The Case for Raw Milk, Local Meat, and a Homesteading Revolution in America | Drs. Jill and Robert Malone
[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW]Modern industrial agriculture relies on heavy chemical inputs and is built around corporate monopolies, leaving many Americans searching for healthier alternatives, say Drs. Robert and Jill Malone.
They’re co-authors of the new book “Homesteading for Health: One Farm Family’s Guide to Food, Land, and Self-Sufficiency.” They argue that true food security and health may begin in our own backyards.
Modern homesteading is not a backward-looking lifestyle, they say, but instead a forward-thinking movement aimed at restoring physical health, mental well-being, and intentional community through self-reliance and real food.
The Malones walk me through a host of questions: Can young families, in practice, choose homesteading over suburban life? What are the virtues of raw milk? Why are niche markets and diversifying a small farm’s income stream critical? And what practices may ultimately lead to healthier food for Americans?
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
In this episode, Robert and Jill Malone join me to discuss their new book, Homesteading for Health: One Farm Family’s Guide to Food, Land, and Self-Sufficiency. They share their vision for modern homesteading, true food autonomy, and taking command of our health.
Jill Malone:
They came up with the idea that families would grow plots, victory gardens, basically a kitchen garden, to feed themselves. It was enormously successful. By the end of World War II, we were producing as much food in our victory gardens as had been grown on the farms out in the rural countryside.
Robert Malone:
That ethic of being self-reliant and creating value from the land—working in the land, belonging to the land—that was at the core of homesteading. This is not a backwards-looking movement; this is looking forward as a way for families in particular and individuals that want to live their own life without being told what they have to do on a daily basis.
There are plenty of eggs today, that’s great. And they’re from those hybrid blues. It’s getting late in the season, and their egg production goes down. I gotta get another cup of coffee. I’ve only had one so far.
Ms. Malone:
So you can see, I don’t know if you can see, you can see that the cream goes right here because milk is not homogenized; it’s raw. So the cream separates to the top. And in Virginia, if you’re going to have raw milk, you have to buy milk shares. So, I have to own part of a cow from my neighbor in order to get milk from her. And we do have those cows down there, but they’re not, they haven’t.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s amazing how they’ve come up with these different systems to work the bureaucracy.
Ms. Malone:
Government regulations, right.
Mr. Malone:
It’s funny how much it’s all driven by politics and constituencies. The milk that comes out of the cow, they centrifuge it, they split it into all its parts, and then they reconstitute it to meet whatever the USDA [U.S. Dept. of Agriculture] regulations are—so when you buy whole milk, you’re not—it’s actually a highly processed food.
Mr. Jekielek:
I had no idea about that. I absolutely love being here. And from what I know, this actually all started through a common love of horses. And just tell me about that.
Mr. Malone:
Okay, so the story: I’m living with my parents in a little canyon just north of the town of Goleta, which is a suburb of Santa Barbara. And I’ve just come back from hiking the John Muir Trail with three other guys. So we’ve now spent six weeks with no girls, three guys, and I’ve come back home. And these two young women show up at my door. Jill and her best friend were visiting the horse that had been her horse, that had just been sold to a family in this very same canyon, Embarcadero. And they decided that they were going to go say hi to this guy that they knew from high school. So it’s at the end of summer of 1976.
They show up, and I’m like, I need a girlfriend after six weeks. And here shows up this beautiful young girl that I’ve met previously, who’s an intellectual. A little bit bookish, a little bit nerdish, in other words, pretty much a perfect match. The neighbors had a couple of quarter horses, and so I started borrowing the neighbors’ horses. For the two of us, they had two horses and they let me ride them. That meant they would let Jill and I ride them together, and we used to ride all over in the back hills.
Ms. Malone:
Very idyllic.
Mr. Malone:
And that was kind of our origin story, riding together Western-style back then.
Ms. Malone:
And we’ve been together ever since. We got married when we were 18.
Mr. Jekielek:
It was literally through the love of horses.
Mr. Malone:
And teenage hormones played a role, I’ll say.
Ms. Malone:
My folks had an avocado lemon ranch, and that’s what they call them in California. It’s not farms, but ranches. Out here, we’d call it a farm, but we don’t have avocados.
Mr. Malone:
And I had experience planting avocados. I planted the hill behind my parents’ house.
Ms. Malone:
So Robert came and worked for my dad, and my dad was Robert’s mentor. Robert’s parents were pretty harsh disciplinarians, and he fell out with them pretty early in his life. And so my dad kind of took him on and mentored him. So Robert worked the farm, my dad’s farm, for many years. In fact, much of putting ourselves through school, nobody paid our way, was working on that farm.
Mr. Malone:
And he really was a mentor. He was a notoriously harsh guy at work. But he absolutely loved his young daughter.
Ms. Malone:
One of the things about our origin story and working on that farm was that Robert had to spray a lot of chemicals. Like at the time, this was the 1970s, this was the way.
Mr. Malone:
I’ve put down hundreds and hundreds of gallons of glyphosate. And that really started our journey. You know, it was a conventional farm, and as we kind of moved through time, looking back on that, I became very much an advocate of organic, basically to avoid glyphosate. And that was really the start of one of our health journeys; we have always tried really hard not to eat food that’s produced with chemicals.
Mr. Jekielek:
Okay, so you got into horses, so you have this farm, but the farm is for the horses, but then you’re farming what?
Ms. Malone:
The farm was for our horses, but we have always homesteaded. And so I have always had a kitchen garden. You know, I’ve always grown produce, always, you know, since we did have a farm, we’ve always had chickens. We’ve always tried to eat really healthy. We’ve tried, you know, I won’t say we’ve never used glyphosate, but certainly in the last decade, we’ve used none. On this farm right here, we have used no chemicals.
