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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] High Priest of the Pasture ''Joel Salatin: Lunatic Farmer''
  • Date: Tue, 03 May 2005 09:02:07 -0600


High Priest of the Pasture ''Joel Salatin: Lunatic Farmer''
By TODD S. PURDUM May 1, 2005
The New York Times > Style > T: Style Magazine > High Priest of the Pasture


The little dirt road is called Pure Meadows Lane, and to follow it
across the slatted wooden cattle guard over the Middle River and into the
550 acres of Polyface farm in Swoope, Va., is to enter a peaceable kingdom,
out of time and up-to-date. The oldest wing of the snug white clapboard
farmhouse up ahead was built in 1750, and Polyface is just a newfangled
name for an idea so old-fashioned as to be revolutionary. In fact, the man
who owns and runs this farm may well be Virginia's most multifaceted
agrarian since Thomas Jefferson. The big sign above his thrumming computer
and cluttered desk reads, ''Joel Salatin: Lunatic Farmer,'' but he is crazy
like a fox.

For 44 years on the western edge of the Shenandoah Valley, three
generations of Salatins (of which he's the middle) have raised grass-fed
livestock on rough and hilly land without recourse to an ounce of chemical
fertilizer or a fistful of seed, in close touch with the soil, the seasons
and themselves, using methods meant to mimic nature. The result is lush
fields of unusual greenness -- even in the sodden melting snow of a late
winter morning -- and pork, eggs and poultry of uncommon cleanliness and
indescribably good taste.

Along the way, Salatin, a 47-year-old onetime newspaper reporter who
calls himself a ''Christian libertarian environmental capitalist,'' has
become, in many ways, the high priest of the pasture. He is one of the
natural-food movement's most prolific authors, having written numerous
articles and five popular how-to books with titles like ''Family Friendly
Farming''; his latest is ''Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer's Guide
to Farm Friendly Food'' (Polyface, 2004). He has inspired scores of family
farmers to adopt his techniques for raising beef, pork and poultry and
attracted admiring visitors from around the world. His services as a
motivational speaker and educator are in high demand wherever organic
farmers and foodies gather to talk shop, from the University of California
at Berkeley to the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico
Hills, N.Y.

In his wide, webbed suspenders and used service-station shirt,
Salatin is part Louis Bromfield and part John the Baptist. And like
Bromfield, the mid-20th-century novelist and farmer who was bold enough to
doubt ''that the impulse of our time toward regimentation, centralization,
mechanization and industrialism necessarily represented progress,'' he is a
rebel -- and an evangelist -- at heart. He is also a red-blooded, robust
rebuttal to the notion that the sustainable-food movement is a
preoccupation of a pampered and unrealistic elite. Nothing could be further
from his business philosophy or personal life. With his wife, Teresa, 47;
their children, Daniel, 23, and Rachel, 18; daughter-in-law, Sheri, 25;
baby grandson, Travis; and Joel's 81-year-old mother, Lucille, Salatin
inhabits an ecosystem straight out of Ecclesiastes: there is a season and a
time to every purpose. Nothing is wasted. Everything matters, and everyone
works, including the four trusty barn cats, diligent mousers all. The farm
is pretty, but not precious, and Salatin has mud on his boots and dirt on
his hands, ''the happiest of men,'' as Bromfield wrote, ''for he inhabits a
world that is full of wonder and excitement over which he rules as a small
god.''

Salatin's own description of his mission is at once humble and grand.
''We don't aspire to an empire,'' he said over a lunch of Teresa's hearty
soup (made from their frozen beef chuck) in their knotty-pine kitchen,
where a log the size of a small child was ablaze in the big fireplace.
''What we aspire to is to have the best food available.'' And by all
evidence, they are succeeding. Their approach is deceptively simple,
relying on age-old precepts of organic agriculture, up-to-the-minute
technology and, most of all, Salatin's ingenuity. He eschews the
government's seal of approval, because he distrusts the bureaucracy and
disdains the large-scale officially ''organic''

farms that he said have ''compromised the movement's values'' in
favor of mass production. He describes his methods as ''beyond organic''
and has pioneered techniques that admiring colleagues and competitors
describe as above reproach.

