If I wanted to inspire you to believe that you can grow enough food for a family of five on 5 acres, I would recommend reading “The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency” by John Seymour. There is no other book available that so completely details how to take an organic, wholesome approach to providing for your self.
But, if you live in the US and already have 5 or more acres, or if you plan on doing so, then you need to know what Joel Salatin has to say in “You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Start and $ucceed in a Farming Enterprise.” He is a well-known promoter of grass-fed poultry and beef and an out-spoken advocate for family farmers in Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Like most original thinkers, he is also a cracked pot. More than once I felt like cracking the spine of his book against the nearest wall when he veered off into right-wing nut-so land. So allow me to spare you the outrage and distill the nuggets of gold buried in the mud of his wing-nut philosophies.
The bottom line reality is that most of America’s farmlands have been reduced to 6 inches or less of topsoil. Generations of monoculture, slash and burn, erosion, drought, and chemical dependency have turned once fertile croplands into barely sustainable grasslands. Simultaneous with this rape of the earth was the imposition of an industrial model of production on an essentially organic process. Salatin sees this quite clearly and yet he blames liberals, tree-huggers, and eggheads for allowing it to happen.
The main mistake was treating agriculture and animal husbandry like an assembly line chemistry project. With an emphasis on standardization and end-results, the essential process of farming has been subverted, perverted and polluted. And the whole concept of family farming or small-holding has been denigrated as a money-losing enterprise. The rise of agri-business has been the death of the small family-owned farm. Salatin blames government without seeing that it has served the interests of the agri-business lobby that was rapidly gobbling up family farms as soon as they foreclosed.
Salatin indicts the entire food producing industry:
When you buy a hamburger from your local fast-food outlet, you are eating beef from a cow that never saw daylight. It was locked into a feeding trough, shoulder to shoulder with other cattle, eating a mix of antibiotics, chicken manure (!), bone meal from other cows (!) and grain. It stood knee deep in its own shit. It never got to chew its cud out in a pasture. It has been treated like raw ore being turn into I-beams. Factory-produced beef is full of sickness and can kill you.
When you eat a chicken bought at your neighborhood grocery store, you are getting an animal that was packed into a warehouse with less than a square foot of space. It also has never seen the sun or felt the wind or tasted anything remotely natural. It had its beak cut off – without anesthetic – so that it won’t peck other chickens to death because of the stress of being so jam-packed against them. And it shits. And the shit lands on the floor and dries out eventually and because chickens scratch, this dust fills the air. The chicken breathes fecal dust all its days. It is shot full of antibiotics but its lungs are still lined with actual crap. If you take one of these chickens and boil it down, the broth is a nasty shade of brown/gray. Factory-produced chicken is full of sickness and it can kill you.
If you buy a tomato at the grocery store, you are most likely eating the fruit from a plant that literally never grew in the earth. It was hydroponically grown in a chemical solution, injected with artificial flavor, red dye and vitamins and arrives at your produce sections at least two weeks after it was packed and shipped. You might as well be eating a nerf ball.
So, we’re eating shit and our land only grows grass. Here Salatin emits brilliance: He takes what he’s got and turns it into a white-collar salary. Put your cows and chickens on the grass that you’ve got and reduce your feed bill by 30-50%. Let the sunshine disinfect their natural animal functions. Feed them living green stuff to kill their diseases. Let them lay a layer of manure on the top soil, scratch it in and build another inch a year until you can plant your own grain and kiss the big-boy grain providers good-bye.
But the key to Salatin’s approach is selling direct at retail or above prices. The most interesting chapters of his endless rant had to do with accounting and marketing. The gist of his accounting is to keep a careful record not only of your expenses but, of your time. Then, pay yourself at least $25 per hour. Work out the per unit value there from. Pay no attention to what the supermarket is charging. You are producing a superior product. It’s wholesome, natural and additive free – and you deserve to be paid accordingly.
