Mother Earth News publisher Bill Uhler told me that staffing reductions were the main driver of the slow response, and he described the social-media deletions as an “unfortunate” decision. Period. 3. It’s no surprise, then, that the individualist agrarian approach promoted by Salatin—small farms selling their wares directly to consumers—has failed to challenge industrial agriculture’s grip on the US landscape and diet, Newman argued in a July 2019 blog post published on Heated, a Medium site, entitled: “Small Family Farms Aren’t the Answer.” Newman cited US Department of Agriculture data showing that the local-food revival heralded by Salatin remains severely limited: Small operations selling food nearby still account for less than 3 percent of the country’s “household calories” and just 1.5 percent of agricultural production by cash value. Last summer, the journal invited Newman to contribute articles in an attempt to diversify the voices it highlights in the wake of the George Floyd murder and subsequent racial-justice protests. Joel Salatin and his family operate Polyface Farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. They planned to raise bison and grow “really old varieties of corn that a lot of the seed keepers in this area keep and need propagated,” he told me. In that review of Holy Cows & Hog Heaven, I did object to some of Salatin’s spiel. For several decades, he has pioneered farming practices that act in alignment with nature rather than contribute to its destruction. By producing these indigenous foodstuffs, the couple would be carrying on the agricultural heritage of Newman’s father, a member of the Piscataway Conoy Tribe, which has resided in the region around Chesapeake Bay’s western shore—including present-day Washington, DC, and Baltimore—for centuries, since long before European contact in the 1600s. This morning we had a heart-seeking conversation with the leaders at Mother Earth News magazine which unfortunately has been caught up in racial allegations against Polyface Farm and me specifically.. In Uncategorized Posted October 5, 2016 “Joel Salatin at his best” – Review From Matt Powers. Blog; Salatin Semester Shop; 0. In my 2011 review of Salatin’s Folks, This Ain’t Normal, I concluded that because of the book’s combination of anti-government rants and critiques of industrial agriculture and processed food, its “ideal audience is your Big Gulp-quaffing conservative cousin,” and thus it “has enormous potential to broaden the [sustainable-food] movement’s appeal.” What I didn’t grapple with is the book’s repetitive, simplistic lionization of Thomas Jefferson and what Salatin called his “intellectual agrarian dream”—and what such rhetoric about a slaveholding plantation owner said to Black readers. In a July 27 post, Salatin wrote that his blog “routinely offends big ag, bureaucrats, big pharma, etc, on purpose. Controversies. Seven years ago, Chris Newman followed Salatin’s call. Today, only about 36,000 of them remain, making up just 1.7 percent of the nation’s farm owners, and tending a scant 4.7 million acres—a nearly 90 percent loss of land. Fortunately, he’s here; rare, but here. For more articles read aloud: download the Audm iPhone app. (Disclosure: I’ve known Eliot Coleman for years and consider him a friend.) This morning we had a heart-seeking conversation with the leaders at Mother Earth News magazine which unfortunately has been caught up in racial allegations against Polyface Farm and me specifically. Polyface broilers and layers are the cornerstone of the farm. What on earth is The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs ? So I’m going out on a limb here in saying anything negative about someone who is not white. “I’ve learned that the right response is silence,” he wrote in response to an emailed set of questions. He burst onto the national scene in 2002, when Pollan wrote a paean in Gourmet Magazine to his ingenious pasture-based livestock-rearing techniques. And you have to devote at least a half-day weekly peddling them to the fickle subset of consumers whose schedules permit them to attend a pop-up Saturday-morning bazaar known as a farmers’ market, competing directly against peers trying to do the same thing, often selling the same products. In an October 8 blog post, he re-upped his stance. Joel Salatin wrote the text and Polyface former apprentice and engineer extraordinaire Chris Slattery did the drawings. Then Salatin deployed a bluntly settler-colonial metaphor, complete with a reference to Native Americans as persecutors of the entitled white pioneer at the vanguard of Westward expansion. The magazine was slow to respond to Newman. Yet Salatin’s crackpot views on science and doctrinaire libertarianism are central to his message. Looking for books by Joel Salatin? By 2015, according to the trade journal Progressive Farmer, the operation boasted annual sales of $2 million. Leadership, he declared, “requires someone to leave the fort first, maybe take some arrows, lead into the frontier.” He ended his piece with a bizarre tribute to William Cody, also known as Buffalo Bill, as a role model for youth today. Salatin’s father moved young Joel and the rest of his family there, and “began clearing some of the jungle” to establish a chicken and a cow-dairy