Thanksgiving

written by

posted on

November 26, 2024

The older I get, the more grateful I am for my parents who embraced different. I mean they weren't reluctant different; they immersed in different. In a day when TikTok and social media ramp peer dependency to new levels, nonconformity seems like a lost art.

Please indulge me a couple of stories from our family's past to illustrate how we relished "maverickness".

Mom grew up in a terrible home situation with an alcoholic father who abandoned her, her sister, and mom. Life was tough. As she grew older, she loathed alcohol. During WWII, when she was in college, as a bright, smart, outgoing co-ed, all the women's sororities courted her for membership.

To her dismay, she learned that these were primarily social drinking clubs and wanted no part of them. She went to the Dean and asked permission to start a women's sorority that didn't use alcohol. Instead of encouraging her, the college leadership marked her resume up with "rebellious; isn't satisfied with what the college offers." Weird.

Dad wanted to farm. No land, no money. What to do? After his stint in the Navy in WWII, he conceived a plan to become a bilingual accountant, get on with an outfit in South America where land was cheap and government regulations fewer, and buy land. The GI Bill funded his degree in business and then a semester at Middlebury in Vermont to study Spanish. He hitchhiked (got that?) from Vermont to Mexico and spent six months with a family there honing his Spanish.

He returned home, sat for the foreign civil service language exam, passed it, and was hired on with Texas Oil Company as a bilingual accountant in the wildcatter fields on the coast of Venezuela.

He married mom and within seven years saved enough to buy 1,000 acres in the highlands of Venezuela. Mom's mother, my grandmother, always joked that Dad stole Mom to take her down with the monkeys. Actually, Mom loved adventure and went happily.

I was four when we returned to the U.S. in 1961 due to civil unrest and the rebels taking our land and driving us off with machine guns. Dad was 39 and lost everything. He'd been there for 12 years and mom for 10.

We found the cheapest, most worn out, gullied rockpile property in the Shenandoah Valley and started over.

Most farmers buy pickup trucks. Dad didn't want an open bed so he bought a 1957 four-door Plymouth from a neighbor for $50, took off the doors, and threw out the seats. That makes a pretty big compartment. When vehicle inspection was passed in the late 1960s, he was so incensed by the governmental intrusion that he bought 4 rims and new tires and kept them in a shed. When the annual inspection came due, he'd put the new tires on and get the sticker, then come home and put the bald tires back on. "The government's not going to keep me from getting my money's worth," he quipped.

In the early 1970s, the Arab Oil Embargo during Jimmy Carter's presidency made gas a centerpiece issue in the country. Prices went up and availability was scarce--you could only get gas on every other day (odd and even that matched your license tag). Dad was 54 years old, driving 17 miles across Staunton to the metal fabrication shop where he did the accounting and job bidding. He bought a 10-speed bicycle and rode it to work. "If everyone would just get a bicycle, the Arabs can keep their oil," he said.

As a teenager at the time, of course, I rolled my eyes. But now, looking back, I realize what a privilege it was to grow up in a home that didn't give a thought to what others thought.

An inveterate experimenter, Dad's different thinking formed the background to most of the innovative farming practices Polyface uses today.

When all the other farmers bought chemicals, he started building compost.

When other farmers built Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), he invented portable electric fencing and mobile field shelters.

When other farmers planted corn, he let perennials grow and moved cows rapidly from field to field.

When other farmers bought fertilizer, he bought a wood chipper to build compost.

And when other farmers sold to nameless faceless industrial middlemen, he developed a local customer base with direct marketing.

Everything, everything, everything our family has done and continues to do trace their lineage back to the courage and fortitude to look at problems and contrive a different solution; to walk a different path.

So when Teresa and I got married in 1980, we drove a $50 car for three years. In fact, we'd been married 20 years before we spent a cumulative total of $10,000 on automobiles. Today, self-respecting farmers are supposed to have $20,000 side-by-side ATVs (All Terrain Vehicles) to get around. I have a $2,000 1987 Ford Bronco with the windows knocked out. Coolest thing in the world.

Teresa and I are still using flip phones. I've never used an app, never texted, and never taken a picture of a QR code. My brand handle, "Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer" proudly carries the iconoclastic legacy forward.

I've been called a Typhoid Mary, bioterrorist, and starvation advocate all my life by conventional farmers.

Does it frustrate me? No.

I laugh all the way to the lush compost-fertilized fields, the unvaccinated livestock, and to patrons who love weird. Yes, weird enough to not buy meat at Wal-Mart. Weird enough to cook from scratch. Weird enough to care. Now that's really weird.

So welcome to our maverick family. I embrace you and thank you for joining in this grand revolutionary idea and practice called nutritious food, soil-building farming, and relational provenance. These are completely foreign to our mainstream conventional culture, but they offer beacons of hope and help to cure the symptoms of dysfunction.

As you enjoy this Thanksgiving with your family and friends, offer some gratitude for the mavericks of society. Those who are willing to say unpopular things. Those who are willing to do unpopular things. All solution breakthroughs start with different.

