Is local food just a fuzzy fad, or can it actually feed the world? At a recent Augusta County Chamber of Commerce-sponsored agri-tourism panel discussion, Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS) Secretary Matt Lohr reiterated the current agri-business axiom that farms like my family’s Polyface Farm cannot feed the world.

To tell the truth, I grow weary of having to deal with this issue — even among my foodie and environmentalist friends. If local food can only be a cute aside from the real world of food production, then all the problems associated with global industrial food have no solution. If we really need Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and fumigated 200-acre strawberry fields in California’s San Joaquin Valley to feed the masses, we’d better get on board promoting those models rather than decrying their existence.

I have news for the VDACS secretary and his expert opinion: you’re wrong, Mr. Secretary — just like the secretaries before you, including Mason Carbaugh who punctuated his secretaryship with the diatribe that if the world went to organic farming, we’d just have to choose which half of the world would starve. In credentialed government and agri-corporate circles, this notion is gospel. In this column, I aim to bury that gospel with some cold, hard truth.

Truth No. 1: Nearly half the world’s edible food never gets eaten. It spoils in warehouses, never gets picked, bouncing along during long distance transportation it gets rejected due to slight blemishes or goes into the garbage due to confusion over “sell by,” “use by,” and “best by” dating labels. Much of what goes on plates never gets eaten. Peeling and prepping destroy more mountains of edible food.

Truth No. 2: Distribution is the only reason people are hungry; nobody is hungry due to a shortage of food. If you could wave a magic wand and double worldwide food production tomorrow, it would not affect one empty stomach. Mountains of food rot every day. A gun-toting Somalian stopping a Red Cross truck on its way to a refugee camp is not a food production problem.

Truth No. 3: There is plenty of land for farming. Unused land is everywhere. The U.S. has 35 million acres of lawn. How about all those irrigated golf courses around Phoenix, Az.? The U.S. dedicates 36 million acres to housing and growing feed for recreational horses. I’m not against lawns or horses, or golf for that matter, but to run around like Henny Penny proclaiming “we’re running out of food” is a bit premature when actually on these lands alone we could grow all the food America needs. Edible landscaping should be promoted by everyone. In Italy, the expressway intersections are divided into quarter-acre gardens tended by urbanites who spend their weekends connecting to their ecological umbilical: building community, having fun, growing food. Forget the batwing mowers—grow squash instead.

Truth No. 4: Science and technology have caught up with natural farming. Scientific aerobic composting, coupled with new biological understanding and high-tech infrastructure like drip irrigation, hoop houses, and micro-chip electric fence energizers give us tools and techniques Grandpa would have given his eyeteeth to have. The agri-industrial complex routinely accuses me of being a Luddite and wanting to move all of us back to swine cholera, brucellosis, wash boards, and one bath a winter. This condescension stems from the unfair perception that our side is stuck at 1900 in all aspects of life if we don’t accept chemical fertilizers and genetic engineering.

The fact is that composting is a modern innovation. Sir Albert Howard introduced the world to scientific aerobic composting in 1943, at the height of World War II. His research capped a frenetic search beginning around the turn of the century for an answer to the soil fertility problem. By 1900, people universally understood that neither the United States nor Australia could solve their soil deficiencies by simply moving west—there was no more west to exploit.

If you visit any living history farm museum, whether it be in Williamsburg or Plymouth Plantation, you will not see modern compost piles. It was simply not practiced—the Native Americans had to teach the colonists to put a fish in the three sisters hill of corn, squash, and beans to keep the soil healthy. The Museum of American Frontier Culture located in Staunton does a great job of showing the poor animal hygiene, poor grazing management, and disregard for managed biomass decomposition that dominated farming during the 1800s. That backdrop created the desperate search for soil fertility in 1900.

Out of the dust storms, “The Grapes of Wrath” and the end of “Little House on the Prairie,” two schools of thought emerged. One agreed with Justus von Liebig, the Austrian chemist whose vacuum tubes in 1837 proved to the world that all of life is just rearranged nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus (NPK). The other came from Sir Albert Howard’s decidedly biological paradigm: that life is more than mechanics, and is primarily about death, decomposition, and regeneration.

Howard’s innovation — aerobic composting — required efficient materials accumulation, careful biomass management, and appropriate application of the finished product. Unfortunately, his idea came before rural electrification, chippers, compact and user-friendly diesel tractors with front end loaders, and PTO-powered manure spreaders. So it took a while for the biological model to catch on.

Von Liebvieg’s chemical approach, however, benefitted from the war effort, because bombs were made out of NPK. The War Department pumped billions of dollars into the knowledge, manufacture, and economical distribution of chemical NPK.

Chemicals won, in short, because the world did not have a Manhattan project for compost.

(And, by the way, a compost Manhattan project would have fed the world without the collateral damage of three-legged salamanders, infertile frogs, and a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico—before the oil spill.)

People like me who espouse a biological fertility solution over a chemical one are not seeking a return to loin cloths and hog cholera. We want to leverage marvelous technological infrastructure to harness the power of solar-grown biomass regeneration. This is the system that will feed the world.

Truth No. 6: We don’t need vaccines and antibiotics to keep farm animals healthy. The rampant plant/animal/human diseases common in the early 1900s were symptomatic of animal and human crowding during the early part of urbanization and industrialization.

When people flocked to factories in the cities, they preceded electrification, refrigeration, stainless steel, piped sewage, electric fence, and canvas shelters. During that three-decade period animals were crowded into muddy fields, people – lacking lights — couldn’t see the dirt in their homes. It took several decades for infrastructure and technology to catch up with the urbanization/industrialization innovation.

