Joel Salatin: Life Lessons from a Farmer

“While doing a lot of pub­lic speak­ing events, it has struck me just how abnor­mal our twenty-first-century civ­i­liza­tion is,” Joel told Organic Connections. “What’s really frus­trat­ing is that I meet so many peo­ple who, when you start talk­ing about some of these issues—whether it’s the lack of nutri­tion in foods, the path­o­genic­ity of food, the pol­lu­tion stim­u­la­tion of fac­tory farm­ing, ani­mal abuse in fac­tory farm­ing, peak oil, energy use, the car­bon cycle, soil deple­tion or water depletion—have this kind of glazed look come over them. It’s almost as if the aver­age per­son really thinks that we’re going to be the clever­est, smartest civ­i­liza­tion in the world; in fact, so clever, so smart, that we’ll be the first one to actu­ally fig­ure out how to sever our rela­tion­ship with an eco­log­i­cal umbil­i­cal. We’ll be able to sail off cav­a­lierly into some Star Trek future with­out any vis­ceral rela­tion­ship to an eco­log­i­cal womb.”

Joel’s obser­va­tions brought him to write his lat­est book, Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World. In this book, Joel observes that a cou­ple hun­dred years ago there was a gar­den and ani­mals right out­side the door of the aver­age home. It has now come to the point where food is pro­duced some­place else, in some mys­te­ri­ous fash­ion, and mag­i­cally arrives, fully pre­pared, or nearly so, in front of the consumer.

“For peo­ple like me who think we are really attached to nature, we’d bet­ter fig­ure out how to build a nest, live in it and regen­er­ate it or we’re not going to be doing right by our own stew­ard­ship man­dates,” Joel said. “What led me to write Folks, This Ain’t Normal was this pro­found dis­con­nect and even almost seem­ing ambiva­lence toward a really basic response to an intu­itive under­stand­ing that we’re head­ing for a pre­car­i­ous precipice. It’s so dif­fi­cult that nobody wants to even think about it; so we’ll sim­ply bury our heads in the celebrity Hollywood bellybutton-piercing cul­ture and some­how it will all work out.”

Nature, Teach Me

It is true that Joel grew up in an envi­ron­ment many of us have never seen. “I guess I began real­iz­ing in high school how dif­fer­ent I was from the rest of the world,” Joel recalled. “While every­body else was laz­ing around on Saturday morn­ings, I was up every Saturday, year round, at about four o’clock, to put my stuff together and get into the local curb mar­ket.¹ So I wasn’t about stay­ing up on Friday nights or whatever.

“That period was also the begin­ning of Mother Earth News and the hippy move­ment, and we had a steady stream of counter-culture hippy types com­ing through the house. Although we were a very con­ser­v­a­tive, reli­gious fam­ily, and nobody else in our church, cer­tainly, had enter­tained peo­ple like this, we found them to be our peo­ple; they were inter­ested in the same kind of things we were, and we just shared a lot of cama­raderie with them. So very early on I real­ized, ‘Whoo, boy, I’m cut from a dif­fer­ent cloth than the aver­age per­son here.’”

As Joel learned the many aspects of farm­ing, he took a tip from the nat­ural pro­gres­sions that were hap­pen­ing right in front of him. “When you come to the farm in a spirit of humil­ity and you say, ‘Nature, teach me,’ then you see things that oth­ers don’t see and you have to invent things that oth­ers don’t know are nec­es­sary,” he said.

“For instance, if you look at nature, you real­ize that ani­mals don’t stay in the same place; they’re always mov­ing. As soon as you adopt that as one of your pat­terned con­vic­tions, sud­denly you’re not try­ing to fig­ure out how to build a football-field-sized build­ing to house ani­mals. Instead you’re try­ing to fig­ure out how to make shel­ter and hous­ing tem­po­rary and/or portable. The man­ner in which you view the way it’s sup­posed to be dri­ves the design inno­va­tion of what you’re developing.

“In another exam­ple, indus­trial agri­cul­ture is try­ing to teach us that depleted and infer­tile soil lacks chem­i­cals, her­bi­cides and pes­ti­cides. Instead, we can look at that and ask about how soil is built through­out his­tory. It has always been built with peren­ni­als, her­bi­vores, and peri­odic rest and dis­tur­bance cycles. How do we stim­u­late this land­scape in respect and honor to this car­bon, real-time solar, bio­mass accumulation-decomposition cycle?”

