. Storytellers are what change the world.

• 3:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 3:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  So I've been very skeptical about these ideas stemming from the WEF globalist types, that there's something pathological about the agricultural sector and the dawning concern as well, or the building concern about the notion that pasture animals like cattle, for example, are bad for the planet. That just seems to me to be absurd on the face of it. I'd have to see a lot of data, so to speak, before I would regard that as credible. And I'm also interested in meat-based diets, for example, because they seem to be very

• 4:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  health-promoting and highly nutritious. And so, one of the things that I've wanted to do for a long time is to spend some time investigating the landscape of so-called regenerative farming. And I found someone to talk to, and there's other people who I could talk to as well, named Joel Salatin. And Joel has written a number of interesting books, and this will give you a sense of him right off the bat. The latest one was "Homestead Tsunami", which is a description of, well, the dawning interest in homesteading as a potential choice of life, let's say. He's also written "Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal", which I love as a title, "You Can Farm", which is partly what we discussed,

• 5:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  and "Pastured Poultry Profits", which is a book that documents a particular form of agrarian lifestyle as a solution to the economic problems that young people might be facing. So it's a pathway to a profitable economic, profitable, sustainable, and socially useful economic future. And so, we spent a fair bit of time talking about all of these things to do today. And so, if you're interested in that, then this is the podcast for you.

• 5:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, Mr. Selton, why don't you start just by telling everybody what you do? Let's start from the beginning.

• 5:50Speaker 05

  Sure. So, we farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, which is in the western part of the state, known historically as the breadbasket of the Confederacy during the Civil War, where Cyrus McCormick invented the Reaper. And that part of the Industrial Revolution really took place in 1837. And so, we farm there full-time with a pastured livestock operation that doesn't use vaccines, hormones, chemical fertilizers. My mom and dad bought the original core property in 1961, so I was four years old.

• 6:33Speaker 05

  And we came there, and it was a gullied rock pile, cheap land. And Dad asked agriculture experts, "How do I make a living on this small farm?"

• 6:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Small being how, what's the size?

• 6:50Speaker 05

  So, at that time, it was about 100 acres open and 450 in woodland. So, it was very much a forest. It goes up along, you know, one of those Appalachian Mountains there. And then, you know, the nice, the bottom land is out, you know, from the base. And so, 100 acres of decent usable land. That was, one of the gullies we measured was 16 feet deep, 16 feet from the top to the bottom. That's a deep gully. But there were just, you know, the hillsides were just gullies like that, like corrugated roofing from back, from erosion back in, you know, plowing in the day. And large areas, a quarter acre, that were just solid rock,

• 7:33Speaker 05

  five to eight feet of topsoil had washed off over the years of tillage. And, and there was no vegetation. I remember as a child being able to walk the whole farm and never setting foot on a piece of vegetation. It was that barren. Uh, it was very, very poor, but it was, but it was cheap. And, and so that's

• 7:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  And worth every penny by the sounds of it.

• 7:56Speaker 05

  Well, uh, so, so, you know, dad, uh, dad says, well, how do I make a living on this farm? And it was, you know, buy chemical fertilizer, plant corn, borrow money, build silos, you know, graze the woods. And, um, my grandfather, his dad, had been a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine when it first came out in 1945. And so he always, he always aspired to be a farmer, but never got there.

• 8:24Speaker 05

  Um, my dad was an accountant, mom was a school teacher. And so he, he saw the, the chemical approach as a, as a, as a rat race.

• 8:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 8:36Speaker 05

  Because you're always trying to outrun the, it's like a drug addiction. You're trying to outrun the, the adaptation of, you know, the, the, the chemicals, they cannibalize in the soil. There's a lot of things that happen there. And so you're trying, you're trying to chase that. You're, you're hoping that human creativity will keep you one step ahead of, of, of biological adaptation.

• 8:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. Well, you're also an interdependent web with all of the manufacturers that you're dependent on as well, right? And they're, they're cutting your, they're nibbling away at your profit margin, which of course they have to do as well to survive.

• 9:12Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 9:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  But, right. Okay. So your dad and your mom, your dad was an accountant and your mom was a

• 9:18Speaker 05

  School teacher.

• 9:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay. So they don't know anything about farming.

• 9:22Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, they, they do. We actually, dad, dad was, so dad flew in the Navy in World War II. And, uh, on GI Bill, went to Indiana University, got his degree in economics. He met mom there. And then he had a dream of farming. His dad never farmed full time, but he wanted to farm. Well, how do, you know, I'm a Midwestern boy, no money, no land. How do I farm? And at that time, this was, this was 1940s. And he saw, you know, um, uh, Atlas Shrugged and Rand. There, there was a lot of socialism going on in, in America there.

• 9:57Speaker 05

  World War II-ish. And um, he said, you know, I'm gonna go to a developing country, you know, it's a, it's a really free market, small government, you know, we can do what we want. So he got on with Texas Oil Company as a bilingual accountant to Venezuela. And in seven years was able to save enough money to buy a thousand acre farm in the highlands of Venezuela. We started raising chickens. Thousand acres. Thousand acres, started raising chickens. And because our chickens were so clean, immediately he took over the local, the local chicken market, you know how those Latin American, all the farmers come in with their wares and, and the middlemen, you know, this is, this is 1950s. And um, and so he quickly took over the chicken market. Because the indigenous chickens had a, they had snot, they had a nasal.

• 10:43Speaker 05

  They were running in open sewers and things like that. And of course, all the farmers accused us of witchcraft and voodoo and that. And so when there was a junta. I thought witchcraft generally means sick chickens, not healthy ones. Well, well, it's amazing what you can come up with. Yeah, when you need to. When you're looking for an excuse. So um, so then in 1959, there was the junta of Petis Amenes there. And when, when you have anarchy like that, uh, it allows scores to be settled. Yeah, absolutely. It wouldn't be otherwise settled under normal times. And so this gave a way for people to, um, you know, to develop their, their, um,

• 11:28Speaker 05

  well, to run us out, if you will. Yeah. And basically the machine guns came in the front door, we went out the back door. And we spent another eight months, dad met with every minister, you know, the Secretary of Interior, Agriculture, Treasury, trying to get protection. And nobody would, it was all bribe, you know, how much you, you pay me, or they were scared they'd be assassinated. And so the only thing to do was to, dad was there 12 years. Loved the culture, loved the country and, and, and loved the language, loved the people. But we couldn't, we couldn't, we couldn't stay with no protection like that. So we came back to the States, uh, Easter Sunday, 1961. Now, when were you born? So I was born in 1957. So were you ever in Venezuela? Yeah. You were there too? I was.

• 12:13Speaker 05

  Do you have any memories of it at all? Toward the end, yes, yes.

• 12:18Speaker 05

  There's a big difference between being three years old and four years old.

• 12:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 05

  And so I don't remember the farm, but I remember Caracas. Of course, I spoke Spanish, you know, as well as English. And, um, and, and I remember some of that trauma at the end, like dad turning the car around and, and running away from gorillas and, you know, things like that.

• 12:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 12:37Speaker 05

  Um, and so there was, there was some trauma there.

• 12:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  That was your encounter with socialism.

• 12:41Speaker 05

  Yes, yes.

• 12:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Fun, fun, fun.

• 12:43Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 12:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  So then your family moved to the States and bought this.

• 12:46Speaker 05

  We, we came back to the States and, and dad was 39, lost everything. And I remember when I hit 39 thinking, if I lost it all, would I start over? And, and he went way up in my, in my, you know, my respect and honor at that point. And, um, and so we did. The reason that we didn't go back to the Midwest where both he and mom were from and had family was because he was still hoping to go back to Venezuela. He was hoping that when things settled, you know, um, we'd, we'd get a call from the ambassador and by being that close to DC, you know, we could, we could run up there in hours, sign paperwork and be back to the farm of Venezuela.

• 13:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  I see.

• 13:28Speaker 05

  That, that was his, that was.

• 13:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  So this was an interim plan.

• 13:30Speaker 05

  This was, this was an interim plan and it ended up not being an interim plan.

• 13:34Speaker 00

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• 13:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  He bought a hundred acres that were open and 450 woodland.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, um, let's, let's let everybody listening and, and watching know about farm size. So compared to traditional farms, let's say of the 1920s and compared to modern farms.

• 14:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  How does the farm that your father purchased? How does it, um, how does it, how is it configured in terms of size of comparative size?

• 14:24Speaker 05

  It would be an average size farm for, for that area. You know, um, 150 acres of, of open land, you know, usable land with, you know, with a woodlot. Um, compared to most farms, it had a much bigger woodlot, you know, being 450 acres. That's a, that's a lot of wood.

• 14:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Any commercial utility in the wood?

• 14:42Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. This is Appalachian hardwoods. This is oak and black walnut and poplar and yeah, it's, there's some, there's some good timber there. It, it had been timbered though. It had been all timbered, so it was primarily, you know, newer growth. It wasn't large, you know, it wasn't large trees. And, um, so there was really not much value there. There was some, but not a lot of value.

• 15:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  And how much of the land? You talked about the gullies and the rock and the fact there was very little vegetation. How much of the hundred open acres was damaged in that way? You're implying that all of it?