operation. (While Salatin’s claim of a “dysfunctional collapse” of Black families is an old racist trope, it’s also worth noting that his statistic is nonsense. Four years later, the self-proclaimed “lunatic farmer” starred in a large section of Pollan’s landmark bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma (excerpted by Mother Jones in 2006). My blog routinely offends big ag, bureaucrats, big pharma, etc, on purpose. Awareness is an ongoing process. We picture political progressives when we think of farmers deploying biodiversity rather than agrichemicals to run their operations. Can you pitch in a few bucks to help fund Mother Jones' investigative journalism? Listen on Apple Podcasts. While there are many versions of this on the Internet, these plans are simple and straight-forward, providing you with some blueprints to create it yourself. Joel Salatin is so BOSS NOTE: This is a fanpage for Joel Salatin. Re-reading my review now and wincing, I see how the book also has enormous potential to limit the movement’s appeal. But this was seen as a temporary flaw in an otherwise virtuous movement. Rather, his brand of libertarianism serves as a beard to justify the kind of white domination of the US economy that endures today. Lately, though, Salatin’s star has dimmed. They say this unconventional, regenerative style farming CAN’T feed the world. Salatin never answered the charge that the individualistic approach to successful farming he champions presumes previously acquired wealth—and instead chose to focus his riposte on Newman’s race: The problem with disagreeing with Chris is that I’ll be called a racist. Thank you for helping me see. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2021 demands. Farm internships are such an interesting topic for me because I know from experience that they can vary wildly in quality. A frequent guest on radio programs and podcasts targeting preppers, homesteaders, and foodies, Salatin’s practical, can-do solutions tied to … About Joel Joel F. Salatin (born 1957) is an American farmer, lecturer, and author whose books include You Can Farm and Salad Bar Beef. From Christian libertarian farmer Joel Salatin, a clarion call to readers to honor the animals and the land, and produce food based on spiritual principles. I’ve done my bit to raise Salatin’s profile. By Matt Powers. Subscribe today and get a full year of Mother Jones for just $12. Bewitched by the lone-wolf agrarian myth, Newman argues, new farmers “trade the benefits of agrarian collectivism—living wages, retirement, a sane workload, profitability, survivability, and the capacity to make a game-changing impact in the marketplace,” for rugged independence: “complete autonomy in decision-making, the ability to grow what/where/how we want, set our prices as we please, sell wherever we choose, and work ourselves into the ground.” He added: “In short, we’ve done the most modern-American thing possible: bartered away our quality of life for the freedom to be miserable.”, Although Newman’s post didn’t mention Salatin, the older farmer registered his offense at its ideas in a November 2019 post on his personal blog called “Whining and Entitlement.” He disdained Newman’s analysis of the go-it-alone approach. “I did not personally attack you or call you a racist,” Coleman replied to Salatin; rather, she wrote, she had “called out Mother Earth News” for deleting comments on its Instagram posts related to Newman and his controversy with Salatin. He wrote a book laying out his libertarian analysis of the food system’s troubles, calling it Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal. Ultimately, the Salatins resettled in Virginia and bought a “worn-out farm” in the Shenandoah Valley. Salatin’s responded to Coleman by lashing out at Newman, again centering his race. Mother Earth News initially responded by deleting the posts, adding fuel to what became a firestorm in the sustainable-agriculture world. For my part, I regret not taking a more skeptical view of Salatin. Salatin inherited the land that became Polyface Farm from his father, according to his account in You Can Farm. But the notion of the private farm, be it a pair of greenhouses or tens of thousands of acres, is what came to dominate American farming, and it’s taken particular hold among the farm-to-table cohort. . How has Salatin managed to avoid such questioning from most of the white food-politics intelligentsia over the decades—even as his views have drawn pushback from non-white observers for years? Since then, he has switched from questioning masks to dismissing them outright. Farmers’ markets began to multiply in the United States, the land of the supermarket; farm-to-table restaurants became commonplace in our fast-food nation, the very one that gave the world McDonald’s. To maintain a direct-to-consumer farm on a small scale, you have to spend enormous amounts of time hustling to market—and deliver—your goods to restaurants. Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights. The event featured a speaker positing that COVID-19 stems from the rollout of the 5G mobile network, and is a “result of too much EMF radiation”; turning off phones means stopping the spread of the infection. Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation. About the legacy of settler colonialism that lets some folk obsess over kale while those harvesting it can’t afford to buy it.”. Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. “The aging farm population is creating cavernous niches begging to be filled by creative visionaries who will go in dynamic new directions,” he declared. Mother Earth News, long a beacon for homesteaders and beginning farmers looking to avoid the pitfalls of industrial agriculture, recently ended a longstanding association with Salatin that included a regular column and keynote speeches at events. Others who like him call him the most famous farmer in the world, the high priest of the pasture, and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson. If I’d posted all my musings regarding our struggles, insecurity, and discouragement in those early years I’d have been both wrong and prejudicial.”, Salatin defended the sanctity of the lone individual: “While I’m a huge believer in collaboration and building community, I’m equally excited about individual leadership and entrepreneurship,” he wrote. An Eggmobile follows the cows in their rotation. A mosaic of public and private lands serving as a base to produce wholesome food from health ecologies. I’m bringing this up because all races need to understand that when you use that term, it shuts down all communication. Pastured Poultry Profits by Joel Salatin, Vicki H. Dunaway (Editor), Teresa W. Salatin (Photographer) All Rights Reserved. As a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer: Joel Salatin brings a unique eclecticism to the food/farm discussion. It was here, in the sustainable-farming boom, that Joel Salatin made a name for himself. Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox. “Salatin penned an appallingly racist screed about me in response to one of my essays on small farming back in November,” he wrote in an email to a Mother Earth News staffer. “A couple working six months per year for 50 hours per week on 20 acres can net $25,000 to $30,000 per year with an investment equivalent to the price of one new medium-sized tractor,” Salatin proposed in his poultry book, first published in 1993. The farm direct markets to individual families, restaurants, and institutional dining services. Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface Farm, jokes with a small crowd before setting out on a tour of the farm in July 2011 in Swoope, Va. Close to 1700 people came to the farm to learn about his pasture-based method of farming. A limited-government zealot, he addressed the Libertarian National Convention in 2020, where he preached the creed that the only thing holding back a small-farm renaissance are jack-booted government inspectors. Racial and class tensions simmered from the start, but were often ignored. “A lot of new and young farmers of color are interested in tapping into ancestral practices which were largely communal and collaborative,” Ebony Gustave, who tracks the cooperative movement though her website, Cooperative Journal, told me. Pastured Eggs, Dairy, & Produce. Betancourt did institute a program to redistribute some land, because “1.7 percent of the landholders own 74 percent of the land,” Time reported in 1959.) But usually community coalesces around individual leadership.”. JOEL SALATIN. Newman declined, citing Salatin’s ongoing publication in the magazine. Not a single scientific study shows their efficacy as currently worn.” (Actually, plenty of evidence suggests that widespread masking slows the virus’ spread and limits the severity of infections.). Nowadays, Newman has ditched the go-it-alone approach and is pursuing a cooperative vision. Inexpensive, too! Salatin’s father had worked as an accountant at a major US petroleum company, crunching numbers for their “wildcat oil drilling ventures” in Venezuela. “The two are not mutually exclusive; they are indeed mutually beneficial. Joel Salatin Preaching and Rory Feek playing an intimate concert hit close to home (because of my dying father). To make a living, you have to scale up—but that means increasing an already-punishing workload, and also scrambling for investment capital that will have to be paid back. Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the, data showing that the local-food revival heralded by Salatin remains severely limited: Small operations selling food nearby still account for. The Eggm Pastured Poultry. “Farmers inheriting their land has long been commonplace in American agriculture. “Covid should not be a federal government issue,” he declared. Homesteaders and farmers alike can employ his practices to make growing Using a “token” payment from the Venezuelan government for the lost land there, “Dad bought 28 Hereford cows and started farming again.” Thus Polyface—100 acres of open land, 450 more in woods—was born. In the meantime, Newman aired his complaint as comments on Mother Earth News’ Instagram posts, and other critics joined in. At the same time, we believe in open constructive conversations. “When I think of William Cody mounting a US Postal Service Pony Express horse at the age of 13 and riding through paths lined with hostile Native Americans, I wonder where he is today. Salatin’s staunch political conservatism breaks that mold, and that makes him a compelling story. So excited