Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World

by Joel Salatin

This exquisite menagerie drives pathogens insane with confusion, rendering these disease agents impotent

confirm this

When the biggest thrill in life is becoming competent enough on the video game to achieve level five performance, what kind of environment are we creating for our future leaders?

nothing is funnier than a boomer talking about video games istg

You won’t find that at the end of a video game, no matter how many times you play.

somebody probably has never played minecraft

Here’s a little-known chore: 4. Keeping animal protein in the chicken yard once a week during the winter. One of the first man-sized chores for farm boys was providing some dead critter for the laying flock to eat in the winter when the grasshoppers and crickets were dormant. Since chickens are omnivores, they need animal protein, and that’s hard to come by during the cold winter months.

nonsocial

multiplayer gaming exists

finger responses

hand eye coordination

Which process actually lays a foundation of cleverness, persistence, and self-actualization to offer us world leaders who are not peer-dependent and who can think through the nuances of a problem?

nearly every game revolves around problem solving

Compare that to spending all day in front of a video game trying to race a car around a track or decapitate the alien invaders.

cooperative building games exist. this is a bad comparison

Using the moon as an example, what these researchers found was that the sooner children learn that the moon is comprised of this and that elements and that it is so many miles away from the earth, the sooner they lose their awe and wonder toward the moon.

clearly these are not future astrophysicists 🙄

It moves, in the human mind, from a majestic orb in the sky, a mystical object of wonderment, to simply a ho-hum rock.

a failure on the part of the teacher to impress on them how unique the moon is compared to other planetary satellites and how the moon, once part of the earth itself, plays a dominant role in the current habitability of our planet. thank you, moon! 🌛

Simon Fairlie’s book Meat: A Benign Extravagance

This is perhaps one of the biggest misunderstandings people have about farming ecology. In a desire to get rid of the cow, they want to substitute plants that require tillage. No long-term example exists in which tillage is sustainable. It always requires injection of biomass from outside the system or a soil-development pasture cycle. To think that plants which require tillage can build soil like perennial pasture indicates environmental absurdity.

Turn off the TV and read to the kids for two hours one night. I’ll bet they’ll want more and you might turn it into a couple nights a week. You might actually be more lovable than when you’re harried and hurried, bustling them off to some extraneous entertainment event. And reading together doesn’t take any energy.

this book really is meant for the eyes of wealthy suburbanites and not the average american that is working though those evenings...

Buy a big freezer so you can buy meat in bulk and lay by. Get the money by selling your big flat-screen TV and canceling your Netflix account.

Large Chest Freezer: $990 Flat Screen TV: $199 Netflix account: $11.99 / mo

the flower of America’s masculinity

this is weirdest fucking thing ive ever read

If you have any land at all,

Americans ages 25-35 overwhelmingly don't! :)

playing a game on his microcomputer.

smartphone?

For lunches at work or school, send leftovers in resealable containers. Send an apple and some cheese slices. Unprocessed and home-packaged in washable containers works just fine. When you start cooking meals, you’ll have leftovers to put in these nifty reusable containers. This includes sandwiches—Teresa has sandwich-sized reusable containers. No need to wrap the sandwich in a plastic bag.

Bento.

But unless and until the East and North step up to their bioregional responsibilities, California will be unable to feed itself. Of course, if Californians decided to feed themselves anyway, hang the rest of the country, then the rest of us would need a crash course in season extension.

Land is moving out of production at an extremely rapid rate, both as a result of the aging farmer and due to land being purchased by nonfarmers.

Arable land going to waste under lawns and shrubbery

Right now too many environmentalists and open space advocates want to preserve farmland, without any regard to farmers. You can’t preserve farmland without preserving farmers.

I asked these young people, “How much of the produce eaten in St. Louis could be produced like this in the city limits?” Their response was quick and firm: “Every single pound of produce could be grown within the city.”

“But the parents who want to send their kids to a college-prep boarding school don’t want them working with compost piles. They don’t want to come on parents’ day and see sheep on the lawn.” How sad that we’ve become so sophisticated as a culture that food production has become yucky.

"yucky" is a word for classism ig

Local food systems must be integrated. In her great book City Chicks, Pat Foreman tells about a town in Belgium that offered three chickens to any household that wanted them. Two thousand families signed up for the birds. Those six thousand hens, in the first month of the program, dropped compostable biomass to the landfill by one hundred tons. This was the ultimate recycling program.

