Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Joel Salatin VIDEO: How to Prepare for A Future Increasingly Defined By 
Localized Food & Energy
http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/joel-salatin-how-prepare-future-increasingly-defined-localized-food-energy/61949

Joel Salatin, proprietor of Polyface Farms and highly-visible champion of 
sustainable farming, thinks modern humans have become so far removed from a 
natural connection to the food they eat that we no longer have a true 
understanding of what "normal" food is.

The rise of Big Ag and factory farming over the past century has conditioned 
us to treat food mechanically (as something to be recoded and retooled) vs. 
biologically. And we don't realize that for all our industrialization and 
optimization, we're actually getting less yield and less nutrition than 
natural-based processes can offer.

Whether we like it or not, the arrival of Peak Oil is going to force us to 
realize that our heavily-energy intensive practices can't continue at their 
current scale. And with world population still increasing exponentially, 
we'll need to find other, more sustainable ways of growing our food.

"What we view today as "normal," I argue, is simply not normal. Just think 
about if you wanted to go to town 120 years ago. If you wanted to go to town, 
you actually had to go out and hook up a horse. That horse had to eat 
something, which means you had to have a patch of grass somewhere to feed 
that horse, which meant you had to take care of some perennial in order to 
feed that horse in order to go to town. And so throughout history, you had 
these kinds of what I call ‘inherent boundaries,’ or brakes, on how much a 
single human could abuse the ecology.

And today, during this period of cheap energy, we’ve been able to extricate 
ourselves from that entire umbilical, if you will, and just run willy-nilly 
as if there is no constraint or restraint. And now we are starting to see 
some of the outcome of that boundless, untied progression. And so the chances 
are, the way to bet, is that in the future we are going to see more food 
localization, we are going to see more energy localization, we are going to 
see more personal responsibility in ecological lifestyle decisions, because 
it's going to be forced on us to survive economically. We are going to have 
to start taking some accounting of these ecological principles."

Joel, his family, and the team at Polyface Farms dedicate themselves to 
developing environmentally, emotionally, and economically-enhanced food 
prototypes and advocate for duplicating their production around the world.

In this interview, Chris and Joel explore what constitutes truly sustainable 
agriculture and the reasons why our current system has departed so far from 
it, as well as practical steps individuals can take to increase their own 
personal resiliency around the food they eat (in short: "find your kitchen," 
source your food locally, and grow some yourself).

Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Joel Salatin 
(runtime 44m:15s):