Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

'All these things we're seeing – E coli, mad cow, listeria, salmonella; this 
is nature screaming at us: "Enough!" '- Joel Salatin, chemical-free farmer

Joel Salatin is America's most celebrated pioneer of chemical-free farming – 
but if you want to taste his beef or chicken you'll have to move to Virginia. 
He talks to Gaby Wood about why local is best and his role in the documentary 
Food, Inc, which attacks the giants of industrialised food production
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/31/food-industry-environment  
  * Gaby Wood
    * The Observer, Sunday 31 January 2010

Joel Salatin is pulling on his braces. He's just had his picture taken 
wearing a suit – our photographer wants to show that he's not just a hands-on 
local farmer but also a new- era businessman – and now he's getting back into 
his work gear: muddy jeans, straw hat, and a farmhand's shirt that reads, in 
embroidered script, "Roy".

"Roy?" I ask.

Salatin follows my gaze to his chest and laughs. "The cleaner sells unclaimed 
ones for 50 cents each," he explains. "I might be Pedro one day, and Roy the 
next."

Such is the unpredictable world of Joel Salatin, hero of the new local food 
movement, feted for his ingenious chemical-free farming methods and admired 
for his outspoken articulacy on the horrors of industrial food.

We are at Polyface, the small farm his family has run since he was four years 
old (Salatin and his wife Teresa now have two grown-up children of their own, 
who also work there). The rambling white clapboard farmhouse – a gold plaque 
above the fireplace designates it a historic landmark, built in the 1750s – 
stands in an absurdly picturesque landscape in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. 
On the January day we visit, 24 inches of snow have fallen in a few recent 
hours and turned the surrounding fields into rolling white patchworked dunes 
dotted with black cows. And as if its children's-book looks were not enough, 
the roads have names like Cattleman and Sugar Loaf and Buttermilk Spring.

The farm is closed to visitors during these months, the coldest of the year; 
the purpose of this period, as Salatin writes on the Polyface website, is 
"the rejuvenation of the Salatin family". Needless to say, they are not just 
sitting around. Farmhands are cleaning out the hens' hoop houses out back; a 
new batch of live-in apprentices is building a temporary structure next to 
the tractor garage; Teresa is dealing with admin and taking down the 
Christmas tree. And Joel has dashed off another book over Christmas. His many 
self-published tomes, which offer first-hand guidance on how to repeat his 
successful experiment, have wonderful titles such as Everything I Want To Do 
Is Illegal and (the new one) The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer.

Salatin, who has been farming in this way for years, came to more widespread 
attention thanks to Michael Pollan's bestselling book The Omnivore's Dilemma 
– he refused to ship meat to Pollan outside of the meat's own bioregion, and 
became an important figure in the book. Now he provides the charismatic moral 
backbone of Food, Inc, a hard-hitting documentary featuring Pollan and 
co-produced by Eric Schlosser, the investigative reporter who wrote Fast Food 
Nation.

Food, Inc suggests some shocking links between big government and big 
business in the food industry, along with some appalling statistics. For 
instance, in the 1970s, the top five beef packers controlled 25% of the 
market; now the top four control more than 80% – meaning that if ever meat is 
tainted by bacteria or chemicals it has the potential to reach vast numbers 
of people; in 1972, 50,000 food safety inspections were conducted by the US 
Food and Drug Administration, and three decades later that number had gone 
down to 9,164; 70% of all processed foods have some genetically modified 
ingredient; in 2007, E coli from food affected 73,000 Americans – something 
the film correlates directly with the increase in consumption of processed 
foods and the scale and cleanliness of the country's huge industrial 
slaughterhouses. But beyond the statistics, the sheer sight of carcasses 
being dunked in ammonia, endlessly and mechanically, would make any meat 
eater want to stop eating meat. The very banality of it – the fact that we 
could, the filmmakers suggest, change the world with every bite yet somehow 
refuse to – is horrifying.

The first thing I ask Salatin when we sit down in his living room is whether 
he's ever considered becoming a vegetarian. It's not what I had planned to 
say, but we've been in the hoop houses with the nicely treated hens, all 
happily pecking and glossy-feathered, and I've held one in my arms. Suddenly 
it makes little sense that this animal, whose welfare has been of such great 
concern, will be killed in a matter of days. Naive, I know, and Salatin seems 
surprised. "Never crossed my mind," he says. The problem that's leading the 
"animals-are-people movement", as he refers to it, is two-fold, in his view. 
First: "The industrial food system is so cruel and so horrific in its 
treatment of animals. It never asks the question: 'Should a pig be allowed to 
express its pig-ness?' And the second thing of course is the urbanisation of 
the world, to the point where people are not now connected to their 
ecological umbilical, so that the only connection anyone has to an animal is 
a pet cat or a pet dog. And that really gives you a very jaundiced view of 
cycles of life – death, regeneration."

