People often say to me "Kyle, why are you so obsessed with starting a farm in a developing country? Why don't you just start a farm in Alabama? It's warm, the land's not so expensive... "
I've had a hard time articulating this until I read the book by Joel Salatin of Omnivore's Dilemma fame. (Michael Pollan went to visit him and largely wrote his book based on his farm.) Joel's book is called
Everything I want to do is illegal.
Yes! That's exactly what it is. This is why I don't want to live in the US.
I know this from personal experience. I started a Thai restaurant in Kenya for $3,000. It would have cost me $300,000 in San Francisco to get the liquor license, other permits and all the stainless steel equipment required for being licensed as a restaurant. People often say to me “wow! you started a Thai restaurant in Kenya. That’s crazy”. But what they don't know is it's way easier to start a restaurant in Kenya than in the US. And a hundred times cheaper.
And after reading Joel’s book I suspect that certified Organic is not the way to go. In fact, until I have better intel I'll avoid it. Perhaps it's a wolf in sheep's clothing. But I'll cover that later.
So…
Joel wanted to raise chickens on his farm, feed them how he wanted to, let them run around outside. And slaughter them outside. (Sunlight is the best disinfectant and that’s not just an idle idiom.) Then sell them on his own farm. His customers could see the entire process and provide their own version of quality control. More importantly, the customers could experience the whole life cycle. They could see the chicken-ness of chickens and respect the meat they received.
When he sold the meat he wanted to include produce from neighboring farms as well. Why not have one store where they sold everything together? That would make it easier for the consumer and easier for the farmer.
But that's not possible. Each step I’ve described above is either illegal or discouraged in the US. (And legal in most countries, even in Europe.)
Why is that?
Glad you asked. It starts with free-range chickens. The government is very afraid of free-range chickens. They say it's because any kind of avian flu from wild birds could be transferred to free range chickens easily during their moonlit avian square-dances.
Logically, free-range chickens cavorting with wild birds makes sense. But in practice it’s not a problem. All avian flu cases in Joel’s state came from factory farms and none from the many homestead, free-range farms. And yet Joel was put on alert that he could be forced to mass murder all his birds on the government’s suspicion. In fact, people who live near livestock and fowl have a lower chance of getting the flu, asthma or allergies.
Their feeding was also illegal. Joel’s farm has been calling their chickens lowercase “organic” long before Whole Foods existed. Suddenly once the government got in charge of the special “O” word Joel, without having changed anything about his farm, was now illegal. To buy certified Organic feed they would have to drive 1,000 miles. Local, naturally grown feed was just down the street. Now, tell me, which one is better for the planet?
Then there was slaughtering. According to the government you need stainless steel containers and inspections and checklists, etc etc etc. There's an exemption in Virginia that allows farmers to slaughter up to 20,000 of their own birds on their own farm provided that the conditions are “clean and sanitary.” The first inspector came and, to paraphrase slightly, said “wow, this is amazing. If I were starting my career now then I would never become a government bureaucrat and would have started my own farm.” Joel had the slaughterhouse with open sides so that there were no nooks and crannies where germs could build up. He was in view of his chickens. He had sunlight for the workers. It was really a special place for the circle of life.
But bureaucrat1 retired and a new inspector came. And because the terms are vague around the exemption bureaucrat2 claimed that the slaughtering was no longer “clean and sanitary.” And shut down Joel's operation until further notice. Until when? Well the government can shut you down for as long as they want and there's no urgency from their side. They can just stop your business if they claim they suspect there's a problem. There's no remuneration for lost business even if you were found to be innocent. So they were shut down and they had to get their State Senator involved who eventually got bureaucrat2 to back down.
The next problem is sales. You can sell your own slaughtered chickens on your own Farm. But if you raise cows on your farm (and Joel does) there's no exemption for cow slaughtering so you can't slaughter cows on your own farm(!!!) so you have to send your cows to a government authorized slaughterhouse. When you send that meat back to your own farm it's no longer your own meat anymore. It's been processed outside the farm and you can no longer sell it by the pound. In order to sell the meat you can sell it as a whole or quarter of a cow. Now it gets a little bit more complicated because actually the farmer cannot sell meat. What they can do is sell a live cow to a customer, send that cow to the slaughterhouse, bring the meat back and then hold that customer's already purchased meat for them to pick up. But the customer's name must be carried around on the carcass of the cow to identify it. This is a horrible customer experience. They can buy 1lb of chicken but a minimum of 200 lbs of beef. Little wonder customers have a hard time buying natural beef.