• 15:16Speaker 05

  All of it was, all of it was poor. Um, some of it was, was poorer than others. It wasn't all rock for sure. You know, the, the shale lies in a, it lies like this in, in the ground. And so, you know, you can, you can go down three feet here and then here you're on rock. And then three feet here, you're on, you know, it's, it's layers. It, it kind of lays in there like that. So, um, so, you know, that's the way that, that's the way the land was. But, uh, dad was a, dad was a, he was such a visionary. And, um, so, so when, when we realized the, the advice from the,

• 15:59Speaker 05

  the system is not acceptable.

• 16:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hmm. And why did he think that exactly? Like, I mean, lots of people do take that route and some people make it profitable. And so why did your father, why had he decide? What was the alternative route precisely? And why did he decide to take that, especially back then?

• 16:16Speaker 05

  Right. Well, A, we didn't, he, he had a tremendous conservation ethic and these gullies, he knew.

• 16:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, I see.

• 16:23Speaker 05

  We, we, we didn't, we couldn't plant corn. I mean, there wasn't enough. That's why we had gullies, you know?

• 16:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. So he could see that it had been mismanaged.

• 16:31Speaker 05

  Right. Oh, yeah, yeah. We, we, you could tell that it had been very mismanaged. So we, we started a very aggressive tree planting campaign. We planted about 60 acres in trees over those first 10 years. So we actually shrunk some of the open land. Uh, and we, you know, we put, we put brush down in the gullies and, and, um, and then we start, and he started experimenting.

• 16:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that was to stabilize the soil against erosion?

• 16:57Speaker 05

  So to, to stop, at least stop the erosion. And, um, and one of my most poignant childhood memories was one Sunday, he said, let's, let's take, I, I met this, I met this guy, I want to go see him. So we got in the car on a Sunday afternoon, took this drive. And I don't remember what the guy had, I don't remember whether he had sheep or chickens or pigs or whatever he had. All I remember was coming home, I was what, maybe six or seven. I remember coming home and dad just literally levitating as he drove the car. This guy had portable animal shelters. And dad had never seen anything like that before. And it clicked in his head, wow, portable animal shelters.

• 17:40Speaker 05

  Suddenly I don't have to build stationery, I don't have to build a barn, I, I can build mobile infrastructure. And because he'd already gotten on to this, this moving animals around, some Andre Voizini was a Frenchman who, who wrote, uh, grass productivity, kind of still the bible of, of rotational or controlled grazing. And where, where you mimic native, native, um, choreography.

• 18:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Where animals- The animals migrate.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  The animals migrate, they, they move around.

• 18:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 18:07Speaker 05

  And, and so, you know, we don't have wolves, um, and they won't let us do fire very much. Uh, and so, but we do have electric fence, electric fence was just coming in, this is the early sixties. And so dad actually invented a portable electric fencing system to where we could start moving the cows around. And, um, and, and, you know, we moved them, whatever, once every 10 days or so. And gradually got better and better and better until by the, you know, by the time I was a teenager, we were moving them, you know, every three or four days. Then when I was in college, I put in our basic permanent grid so we could move them every day. And that, that was a quantum leap, that, that moved us. When we started moving them every day, everything started to kick in.

• 18:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so walk us through that. So, so, a typical farm would have a fenced-off area, and the cattle will graze there. And the problem with that is they'll graze the vegetation right down to the ground, and then that's not good.

• 19:07Speaker 05

  Right.

• 19:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? And so hypothetically, if you could imagine a huge circle, you could rotate them around the circle at some speed, and they wouldn't be able to graze at some of it, and that would grow in behind them.

• 19:19Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 19:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Then their waste products would also fertilize the land, and the grass would stabilize, be stabilized against erosion.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 19:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? And so, okay, so now you said you experimented with 10 days, and then four, and then one.

• 19:33Speaker 05

  And gradually got it down to where...

• 19:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so how do you, how do you build the electric fences? And how do you, how do they move?

• 19:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, so the thing you have to understand from an ecology standpoint is if we had a graph, and we, and we charted the way grass, the way vegetation grows, it grows in a sigmoid curve. It, it, you know, it's, it's just like a person. Now, they start small, little baby, you know, and then they hit teenage years, and woo, you know, they grow real fast, and then they quit growing, and eventually go into senescence. So, I call this diaper grass, teenage grass, and nursing home grass. Okay? Just to help. And so, if you, if you want to accumulate the most biomass possible, you want to let it go through that blaze of growth. So, the whole idea of...

• 20:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and that's when the cows come in.

• 20:19Speaker 05

  Of controlled grazing is to hit it at the second break point, not this break point, not this point down here, when it's long enough to graze, but it hasn't gone through this, this teenage growth spurt.

• 20:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Uh-huh.

• 20:30Speaker 05

  So, that's what the, that's what the electric fence becomes, then, a steering wheel, an accelerator, and a brake on the, on the four-legged sauerkraut pruner to be able to steer them around the landscape to catch this second growth point all the time. And suddenly, what happens is, by letting the grass go through there, you get a completely different energy flow? Because now the grass is always at energy equilibrium, it's not...

• 20:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  What do you mean by energy equilibrium?

• 21:00Speaker 05

  What I mean is, when the, when the, when the forage gets pruned, or grazed, I use the word pruning because grazing is now, that's a bad word.

• 21:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay.

• 21:08Speaker 05

  So, pruning, all right? Um, when it gets pruned, if it gets pruned too frequently, you actually weaken the plant.

• 21:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:15Speaker 05

  And so by, by only allowing, by controlling when the pruner can prune, strategically, you, you allow that plant to actually accumulate energy and, and vibrancy and flourish, just like pruning a vineyard or, you know, an apple tree or anything else. And so, for example, in our area, the average grass-

• 21:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so the optimal amount of grazing in a grassland is not zero?

• 21:44Speaker 05

  No, so, so rather than grazing, you know, twenty times this long, we're grazing six times this long, for example. And, and so in our county, for example, the average cow days per acre, so a cow day is what one cow will eat in a day. All right, that's a cow day. And in our county, the average is eighty cow days per acre, so an acre will support eighty cows for one day a year, or one cow for eighty days a year. We're averaging almost four hundred.

• 22:19Speaker 05

  And we started with gullies and rocks and never planted a-

• 22:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Four hundred, so five times the efficiency.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 22:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because you're allowing them to graze when they're-

• 22:26Speaker 05

  Because we're allowing that forage-

• 22:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why doesn't everybody do that? If there's five times the efficiency gain, it seems self-evident.

• 22:34Speaker 05

  Because, because they, they, they think it's too hard to move cows.

• 22:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, it's fair enough, they're big.

• 22:40Speaker 05

  And they, they think it's too hard to move cows, well, we're, I mean, we have a thousand heads, so we're not a backyard operation by any means. Um, but, but most people, because it's new. It's, it's, it's just different, it's new, it's not what, it's not what grandpa-

• 22:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, fair enough.

• 22:56Speaker 05

  And you gotta realize that, you know, with America's average farmer being sixty years old, uh, the, the, the average farmer is still in grandpa's paradigm.

• 23:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 23:07Speaker 05

  When land was cheap, fuel was cheap. You know, and it is still in this 1950s paradigm, you know, when we talk about

• 23:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  The average farmer is 60.

• 23:17Speaker 05

  Is 60 years old, which means in the next 15 years, half of all America's agriculture equity is going to change hands.

• 23:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that means there's a time for potential transformation there.

• 23:29Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 23:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, or catastrophic failure.

• 23:31Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, and that level of agrarian equity transfer has never happened that fast in any civilization in history, except in conquest. You know, the Huns come over and run over Rome or whatever. Now, I'm not saying we're getting ready to have conquest. I am suggesting that we're in a guinea pig time here if we can pull this off at peace and have this level of transfer. So obviously, the question is, well, who's going to control this land in 15 years? Is it Blackrock? Is it Bill Gates? Is it to Chinese? Is it, you know, what is it? And that's why I'm a bit on a tear to try to to try to germinate young farmers.

• 24:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  So to speak.

• 24:14Speaker 05

  Yeah. Young farmers to jump on this because I think we're in an unprecedented time of opportunity.

• 24:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 24:22Speaker 05

  In farming, because so much is going to become available.

• 24:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so now you have this land. It's all full of gullies. It's not doing very well. You start planting trees to rehabilitate it. What do you do about the gullies? How do you get grassland to grow? How do you introduce the cows? And then tell me more about the electric fencing and how you learned to move them, move the cattle.

• 24:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, so some of the, some of the gullies were on gentle land, you know, pasture land. And those, we actually built dug ponds, built ponds in low ground and hauled the silt. All that silt that had accumulated down in the, in the valley, we hauled it up and actually, literally, land filled in those ditches. Um, you know, with, with taking the silt that had washed down. Um, a lot of the real steep.

• 25:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, you, you built ponds where you took the silt out of?

• 25:16Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, so, so now.

• 25:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  So the erosion had washed the soil and you found where that had washed to?

• 25:23Speaker 05

  And, and we actually found, we actually found 100-year-old fence posts buried 10 feet under silt.

