Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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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