Mr. Malone:
She was just talking about her father’s farm. And my father’s farm was just a little bit out of the way. Quite literally, he had a John Deere tractor.
Ms. Malone:
This is true. I would sit there in a bikini with my feet on the steering wheel so I could steer because you’re going like one mile an hour because somebody’s behind you with a hose nozzle and a tank spraying. I would read romance novels and steer with my feet while he sprayed. Like that was.
Mr. Malone:
I walked behind the tractor and sprayed glyphosate.
Ms. Malone:
Looking back, I wish somebody had a video or a picture of it. But yes, it’s true.
Mr. Malone:
We basically grew up in this amazing bubble of time and situation, kind of the last, in many ways, golden years of California.
Ms. Malone:
Yes. We had parents that had long-term stable marriages, so we were kind of set up a little bit for success in terms of our marriage.
Mr. Malone:
That’s the narrative of the book is we’re now looking back on 50 years of living together, six small farms, all kinds of setbacks. You know, we lost—
Ms. Malone:
The Great Recession.
Mr. Malone:
We lost our shirts during the Great Recession. We lost all the equity we’d built up.We basically had to restart. And the reason that’s relevant, and that’s core to the story of the book, the reason that’s relevant, I think, right now is a lot of young people, they call them the Zoomers, the Gen Zs, are looking for, how do we have a life in this crazy world we’re living in?
Ms. Malone:
Hard economic times, and it’s hard right now.
Mr. Malone:
And they look at their options and they think it’s impossible. How can we possibly find a way forward in this world? And our story illustrates, because we had to completely reboot. But most recently, you know, this was 2017 when we bought this property, right? And it was rough. It was just played-out, raw hay land. That building was falling down, caving in. There was no house. I like to point out there was no well, no power, no septic, no fences, no houses.
Ms. Malone:
And we came with 12 horses.
Mr. Malone:
Yes, and we had to make it work.
Ms. Malone:
I would just say, not what we did, but what other people can do. And that’s one of the things rural America right now is dying. Property is cheap. You can go to West Virginia, even parts of rural Virginia, and pick up a house and 10 acres. It’s going to be a cruddy house, but you’re going to pick it up for under $200,000.
Starlink allows you to remote work. You do not have to live in the city. You do not have to live in suburbia if you do not want to. And when you live in a rural community, you have an intentional community. You shop at the same store as your neighbor. You go to the same feed store and you develop connections.
So, for people looking for connection, for looking for an intentional community, living in a place that isn’t so popular, that other people may reject because it’s isolated, is a good option. It’s a real option, and you don’t have to get the house of your dreams.
Okay, that’s like another big message: buy the cruddy house, buy a house you can take a little loan on. Pay it off rapidly, then you have all that equity. So there’s ways to get into homesteading where you have some land that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
Mr. Jekielek:
But your point is very super interesting. I’m just going to harp on this just for a moment. By default, basically, that’s what happens when you’re living in a rural community. And not everyone’s your favorite person, but hey, you know, it’s interesting.
Mr. Malone:
We have to all get along because we don’t have any choice.
Ms. Malone:
Robert will go to the feed store locally and he’ll say, I just got to go get something for the horses, some grain or whatever. And I’ll just think to myself, well, he’s going to be gone half an hour because he’s going to end up talking to the guys at the loading dock, and they’re going to get into a conversation, and he won’t be home for half-an-hour, even though it’s less than five minutes to the feed store.
You build relationships when you see people, the same people, time and again in a local community. You don’t often have those opportunities in an urban environment where people are always changing, always new faces. So, our book is about—it’s not just homesteading, it’s homesteading for health, and that’s eating real food, building community, intentional community, and learning to take care of yourself.
Mr. Malone:
When we say health, people often think about things like obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, but another huge component of health is mental health. And human beings need community. They need connection with other human beings. It’s how we’re wired, it’s what we evolved to be. And electronic communication is no substitute for actual human interaction or for being outside.
Ms. Malone:
And that’s one of the things about having a garden, being outside, keeping animals and getting your hands dirty. We build a strong immune system by being outside, not by taking pills. Wait till you meet our cows. We have very friendly cows. Yes, so learning to be healthy, and for us, a big component of that is homesteading.
Mr. Malone:
Homesteading, as we’re describing it, is another thing that people are often perplexed by. When you say the term homesteading, what they think about is the world of the 1800s when we had all these Western territories that were being basically colonized. And the government had a policy, and by the way, that land policy is very similar to ancient Ottoman law.
The policy of the U.S. government was basically you can take ownership of that land, which we determine is currently uninhabited. We can argue about that, about Native American populations, but that was the government’s position. You can have ownership of that land if you can prove that you’re working it. So that was homesteading then.
Now, when people use the term, people that are on the outside listening to it often get confused. That ethic of being self-reliant and creating value from the land, working the land, being part of the land, belonging to the land that was at the core of that homesteading, is what is the continuity with today’s homesteading. And people think that this is backward-looking, that it’s somehow Luddite, but it’s not. By the way, one of the large homesteader conferences, totally sold out, is happening about an hour north of here in Front Royal, Virginia, as we speak. A huge community of people coming together from all over the world.
But this is not a backward-looking movement. This is looking forward. As a way for families in particular and individuals that want to live their own life without being told what they have to do on a daily basis, without being subjected to the whims of modern large corporate structures and finance and media and everything else, to live an independent life in which they can exercise their own values and not have to be subjected to the pressures of modern life that are associated with it.
Ms. Malone:
Many homesteaders homeschool their children. That’s part of, you know, with young families, a lot of people have large families.