• 25:30Speaker 05

  Hmm. Okay. Truck that? Yes, yes. And what, what trucks and what, front end loaders? Yeah, yeah, a, a track, track loader, you know, and a, and a, and a couple dump trucks. And, I mean, you're, you're just running it, whatever, you know, 200 yards. I mean, it's close. Boom, boom, boom. And, uh, and so. So you're flattening everything back out. So, so we're, we're filling in those, those, uh, gullies. Are you filling it in with? Do you fill it in with filler first and then topsoil? How, or what? You, you, you just, you just fill it in with the material you're digging to build a pond. I see. So, so you're just digging out, digging out. So it's relatively straightforward if you have the machinery. Yeah, yeah, that's. And you had enough capital for the machinery. Well, we, we hired it. We hired excavator. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that wasn't done early.

• 26:14Speaker 05

  That was done much, much later, you know, uh, we, we just start, we just started moving, moving animals around and, and. On, on the land you had. And, and the choreography of moving them around, uh, itself was a tremendous healer. And I watched over my lifetime, these, you know, big quarter acre saucers of bare rock. Just like a scab on your hand. You know, it heals from the outside in, doesn't heal from the inside out. It heals from the outside in. You know, it gets smaller and smaller. And finally that last little, you know, and you pull it off and you're new skin. That's exactly the way the soil was on these barren places. Every year, you know, 18 inches, the soil would come up on the edge.

• 26:56Speaker 05

  18 inches, 18 inches till eventually the rocks were not there today. And so why did it come back exactly? Because vegetation decompose, if you can get enough decomposing vegetation. Hmm. That builds soil. Right, right. That, that's how you. So blow up, like there'd be dead leaves blow along the edges and collect. And so by letting the grass grow to this second point where we're getting this, this, you know, voizin', called it the blaze of growth. Period all the time. We were getting more root structure, more biomass.

• 27:31Speaker 05

  More manure from the animals themselves.

• 27:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  So the plants will colonize the rocks essentially?

• 27:36Speaker 05

  Yes, the plants, absolutely. And so today, all those areas that when I was a kid, you know, it was bare rock, today has, you know, 16 inches of soil on it.

• 27:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, now, I wanted to ask you specifically about that too, because we hear a lot of noise about how cows are contributing to global warming, which, you know, is an idea that's really struck me as rather specious right from the beginning. Because like, the buffalo did that too? Like, I see, so huge herds of grazing animals are bad for the planet? That strikes me as highly unlikely. So, and I know they talk about methane, but, you know, people talk about a lot of things. Now, you said that you regenerated the ground with the cattle and with the careful management of grass, and now you're producing, say, a foot of topsoil on top of this rock? I presume that's also a carbon sink?

• 28:28Speaker 05

  Yes, oh, absolutely.

• 28:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, because plants take in carbon, because they're like made out of carbon and...

• 28:33Speaker 05

  Right, and in fact, when you look at that, in 1961, the first soils test that we took, we averaged about 1% organic matter. Organic matter is a kissing cousin to carbon. Organic matter is something is...

• 28:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, because carbon is life-based. Life is carbon-based.

• 28:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, right, right, right. And so, organic matter is something that was living at one time, and now it's in a, it's in some state of decomposition in soil. It's what gives soil its porosity, its bounce, its, you know, it's...

• 29:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's what segregates it from sand or dust.

• 29:09Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, or even clay.

• 29:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right.

• 29:13Speaker 05

  And so, 1%, today, we're a little over 8%. So, all it would take, I mean, if you want to talk climate, you know, atmospheric carbon, all it would take is all of our farmland to change 1% in organic matter, and we would return to pre-1960 atmospheric carbon levels.

• 29:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, one of the things that's really struck me as incomprehensible about the carbon debate is, so I know, for example, that over the last 30 years, something like that, the planet has greened quite radically, especially in semi-arid areas, and that seems to be a consequence of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, some of which is arguably human-made, but the net consequence of that, it's so interesting to see, is immense green.

• 30:10Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 30:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's something like 20% of the Earth's area, which is like, that's a lot, and the fact that it's in semi-arid areas means that exactly the desert-like areas that were supposed to expand, according to the climate doomsayers, have actually shrunk. And then, and I've been thinking that through, again, more recently, I talked to Patrick Moore, for example, and he was one of the founders of Greenpeace.

• 30:35Speaker 05

  Right.

• 30:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  And Moore has produced these, he's not the only one, but he's produced these graphs of carbon dioxide levels across like 500 million years instead of 250, and we're definitely at a carbon dioxide low.

• 30:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so if we tap it up even a little bit, it makes a big difference, but that's all to say that plants like carbon dioxide a lot.

• 30:56Speaker 05

  They do.

• 30:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then when there's more of it, they grow and sequester it, and they do that rapidly, and so, and then I read a paper here recently that indicated that the typical climate model underestimates the rapidity at which plants utilize carbon dioxide by 30%, which is like a fairly large margin of error, and so it just seems to me to be self-evident that if we set the preconditions, plants would mop up any excess carbon dioxide in like no time flat. And so you're saying that if we improved even our grazing habits?

• 31:29Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 31:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that grass was allowed to grow longer before it was grazed on, you don't need much of a percentage in how effective the plants sequester carbon to take whatever excess carbon is.

• 31:42Speaker 05

  That's exactly right, and as pastures, as perennials, and of course, you know, a lot of North America was a prairie, okay, that's a perennial prairie, as opposed to an annual, which is corn, soybeans, and crop, okay, annual crop, okay, in a healthy perennial perennial.

• 31:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, you don't have to plant perennials, they just grow year after year.

• 32:01Speaker 05

  That's right, that's right. So in a perennial prairie situation, pasture situation, if it's healthy... There's enough methanotrophic bacteria, this is a special kind of of of freestanding bacteria, methanotrophic bacteria, and like its name suggests, it it's there to pull down methane. There's enough there to metabolize into the soil bank. The methane released from a thousand cows per acre. Well, you're never gonna have a thousand cows per acre. So, so.

• 32:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  So where do these, where do these ideas come from then, given, you know, because we here follow the science all the time, but then if you look into the science, first of all, there's plenty, there's a plethora of opinions.

• 32:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, at minimum.

• 32:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so, and just now and then, you know, when you're looking at data, you kind of have to stand back and use your head a bit, and you start from maybe the presumption that any idea that large grazing herds are bad for the planet is to be regarded with extreme skepticism to begin with, because large grazing herds are exactly the sorts of things that the environmental types worship when they're happening naturally in Africa. So you can't have it both ways.

• 33:12Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 33:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so, I just, I've just always thought the idea that pastured animals, properly pastured, being bad for the planet somehow, and that's as bad as equating factory farming with regenerative farming, for example.

• 33:26Speaker 05

  Right.

• 33:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  They're not the same thing at all.

• 33:28Speaker 05

  No, no.

• 33:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so your experience on the farm was that carefully managed grazing herds regenerated soil that, well, not even soil, they they actually made rocky areas

• 33:41Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 33:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  into soil that could then be, well, first of all, a carbon sink, if you care about such things, but also productive grazing land.

• 33:48Speaker 05

  Yes, yes.

• 33:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  And a big part of the trick there is to manage the grass properly and to move cattle.

• 33:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay.

• 33:55Speaker 05

  And then, and then, and then we began adding the other species. So you've got the cattle, and so we look around, so, so, Jordan, a lot of what, what developed here was, um, in the, in the mid sixties, dad looked around, he said, well,

• 34:10Speaker 05

  10 10 10 chemical fertilizer doesn't build soil, alright? What, what, what does build soil? What makes regeneration happen? And it's very simple, you know? Um, there is no animalless ecology, so you gotta have animals. Well, what about these animals? Well, they move. Well, if they move, then we have to give them shelter, water, and, and control. And so all of our, our innovations that we're now, you know, famous for, grew out of not, you know? We didn't sit around in a, in a focus group saying, "How can we innovate?" You know, it, it was strictly, "How does nature work? So how do we mimic that on a domestic scale?" That was all. We don't have-

• 34:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so you're basically mimicking migration?

• 34:55Speaker 05

  Mimicking the, the, the choreography. Uh, we call this mob stocking, herbivorous, solar conversion, lignified carbon, sequestration, fertilization. And I knew you would enjoy that.

• 35:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, say that again, that's quite nice to say.

• 35:09Speaker 05

  And I did, I did practice that in front of your parents.

• 35:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, let's hear it again.

• 35:12Speaker 05

  Mob stocking, herbivorous, solar conversion, lignified carbon, sequestration.

• 35:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yes, oh, yes, okay, well, that sounds plenty scientific.

• 35:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, plenty scientific.

• 35:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:22Speaker 05

  So, so then we say, well, well, um, how, how, how does this maintain sanitation? You got all this manure and urine and stuff. And, well, birds, birds follow herbivores. So we, we, we built egg mobiles for laying chickens, and they follow the cow herd. The chickens scratch through the cow pies, eat out the fly larvae, scratch the cow patties into the ground, stimulating the fertility, eating the grasshoppers and crickets that compete with the cows for the vegetation. And, and instead of, instead of where most farmers would shoot-

• 35:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  So the chickens chase the cows. Are they moved too?

• 35:56Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, so they're in egg mobiles, that's what we call egg mobiles.

• 35:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so the chickens, the chickens follow the, the cattle, and you move the chickens as well?

• 36:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, so you're like the egron the rhino's knows. I mean, look at any herd, wildebeest in nature, and you'll see these flocks of birds following, and they're the sanitizers, uh, with the herbivores. So instead of, instead of shooting the cows up with paracetamides and grubicides- And things like that, we just collect a hundred thousand dollars worth of eggs as a byproduct of the pasture sanitation program and the fertility program. So this then allows.

