Parallel Economies - Agriculture

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PARALLEL ECONOMIES - AGRICULTURE

The Lunatic Farmer Joel Salatin | November 16, 2022

Hi everyone—

I had the distinct privilege and honor yesterday to speak here at Hillsdale College in Michigan. This college is a bastion of liberty and freedom, refusing even to take the GI bill because of the government strings attached. Since they wanted my remarks written to be printed in the conference proceedings, I wrote this speech and therefore have the unusual opportunity to get you a copy. It was a 40 minute speech to give; you can probably read it in 20-25 minutes. Glad to hear your thoughts.

Blessings,

joel

HILLSDALE COLLEGE

PARALLEL ECONOMIES—AGRICULTURE

Joel Salatin

This spring when Russia invaded Ukraine, fertilizer prices increased in some cases 400 percent and global grain shipments sputtered, our farm didn’t feel anything because we don’t buy fertilizer and we don’t buy foreign grain.  Suddenly our years of being marginalized by the agri-industrial complex inverted and interest in our methods and madness exploded.  Both farmers and non-farmers began asking “how do we disentangle from the system?”

“Just in time,” the darling inventory phrase of recent decades, changed to “just in case” as supply lines fractured.  Culturally, a society detached from menial life tasks like farm chores and kitchen duties, suddenly found itself vulnerable to unforeseen fragilities.  The food and farming sector goal switched from efficiency to resiliency.  In the spring of 2020, as covid’s black swan permeated the world, store shelves went bare.  Farmers euthanized (that means killed and threw away) millions of chickens, turkeys, and hogs because mega-processing plants couldn’t maintain operations.

At our house, we neither worried nor feared because we had freezers full of meat and a basement full of canned garden produce.  I don’t say all this proudly; I say it gratefully, and as a challenge to everyone:  freedom comes from participation.  We’ve spent a couple of generations exiting historically normal tasks and behavior, from integrating livestock and crops, growing gardens, buying locally and cultivating domestic culinary arts.  We even abandoned breast feeding our babies for a couple of decades.

We thought squeezable cheese and subcontracting kitchen duties to mega-corporate entities, replacing decomposition with chemical fertilizer, honey with refined sugar, and butter with hydrogenated vegetable oil would launch us into a new freedom nirvana.  But instead it shackled us, enslaved us to nefarious scientists bringing us fertilizer and menus from laboratories instead of from God’s ecological womb.  Those of us who continued to participate in historically-normal farm chores, garden production, local or biologically grown sustenance, and domestic culinary arts are today enjoying more independence and freedom.  You cannot have freedom without participation.

Here are two questions to ponder.  First, would America’s food system have convulsed as violently if instead of 300 mega-processing facilities employing 5,000 people apiece we funneled our food through 300,000 community-scaled 20-50-employee facilities?  The second question is when rocky disruptions affect our ship of state, would you rather navigate dangerous shoals in a maneuverable speedboat or an aircraft carrier that takes 10 miles to turn around?


Let’s examine what a food and farming parallel universe would look like by juxtaposing current objectives with the lunatic fringe alternative.


1.  CHEAP FOOD VERSUS PRECIOUS FOOD.  If one thing defines American agriculture, it is dedication to cheap food.  American per capita expenditure on food is the lowest in the world; our per capita expenditure on health care is the highest.  Cheap food promised to give us spendable cash to attend football games and casinos, cruises and movies. 

It created a love affair with Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOS) that became incubators for disease.  Floating on a sea of cheap energy, these facilities promised mechanized farming and pharmaceutical health.  Subtherapeutic antibiotic use created a world of superbugs like mRSA and cDiff.  A brand new lexicon burst on the American vocabulary:  campylobacter, lysteria, E. coli, salmonella, food allergies, Type 2 diabetes:  these are nature, beaten and abused, on its knees, pleading and begging “Enough!”   