To make this whole thing more complicated if you want to sell your own vegetables and your own chicken and your own cows (but not your own beef) on your own farm you can do that and you don't need any special permits. But as soon as you sell one zucchini from a neighboring farm now you must have a fully licensed sales establishment. You have to have wheelchair access and fire extinguishers and male and female bathrooms. You need to have your roof inspected and your foundation inspected. And this all seems reasonable if you have a supermarket. But what if you're just a local farmer with not a whole lot of money and not a whole lot of produce but it's really good and it's really fresh and supermarket will never buy your 70 lbs of zucchini but your neighbor will help you sell those zucchini for a share of the profits. This would be good for the entire community. But it's illegal.
So it turns out that what's best for our health and what's best for the land and what's best for the country is illegal. I just don't want to live in a place where I have to fight to do what's good when I can do it freely somewhere else.
Compare farming restrictions with eBay. You don't need any certification to list your products and you can sell them for whatever price you like to whoever you like and ship them wherever you want. You can package them however you like and as long as the customers are happy the government is happy.
But if eBay sellers were treated like farmers are treated you would need to have an OSHA inspection for safety to make sure that you weren't getting any kind of injury from using your keyboard and you'd need a fire extinguisher in case the computer caught on fire and you need a certification for your house to make sure the roof wouldn't collapse and you would need a business certification and you would need to keep daily records of the number of hours you typed and report that on a quarterly basis to a codfish-eyed bureaucrat. You would need to use business certified charge protectors (not just the usual CE certified charge protectors, no that would not be enough). No, As soon as you make a financial transaction then the quality of your surge protectors must be certified for retail sales. And then if the government ever suspected that your roof might be less strong than you claimed they could shut down your whole eBay business (and confiscate your Beanie Babies) until further notice.
We don't need a law against McDonald's or a law against slaughterhouse abuse - we ask for too much salvation by legislation. You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.
Joel Salatin
So that, my friends, is why I don't want to live in the US. It seems like Joel had fun evading the authorities though causing near heart break on many occasions. I'm sure I'll have plenty of problems and plenty of theft and plenty of developing world problems. But I don't like having a guy with a gun to my head telling me how to slaughter my chickens. Because that's what it is. If you don't slaughter your chickens the right way then you get forced to close. If you refuse to close you'll get a fine. If you refuse to pay your fine they'll arrest you and if you refuse to be arrested they'll arrest you at the point of a gun.
So Joel and his friends have gotten pretty creative. They've started a conference called Rogue Food Conference. For any kind of legalese there's always a loophole. In some places you can't sell unlicensed chickens to your neighbors even though they're perfectly good chickens. But if it's part of your religion then you can get an exemption like how the Amish have an exemption. So Niti Bali started the Food Church and if you belong in the parish then part of the benefit is that you can buy unlicensed chickens as part of your religious expression.
Another farmer found that they could sell anything they wanted as long as it said “Pet Food” on the packaging. If the customers choose to eat the Porterhouse Steak “Pet Food” that was their choice.
Why I won't buy organic:
Previously farmers used the term organic to describe a more natural way of farming. Each farmer had their own requirements for what they considered organic because each farm is different. Each farm has to decide whether it's better to buy feed 5 mi away that used some pesticides two years ago or to travel a thousand miles to get feed that never used pesticides. Which one's better? It's unclear. But the organic movement majority decided they wanted the government to regulate this. (These are the same people who had been fighting the government for years to allow them to raise their own chickens on their own land to slaughter and sell themselves. The logic of having Daddy enforce rules when it was an abusive daddy who caused the problem in the first place confuses me. But we humans aren't all that rational.)
So the movement had Daddy come in and make strict rules about what was and wasn't organic. Farmers couldn't make decisions about their farms anymore. The result is that the burden of certification lies heavier with small farms. Bigger and bigger farms have a greater advantage creating legally Organic chickens. So now Organic is just another way of saying factory farmed. Free range and natural are similar to the “O” word in that they are regulated and will increasingly have factory farms. When the goal is compliance, not good health, farmers try to get away with the least they possibly can to maintain the status. Compare this to traditional organic, before daddy came in, where the farmer would try to do the most they could for the soil. Because they loved their farms. Not to get a rubber stamp from a government bureaucrat who couldn’t tell the difference between a fescue grass and a clover.