• 36:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why sanitation exactly delve into that a bit more because while the cows are are manuring the land as they graze and the sanitation problem, it doesn't, it doesn't decompose rapidly enough without the birds like what, what, what exact role do the birds play?

• 36:44Speaker 05

  I mean, there are dung beetles, but, but the sanitation is that the manure is what carries the cattle parasites. That's, that's where the parasites live and, and, and, and and propagate to reinfect the cows when they come back through.

• 37:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  I see.

• 37:01Speaker 05

  So when the cows scatter them, the sun and, and now not having enough, enough of a pie to, to procreate in.

• 37:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 37:10Speaker 05

  To live in.

• 37:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  I see.

• 37:11Speaker 05

  Then, then they, they, they don't, they don't live for another day.

• 37:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay. So you move the cattle for two reasons then actually. One is to allow the grass to maximize in terms of density, but also to allow the land to clean.

• 37:23Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 37:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that when the cows come back, they're eating grass, right? Rather than their own waste product.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 37:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  And the chickens help with that. And then you collect the eggs. Okay. So now the problem comes down to essentially, how do you move the cattle? Right? That's.

• 37:35Speaker 05

  Okay. Yeah. So, so we move the, so, um, uh, we move the cows every day around four o'clock. We like the afternoon move best for a number of reasons, but, um, it's electric fence, one strand of electric fence. Cows are very smart. They, they don't want to get shocked. And so we just go out and, and open, open a cross fence. So imagine a ladder with rungs. And so our permanent wires, our permanent fence is the stringers on the outside. Our portables are the rungs on the inside and we can, we can expand and contract those based on how big the herd is, how much grass there is, you know, all sorts of factors. As to how, how much we're gonna give them.

• 38:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  So let's, let's get an idea of the, the, so let's say, let's say we have a field.

• 38:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you wanna move the cows. What's, what do you have that's permanent that's fencing exactly?

• 38:29Speaker 05

  Well, the edges, the edges, the edges define like between the field and the forest, or the field and a, and a creek, field and a pond, alright, so, so you.

• 38:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so that's permanently fenced off.

• 38:40Speaker 05

  That's permanent.

• 38:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay.

• 38:41Speaker 05

  And then you simply, you simply run, you know, you had a little reel, okay, with a polywire on it, and you run that across from side to side, and that gives, that then gives you.

• 38:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  That demarcates an area.

• 38:52Speaker 05

  Demarcates an area, and you're simply, you're simply giving those cows a segment of that, you know, we call it a paddock.

• 39:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 05

  Every day, and the beauty is that in no time, the cows respond to you coming. I mean, think about your dog or your cat, when you, when you bang the, um, bang the dish, they come running, they know what that is. Well, the cows, when we go out to move them roughly, you know, we try to do it as close to four as possible. You know, i- if you got called every, every day at four o'clock for a bowl of ice cream, about 3:45, you know, your tail would wag and your ears would wiggle too. And so the cows are ready, and we go out and we just call them, "Come on, cows", and they just, they just come running through, we close behind them.

• 39:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why, why do they, because they know the food will be better?

• 39:44Speaker 05

  Because, yes, because they've got a new salad bar.

• 39:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so they've learned that.

• 39:47Speaker 05

  They've got a new salad bar.

• 39:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  They've learned that, and then, and then.

• 39:49Speaker 05

  It doesn't take them long to learn that, they learn that very, very quickly. And so they just, so you don't have to herd them, you know, you don't have to.

• 39:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, their advantage to doing it the same time every day, because you establish a habit with the cows.

• 39:58Speaker 05

  Animals love routine, animals love routine.

• 40:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  So do people, as it turns out, yes, even though they think they don't.

• 40:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, oh, no, we, we, we're, we are creatures of routine, so, uh, so that's, so the moving them. But you have to understand.

• 40:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  So why do you need the fences at all then? Why do you need the fences at all? I mean, it stops them from going back.

• 40:19Speaker 05

  It stops them from going into tomorrow's dinner. So basically, we're giving them, we're giving them one day's plate of menu every day.

• 40:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 40:30Speaker 05

  One plate full. If you, if, if somebody, if, if somebody came and gave you, you know, five platefuls of food for five days, you'd probably just pick out the good stuff and leave the stuff you didn't want. And, you know, you'd be a lot more.

• 40:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so they have enough.

• 40:46Speaker 05

  So they have enough, yeah. And, and they actually change their behavior to eat more aggressively and, and with less prejudice on the liver and onions, if you will. Um, uh, and so, so this actually is healthy for the cows to actually, you know, increase their palatability index to eat things that they wouldn't. So they, they'll eat thistles and they'll eat all sorts of, you know, things that are actually good for them that they wouldn't eat.

• 41:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  If they had more choice.

• 41:19Speaker 05

  If they had a lot, if they, if they had all the choice.

• 41:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  So how did you figure out what to plant as well?

• 41:24Speaker 05

  I mean. We never planted anything.

• 41:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, so this is, oh.

• 41:27Speaker 05

  This is natural seed bank. Whatever's there grows. And, and so.

• 41:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, okay.

• 41:33Speaker 05

  So the management, the management affects the type of vegetation you have.

• 41:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so. So how did that get started then? I mean, because we, we were talking about the gullies and the rocks.

• 41:45Speaker 05

  There's a seed bank.

• 41:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Already in nature.

• 41:48Speaker 05

  There's a seed bank in nature. It comes in on bird wings, deer hide, possums waddle across. The, the, the, the ability of nature to spread seeds is almost incomprehensible. It's almost incomprehensible.

• 42:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, all the plants that weren't good at that don't exist. Right, right, so that's crucial.

• 42:07Speaker 05

  So, so, so they, so the seed bank.

• 42:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  So the seeds will come all by themselves.

• 42:11Speaker 05

  So the key, so the key is for us to create a, a, a habitat.

• 42:18Speaker 05

  That will allow as many different kinds of plants to flourish as possible. And, and, and so that's what, that's what revegetated these fields.

• 42:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  And why is many, as many different kinds of plants as possible?

• 42:32Speaker 05

  Because, because each one of them creates a different, a different enzyme, a different, they,

• 42:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Makes it more resilient too.

• 42:40Speaker 05

  Some have spreader roots, some have taproots, some, some like sun, some like shade.

• 42:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  So they take advantage of all the available sun and resources if you have a diversity of plants.

• 42:49Speaker 05

  And not only that, but the, but the research being done by the Bio Nutrient Food Association right now, they're two years into this beef study. It's being done at the University of Utah, the lab, and they're measuring 150 different nutrients in beef. And, and what, what, what makes, what makes one have more than the other? You know, what, what makes beef different nutritively? And interestingly, there's no difference in organic. There's no difference in breed, no difference in age.

• 43:31Speaker 05

  The only metric that is, that, that makes a big difference in the amount of riboflavin, the amount of, you know, niacin, whatever, you know, 150 nutrients. The only thing that makes a big difference is how many different types of plants did the animal eat.

• 43:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. So that means, oh, so that's so cool because that means that you can.

• 43:55Speaker 05

  So the diversity.

• 43:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. So you can maximize for biodiversity at the plant level.

• 44:00Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 44:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that means that you have a mix of plants that can take advantage of different kinds of soil and different growing conditions.

• 44:07Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 44:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  And your pasture is resilient because there's multiple species. And so some will grow better in dry years and some will grow better in, in wet years and, and cold versus warm. And so your, your, your, your plants are resilient. And then the animals, because they have a varied diet, can derive from that variation the balance of nutrients that will make them grow best and be healthy. And that makes them more. That gives them a higher nutritional value.

• 44:34Speaker 05

  That's correct.

• 44:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that's a good deal and you don't have to plant. Okay, well, let's go back to the planting idea just for a minute. I mean, are there ways that you could augment the

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• 45:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Productive quality of your pasturing by doing some planting? Or is it just better to leave it natural?

• 45:15Speaker 05

  Jury's out on that. I mean, there are certainly people who have planted things in their fields. In general, if I'm going to convert, for example, a cornfield into pasture, I'm going to plant. I don't have time.

• 45:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Time to wait.

• 45:31Speaker 05

  I don't have time to wait. You know, in 20 years, yes, it'll be a pasture, but I don't want to wait 20 years.

• 45:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 45:35Speaker 05

  So in that case, I would certainly plant.

• 45:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  You would plant what? Elphelphera, maybe? What do you plant?

• 45:40Speaker 05

  No, I would plant a cocktail. You know, two clovers, three grasses, some plantains, some, you know, some

• 45:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  You just sprinkle that together?

• 45:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  I see. So you'd make an artificial diverse

• 45:53Speaker 05

  Artificial cocktail. Yeah, yeah.

• 45:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay.

• 45:57Speaker 05

  And then it'll gradually diversify, you know, over time.

• 46:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, how does the dollar return on your cattle, say, compare to what you could make while using the land for other purposes? If you had a monoculture, for example, if you planted corn? Like, I'm very curious about the economics of this because farming is famously a very low margin, high labor enterprise, very difficult enterprise. And so there's a variety of things you can do with land. And obviously, many people plant massive monocultures and they use chemicals and they use chemical herbicides. And I'm not a priori critiquing that. You decided to go with cattle and chickens? And what else do you raise?

