Redeeming Food: A Profile of Joel Salatin and Polyface Farm

photos from polyfacefarms.com

For some time, a growing number of people have questioned the sustainability, health and wisdom of our addiction to the modern practices of industrialized food production. If you haven’t noticed the “local foods” restaurants or markets popping up in your neighborhood, perhaps you’ve spotted a “buy fresh, buy local” sticker on a few bumpers. While some local food enthusiasts, described as locavores, refuse to eat anything grown outside a 100 mile radius of where they live, the heart of the local food movement encourages us to consider the impact (environmental, economic and nutritional) of our food choices – and to move closer and closer to the localized agrarian patterns our great-grandparents enjoyed.

If you listen in on the local foods conversation for any length of time, you will hear the name Joel Salatin, a farmer in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Salatin’s Polyface Farm, managed by his son Daniel, covers a spread of only 550 acres; but this small family-run operation garners immense national attention. Michael Pollan’s wildly popular The Omnivore’s Dilemma profiled Salatin, and the recently released film, Food, Inc. featured him as well. The New York Times went so far as to dub Salatin the “high priest of the pasture.”

Salatin is a passionate and colorful character. Labeling himself a “Christian-Libertarian-Environmentalist-Capitalist-Lunatic,” you can imagine how he has no shortage of opinions. These days, he spends about one-third of this time traveling and lecturing, trying to change opinions and promote conversations about something so many of us rarely ever consider: whether or not there are any moral dimensions to how that can of pineapple bits landed on the grocery shelf.

Salatin believes that our society has turned nihilistically utilitarian, removing us from the simplest things, like caring for our land, preparing nutritious and scrumptious food and honoring nature’s ingrained patterns for supporting life. While Salatin seems a simple farmer running a modest farm, Polyface’s vision for the work they are doing is anything but modest. “We are in the redemption business: healing the land, healing the food, healing the economy and healing the culture.”

This word – redemption – has a lot of play in Salatin’s view of things. This passion for renewal has been part of their ethos from the first days of Polyface Farm (1961). William and Lucille, Joel’s parents, purchased a run-down, burnt-out piece of land in Swoop, Va., and set out to restore it to its original beauty and vitality. They dug ponds and planted new trees and began to see fresh life sprout from the tired ground.

Soon after this, they returned to agrarian practices that followed nature’s cue. Rather than keeping livestock corralled in a corner of a pasture, they move them daily, just the way undomesticated cows have grazed for centuries. Then, using a portable chicken coop called an eggmobile, they move the chickens to wherever the cows were the day before, allowing them to follow the cows and scratch up their food the way nature intended. Their livestock (and turkeys too) eat fresh pasture grass, never grain (not to mention meat scraps from other dead cows, an unsavory – and common – practice many believe contributes to mad cow disease). Salatin likes to say that his animals “eat fresh salad every day” and even goes so far as to call their fresh cuts of meat, “salad bar beef.” One of his core principles is that human cleverness can never do better than nature’s inbred patterns.

Salatin believes there is great value and purpose in restoring a sense of beauty to the work of raising and harvesting food. “Good food should be aesthetically pleasing from field to fork,” says Salatin. Further, he has a firm belief that we can (and must) restore a balance between producing our food and caring for our natural resources. “A good food production model doesn’t force a huge landscape change. It’s gentle on the land. It actually nests into its ecological umbilical cord.”

Since Salatin is a devout man of faith, it is no surprise that the theme of redemption informs him so thoroughly. “I do what I do as a steward of creation,” he says. “God put us here to nurture his creation, not pillage, rape, and extract everything in the short term. In spiritual terms, I am in the business of trying to build forgiveness into nature.”