[Sdpg] Joel Salatin advocates a better way to raise food /Christian Science Monitor Nov 24/09

Thu Nov 26 06:57:29 PST 2009

Joel Salatin advocates a better way to raise food
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.
By David Grant  | 

Meet the best, loudest (and only) 
Christian-libertarian- 
Capitalist-environmentalist-lunatic farmer on the 
face of planet Earth.
http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2009/11/24/joel-salatin-advocates-a-better-way-to-raise-food/

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? Š 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."

Editor's note: For more articles about the 
environment, see the Monitor's main environment 
page, which offers information on many 
environment topics. Also, check out our Bright 
Green blog archive and our RSS feed.
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