• 46:41Speaker 05

  More than that, we went, two things. One, we went multi-species. So we have cows, chickens, both meat and eggs, pigs, lamb.

• 46:56Speaker 05

  Rabbit.

• 46:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hmm.

• 46:58Speaker 05

  Duck. So multi-species.

• 47:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, okay. That's for the ponds, the ducks, I presume?

• 47:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, well, it's for eggs and meat.

• 47:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:08Speaker 05

  Um, that, that's a, that's a, that's a small. We won't do a lot of those. Our, our main, our main is beef, pork and chicken.

• 47:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay, sure.

• 47:17Speaker 05

  That's our main thing. Rabbit, duck, lamb, those are all kind of peripheral things. But, um, but the other part of this is that we elected to direct market.

• 47:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 47:29Speaker 05

  So remember, Dad was an accountant and he understood very early on that as a small farm, the commodity margin, the commodity business, the whole goal is to become the least cost producer.

• 47:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, at, at high scale.

• 47:45Speaker 05

  At high scale.

• 47:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, right, right.

• 47:47Speaker 05

  And, and as a small farm, he understood we can't compete at that. So I'm sure you've heard farmers say, well, the middleman makes all the money.

• 47:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, of course. Well, that's typical for many, many, many enterprises.

• 47:58Speaker 05

  Exactly. So, so he realized, well, in order for us to compete, to actually make a living on this small farm, we, we need to become a middleman.

• 48:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Speaker 05

  We need to own that. So basically, the retail dollar is divided into producer, processor, marketer, distributor. Those four basic.

• 48:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Say that again. Producer, farmer.

• 48:19Speaker 05

  Processor.

• 48:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Processor.

• 48:21Speaker 05

  And distributor.

• 48:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, the marketer's the one who lets everybody know that the products exist, which is very important. And then the last one?

• 48:28Speaker 05

  Is distributor.

• 48:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, of course.

• 48:30Speaker 05

  So it's got to, it's got to get to the, the retail interface somehow, okay? So, so the retail dollar is divided those four ways and different commodities. There are different, you know, rate percentages in each of those four categories, but.

• 48:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  And tremendous competition between them.

• 48:44Speaker 05

  Yes, tremendous competition.

• 48:47Speaker 05

  The farmer, the, the, there's only one part of that that is subject to what I call the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

• 48:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 48:56Speaker 05

  Which is weather, price, pestilence, and disease.

• 48:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 49:00Speaker 05

  That's production.

• 49:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so he takes all the risks in the natural world.

• 49:03Speaker 05

  He takes all the risks.

• 49:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:05Speaker 05

  Whereas, you know, when the grasshoppers come, they don't eat the tires on your delivery vehicle. When the drought comes, it doesn't eliminate your wifi connection to your customers. So, so these other three, the three, the processing, marketing, and distribution are relatively immune from weather, price, pestilence, and disease.

• 49:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  They're also not dependent on any single farmer.

• 49:23Speaker 05

  That's right. That's right.

• 49:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  So their risk is distributed.

• 49:26Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 49:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 49:27Speaker 05

  So, we began, um, when we, when we, uh, headed into this, we established a direct marketing persona, uh, eventually became our brand, Polyface, P-O-L-Y-F-A-C-E, Polyface Farm, Farm of Many Faces. Um, that became our brand, and we, we now sell to restaurants, institutions, boutique groceries. We ship, we ship nationwide. We have a farm store. We direct, direct sell into about thirty-five drop points in the urban sector around Northern Virginia, DC, um, Richmond, Virginia Beach, Williamsburg.

• 50:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  And those are, those drop, tell me about those.

• 50:10Speaker 05

  Urban drop points.

• 50:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Farmers markets, or?

• 50:13Speaker 05

  No, no, we, we're not involved in any farmers markets.

• 50:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, you're not.

• 50:16Speaker 05

  And I'm not opposed to farmers markets.

• 50:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 50:18Speaker 05

  But I just don't think, in general, they're not a very efficient interface, because they're primarily social circles.

• 50:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 50:25Speaker 05

  They're primarily social clubs.

• 50:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Relatively low volume, I would presume, too.

• 50:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, because.

• 50:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  So they're like a boutique product.

• 50:31Speaker 05

  Exactly, yeah, because most of the people who go are there to show their support of local food and, and assuage their guilt from taking.

• 50:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, and have a nice day at the farmer's market.

• 50:41Speaker 05

  And have a nice day, and show off their newly-coiffed little poodle dog, you know, that they had done.

• 50:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right.

• 50:45Speaker 05

  And so they can only buy a little baby food jar with a pink ribbon on it of kimchi or, or some, you know, special thing. They're not buying bushels of green beans, or bushels of apples, or, or things. And so we just found farmer's markets a very inefficient.

• 51:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  How did you build your customer network? That's work, man.

• 51:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, it is. It is. We spend as much time marketing as we do the entire farm production.

• 51:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, marketing is such a funny enterprise because people, first of all, it's not even named very well because what you're doing when you're a marketer, really what you are is a communicator and a network builder. And, you know, people say things like, "Well, if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a pass to your door." And that's a lie.

• 51:31Speaker 05

  You're absolutely right.

• 51:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's just not true because, first of all, it isn't obvious they want a better mousetrap. And they're pretty set in their mousetrap habits. And plus, they don't know your damn mousetrap exists. And they actually don't care. And so, you know, one of the things that shocked me when I started making consumer products, which was like 30 years ago, was, see, because I thought I'd invented this process with my colleagues that helped people identify and hire more effective employers, employees. And the first error I made was thinking that large companies actually cared about that, which they don't at all, which is quite a shock. They say they do, but they actually don't when it comes down to it.

• 52:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  But then, but more than that, I also realized that if you have something new, that's actually a a risk and not an advantage because most people are so risk averse, they won't try anything new. They want to know that many other people are using this and haven't died because of it. And then, no one knows your damn product exists. And so, I would say for the average enterprise, you tell me what you think about this with regard to your enterprise. The product is 5% of the problem and communication about the product is

• 52:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Ninety percent of the problem? I know that leaves five percent for noise, but like it's exactly the opposite of what most people would think. Marketing is communication and it really matters. So you guys figured that out.

• 53:00Speaker 05

  Messaging, messaging is everything. So and and the messaging always has to be in terms of the possible buyer.

• 53:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 53:11Speaker 05

  In other words, it it it's not about you.

• 53:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  No, not at all.

• 53:13Speaker 05

  It's about their need.

• 53:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 53:15Speaker 05

  Uh, describing their need.

• 53:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  What's their problem?

• 53:17Speaker 05

  What's their need? What can I fix for you?

• 53:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 53:20Speaker 05

  And and and and that's a hard thing when when I'm not like my normal consumer.

• 53:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, definitely.

• 53:28Speaker 05

  I have a big garden. I have, I walk out the back door. I've got eggs. I've got cows. I've got, you know.

• 53:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you don't even exist in the landscape where the problem.

• 53:35Speaker 05

  Exactly. So you, so so for me, for me, I almost have to get into some sort of a, you know, a yen position or something to to to to. Okay. Uh.

• 53:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  How do I think when I don't have these?

• 53:48Speaker 05

  How do I think like my consumer, like my customer thinks?

• 53:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Very difficult, yeah.

• 53:52Speaker 05

  Very, very difficult. But when you can get into that position, you can absolutely, uh, message it.

• 53:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, well, tell me how you guys did that. That's, and I'd like to know more about the details of your network. You, you talked about many inroads for sales, so.

• 54:07Speaker 05

  So so remember when we started, when, so I came back to the farm full time, September twenty four, nineteen eighty two. Okay, nineteen eighty two. I I left, I I was a, um, I was a reporter, investigative reporter at the local newspaper for two and a half years after college. So, you know, so here, here, now I'm wanting to come back to the farm full time. Now I'm working in the, in the, in town, you know, trying to, how do I come back to the farm full time? Teresa and I got married. We remodeled the, uh, the attic of the old farmhouse. Uh, we didn't call it the attic. We called it our penthouse. And, um, and we lived on, on, we drove a fifty dollar car. Uh, lived on three hundred dollars a month. And within two years, we were able to save enough that we could, that we could live for

• 54:52Speaker 05

  one year without an income.

• 54:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hmm.

• 54:54Speaker 05

  And so, September 24, 1982, I walked out of the office. I didn't think we'd make it.

• 55:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why the hell was your wife on board with this? Like, why did she think?

• 55:04Speaker 05

  Because I'm married to the greatest gal in the world, man. I mean, she is, she is the ultimate home economist. She cans 800 quarts of stuff a summer. She can sew clothes, make.

• 55:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  I see, I see. She was interested in doing all of that?

• 55:17Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. She, yeah, she, um, yeah, I mean, she, she thought I was pretty sharp.

• 55:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, so, but you were working as.

• 55:24Speaker 05

  I think she still does.

• 55:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  You were, you were working as a reporter and she was working as what?

• 55:29Speaker 05

  Uh, well, we had, we had Daniel, so she, um, she worked at a, at a fabric store for a little bit, clerking, but Daniel came very early and so she stayed at home and I'm working at the newspaper.

• 55:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, but both of you wanted to go have a farm life?

• 55:44Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.

