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Farmer/lecturer Joel Salatin champions 'moral farming' as a
better way
to raise food. 'What is a moral way to raise a chicken?' he asks.
November 24, 2009 edition
Reposted from the Christian Science Monitor
How farm animals are treated on the majority of farms today dismays farmer Joel Salatin.
Farmer, author, and lecturer Joel Salatin on Polyface Farm in Swoope, Va., in the Shenandoah
Valley. His approach is a mix of environmentalism, Christian values, and savvy.
Meet the best, loudest (and only) Christian-libertarian-capitalist-environmentalist-
lunatic farmer on the face of planet Earth.
Joel Salatin, self-professed owner of that lengthy honorific, has a personality bigger
than the Grain Belt and a genius for farming that has made him a glib, brilliant prophet
to a growing movement of
back-to-nature farmers from California to Swoope, Va.
(pop. 1,326), where his 550-acre Polyface Farm rests at the foot of the Blue Ridge
Mountains.
Mr. Salatin’s agricultural preaching has influenced food author and journalist Michael
Pollan (“Omnivore’s Dilemma”) and earned him a prominent spot in the documentary
“Food, Inc.,” making waves worldwide.
What makes Salatin so powerful on the farming scene is a unique mix of ingenuity,
faith, and business savvy.
Whether making farming lectures feel like religious revivals or handling customers’
questions at the family store, it’s this blend of agricultural potency and inspirational
vision that enables him to gross roughly $2 million annually and stand at the front of
a growing
community of farmers that may look like quintessential American rustics
but whose techniques are anything but traditional.
On a foundation of Christian principles, Salatin has built a farming ecosystem where
cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and rabbits interact ecologically in a way that goes
beyond conservation.
“What we’re looking at is God’s design, nature’s template, and using
that as a pattern
to cut around and lay it down on a domestic model to
duplicate that pattern that we see
in nature,” Salatin says.
What that means for Polyface in practical terms is that the cattle
graze different areas
of pasture every day. Then chickens pick through
the same fields, eating bugs and
spreading cow manure before clucking
back to mobile coops.
The farm’s pigs generate fertilizer by rooting around the floor of
the barn, lured by
sweet corn into aerating the mix of hay, cow manure,
and wood chips. The finished
compost is spread on fields. This process
not only takes almost nothing out of the
environment, it puts nutrients
back in.
“We believe that the farm should be building ‘forgiveness’ into the
ecosystem,”
Salatin says. “What does that mean? That a more forgiving
ecosystem is one that can
better handle drought, flood, disease,
pestilence.”
Salatin concedes that when his father bought the farm in 1962, the
family’s initial
emphasis on sustainable farming had more to do with
environmental concerns than
faith convictions. But as the business
evolved, Salatin began to see himself situated
at a unique place in
America’s moral conversation.
“We should at least be asking, Is there a righteous way to farm and
an unrighteous
way to farm? … The first goal is to at least get people
to appreciate that how we farm
is a moral question,” he says. “Once you
get to that point, then you can actually
discuss: What is a moral farm?
What is a moral way to raise a chicken?”
How farm animals are treated on the majority of farms today dismays Salatin.
What Americans do to pigs, chickens, and cows speaks ill of the
nation’s moral health,
he says. “A culture that views its life from
such a manipulative, disrespectful stance
will soon view its citizens
the same way and other cultures the same way. It’s how we
respect the
least of these that creates a moral-ethical framework.”
Don’t be confused: Salatin is no crunchy-granola transplant to
Appalachia. He
graduated from archconservative Bob Jones University in
Greenville, S.C., with a
degree in English. While he appreciates the
“bearded, beaded, braless, Woodstock
revolution” set who make up the
bulwark of environmentally conscious farming, he’s
delighted that half
of those coming to visit his farm nowadays are involved in the
home-school movement.
It’s this broad appeal that makes Salatin unique, says Teresa Heinz,
the American
philanthropist whose foundation recently awarded him a
$100,000 award for his
work. “Salatin is a person who is accessible
conceptually and conceptually acceptable
to a huge number of people –
not just the Massachusetts guys, but people from
anywhere,” Ms. Heinz
says.
