“The quickest way, the quickest way to get a child, an adult, anybody to make foolish decisions is to protect them from the consequences of their foolish decisions.” Joel Salatin · The David Lin Report
September 2026
David Lin asked what Congress should do for farmers squeezed by rising diesel and fertilizer costs, and whether it should subsidize them. Salatin's answer is to phase out subsidies entirely, on the grounds that the safety net is exactly what lets bad decisions survive. Pressed on a supply shock, he argues there is enough idle land in the country that nobody would go hungry.
Transcript
Sure. So we use compost. So we have a heavily integrated. Yeah. So we don't buy fertilizer from Putin, but we use large-scale composting. We even turn it with pigs so we don't have to use diesel fuel to turn the compost. We let pigs do the work. And that's like buying appreciating machinery. We buy pigs for $150, sell them for $1,200. That's the way I like to buy equipment. And the pigs never need their oil changed. They don't need spare parts. They always show up on time. And they're the great employees, the greatest employees you can ever have. They'll never sue you. And so, you know, letting animals do the work completely changes not only the economics, but the ecology of the farm. So yeah, we do large-scale composting. We rotate the animals. We do buy GMO-free grain from local sources, local producers. Who generally run integrated programs as well? They may use compost, they may use cover crops. I mean, there are numerous farms across the Midwest now that are showing with aggressive cover cropping, you can biologically grow your own fertilizer or drop your fertilizer use substantially compared to before, increase your organic matter. Now you have better hydration, better water holding. It all works together. The question is: is farming fundamentally a mechanical operation or is it a biological operation? I mean, if you want to bring the camera out and look, you know, macro, that's the question of the century. Is farming fundamentally mechanical or biological? And so, those of us who take my approach say that farming is fun and food is fundamentally biological, it's not mechanical. Do we use machines? Yes, we do, but it is fundamentally a biological system, not a mechanical system.
Well, let's suppose Congress calls you in to testify and ask you: hey, Joel, what should American farmers do to prevent total collapse of agriculture? If let's say diesel continues to go up and fertilizers continue to go up and nobody could afford to stay in operation, I mean, I'm talking about the people that rely on fertilizers and diesel. And they ask you, hey, should we subsidize some farmers? So, that's a two-part question. What should be done for the farmers? What should the farmers do to survive this crisis? And should the government step in? How would you answer this?
Well, I am not a government program guy. So, my answer to the whole program is to gradually, you know, I mean, I would love to just eliminate it tomorrow, but all subsidies. The problem with the subsidies is that they provide such a safety net to farmers that farmers can make silly decisions and not suffer the consequences. The quickest way, the quickest way to get a child, an adult, anybody to make foolish decisions is to protect them from the consequences of their foolish decisions. And so, here we have these farmers growing corn we don't need, soybeans we don't need. The world doesn't want them. I mean, China has, China, which has taken half of America's soybean crop, they have a 2030 target to eliminate imports, to become crop self-sufficient, basically. And so, the obvious trajectory is these markets are going to collapse. And subsidies just continue kicking the can down the road until it becomes completely untenable to continue producing what they're producing. And so, the truth is that for the cost of putting in a crop of soybeans, you can transition that farm with a one-time, a once-a-century capital cost to convert it into livestock and grow cows instead of soybeans, or at least you can start to add livestock. The fact is that nature doesn't have animal-less systems. And the fact that we have substituted petroleum for livestock in this country and we have segregated instead of integrated our livestock and our cropping, this is why these systems are starting to break down because the soil is a living biological system. It's not just chemistry and it's not just mechanics, it is a living biological system, and it begins to break down when we fail to see it. So, what would I say? I would say I would say have a phase out, you know, maybe a 10-year phase-out of all safety net programs in the USDA, which total billions and billions of dollars a year, just have a 10% drop every single year and put farmers. Look, New Zealand did this. New Zealand did this 20 years ago. They eliminated their equivalent of our USDA, eliminated all subsidies at one time. Half the farmers went bankrupt, but the half that stayed in became the most efficient, profitable farmers in the world. And so, was it a catastrophic? Yeah, it was. But why should bad farming be propped up? You know, there's good farming and there's bad farming. And it's a crazy geopolitical cultural policy to prop up bad farming. We should not be propping up bad farming.
I guess. The counter-argument is the risk of, let's say, if there's a geopolitical shock, let's say some war in the Middle East, and input prices go up, farmers don't have enough time to adapt to these shocks, and a lot of them do go out of business, and we have a food deficit. How close are we to that situation?
America has 35 million acres of lawn, 35 million acres of lawn, and 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses. That's 71 million acres. That's enough to feed the entire country without a farm. We've got plenty of land, plenty of resources. The truth is that we are producing many things that we don't need and that the market is in a surplus for. And so, you know, in 1945, almost 50% of all U.S. vegetables and produce were produced in backyard gardens. They called them victory gardens, if you remember your history books. And that can be done again. The ability, the ability of people to adapt to crises, as you know, is incredible. And so I don't think that if we actually reduced government involvement in agriculture, that anyone would starve. Would some farmers go out of business? Yes. But bad farming would quickly be seen for what it is, and it would not survive. And frankly, I'd be happy to see bad farming not survive. That would be fine.
If I were in Congress, I'd also ask a farmer about current trends in food prices. Let me just show you a few statistics here. The FAO World Food Price Index published by the United Nations, the FFPI price index averaged 131 points in July 2026. That's up 0.7 points from its June level. Compared to a year ago, it's 1.3 points higher. But, and here's a but, it's 18.2% below its peak in March 2022. That's a global average. Okay, now I'm going to show you the American CPI for food at home. This is from the BLS on the St. Louis Fed website. As you can see, in nominal terms, the food price index in America did not go below its 2022 peak. In fact, it continued climbing. So, you know, if I were to be a hardball congressman here, I'd ask the American farmer or even the grocery store executive, how is it that in America, food prices continue climbing overall? The rest of the world, they're stagnant, they're not down. How'd that happen?
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