''He's not following anybody's blueprint,'' said Jo Robinson, an
expert on the advantages of raising grass-fed livestock, the principal
writer for eatwild.com and the author of ''Pasture Perfect: The
Far-Reaching Benefits of Choosing Meat, Eggs and Dairy Products From
Grass-Fed Animals'' (Vashon Island Press, 2004). ''He's not going back to
the old model. There's nothing in county extension or old-fashioned ag
science that really informs him. He is just looking totally afresh at how
to maximize production in an integrated system on a holistic farm. He's
just totally innovative.''

Salatin's secret is the grass, and it is in the pasture that
everything begins and ends. He believes that every square yard of sward
should contain at least 40 varieties of plants, and he calls his fields a
''salad bar,'' a riot of fescues and clovers and earthworms churning the
soil. Cattle graze freely on a patch of this super-rich pasture, held in by
an electrified wire. Every day or so, they are moved to a new patch, and a
succession of chickens (or turkeys, in season) are moved into the plot that
the cows just left. Both laying chickens and broilers -- raised for their
meat -- have portable shelters for shade and are protected from predators
by portable webbed polyethylene fencing interlaced with electrified wire.
Buried, pond-fed plastic pipes channel pressurized water, virtually
anywhere, on demand. The chickens dig through fresh cowpatties for
nutritious grubs and worms, and then scratch the manure into the dirt,
aerating the soil and creating compost, so the cycle of growth can begin
all over again.

In winter, the approach is, if anything, even more ingenious. Cattle
are sheltered in open-sided barns -- with hand-hewn log poles and timbers
milled from the Salatins' oak trees. They rest on a thick bed of straw and
are fed hay in V-shaped troughs designed by Joel to be raised and lowered
on ropes and pulleys. Every couple of days, fresh straw is tossed onto the
barn floor, where the cattle each deposit an average of 50 pounds of manure
and urine a day, and the feed troughs are raised to keep pace with the
rising straw on the floor. As the pile gets higher, sawdust, wood chips and
whole shelled corn are mixed in. The result is a sweetly decomposing heap
that gives off heat to keep the cattle warm and no odor worse than the
pleasant dampness of a breast-fed baby's diaper. Then the cows are turned
out, and the pigs (which in summer forage freely on the pasture's wooded
hillsides and are moved around with more electric fencing) come in, rooting
around through the layers of straw for the nuggets of fermenting corn.
Voila: more aerated compost to be spread over the pasture when spring
comes. Joel calls these living machines his ''pig-aerators'' and proudly
notes that, unlike most farm equipment, which depreciates, rusts and costs
money to repair or replace, they actually appreciate, get fatter and bring
a fine price at slaughter, while doing work for which only their own
internal-combustion engine is needed.

All over the farm, some version or another of this system prevails.
When Daniel Salatin was 8, he decided he wanted to raise rabbits. He got a
book and went to work, while Joel devised a plan for waist-high cages,
suspended over the dirt floor of the airy, sunlit, Quonset-style structures
where the egg-laying chickens are raised in winter. The rabbit droppings,
notoriously high in noxious ammonia, fall onto the straw, where hundred of
chickens pick through them and scratch them into -- what else? -- harmless
compost. There is a cacophony of clucking and scratching and pecking, but
only the soft scent of feathers and fur. ''You don't want to throw the baby
out with the bath water,'' Salatin said simply. ''There's a big difference
between industrializing production of tractors and industrializing
production of food. We like technology, but we really like technology that
allows us to do better what nature does itself.''

That philosophy has made Salatin ''sort of the high prophet of
sustainable family farming,'' said Fred Walters, the editor of AcresUSA,
the nation's oldest monthly magazine on sustainable agriculture, who has
often published Salatin's articles. ''I like that he aims for low-tech,
simple systems. While conventional agriculture is trying to make
agriculture a factory or a physical system, in the end it's a biological
system: there's life involved. Joel recognizes the life behind the system.
And in doing so, he's created a model that can save the family farm, where
people don't have to have thousands of acres and millions of dollars of
debt.''