The high tech gadgets that ecology-friendly farmers enjoy today allow us to spin circles around the scale and hygiene of grandpa’s farm. Thanks to electric fencing, polyethylene pipe, and portable shelters, we don’t need prophylactic vaccines and antibiotics to keep our animals alive and healthy. For the first time in human civilization we can raise more animals, on a commercial scale, in a more sanitary, hygienic, animal-friendly way than anyone could on a homestead a century ago. That’s pretty cool. And it does feed the world.

Internationally acclaimed farmer, conference speaker, and author Joel Salatin and his family operate Polyface Farms in Augusta County near Staunton, Va., producing and direct-marketing “salad bar” beef, “pigaerator” pork, and pastured poultry. He is also co-owner of T&E Meats in Harrisonburg.

Start-up businesses are capitalizing on the local food trend. But when those businesses fail, farmers don’t get paid.

By Joel Salatin

Big food companies employ lawyers and other means to make sure wholesalers and retailers pay for what they buy. Because they can spread the cost of that legal leverage over millions of unit sales, the cost of payment compliance assurance is not a significant portion of their business expenses.

Local, artisanal, ecological food is culturally innovative right now, so it attracts lots of start-ups. Start-ups are always a high risk. Think of the signs you see by cash registers that read “Store will not cash checks numbered under 500.” The store does not trust that a new bank account is solvent. (People work around this by opening up checking accounts and ordering checks that begin with number 501 instead of 001.)

The truth is that our local food system attracts newbies, because it is a fledgling business movement. This creates a climate ripe for shysters to exploit and opportunites for inexperienced businesspeople to experiment.

All innovative sectors go through this shake-out period. Remember, in 1912 America had some 1,500 auto manufacturers before the industry matured and shook out most of the also-rans. For a more recent example, look at the turnover in the e-boom. Only two of the 17 e-commerce companies that advertised during the Super Bowl 10 years ago are still in business today. And so it is understandable that our local food movement would go through the same shake out. But when you’re one of the steady, small businesses and you can’t afford a bevy of lawyers to keep customers paying in a timely fashion, this creates significant financial pressure.

In the last year, our small operation has been left holding accounts receivable from two restaurants and a catering outfit. One was an Asian restaurant and butcher shop just outside Washington, D.C. We delivered an order and found the door padlocked. Try as we might, we cannot track the owners down. Write off? $2,000.

The people at a Northern Virginia catering company used all the right buzzwords, had a good story, yada yada—but stiffed us for a little more than $5,000. Apparently a divorce broke up the business and now the parties are arguing over who owns what—but not who owes what. We’ll never see that money either.

Another restaurant went belly up while owing us a little more than $1,000. Gone. They also had good brochures and a good story; they meant well. But they had poor business standards and ethics. The point here is that just because an outfit says it is local, clean, humane, or whatever word floats your boat, it doesn’t mean it is operating with integrity out the back end of the house. Just with our tiny customer base, those three dead-end clients took us for more than $8,000. That’s a chunk of change for a small business.

I won’t go on about the businesses we’ve had to threaten to get paid. There are several. We’ve had to institute a hard-and-fast rule—30-day net or no more product—for our institutional accounts in order to keep receivables on a short leash. If your favorite farm is no longer on the menu at a restaurant promoting local food, it may be because that farmer got tired of not being paid.

Fortunately, most restaurants either pay cash on delivery or in a timely way. This column is not meant to be a grousing session; it is meant to explain the reality and soft underside of the local food bandwagon. As is the case for most movements, the public appearance is not always the whole story. In truth, small direct-market farmers like us spend substantial time and energy chasing down receivables—time that we’d much rather spend raising some more chickens or putting in another row of tomatoes.

Because we farmers often only reluctantly deal with these business intricacies, we’re not efficient at it. I really don’t like writing nasty letters or making threatening phone calls to deadbeat accounts. That’s why big businesses hire in-house attorneys and bill collectors who enjoy nasty work. And the entrepreneurs I’m calling don’t like to do that job any more than I do.

Given the sheer number of start-up businesses entering the rapidly growing local food scene, we can expect a high failure rate. This is not a mature business sector. As such, farms like ours have to charge higher prices in order to cover these shake-out expenses, which are a natural part of cultural innovation. Flavor readers are part of that innovation. Bless you for hanging in there during the shake out. Carry on.

Internationally acclaimed farmer, conference speaker, and author Joel Salatin and his family operate Polyface Farms in Augusta County near Staunton, Virginia. His newest book is The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer.

If you weren’t already convinced that the industrial food system is unsafe, the recent egg recall should have scared you straight.

By Joel Salatin

“I don’t think we should buy any eggs,” a customer whispered to her husband in our farm sales building a day after the multistate egg recall of several million eggs—due to salmonella—in late August.

Wendy, our cashier, overhead their hushed conversation and in her true customer-friendly, Polyface-assertive way responded, “What do you mean you don’t want to buy eggs? If any egg is safe, any egg fit to eat, it’s one of ours. You should buy a bunch. Our eggs are the safe alternative.” The couple walked out the door with nine dozen eggs tucked under their arms. (Yay, Wendy!)

Photo of Polyface Farms by Molly McDonald Peterson for Flavor Magazine

Why are we so confident that our eggs are safe? Because the conditions in which our hens are raised is dramatically different than what you’ll find in the industrial food system.

* * *

How does salmonella bacteria get transmitted from hens to eggs?

It isn’t easy. As you learned in science class, protective biological barriers abound. From immune systems to separate bone, blood, and respiratory systems, living things have numerous built-in walls to keep pathogens out. That’s the way nature works; nature loves protection.