In general, what you gain in legalese you lose in goodwill. Making a tighter contract means people follow the contract to the letter of the law. But if you let human relationships guide a contract (let's say a purchase contract) then people don't follow the letter of a law but they adjust for each situation to make the outcome good for everyone because they care about the ongoing relationship (for emotional or financial reasons).
So that's why I’ll avoid certified Organic
You might say "Okay, Kyle sure organic's not the greatest. Government regulations aren’t either. But what's the other option?"
I'm so glad you asked.
Government regulation should regulate the outcomes not the inputs. Instead of regulating what kind of walls a chicken slaughterhouse should have they should randomly test the chickens once they're packaged for any pathogens. If they are below a certain threshold then whatever system the slaughterhouse used must be fine. This would enable lots of innovation. And make it easier for the bureaucrats to test. They would need far fewer employees if all they did was randomly sample chickens from each slaughterhouse rather than reams of paperwork. But that's the problem. They don't want to reduce employment. They want to create jobs not create a better world.
Joel tested his “illegally” slaughtered chickens against supermarket chickens for pathogens. The results weren’t even close.
Create platforms not rules.
“okay Kyle it's all well and good to complain. But what are you doing to fix it?”
I suggest we create the Do Nothing Awards. We will honor people who when they had the opportunity to intervene didn't. Too often (actually always AFAIK) we give awards to people for something they did. But often what they didn't do is even more important. Growing up, when my siblings and I squabbled over over a toy and cried to mom she’d say “I don't care who started it; I only care who stopped it.” All of us had to confess that we hadn't stopped it. If her first line of defense wasn’t enough-- if we kept complaining-- then she would take the toy away. It was always worse to ask for her to intervene. We were better off sorting it out amongst ourselves. It was lose-lose if we asked for her judicial verdict.
By actively doing nothing she made the relationship between us siblings stronger. And probably saved herself a whole lot of time trying to police and micromanage our relationships.
My siblings and I are as close as I know any siblings to be to this day.
So I nominate my mom for the first Do Nothing Award. Who would you nominate?
Yours,
Kyle
PS. I got this wonderful beach house for January in Todos Santos, Mexico. I have an extra room available in January. It’s a direct flight from JFK and many other airports. If you’re interested send me an email.
Everything I want to do is illegal
Everything I want to do is illegal
Everything I want to do is illegal
(and why I’ll avoid “Organic” labelling)
People often say to me "Kyle, why are you so obsessed with starting a farm in a developing country? Why don't you just start a farm in Alabama? It's warm, the land's not so expensive... "
I've had a hard time articulating this until I read the book by Joel Salatin of Omnivore's Dilemma fame. (Michael Pollan went to visit him and largely wrote his book based on his farm.) Joel's book is called
Everything I want to do is illegal.
Yes! That's exactly what it is. This is why I don't want to live in the US.
I know this from personal experience. I started a Thai restaurant in Kenya for $3,000. It would have cost me $300,000 in San Francisco to get the liquor license, other permits and all the stainless steel equipment required for being licensed as a restaurant. People often say to me “wow! you started a Thai restaurant in Kenya. That’s crazy”. But what they don't know is it's way easier to start a restaurant in Kenya than in the US. And a hundred times cheaper.
And after reading Joel’s book I suspect that certified Organic is not the way to go. In fact, until I have better intel I'll avoid it. Perhaps it's a wolf in sheep's clothing. But I'll cover that later.
So…
Joel wanted to raise chickens on his farm, feed them how he wanted to, let them run around outside. And slaughter them outside. (Sunlight is the best disinfectant and that’s not just an idle idiom.) Then sell them on his own farm. His customers could see the entire process and provide their own version of quality control. More importantly, the customers could experience the whole life cycle. They could see the chicken-ness of chickens and respect the meat they received.
When he sold the meat he wanted to include produce from neighboring farms as well. Why not have one store where they sold everything together? That would make it easier for the consumer and easier for the farmer.
But that's not possible. Each step I’ve described above is either illegal or discouraged in the US. (And legal in most countries, even in Europe.)
Why is that?
Glad you asked. It starts with free-range chickens. The government is very afraid of free-range chickens. They say it's because any kind of avian flu from wild birds could be transferred to free range chickens easily during their moonlit avian square-dances.
Logically, free-range chickens cavorting with wild birds makes sense. But in practice it’s not a problem. All avian flu cases in Joel’s state came from factory farms and none from the many homestead, free-range farms. And yet Joel was put on alert that he could be forced to mass murder all his birds on the government’s suspicion. In fact, people who live near livestock and fowl have a lower chance of getting the flu, asthma or allergies.