If every kitchen in America had enough chickens attached to it to eat all of the scraps coming out of that kitchen, no egg industry or commerce would be necessary in the whole country.

My daughter-in-law Sheri thinks that all the interstate medians should be planted with orchards tended by inmates. The inmates go out there to spray weeds anyway. Why not let them prune trees and pick fruit, selling it back to the community in prison farmers’ markets? They’d get out in the fresh air, earn some money, and do something meaningful. I’d buy from them. How about you?

Before we start promoting prison labor for our food system, maybe we should address the drug laws that disproportionately target black and brown youth?

I think we’d better quit administering tests in school. The risk of emotional trauma is too high.

the intense focus on standardized testing in schools is failing students and causing anxiety disorders, so you're onto something even if you're being sarcastic

A society ruled by fear is stagnant.

a society that stigmatizes failure results in that fearfullness

I’m being sexist on purpose here, because I enjoy being sexist.

😐😬

“We can’t even begin talking about local food until we get enough culinary expertise to know what to do with things when they are available. Nobody even knows how to cook anymore.”

Cooking should be a non-elective course in schools, to be taken repeatedly throughout the growing stages of life. Parents lack this skill at home, if they even have the time to do it, but we can raise a generation with these skills if we actually want to.

industrial factories fabricating artificial meals out of pseudo-food.

adjectives adjectives adjectives!

We buy peanut butter from a Mennonite bulk foods business in the county. The ingredients? Peanuts, salt. And if you want, you can get it without salt.

peanut paste, in other words

While many people are enamored of Star Trek pill-meals,

Not a thing. Star Trek shows its stellar explorers eating fully prepared meals from a "replicator," which is better compared to a microwave. Voyager and Deep Space Nine both introduced the concept of growing food aboard ships and preparing hand cooked meals in addition to replicator rations, both for health/morale and smarter resource consumption. Star Trek as a sci-fi media franchise remains one of the most progressive imaginings of a future life in space.

Many years ago I remember reading an article about a farm unable to compost feedlot manure because it didn’t have enough microbes in it to decompose. The manure was rendered virtually sterile with all the parasiticides, antibiotics, and other additives in the cattle diet.

mixing in some microbially active manure would seem to be the solution

That is why I advocate getting rid of the parakeet cage and replacing it with a couple of chickens.

whats all this about parakeets? people rarely have pet birds and the pet policy wouldnt extend to chickens anyway

Many varieties of candy can last virtually indefinitely.

sugar is used to preserve foods so this one shouldn't be that shocking

Stated another way, if it would decompose, it was food.

that is to say, if there things that eat it, it is food

That a self-regenerating system could exist was a strange notion indeed.

one merely has to look at a forest to know better

And now, of course, research everywhere is showing a direct correlation between lower breast cancer rates and early breast-feeding.

Of the infant or themselves?

Anyone who refused to jump from the chemical soil ship by that time deserved to go bankrupt, lose their farm, or whatever. That sounds hard, but it’s kind of like saying a pedophile just can’t help it. I’m sorry, a soil abuser that can’t help it? No way. They can all help it.

😓

Quit feeding herbivores grain. Period.

👏 👏 👏

Only people with their head stuck in celebrity magazines

i cant imagine a person under the age of 45 who still reads magazines

You would think the liberals, who can’t give other people’s money away fast enough, would be the ones wanting to strip out all the energy.

Considering the fair allocation of resources to be a community priority gloves pretty well with environmental stewardship, actually.

The house police said it was to protect a future buyer in case the house was ever sold.

protect them from what?

Farm ponds are actually one of the best returns on investment in basic ecology enhancement and hydrology cycling.

brain-damaged

the author uses this term to mean "misled" or "uneducated"

The critical thing to understand is that grazing can be done in a way that builds soil and heals the land, or it can be done in a way that destroys the land. Grazing is not inherently good or bad. It is the grazing management, the pattern, that makes it ecologically positive or ecologically negative. Nomads have certainly destroyed plenty of land through overgrazing, as have American farmers.

Soy products induce infertility, make boys effeminate,

these statements are unproven

If manure is properly managed, it will never smell.

we’re much more interested in figuring out how to give free heavy metal–laden swine flu vaccinations to our little kiddos

the mercury derivative in vaccines is not exactly a qualifier for "heavy metal laden"