No Animal-less Ecology

It is evi­dent from watch­ing Joel on film, and read­ing his books, that he has per­ceived and uti­lizes ani­mals as part of this cycle. “From pole to pole, at the trop­ics and every place in between, there is no animal-less ecol­ogy,” Joel explained. “One of the sig­na­ture roles of ani­mals in nature is that they’re the only way, except for humans and machin­ery, to defy grav­ity in fer­til­ity place­ment. Fertility—nutrients and biomass—tends to move down­hill. That’s why you have fer­tile val­leys and infer­tile moun­tain­tops and slopes. Animals—especially herbivores—typically eat in the val­leys, then climb up to the ridges to sleep and defe­cate because that’s where they can look out and see if they have preda­tors com­ing up to attack them. That cycle then car­ries the val­ley nutri­ents back up on top of the hill so that it can restart the sequence.

“Herbivores also prune the bio­mass to restart it to its fast growth cycle. If you don’t prune the grass, it will just sim­ply turn brown and oxi­dize in the atmos­phere, and you won’t have any car­bon seques­tra­tion or any­thing. So the role of the her­bi­vore is to prune the plants for more ver­dant and stim­u­lated growth and for more effi­cient con­ver­sion of solar energy into decom­pos­able bio­mass. I call it the bio­mass accu­mu­la­tion restart button.”

In observ­ing Joel at work on his farm, you see him employ the live­stock he is rais­ing exactly for these pur­poses. It is because of his imple­men­ta­tion of nature and her cycles that his profit per acre is sev­eral times that of his indus­trial farm­ing neighbors.

Local Food Tsunami

Part of Joel’s mis­sion is the teach­ing of real, sus­tain­able farming—and the need for it has never been more vital. “One of the big oppor­tu­ni­ties we’re fac­ing right now is what I like to call the ‘local food tsunami,’” Joel said. “I assume that fos­sil fuel is going to become more expen­sive, because that is his­tor­i­cally nor­mal. The way to bet is that our food sys­tem will not become more and more con­cen­trated, because that is extremely abnor­mal. Our food sys­tem becom­ing less con­cen­trated, becom­ing dis­sem­i­nated out on the land­scape better—that is his­tor­i­cal nor­malcy, and also the way ecol­ogy works. Ecology does not trans­port plant or ani­mal car­bon long distances.

“If we are to keep these things decen­tral­ized, if we are to spread out this food pro­duc­tion as opposed to con­cen­trat­ing it, we’re going to need a more his­tor­i­cally nor­mal num­ber of farm­ers. Talk about abnormal—we’re the first civ­i­liza­tion in the world that has twice as many peo­ple incar­cer­ated in pris­ons as we have grow­ing our food! So if you’re in a horse race, the way to bet is on the horse that has the track record. All I’m try­ing to sug­gest in this book is that this is a his­tor­i­cal abnor­mal­ity; it’s a very untried race­horse that we’re bet­ting on. I’m just want­ing to help peo­ple who are attempt­ing to get their heads wrapped around the extent of our abnor­mal­ity to real­ize, wow, this is not sus­tain­able and it’s not going to con­tinue like this.”

Feed the Omnivores

Not all of us are going to be farm­ers. For this rea­son Joel, in his book—relating back to how life is lived on his farm—gives var­i­ous sug­ges­tions (in a list at the end of sev­eral chap­ters) for any­one wish­ing to assume more con­trol of his or her food sys­tem. These include ideas such as can­ning and pre­serv­ing, tak­ing a fam­ily vaca­tion to a farm, plant­ing a veg­etable gar­den, buy­ing a cou­ple of chick­ens, com­post­ing, and many more.

Click any image above to see a larger version.

Given that we have come so far from our food roots, is Joel infer­ring that we should ulti­mately go back and live like we did two hun­dred years ago? Far from it. “So many people—especially the indus­trial foodists—think I’m some sort of a throw­back and that I want to return to hoop skirts and wringer wash­ers,” Joel laughed. “Nothing could be fur­ther from the truth. The thing that I’m sug­gest­ing is to take the glue—the sub­stance of things that were nor­mal until this last century—and grasp it with one hand, while we march into the future with the other hand fully embrac­ing the appro­pri­ate tech­nol­ogy that over­comes, frankly, a lot of the prob­lems that the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions have encountered.

“An exam­ple of how we can incor­po­rate the past to deal with today’s prob­lems is in the use of omni­vores. Historically, omnivores—chickens and pigs—were essen­tially home­stead food recy­clers. They were the things that took the blem­ished fruit, spoiled milk, or whey left over from cheese­mak­ing and con­verted that into a very nutrient-dense pack­age of eggs, poul­try or pork. Today, depend­ing on who you read, any­where from 30 to 50 per­cent of every­thing that goes in land­fills in the US is actu­ally decomposable—and 30 per­cent of it is actu­ally edible!