Although pathogens are everywhere, they are supposed to be held in check by these natural defenses. But when a habitat discourages immunological function, pathogens can overwhelm and destroy or penetrate where they normally would be kept at bay.

In concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where hundreds of thousands of laying hens are confined in one building, the air is filled with fecal particulate. The daily manure load is agitated by claws, wings, and feathers, and it permeates the air with abrasive particles carrying pathogens. These particles scratch the tender mucous membranes of the hens’ respiratory system and create lesions, or open sores, along the trachea and into the lungs.

These lesions enable nitrates and other pathogens direct access to the blood stream, which is supposed to be protected from direct air contact by filters in the respiratory system. Pathogens, therefore, overrun the filters and penetrate the defenses, entering the blood stream—which feeds the developing eggs.

To combat this, the industry uses an arsenal of drugs, vaccines, and anti-microbial cleansers. If they can medicate the birds enough to keep the lesions from forming, the protective barrier can function. Of course, the industry also uses large fans to try to exhaust the contaminated air and draw in fresh air. This is why nitrate contamination way higher than EPA allowances has been measured hundreds of yards from these allegedly “environmentally controlled” houses. So much for control.

* * *

Let’s think about pathogens. If you and I tried to develop a pathogen-friendly production model, what would we do? First, we’d limit our farm to only one kind of animal. Then we’d crowd those animals together. Then we’d deny them exercise, fresh air, and sunshine. Next, we’d feed them junk food (genetically modified organisms) from chemically grown plants. Finally, we’d vaccinate and bombard with antibiotics to destroy their natural immune systems.

That, folks, describes the American industrial food system.

As with all these huge industrial recalls, I think it’s important to realize how many brands came out of that one enormous Iowa farm. If people need to learn anything from this, it is simply that industrial food all comes from the same door, the same conveyer, the same processing facility. It’s the same stuff.

Unfortunately, this recall, like all the ones in the past, will create panic and paranoia as well as cries for more regulations and more rigorous testing. These solutions, of course, will simply put small operations like ours out of business because the requirements designed for CAFOs won’t scale down to family farms. Expensive machinery, testing, and paperwork are only cost effective at a large scale.

* * *

Two days after the outbreak, a radio news anchor called me and asked, “So how do I know, when I go to the supermarket, that I’m getting safe eggs?”

This was my response: Don’t buy them in the supermarket.

Get them from pastured operations at a farmers market, a local-foods retailer, or a buyers club. Get them from farms that raise more than one kind of animal, that allow you to visit and walk among their animals, that are pleasing both aesthetically and aromatically, and that are sensually romantic.

Better yet, get your own chickens. Two chickens in a roomy cage in your apartment are certainly no dirtier than parrots or parakeets. Chickens will take all your kitchen scraps and give you eggs in return. How cool is that?

* * *

The response to this outbreak should be a massive consumer shift in patronage. Only when we withdraw our support from the industrial fecal factories will they cease to exist. In their place, hundreds of thousands of urban kitchen flocks, backyard flocks, and pastured farm flocks will offer a safe and secure egg. This is not a time for hand wringing and calls for more bureaucracy. It’s a time to build a chicken mobile and visit your local pastured egg farmer.

Internationally acclaimed farmer, conference speaker, and author Joel Salatin and his family operate Polyface Farms in Augusta County near Staunton, Virginia, producing and direct marketing “salad bar” beef, “pigaerator” pork, and pastured poultry. He is also co-owner of T&E Meats in Harrisonburg.

Subscribe to Flavor Magazine and get 6 issues a year for just $19.95 + S&H!

You can see more of Joel’s articles in our back issues. Sign up for access here.

You can also read some online here.

By Joel Salatin

Photo courtesy Central Carolina Community College

I recently traveled to Chatham County, North Carolina, the epicenter of a local food revolution. Central Carolina Community College, which has offered a sustainable agriculture associate degree for nearly a decade, has now added the next permutation: a “natural chef” culinary arts degree.

The college asked me to come to the Pittsboro campus recently to kick off this groundbreaking program. The biggest room they could find seats 150. Held on a weeknight during the week of July 4, it drew nearly 500 people—many sat on the lawn listening to loudspeakers.

Pittsboro is also home of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, a 1,200-member powerhouse that serves the local, ecologically based food system. It is only natural that this effort would be conceived and launched in such an area.

The mission statement of this new degree program includes four objectives:

1. To train culinary professionals in basic culinary techniques with an emphasis on local food systems, in-season food preparation, fundamentals of nutrition, and the connection between food and wellness.
2. To develop leadership in the region and beyond for the promotion of Natural Chef programs, holistic education, and whole foods culinary advancement, for consumers and professionals.
3. To promote education of nutrition standards for all students and faculties through workshops, literature, community events, and to be a resource for whole foods information.
4. To promote the connection between local sustainable farms and future culinary professions.

In addition to standard courses such as Culinary Math and Basic Menu Planning, the program offers this gem: Farm to Fork/Seasonal Foods/Organic/Preserving/Slow Food.

To say that I was jazzed about this program would be the understatement of the year. The faculty and staff did not know of a similar program anywhere. Since the school maintains a farm for its sustainable agriculture program right outside the kitchen doors, it was a natural marriage to wed the farm to the kitchen. What’s more amazing is that in our culture, this farm-oriented arrangement was normal until just a few decades ago.