Their feeding was also illegal. Joel’s farm has been calling their chickens lowercase “organic” long before Whole Foods existed. Suddenly once the government got in charge of the special “O” word Joel, without having changed anything about his farm, was now illegal. To buy certified Organic feed they would have to drive 1,000 miles. Local, naturally grown feed was just down the street. Now, tell me, which one is better for the planet?
Then there was slaughtering. According to the government you need stainless steel containers and inspections and checklists, etc etc etc. There's an exemption in Virginia that allows farmers to slaughter up to 20,000 of their own birds on their own farm provided that the conditions are “clean and sanitary.” The first inspector came and, to paraphrase slightly, said “wow, this is amazing. If I were starting my career now then I would never become a government bureaucrat and would have started my own farm.” Joel had the slaughterhouse with open sides so that there were no nooks and crannies where germs could build up. He was in view of his chickens. He had sunlight for the workers. It was really a special place for the circle of life.
But bureaucrat1 retired and a new inspector came. And because the terms are vague around the exemption bureaucrat2 claimed that the slaughtering was no longer “clean and sanitary.” And shut down Joel's operation until further notice. Until when? Well the government can shut you down for as long as they want and there's no urgency from their side. They can just stop your business if they claim they suspect there's a problem. There's no remuneration for lost business even if you were found to be innocent. So they were shut down and they had to get their State Senator involved who eventually got bureaucrat2 to back down.
The next problem is sales. You can sell your own slaughtered chickens on your own Farm. But if you raise cows on your farm (and Joel does) there's no exemption for cow slaughtering so you can't slaughter cows on your own farm(!!!) so you have to send your cows to a government authorized slaughterhouse. When you send that meat back to your own farm it's no longer your own meat anymore. It's been processed outside the farm and you can no longer sell it by the pound. In order to sell the meat you can sell it as a whole or quarter of a cow. Now it gets a little bit more complicated because actually the farmer cannot sell meat. What they can do is sell a live cow to a customer, send that cow to the slaughterhouse, bring the meat back and then hold that customer's already purchased meat for them to pick up. But the customer's name must be carried around on the carcass of the cow to identify it. This is a horrible customer experience. They can buy 1lb of chicken but a minimum of 200 lbs of beef. Little wonder customers have a hard time buying natural beef.
To make this whole thing more complicated if you want to sell your own vegetables and your own chicken and your own cows (but not your own beef) on your own farm you can do that and you don't need any special permits. But as soon as you sell one zucchini from a neighboring farm now you must have a fully licensed sales establishment. You have to have wheelchair access and fire extinguishers and male and female bathrooms. You need to have your roof inspected and your foundation inspected. And this all seems reasonable if you have a supermarket. But what if you're just a local farmer with not a whole lot of money and not a whole lot of produce but it's really good and it's really fresh and supermarket will never buy your 70 lbs of zucchini but your neighbor will help you sell those zucchini for a share of the profits. This would be good for the entire community. But it's illegal.
So it turns out that what's best for our health and what's best for the land and what's best for the country is illegal. I just don't want to live in a place where I have to fight to do what's good when I can do it freely somewhere else.
Compare farming restrictions with eBay. You don't need any certification to list your products and you can sell them for whatever price you like to whoever you like and ship them wherever you want. You can package them however you like and as long as the customers are happy the government is happy.
But if eBay sellers were treated like farmers are treated you would need to have an OSHA inspection for safety to make sure that you weren't getting any kind of injury from using your keyboard and you'd need a fire extinguisher in case the computer caught on fire and you need a certification for your house to make sure the roof wouldn't collapse and you would need a business certification and you would need to keep daily records of the number of hours you typed and report that on a quarterly basis to a codfish-eyed bureaucrat. You would need to use business certified charge protectors (not just the usual CE certified charge protectors, no that would not be enough). No, As soon as you make a financial transaction then the quality of your surge protectors must be certified for retail sales. And then if the government ever suspected that your roof might be less strong than you claimed they could shut down your whole eBay business (and confiscate your Beanie Babies) until further notice.