“That’s a pro­found break with his­tor­i­cal nor­malcy, where all that stuff was food for the omni­vores. These days we’re throw­ing all of it in the landfill—using diesel fuel to get it there—and com­pen­sat­ing with chem­i­cally grown grains for that incred­i­ble waste of edi­ble product.

“People who talk about how bad the battery-cage egg pro­duc­tion and egg fac­to­ries are need to under­stand that if every kitchen in America had enough chick­ens attached to it—whether a home kitchen or insti­tu­tional kitchen or restau­rant kitchen—to actu­ally eat all the food waste com­ing out of that kitchen, we wouldn’t even need com­mer­cial egg com­merce in the entire coun­try. All the eggs would be pro­duced on site. We wouldn’t need the land­fill, we wouldn’t need the diesel fuel to haul it any­where, and it would all be an imbed­ded inte­grated system.”

No Place like Home

“Another illus­tra­tion, of course, is refo­cus­ing our atten­tion on the home itself,” Joel con­tin­ued. “The house­hold has moved from the focal point of life, where real life and real mem­o­ries hap­pen, to sim­ply a kind of pit stop for activ­i­ties all out­side the home. Normalcy is not to be run­ning off at every lit­tle thing—maybe not have so many soc­cer leagues and maybe not have so many other activities—but actu­ally to come home and get to know each other and make the home the focus of where the real mem­o­ries and the real activ­i­ties occur.

“In that vein we can make the home a focal point, for exam­ple, of food preser­va­tion. The kids can learn their frac­tions by mea­sur­ing quar­ter cups and half cups and things like that. There’s a vis­ceral under­stand­ing of this cere­bral prin­ci­ple of frac­tions. That’s how peo­ple learned aca­d­e­mic things for cen­turies. They did it in the con­text of what they needed to know, and on a prac­ti­cal par­tic­i­pa­tory basis. It’s only been in very recent years that we’ve gone to this incred­i­ble abstrac­tion where we know more and more but we have no rea­son for need­ing to know it or how to apply it, or any sen­si­ble con­text or rea­son for its appli­ca­tion. I’m not sug­gest­ing that we be stu­pid or that we not know things, but I am sug­gest­ing that there is a con­text in which we can learn things and know things, and that home is one of those bet­ter places.”

Really Only Us

In the final analy­sis, Joel points out that we all brought soci­ety and our food sys­tem to this point—and it will take each and every one of us to bring it back again.

“I wish—I wish—I could snap my fin­gers, and the aver­age per­son wouldn’t have to do any­thing and every­thing would just turn out fine,” Joel con­cluded. “But the fact is that we are where we are because of tril­lions of moment-by-moment deci­sions made by mil­lions of peo­ple over the last sev­eral decades. We could have endorsed the sci­en­tific aer­o­bic com­post­ing pro­gram of Sir Albert Howard² in the 1940s, when it was intro­duced to the world, and said, ‘A pox on chem­i­cal fertilization—we’re going to do the bio­log­i­cal approach!’ But we did not. We could have told who­ever was the first one that invented TV din­ners, ‘A pox on you!’ But we did not.

“We’ve par­tic­i­pated in where we are, and we’re going to have to par­tic­i­pate in where we need to go. So this whole idea of redis­cov­er­ing and recon­nect­ing to our eco­log­i­cal umbil­i­cal through domes­tic culi­nary arts is part and par­cel of the whole sys­tem. It’s not just up to farm­ers; it’s not just up to food dis­trib­u­tors; it’s not just up to proces­sors. We’ve already tried that. We tried giv­ing up our his­tor­i­cal respon­si­bil­i­ties in domes­tic culi­nary arts, to Velveeta Cheese and Kraft and Procter & Gamble and Quaker Oats, and look where we are. We’ve got Twinkies and Cocoa Puffs and Mountain Dew and squeez­able cheese. The truth is that there isn’t any them, they and those peo­ple—there is really only us. And us has to get busy and start par­tic­i­pat­ing in this.”

Joel’s book Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World is avail­able from the Organic Connections book­store.

Learn more about Joel and Polyface Farms at www.polyfacefarms.com.

1. curb mar­ket: pre­cur­sor to today’s farm­ers’ market.

2. Sir Albert Howard (1873–1947): English botanist and organic farm­ing pio­neer; a prin­ci­pal fig­ure in the early organic move­ment. He is con­sid­ered by many in the English-speaking world as the father of mod­ern organic agriculture.