That these students will not be besieged by industrial institutional chefs showing them how to take culinary shortcuts with prepared frozen dough and pre-boxed heat-and-eat dinners is truly refreshing. As more culinary professionals enter kitchens armed with the savviness and understanding this program will provide, all I can say is, “Look out, Archer Daniels Midland. You’re going down.”

Most institutional culinary professionals are completely intimidated by the local food option. They don’t believe farmers can actually provide them with food. After all, food comes from a truck—the same truck that brings toilet paper and chicken nuggets in the shape of Dino the dinosaur.

One of my most poignant memories of working directly with a chef dates back more than 20 years when Lisa Joy, chef at the Joshua Wilton House in Harrisonburg, met me at a cold storage facility to off-load a side of beef. (The restaurant freezer wasn’t big enough for all of it.) I backed up my pickup truck next to two tractor trailers loaded with boxed, frozen “banquet meals” for other restaurants. Lisa and I had quite a belly laugh over the contrast between what she was doing in her kitchen and what most chefs do in theirs.

To think that now we might actually have accredited institutions training and graduating more chefs like Lisa is almost more than I can imagine. When this new generation of chefs hits the mainstream, watch out Sysco. It won’t be business as usual. Having walked the farm, acquired the products, scratch-prepared the meals, and savored the results, these young chefs won’t be content to go back to prepared, processed, industrialized, irradiated, genetically prostituted, amalgamated, extruded, dyed, and artificially flavored mush.

They will figure out how to punch through liability requirements, food police, distribution headaches, and raw-ingredient logistics to offer their clientele nutrient-dense, transparent, community-imbedded menus. That will be good for all of us. Let the revolution continue.

Internationally acclaimed farmer, conference speaker, and author Joel Salatin and his family operate Polyface Farms in Augusta County near Staunton, Virginia.

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You can see more of Joel’s articles in our back issues. Sign up for access here.

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By Joel Salatin • Photographs by Molly McDonald Peterson

© Molly McDonald Peterson

Because high-quality local food often carries a higher price tag than food generated by the industrial system, the charge of elitism coming from industrial foodists is often vitriolic, and embarrassed foodies agonize over the label. For all their positive energy surrounding food, I’ve found latent guilt among this group—guilt for paying more for local food when others are starving, guilt for caring about taste when others would happily eat anything. Instead of cowering in self-guilt, let’s confront the issue of prices head on.

Why It’s Worth It

First, it’s better food. It tastes better. It handles better. And it’s safer: Anyone buying chemicalized, drug-infused food is engaging in risky behavior.

It’s also nutritionally superior. For those willing to see, scientific data shows fresh foods’ conjugated linoleic acid, vitamins, minerals, brix readings, omega 3–omega 6 ratios, and polyunsaturated fat profiles are empirically superior.

Better stuff is worth more.

Second, economies of scale will continue to progress as more people patronize local food, which will bring prices down. The collaborative aggregation and distribution networks that have been fine-tuned by mega-food companies can and will be duplicated locally as volume increases and regional food systems get more creative.

Third, eating unprocessed foods is the best way to bring down your grocery bill, regardless of where the food originated. A 10-pound bag of potatoes costs the same as a 1-pound bag of potato chips. Cultivating domestic culinary arts and actually reinhabiting our kitchens—which we’ve remodeled and gadgetized at great cost—can wean all of us away from expensive processed food. A whole pound of our farm’s grass-finished ground beef, which can feed four adults, costs about the same as a Happy Meal. (And guess which one is more healthful?)

Fourth, non-scalable government regulations—which are designed to protect eaters from the dangers inherent in the industrial food complex but are not relevant in a transparent, regional food system—inordinately discriminate against smaller processing businesses like abattoirs, kitchens, and canneries, because the costs of complying with the (inappropriate) paperwork and infrastructure requirements cannot be spread out over a large volume of product. These regulations lead to price prejudice at the community-based scale: Small processors are at a disadvantage because they must pass those costs on to consumers, making their products more expensive than the mass-produced ones. These burdensome regulations also discourage entrepreneurs from entering local food commerce.

Fifth, unlike huge, single-crop or single-animal farms, diversified farms like ours do not receive government subsidies. Nor do the production, processing, and marketing of our food create collateral damage like that caused by factory farming—damage left for taxpayers to fix. Subsidies and government clean-up measures are not included in the price you pay for processed food at the grocery store, but if they were, local food would not seem so expensive in comparison.

Consider the Rhode Island–sized area in the Gulf of Mexico now known as a “dead zone” because nothing can survive in the oxygen-starved water, a result of manure and pesticide runoff. Who pays for the clean up and the reversal efforts? Who pays to address antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria like MRSA, caused by the overuse of antibiotics in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations)? Who pays to treat people with Type II diabetes, which they get from consuming processed food that is sold cheaply because the corporations making it have received subsidies? Who pays to clean up stinky rural neighborhoods with densely populated poultry and livestock compounds? And what is the value of the land irreversibly damaged by bad farming practices?

Sixth—and this is where I wanted to head with this discussion—plenty of money already exists in our economic system to pay for good food. Can you think of anything people buy that they don’t need? Tobacco products, $100 designer jeans with holes already in the knees, KFC, soft drinks made with high fructose corn syrup, Disney vacations, large-screen TVs, jarred baby food? America spends more on veterinary care for pets than the entire continent of Africa spends on medical care for humans.

I won’t belabor the point, but if you took all the money people spend on unnecessary baubles and junk food, it would be enough for everyone to eat like kings. We could all be elitists.

With that money, we could create a suburb of Lake Wobegon, where all the people eat food that is above average. Almost everyone I know who owns a community supported agriculture (CSA) share could afford to purchase an extra one for an impoverished family. And if you had to give up a few $4 lattes to do it? What a pity.

