The Magic Pill Page #10

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The chickens as well.

So they ate all the bugs for me,

and I never saw another slug.

Animals tell us

what they want.

You know, if you just

let them do what their nature

is to do, then they're...

It's not even

that they are happy,

it's that they are

who they should be.

The most destructive thing

we've done

is this activity

called agriculture.

We don't really have

a clue what goes into making

that corn or making that soy.

All we know is that

you look down on your plate,

and it doesn't look

like a dead thing,

therefore, heh,

it somehow must be peaceful,

and kind, and sustainable.

And we're utterly wrong

about this.

You take a piece of land

and you clear

every living thing off it,

and I'm including

the bacteria in that.

So all the plants and animals

that are supposed

to live there, they're gone.

Now you're going to grow

an acre of corn or wheat.

That corn is

going to require things

that are not there for it,

and you're going to have to come

from the outside and apply them.

It's going to take

a lot of fertilizer,

insecticides, and fungicides,

'cause you're fighting

a war. Right?

All those other plants

and all those other little

animals want to come back.

Now another

thing that happens is

every time you plant that corn,

you're destroying that soil.

A prairie or a grassland,

it's the perennial roots that

make channels for the rain.

When you only have annuals,

they don't live a long time,

so they don't have time

to build long roots,

so year-by-year,

you are drawing down that soil.

And then of course,

all that soil washes off.

If you're on any kind

of a slope,

it all is just going to go

into the local river,

and kill it with all that dirt,

so now there's no fish either.

In the meantime though,

while the corn is still growing,

you can transport it

to a miserable cow

living on a cement floor

inside a steel building...

and feed that cow

for about 60 days.

Past that point,

she will die from the corn

because it's not

her natural diet.

But until that point,

she will get really fat,

really fast.

And then slaughter her,

feed her to humans,

so you're going

to make people sick

eating this meat as well.

As far as I can tell,

this is nothing but death

and destruction

from the very beginning

to the very end of this.

Now I'm going

to walk you through

another scenario, which is

you take

the same acre of land,

but you don't hurt it

in any way.

You let it have

its own wisdom,

its own impulse toward life,

its own wild way.

And what you have is a whole

bunch of perennial plants

growing there.

You have a whole bunch

of really sturdy grasses.

You've got big birds, and you've

got ground-dwelling birds.

And then you've got small

mammals and larger mammals.

You might even have,

every once in a while,

a really big mammal

come across there.

You might have a wolf,

a bear, or somebody.

And in the meantime,

you've got a ruminant.

[moos]

So you've produced the same

amount of food for people.

You've got

the one ruminant at the end.

You slaughter her,

and now people can eat,

but that acre that is still

in that prairie, that grassland,

you could come back

in 10,000 years

and all of that life

would still be there.

The only thing different

would be a little more soil,

which is to say

a little more resilience,

a little more depth to life.

And that is how we lived

for 2.5 million years

as humans on this planet,

participating in that cycle.

[Joe Salatin]

We're here in the Shenandoah

Valley of Virginia,

and what we do

is pasture livestock.

[moos]

In nature, herbivores live

in large groups

and they migrate.

All we're doing is duplicating

that kind of migration,

moving the animals

across the land,

so that this choreography,

this ballet

of the pasture

can perform

its dance on the grass.

When people say eating

this way is unsustainable?

Oh. Listen,

it's not only sustainable,

it's actually

what we call regenerative.

It allows the grass, then, time

to regrow, to recuperate.

Grass is essentially

95% sunshine.

This takes sunbeams

and converts it into something

that has weight.

And amazingly,

the herbivore can take this,

ferment it in her rumen,

and turn this into, arguably,

the most nutrient-dense food

in the world.

Grass grows in what

I call an S-curve.

If you can see that 'S'.

So diaper down here,

teenage, rapid growth,

and then nursing home out here.

What we want to do

is keep this forage

in this rapid-growth state

as much as possible.

So the role

of the herbivore in nature

is actually to prune the grass

to restart that rapid

metabolic capacity.

This is what builds soil,

hydrates the landscape,

and actually sequesters carbon.

This is the system.

When grass is allowed

to be as productive

as its supposed to be,

it actually is

far more efficient

at converting solar energy

into biomass than even trees.

That's why

all the rich, deep soils

of the planet are

under prairies with herbivores.

And if every farm

in the world would do this,

we would sequester

all the carbon

that's been emitted

since the beginning

of the Industrial Age

in fewer than 10 years.

[Joel]

When a confinement

animal facility

shows a picture

of this hog factory

or chicken factory or whatever,

they're not showing

all the land that's required

to grow the grain

to keep it going

and all the land

that's required

to handle all the manure

that it's generating.

In this system,

you're seeing all that land.

I think a lot of industrial

agriculture thinking

is that the earth

is a reluctant lover.

Whereas, actually,

we view the earth

as an abundant, loving partner

who responds to caress,

who responds to care,

and if we will come humbly

to the land,

why, it's ready to give us

way more than we could have

wrestled from it.

-[honking]

-This is the mystical,

awesome cycle of life,

and to be able

to be this close to it

has a humility to it,

a perspective...

that is actually quite profound,

and actually

quite historically normal.

[people chattering]

[Barry]

Really for the past few years,

every time I've spent time

with my mom...

just her cognition

reminded me of my grandmom.

It was starting

to remind me

of those early stages

of my grandmom.

[Debbie]

My son just told me

not too long ago,

he said, "I love you,

"and I'm really becoming

concerned with you.

"You're starting

to check out of life.

"I see you starting

to deteriorate

the same way that she did.

That scares me."

I used to get

these horrible headaches.

I was battling depression.

I would just start to cry.

I would tell my husband,

I said, "I'm tired of this.

I'm just tired

of feeling like this."

Since we started

eating clean like this,

I have not had--

and I kid you not--

I have not had one

of those headaches. Not one.

My energy level,

my thought processing--

I mean, I've seen

remarkable changes.

Oh, whoa, whoa!

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