Then, go out there and sell it. Not everyone has the personality to do this or the daredevil gustiness to put their product on the line and demand a higher price. Salatin has that kind of evangelical fervor. He has preached his gospel of “God’s Own Plan” for whole food goodness at every PTA, garden club or Moose Lodge that would have him for the last 25 years. I commend his passion. Salatin can rant with the best:
http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/2003/Everything-Is-Illegal1esp03.htm
This is a good read and presents some of his basic principles and prejudices. I disagree with his position that anyone should be able to brew up spaghetti sauce in their roach-infested kitchen and sell it to whomever they please. Since I can’t be in the kitchen of everyone who provides food to me, I rather like knowing someone else is inspecting the premises. I plan on building the kitchen on my farm to surpass health code requirements.
But, I digress.
After spending quite a bit of passion ranting against the mechanical, industrial production models of big agi-business, Salatin presents his alternative – which is, at its core, a mechanical , industrial model of production. Yes, his cows get fresh grass and sunshine – while being moved along inside of electric fencing. Given their freedom, most cows would prefer to wallow under shade trees but Salatin drives them forward across his prairie grass with an electric prod.
Instead of the one-square foot of space they get inside agri-business chicken warehouses, Salatin’s chickens get a whopping two-square feet inside of a 12 foot by 10 foot by 2 foot high chicken wire cage that is moved every other day across the prairie grass two days after the cows.
There’s no question that his model is an improvement over standing in shit and breathing fecal dust. At least his animals do get fresh air, sunshine and fresh grass. But, his successful production depends on controlling his herds and flocks. On the one hand, he exalts allowing animals to enjoy their “animal-ness” while on the other he assures us that they have “no souls” so we shouldn’t be bothered about eating them. Or controlling them. After all, that’s what God intended we should do.
I had wild vacillations of moods reading “You Can Farm” and “Pastured Poultry for Profit$.” I veered between admiring Salatin and abhorring him. I want small farmers to succeed and everything that helps them is good to me. But, I have reservations about endorsing a man who takes pride in being sloppy and lazy about farm building projects and considers his children as so many peons to do his bidding.
He tells us that his young daughter just loves getting up before dawn to help Dad refill the feeding bins for the chickens out on the pasture. I bet she does; since she is home-schooled, does she even know of any other activities that might please her more? The photographs of her in her home-spun cotton dress, squatted down by the movable chicken coops caused me undo ire – can’t the man buy her a pair of blue jeans? Doesn’t he understand what a cold draft up a skirt can feel like at 5am?
I know this criticism may be petty but I felt it exemplified the callousness of Salatin’s ego-driven success. He’s a salesman and his product is his farm produce. You may replicate every aspect of his production model and still fail if you lack his ability to sell, sell, sell! So the hinge on which his system swings is ego and personality. I have met a few of his disciples and they all had that slightly perspiring edginess that defines cult followers.
One of them told me in a whisper, “I couldn’t keep my chicken boxed up like that. I let `em go in the pasture and it works just as well, I think.” I looked at the photos of his flock roaming freely across his pasture and bought a couple dozen eggs and a stew chicken who had passed her prime egg-laying. The eggs are superior and we’re having Chicken and Dumplings tomorrow. I don’t’ mind eating chickens who have had good, productive lives. It’s not because I think they don’t have souls; it’s because I know they have spirits and I respect the sacrifice of their lives to mine. I pay homage to them and thank them for providing for me. Salatin doesn’t get the idea of Nature’s Plan and, for that and his hatred of intellectuals and “eggheads,” I’ll never be one of his true followers.
Bottom Line: Salatin’s process of adding an inch of top soil per year to your land by driving animals in cages across it actually will work – if you’re a lazy S.O.B. who is off giving lectures to sell your products.
On the other hand, if you are willing to work hard and shovel all the free cow manure available from dairies and the free horse manure from stables and invest in a manure spreader and a tractor to plow it into your grasslands about once a month for a year, then you can add six inches of top soil in a year! And grow whatever you want in that nitrogen rich mix. But, I’ll wait to write that book after I’ve actually done it. Yep, Hubby and I often joke that the locals are going to call us Manure Farmers for the first year until they see our yields in the second year…
I believe that Peak Oil is going to throw us all back into being reliant upon local providers of food. And I plan on being one of those providers. You, too, can join the real Green Revolution if you have cash for land and the inclination to work hard. There are no get rich quick schemes even tho Salatin claims there are. It’s easy for him to say; he’s a snake-oil salesman, selling another model of unnatural animal confinement and calling it wholesome. Well, honestly, more wholesome. Is that good enough?