I'm eternally grateful to have grown up with parents who embraced different. Thank you for investing in that difference on your table. Now you're weird. Love it. Embrace it. Be thankful for it. The lunatic fringe is life's exciting edge.

Happy Thanksgiving from our fields to your fork.

Joel Salatin

About

Food Shortages

I'm in Oregon today speaking at the Azure Harvest Festival and a question from the audience during a Q&A stimulated a lot of discussion: "What do you think about the possibility and preparation surrounding food shortages?" David Stelzer, founder of Azure Standard, answered that the issue is not food volume, it's food nutrition. That was an interesting answer that has a lot of merit. As a nation, we are overfed and undernourished. This is the crux of the MAHA movement and the epidemic diseases we see in our country. At Polyface, we know the pastured meat and poultry we produce is far superior in essential phytochemicals and other nutrients due to the carotenes, exercise, and stress-free habitat we offer. You can taste the difference, feel the difference in texture, and measure it empirically. Perhaps my most poignant affirmation was our cat test. We purchased meat from the supermarket and offered our own for the four cats. They wouldn't touch the conventional meat (ground beef). Even though two plates and four cats would be much easier to accommodate if they spread out, all four crowded around the plate with our meat, eating it all and licking it up, before later sniffing and gingerly eating the supermarket counterpart. Since cats don't understand TV ads or USDA propaganda, they know what's good and what's not. We encourage anyone dismissive of food differences to ask their pets: you can trust them far more than doctors and experts. Yes, I get the nutrient deficiency angle on the shortage question. But I'd like to explore it a bit further. Right now, the world throws away more human-edible food, as a percentage of production, than at any time in human history. The planet is awash in food. Some 40 percent gets thrown away because it has a slight blemish, exceeds the sell-by date, or is tainted in some way. We have a fundamentally segregated food supply rather than an integrated one, and that creates a lot of unusable waste. The vulnerabilities of our food system, I think, are much more subtle. When I was in Uruguay two years ago, speaking at a conference, one of the other presenters was from Germany and showed a soil map of the globe. Not a single commercial agricultural region had a stable or positive soil trajectory. Every single area on the planet is losing soil; some faster than others, but globally our soil depletion continues without any sign of abatement. This is not a good trajectory. As much as the technocrats promise food without soil, that's not the way to bet. Soil is the skin of the earth. When it goes, famine results. The main difference now compared to centuries ago is that we have the capacity to move food around. Nobody starves due to a lack of food on the planet; they starve due to socio-political unrest and dysfunction. But what happens when massive areas can't grow anything anymore? Even being able to move food around doesn't help when there isn't enough. The soil trajectory does not look good. But at Polyface, we're building soil. Areas covered with shale (layered rocks) half a century ago now have a foot of soil on them. That's not the 3-5 feet that 150 years of inappropriate tillage eroded, but it's a build-back start. In addition to soil loss, as a planet we're seeing hydrologic decreases. The Oglala aquifer, which undergirds the irrigated agriculture in five states, has dropped more than 100 feet in the last half-century. At its current rate, it will be unpumpable in about 50 more years. Imagine if all those circular irrigation pivots in Nebraska and Kansas shut down. What then? At Polyface, we keep building ponds to inventory surface runoff. By definition, surface runoff occurs when rains come too fast at once or too much at one time for the soil to absorb it. Holding that and using it strategically in a drought is a way to reduce flooding during rain events and grow grass when it gets dry. This is one of the most landscape resilient techniques we can implement. Finally, major animal and plant diseases threaten the world's food systems like never before. African swine fever, hoof and mouth disease in cattle, and bird flu in poultry appear to be getting worse and covering larger areas. Why? We believe it's because chemicals and factory farming compromise the immunological systems in both plants and animals. Monocrops and chemical fertilizers wreak havoc on immune systems, opening the planet's food systems to new levels of fragility. In contrast, at Polyface, we believe happy animals and biodiversity offer the best antidote to immunological deficiency. Stress from unsanitary conditions, mono-species density, or dietary deficiency (rations or fertilizer) invites disease. Nature uses disease to cull the weak. Predators pick off the stragglers. This is the way biology works. But at Polyface, we keep these vulnerabilities at bay with compost fertilization, pasture rotations, and lots of species diversity, including pollinators and wildlife. Here's the point: the basic long-term vulnerabilities in the planet's food systems could all be reversed with practices Polyface uses every day. Looked at another way, the entire food shortage question could be answered if eaters and farmers implemented these ecological and immunological protocols, working together to rather than completely separated. We don't need to fall into an abyss of starvation. If we all simply began eating food from farms that build soil, increase water, and stimulate immunity, we could deliver a hospitable, abundant planet to our children. Reversing these trajectories wouldn't take much time or money. It takes intentionally-minded folks who connect the chain of sustenance from their plate to the planet. Polyface patrons do that. Thank you. Let's heal the land together. Joel

Thanksgiving

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Food Shortages

Choosing Your Farmers

The Crisis Beneath Our Feet

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