“DANIEL, THE ONLY THING WE HAVEN’T TRIED IS CHICKENS”
Daniel Griffith arrived at an unlikely solution to severe health problems: Buy chickens and start down the road to regenerative farming.
From a conversation with ecologist and regenerative farmer Daniel Griffith. For the entire conversation, please click on the link to the YouTube video.
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HART HAGAN: Daniel, tell us about the journey that led you to regenerative agriculture.
DANIEL GRIFFITH: Growing up a native of Northeast Ohio, I grew up with an entrepreneur minded father. I grew up on 30 acres. We were outdoorsy. But in no way agricultural. I wanted to grow up to be just like my dad and run some tech companies.
I was highly athletic. I had a pretty successful athletic career in high school. I got Division One scholarships to anywhere I wanted to go for football and wrestling. But my senior year I was diagnosed with a severe degenerative genetic disease.
For the next five years after that … obviously I didn't go to college to play football … My weight fluctuated. My life pretty much ended. I lost the ability to walk. I had severe depression. I lived in hospitals. I lived at the Cleveland Clinic for 9 months, just relearning how to walk. I had doctors that would touch my quad and told me to flex my quad, and I couldn't do it. And the whole day's exercise was trying to figure out where your quad muscle was.
I'm skipping over a lot of details but I traveled all over the country and lived in hospitals. I had surgeries. I've had all my limbs taken off my body and put back on trying to solve these problems and we never could get there. We might have fixed momentarily a particular aspect of the greater problem, but we only created more problems in the process.
One day I was sitting on our back porch, at our place in Northeast Ohio. It was a spring day. I'll never forget it. I was sitting outside with a little fire. Springtime in Ohio is like the only time to be in Ohio, in my opinion. It’s glorious and marvelous. The colors are back and the birds are there because they're all in their migration pathways.
I was reading a book, “Folks, This Ain’t Normal” by Joel Salatin. The book was about agriculture. I didn't think about agriculture. I was working in the tech space part time. And at the time my wife was working full-time in the clothing industry.
When I was reading the book, I started to see these patterns of health and all sorts of things. I'll let you dive into the book in your own way, but it starts to postulate these ideas of regenerative agriculture.
HART HAGAN: “Folks, This Ain’t Normal” is about how abnormal our time period is in terms of food, agriculture, our relationship with the land, etc.
DANIEL GRIFFITH: Yeah. And what a perfect canvas, right? Because I'm sitting there as a twenty something year old individual. I probably weighed 130 pounds. I was nothing. I mean, I was literally wasting away and I'm reading this book and it's like, yes, this couldn't be normal.
My wife is working full time. I can barely move. I'm relearning how to walk. I weighed less than I did in fifth or sixth grade. I'm in my 20s. There is nothing normal there, and I'll never forget. It was the biggest moment. One of the most important days of my life. And my mom walked out of the back onto the patio. You could tell, she'd been thinking about this.
She was emotional and maybe even crying. And she said, “Daniel we've tried everything.” And we had. She had been with me all over the country, for years and years, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills. We were not in a good place financially. And she said, “The only thing we haven't tried is chickens.” And to this day, I laugh. It's hilarious. I said, “What are you talking about?” And that was my response at the time. I was like, “What do you mean chickens?” And she said, “Listen. We've been passive.”
I'm going to happily give her the credit here. These are not my ideas. These are hers. This is her maternal wisdom. She said, “We have been passive up to this point. We've gone to hospitals, and we beg for healing. But what we have never facilitated is active health.
We've never looked at our lives and said, let's change the way we think, let's change the way we live, let's change the way we eat. In her opinion, raising 100 chickens in the backyard was the first step of changing those three items, physical, spiritual, and emotional.
So that day without even asking my wife--which is a joke between us to this day--we went online to a hatchery, Murray Hatchery and bought 100 Black Astralorp chickens. We knew nothing of pasture-raised poultry.
We knew nothing. I didn't even know who Joel Salatin was. I was reading his book, but that's the totality of what I knew about him. I didn't know about chicken tractors and soil health. I knew nothing of that. I didn't even know how to raise a chicken. But we jumped in. We fell in love with it.
In the next couple of years we had a market garden that we were actively working. Health was returning. I started actually volunteering at a 200-head grass-fed and finished, truly regenerative and holistically managed cattle operation just south of Cleveland Ohio.
We continued to fall in love with it. And health started to truly come back. As we grew into it, we realized we're not gardeners. Market gardening does not bring us joy or peace, just stress and anxiety. Working with animals is truly the joy of our life.
We were looking for Land in northeast Ohio, we couldn't find any land. Land is $50,000-100,000 an acre. I could have bought like one acre. We ended up working with some family land down here in Virginia and it just emerged from there.
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For the entire interview with ecologist and farmer Daniel Griffith,, please click on the link.