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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Pathways to Re-Localisation with Joel Salatin (text and video)
  • Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:17:51 -0700


Pathways to Re-Localisation with Joel Salatin (text and video)
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/51580
http://www.hopedance.org/home/energy-news/1645-pathways-to-re-localisation-with-joel-salatin
... Not merely a “lunatic farmer,” Joel Salatin is also a prolific author,
front-line local-food activist,
regenerative-silvo-pastoral-profitable-Permaculture farmer, sought-after
speaker, marketing guru, agricultural innovator, eco-prophet, and general
“bio-evangelist.” He has been written about quite extensively elsewhere, has
appeared in worthy films such as Food, Inc. and Fresh, and well-deservedly
ranks as something of a celebrity-dynamo in the eco-ag domain.
In 1961 his father moved the family to an abused, soil-depleted,
de-vegetated, gully-infested, 550 acre block of land in Virginia called
Polyface Farm. Beginning then, and continuing to this day, the Salatin family
began a series of adaptive experiments in natural farming that regenerated
Polyface and, to a large degree, aspects of the surrounding communities. Over
the years Mr. Salatin has produced many ground-tested, tried-and-true,
replicable models for profitable small farm production. Everything from
pastured pork and poultry, to timber, to grass-finished beef (some of his
books – You Can Farm, Pastured Poultry Profits, and Salad-Bar Beef – offer
complete models of these enterprises, as well as lots of other juicy,
hard-won, ecological farming tidbits). Along the way the Salatin’s have
occasionally found themselves locking horns with insensitive bureaucracies,
incompetent politicos and agencies, and incomprehensible legal issues (see
Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal) that tend to keep sensible, locally based
farms and initiatives out of important local markets (usually to protect
far-flung, large scale agribusiness and multinationals from relevant local
competition under the guise of ‘food safety’). This varied, agricultural
life, specific set of experiences, cheerful personality, and wit makes Mr.
Salatin uniquely qualified for such zealous pulpiteering on the topic of
re-localizing our world.
So what pathways does Mr. Salatin suggest? How do we get to a thriving,
locally based, community embedded agriculture – an agriculture that is
neighborhood friendly, what he calls an “embryonic aesthetically aromatically
sensually romantic farming model” – from the present degenerative state of
affairs? To begin the journey requires recognizing where we are starting
from. For Mr. Salatin our society is presently at “the zenith… of the
Greco-roman, western, linear, reductionized, disconnected, democratized,
individualized, fragmented, systematized, all-about-me kind of thinking.” His
answer is to preach what he practices. “We need to engage… to be the ones
that reach out,” says Mr. Salatin. It is this highly pro-active, interactive,
social modality of engaging others that is necessary for farmers and for all
agents of change to practice in order to begin to bring about the kinds and
scales of changes that are needed. ...
(December 9, 2009)
HopeDance has posted Salatin's talk:
"The very inspiring and packed-house talk Joel Salatin presented on
Relocalization, in Santa Barbara on December 9, 2009 as part of the Carbon
Economy Courses, presented by Quail Springs and Orella Ranch." (YouTube via
HopeDance)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Populist oratory for relocalization from the owner of Polyface Farm. Salatin
defies all the stereotypes.
Also on YouTube (30 mins total) - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4-BA





  • [Livingontheland] Pathways to Re-Localisation with Joel Salatin (text and video), Tradingpost, 02/17/2010

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