• 55:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why did she want that? I mean, did she come from a farming background?

• 55:49Speaker 05

  She wanted to be with me.

• 55:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, oh, well, fair enough.

• 55:51Speaker 05

  Is that fair enough?

• 55:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  But did she come back? Come, yeah, but still.

• 55:55Speaker 05

  She, she grew up on a farm.

• 55:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, okay, so she had some familiarity with that?

• 55:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, and she had, she'd bought into the idea that you had put forward?

• 56:02Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 56:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  And she was enthusiastic about, because that's important. I mean, you want your, you want your wife to be seriously on board with this. This is hard work.

• 56:10Speaker 05

  The single biggest reason farms fail is income, is, is, um, is contradictory, um, visions.

• 56:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 56:18Speaker 05

  Of, of husband, wife.

• 56:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's probably the biggest reasons marriage fails, all things considered. But, but I can see it being particularly acute with a project like this. It's all consuming.

• 56:27Speaker 05

  You're, you're, you don't go to work every day, you know, you're, you're with each other.

• 56:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 56:31Speaker 05

  And so, uh, so, yeah, those, that.

• 56:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you've got the four horsemen of the apocalypse nipping at your heels all the time.

• 56:37Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, exactly. So, so we, we, um. So I came back to the farm full-time. Now I'm there.

• 56:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Eighty-two, right?

• 56:44Speaker 05

  In eighty-two, and um, and it took us three years, Jordan, u- until we could, I would say, we could exhale. I think we're gonna make it. It took us three years.

• 56:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 56:54Speaker 05

  But, but that little.

• 56:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's not too bad to start a new business.

• 56:57Speaker 05

  No, no, that's right. That's right.

• 56:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Lot of new businesses fail there, and the first part of it, when you're not making any money and you've got no network.

• 57:03Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 57:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  What do they say? Getting from zero to one, that's very hard.

• 57:07Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 57:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  One to two is still hard. Two to three is getting a little better.

• 57:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, but, but, but ten to eleven's a lot easier.

• 57:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right, right, right.

• 57:15Speaker 05

  So, so, uh, so what I did at that time, uh, fortunately, I was blessed with a, and have been blessed, uh, with, with a bit of a gift of, gift of gab, communication. I'm an extrovert. Um, and in, in high school, college, I was in, I did inter-scholastic, intercollegiate debate. I've got a room full of debate trophies.

• 57:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hmm.

• 57:35Speaker 05

  And, uh, and did theater, drama plays, public speaking, all that. I, I didn't do the, the, the athletic thing. I, I, I was not, I was, I was a late bloomer, got, the best thing that ever happened to me was getting cut from the seventh grade basketball team. My mother was a, a health and phys ed teacher, so she was extremely athletic. My older brother was very athletic. And here I come along, well, you know, I've got to be athletic, right? In order, you know, you gotta, gotta join, join the family brand after all. And, um, so I'm, I'm a, I'm a pudgy, you know, fourteen-year-old, you know, late bloomer, and I get cut from the seventh grade baseball team. I get cut from the eighth grade basketball team. In other words, I don't make the teams. Not, not, I'm on the team and get cut. I mean, I didn't even make the tryouts, okay? I didn't make.

• 58:19Speaker 05

  And I remember like yesterday in eighth grade, looking and not seeing my name on that roster, and making a mental decision, okay, athletics is done. I'm a great communicator, you know, I win spelling bees, I win, you whatever, you know, speaking contests. I'm gonna put all my attention on that. So I tell kids, I say, you be thankful for what you fail at early, because that helps you determine your path in life.

• 58:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, there's another issue there that you're highlighting that's extremely relevant with regard to our discussion of marketing. It's like, one of the things that people don't understand, and this might be more true of people who, like, let's say, have an interest in practical matters like trades or even engineering. It's like, well, why do I need to be fluent in my communication? Why do I need to write? Why do I need to learn to speak? It's like, well, if 75% of your business problem is communication, and it certainly is, right? What are you selling? What do you have to offer? How do you talk to people?

• 59:23Speaker 05

  For your employees?

• 59:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, that's right. How do you negotiate? How do you make contracts? All of that's like, there isn't anything more worthwhile than you can learn to do than how to get command of the language. And that's so interesting in your situation, because you might think, well, that might be true, except for farming. Now, I know you shouldn't think that, but it's just not true. Because communication is so crucial.

• 59:47Speaker 05

  The people who communicate lead their professions.

• 59:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 59:51Speaker 05

  Across the board.

• 59:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, exactly.

• 59:53Speaker 05

  And I have moms come up to me with their little, you know, 10-year-old in tow. My son wants to be a farmer, or daughter wants to be a farmer. What would you suggest to them? I say, "Find your local amateur theater group, enroll them."

• 1:00:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right, right. So counterintuitive.

• 1:00:10Speaker 05

  And they look at me like, "Yeah." I say, "Become a storyteller. Come on, storytellers are what change the world."

• 1:00:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right, that's exactly right.

• 1:00:19Speaker 05

  And so, we, obviously, '82, this is before computers, before, you know, internet, any of this stuff. And so, we basically did a three-pronged approach. I put together a slide program, you know, the old Kodak Carousel, you know? A slide projector? And at that time, every city had a very vibrant kind of, you know, Philanthrop, you know, Rotary Club, Ruritan, Kiwanis, Toastmasters, Elks, Moose, right, all this. And they do, you know, weekly or monthly dinner meetings, and they're always looking for an interesting program. And so, I put together a carousel program, "How We Can Heal the Planet with Pasture-Based Livestock." And it was the beginning of this.

• 1:01:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  This was, when did you do this?

• 1:01:05Speaker 05

  In eighty-two.

• 1:01:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yeah, so, okay.

• 1:01:07Speaker 05

  So, this was just the beginning, you know, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, were just beginning to, once in a while, put in a tidbit about cow burps. And, you know, there was just the beginning of this kind of demonization of livestock. And, um, and so, anyway, I put this together. And at the end, I would say, now, if you'd like to participate in this, I'll be glad to add your name to our, to our, uh, customer list. You'll get a newsletter and, you know, order blank and, you know, we can, and each one of those would, would yield, you know, two, three, four people, you know? So, that was one thing I did. The second thing.

• 1:01:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so that's, that's also something that we shouldn't skip over lightly. So, um, I think the most valuable, I have millions of social media followers. And I don't know how many, twenty million, some, lots.

• 1:01:55Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:01:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  The most valuable of all the things we own are our mailing lists. And I think, well, I don't know what my mailing list has on it, three hundred and fifty thousand people, something like that, which is a pretty small fraction of the total social media network. But it's by far, like, if we're trying to advertise for tickets for a lecture. So, you're going out there and you're collecting individual people who are interesting. Like, how many people interested in what you're doing? How many people like that did you need before you were successful? How many did you have to collect?

• 1:02:30Speaker 05

  Fortunately, at that time, you know, we, with our low expenses and, and all that, we, we didn't need more than, goodness, uh, a hundred families, a hundred, two hundred families.

• 1:02:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, okay, okay, so that's really worth knowing. So, so you put together this slide, presentation, and you collected a hundred and fifty avid customers.

• 1:02:48Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, yes. Uh, and, and if you've got a hundred people that are spending a thousand dollars a year with you, that's, that's significant.

• 1:02:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:02:56Speaker 05

  And, and so that's.

• 1:02:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Especially if they're loyal and they had also talked to other people. Because word of mouth really matters.

• 1:03:02Speaker 05

  Okay, so, the next thing we did was, when somebody would call us and say, hey, I, you know, I, I heard about you, I want your stuff. You're tempted to say, oh, good, good. Well, what do you want? Yeah, you want five chickens and

• 1:03:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Speaker 05

  Three T-bone steaks. Uh, my first question was, where did you hear about us before I, where did you hear about us? Oh, I had dinner over at, you know, Mary Jane's.

• 1:03:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Speaker 05

  And so then I'd go to the customer box and I'd put a post-it note at Mary Jane's to remind me the next time Mary Jane came out and picked up something.

• 1:03:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hmm.

• 1:03:32Speaker 05

  Mary Jane, thank you. I just hug her, slobber all over her, say, thank you for spreading the word.

• 1:03:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:38Speaker 05

  Um, and, and, uh, tell you what, uh, go over and, and, and take a dozen eggs home, which are for free.

• 1:03:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Absolutely.

• 1:03:44Speaker 05

  And, and people, people are starved for appreciation. They're starved for love. They're starved for appreciation. They will, they will jump off a cliff for you.

• 1:03:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you just said something like with both those that's unbelievably worth noting because one of the things you can do in your family, well, even for yourself, to promote positive change that's unbelievably effective. Well, give you an example of this. So there's a famous psychologist, B.F. Skinner.

• 1:04:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  And B.F. Skinner was the father of reinforcement learning theory. And, um, that's a big deal. These large language models, these new AI systems, they're trained with reinforcement theory. So like this was a major deal and B.F. Skinner was a master of this. And he could, he, in, in World War II, he trained pigeons to guide missiles by pecking on photographs as they were flying across the sky, right? So Skinner could train animals to do anything. Now, he noted that you could, you could use threat and punishment to shape an animal's behavior, but the best thing to use was targeted reward. And so what he would do is he'd, his animals were hungry because they had to be motivated to work for food pellets. And so he'd have a hungry animal.