Instead of God’s designed decomposition driving fertility, petroleum-based chemical fertilizers substituted, like an intravenous feeding tube replacing edible food. In short order, our agriculture system created a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico, infertile frogs, and three-legged salamanders.  And now our life expectancy is dropping; we’re addicted to pharmaceuticals; physical and emotional maladies plague our nation.

Perhaps cheap food policy’s most damaging effect is on farmers themselves.  The primary custodians of our natural resources, not to mention food, feel marginalized and unappreciated.  When’s the last time you heard about a school guidance counselor advising:  “Mary, you’re really sharp, with great grades and honors credentials.  You should be a farmer.”  Burdened with the unnecessary and ridiculous responsibility of feeding the world, American farmers now number fewer than our prison population.  It gives me pause to realize that my book You Can Farm would have much bigger buyer interest if it had been You Can Be a Successful Inmate.  Stewarding our air, soil, and water with our best and brightest will only come when we have a precious food policy. That’s up to consumers, not farmers.

Can you imagine a cheap religion policy?  A cheap road-building policy?  A cheap information technology policy?  Dear folks, you cannot abdicate precious food respect without serious consequences.  As a culture, we must leave this cheap food universe and get in the escape pod of precious food.


2.  QUANTITY VERSUS QUALITY.  Bushels and tonnage are all we measure.  By every metric, over the last century nutritional quality plummeted.  Today you have to eat three times as much broccoli to get the same nutrition as you did in 1940.

Our farm participated in a pastured egg nutrient study several years ago.  The official USDA nutrition label for conventional supermarket eggs lists folic acid as 48 micrograms per egg.  Our Polyface eggs averaged 1,038.  Grass finished beef has 300 percent more riboflavin than grain-finished.  Pastured livestock offer much higher percentages of conjugated linoleic acid; indeed, only two weeks of grain feeding chases it out of the body on beef cattle.

The Bionutrient Food Association is documenting the wildly disparate nutrient contents of various foods.  In carrots, for example, they found that you would need to eat more than 10 carrots of the worst to get the same nutrition as one carrot of the best.  To my knowledge, nobody in the conventional food and farming sector is seeking better quality; they’re just trying to fill bins and trucks.  Doesn’t matter if it’s junk.

We can all thank Austrian biochemist Justus von Liebig for beginning this downward trend when in 1837 he told the world that all life is simply a rearrangement of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous (NPK).  Replacing the magnificent complex relational biological community with simple chemicals denies the human microbiome its optimal sustenance.

Sir Albert Howard, who developed the scientific aerobic composting method and brought it to the world in his iconic 1943 book, An Agricultural Testament, wrote “Artificial manures [that’s what he called chemical fertilizer] lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals, and finally to artificial men and women.”  I would add “who can only be kept alive with artificials.”  A functional authentic agriculture requires a focus on quality.       


3.  SEGREGATED VERSUS INTEGRATED.  Throughout history, agriculture required a highly integrated approach because until cheap energy and mechanization, distribution was laborious.  You couldn’t pack more animals in a house than you could bring in feedstocks and haul out manure by draft power. 

Indeed, from 1900-1910, with the industrial revolution well underway, along with rapid urbanization, newspaper editors and city planners feared metropolitan implosion.  Dependent on draft power to haul in fodder and livery supplies and haul out manure, cities were sinking under transportational inefficiency.  Poop covered the streets.  It was on your shoes when you went into the bakery.  Travelers drug manure into hotels.  Patrons carried poop into restaurants.

On farms, the same constraints required integrated systems.  Crops required proximate animals in order to receive the blessing of their manure.  In 1946, the average morsel of food in America traveled only 40 miles from field to fork.  Today, the average is 1,500 miles.  And we’ve gone from a calorie of energy per calorie of food to 15 calories of energy to a calorie of food.  We’ve become that inefficient, or looked at another way, that segregated.

No longer dependent on nature’s fertility, we mine our fertilizer from far away places to be placed on land that grows crops to be fed hundreds of miles away to animals that are trucked to mega-processing facilities for packaged food shipped to the Costco near you.  Meanwhile, the historic blessing of manure becomes a liability, clogging our streams and poisoning our groundwater because it’s too much in one place for our ecological womb to metabolize. 