If anyone knows how hard it is to make a go of family farming, it's
Salatin. His grandfather, an avid backyard gardener and beekeeper in
Indiana, was an early devotee of J.I. Rodale, the founder of regenerative
organic gardening. In 1961, Salatin's parents bought the land that would
become Polyface after losing a farm they had started in Venezuela to
political turmoil there. They began raising cattle using organic methods,
but decided that, at least until the mortgage was paid off, they could not
make a living on the farm, so Joel's father worked as an accountant for
other farmers while his mother taught high school physical education.

In high school, Joel began his own business raising chickens. He and
Teresa, who grew up on a nearby farm, were sweethearts and went off to Bob
Jones University, the fundamentalist Christian school in South Carolina,
where she majored in home economics and he in English. They married in
1980, but Joel said: ''I didn't really see a way to make a living on the
farm. I always loved writing. I was the guy who won the D.A.R. essay
contest and things like that, and it was the era of Watergate, and I
decided I would be the next Woodward and Bernstein, and then retire to the
farm.''

So he took a job in Staunton, eight miles from home, at The News
Leader (''The Daily Misprint,'' he calls it now), and Teresa worked in a
fabric store. But he grew tired of having his stories spiked when they
offended the local powers that be and decided to try farming full time.
Joel and Teresa lived in an apartment in the attic of his parents'
farmhouse on $300 a month. They had a $50 car and produced their own meat,
milk and butter on the farm. Teresa canned applesauce and made bread. They
bought their clothes in thrift stores and spent perhaps $50 a week on
groceries, mostly for things like shampoo and detergent. ''I always said if
I could figure out a way to grow Kleenex and toilet paper on trees, we
could pull the plug on society,'' Joel said. When the children came, Teresa
schooled them at home, at small desks in the upstairs hallway, and Joel's
parents moved into a mobile home a few yards away, where his widowed mother
still lives. At 19, Daniel became the president of the state chapter of
4-H, and last year he built his own house, with lumber from the farm and
some help from neighbors, on the hillside above his parents' home. Rachel
is now at the local community college, interested in culinary training and
interior design.

Year by year, as Joel improvised his novel techniques and Teresa kept
the books, the farm began to prosper. Now it harvests 30,000 dozen eggs,
10,000 to 12,000 broilers, 100 head of cattle, 250 hogs, 800 turkeys and
600 rabbits a year -- as well as a smattering of blackberries, grapes,
vegetables and tree fruit mostly for home use. For some years, it has been
classified as a commercial farm under the United States Agriculture
Department's definition, meaning its gross annual sales exceed $250,000
(Polyface grosses $350,000). The average net income for such farms
nationwide is $156,324, and Salatin said Polyface's runs about that, which
he said is proof positive that sustainable farming is not some rarefied
niche business serving elite consumers but a viable way to keep family
farms together while producing healthy food in harmony with the
environment.

Patrick Martins, the president and a co-founder of Heritage Foods
USA, an online market clearinghouse for heirloom and artisanal foods, said
Salatin has succeeded in part because he is unusually articulate but mostly
because he can back up his compelling talk with simple methods, low
overhead and equipment costs and indisputable results: ''He is a real
beacon for farmers all over the place, and yet it comes from how successful
he is on the most local of levels.''

Organic farming accounts for less than 1 percent of the country's
agricultural output, or $393 million in sales of the total $207 billion in
2002, the last year for which comparative data is available. Of 2.1 million
farmers, just 12,000 were making certified organic products. But Keith J.
Collins, the Agriculture Department's longtime chief economist, said the
sector is growing fast. ''A lot of people doing what this guy's doing are
doing something that adds value in terms of what some consumers want,'' he
said. ''Maybe it's quality in taste, maybe it's quality in the way it's
produced. How much bigger can this become in American agriculture? I don't
really know the answer. I think there's certainly a lot of scope for it to
grow.''