• 1:04:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Maybe you're trying, so imagine there's a rat in a cage and there's a little ladder and you want the rat to go up on the ladder and then walk across and go down the other side. It's pretty complicated behavior. So here's how Skinner would do it. He would just watch that rat and as soon as it got near, as soon as it made a move near the ladder, he'd give it a food pellet. Then it would start hanging around the ladder. And when it was hanging around close to the bottom of the ladder, now and then it would put a paw up and he'd give it a food pellet. And then now the rat was doing this quite a bit. And then now and then it would do this, food pellet. And so it would, but the key issue was that he was observing. And then when he got an increment of behavior in the direction he wanted, he signified that.

• 1:05:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's what you're doing with your customers is you're paying very careful attention. And then one of your customers does something that you'd really like them to do more of. You notice, you tell them, you reward them for it. And then now the other thing you said that was very cool was that people are dying for this. It's like if you watch people, you'll see that they kind of do, they do some tentative, good things, kind of secretly. It's like they're hoping that someone will notice, but generally people don't. And so they'll do something good that's a little bit extra. They'll do this with their boss or with their wife. And generally people are kind of opaque to that. But if you notice that, you say, ha, with kids, you see this, with kids, see like,

• 1:06:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  I see that you spent a little extra time like putting away your Legos today. And like you moved all those Legos from there to there. And that was really good. I'd like to see more of that. The kid is just like, if you can catch them in the act, oh, man, they're so happy about that. That's right. And so that's, so now you've got your hundred people who are on your side and you're watching them very carefully. And if they do, if they put in a good word for you, which they don't have to do, by the way. Yeah, you want to say, we saw that, we appreciate it. Here's a little gift, thank you very much. That's all, you don't have to say, please keep doing it. That's right, that gets that exchange going, right? And those, those person to person, like one of the things, we're very careful on tour. For example, I mean, I see thousands of people, hey? And my, my staff know this particularly.

• 1:07:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  The rule for my staff is do not ever annoy any of the people who are interested in coming up to me or being at the shows. Because, yeah, yeah, because if you annoy one person. They will tell a thousand people, if you annoy a hundred people, enough so they start talking about it, you're done, your business is done.

• 1:07:30Speaker 05

  Well, that's, you know, Stephen Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you know, talks about emotional equity. And he says, and he says, it takes roughly, it takes roughly ten positives, ten praises.

• 1:07:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Cancel out one.

• 1:07:44Speaker 05

  To take, take one criticism.

• 1:07:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's probably an underestimate, but yeah. Well, and also people remember the negative.

• 1:07:52Speaker 05

  Oh, we're hardwired to remember. Nobody comes back from town and says, honey, I hit five go lights. We hit stoplights. We never call them go lights, even though they, they let us go. We never think about them letting us go. We think about them making us stop.

• 1:08:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:08:06Speaker 05

  So, so we, so we, we, I, I did the, you know, I did the, the slide program, kind of what I call infotainment.

• 1:08:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, and the story, the story's so important, because you have an interesting story to tell, yeah.

• 1:08:17Speaker 05

  Exactly, the story. And, and, and people, listen, people still love to feel like they're a part of, of a great cause.

• 1:08:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, of an adventure.

• 1:08:27Speaker 05

  And so, so, so the whole theme here is, you can participate in, in, in healing the planet, making vegetation, building soil, clean water, clean air. You, you can participate with what you eat. Here's how you do it. And so people love, they're drawn, they're attracted to this what? You know, our, our, our little, our, all of our little bags at the farm store, our, our little, you know, slogan is, healing the planet, or, or healing the land one bite at a time. We're trying to connect what you're eating to the, to the landscape. And we're actually doing it. All right, so.

• 1:09:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Important detail as well.

• 1:09:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. The, the thing I love most is when people come to visit the farm. We have a 24/7, 365, open door policy. Anyone can come from anywhere in the world to see anything, anytime, anywhere, unannounced. That's our, that's our dedication to transparency. And we love to hear people come and say, wow, it was better than I imagined.

• 1:09:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, that's, that's good, yeah.

• 1:09:25Speaker 05

  That, that's good stuff. So, so, uh, so we did that. And then the other thing we did was that, uh, that when, when, when somebody was interested, we gave them a sample. Samples work. If you've got a good product, or you've got good content, samples work.

• 1:09:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Uh huh.

• 1:09:42Speaker 05

  And so, we'd tease them with a sample. You know, give them a chicken, give them a dozen eggs, give them a T-bone steak, give them a pound of ground beef, or, you know, a pound of bacon or something. And, uh, and, and because for the very reason that you said earlier, nobody's looking for something new. No, no, nobody, nobody goes down the shampoo aisle and says, you know,

• 1:10:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  No.

• 1:10:05Speaker 05

  I, I've been a head and shoulders guy all my life, but today, for some reason, I've got a hankering for something else. Pantene Pro V, you know. Nobody does that.

• 1:10:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  You don't want the decision cost even.

• 1:10:16Speaker 05

  No, no, no.

• 1:10:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Or the risk.

• 1:10:18Speaker 05

  Nobody wants to make a decision.

• 1:10:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, the incremental benefit is basically zero. The risk that you, you, first of all, it's difficult. You know, there's a whole consumer literature on this, hey? So, imagine, you might think that if you went into a shop,

• 1:10:31Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 1:10:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  And here's your options. You have 200 shampoos to pick from, or four.

• 1:10:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, or one. Okay, people don't like one, because there's no choice.

• 1:10:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  But they don't like 200 either. And part of the reason for that is, imagine there's the best one in 200. Okay, what's your chance you're gonna pick that?

• 1:10:49Speaker 05

  You're gonna pick the best one.

• 1:10:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's one in 200.

• 1:10:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's called paralysis of choice.

• 1:10:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Exactly, exactly. And so, maybe you want four.

• 1:10:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, something like that.

• 1:10:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's exactly right. So, so, um, so we, we'd give a sample, so that, so that they could try something new with no risk.

• 1:11:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:11:05Speaker 05

  And, and what we found was, a lot of times, people are naturally intuitively prejudiced to a gift, more than they are something that they bought. Because when you buy something, you have buyer's remorse. When somebody gives you something, there's no remorse. And so, you have this, this feel-good thing. Even if they're equal, the one you were given, you tend to have more

• 1:11:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Positive emotion.

• 1:11:30Speaker 05

  More positive emotion for than, than what you had to buy. And so, now, I'm not saying our stuff wasn't as good. I'm just saying

• 1:11:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  But you are saying if it was equally good, that would be good enough.

• 1:11:40Speaker 05

  You tap into, yeah, you tap into these, these, these emotional things. So, that was kind of our three-pronged approach, early on, to, you know, to, to kind of start and build a, you know, build a patron base. In fact, we don't call them customers. We call them patrons. We call them patron saints. And we address them as patron saints. Um, you know, this, this is all about.

• 1:11:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  You know, a customer is often someone whose eyes you want to pull wool over. Whether, whereas if you have patrons, let's say, you know, um, then you treat them properly and you treat them hospitably and you're damn happy they exist. And you want them to know that and you remember it.

• 1:12:17Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. And, and we, uh, we, we call this relationship marketing.

• 1:12:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22Speaker 05

  We're, we're really marketing a relationship because they're not buying it because it's a label. They're not, they're buying it because they trust us. Yeah, be- because they trust us. Uh, and, and now with, with food choice and, you know, labeling confusion and, you know, what is a cage-free, natural, you know, all this stuff? What is all this stuff? We've now presented ourselves as, as our, our patrons' food coach. You don't ever have to be confused again. Just buy it from us and you'll know it's the best. It doesn't matter.

• 1:12:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. So that's another example of you identifying the problem that people have.

• 1:12:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah. So the problem is.

• 1:12:59Speaker 05

  Cause every mom is scared to death. Am I buying the best for my kid? Am I buying the best for my kid? So I, I just come in straight away and say, um, you never have to be concerned about that at all. I'll solve that.

• 1:13:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:13:10Speaker 05

  Get it from us and, and you never have to worry about that again.

• 1:13:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  So here's some, here's, we're hospitable. Here's some evidence. You can trust us. Try our product. You'll see it's high quality. Now, because you can trust us, there's a whole bunch of problems you don't have.

• 1:13:23Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:13:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. So you can solve them all at one, in one fell swoop.

• 1:13:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah. And well, and you said earlier, and this is very useful for everybody who's watching and listening to know. It's like, well, how do you sell effectively? Well, you know, the, the crooked used car salesman approach to that is sell junk to idiots and laugh at them when you pull the wool over their eyes. And that'll work once.

• 1:13:44Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:13:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. But you make an enemy. And if you do that 50 times and they tell a thousand people, you have 50,000 enemies and you're done. And so what you want to do instead is tell people the truth and develop that relationship, right? And so, and you also pointed out that. You want to tell stories to people so that they're interested in what you're doing and so they can come along in an adventure. But you also want to listen to them. So you know what their problem is. And so that's a really good way of thinking about sales is when you go out to sell, you're actually seeing if you can establish a partnership. And you can't establish a partnership if you have nothing to offer.

• 1:14:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you have nothing to offer unless the solution you have matches the person's problem.

• 1:14:32Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:14:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so you go and say, the first thing you want to know from someone new is, what's your problem?

