The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
539. The Best Argument Against Veganism | Joel Salatin
Thu, 17 Apr 2025
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
Chapter 1: What is the best argument against veganism?
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.
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 mob-stalking, herbivorous, solar conversion, lignified carbon, sequestration, fertilization. We spend as much time marketing as we do the entire farm production.
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?
Thank you.
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. I'm also interested in meat-based diets, for example, because they seem to be very health-promoting and highly nutritious. 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, and Pastured Poultry Prophets, 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, 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. Well, Mr. Selliton, why don't you start just by telling everybody what you do? Let's start from the beginning.
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Chapter 2: How do cows contribute to soil health?
Yeah, so the thing you have to understand from an ecology standpoint is if we had a graph and we charted the way vegetation grows, it grows in a sigmoid curve. It's just like a person. They start small, little baby, you know, and then they hit teenage years and they grow real fast, and then they quit growing and eventually go into senescence.
Mm-hmm.
So I call this diaper grass, teenage grass, and nursing home grass, okay, just to help. And so 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 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 teenage growth spurt.
So that's what the electric fence becomes, then a steering wheel, an accelerator, and a brake 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.
What do you mean by energy equilibrium? What I mean is when the forage gets pruned or grazed, I use the word pruning because grazing is now, that's a bad word. Okay. So pruning, all right? When it gets pruned, if it gets pruned too frequently, you actually weaken the plant. And so by only allowing, by controlling when the pruner can prune strategically,
you allow that plant to actually accumulate energy and vibrancy and flourish, just like pruning a vineyard or an apple tree or anything else. And so, for example, in our area, the average grass— Right, so the optimal amount of grazing in a grassland is not zero. No. So rather than grazing 20 times this long, we're grazing six times this long, for example.
400.
So five times the efficiency. Yeah, right.
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Chapter 3: What is regenerative farming?
So let's get an idea of the... So let's say we have a field and you want to move the cows. What do you have that's permanent that's fencing exactly?
Well, the edges. The edges. The edges define like between the field and the forest or the field and a creek, field and a pond. All right. So you... Okay. So that's permanently fenced off. That's permanent. Okay. And then you simply run, you know, you had a little reel, okay, with polywire on it, and you run that across from side to side, and that gives— That demarcates an area.
That demarcates an area, and you're simply giving those cows a segment of that, you know, we call it a paddock.
Yeah.
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 bang the dish, they come running. They know what that is. Well, the cows, when we go out to move them roughly, we try to do it as close to four as possible,
If you got called every day at four o'clock for a bowl of ice cream, about 345, 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 come running through. We close behind them. Why do they...
Because they know the food will be better?
Because, yes, because they've got a new salad bar. Okay, so they've learned that. They've got a new salad bar. They've learned that. 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.
Now they're advantaged to doing it at the same time every day because you establish a habit.
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Chapter 4: How do electric fences improve cattle management?
Mm-hmm.
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 customer list. You'll get a newsletter and order blank. And each one of those would yield two, three, four people. You know, so that was one thing I did.
The second thing— Okay, so that's also something that we shouldn't skip over lightly. So I think the most valuable—I have millions of social media followers, and I don't know how many, 20 million, some, lots. Right, right. The most valuable of all the things we own are our mailing lists, and I think—
I don't know what my mailing list has on it, 350,000 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? Fortunately, at that time, you know, we, with our low expenses and all that, we didn't need more than, goodness, 100 families, 100, 200 families. Right, okay, okay.
So that's really worth knowing.
So you put together this slide presentation and you collected 150 avid customers. Yes, yes, yes. And if you've got 100 people that are spending $1,000 a year with you, that's, That's significant. Right, right. Especially if they're loyal and they had also talked to other people, because word of mouth really matters.
Okay, so the next thing we did was when somebody would call us and say, hey, I heard about you, I want your stuff. you're tempted to say, oh, good, good. Well, what do you want? You want five chickens and three T-bone steaks? My first question was, where did you hear about us? Where did you hear about us? Oh, I had dinner over at Mary Jane's.
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