Mr. Malone:
It’s an emergence of a different culture. It looks back to the past and draws from traditional values, including often faith. But it’s also very much an effort to try to find a solution to the modern problems associated with this kind of, I’ll say it, central planned economy logic that dominates much of the Western world now. We seem to have assimilated. We not only rejected communism, we vilified communism, and anybody who is associated with communists, that was one of the earlier fear narratives. It was communism and the communists and the Red Scare, but in a strange way, as often seems to be the case, we seem to have surreptitiously become that which we had demonized. And this is also a reaction to that.
Ms. Malone:
And part of that is fear. The nanny state is going to take care of you, the government is going to take care of you, you don’t have to worry about things. And that’s a very seductive narrative, especially for young people. And yet, we all know that that’s a false narrative.
Mr. Malone:
And I want to say it’s not a Right vs Left thing. It’s not Democrats vs. Republicans. We were listening to a fascinating biopic recently about Molly Ivins, the famous, very liberal, very outspoken Texas writer and humorist. She talked about fear and the weaponization of fear, and the series of examples that she rolled out. Starting with the Red Scare and the fear that was promoted surrounding communism, and then carrying through, as I recall in her story, to the fear surrounding AIDS that was promoted. But many steps in between, she was able to perceive that fear has been used again and again and again to manipulate the population.
Her key point was that in every case, the prescription, the treatment, the solution that was offered is you just have to give up a little bit of your liberty in order to get security, and then everything will be okay. And she nailed it. She basically nailed the ratchet logic that every time you give up a little bit of your liberty to gain security and they never give it back.
Ms. Malone:
I think that breaking away from government, being your own individual, for many people, this is what part of the American culture is, the work ethic, it’s the ingenuity, it’s the self-sufficient.These are all things that homesteading, whether you have a lot of land like us or less land, it’s an ethos, it’s very American.
And that’s really important going forward, I think, for future generations that they can incorporate this ethos, which is very much our culture. And it is a culture and it’s worthy of preserving. And we don’t talk enough about the good in American culture. Our farmers built America.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let me jump in. You know, I understand that you actually did some of your learning from an Amish community?
Ms. Malone:
You know, we came in contact with and developed a number of Amish friends. A typical Amish farm will grow its own vegetables, but then it’ll really use and incorporate the idea of niche markets. So they might be breeding draft horses, they might be selling raw milk, they might be, the women might be making fried pies in their kitchen to sell at the local farmers market and the local groceries, and they’ll be doing all these things because they have multiple diversified income streams, right? At the core of it, they are truly the one successful of small farming in the United States.
Mr. Malone:
In our opinion, they’re the only ones left that really understand how to make a small farm work pay. And our government in the 1960s, under Earl Butz, who was the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, decided that small farms were a bad thing. He came up with the phrase, get big or get out. He said that the U.S. government, through crop subsidies, would only lend money and have insurance policies for big farms. This literally hollowed out rural America, and it was a government plan to do so. So now we are stuck with the consequences.
Before that, farm families had a lot of kids, which would provide many hands for the farm, and those kids would go into the military, supplying our military. We’ve lost that. We’ve lost our large farm families, and instead, now we have to import migrant labor because we no longer have large farm families to do those farm jobs.
When you hollow out small farms, you hollow out small towns. You also hollow out one of the things that’s odd about the traditional farm and the smaller farm. I mean, a small farm in the Midwestern context can even be a thousand acres. But what often happens in farming is you have these times when everybody is fallow.
They’re sitting around because it’s winter, or it’s a time during the summer when the crops are growing, but you’re not harvesting. You have these periods of downtime. Often you go into the garage and fix the tractor or whatever, but there’s a whole lot of tinkering that goes on during that period. And with that comes innovation.
I assert that Detroit, a lot of our automobile industry, a lot of our typical fabrication, traditional fabrication that occurred in the Midwest, was the consequence of farmers having time on their hands to tinker around with stuff in the garage and solve the problems that they were encountering on a regular basis. The story of American agriculture is a story of amazing innovations having to do with things like plows, the rise of John Deere, the tractor, and so many other things that were the consequence of just trying to solve the daily problems associated with living on a farm and making things.
Ms. Malone:
We don’t want to romanticize farming or homesteading because there’s a lot of hard work, but the hard work keeps you healthy, and that’s the other part of gardening. People who garden live longer. That’s a true story. People who keep animals, even pets, live longer. There’s a real benefit to all of this.
Mr. Jekielek:
So you actually have these multiple income streams. You have the horses, you have, I think we talked about poultry. You have, do the emus? Are the emus around the stream?
Mr. Malone:
You haven’t mentioned that, but I think that’s aspirational. But that’s a good point. Okay, so why have, if we’re going to have poultry, because emus are poultry. And poultry is not really.
Ms. Malone:
No, they’re birds. I don’t consider them poultry.
Mr. Malone:
So, one of Jill’s core competencies is in avian biology. At one point, she came to me with this really off-the-wall idea. I think we need to have emus here on the property. What? Why emus? You know, of all the things in the world. Well, it turns out that a particular.
Ms. Malone:
I want to hear how I convinced him that we needed emus. By the way, I’m kind of interested. What was that? Recently, I’ve been wanting a camel, so I need to take this lesson.
Mr. Malone:
So, her logic was that regular emus are used for meat and other things, but they’re pretty much a commodity product. But in the United States, a rare mutant of a white emu has emerged. And they fetch a premium. How much?
Ms. Malone:
They have blue eyes. How much for? About $800 for a bird and about $100 for an egg is the going price right now. Emus lay in the winter, and they have somewhere between 10 and 20 eggs. They are deep, deep blue-green colored eggs. Beautiful eggs. A lot of people use them for carving.
Mr. Malone:
It looks like a dragon egg from Game of Thrones.
