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An Evening With Sustainable Farmer Joel Salatin

· Posted Tuesday January 29, 2008 by jamie

Yesterday evening, the Pierce Conservation District’s Annual Meeting featured Virginia farmer Joel Salatin. A self-described “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer”, Salatin has written several books of his own, but you’ve likely read about him in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

You might think that listening to a farmer talk about farming would be boring, but you’d be wrong. Salatin was funny, engaging, compelling, and ingenious, and truly connected with the crowd as he described his “grass farm”. Cows graze a small section of pasture at a time, being moved frequently so the grass is mowed but not damaged. Chickens come behind the cows (in the Eggmobile) to turn over cow pies and eat all of the bugs, helping to fertilize the ground and reduce disease. Pigs turn over compost piles made up of cow bedding and excrement (foraging for hidden corn). Forest is allowed to grow in fingers across the farm, encouraging birds and providing habitat for small woodland creatures that the racoons and coyotes can eat instead of coming after the chickens. It’s all very clever, extensively thought-out, and really helps to close the loop and make the whole farm more healthy and sustainable without feeding corn to cows, using antibiotics, irradiating meat, or other concerning “modern farming practices” that attempt to challenge nature with technology. (As Salatin pointed out, nature always gets the last move.)

I think what most struck me was Salatin’s invocation of morality. Here is this guy, an unabashed Christian farmer (he actually gave something of a benediction at the end of his presentation), yet…it seems so often that mainstream Christianity is at odds with the counterculture that is more likely to engage in organic farming, and this guy that is anything but a hippy. And when he started talking about morality, he wasn’t at all talking about anti-choice legislation, or the “protection of marriage”, or any of that: he was talking about being true to what nature intended. Not raising beef on single-purpose feedlots, or growing acres and acres in monocultures of corn and soy, but creating ecosystems where we allow cows to do what cows to best and chickens to do what chickens do best, etc. Probably the most powerful statement he made here was to discuss the “pigness” of the pig…now we’re almost talking in Hindu mysticism or something. But Salatin stated, and he’s right on with this, that when we stop seeing the pig for what it is, for it’s uniqueness, we’re on a slippery slope to not seeing other people as unique individuals, and just living in a homogenized world. Now we’re talking about a moral system I can get behind.

I’ve talked too long, but this really was quite an enjoyable presentation. I think everybody there left excited about what can happen to make local, sustainably-grown food more accessible in Pierce County. The time is definitely ripe. Apparently the Conservation Disctrict is already thinking of bringing Salatin back to help with some consulting work with local farmers on how to move in that direction. Neat stuff.

More about Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms.


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Comments:

  1. I see our last-minute need to flee the state has caused us to miss re-meeting you yet again …

    — tacomachickadee    Jan 29, 10:10 AM    #

  2. I wish I would have known about this!! This guy is a real genius… well, thanks for going and documenting it.

    — Niki Sullivan    Jan 29, 10:27 AM    #

  3. Chickadee: Oh yeah, I meant to mention something about your award for the Gardens project. I at least got to see you win it in absentia, I guess… :-)

    — jamie    Jan 29, 10:28 AM    #

  4. Hey! You’ll have to tell me about my win since I had to miss it. Sigh. This isn’t the first time I’ve done such a thing … the other was back in the Lute-era though …

    — tacomachickadee    Jan 29, 02:42 PM    #

  5. Thank you so much for this post. I’m biased of course, but it was a great meeting. Let’s stay in touch; there’s alot that needs doing.

    To Niki and Tacomachickadee, we’re bringing him back in a couple of months to do some strategic planning. Don’t despair!!!

    Monty Mahan
    http://montysview.blogspot.com

    — Monty Mahan    Jan 31, 08:28 AM    #