It's true that America is particularly susceptible to this – even without 
knowing much of the information revealed by Pollan or Schlosser or Food, Inc 
director Robert Kenner, you sense it. The US is especially blind to it for 
the sake of convenience or affordability. But living in a city like New York, 
as I do, on the occasions when you allow your field of vision some leeway – 
into the future health of your children, into the vastness of the country – 
you see how integral the city's relationship to the origins of its food is to 
its profound ill health. The enormous quantities produced by the few 
monopolies in power, the distance food travels to get to your door, the 
bounteous look yet empty, aqueous taste of its fruit.

I ask Salatin when he first realised his country was poisoning itself.

"Well, goodness," he says, and reaches back into the learned resources of his 
mind. "Chemical agriculture really started with Justus von Liebig in 1837 
[Liebig was the father of the fertiliser industry, and also the father of the 
Oxo cube], telling the world that: 'Oh, a plant is really only nitrogen, 
potassium and phosphorus.' I think it's important to understand that in the 
big historical context of things, there has been land degradation from 
civilisation since the beginning of history. I mean, the Rajputana desert in 
India is a manmade desert caused by overgrazing. Land degradation did not 
start with chemical agriculture. But chemical agriculture offered new tools 
for annihilation."

But what, I press him, can we say about the moment we're in now? Are we in a 
state of crisis or a continuation?

Salatin quotes Joel Arthur Barker on paradigms – every paradigm, he says, 
exceeds its point of efficiency. Agriculture is always the last sector to 
join the new economy, because farmers are very conservative. So only now has 
the industrial paradigm in agriculture come to the end of its workability, 
Salatin explains. "What happens is all these things we're seeing – 
campylobacter, E coli, mad cow, listeria, salmonella, that weren't even in 
the lexicon 30 years ago – that is the industrial paradigm exceeding its 
efficiency. So these Latin squiggly words that we're learning to say – bovine 
spongiform encephalopathy – are nature's language screaming to us: ENOUGH! 
And the question then is: what will it take for us to listen? And my 
contention is that Wall Street is still wearing conquistador mentality and 
uniforms, and nobody is listening to the pleadings of nature saying: 
'Enough.'"

Salatin says he thinks that in the clash between artisanal and industrial 
"we're just beginning to see the tip of the iceberg", and he doesn't like to 
predict who will win. Personally, he tries to be an optimist, but he adds 
ominously that "time will tell. Who would have thought in 1925 that six 
million Jews would have been gassed in Germany? A lot of crazy things have 
happened in history".

Human arrogance is one thing Salatin strongly warns against. Of course, it's 
one way of explaining the large-scale upset to the natural order of things. 
But Salatin also thinks the way you treat animals is a reflection of the way 
you will go on to treat human beings. One of his more romantic and 
far-fetched-seeming statements in the documentary is to this effect, and it 
turns out to be one of the most centrally, shockingly true: the treatment of 
illegal workers by big food corporations. Films like Food, Inc, Salatin 
suggests, are finally "exposing the kind of corruption and evil that is the 
shortcut. What happens when you don't ask: how do we make pigs happy? Well, 
you view the pig as just a pile of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated 
however cleverly human hubris can imagine to manipulate it. And when you view 
life from that kind of mechanistic, arrogant, disrespectful standpoint, you 
very soon beginto view all of life from a very disrespectful, arrogant, 
manipulative standpoint. And the fact is, we aren't machines."

It's probably safe to say that not all farmers in Virginia speak like this. 
Salatin, the son of an economist who moved here and turned local chemical 
farming habits on their head, was born in Venezuela and worked as a reporter 
for the local newspaper in Staunton, Virginia before he came to work at the 
family farm. He met Teresa when they were in high school and married her 
almost 30 years ago.

Salatin is a remarkably youthful 53-year-old: his skin is strangely 
unweatherbeaten, and his eyes, behind large square glasses, are full of life. 
He writes prolifically and commands several thousand dollars a pop for public 
speaking engagements on topics such as "Dancing with Dinner", "Holy Cows and 
Hog Heaven" and "Forgiveness Farming". He's funny, informed – he thinks 
nothing of dropping Louis Pasteur or Sir Albert Howard into the conversation 
– and rewardingly heated in his arguments. He also seems to have come into 
his own somewhat. When I ask him what he and his wife disagree about, given 
that they have worked together so closely for so long, he says he has to 
respect her need for privacy, while she has to put up with his exercising his 
own very particular gifts: "I'm out here in my world of people and parties," 
he says, "and she's being crushed. But she appreciates that this is where we 
are now. I need people – theatrics and schmoozing and storytelling are part 
of my talent."