Ms. Malone:
So again, they’re beautiful. For us, having animals, because we have a lot of visitors to the farm, and there is an agritourism element to it. Having exotics is fun, and again, they pay their own way, and that’s a really important thing. So, normal emus would not pay their own way. You know, they’re worth about $100, $150 per bird. That’s a lot of food for $100 that they eat. But the white emus, that’s a premium.
Mr. Malone:
So, likewise with the dairy cows.
Ms. Malone:
We have miniature Jerseys. And number one, the miniature.
Mr. Malone:
Why miniature Jerseys?
Ms. Malone:
Because there’s a market, because the homesteader—and this is a big, growing movement—can have two cattle and have their own milk and sell the offspring. And so, the miniatures are just easier to take care of because they’re about 500 pounds, and it’s just a lot easier to work a 500-pound animal than a 1,000-pound animal. But they’re still big animals. It’s not like they’re goat-sized, but they have real teats. You can milk them; they produce one to two gallons of milk a day.
When you’re milking goats, you’re down here and you’re not getting a lot of milk per goat. Goats are notoriously difficult to keep in; they like to eat everything, they ring trees, they have all sorts of bad habits, including the ability to escape. And dairy cattle are just kind of easier to take care of. So the miniature cattle really fit a niche for the homesteader. And the babies, which we can sell for $7,000 each for the heifers. What’s not to like?
Mr. Jekielek:
How hard is it? So, you know, you are someone who’s loved animals your whole life. You worked at the San Diego Zoo, a famous, you know, incredible zoo. For you, it’s just natural. And indeed, you’re kind of suggesting here that you’re coming up with creative ways to convince Robert to get more animals. But for the typical person who is in the city…
Ms. Malone:
For the typical person with the homesteader, and that includes the person in suburbia, chickens are absolutely the number one choice. About 8 per cent of all American households in the United States keep chickens. I kind of take that as an indication that there’s 8 per cent of American households at least interested in homesteading. For chickens, I’m not talking about a flock of 10.
Mr. Malone:
We’re not talking about a 300-bird chicken barn.
Ms. Malone:
No, I’m talking about a small coop, often a chicken tractor, which can be moved around on your suburban lawn, and three hens. You want to get a breed, if you’re going to get them young as babies, that are sex-linked, which means that when they’re born, the females are a different color. So you only want hens. You do not want a rooster.
If you get a rooster, you’ll be trying to give the rooster away when it’s 15 weeks old and attacking you and your children, or attacking the hens, because they’re notoriously aggressive. I won’t say every rooster is like that. You’re always going to have somebody saying, no, I have a wonderful rooster. And there might be some out there.
But generally, three hens, and a small cage. And they can free-range if you don’t have foxes. And they will both keep the bugs down in your garden and they will build your organic soil. Then you’re going to be collecting manure, you’re going to be able to compost, you’re going to find your compost goes and turns into soil much more quickly. The huge benefits. So that’s where I would start with homesteading and animals.
Mr. Malone:
The book has a middle section about a lot of practical lessons learned. If you’re going to get a pig, what kind of pig do you want to get? If you’re going to get a sheep, what’s the best sheep you can get?
Ms. Malone:
And by the way, our advice on pigs? Don’t do it.
Mr. Jekielek:
But there are also very cute dwarf pigs, aren’t there?
Mr. Malone:
There are, but those are going to be more pets. So if you’ve got a forest and you want to do sylvan or pig keeping, like Joel Salatin does, absolutely, go for it. I wanted to share a little story that relates to families and why families should consider having animals and livestock.
We were at a draft horse show, and there was a guy in the stall next to us who was talking about this with his own children and his life, reflecting back. And he said, you know, if you have animals, if you have livestock as you’re raising your kids, they tend to be better with other people.They tend to have more empathy. There’s something they learn from caring for animals that leads to them caring more for their fellow human beings.
I think that that alone justifies having at least some livestock if you’re a young family raising children. It doesn’t have to all be about economics. This is one of my pet peeves: we’ve chosen to define human existence using the language of economics.
Ms. Malone:
Yes, and that’s the thing about keeping chickens, and why I also think that they’re a great starter animal, is that a chicken that is out free-ranging, eating bugs, eating green grass, is going to have a different egg composition. It’s going to have more omega-3s. It’s going to have more of the healthy fats. It’s going to have less omega-6s. You’re feeding scraps to your chickens, as we did this morning. So whatever is left over—the leftover of our scrambled eggs—is going to go out to our chickens to eat. We won’t tell them.
Mr. Malone:
And the bread that we didn’t eat.
Ms. Malone:
Right. So if they’re getting healthy scraps, and a lot of them, again, this is making healthy eggs.
Mr. Malone:
Garden clippings.
Ms. Malone:
Yes. When I weed my vegetable garden, I take all those weeds and I throw them into my chicken coop.
Mr. Malone:
A lot of people traditionally would use pigs in this way. We find that a flock of chickens will eat almost anything.
Ms. Malone:
Anything. So for us, this farm used to be a quarry. A gravel quarry. And they put gravel everywhere, and Virginia has notoriously horrible soil. It’s red clay. And we have had to build our soil, and the animals have really helped with that. And we use a lot of horse manure to build soil.
Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned Joel Salatin earlier. Polyface is a farm that I’ve visited quite a number of times now. I actually get some meat from there, you know, direct to consumer, so to speak. I’ve talked with him extensively about, well, most recently he calls it, the war on cows. And of course, a big topic of his is just everything I’ve ever tried to do is illegal, right, and trying to fight regulation.
So I want to get you to tell us a little bit about, you know, of course, you talk about this a lot in the book, how you deal with some of these rules that make it a lot harder to do this stuff and actually, in a lot of cases, dissuade people from even entering the space.