Spare Change?

This winter, the Front Range Permaculture Institute invited me to come to Fort Collins, Colorado, and give a speech at a fundraising event. They filled a huge community theater with people, and ticket sales were enough to pay my travel and honorarium—with enough left over to buy 40 CSA shares for poor families in their community. What a wonderfully empowering local effort. (They didn’t wait for a government program.) Perhaps nothing would reduce perceptions of elitism faster than foodies buying CSA shares for impoverished families.

At the risk of sounding uncharitable, I think we need to quit being victims and bring about change ourselves. Don’t complain about being unable to afford high-quality local food when your grocery cart is full of beer, cigarettes, and People magazine. Most people are more connected to the celebrities in People than the food that will become flesh of their flesh and bone of their bones at the next meal.

The other day I saw precooked bacon in a box at the supermarket—for $30 a pound. Do we really have to buy precooked bacon? If you took the average shopping cart in the checkout line and tossed out all the processed food—everything with an ingredient you can’t pronounce, everything you can’t re-create in your kitchen, and everything that won’t rot—and substituted instead locally sourced, fresh items, you would be dollars ahead and immensely healthier.

We can all do better. If we can find money for movies, ski trips, and recreational cruises, surely we can find the money to purchase integrity food. The fact is that most of us scrounge together enough pennies to fund the passion of our hearts. If we would cultivate a passion for food like the one we’ve cultivated for clothes, cars, and entertainment, perhaps we would ultimately live healthier, happier lives.

Embracing Elitism

To suggest that advocating for such a change makes me an elitist is to disparage positive decision making and behavior. Indeed, if that’s elitism, I want it. The victim mentality our culture encourages actually induces guilt among people making progress. That’s crazy. We should applaud positive behavior and encourage others to follow suit, not demonize and discourage it. Would it be better to applaud people who buy amalgamated, reconstituted, fumigated, irradiated, genetically modified industrial garbage?

The charge of elitism is both unfair and silly. We foodies are cultural change agents, positive innovators, integrity seekers. So hold your head high and don’t apologize for making noble decisions.

Internationally acclaimed farmer, conference speaker, and author Joel Salatin and his family operate Polyface Farms in Augusta County near Staunton, Virginia, producing and direct marketing “salad bar” beef, “pigaerator” pork, and pastured poultry. He is also co-owner of T&E Meats in Harrisonburg.

Subscribe to Flavor Magazine and get 6 issues a year for just $19.95 + S&H!

You can see more of Joel’s articles in our back issues. Sign up for access here.

You can also read some online here.

By Joel Salatin

The winter of 2009–2010 will go down in our mid-Atlantic record books as one to remember. Fender benders, shoveling, and bone-chilling cold. Here in the Shenandoah Valley, we had eight weeks of snow cover. What a treat to not have to go to Aspen this winter.

The people who study sunspot activity say this is the harbinger of the next five winters. Look out.

Stranded trucks on interstates, empty supermarket shelves—these events illustrated the stark modern reality that at any one time, only three days’ supply of food exists in a locality. That seems fragile to me.

Looking back from our spring vantage point, I think it behooves us to appreciate preparing, preserving, and stockpiling food as a wise activity. On our farm, as the inches of snow began to build, we had a deep sense of security and satisfaction. Here’s why.

The freezers were full of venison, beef, pork, chicken, turkey, and rabbit, all laid up from a bountiful 2009 production season. Even if the electricity had gone off, the cold would have kept things from defrosting fast—a week at least. Probably two. The woodpile, mounded up, offered plenty of thermal energy during the blizzard.

In the basement, hundreds of canning jars glistened, ready for use: sauerkraut, applesauce, pickles, green beans, yellow squash, beets, peaches, tomatoes, tomato juice, grape juice—a veritable cornucopia of abundance. In the root cellar, boxes of sweet potatoes, winter squash, and white potatoes lay ready for hearty winter feasts.

Honey harvested late in the season offered sweetness. Maple syrup boiled the previous spring ran low and eventually ran out just before a two-week warm snap in January, when the sap from our trees flowed freely again into buckets. Frozen strawberries gleaned from our neighbor’s abundant patch and blackberries picked painstakingly along the road added fruity zest to shortcake.

Our hands butchered, juiced, diced, sliced, pitted, and did all the other necessary steps to fill the larder for just such a time as this blizzard. And now, in the shock of a hard winter—payday. Emotional payday. Nutritional payday. Economic payday.

Every living thing prepares for winter. The spider spins a porous cocoon around a zillion carefully laid eggs. The bear and groundhog gorge and then sleep. (Sounds like a good plan to me.) Deer put on back fat, like a savings account, to be withdrawn as extra energy if the going gets tough. Squirrels scamper around, burying walnuts and hickory nuts all during October and September and moving from airy summer nests to cozy tree hollows.

Following nature’s example, farmers spend most of the season putting up provisions for winter—grain, hay, sawdust for bedding. This is natural and normal.

Who would not go through this ritual? Who would not stockpile for environmental or economic shocks? Only people completely disconnected from their ecological umbilical. It really is a narrow cord. For all our sophisticated computers, cars, and cell phones, we humans haven’t figured out how to survive without food and water. Biologically we’re no different from those Native Americans who romped these forests and fields, hanging venison and buffalo in their smoky habitations to dry and stockpile for a hard winter.

