Religious lunatic farmer
“Greetings from the non-bar code people,” began one recent missive, before launching into a high-flying jeremiad against our disconnected “multi-national global corporate techno-glitzy food system” with its “industrial fecal factory concentration camp farms.” (The dangerous pileup of modifiers is a hallmark of Joel’s rhetorical style.) Like any good jeremiad, this one eventually transits from despair to hope, noting that the “yearning in the human soul to smell a flower, pet a pig and enjoy food with a face is stronger now than anytime in history,” before moving into a matter-of-fact discussion of this year’s prices and the paramount importance of sending in your order blanks and showing up to collect your chickens on time.
I met several of Polyface’s parishioners on a Thursday in June…
Heiderose Kober:
I just put down my deposit for my 2008 share in my neighborhood CSA. No bar codes! And my free-range chickens are laying right through the winter so far.
see: http://www.localharvest.org
A CSA, (for Community Supported Agriculture) is a way for people to have a direct relationship with the farmer who provides them with a basket of produce every week during growing season. By making a financial commitment to a farm, people become “members” (or “shareholders,” or “subscribers”) of the CSA. Farmers don’t have to go into debt to plant and don’t have to take time away from their work during their busiest time to market their produce. Most CSA farmers prefer that members pay for the season up-front, but many farmers will work with you to stagger payments.
A CSA season typically runs from late spring through early fall. The number of CSAs in the United States was estimated at 50 in 1990, and has since grown to well over 1000.
1 January 2008, 10:24 pmgdenby:
While Mr. Pollan’s writing makes good use of Mr. Salatin’s zeal to get the reader’s attention, this brief article only hints that the organic farmer must attend to his chores “religiously.” All farming is hard, and organic in America is more so. It takes years of careful practices just to get most land clean. In “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” from which the article is drawn, its stated that Polyface Farm’s land had been only marginally productive, but after decades of careful practice now produces a very large quantity of extremely high quality food.
So, if you are lucky enough to live near someone who’s putting that kind of effort into food, drop a few $$ on them. You will most likely be back for more.
2 January 2008, 12:56 pmStan:
I am reading Joel Salatin’s book. Everything I Want to Do is Illegal right now. Strongly recommended. Plenty of girst there for those who might want to make connections between the eco-libertarian folk like JS (who is also quite religious) and the rest of us who are looking into some form of food praxis politics.
2 January 2008, 5:33 pmDeAnander:
Posting intermittently from my new home in Canada, with apologies for the lengthy silence while I was in the awful process of actually moving…
Salatin is a mixed bag fersure. He is unalterably opposed to abortion and a strong proponent of “traditional family values,” i.e. the patriarchal household with its paterfamilias laying down the law. Just goes to show that hardly anyone is gonna get everything right every time… his is not a flavour of xtianity that appeals to me, at all. But his agrarian praxis is brilliant, and his interpretation of Scripture as enjoining “Creation care” on humanity as both duty and joy, sure beats the disembodied world-hatred that so often goes with Paulinist xtianity.
5 January 2008, 12:43 amStan:
WELCOME BACK!!!!! (:
D’accord on all counts.
The reason I am recommeding Salatin’s book here is that it is a long, itemized list of his experiences making a prima facie case that ag regulations are a mechanism to increase and consolidate the power of agribiz over the small farmer, and that the biophobic propaganda against sustainable practices in ag underwrite these regs. This book will infuriate us, in the same ways that Sandor Katz book — The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved — does.
Great to have you back, De.
5 January 2008, 9:41 amDeAnander:
With you all the way on the two edged sword of regulation. Katz’ retelling of the story of Pasteurisation of milk is a revelatory read. BTW, in Canada the loopholes which Salatin found for poultry production are closed; my Canadian friends with 150 acres in inland BC cannot even sell chickens from their farmstead, all animals and fowl must be carted 5 hours away to an industrial slaughterhouse. They are scratching their heads as to how to make any kind of income from their land — as Salatin wrote, everything they want to do is illegal. The game is rigged so that only the big players can afford to conform to the rules, and so that local food production and marketing is made nearly impossible, while long-haul factory farming is made normative.
5 January 2008, 11:33 pm