Ms. Malone:
There are two issues here. One is federal regulation, so about the war on cows. You know, you’re not allowed as a small farmer to sell your meat over interstate lines unless it’s been inspected by a USDA inspector, but there are no USDA inspectors available for the small abattoir.
Mr. Malone:
Which is a fancy word for a slaughterhouse.
Ms. Malone:
For a butcher’s slaughterhouse. So, therefore, you’re stuck. You have to sell your meat to a big aggregator, to these livestock yards that are located elsewhere.
Mr. Malone:
And you end up getting about 15 cents on the dollar.
Ms. Malone:
On the dollar, right? So there are huge structural issues at the federal level. There is the PRIME [Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption] Act. There are congresspeople trying to take this on, but it’s an issue. And then there are also regulations at the local level. For instance, Montgomery County, Maryland. If you have cattle or horses, you have to have a manure plan, you have to bin your manure, have to take it off site, and there’s a whole set of regulations. But other counties, other states have different rules and regulations.
So if you’re going to homestead, you have to be aware that if you’re going to do it in an urban or suburban area, you’re going to be subjected to different laws, rules, and regulations than if you’re out here in rural Virginia or West Virginia or Ohio. Generally speaking, if you’re a small homesteader and you have a few animals, you can usually slip by. A lot of the rules and regulations, even at the federal level, have exemptions for keeping livestock yourself. You said two cattle, right?
Mr. Jekielek:
Is that the exception?
Ms. Malone:
No, it’s not the exception. The exception is I can eat my meat. I can have my neighbors eat my meat. I can have my friends eat my meat. But if I charge a penny to my neighbor for buying my meat, I’m not allowed to do that.Okay, so as a small farmer, I have to use a custom processor, and if I use a custom processor to slaughter my meat, then it can only be sold within the state unless that custom processor has a USDA inspector. But they don’t have very many USDA inspectors; they only go to the big slaughterhouses.
Mr. Malone:
And it’s really expensive to have a USDA inspector if you can even get one. And then because they have to have a bathroom, they have to have an office, all kinds of infrastructure.
Ms. Malone:
And then to slaughter your meat, you have to schedule often six months, even a year in advance to bring your cattle in. So they make it very difficult for a small farmer to actually have a herd of beef cattle and do it locally.And that’s what we’re trying to change: these local rules and regulations that allow farmers to sell direct to consumer, where they can retain the money, the profit, rather than having Big Ag, like JBS and Tyson’s Food, basically suck up all the profit.
Mr. Malone:
You mentioned Joel Salatin, and he’s a leading example. As far as I’m concerned, Joel ought to get the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I think he’s a national treasure, and he’s pioneering in a significant way a new business model for the smaller farm. He has a couple thousand acres, I think, right now. So calling him a small farm wouldn’t really be my idea of a small farm, and you know, I suppose if you live in Nebraska, a couple thousand acres is a small farm, but out here, that’s a pretty big operation.
And what Joel has done is he also uses a very diversified business model, income stream. He has an internship training program. He’s really pioneering this emerging new area, and he’s a major champion of direct-to-consumer marketing. You mentioned, and we’ve done the same thing when we visited Polyface Farm, I think it’s some of the best chicken I’ve ever tasted.
Joel has championed and lives the reality of selling direct to consumer. And it is the business model of the future that changes all of this with the internet. And this is why legislation, like the PRIME Act, is so important. This is another example of how this can be transformational.We were talking earlier about raw milk and milkshares and how this is making it possible for the stay-at-home person that’s managing the homestead, perhaps while the other partner is off doing one of the trades. In many cases, they can earn something like $20,000 to $30,000 a year from a small dairy herd if they can find a way to sell the milk. This is transforming dairy.
Mr. Jekielek:
Except in a lot of cases, you have to pretend it’s like pet milk.
Ms. Malone:
Right, so the whole regulatory thing with raw milk. There are about a thousand cases of Salmonella or Listeria infections annually in the United States. Those are acute infections of people from drinking raw milk. So, there is a risk to drinking raw milk, and one can protect themselves by making sure that the facilities are sanitary, by making sure that the farmers are doing the proper testing. There are ways to de-risk it, but there’s still always a small risk because it’s not being pasteurized.
On the other hand, you know, people laugh at the idea that raw milk is somehow healthier, but there are a couple of very interesting studies that show that children who grow up drinking raw milk have about 30 per cent fewer allergies and asthma. Now we have millions of children in the United States. A vast number of them have allergies and asthma. It’s one of the leading childhood diseases.
What if those children were all drinking raw milk? What if we saw a 10 or 20 per cent decrease in allergies and asthma? What would that look like, that benefit, vs. the risk of Salmonella and Listeria? It is actually a very small risk because you have a thousand cases, so you’re probably looking at 200 cases in children a year. So there’s this risk-benefit analysis that our public health officials don’t do and won’t even consider.
But the truth is, those of us who drink raw milk, number one, it tastes incredible, it’s amazing, and it’s a risk that we’re willing to take. We understand that risk, we’re willing to take that risk. But number two, there really could be huge benefits from drinking raw milk. And this needs to be something that’s analyzed and studied, and the government should have an interest because if it could decrease asthma.
Mr. Malone:
I can get back on the thread we were talking about, about direct to consumer. If we were to enable, and I used raw milk as one example, the beef industry, the ability to produce. From a small number of steers, where you buy the calf, you raise the steer, slaughter the cow. In many of these families that do this, they’ll raise three, slaughter one, that’s all they need for their freezer. And sell the meat from the other two to other folks. They have to go to a state-authorized slaughterhouse in order to do this. They can’t.
Ms. Malone:
The custom is the custom avatar.
