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Joel Salatin on Human-Scale Farming
Nov. 18th, 2010 09:25 pmI grew up next to a fairly good sized dairy. "Fairly good sized" means barn with milking line, retention pond for effluent, acreage for grazing, and . . . drum roll please . . . an effluent disposal system known colloquially as a shit sprinkler. We're talking reciprocating industrial sprinklers fed with 4-inch aluminum pipe that shot a mix of cow manure, urine and water a good 50 feet. During his recent funeral, I declined to mention that my step brother, sickened by that damned sprayer, once grabbed his wrenches and set out to dismantle that sprayer . . . only to get there just as the farmer half a mile a way turned on the pump. He was quite a bit dirtier than he had to be, simply because he dropped a wrench and had to go back to get it.
Yes, the grass that gathered this daily shit storm grew very lush and green. But it wasn't a field upon which one could walk. It was too lush. The fibers of the shit never compacted, as they would on a field naturally grazed. And the cows forced into these grass bogs would inevitably wallow in the periodic covered ponds of shit, almost indistiguishable from regular grass-covered field, emerging later with shit and dirt caking their legs well beyond their knees, sometimes up to their bellies.
Add to the fun the fact that the farmer would dispose of dead cows in these bogs. Not through burial, mind you, but simply by hoisting the poor beast in a front loader and unceremoniously dumping the carcass in a low spot unlikely to be investigated by the neighbors. Our dogs, free roamers as dogs should be, would often come home with treats, littering the yard with femurs, skulls, ribs and other tasty goodies. Mom, a kindergarten teacher, would wait until the dogs had their fill, then would take them to school, bury them in the sandbox, and allow the kids to dig for dinosaur fossils. As kids ourselves we would very occasionally investigate this boggy no-man's-land, this source of doggy treats, to find corpses bloated to twice their normal cow-y size. If you could find rocks in this over-sprayed jungle of grass growth, it was fun to chuck them at the leather balloon and watch them rebound with Super Ball force, giving a resonant bass drum "thump" in the process. Fun, that is, until one actually burst. Ye gods, the smell.
And did I mention what happened when it rained? This is Western Washington, after all. It rains. Rain is water that falls from the sky. Sometimes a lot of water falls in a short period. This water gathers on the ground until whatever structure the ground has to offer fails. The water then wanders wherever gravity will allow it to travel, picking up any water soluble substances -- like, say, cow shit -- and carrying it along for the ride. To, for example, our basement. Every have two inches of greenish water fouling your toys, kids?
Enough of me. I'm excited by farmers preaching a new type of agriculture, one that doesn't rely overly much of specialization, one that respects the land in ways that might allow the land to remain fecund and usable.
( Under the cut, enjoy Joel Salatin in a multi-part You Tube lecture. )
And lest anyone write this guy's ideas off as hippie kumbaya treacle, do remember that he grosses about $1.8 million a year on 1500 acres. (He gives a short rundown on the profits and costs in Part VIII; the $1.8 million figure I got on a recent C-Realm interview with a man who did some work for Salatin. It's in the episode titled "Drifting with the Plow.") Yes, it is more labor intensive, obviously; but I would suggest that avoiding labor costs might be the principal reason agriculture is morphing so drastically into the unrecognizable and absurd practices we currently witness with horror.
Yes, the grass that gathered this daily shit storm grew very lush and green. But it wasn't a field upon which one could walk. It was too lush. The fibers of the shit never compacted, as they would on a field naturally grazed. And the cows forced into these grass bogs would inevitably wallow in the periodic covered ponds of shit, almost indistiguishable from regular grass-covered field, emerging later with shit and dirt caking their legs well beyond their knees, sometimes up to their bellies.
Add to the fun the fact that the farmer would dispose of dead cows in these bogs. Not through burial, mind you, but simply by hoisting the poor beast in a front loader and unceremoniously dumping the carcass in a low spot unlikely to be investigated by the neighbors. Our dogs, free roamers as dogs should be, would often come home with treats, littering the yard with femurs, skulls, ribs and other tasty goodies. Mom, a kindergarten teacher, would wait until the dogs had their fill, then would take them to school, bury them in the sandbox, and allow the kids to dig for dinosaur fossils. As kids ourselves we would very occasionally investigate this boggy no-man's-land, this source of doggy treats, to find corpses bloated to twice their normal cow-y size. If you could find rocks in this over-sprayed jungle of grass growth, it was fun to chuck them at the leather balloon and watch them rebound with Super Ball force, giving a resonant bass drum "thump" in the process. Fun, that is, until one actually burst. Ye gods, the smell.
And did I mention what happened when it rained? This is Western Washington, after all. It rains. Rain is water that falls from the sky. Sometimes a lot of water falls in a short period. This water gathers on the ground until whatever structure the ground has to offer fails. The water then wanders wherever gravity will allow it to travel, picking up any water soluble substances -- like, say, cow shit -- and carrying it along for the ride. To, for example, our basement. Every have two inches of greenish water fouling your toys, kids?
Enough of me. I'm excited by farmers preaching a new type of agriculture, one that doesn't rely overly much of specialization, one that respects the land in ways that might allow the land to remain fecund and usable.
( Under the cut, enjoy Joel Salatin in a multi-part You Tube lecture. )And lest anyone write this guy's ideas off as hippie kumbaya treacle, do remember that he grosses about $1.8 million a year on 1500 acres. (He gives a short rundown on the profits and costs in Part VIII; the $1.8 million figure I got on a recent C-Realm interview with a man who did some work for Salatin. It's in the episode titled "Drifting with the Plow.") Yes, it is more labor intensive, obviously; but I would suggest that avoiding labor costs might be the principal reason agriculture is morphing so drastically into the unrecognizable and absurd practices we currently witness with horror.
