Meet Christian-Libertarian-Environmentalist-Capitalist-Lunatic Farmer Joel Salatin

Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms

You wouldn’t expect a farmer from Virginia to draw such a huge crowd, but when Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms spoke at the University of Northern Colorado in March of 2010, the audience of thousands was absolutely enraptured. “Consider this; he who feeds you, owns you.” The thousands of students, farmers, and thinkers collectively drew in our breaths as we heard this.  “Every paradigm can exceed its efficiency. Our twentieth century model of the industrial food system is cracking and on the verge of collapse!”

Salatin is an expert on swimming against the current of industrial farming. When his parents bought the 550 acre Polyface farm in Swoope, Virginia in 1961, it was a badly-eroded wreck with poor soil. The Salatins began gradually restoring the soil health through carefully-crafted ecological land management involving rotation of livestock, planting trees, and creating ponds to prevent erosion and provide ecological habitats. Even while their conventional-farming neighbors called them lunatics and bioterrorists, the farm blossomed with thicker soil, renewed pastures, and an increasing carrying capacity for supporting livestock.

Cattle at Polyface contained by moveable electric fencing

Joel Salatin has not only carried on in his parents’ footsteps, he has continued to adapt his farming practice with new innovation.  Polyface currently supports 400 head of cattle and thousands of chickens, turkeys, pigs, and rabbits. Only locally-sourced organic feed is provided, and no antibiotics, chemicals, or growth hormones are used. The meat and eggs are sold to high-end restaurants and individual families. Most famously, Chipotle restaurant uses Polyface beef and poultry.

Salatin inspecting his pasture.

All of this is possible through careful management of a singular miracle crop: grass.  Actually, grassland is a complex ecosystem involving hundreds of species of native perennial grasses as well as wildflowers and weeds, such as nitrogen-fixing clover and vetch and nutrient-accumulating dandelions. Grassland is also the natural habitat of grazers and browsers such as cattle. In careful grazing practices, the cattle mow the grass and leave behind fertilizer which serves the dual purpose of enhancing the soil fertility and sequestering atmospheric carbon. Salatin has innovated techniques that mirror natural patterns of grazing and allow the animals the freedom to exhibit their instinctive behavior.

Fleets of chicken coops are moved daily

Salatin describes his operations thusly: “For context, please understand that we don’t do anything conventionally. We haven’t bought a bag of chemical fertilizer in half a century, never planted a seed, own no plow or disk or silo — we call those bankruptcy tubes. We practice mob stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization with the cattle. The Eggmobiles follow them, mimicking egrets on the rhinos’ nose. The laying hens scratch through the dung, eat out the fly larvae, scatter the nutrients into the soil, and give thousands of dollars worth of eggs as a byproduct of pasture sanitation. Pastured broilers in floorless pasture schooners move every day to a fresh paddock salad bar. Pigs aerate compost and finish on acorns in forest glens. It’s all a symbiotic, multi-speciated synergistic relationship-dense production model that yields far more per acre than industrial models. And it’s all aromatically and aesthetically romantic.”

Clearly, this is not the type of speech you’d expect from a farmer. In fact, Salatin has a degree in communication from Bob Jones University. While his classmates went on to pursue careers in radio, television, and preaching, Salatin has become the national voice of the ecological farmer and natural food, much to the chagrin of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) everywhere, who still call him a “lunatic.”

Laying hens are housed with rabbits to confuse pathogens.

At the conference hall in Fort Collins, Salatin continued his speech. “The regulations of the USDA, or US ‘duh’ as I call them, are designed exclusively for an industrial model of food production. Of course you need antibiotics when you have 10,000 chickens in a 5,000 foot building. That’s like an open wound.  These regulations do not scale down to a smaller, more natural model and are prohibitive for smaller family farms. What people need to know is that there are both good as well as bad bacteria, and that sterile does not equal safe.”

Salatin’s sees his stewardship of the land as his Christian calling. “The forgiveness of the Creator is mirrored by the forgiveness of nature. I am a conduit of forgiveness in my life. The religious right has squandered the stewardship responsibility of Creation. The faith community should be a repository of Earth stewardship.” The audience cheered at this, giving me hope that environmentalism can start to be shouldered by a segment of the population often more preoccupied with taking rights away from others they find morally wrong.

Salatin discusses pasture managment with a young farmer at the Lyons Farmette.

Just over a year and a half later, I got to meet Joel Salatin at a smaller gathering of local farmers at the Lyons Farmette.  He was equally inspiring in what he told us with regard to vegetarianism “Look, there is no functioning ecosystem in the world that does not also contain animals. Animals are required to move nutrients from low-lying areas to higher ones. All ecosystems require a certain amount of disturbance to tune the succession. Look at this beautiful grassy field. It wouldn’t look the same way if we just left it this way. You need to mow it with a machine or grazing animal to freeze this particular expression of life.” With regard to GMO crops, he said “You think people are promiscuous, try plants! GMO plants cannot be contained and shouldn’t be used.”

His unflagging enthusiasm and energy exceeded that of even the youngest farmers. “It is our manifest as humans on this planet to build the topsoil. Permaculture can feed the world; you will see it when you believe it!”

Joel Salatin is the author of numerous books, including my favorite, The Sheer Ecstasy of being a Lunatic Farmer.  He is also featured in the movies Food, Inc., Fresh, and Farmageddon.

Today is Earth Day, 2012!  I encourage you all to eat healthy, locally-sourced food today.

Fresh prepared chicken from Polyface

Pictures by Polyface Farms and Wikimedia Commons

You might also enjoy Willie Nelson’s “Back to the Start”, produced by Chipotle, which was inspired by people like Joel Salatin.

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