Mr. Malone:
They can’t do it on their own farm. But then you go from 15 cents on the dollar in selling your beef to something more like 50 cents on the dollar coming back to you, and it totally changes the economics. Joel’s vision is enabling direct-to-consumer marketing using the kinds of ideas that we think of with, for instance, Amazon, being able to ship your product via UPS [United Parcel Service]. He has satellite facilities associated with his 2,000 acres that they ship frozen meat to, that then is available for folks to come in and purchase meat from. And it totally changes the economics of all this.
Ms. Malone:
And it’s not just the economics; I have to harp back on health, okay? When you’re talking about cattle, number one, is the farmer spraying glyphosate on their fields? Are they buying hay with glyphosate or grain with glyphosate? Are they using non-GMO atrazine? The other big issue with cattle is that almost all the beef cattle in the United States have farmers inject pellets of steroids behind their ear to make them grow quickly.
Okay, most people don’t know this. So being able to ask the person you’re buying your meat from face to face, are you using steroids on your meat? You know, are you spraying glyphosate? These are questions that, as a consumer, I want to know. Whether we have the right to know it, I don’t know. I think we certainly have the right to ask our farmer. And so I’m a big advocate of buying direct from the farm because it can be a very healthy product.
Mr. Malone:
That’s all true, but it doesn’t work for the producer unless they get enough revenue from that because it’s not sustainable.
Mr. Jekielek:
So, what I’m getting, and this is from having talked with Joel and other folks, and of course yourselves, is there’s this huge disincentive based on current statute and regulation of having small operations and basically their function within communities. Now, the value here is really interesting because when things get big, right now, I guess the locus of accountability becomes different. You’re not accountable to that person that’s right there. You said, you know, looking, that’s what made me think of it, looking the person in the face.
There’s this sort of thing like if I don’t give good milk, if my raw milk’s contaminated, no one’s ever going to buy from me again. So I’m going to make darn sure that that’s the case. Whereas if you’re big, well, you might have to do a massive recall, it’ll cost you a bunch of money.But you roll on through, do another big marketing blitz or PR blitz, and you’re back in business.
Ms. Malone:
And let’s remember who benefits from regulations. It’s often not the consumer, it’s the big company. So, by regulating beef so that only big corporations can slaughter and kill, they have captured the market.
Mr. Jekielek:
And Joel told me it’s like the four companies, 85 per cent of the market or something.
Ms. Malone:
85 per cent, and two of those companies, maybe three, are foreign-owned. Lobbyists are in there pushing for more regulation because it’s going to benefit the large corporations who want to keep out the competition.
Mr. Malone:
The last third of the book really focuses on this issue of public policy and how it’s impacted agriculture and given rise to the food industry that we have right now. And so, earlier on, we talked about Earl Butz and the logic of get big or get out. That was the underpinning to the get big or get out structure implemented under Nixon in particular in the 60s and in the 70s, was that the United States had the responsibility to feed the world? We were wealthy nations.
Ms. Malone:
The message when we were growing up was that there were starving children in Africa.
Mr. Malone:
Remember the little African infant with the distended belly? By the way, that’s kwashiorkor, it’s protein deficiency. But that logic was that we as a nation-state had a responsibility to feed the world. And so we needed to ramp up Big Ag. Now, Big Ag benefited from that. John Deere benefited from that.
Ms. Malone:
They actually pushed for this legislation.
Mr. Malone:
But that was how it was sold to all of us as a humanitarian thing.We had a moral obligation to feed the world. Now, what happened with that was not only the destruction of the small farm and, by extension, small-town America, but what happened as we’re exporting these, you know, bean and wheat-based soy products.
Ms. Malone:
And oats.
Mr. Malone:
As we’re exporting them into African nations, poor African nations, for all the right reasons, it triggers a whole cascade of corruption and other things, but in particular, what it did was it destroyed reliance on local agriculture and traditional practices in food preparation because this is different kinds of food. And now, what we have in all of these nations where we’ve implemented these policies is a strange coincidence: an outbreak of the same kind of chronic diseases that we see now plaguing the American population. We’re kind of not only exporting our food, we’re also exporting our chronic disease that is derived from that food, and we’re destroying local agriculture and local food practices.
So, in the end, we think we’re doing good for all the right reasons. And it has led to, like a lot of government policies that were well-meaning but not completely thought out. We end up having all these secondary consequences or blowback that no one would have thought of, but now is a major driver of many of the problems that we see all over the world, again having to do with nutrition.
Mr. Jekielek:
People who are into homesteading will tend to be into health, and will tend to be into doing things in a somewhat regenerative way. They’ll be interested in that space. How much of the use of chemicals, perhaps pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or synthetic fertilizers is okay in this system?
Mr. Malone:
In the UK, it’s a common part of the discussion now in this space. You’re referring to regenerative agriculture in particular, that the British farming practices may only be sustainable for a small number of additional years. And what’s at the core of that is that, particularly deep tillage, the use of pesticides and herbicides, and the use of synthetic fertilizers, which are usually salts, are depleting the soil of its life. Soil is a living thing; it has a rich community of fungi and microbes that all exist within that. And this sounds a little bit flaky, but they actually exist in symbiosis with the plants themselves.
Mr. Jekielek:
That doesn’t sound flaky. That’s just a fact.
Mr. Malone:
It is a fact. But for some people, that sounds a little bit sketchy, but it is absolutely solidly based in agricultural science. And where this magic happens is at the level of the rootlet. So these little fine things, and I’m getting a little too academic, that’s why Jill just kicked me.
But at that periphery, you have this community of fungi and other things that are able to mobilize micronutrients out of the soil that the plants can’t do. They don’t have the chemistry, but these other associate organisms do.And they exchange for sugars, among other things, that are produced from photosynthesis with the plant these micronutrients. Now, Jill did a dive into this, looking at some key studies about nutrient composition in foods over time.
