You're a Hero

written by

Joel Salatin

posted on

February 3, 2024

As a society, too often we miss true heroism.  This is not to disparage in the least the folks who deservedly receive widespread accolades for heroism.  Firefighters who risk their lives to save someone in a burning building.  On the battlefield, the one who loses his own life to save others.  The policeman who steps between a domestic altercation. Yes, we all understand these widely accepted heroes.

But another kind of heroism is standing in the face of orthodoxy during mundane decisions and activities of life to protect your children, your community, and the earth.  Way too few people today think about these things.

We’re besieged with advertisements to eat and drink junk.  Everybody’s eating Lunchables, right?  And fast food—it’s ubiquitous.  DoorDash is a click away, even for eggs and milk now.  Defunding McDonald’s, Monsanto, and Tyson (“feeding you like family”) takes real effort.  If you go with the flow, you’ll finance the production, philosophy, and poor nutrition of the chemical industrial exploitation complex.  The only thing you have to do to make sure these miscreants thrive is to not think and not act.

When you sit down to a meal, pause a moment to squint your eyes and try to look through what’s on the plate to everything behind it.  What kind of farms produced it?  What kind of processing put it in packages for you to buy?  What kind of framework delivered it to your hand?  Then ask yourself:  “Is this the kind of world I want my kids to inherit?”

With mRNA now being used (unlabeled) throughout the livestock industry and a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico holding steady, one of the most heroic things a person can do is patronize a healing food and farm alternative.   Here at Poyface, we aren’t perfect, but we have a 60-year track record that builds soil, creates happy, contented animals, and brings superior nutrition to your plate.

We don’t rely on Russia for fertilizer.  We don’t depend on Istanbul for grain.  We don’t finance Monsanto’s Roundup (glyphosate) or Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) for feed.  We don’t pollute the surface or groundwater for taxpayers to clean up.  You won’t get diarrhea from anti-biotic-hyped super-bugs.  Our animals don’t do drugs.

And the grass.  Aaaah, the grass.  Phytochemical taste and nutrition come from the pasture salad bar, our signature goal at Polyface.  That’s why our eggs have 1,058 micrograms of folic acid rather than the 48 in supermarket eggs.  Everything is superior when it gets fresh air, exercise, sunshine, and fresh salads.  Because we depend more on grass (solar panels) and management, we’re less dependent on all the nefarious agendas bandied about by the industrial chemical food complex.

But you won’t find this at the normal supermarket.  You won’t get it delivered from Grub Hub or DoorDash.  You won’t find it at McDonald’s, Burger King or Chik-fil-A.  You have to come to a conviction in yourself and make a conscious, intentional decision to find us, to patronize a more stable, secure, and safe system.  Standing up to cultural normality takes courage.

In some ways, rushing into a burning building is easier.  That crisis moment awakens in the human spirit a have-to, can-do, must-do hyper-awareness that often empowers us to rise to the calamity.  But what about when the tragedy wanes?  What about when it’s not as apparent?  Making life-saving decisions when they seem unnecessary is harder. Crises always draw us to find courage and decisiveness that may not have been apparent.

But to exercise that courage and conviction when things are routine is difficult.  Why participate in inconvenience when I can just be convenient?  And normal?  Because being content to be convenient is a fool’s game.  Eventually, convenience catches up.  America, as a nation, now leads the world in non-infectious chronic illness:  heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer.  With the summer Olympics coming up, we’re all pulling for our little superstar Simone Biles and other U.S. contenders, hoping to be number one in numerous competitions.  Being number one in chronic morbidity is not a number one spot to covet, folks.

The U.S. invented hydrogenated vegetable oil, TV dinners, DDT, GMOs, factory farming, mRNA, drive-through windows, and now leads the world in research toward lab-cultured fake meat.  Standing into this takes courage, intention, conviction.  So today, we salute, we honor, we appreciate you as everyday heroes who aren’t waiting until a crisis to act.

When you choose Polyface, you proactively take on the hero’s spirit to fight for your kids, your community, and our collective ecological nest.  For immune function, nutrient density, and balance. For pollinators, bluebirds, earthworms, and functional microbiomes.  That might not be a burning building, but it might be if we don’t invest in a better future.  Thank you for leading the way, and for being a hero right now.

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More from the blog

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