Sir Albert Howard also envisioned diamond cities and predicted water-based sewage systems would fade into obsolescence by the 1960s.  He imagined 25-house developments placed in a diamond shape so each one would have access to passive solar heat.  The one acre inside the diamond would employ a master gardener and composter who would collect the human excrement each day, compost it, and grow highly nutritious fruits and vegetables to feed the 25 households surrounding the garden.  Isn’t that beautiful?           

Our college campuses should all have a chicken house attached to the back door of the dining hall so kitchen scraps can be converted to eggs onsite.  All roofs can be guttered to cisterns equipped with pumps operated by exercise bikes in the fitness room.  Students could exercise by pumping the water back up the roof, which would grow vegetables that would cascade down the walls for fresh picking from dorms and classrooms.  The vegetated roofs would cool the buildings enough to eliminate the need for air conditioning.  The cisterns would eliminate stormwater infrastructure.  The campus would be divided into quadrants and each day students would waken to an app notice telling them where fresh blackberries, apples, or strawberries were ready for picking; the students would graze their way across campus.  All buildings would have attached solariums, generating passive solar heat and growing cool-hardy leafy greens all winter, eliminating trucking from California.  The campus that institutes these simple low-tech improvements will be a beacon of hope and help to a world wallowing in hopelessness and helplessness.  Could it be Hilsdale?


4.  CENTRALIZED VERSUS DECENTRALIZED.  People assume that to feed the world, we need big things.  Big chicken factories.  Big combines.  Big fields.  No we don’t.  A lot of littles can outcompete one big.

I appreciate big and small are subjective terms and by USDA standards, our Polyface Farm is now a large farm.  But compared to Tyson, we’re a drop in the ocean.  On our farm, scaling up is not by centralization; it’s by duplication.  The difference is profound.

The average American farmer is now 60 years old.  In the next 15 years, 50 percent—half—of all agricultural equity is going to change hands.  That’s farmland, equipment, and buildings.  No civilization has ever seen that big a change in ownership in peace; only in conquest, like the Huns rampaging Rome.  I’m not suggesting the U.S. is getting ready to be overrun by Huns—maybe we are or maybe we aren’t.  But what we’re seeing in the geo-political agricultural landscape is unprecedented.  Any business book will tell you that when the average practitioner in any vocation or economic sector is more than 35 years old, that’s a sector in decline.  This successional problem isn’t because farming is obsolete. It’s largely due to cost of entry for the next generation.  When young people can’t get in, old people can’t get out.

For example, if a young person wanted to grow chickens for Tyson, the first item on the agenda is a half a million dollar building.  Would you call that an impediment to entry?  Compare that to our pastured poultry model which requires 10 ft. X 12 ft. X 2 ft. high floorless boxes containing 75 broilers (meat chickens) moved daily across the field.  All you have to do is cancel your Netflix subscription for a couple of months and you have enough cash to build one and enter the chicken business.  If you like it, you can build another with retained earnings.  If you love it as much as we do, over time you can build more than 200 of them, debt free.  Dave Ramsey would be proud.

America has roughly 35 million acres of lawn and 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses.  We can spread production over thousands and thousands of places; not a single confinement animal facility is necessary.  We have millions of acres locked up.  On our farm, pastured pork and forest-housed pigs using high tech electric fencing and moved every few days exercises the ecology and eliminates concrete, fans, and despicable manure lagoons. 

People who embrace pod schools, home schooling, and educational coops know that centralization, which is akin to institutionalization, does not a better education make.  The same applies to agriculture.  Spread it out; democratize it; entrepreneurialize it.


5.  MECHANICAL VERSUS BIOLOGICAL.  The Greco-Roman disconnected compartmentalized linear reductionist individualized parts-oriented mindset views life as fundamentally mechanical.  It views living things like inanimate piles of protoplasm to be manipulated however cleverly hubris can imagine, like 3-D printing or metal widgets.