Now, perhaps we can all easily agree that eating Salatin's meat is better for 
us (and I can certainly vouch for its tastiness, having had Polyface chicken 
in a local restaurant in Staunton), but getting down to basics, I ask him if 
I were from Mars how he would explain why I should eat his meat. Salatin 
offers five reasons.

"The first thing is," he says, "it's safer from a bio-security standpoint. If 
you eat our stuff, it's gonna be only sold real close right here. There's a 
short chain between field and fork, and the shorter that chain is – the 
fresher, the more transparent that system is – the less chance there is of 
anything from bio-terrorism to pathogenicity to spoilage. You wanna get 
diarrhoea? Eat industrial food.

"Number two is what I would call your own personal immune system." The more 
antibiotics are given to the animals we eat, he explains, the less responsive 
we become to antibiotics when we need them for medical reasons. "You've been 
drugging yourself at dinner every day."

Thirdly, he goes on, they've had their meats checked, and they are unequalled 
in their nutritional density and power, however you want to measure it – 
"Omega 3, omega 6 ratios, riboflavin, polyunsaturated fats, vitamin A…"

Four: it tastes better.

"And the fifth reason," he concludes, "is: it's better for the environment. 
It's a very landscape-therapeutic production model."

So: we know why we should eat this. How many of us can? Salatin currently 
feeds between 7,000 and 9,000 locals. That's a tiny proportion of the 
American population; how sustainable is his system?

"Can I feed the world? That's a wonderful question, one of my favourites," 
Salatin smiles, having more or less asked the question himself. "Not only can 
we feed the world, this is the only system that really can feed the world."

And, I ask, what happens to the next 9,000 people, and the next and the next?

"Well, there are a couple of answers to that," Salatin replies, taking off 
into vivid detail about a small part of how he actually operates. "Let's take 
cows, for example. With good, controlled grazing, where we're moving these 
cows every day to a new patch, on our farm we're averaging 400 cow days per 
acre – a cow day is what one cow will eat in a day. Our county average is 80. 
Because grass grows in an S-curve, so when you have cows in continuous 
grazing, they keep the grass short, in what I call its nappy phase. And what 
we want to do is get it in its juvenile adolescent growth curve. We don't 
want it to grow into what we call nursing-home grass. I say this not for 
humour – it is funny, but: everybody can understand that. People grow faster 
between 12 and 18 than at other ages. And so if we can maintain the forage in 
that fast juvenile-growth stage, then we are metabolising way more solar 
energy in the biomass than you are at any other time in the growth cycle of 
the plant. And to do that, you have to manage the meeting between cow and 
grass. You can't just turn the cows out and hope that it'll happen, because 
it won't. Cows always eat dessert first."

So, I ask, you're saying this particular system of management and growth 
could be taken anywhere in the world and replicated?

"Absolutely."

And why are people not doing that?

"Well, I don't know," Salatin says, stretching his shoulders into an 
exaggerated shrug. "Why don't people like the truth? It's a big question. One 
answer is: it hasn't been done before. It's just not what Grandpa did. And 
remember, farmers are conservative. If the neighbour doesn't think it's a 
good idea, it's not a good idea. Whereas my position is: a good idea is what 
the neighbours think is a terrible idea!"

Just on principle, I laugh. Salatin is marvellously perverse. "Exactly," he 
says. "You know it won't work if the neighbours think it will."

You must have terrible neighbours, I suggest.

For a second, he pauses. "No, we have wonderful neighbours! And the other 
thing is, if everybody started doing the kind of farming we do, it would 
completely invert and realign all of the food-system power economic structure 
in the world. We're looking at cultural revolution – that's what this is."

Salatin is not entirely without critics – I don't mean big-brother 
big-business bad-guy critics; I mean people who are trying to do the same 
thing in a more purist way and regret that he is being hailed as the saviour. 
In Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Eating Animals, a poultry farmer named 
Frank Reese, who raises heritage breeds only, not birds whose genes are 
identical to the industrial birds, criticises Salatin in these terms. "That 
farm is a joke," Reese says of Polyface. "Joel Salatin is doing industrial 
birds. Call him up and ask him. So he puts them on pasture. It makes no 
difference. It's like putting a broken-down Honda on the autobahn and saying 
it's a Porsche."

I put this to Salatin, and initially he denies it. "That's just wrong," he 
says defensively, "Just because it's in print doesn't mean it's true." 
Salatin doesn't know Frank Reese. He asks if Reese is in favour of using only 
heritage breeds, and I say that's my understanding of it, yes.

"OK," he concedes. "You know what, that's fine if you want to do that. I'm 
not opposed to heritage breeds. We have some heritage breeds. Here's the 
problem though: marketability. When you say: 'Can we feed the world?', we're 
not going to turn around the system by feeding only 10% of the population. We 
gotta feed 90%."

