“While he may be a lunatic farmer, he’s one who a lot of people are paying attention to.” This was the introduction for Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface Farm in Virginia’s Shenendoah Valley, instigator and figurehead of the local food movement, and feature of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food Inc., who spoke to an overflowing room on February 23rd.
Salatin set out to tell us why his farm is so different. “First of all, we believe that soil is alive,” he began in his passionate Virginia twang. “If you take an electron microscope, and you look through that into the soil, one handful of soil has more beings in it than there are people on the face of the Earth.” He began talking excitedly about a little elephant-shaped organism you might see with “saliva coming out of his mandibles” coming up against a narwhal. “This makes Stephen Spielberg look like a kindergartener!” he exclaimed: “and it’s real!” Salatin strongly advocated that we are “completely and utterly dependent” on this community of beings in the soil. And the most important work of his farm is “massaging and caretaking” that community.
Salatin then moved on from soil to the plants and animals it nurtures. “We live in a culture that doesn’t care a lick about what is the essence of a pig or a tomato,” he bemoaned. Salatin believes in “putting animals out there to mimic the kind of life they have in nature,” letting them continue their role of cycling nutrients. One of these nature-mimicking systems he has implemented is the creation of compost. He first creates a bedding of sawdust for cows. He then adds corn to it. They tromp through this bedding and make it anaerobic as the corn ferments. He then moves the pigs onto this bedding, and they go for the corn. This process creates great compost and uses cows and pigs as “laborers and team members.” “Now isn’t that more fun?” He described the implementation of this process as “sheer ecstasy in having these pigs perform their pigdom.”
Salatin then moved on to a discussion of grass. He promotes the nurturing of perennial grasslands, which can sequester four times the amount of carbon as forests. He argued that our culture is brain-damaged about grass because we don’t see much anymore: “people think lawn or golf course.” Salatin argues that herbivores should be used as “biomass accumulation re-start buttons” because their “purpose” is to prune biomass and restart the accumulation cycle.
“If we wanted a pathogen-friendly world,” began Salatin, we would create a very specific kind of agricultural operation, which would have:
- one species
- as close together as possible
- with no exercise, fresh air, or sunshine so that they could breathe in fecal matter
- fed food that is artificially grown so they can grow as fast as possible.
- given drugs all the time
“What have I just described?” he asked the audience: “Modern American agriculture.”
“I’m a believer in local food rather than global. We have to take care of ourselves,” said Salatin, his passionate exhortations bordering on proselytizing. “We cannot have a health society physically, morally, ecologically, without the health of our soil.” He entreated each audience member to “become a participant in this wonderfully choreographed ballet.” “Nature’s here! It’s in us! It’s all around us! Participate!”