More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Joel Salatin
Read between
January 8 - January 23, 2023
We’re the first culture in the world that routinely eats things that have never lived. In spiritual parlance, we’re ingesting things that are an abomination to our bodies—and then requesting prayer for the ailments that result. God set up life and death, living food and its decomposition and digestion, as visceral object lessons, daily, of our dependence on Him. Ecology does not give us the liberty to deny its principles and neither does God.
Rather than being the scourge of the earth, herbivores are actually the most efficacious soil-building and carbon-sequestering partners out there. But if we allow continuous grazing and overgrazing, they are the most destructive partners out there.
We develop a food pyramid with carbohydrates on the bottom and thirty years later we realize it created an obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemic. It should give us all pause that we would be a much healthier nation if the government had never told us how to eat.
Weston A. Price traveled the world during the early twentieth century and discovered that populations who had not been adulterated with processed foods from Western diets had almost no incidence of chronic illnesses.
Milk-borne pathogens could be prevented by humbly returning to cows eating grass and milk pails being judiciously and vigorously scrubbed with hot soapy water. In hindsight, it seems like such a simple fix, but in the context of the day, lacking bacterial understanding and infrastructure, it was easier just to boil the milk. After all, if food and life were fundamentally mechanical, what difference did it make whether the milk was heated or not? It still looked the same.
Even worms will not eat most of the stuff from the center aisles of the supermarket. Try feeding Cheerios and Twizzlers to earthworms. They won’t eat the stuff. Why should we? Is our body not the “TEMPLE OF THE HOLY GHOST” (1 Corinthians 6:19)?
We don’t have the beavers anymore, although what they did represented a major disturbance on the earth. We don’t have unowned land with millions of bison, wolves, and passenger pigeons. But we have pigs, electric fences, cattle, and poultry.
I don’t believe using petroleum is wrong, any more than using any God-given resource is wrong. What is wrong is using it like a drunken sailor and not leveraging it for multi-generational landscape resiliency. Or using it toward inappropriate ends.
As we use that water both in the house and to water our gardens and flower beds, it gradually seeps into the soil and then into aquifers. This maintains base flow, springs, and creeks so rivers remain healthy. Instead of the buildings and grounds committee at the church buying fertilizer for the lawn, how about installing a cistern to make the whole facility water independent and publicize the amount of water in the reservoir to help everyone understand ecological dependency and carrying capacity?
Interestingly, the Levitical laws defined a way of life that liberated the Israelites from the diseases and heartaches routinely affecting neighboring cultures. While a casual reading may give the perception that these regulations regarding land, livestock, and food were burdensome, they actually liberated the society from heartache. Consider the prohibition against cutting fruit trees as they entered the promised land. While on the surface that may appear to be burdensome, it actually provided sustained sustenance to the people. Jesus says, “MY YOKE IS EASY, AND MY BURDEN IS LIGHT” (Matthew
...more
Now juxtapose that with a grass-based cattle operation. First of all, the grass is a perennial so it doesn’t have to be planted every season. The perennial has a totally different energy flow than an annual. Rather than storing its energy in the seeds (barley, wheat, corn), it stores energy in the roots. That means the perennial offers more soil fertility; it actually builds soil more effectively than annuals. Here’s the big kicker: the cattle self-harvest the crop. We don’t have to run a combine over it, haul it to an elevator or storage bin, dry it down, and then haul it to the animals.
...more
When we let the cow be the cow, in all her simple glory, she doesn’t enslave us to expensive infrastructure. That’s our doing, not hers. The average farm in America requires $4 worth of buildings and equipment to generate $1 in annual gross sales. At our farm, the ratio is 50 cents to $1. That’s an 800 percent difference in capital costs. Note that I’m not putting the land into this equation at all. Heavy capitalization costs enslave farmers to the equipment dealer, the banker, the mortgage company. A liberated farmer doesn’t spend much time on bended knee in front of lending institutions.
...more
On our farm, we haven’t bought a bag of chemical fertilizer since we bought the place in 1961. We use no herbicides, no pesticides. We follow the cows with free-roaming chickens (yes, those risky, insecure birds) in the eggmobiles to provide parasite and grub control. Rather than spending money on toxins, we simply gather thousands of dollars’ worth of eggs as a by-product of the pasture sanitation system.
On our farm, an excellent example of liberating infrastructure is the pastured poultry shelter. These simple ten feet by twelve feet by two feet high floorless boxes house seventy-five broilers apiece and we move them, by hand, every morning across the pasture to another spot. They’re cheap, simple, and portable. That means we can get in and get out of the business enterprise easily. If we decide to downsize or upscale, we can finance both retraction and addition with self-generated cash flow. That offers flexibility.
A liberated farm should concentrate on perennials, on-farm composting systems, diversified production, functional immune systems, and multiple-use portable lightweight economical infrastructure.
Again, I don’t think it’s a sin to engage in food commerce over long distances. The spice trade is well established. But the backbone of any community is a local-centric food system.
If you read cooking diaries of colonial Americans like Dolly Madison or Martha Washington, you’ll see all sorts of interesting foods few of us would even be able to identify today: quince and currants. The supermarket only has a couple of varieties of apples; our forebears knew the nuances of dozens of different varieties.
On our farm, we have cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, ducks, lambs, vegetables, fruit, honeybees, forests—it’s breathtaking choreography, always dancing. Synergistic, symbiotic relationships are simply more interesting than simplistic sameness.