What breaks Salatin’s heart is that the rest of the religious right
has been largely
uninterested in picking up the banner of environmental
stewardship.
“I think the whole religious right community should be very
apologetic and repentant
that we – who should have carried the banner
of Earth stewardship – got co-opted on
that message,” he says.
But his position as a darling of the environmental left but with
increasing cachet and
respect from the religious right may make him the
catalyst in bringing the two groups
together.
“Buying food as a community is a very fundamental Christian value.
It’s a value of
many religions, and it’s a value of the liberal
community as well,” says David Evans,
who owns Marin Sun Farms, 40
miles north of San Francisco. “I like to believe that
around food
production is where we can become more politically neutral. Everyone
should be around the table on these issues.”
Like Salatin, Mr. Evans refuses to sell his products beyond a
roughly four-hour drive
from his farm. By following Salatin’s model of
marketing directly to local restaurants,
farmers’ markets, and grocers,
Evans has tapped into a community-based form of
economic growth.
“We were growing at 50 to 100 percent a year for the last 10 years,”
Evans says,
adding that sales between June 2008 and August 2009
increased by 100 percent.
“It’s easy to adopt [Salatin’s] practices
because he has proven results.”
In partnerships with local ranchers, Marin Sun Farms grosses roughly
$3 million per
year by selling to three public school districts, 49
restaurants, and Stanford
University’s dining services, among others.
Salatin, by comparison, sells to roughly
2,000 families through local
“buying clubs” and about 50 restaurants, including a
Chipotle franchise in Charlottesville, Va.
While farmers are often quick to grasp Salatin’s agricultural
practices, persuading
them to adopt the marketing portion of his
program is much more difficult.
“They assume they can just sit out on the tractor seat and till the
crop and not have to
deal with the people,” says Galen Bontrager, a
former apprentice at Polyface Farms
who now runs a small,
Salatin-inspired farm in Iowa.
Moreover, Mr. Bontrager says, farmers have become so used to relying
on those
outside agriculture for guidance on their farms that they’ve
lost their
initiative. This is part of the reason Salatin spends
nearly half his time preaching his
agricultural evangelism from coast
to coast. By all accounts, his presentations are
barnburners. “Hearing him talk is like going to a revival meeting,” says Jo
Robinson,
a journalist and founder of eatwild.com, a clearinghouse for
information on pasture-
raised animals. People come away from his
meetings, saying, “ ‘I’m going to do
everything he’s doing!’ ” she
adds. “He takes people who have never been farmers
and inspires them to
become farmers.”
But the big question is, Can this sort of small-scale, environmentally sustainable
farming really feed the world?
Salatin answers with a resounding yes, even though ecoconscious
farming currently
accounts for less than 5 percent of American food
production. And that’s after what
he estimates is a quadrupling of the
number of environmentally friendly farms in the
past five years.
“Not only can we feed the world, we’re the only system that can feed
the world,”
Salatin declares. “What’s happening is that the current
industrial system is beginning
to break down.”
Still, Polyface Farms faces an ethical limit when it comes to
producing food:
By promising personal connections with the purchasers
of Polyface products,
the business can grow only so large.
“His model is not scalable in terms of getting bigger and bigger.
That defeats what
he’s doing,” Ms. Robinson says. “It can be multiplied
– there can be many people
that do what he does. There are people who
are scaling up so that they can sell to
restaurant chains and Whole
Foods, and he’s not a part of that.”
If Salatin’s model is going to be more than a footnote to American
agricultural history,
many more farmers will need to attempt his
delicate balance: growing big and savvy
enough to make a decent profit
while staying small enough to remain part of the
community. Until then,
Salatin and his devotees hope to find converts in more and
more
farmers’ markets, local restaurants, and buying clubs.
“We know that the best-tasting stuff and the most integrity is found
by buying right
from the farmer you know,” Evans says. “It doesn’t get
any better than that.”
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