Ms. Malone:
Yes, so USDA has been analyzing food forever. And a couple of big labs did studies where they showed that the micronutrients in food from the 1950s was much greater in produce, I should say—not meat—in produce and grain crops.Than it is, this study was done like in 2000. That it had decreased over 40 years is a huge amount, and that’s coming both because we’ve changed the genetics of our crops but also from soil micronutrients, as Robert was discussing. We basically use liquid petroleum to make fertilizer. So we’re fertilizing with oil.
Robert and I have come to the place where we don’t think that our entire food system is fixable. One of the things in farming with draft horses and learning from these old American farmers was they were basically doing regenerative farming at the turn of the century before tractors. This is not anything new. We’re just putting big words like carbon sequestration onto these old practices, and it’s a return to tradition.
But for the homesteader and for the person interested in health, to be able to buy healthy food, to be able to create healthy food, to create living soil, these are things as an intentional community, as a minority community.We can do to save ourselves because we can’t look to the government to save us. We can’t look to the government to save our children and our children’s health.
We have to do it ourselves. We have to take command of our health. For Robert and I, that’s part of this homesteading for health thing, is basically saying, yes, we can get healthy and we can use agricultural practice, whether we do it, whether our local farmer does it, to create better health for ourselves.
We do use some chemical fertilizer. I use it around the plants, the trees. So I use 10-10-10 nitrogen, potassium, phosphate fertilizer, which is a concentrated fertilizer around our fruit trees because I also use compost, but they need something extra. But spreading it all the time in the soil kills a lot of that microbe diversity.
Now, there’s another thing that has become the norm, particularly in the Midwest, is deep tillage. And this is the big plows that turn up the soil deeply and make it very homogeneous, break up all the clods.This has become the norm, and back in the day when people were using draft horses, it just wasn’t an option. You couldn’t do it. And what’s happened around here.
I’ll tell a story. A couple years ago, I decided that we needed a plow for the back of our tractor. And I went to the local equipment stores and I said, I need a plow. And here’s a plow in the catalog made by an Amish factory. Can you get this? And every one of them said to me, We don’t carry that. And it turned out that the plow in the catalog, they weren’t even making anymore. How come? All the farmers around here have gone to what’s called no-till drills. It’s a very different approach.
It’s an approach in which the soil is not disturbed in the same way. The drill, which is the farming term for the thing that’s used for planting seed in a mechanized way that you pull behind the tractor. The drill cuts a little channel just deep enough for the seed. It drops the seeds in and then it flips the soil over, but it doesn’t disturb all the soil and tear up the earthworms and the fungi and everything else that lives in that micro community.
Ms. Malone:
But let me just say something to that. The no-till drill has a real place in regenerative farming. But what we’re seeing around here, unfortunately, is the use of the no-till drill that they can use, not because they’re using good cover crops, but because they’re using basically glyphosate and other herbicides to kill everything.
So, they’re able to not have to deep plow because they’re using chemical ways to kill the weeds before they plant. So, the no-till drill is absolutely used in regenerative farming, but you have to be careful because sometimes, yes, they’re not using that deep plow, but they are using chemical herbicides that allow them to control the weeds. Yes, yes.
Mr. Malone:
Instead of cover crops and things that create stability.
Ms. Malone:
Right, and it’s a whole learning process. On a small farm, even to learn how to use cover crops and when to use them. There’s all different varieties we talk about in the book.Many, many different kinds of cover crops.
Mr. Jekielek:
And just a cover crop for the uninitiated is something that you grow in addition to your main crop to help you avoid having…
Ms. Malone:
Right, and the cover crop, for instance, one cover crop may be vetch, which is a legume, so it’s nitrogen-fixing, so that it’s fixing the nitrogen in the soil. Clover is what we use here. Clover, we use in order to get healthy soil. If you can’t see, we’ve got clover coming up all over the place. We use white clover, and it builds soil.
So, cover cropping is a way of building soil, and then it will crowd out the broadleafs, the weeds that can just take over and create a huge mess. But we do have to be careful because, for instance, the no-till drill is, yes, it’s a very useful tool, but it can work both ways.
Mr. Malone:
Depends on how you use it.
Ms. Malone:
It depends on how you use it.
Mr. Malone:
Like everything. And you talked a moment ago, you kind of led in with the costs of moving from traditional agriculture to regenerative agriculture, and it’s absolutely true, and we talk about that in the book. The data shows that it often takes something like four-plus years.
Ms. Malone:
Yes, and even then, it’s hard to, you know, you’re still probably going to have 20 per cent less yield. You just are. And there are farms that say that they have recouped completely, but there are other studies that show that there is a loss of yield when you’re not using these chemical fertilizers. And just to say it, there are ways that we can immediately cut down on the amount of herbicides and pesticides that we use.
So, one of the big things with glyphosate and other herbicides is they use them as a desiccant, in which they spray the crop, it all dies at once, and then they can harvest. And so we’re all, I hate to say it, we’re all peeing glyphosate. Almost everybody, you can test their urine, and it’ll have trace amounts of glyphosate in it. People who eat organic food actually have less glyphosate in their system.
That said, this use of desiccants like this is a relatively new thing. Twenty years ago, they weren’t doing it. So, the use of glyphosate has just gone through the roof in the last 20 years. So, it’s not like we can’t go back to the ways they were doing 20 years ago and the ways that they do in Europe, right? And there are simple solutions.
One is you basically go through and you crimp the crop so you kill the vascular stem, so it dies rapidly, but it’s not being done through the use of a chemical. Another is to just cut it, and then it just all dies at once. But those aren’t quite as effective. We’re talking about a small yield problem from using a crimping technology versus a chemical technology. There are ways we could immediately decrease glyphosate use that wouldn’t be affecting the, it’s really not the farmer’s bottom dollar, it’s big ag’s bottom dollar.