Until recently, this was simply an incorrect idea.  But with today’s disdain for death and cultish worship of animals, it has new allure.  My dog is my aunt is my cat is my child now permeates society with the fundamental notion that life does not require death.  Thinking they’ve entered a new evolutionary elevated spiritual awareness, these folks actually exhibit a profound devolutionary spiral into anti-ecological thinking.  Everything is eating and being eaten.

If you don’t believe that, go lie naked in your flower bed for a week and see what gets eaten.  Or in the pig pen.  Nothing more dramatically illustrates this principle than a compost pile, teeming with bugs and worms, all eating and in turn being eaten.  The life, death, decomposition, regeneration cycle is as foundational to our ecological womb as the need for sunlight and water.  Respect during life creates either desecration or sacredness in sacrifice.  At our farm, we dare to ask how to honor the pigness of the pig and the tomatoness of the tomato, understanding that such questions define ethical and moral boundaries around affirmation and being-hood.  A society that refuses to ask how to have happy pigs will soon refuse to ask how to have happy people.  If we’re going to honor the Tomness of Tom and the Maryness of Mary, it starts with honoring the pigness of the pig.

If you’re eating something that won’t decompose, it probably won’t digest.  Shelf stable cheese isn’t food at all.  Good cheese should mold at room temperature and even sprout legs and walk off the table in a week.  In order to create life, something has to die.  If we want to live, we die to self.  I think Jesus had something to say about that.

Interestingly, our pastured beef, pork, and chicken cook 15-20 percent faster than conventional supermarket counterparts.  One explanation is that ours is more moist due to exercise.  Another is that our animals live a happy life, stress free, and do not live every day secreting hardening adrenalin that makes them tougher to cook.  If we eat stress, do we become more stressed?  Hmmmmmm.

Life is far more than interchangeable parts.  Machines can’t forgive.  They can’t heal.  They can’t love.  You can hug your Tesla all day but when you finally tear yourself away, it doesn’t pine for another hug.  A parallel agriculture understands that growing sacred food, authentic sustenance, feeds our microbiome life, not inert substance. 


6.  OPAQUE VERSUS TRANSPARENT.  The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker used to live above their shops, attend community functions with others, and be approachable.  The industrial revolution expanded the butcher, baker and candlestick maker to a size that was unapproachable.  Hiding behind razor wire and security posts, mega-processors and farms became opaque to the populace, which fostered ignorance about what was going on behind those cloistered complexes.  Ignorance breeds fear.

Fear demanded government oversight.  Today, Americans fear food.  Our credentialed experts told us to quit eating butter and go to margarine.  They said to quit using manure and go to chemical fertilizer.  They encouraged us to powder our garden beds with DDT.  They brought us the food pyramid in 1979, placing Cheerios and Twinkies on the foundational bottom tier.  Today they tell us genetically modified organisms are safe, encourage us to stab our kids with 72 injections before they’re 18, raw milk is bad but Coke is fine.  Folks, the government/industrial credentialed expert track record is abysmal.

The food police are fine with chlorinated chicken and red dye 29, but criminalize home-processed chicken and homemade pepperoni.  You can eat it; you just can’t sell it.  If it’s too hazardous to sell, why isn’t it too hazardous to eat?  Thousands and thousands of wanna-be entrepreneurial farmers are held hostage by scale-prejudicial food regulations.  Food choice is not guaranteed to Americans.  My Virginia commissioner of food inspection told me that if we allowed people to make their own food choices, like buying pie from a friend at church, we couldn’t build enough hospitals for all the people sickened by unsafe food.