The Salatins work hard to keep prices more like a supermarket's than
a specialty store's by cutting out middlemen wherever possible and
eliminating anything that smacks of fancy packaging. Many customers buy
directly from the no-frills on-farm sales office, where a giant walk-in
freezer holds the inventory. A perfect six-pound chicken; a dozen
bright-orange-yolked eggs; a 2.5 pound bone-in pork roast; a pound of sweet
Italian sausage; a pound of chicken livers; and two New York strips all
cost just under $50 on my recent visit. Restaurant accounts are served by a
wholesaler, and every six to eight weeks, a Salatin delivery van takes food
to seven ''buying clubs'' in Virginia and Maryland, where neighbors come
with coolers to pick up their custom orders. The Salatins ship nothing by
mail, both because it would be too complicated and because they want
customers elsewhere to patronize their local farmers.

Elaine Lindholm, the communications director for the Virginia
Agriculture Department, with which Salatin has tangled repeatedly, seemed
to go out of her way to avoid provoking him, saying, ''He provides a very
valuable service.'' But she added: ''His is a specialty-niche market. Not
everyone could do it. Not everyone would want to do it.''

The Salatins see such talk as defeatist. But they concede that many
of their own neighbors share that view, though they make no better or
steadier income. ''They think we're nuts but try to get along with us,''
Teresa said.

Salatin himself makes no secret of his feelings about the
agribusiness bureaucracy: he hates it. A favorite line is, ''Everything I
want to do is illegal,'' and he will readily regale a visitor with tales of
his travails in keeping the right to process his own chickens in an
immaculate, open-air backyard operation (Virginia argued that it was
''inherently unsanitary'' because it didn't have walls). He bemoans the
fact that federal meat-processing regulations force him to send his cattle
and hogs to commercial locker-plants and thus surrender control over the
final stage of a process throughout which he has tended them with such
care. (He thinks the government should allow mobile abattoirs that could do
on-farm slaughtering for small-scale operations.) At a time when
homeland-security experts warn of the vulnerabilities of a food-supply
system based on large-scale production, centralized processing and
long-distance transportation, he complains that politicians of both parties
call for only ''more centralization.''

''Not only is there not government support for what we do,'' he said,
''there is a profound antagonism at every level for what we do.''

Salatin is not easy to pigeonhole. He speaks with equal contempt of
the early American settlers' disregard for Native American agriculture and
modern ''gene splicing, irradiation and all sorts of things we don't
understand.'' He sprinkles his book with the wisdom of motivational gurus
like Stephen Covey and Zig Ziglar and sensible child-rearing advice about
the painful dangers of ''fussy dads,'' who drive their children from their
farms (and from their arms). He concedes that his views are too Christian
for some liberals, too environmentalist for many conservatives, too
libertarian for conformists. He greets his hogs with a tender ''Hey,
piggles,'' and confesses to an occasional pang when it comes time to kill
an especially kindly old cow, but he speaks of the cycles of life in terms
that any Eastern mystic might understand. Just as agriculture was the last
occupation to enter the industrial age, Salatin believes it will be the
last to leave it, and not without a fight. ''I would love to sit down on
Oprah Winfrey or Tim Russert, across from Don Tyson, and ask him whether it
matters if a chicken can express her chickenness!'' he exclaimed at one
point.

Teresa interrupted with a dry ''Of course not!'' but Joel continued,
undeterred. ''Because as soon as you posit any moral constraints, then you
have to be able to articulate them.''

Salatin has no trouble articulating the Joelness of Joel. ''I see
myself today as Sitting Bull,'' he said, ''trying to bring a voice of
Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture. If
we fail to appreciate the soul that Easternism gives us, then what we have
is a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized,
reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process that counts on cleverness.
Now, how's that for a mouthful?''





  • [Livingontheland] High Priest of the Pasture ''Joel Salatin: Lunatic Farmer'', Tradingpost, 05/03/2005

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