Mr. Malone:
But can I tie this back to when we were talking about Earl Butz? One of the other arguments I hear—and frankly, this is an argument made by the current administration in deciding that it would make glyphosate a national security issue—was that if we don’t use these practices, we won’t be able to produce as much food, and the implication is that Americans will starve.
But let’s unpack that. We’re actually shipping most of our agricultural products from these large farms—our corn, beans, oats, wheat—we’re shipping it overseas. We’re producing these enormous surpluses because they’re profitable and they can be sold for cash overseas. It’s a foreign exchange thing.
Mr. Jekielek:
And as Joel Salatin pointed out to me, in many cases, they’re actually subsidized. Yes, precisely.
Mr. Malone:
And so the argument that is basically made is another fear argument: Americans will starve if we switch to regenerative agriculture because it’s going to reduce overall productivity by 20 per cent, or if we stop using glyphosate, or whatever. But where is that surplus going? It’s being shipped overseas for profit.
Ms. Malone:
So, if we want to talk about healthy food, let’s feed Americans healthy food first.
Mr. Malone:
There’s another aspect to this I want to touch on, and it’s the example that we use a lot in the book, which is the Victory Farm.And that kind of underpins all of this, and it demonstrates that we, the people, can take charge of our food in an effective way because we’ve done it in the past. Tell us about the Victory Garden.
Ms. Malone:
So the Victory Garden started first in World War I, and then they started in England, and then in World War II. And the idea was that all the farmers, all the young men who worked these fields, these large families, all the young men were going off to fight in a war, and we weren’t going to have enough food domestically because we had to export the food over to the war front. And so they came up with the idea that families would grow plots, victory gardens, basically a kitchen garden, to feed themselves. And it was a huge campaign.
Mr. Malone:
It was propaganda. The government did a propaganda campaign that everybody needs to get to the Victory Garden.
Ms. Malone:
Everybody got booklets on how to grow food, and it was enormously successful. By the end of World War II, we were producing as much food in our Victory Gardens as had been grown on the farms out in the rural countryside. And these farms, Central Park, had victory gardens; schools were having victory gardens. Think about how healthy it would be if children would go out for half-an-hour every day and tend the garden in their school. That is a real learning experience.
Mr. Malone:
So, what happened at the end of World War II?
Ms. Malone:
At the end of World War II, there was so much food being grown that the government actually did another propaganda campaign to discourage people from growing their own food.
Mr. Malone:
So, the logic was, the farmers coming back from the war, if we didn’t stop it with those victory gardens, the farmers wouldn’t have enough jobs. There wouldn’t be jobs for the GIs coming back to the farm after the war.
Mr. Jekielek:
This victory garden example is actually truly astonishing, right? Because it’s something that could easily be replicated.
Mr. Malone:
Yes.
Mr. Jekielek:
Right? Like, it’s easy, actually, easy to be replicated, right? This is not a complex thing. We have the tools.
Ms. Malone:
You don’t need 10 acres.
Mr. Jekielek:
You don’t, like, so, you know, everybody could, well, not everybody. If you’re living in a high-rise, it’d be a little bit different.
Ms. Malone:
You can grow alfalfa sprouts, you can grow microgreens. I mean, even living in an apartment, there are hydroponic gardens now that you can buy.
Mr. Jekielek:
Right. You can do vertical gardens. Absolutely.
Mr. Malone:
We use these small hydroponic gardens routinely in the late winter to create starts so we get a jump for our veg.
Mr. Jekielek:
Great. And so, you know, your book actually brings together an astonishing amount of just. On one side, you know, just some great stories, some great history, some great tips, right, and actually, just a feeling of, you know, this is doable, even for someone like me who is like, you know what, someone else is going to be doing the gardening.
Ms. Malone:
Thank you for that. And I do want to say, you know, I spent a lot of time on the illustrations in that book, and it is visually appealing. Like, it’s a nice-looking book. You know, we have a lot of images in there, and we really had fun putting it together.
Mr. Malone:
And there’s so much around us that is dark.We’ve all come through this COVID period. We have war, all these things that are very dark that surround us.I’ll tell you that when we are here on the farm, we don’t feel that darkness. We write about it, we report on it, but our lives are surrounded by positive light, energy, life. The dogs are happy.
It’s a joyous life. And part of that has to do with our relationship.I’ve heard one interview talked about this being a love story, this book. It is a love story. It’s a love story between us, it’s a love story of our life, of our life together. It’s a celebration of life.
Ms. Malone:
Which is what homesteading is, in a way.
Mr. Malone:
It is. That’s not to say it’s an easy life. Things go wrong all the time. There’s absolutely mud and manure and flies and everything else.
Mr. Jekielek:
And I wouldn’t trade it for city life, you know, for anything, and also a bit of getting through adversity and illness and injury, and we’re not going to dig into that, but that’s actually quite a powerful part itself. So, I’m going to encourage everyone to give it a read. Again, I don’t know if I’m going to be implementing a lot of the agricultural advice in here, but I loved it.
Mr. Malone:
But even if you’re a consumer, even if you’re a partner to farmers. I know that you love eating our eggs. We brought them up to the very sterile, high-profile offices of The Epoch Times in Washington, D.C. Everybody wants those eggs. If you are able to engage with somebody that’s doing this, it’ll enrich your life. Then you’re helping enable this, even if you’re not directly doing it.
Ms. Malone:
And it’s a fun story, even if you’re not gardening and homesteading.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, Dr. Jill Malone, Dr. Robert Malone, such a pleasure having you on.
Ms. Malone:
Thank you.
Mr. Malone:
And thanks for being here.
This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.