So that, my friends, is why I don't want to live in the US. It seems like Joel had fun evading the authorities though causing near heart break on many occasions. I'm sure I'll have plenty of problems and plenty of theft and plenty of developing world problems. But I don't like having a guy with a gun to my head telling me how to slaughter my chickens. Because that's what it is. If you don't slaughter your chickens the right way then you get forced to close. If you refuse to close you'll get a fine. If you refuse to pay your fine they'll arrest you and if you refuse to be arrested they'll arrest you at the point of a gun.
So Joel and his friends have gotten pretty creative. They've started a conference called Rogue Food Conference. For any kind of legalese there's always a loophole. In some places you can't sell unlicensed chickens to your neighbors even though they're perfectly good chickens. But if it's part of your religion then you can get an exemption like how the Amish have an exemption. So Niti Bali started the Food Church and if you belong in the parish then part of the benefit is that you can buy unlicensed chickens as part of your religious expression.
Another farmer found that they could sell anything they wanted as long as it said “Pet Food” on the packaging. If the customers choose to eat the Porterhouse Steak “Pet Food” that was their choice.
Why I won't buy organic:
Previously farmers used the term organic to describe a more natural way of farming. Each farmer had their own requirements for what they considered organic because each farm is different. Each farm has to decide whether it's better to buy feed 5 mi away that used some pesticides two years ago or to travel a thousand miles to get feed that never used pesticides. Which one's better? It's unclear. But the organic movement majority decided they wanted the government to regulate this. (These are the same people who had been fighting the government for years to allow them to raise their own chickens on their own land to slaughter and sell themselves. The logic of having Daddy enforce rules when it was an abusive daddy who caused the problem in the first place confuses me. But we humans aren't all that rational.)
So the movement had Daddy come in and make strict rules about what was and wasn't organic. Farmers couldn't make decisions about their farms anymore. The result is that the burden of certification lies heavier with small farms. Bigger and bigger farms have a greater advantage creating legally Organic chickens. So now Organic is just another way of saying factory farmed. Free range and natural are similar to the “O” word in that they are regulated and will increasingly have factory farms. When the goal is compliance, not good health, farmers try to get away with the least they possibly can to maintain the status. Compare this to traditional organic, before daddy came in, where the farmer would try to do the most they could for the soil. Because they loved their farms. Not to get a rubber stamp from a government bureaucrat who couldn’t tell the difference between a fescue grass and a clover.
In general, what you gain in legalese you lose in goodwill. Making a tighter contract means people follow the contract to the letter of the law. But if you let human relationships guide a contract (let's say a purchase contract) then people don't follow the letter of a law but they adjust for each situation to make the outcome good for everyone because they care about the ongoing relationship (for emotional or financial reasons).
So that's why I’ll avoid certified Organic
You might say "Okay, Kyle sure organic's not the greatest. Government regulations aren’t either. But what's the other option?"
I'm so glad you asked.
Government regulation should regulate the outcomes not the inputs. Instead of regulating what kind of walls a chicken slaughterhouse should have they should randomly test the chickens once they're packaged for any pathogens. If they are below a certain threshold then whatever system the slaughterhouse used must be fine. This would enable lots of innovation. And make it easier for the bureaucrats to test. They would need far fewer employees if all they did was randomly sample chickens from each slaughterhouse rather than reams of paperwork. But that's the problem. They don't want to reduce employment. They want to create jobs not create a better world.
Joel tested his “illegally” slaughtered chickens against supermarket chickens for pathogens. The results weren’t even close.
Create platforms not rules.
“okay Kyle it's all well and good to complain. But what are you doing to fix it?”
I suggest we create the Do Nothing Awards. We will honor people who when they had the opportunity to intervene didn't. Too often (actually always AFAIK) we give awards to people for something they did. But often what they didn't do is even more important. Growing up, when my siblings and I squabbled over over a toy and cried to mom she’d say “I don't care who started it; I only care who stopped it.” All of us had to confess that we hadn't stopped it. If her first line of defense wasn’t enough-- if we kept complaining-- then she would take the toy away. It was always worse to ask for her to intervene. We were better off sorting it out amongst ourselves. It was lose-lose if we asked for her judicial verdict.
By actively doing nothing she made the relationship between us siblings stronger. And probably saved herself a whole lot of time trying to police and micromanage our relationships.
My siblings and I are as close as I know any siblings to be to this day.
So I nominate my mom for the first Do Nothing Award. Who would you nominate?
Yours,
Kyle
PS. I got this wonderful beach house for January in Todos Santos, Mexico. I have an extra room available in January. It’s a direct flight from JFK and many other airports. If you’re interested send me an email.