You don't think people will pay…

"Double?" he says, finishing my question. "No, they won't. And besides, it's 
all dark meat. No double breast. Hey, 40 years ago, every woman in the 
country – I'll be real sexist here – every woman in the country knew how to 
cut up a chicken. When we started doing these pastured chickens, it was a 
moot point. Nobody asked for breast – it didn't exist! I mean as a separate 
item. Now 60% of our customers don't even know that a chicken has bones! I'm 
serious. We have moved to an incredibly ignorant culinary connection."

Salatin is hitting his stride now. "We tried heritage chickens for three 
years and we couldn't sell 'em. I mean, we could sell a couple. But at the 
end of the day, altruism doesn't pay our taxes. And I'm willing to say: 'You 
know what? I don't have all the answers and I pick my battles and 
compromises.' If you want to get brutally honest, in my opinion we shouldn't 
even have egg sales in America! Every restaurant and every home should have 
two or three chickens. I mean, you got a parakeet, why not have two chickens? 
You get eggs instead of a parrot keeping you awake at night. In a perfect 
world, that's how it would be."

This tirade from Salatin is quite a performance, and not without good, 
convincing intentions. But it's also peppered with apparent contempt, which 
makes one wonder: is he the spiritual, crusading zealot he appears to be? Who 
is he trying to save: us, the world, or farmers like himself? His answer to 
this question is that you can save all of those at once, if only people would 
"take charge of their food system". Let's hope he's right.

Salatin looks at his watch. While we pack up, he attends to other things. We 
wait around to say goodbye, but he's on the phone, and it looks like it's 
going to be a long one. He's launched into his spiel again with gusto, and he 
gives us a smile and a wave, talking into the receiver all the time. We ask 
Teresa who's on the other end of the line.

It's Oprah – naturally.

Food, Inc opens on 12 February. We have two pairs of tickets to the premiere 
to give away, see www.observer.co.uk/foodinc for details
----------------------

Following article:

Dishing the dirt – the author of Fast Food Nation and co-producer of Food, 
Inc, and the director of the film discuss the american food industry

Eric Schlosser "We showed the film to the head of the US Department of 
Agriculture and he seemed very sympathetic to it, but his argument was: 'Make 
us do it.' There is so much resistance to change that you really need a 
movement. Of all the sorts of reforms, the one that will be easiest to do in 
the US is food safety, because there's not a big popular lobby for 'shit in 
the meat' – Republicans, Democrats, if you ask them: 'Do you want faecal 
material in your hamburger?', most people say no. The regulatory changes to 
food safety are very simple – Kevin's Law [named after a child who died after 
eating E coli-contaminated meat] would mandate that meat is tested as it 
leaves the plant. This isn't about a socialist revolution. This is about: if 
there's deadly pathogens in the meat, you're not allowed to sell it. If we 
find it, we're allowed to take it off the shelf. I'm optimistic about the 
possibility of that change. The industry line is: just cook it. It's a way of 
shifting responsibility away from selling a tainted, faulty product, and onto 
the consumer. The ultimate message is: if your food's poisoned, it's your 
fault. If you're obese, it's your fault."

Robert Kenner "It was amazing making this film. I had no idea food was such a 
litigious subject. Kevin's mother is asked how his death changed her eating 
habits, but she can't answer on film because she fears she could be sued by 
the food industry. I was dumbfounded. She mentioned Oprah [who was sued by 
Texas beef producers for saying on her show that she would never eat another 
burger after a segment on BSE in 1996] and I knew about that, but when you 
connect the dots it becomes a lot more insidious – and in context it made me 
really scared! We were certainly attacked on a regular basis – several 
websites were set up to attack the film. We had every word verified three 
times. We had to negotiate everything. I spent more on legal fees on Food, 
Inc than I did on my past 15 films, times three.

"One of the big arguments in the US is that it's your responsibility to eat 
better, but there is a massive amount of effort going into working out how to 
sell us more calories, to feed our addiction – billions of dollars to figure 
out how to get you to want their food and to continue the myth that our food 
comes from a farm with a picket fence and a red barn, when in reality there 
are a few companies that own products under a lot of different names. We've 
been so removed that we think chicken is grown in little strips. We subsidise 
food in the United States that makes you sick. The fact is, we love cheap 
food, and I'm no different.

"But the job of the film is to say that this food is much more expensive than 
it looks. We need to start taxing things that make us sick, in the same way 
we dealt with nicotine. Food, Inc has become an Inconvenient Truth-type of 
film – the debate is very new in the US. There is a growing food movement, 
but Food, Inc helped explode it – Michael Pollan had bestselling books 
before, but now he's being outlawed on college campuses. The food 
corporations are funding these universities and they say: 'You'll lose your 
funding if he goes on stage without someone else to counteract what he's 
saying.' But their market surveys are saying: 'You'd better start listening.' 
So I'm getting invited to conferences to speak to people from food 
corporations who'd probably like to shoot me.