Only proud, arrogant, unthinking people assume that the supermarket will always be there, that the car will always get through. Perhaps if many more people realize our vulnerabilities to shocks and stockpile local food against the next hard winter, this season will have taught them a valuable lesson. The food our family enjoyed this hard winter did not come with extensive ingredient lists. If left on a table, it would rot—which also means it will digest properly. It was just like the food people ate before 1900. It was the stuff our great-grandparents ate in hard winters.

Indeed, appreciating that we’re all still completely dependent on this little orb floating through space is both humbling and challenging. The memory of this past winter should drive us all to the kitchen this coming harvest season. It should drive us all to the food treasures in our communities, where we patronize seasonal abundance and enjoy its security during a hard winter. The ultimate food security is growing in the fields and pastures in our neighborhood and the stockpile lying, precious, in our pantries, root cellars, and freezers.

If we all devoted ourselves to this natural, heritage-based mind-set, a hard winter would drive us to gratitude, neighborliness, and deep satisfaction. That is the blessing of community.

Internationally acclaimed conference speaker and author Joel Salatin and his family operate Polyface Farms in Augusta County near Staunton, Virginia, producing and direct marketing “salad bar” beef, “pigaerator” pork, and pastured poultry. He is now also co-owner, with Joe Cloud, of T&E Meats in Harrisonburg.

Subscribe to Flavor Magazine and get 6 issues a year for just $19.95 + S&H!

You can see more of Joel’s articles in our back issues. Sign up for access here.

You can also read some online here.

By Joel Salatin

Anyone who knows me knows I’m an ardent supporter of farmers markets and community supported agriculture (CSA). Direct-marketing models linking farmers to buyers are as varied as entrepreneurial ingenuity. Generally, I’m in favor of anything other than nameless, faceless, opaque industrial food–based supermarkets.

But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to move this heritage-based food movement beyond 1 percent market penetration. Our nearest farmers market, founded nearly 20 years ago, has not yet had cumulative sales in its entire history equal to our farm’s gross sales in one year. I’m not bragging—I’m just pointing out how tiny the local food network is. So what’s holding it back?

I think we need to appreciate the secret of supermarkets’ success. When we compare their features to those of farmers markets and CSAs, I think we can begin to see why truly local food is not purchased more widely. And perhaps rather than start more farmers markets, we need to channel our efforts elsewhere.

Farmers markets are destination places. Normally, customers have to make a special trip within a narrow window of time to patronize them. CSAs require that consumers plan ahead, take produce they may not like, and drive out to a pickup place. And seldom do either of these venues offer a complete menu: They typically lack dairy, meat, poultry, and processed items like noodles, soups, and heat-n-eat convenience foods. And both of these venues require additional trips (read: precious time away from the farm) for farmers to attend the venue.

Compare that to a Kroger or Giant store. They are open 24/7 so shoppers can shop at their convenience. They have a huge diversity of both raw and processed product, including dairy and meat. Farmers don’t have to make a special trip to take their wares there because their products enter the food system from centralized pickup points, whether it be a grain elevator, livestock sale barn, or processing facility. In the case of processors like Tyson and Smithfield, farmers under contract don’t have to go anywhere because the company comes and picks up the chickens or hogs. And the store’s cashiers are always busy, which helps justify the overhead spent on them.

Why can’t we take these basic supermarket features and re-create them on a local level? What would such a model look like? First, it would be on a main drag, located preferably next to Walmart or in the retail commercial district where people go all the time anyway to shop. The hours would be extended enough to catch people when they are already out and about—going to and coming home from work, volleyball, and ballet practice. Customers could pop in and shop conveniently.

Farmers could come by with their wares when they are already out and about running errands. The ideal venue would have a commercial kitchen with a diner on one end so patrons could enjoy a meal. The kitchen would be used to create processed foods, from noodles to heavy soups, utilizing raw items from the store no longer at the peak of freshness. Pot pies and frozen pizzas would offer opportunities to salvage food before it spoils, creating an in-house safety net for the farmers’ items.

The whole idea here is to scale down and create proximity in all the food components that currently occupy mammoth single-use or single-item processing plants around the country. A community-scaled processing facility like the one I just described should be able to handle many different items, not just green beans. That leverages the stainless steel, walk-in coolers, and staff expertise across several food items. This way even a small processing facility can be as efficient overall as a huge single-item plant doing just green beans or tomato soup.

One of the biggest expenses in specialty stores is staffing the cash registers, so cashiers need to stay busy. In this new model, the cash register would service the locally supplied market as well as the diner—similar to Cracker Barrel’s store-and-restaurant concept—so it would stay busy with the multiple sales streams. And the diversity in real-time purchasing allows customers to cherry-pick, buying only what they want.

Put them together and offer real-time diversified buying options to customers. The one-stop shop model works. We just need to figure out what a truly transparent, localized one-stop shop looks like.

Once we figure that out, heritage-based food can penetrate much farther and deeper into the marketplace. As wonderful as farmers markets and CSAs are—and as crucial as it is that consumers have the opportunity to meet the people growing their food—I don’t think they will ever yield the kind of marketplace penetration needed to fundamentally change our food system. We have to make it easier for people to buy local, not harder. The future can’t be the limited options of either extreme: farmers markets and CSAs or Walmart.

