By Joel Salatin at Brownstone dot org.

The operative word of our time is disentanglement. How many people do we run into that say, I just want to disentangle. I don't want to feel dependent on the education system. So we have a tsunami of homeschooling.

I don't want to be dependent on the healthcare system. So we have a tsunami of medical quacks, many of them speaking here. We all want to go to a quack these days. Absolutely. All right. Financially, we're all concerned. Where's the money going? So 401(k) plans are being converted into living, moving, and knowing.

Proximate to investing in how to grow things, fix things, and build things. And if you know how to grow, build, and fix, or live next to people who do that, it is better than any 401(k) plan. That is disentanglement.

Entertainment. Entertainment. Many people are now ditching the entertainment money and investing it in information like this. I'd rather come here for this weekend than a Caribbean cruise. Which is more valuable? So this disentangled news, disentangled from the news. So what we're doing…Substack and podcasts and we've kissed mainstream media goodbye. I don't want to be disentangled with that.

And food. Food we're realizing every day and really gaining momentum through the efforts of RFK, Jr. and MAHA, how inauthentic and unacceptable our food supply is. I mean, think of what he's brought to the discussion. How many of us knew five months ago that $15 billion a year of SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) benefits went to Coca-Cola? I didn't know that. Most of us didn't, but that's now part of the national conversation.

And so we're seeing this desire to disentangle from the system on multiple levels.

I'll concentrate on food just because that's what I'm going to talk about. I know more about that than the others, but the others, it's happening over and over, and this is driving now a homestead tsunami. Thirty years ago, 80% of the visitors here at our farm were lefty greeny, earth muffin, tree hugger, liberal environmental, wackys. Today, 80% of our visitors are conservative, faith-based, right-sided. Wackos.

The desire has turned; the desire has turned from "Government, solve all my problems" to self-reliance and resilience. That's what the homestead economy is all about. In food.

I don't trust Procter and Gamble.

I don't trust Nestle's.

I don't trust Hershey's.

Basically, when they shut down the tobacco companies, all of that laboratory and scientific chemical knowledge got scarfed up by the big food companies and the tobacco experts are formulating our food, and that's why we now have - what is it - 70,000 food additives that are unpronounceable. The European Union only has 400, and so the whole ultra-processed food thing has come down to us. So I want to know what's in the pantry. I want to know what's on the table for my kiddos.

Think about our children. Our children from a homestead situation. We now know that how we build an immune system is eating dirt, playing in the dirt, getting dirt under our fingernails.

Finland leads the world in the scientific studies showing farm kids who eat some poop when they're toddlers are far more immunologically vibrant than their city cousins who live in a sterile environment. So if anybody's looking for a million-dollar entrepreneurial idea here, it's funny, but I'm dead serious.

What we need is for somebody to start a subscription program for welcome mats that are permeable, that are filled with compost and soil from farms so that city subscribers can get their welcome bladder, not physical bladder, but their welcome mat bladder settled and get their immune system going.

Self-worth. We have a teenage suicide problem. Big problem. How do you develop self-worth? I'm not a psychologist, but here's my farm boy definition of how a kid develops self-worth. It is when you successfully accomplish meaningful tasks. When you successfully accomplish meaningful tasks. All four of those words are important.

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