This is one reason why families in our modern self-reliance movements gravitate toward rabbits and chickens along with their gardens and beehives. If the power goes out and you lose what’s in the refrigerator, the chickens will lay eggs tomorrow and you can dress the rabbits for dinner.
Even old-school agronomists are now realizing that the key to healthy plants is healthy soil and the key to healthy soil is humus. Organic matter. Springiness and sponginess. It’s created by decaying biomass—carbon.
Is it inviting when stench, dead carcasses, and pesticides assault our senses? No. Our farms should be places where our children praise its awesomeness to their friends. When you have abundant and varied wildlife and surprises tucked around corners, the farm is a magnetic place.
Rather than one huge hoophouse, for example, we have five smaller ones. Between them are fruit trees and garden terraces. This takes the stark structural edges off the landscape, softening it, greening it, and nesting it into its ecological womb.
According to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, man’s whole duty is to please God now so we can live with Him for eternity (my paraphrase).
Dandelions, interestingly, especially attract and synthesize calcium. As a weed, their presence indicates calcium deficiency in the soil. They grow well where calcium, a major plant mineral requirement, is in short supply. Isn’t it awesome that the Creator designed a plant with a long taproot to love growing in calcium-deficient places in order to remedy the calcium deficiency?
North America supported far more pounds of animals in pre-European times than it does today, even with factory animal houses, hybrid seeds, John Deere, chemicals, and petroleum. And all those farmers. Wow.
Grass, or forage, is far more efficient at capturing these sunbeams than shrubs or trees. Think about grass. It’s like an expressway. Almost no branches. Shrubs and trees are a network of branches. Things have to slow down to make those turns. If you really want to build soil, you do it with grass. But grass has a high metabolism; it grows fast and then dies. The herbivore is what prunes it back as it approaches senescence,
Never before have we had the technology to enable us to leverage the biomass cycle more efficiently than we can today. With modern aerobic composting methods, chippers, front-end loaders, and electric fence, a low-energy carbon-centric fertility system is within our grasp. We certainly don’t need chemical fertilizers. That more than 75 percent of material filling America’s landfills is biomass, the caught sunbeams God wanted converted into fertile soil, should bring us all to our knees in repentance and confession.
Simon Fairlie’s book Meat: A Benign Extravagance. With the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel, he dissects the animal agriculture question and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that animals function in numerous powerfully positive ways. From salvaging food scraps to anointing the soil with manure, the role of animals is broad and eclectic.
Heavily leveraged farmers inherently have a harder time making good long-term decisions because all they can see is tomorrow’s payment. If that’s all you can see, you’ll sacrifice the permanent on the altar of the immediate every single time.
We’re overfed and undernourished. The USDA began telling us what to eat after World War II: hydrogenated fat, carbohydrates, margarine. Meanwhile, big food manufacturers loved that we were exiting the kitchen and giving them proxy status over our menus.
Just for the record, I don’t think it’s a sin to drink a soft drink once in a while. Indulgences are allowed. But drinking one a day is a different story. The cumulative effect of what is now known as the modern American diet, where virtually everything is highly processed, laden with sugar, and grown from chemicalized deficient soil, is a seriously sick population. America now leads the world in the five leading chronic diseases. That’s not a good place to be number one.
estimates that if roughly one in three households in America had a few chickens to eat their kitchen scraps and those of their neighbors, it would completely displace the entire factory commercial egg
We universally applaud efforts at zoos to create natural habitats for the animals and then think nothing of buying food—on site—from vendors who acquire their ingredients from production systems that don’t give a hoot about habitat for domestic livestock.
Perennials Trump Annuals. Stay with me here. A perennial is a plant that doesn’t go through its life cycle in one year. Trees, grass, asparagus—these are perennials. Annuals need to be planted every year—corn, soybeans, sugarcane, cotton, wheat, rice. Guess which ones our taxpayers subsidize? Only annuals. But in God’s template, perennials rule; annuals take a backseat. Carbon-Cycling. Until the last few decades, the world ran on solar-driven carbon cycles. Deep, fertile soils built up under herbivores, rest, and disturbance cycles. Chemical fertilizers have and always will be completely
...more
Goodness, the Swiss built their entire farming system around pigs eating whey leftovers from cheese-making high up in the Alpine meadows. If you grow chickens for an industrial factory outfit, you can’t have any other chickens on the place—not even for your own personal consumption. You
One final benefit: no carpal tunnel syndrome. Food and farming systems that enjoy significant diversity also require many different processes. Maintenance tasks from one hour to the next involve quite different types of work. That, in turn, exercises a whole different set of muscles throughout the day. Variety truly is the spice of life. Think, however, about the kind of farm encouraged by the industrial system. It’s devoid of variety and all of nature’s checks and balances. Farms should be seen as art forms. They are landscape sculptures. They should not be boring and same old, same old.
The parallels are profound. The adage about the family that prays together stays together is equally valid for the physical: the family that eats together stays together. Just imagine if the Christian community rose up, en masse, against these orthodoxies? It would literally turn our civilization upside down, and I think I speak for most of us in the religious right, that we think that would be a good thing. We fret and fume about social misconduct. But what about us participating in an orthodoxy that defies, denies, and denigrates the narrow way God established for His creation?