Of course, the other conundrum related to further market penetration is how successful “integrity food” operations get sucked into the industrial system, like when Walmart calls and wants your product. Is Walmart really where integrity food should go? Is there something about that arrangement that actually compromises integrity food? I don’t have answers for all these questions, but I am passionate about trying to localize, to increase transparency. As discussed in the film Food, Inc., whether or not Stonyfield has compromised since its products were picked up by Walmart is subject to debate. But why should Virginians eat Stonyfield yogurt bought at Walmart? Why can’t folks in Virginia eat Virginia-made yogurt that comes from Virginia-raised grass-fed cows—bought at convenient, locally operated stores?
I’m sure some of my friends who are die-hard farmers market supporters are ready to string me up at this point, but I have tried several of those market venues over the years and found them frustrating for a lot of reasons. Yes, farmers markets will be here for a long time. But a lot of folks don’t want to pay a bunch of different vendors, and they enjoy a bit more shopping anonymity.

Being able to dash into a store that’s on your way home from soccer practice, fill up a cart with the specific locally produced and processed items you want, and pay for it all at a single cash register—now that’s an idea that should be explored.

By Joel Salatin

The words stung.

“You cannot build a single structure on this farm.”

We wanted to build a chick brooder and a small processing shed in order to add pastured broilers to the farm we leased. This new enterprise was essential to making the whole farm viable. But the nonprofit organization policing the easement was adamant: No new construction.

Almost everyone is in favor of preserving green space. How best to do it is another matter. One of the models currently lauded by environmental groups is an easement whereby a landowner voluntarily creates a deed restriction against future development or nonagricultural uses, policed by a trust, in exchange for tax concessions due to the change in real estate value.

Landowners proudly display their easement signs at the farm gate: “Protected forever . . .” Protected from what? Protected from innovation, that’s what. Having dealt with several easements on other farms, I can’t imagine a scenario in which I would sign up for one.

Perhaps the most common easement is the government program known as CREP (Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program), which ostensibly protects riparian areas in exchange for fencing and tree establishment and a 10-year cash payment per acre. On one farm we lease, the landowner signed onto the program and subsequently spent tens of thousands of dollars in her 80/20 cost share arrangement. The water system, which cost well over $100,000, completely failed in its first season.

For some reason, CREP won’t develop ponds, which I consider far and away the most efficient livestock watering containment and storage system since a pond yields aquatic environments, holds runoff from seasonal floods, and doesn’t punch holes in aquifers. Unlike wells—which, in a drought, can stop without notice—ponds are visible, so a farmer can walk out any day and see how much water is available. The other problem is that the government program only pays for nonportable, capital-intensive watering stations that militate against ecological grazing management. (That is, a farmer cannot rotate his herd around his property but must instead keep it near the watering station, to the degradation of the land.) Furthermore, the government-built fences, with their straight lines and square corners, assault the topography.

After the CREP system failed, we went in and built a pond (fenced off from the cattle, of course) and installed a piped underground water system that serves three times the acreage, that has never failed, and that is conducive to rotational grazing—for one-tenth the cost of the government system. The landowner, incensed over the money she wasted in the easement-based system, asked the government agent in charge to come for a tour of our low-cost alternative system. He wouldn’t come. (So much for a spirit of open-mindedness.)

On this farm, we can’t even build a doghouse. The landowners are now quite remorseful that the easement exists. To have a nonfarmer group from 200 miles away telling the landowner what is appropriate according to the easement is like putting an Amish man in charge of nuclear reactor regulations.

On another farm, a young couple wanted to run pastured chickens on their rented farm. But according to the landlord, the easement police considered even portable chicken shelters and eggmobiles to be new construction and therefore inappropriate development. What good is protecting farmland if we don’t protect the farmers and their economic viability on the land?

Building a chick brooder and processing shed, or adding a walk-in cooler for an egg inventory, is not antithetical to farming. Indeed, a house for employees and a pavilion for agritourism dinner entertainment are all pieces of the economic puzzle to keep non-industrial farms viable in our modern day.

One of the distinctive features and appeal of Colonial Williamsburg is the imbedded craft economy surrounding the farmsteads. The blacksmith, woodworker, barrel maker, shingle maker, spinner, and candlemaker found behind the main farmhouse all contribute to the economic viability of the farm.

Economic viability today demands value-adding, which means onfarm infrastructure like you would expect to see in Williamsburg. Too often those policing these easements want to see cows, pretty pastures, and bucolic gambrel barns without realizing that such a landscape never existed sustainably. Real profitable and ecologically sensible working farms had smokehouses, butchering facilities, housing for workers, inventory and distribution centers, and a host of other synergistic enterprises.

One of the main reasons farms have become non-viable today is that they do not include the compatible industry required to keep the money on the farm. Instead, farms have become simply raw commodity production areas that cheaply supply material to valueadded industry offsite. If we are ever going to shake the stranglehold of the industrial food system, we must bring the butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers back to our farms.

Ultimately, these easements reduce farm viability and gradually turn Virginia’s pastoral landscape into a wilderness area. That’s probably not the green space folks have in mind. Giving over farm decisions to people who neither farm nor adapt their approaches jeopardizes farmers’ livelihoods. Ultimately, preserving farmers is the only sustainable way to preserve farms.

Internationally acclaimed conference speaker and author Joel Salatin and his family operate Polyface Farms in Augusta County near Staunton, Virginia, producing and direct marketing “salad bar” beef, “pigaerator” pork, and pastured poultry. He is now also co-owner, with Joe Cloud, of T&E Meats in Harrisonburg.

Editor’s note: Many readers were angered by this column. Several letters with this sentiment were published in the Feb./Mar. 2010 issue, which you can read here.

Our response, also published in the Feb./Mar. 2010 issue, is here. We also invite you to read a pro-easement article from our first issue here.

We invite you to post your comments below so that this conversation can continue.

Subscribe to Flavor Magazine and get 6 issues a year for just $19.95 + S&H!

You can see more of Joel’s articles in our back issues. Sign up for access here.