to bringing back Polyface Farm Camp for a third season! The firestorm that developed over the weekend on social media stemmed from a … It was implied that I was being divisive and that I was hurting people’s feelings.”, So where does the Newman–Salatin dispute leave, global sustainable-agriculture speaking circuit, 100 acres of open land, 450 more in woods, join us with a tax-deductible donation today. Does it advantage white farmers? The Sylvanaqua Farms website lays out the kind of operation he’s trying to build, funded in part through crowdfunding from Kickstarter and Patreon: 1. Many Indigenous nations, along with a number of religious and ethnic communities, continue the practice to this day. In his 1998 manifesto You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Start & $ucceed in a Farming Enterprise, Salatin crystallized his pitch to a new wave of small-scale farmers. Owned/operated by Joel Salatin and his family, Polyface Farm is located in Swoope, Virginia and has been at the forefront of grass-based farming for 40+ years. 5 talking about this. Absolutely, but that injustice didn’t begin with Joel Salatin; it began with Indian removal and other historical crimes against people of color that forced them off their land,” he said. “The idea that entrepreneurs, as individuals and families, cannot be successful is to fall prey to a victimhood mentality,” he argued, using a favorite phrase of conservative polemicists who want to belittle any suggestion there might be structural impediments facing Black people. There are racist individuals, for certain, but we elected a Black (I’m told to capitalize it from now on) president for goodness sake. Consumers will pay only so much for food, no matter the quality or the soundness of the ecological practices behind it, so profit margins are painfully tight. Copyright © 2021 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress. The second is the need to highlight the deeply racist legacy of US agriculture, and show how racism is embedded in the movement to create an alternative to industrial agriculture. In a July 27 post, Salatin wrote that his blog “routinely offends big ag, bureaucrats, big pharma, etc, on purpose. Our Method: Eggs are harvested with our own special processes. Terms of Service apply. Salatin’s work taught him that to “make a living as farmer, you need to sell stuff that has an established market.” Bison meat and heritage corn “need to be propagated and taken care of,” Newman decided, but for beginning farmers, “it’s a lot easier to build your house, so to speak, doing the normal stuff—chicken, beef, big red tomatoes—that you know people will buy.” So they debuted Sylvanaqua Farms, selling eggs, chicken, pork, and beef, raised by rotating the animals through pasture—the technique championed by Salatin. . Salatin focused on burdensome regulation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Salatin has long appealed to both left- and right-wing audiences. He also defended his metaphors celebrating settler colonialism: “The fact is that historically people out of the fort first did receive arrows. The post, entitled "Whining and Entitlement" was intended to extol the virtues of leadership and charging ahead . That’s unfortunate. Apr. Blog 0. What I didn’t understand was that these things can’t be separated from his ideas about sustainable farming. The result is an avalanche of stress that doesn’t get a lot of play in Salatin’s chirpy how-to manuals. Before you know it, you’re strung out and barely scraping by economically—and devoting your non-existent spare time to an off-farm money-making gig, to subsidize your farming habit. Joel Salatin Chicken Tractor Plans Joel Salatin, well-known farmer, author, and lecturer created the initial idea for these plans. As for viruses, they’re just “garbage collectors to grab junk and take it out of our cells and to run around in the body warning ‘something bad’s coming; get ready,'” he opined. It’s nice to know that Joel Salatin provides a good experience to the new generation of farmers. Newman offered a similar explanation for the emerging tendency to question a go-it-alone approach to farming. Joel Salatin has certainly been a resource for me, as I think he has for all young people interested in sustainable farming. Mother Jones illustration; Greg Kahn/The Washington Post/Getty. The problems I’m describing aren’t examples of over-regulation; they represent hyper-competition—small operators fighting over limited consumer dollars, not just with local peers but also with giant operations that stock chain supermarkets. A Black-led urban agriculture effort coincided with—and even preceded—the explosion of farmers’ markets in posh white enclaves, but these rumblings received little notice from the broader food world. Along with a host of white food politics writers, I glorified Salatin, chalking up his occasional bursts of illiberalism to a sort of rough-hewn eccentricity. “People who are Black or Indigenous or gay, who are trans, are used to having to architect their entire existence around incumbent oppression.” He added: “When you see all these collective movements and cooperatives coming out of communities of color, it’s really not surprising, because people of color who want to get on the landscape don’t usually have the opportunity to go it alone.”