You might think every organic farm does this sort of thing as a matter of course, but in recent years the movement has grown into a full-fledged industry, and along the way the bigger players have adopted industrial methods—raising chickens in factory farms, feeding grain to cattle on feedlots, and falling back on monocultures of all kinds. “Industrial organic” might sound like an oxymoron, but it is a reality, and to Joel Salatin industrial anything is the enemy. He contends that the problems of modern agriculture—from pollution to chemical dependence to foodborne illness—flow from an inherent conflict between, on one hand, an industrial mind-set based on specialization and simplification, and, on the other, the intrinsic nature of biological systems, whose health depends on diversity and complexity.
On a farm, complexity sounds an awful lot like work, and some of Salatin’s neighbors think he’s out of his mind, moving his cows every day and towing chicken coops hither and yon. “When they hear ‘moving the cattle,’ they picture a miserable day of hollering, pickup trucks, and cans of Skoal,” Salatin told me as we prepared to do just that. “But when I open the gate, the cows come running because they know there’s ice cream waiting for them on the other side.” Looking more like a maître d’ than a rancher, Salatin holds open a section of electric fencing, and 80 exceptionally amiable cows—they nuzzle him like big cats—saunter into the next pasture, looking for their favorite grasses: bovine ice cream.
For labor—in addition to his six-foot, square-jawed, and red-suspendered self—the farm has Salatin’s wife, Teresa (who helps run their retail shop and does the bookkeeping), children Rachel and Daniel, and a pair of paid interns. (Polyface has become such a mecca for aspiring farmers that the waiting list for an internship is two years long.) Salatin, whose ever-present straw hat says “I’m having fun” in a way that the standard monogrammed feed cap never could, insists, however, that “the animals do all the real work around here.” So the chickens fertilize the cow pasture, the sheep weed it, the turkeys mow the grass in the orchard and eat the bugs that would otherwise molest the grapes, and the pigs—well, the pigs have the sweetest job of all.
After we moved the cows, Salatin showed me the barn, a ramshackle, open-sided structure where 100 head of cattle spend the winter, every day consuming 25 pounds of hay and producing 50 pounds of waste. Every few days, Salatin adds another layer of wood chips or straw or leaves to the bedding, building a manure layer cake that’s three feet thick by winter’s end. Each layer he lards with a little corn. All winter the cake composts, producing heat to warm the barn and fermenting the corn. Why corn? There’s nothing a pig likes more than 40-proof corn, and nothing he’s better equipped to do than root it out with his powerful snout. So as soon as the cows go out to pasture in March, the “pigerators,” as Salatin calls them, are let loose in the barn, where they proceed systematically to turn and aerate the compost in their quest for an alcoholic morsel.
“That’s the sort of farm machinery I like—never needs its oil changed, appreciates over time, and when you’re done with it, you eat it.” Buried clear to their butts in compost, a bobbing sea of hams and corkscrew tails, these are the happiest pigs you’ll ever meet. Salatin reached down and brought a handful of the compost to my nose; it smelled as sweet and warm as the forest floor in summertime, a miracle of transubstantiation. After the pigs have completed their alchemy, Salatin spreads the compost on the pastures. There, it will feed the grasses so that the grasses might again feed the cows, the cows the chickens, and so on until the snow falls, in one long, beautiful, and utterly convincing proof that, in a world where grass can eat sunlight and food animals can eat grass, there is indeed a free lunch.
Did I mention that this lunch also happens to be delicious?
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