You can also read some online here.

At Polyface farms, cows eat what cows have always eaten—grass.

The industrial food system employs some of the sharpest cleverspeak wordsmiths in our culture. Their art is describing things in a way that makes you like something even though it is reprehensible. Most people don’t realize that in the focus groups and think tanks of industrial food empires—down in the bowels of the beast—really smart, high-salaried folks create words to drive their public relations campaigns. In this column, I’d like demystify a few of these terms so you’ll be wise when they show up in news stories and policy position papers.

Cold Pasteurization

“Cold pasteurization” means irradiation. Since most folks understand that zapping food with radiation might alter it in some way—and it certainly does—the industry had to figure out a way to label this process more acceptably. And since most consumers believe pasteurization is a good thing, this phrase takes the negative edge off the obvious association with radiation, like mushroom clouds and Chernobyl, and makes the whole process seem like God’s gift to health. The number one food candidate for irradiation is meat, but this technology is in the cards for all foods.

Tracking

“Tracking” is another name for placing government-mandated radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips in animals and eventually in fruits and vegetables. The USDA has already spent millions trying to implement the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) but is running into farmers with fierce independent streaks who don’t want every backyard chicken implanted with an RFID chip and registered in a government database. Capitalizing on the foodie buzzword “sourcing,” the industrialists reinvented this draconian, unworkable idea by piggybacking on the benevolent desire to know where your food comes from. Never mind that a single fast-food hamburger contains parts of 1,500 different animals.

Our government, which can’t seem to identify corporate banking scoundrels or undocumented foreigners, will be hard-pressed to keep up with every backyard chicken, don’t you think? This whole expensive notion will in effect destroy all small farming in America—and that’s exactly what the industrialists want. A large-scale commercial chicken house only needs one chip for every 15,000 chickens, but in a small backyard flock, you would need one in every bird. How’s that for prejudicial?

Precision Farming

The phrase “precision farming” is quite insidious. What could be better than being precise? After all, don’t we want to be precise? But what this specific term really suggests is that humans are capable of taking all the guesswork and mystery out of nature. It applies both to genetic manipulation and to the application of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides using global-positioning satellites. While applying toxic substances precisely sounds like a good idea, it begs the question, “What about not applying toxic substances at all?”

Of course, like most of these terms, “precision farming” is used condescendingly to separate its practitioners from imprecise, or general-type farmers. But heritage-based farming is general. On our farm, we don’t begin to try to manipulate the cow’s ingestion too closely, as if there were a perfectly scripted diet; we rely on her innate ability to choose one grass, legume, herb, or weed over another totally spontaneously and according to her own senses. That someone would presume to know precisely what she should eat on May 15 at 5 p.m. is itself arrogant and disrespectful of the cow’s mind. To say that my trust of the cow and the compost (which is inherently imprecise because it has all those bugs in it) is farming with unknowns—and therefore unsafe or backwards—assumes that humankind has unlocked all the mysteries of the mitochondria.

When the human genome mapping project started, the scientists assured us that at least 100,000 gene pairs would occupy the DNA strand, due to the precise calculations of the number of known genetic traits. Wonder of wonders—the project discovered only some 35,000 or so, concluding that a lot of hanky-panky is going on up and down that DNA strand that we don’t have a clue about. And yet we match, bombard, and rematch DNA with impunity, release these new life forms into the world, and act like we humans have it all figured out. Precision farming is another way to say, “I’m an arrogant know-it-all and all the rest of you hick farmers are holding back progress.” In truth, genetically modified organisms can’t be kept in a bottle and are far from controllable.

Science-Based

The phrase “science-based” is wending its way through Congress in food safety bills and is probably the most insidious term on my list. Industrial food elitists want government agencies to be able to conduct warrantless searches of all farms to determine whether any production practice does not adhere to science-based criteria. Of course, “science-based” farming means factory chicken houses and hog farms, irradiation, mandatory vaccinations (which assumes that the conditions in which animals are raised makes them sick), chemical usage, and anything else agribusiness loves. The whole campaign is to paint agribusiness corporations as scientific and heritage-based farmers as anti-science Luddites.

Remember, the USDA has been telling farmers like me for 40 years that science-based cattle production requires feeding dead cows to cows. (Scientists created feed that includes pulverized cow carcasses.) Isn’t it disingenuous for the very agency that promoted the techniques that by its own admission gave us bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) to then position itself as the repository of food safety? Or science? Why would you, I, or anybody else trust these folks? To them, science-based poultry raising means crowding 15,000 chickens, beak by wattle, in a house filled with fecal particulates. They say that letting chickens chase down grasshoppers and ingest clover buds on open pasture is unscientific.

Every time you see a news article quoting an expert lauding science-based agriculture, realize that he’s taking a pot shot at organic, pasture-based, multi-speciated, nonmedicated, heritage-based agriculture—the kind of agriculture that heals the land, the plants, the animals, and ultimately the eaters.

Now you’ve got the scoop. Beware.

Internationally acclaimed conference speaker and author Joel Salatin and his family operate Polyface Farm in Augusta County near Staunton, Virginia, producing and direct marketing “salad bar” beef, “pigaerator” pork, and pastured poultry. He is now also co-owner, with Joe Cloud, of T&E Meats in Harrisonburg. Visit www.polyfacefarms.com for a list of restaurants and stores that feature Polyface products, a calendar of Joel’s speaking engagements, and information on his many books.

Subscribe to Flavor Magazine and get 6 issues a year for just $19.95 + S&H!

You can see more of Joel’s articles in our back issues. Sign up for access here.

You can also read some online here.