. Salatin published a response (you should read it), where he described “venomous vitriolic vituperative invectives” coming at him “from a blog regarding climate change and asserting that I’m a classic climate change denier.” I think it has foregrounded two vitally important conversations that were scarce when I joined a small farm 15 years ago, and that have been too absent in my own writing. Beginning in 1961 the family developed soil building and water-enhancing protocols to grow pastured livestock: beef, pork, chicken, turkey, ducks, and sheep. If you’re reading this, you probably know who Joel Salatin is. Then a DC-based engineer, he had hoped to eventually retire with his wife, Annie, and farm on Virginia’s Northern Neck region near Chesapeake Bay (about three hours east of Polyface). First half of a two hour tour on Joel Salatin's farm in Swoope, Virginia. In 2013, Newman’s high-stress tech career led to a health scare, and the couple decided to speed up their agrarian timeline, starting on rented land. Molly and Grace are hard at work planning adventures and projects for this year and hope to have sign ups ready by the end of February! You will get a blog post from the desk of Joel Salatin soon. On July 29, Salatin emailed Clara Coleman to confront her for what he perceived as her criticisms of him. By the early 20th century, nearly a million Black farmers owned 20 million acres of land, making up a seventh of all farms. On November 15, he hosted 300 people at his farm, with “registrations filled in a couple of days with a looooong waiting list,” he boasted on his blog. Is it more racist to play the race card to anybody who dares disagree with you than it is to actually be a racist? The firestorm that developed over the weekend on social media stemmed from a Nov. 22, 2019 post. Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and the wealthy wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do. “Yes, it’s a white supremacist neoliberal framing of food and sustainability when you publicly admit that you aren’t really concerned about Black moms in the inner city struggling to feed their children (because hey, they don’t have buying power like white soccer moms),” wrote scholar Breeze Harper, creator of the Sistah Vegan project, in response to comments Salatin made at a workshop. Soon you’re spending so much time marketing and hustling that things in the field go sideways—weeds have taken over this patch, while that one over there needed to have been replanted a week ago. To an emerging generation of aspiring growers, Salatin is less a beacon to a sustainable future than an example of Black and Indigenous erasure and nostalgia for a mythologized agrarian past. At the end of the day, our overriding goal is to grow better food, build soil, caretake livestock, and build stronger communities. Salatin is the editor of The Stockman Grass Farmer, granddaddy catalyst for the grass farming movement. Drawing from “really solid advice” in Salatin’s books, the Newmans quickly shifted their farming strategy from their original retirement vision. But I never intend to offend people due to their race, religion, culture, gender, or creed and I'm sorry that this post did. A vertically-integrated, employee-owned cooperative of farms, nurseries, mills, processors, retail outlets, and wholesale distributors. He and Annie found themselves stuck on a treadmill familiar to anyone (like me) who’s ever tried to scratch a living off of the land without leaning on low-paid hired labor. A self-described “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer,” he has long appealed to journalists’ impulse for counterintuitive stories. It took Newman, the son of a Black mother and a Native American father, to make clear how they’re all connected. In my 2005 review of yet another Salatin book, Holy Cows & Hog Heaven, I argued that the author’s “libertarian strain leads to insights worth heeding,” namely that “regulations designed to rein in industrial farms often wind up bolstering their power by burdening smaller, environmentally friendly operators with ruinous and unnecessary costs.” This remains true, especially with regard to small-scale slaughterhouses having to survive under hygiene regulations appropriate to industrial-scale operations. “Are you tired of masks? The author summoned prose as lush as a summer prairie to describe Salatin’s operation, Polyface Farm, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley: It was “a scene of almost classical pastoral beauty—the meadows dotted with contented animals, the backdrop of woods, a twisting brook threading through it all—marred only by the fact that I couldn’t just lie here on this springy pasture, admiring it for the rest of the afternoon.”. “Seldom has agriculture held out such a plum.” He added: “The pastured poultry opportunity shines like a beacon in the night, guiding the way to a brighter future.”. Ultimately practical, the book includes how to build a corral, a home-made head gate and even how to select the right axle for your project. See all books authored by Joel Salatin, including Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World, and You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise, and more on ThriftBooks.com.