• 1:14:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, what do you need? What are you looking for? What are you looking for?

• 1:14:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  And if the answer has nothing to do with what you're selling, you should find someone else to talk to. You might be able to say, well, I know some people who can help you with that. But they're actually not someone you should partner with. Because your offering and their problem don't match. And then if you force that by convincing them or lying to them even, then, well, they're not satisfied because you didn't solve their problem. Plus, they're annoyed at you. Plus, even worse, if you do have a partnership with them, they're going to bend you towards their problem. And that's definitely not something you want. So you've got to think of the first sales approach as an investigation.

• 1:15:19Speaker 00

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• 1:15:44Speaker 05

  Well, you also have to think about it as persuasion that people don't move too far, too fast. People move incrementally.

• 1:15:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Speaker 05

  So one of the things that we deal with all the time is, on a scale of say, 1 to 10, 1 being your food comes from the gas station. And let's say we're a 10, okay?

• 1:16:09Speaker 05

  You irritate somebody if you try to move them from a one to a 10.

• 1:16:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Speaker 05

  They're not a customer.

• 1:16:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's because you're criticizing everything that you do.

• 1:16:16Speaker 05

  That's right, that's right. But if we can move them, if, as a result of a discussion, a friendly discussion, a non-aggressive discussion, we can move them from a one to a two.

• 1:16:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Speaker 05

  Well, they're on their way.

• 1:16:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:30Speaker 05

  And they might not buy from us, but now instead of buying from the, you know, from the gas station, they're going to the, whatever, organic section of the supermarket or something, okay? And you gradually, you know, move them up. And so, too many times in persuasion, people try to move people too fast.

• 1:16:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:46Speaker 05

  And people resist being moved too fast.

• 1:16:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Definitely.

• 1:16:50Speaker 05

  And that's why you have to start with a, with a question that moves you to common ground quickly, if you're going to, if you're going to make progress. Because if you, if you move too fast, then you lose them.

• 1:17:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:06Speaker 05

  And now there's, now there's no, there's no discussion.

• 1:17:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, they can't see a way to bridge the gap.

• 1:17:09Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:17:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Plus, you're criticizing their whole lifestyle.

• 1:17:12Speaker 05

  Right. So, in marketing, one of the things that, that we, you know, teach and promote, you know, through our team, is no sale is an end to itself. Every sale is a springboard for the next sale.

• 1:17:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, of course.

• 1:17:27Speaker 05

  You cannot stay in business finding new customers.

• 1:17:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:31Speaker 05

  The only way you stay in business is to please the customers you have.

• 1:17:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:37Speaker 05

  Enough that they buzz and tell people about it and bring them back to you.

• 1:17:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that's a long-term relationship. It's akin to a friendship relationship. You don't want to play with someone once.

• 1:17:45Speaker 05

  Which is why you don't want to irritate somebody at your, at your lectures or your presentations.

• 1:17:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, because they're already in the camp.

• 1:17:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:17:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, they're the last people you want to irritate.

• 1:17:54Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:17:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah. They've done all the work coming to you.

• 1:17:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, you need to do backflips to make them happy and, and meet their, meet their

• 1:18:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Alright, well, look, this has gone by very rapidly, so let me do two things. I'm going to tell everybody what we're going to do on the Daily Wire side. It's something I would have liked to have done on the YouTube side here, too. I would like to talk to you a little bit about how people can

• 1:18:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  I would like to talk about the practical steps that people could take if they're interested in knowing more about this, just conceptually or as a lifestyle, right? So let's do that on the Daily Wire side. I want to recapitulate what we've discussed and then give you an opportunity to add anything that you might want to this broader audience while you have the opportunity. So you talked about the fact that, and there's so many things we could have touched on still, that there is an agricultural enterprise, which is roughly termed now something approximating regenerative farming, which requires the use of multiple species and a particular approach to pasture management.

• 1:19:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  The pasture management is a diverse, natural landscape, multiple plants that's grazed upon by herbivores that move like they do when they're migrating, that you mimic artificially. You use multiple species to fill in the ecological niches. You use birds to track the herbivores, the cows, and to sanitize the ground that they've grazed on. You rotate the cattle around your, through use of paddocks around your land. You maximize the amount of product that your grasslands are producing so that that's hyper-efficient. You regenerate the soil so it gets thicker. That sequesters carbon.

• 1:19:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  You produce high-quality meat, and you can do that profitably while you're pursuing a lifestyle that's enjoyable and serving a dedicated and committed customer base. That's about that, eh? Anything else?

• 1:20:02Speaker 05

  That's, that's pretty good.

• 1:20:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  It is pretty good. It is pretty good.

• 1:20:05Speaker 05

  It is pretty good.

• 1:20:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  And it's a good deal for everybody, and so...

• 1:20:08Speaker 05

  It is.

• 1:20:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, and so you're still an enthusiastic advocate of this after 40 years as well.

• 1:20:12Speaker 05

  Yes, indeed. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why? Why is that?

• 1:20:16Speaker 05

  I'll tell you something. Most farmers my age, and I'm almost 70, most farmers my age are lonelier than they've ever been in their life. Their kids are gone.

• 1:20:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  And they've had enough.

• 1:20:27Speaker 05

  The kids are gone. It's Matilda and I by ourselves.

• 1:20:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:32Speaker 05

  And, boy, I can't get up and down off that tractor as well as I used to, you know, that sort of...

• 1:20:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:38Speaker 05

  And, and for me, Jordan, creating this, this model, this farm, that, that, that, yes, the multi-speciation makes it, makes it different every day. You know, you're different animals, different things. The diversity of ecology, you know, we've built 20 ponds, so there's, there's ducks and there's wood ducks and there're deer and there're bear and, and there's wildlife and pollinators and so there's just, there's just vibrant life and earthworms and, and so you have all of that, you have that aesthetic and aromatic sensual beauty and attractiveness. And then you add the component of, of the social element, the people, our customers.

• 1:21:21Speaker 05

  In other words, we're not just out here hauling grain to a Cargill grain bin.

• 1:21:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, you have a social community.

• 1:21:27Speaker 05

  Every day, there are people at the farm saying, ah, so thank you for what you do. You're, you're just, our family depends on you. Thank you, you know, from our, our day one, our kids grow up, you know, with our customers, pinching them on the cheek, saying, we just think your parents are the coolest in the world and thank you for, for being a part of this. And so here I am, you know, 22 of us now basically earn a full-time living from the farm. And, and I'm surrounded now by this, these twenties and thirties-year-old, you know, the oldest ones are in their early forties now, but, but these team and these young people that are just, just can't wait to do what I've done. And every day, they,

• 1:22:11Speaker 05

  they, they think I'm cool, you know, and, and they want to do this. And, and so, I mean, I just, I, I just break down in tears when I, when I, I, you know, explain the blessing and the gratitude that I have, that at this stage in my life, I'm surrounded by this youthful enthusiasm.

• 1:22:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, understand it.

• 1:22:33Speaker 05

  To appreciate what I've spent a lifetime carving out, and they will now take it to new heights that I never dreamed.

• 1:22:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, and we didn't, there's so many things that are advantageous to this that we didn't even discuss too, because the approach that you're taking, if that was duplicated at a larger scale, also makes for a much healthier, healthier livestock with a much higher quality life, and much more resilient farms and more decentralized food production, and less reliance on chemicals and, and both fertilizers and pesticides and...

• 1:23:07Speaker 05

  And pharmaceuticals and pharmaceuticals.

• 1:23:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, right, and, and no antibiotic overutilization, which, you know, which is a very major thing.

• 1:23:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, and regeneration of the soil and carbon sequestration and, yeah, yeah. So, so, you know, we hear all this nonsense at high levels among the globalists about the fact that agriculture is a net pollutant and that we have to radically cut back, for example, on our meat consumption, which is something that's like, oh, I see, so everybody's gonna have a little brain because they eat nothing but plants, that's your damn theory, right? And so, you, you know, you hear about these regen...

• 1:23:42Speaker 05

  If we're, if we're all eating beans, that might solve the gas problem.

• 1:23:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, that's also, well, apparently Bill Gates has a solution to that that's pharmaceutical as well.

• 1:23:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, some, some Bovira or something.

• 1:23:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, exactly, exactly. There's a putting the cart before the horse. And so, it's very optimistic to hear about such approaches because they seem to be producing a variety of social goods simultaneously and is in a truly resilient and sustainable way. So, well, thank you very much, sir, for coming to talk to us today. And we'll turn to the Daily Wire side, and I think we'll go more into the nuts and bolts of this, maybe talk a little bit more about the issues of resilience, sustainability as well. But if you're looking for a practical guide to how this sort of lifestyle might be, well, at least participated in, but possibly pursued, then join us on the Daily Wire side. And thank you very much to the film crew here. Where are we today? Evanston?

• 1:24:37Speaker 05

  Evansville.

• 1:24:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, sorry, sorry to everybody in Evansville. Evansville, Indiana. Yeah, yeah, and so, I had a show here last night. And so, it's a lovely place, and we've been happy to be here. And it was very good to meet you, sir.

• 1:24:49Speaker 05

  It was wonderful, what a pleasure.

• 1:24:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Thanks very much for the conversation. Thanks to all of you on the YouTube side. And join us over on the Daily Wire side for a continuation of this conversation.

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