Years ago the Government Accounting Office conducted a study on food-borne illness and found four culprits:  centralized production, centralized processing, long distance transportation, and subtherapeutic use of antibiotics.  This is one of the only times I’ve ever seen a government study get it right.  Wouldn’t you think such a finding would make someone in the seat of power ask “well, if that’s the cause, what’s the opposite?”  Let’s see, the opposite of centralized production would be lots of viable small farms.  The opposite of centralized processing would be thousands of small outfits.  The opposite of long distance transportation would be . . . let’s see . . . what would that be?  Oh, local.  And how about drugging our animals?  Oh, that would be happy pigs.  But nobody dared broach the solution because it would invert the power, position, prestige and profits of the entire food and farm industry. Food bullies don’t like transparency.

Why do we listen to them?  On our farm, we have a 24/7/365 open door policy for anyone to come from anywhere to see anything anytime unannounced.  We’re customer inspected, not bully compliant.


7.  CHEMICAL VERSUS CARBON.  What feeds soil biology is decomposing biomass.  Through photosynthesis, a plant takes in something as mystical and esoteric as sunbeams and converts it to fungible, physical, measurable, tradable material.  The plant pumps energy into the soil, where up to 5 billion microorganisms per handful engage in an underground cafe.  “I’ve got a gram of molybdenum I’ll trade you for some polysaccharide.”  It’s more drama and theater than Broadway ever imagined.

All ecosystems thrived without chemical fertilizers.  From the Fertile Crescent to the American plains, chemical 10-10-10 fertilizer did not build the rich soils that grew powerful civilizations that collapsed under fertility depletion.  This historical cycle is as axiomatic as high taxes and governmental corruption.  North America produced more food 500 years ago than it does today.  It wasn’t all eaten by humans, for sure.  We had 200 million beavers eating more vegetation than all the humans today.  Some 2 million wolves at 20 pounds of meat a day.  Passenger pigeons numerous enough to be in flocks big enough to block out the sun for three days flew over the landscape.  And 100-200 million bison, along with elk, deer, prairie chickens and turkeys filled the landscape.

The notion that abundance comes out of a bag or tube fails to appreciate the real source of soil development:  the sun.  In our faith community, we honor the S-o-n.  In a functionally fertile agriculture, we honor the s-u-n.  We do that through a carbon economy rather than a chemical economy.  That means we till less, grow more perennials rather than annuals, and put carbonaceous diapers under our livestock when they’re housed in the winter.

With an industrial-scale chipper, on our farm we convert low-quality trees into chips to absorb manure and urine.  As the diaper builds through the winter, we add corn, which ferments in the anaerobic bedding pack.  When the cows come out in the spring, we put in pigs—we call them pigaerators—who seek the fermented corn and churn the diaper into aerobic compost.  If American agriculture  took all the money we currently spend on chemical fertilizer and battling fires due to overgrown vegetation and spent it on fertility from carbon, we would grow far more nutritious food, build soil, and provide sacred employment for thousands who yearn for society’s respect working in blue collar vocations.

Carbon and organic matter are kissing cousins.  Carbon feeds the soil biology and increases sponginess.  I like to view the soil like a majestic cathedral, full of rooms and compartments.  Some have hydrogen; some have water and some have minerals.  Throughout the cathedral, billions of parishioners called nematodes, actinomycetes, bacteria and the gigantic worms and grubs interact in both harmony and competitiveness, eating and being eaten, trading and growing.

On our farm, we’ve moved from 1 percent organic matter to more than 8 percent in half a century.  Every one percent of organic matter can hold 20,000 gallons of water per acre; we’ve moved 7 percent, which is 140,000 gallons of water per acre we can hold in our farm soils now that we couldn’t when we arrived in 1961.  Our gullied rockpile armpit of the community now produces 3-4 times the county average.  Scarcity moved to abundance.

People who think we could not have fed the world without chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and hybridization don’t understand that if we had had a Manhattan Project for compost, not only would we have fed the world, we would have built soil, reduced sickness, and created landscape resiliency.  Indeed, we would have done it without three-legged salamanders and infertile frogs. Nature is not a reluctant partner to violently wrestle into submission; creation is a benevolent lover to be caressed in the right places.

We don’t need to shortcut the sun.  We need to harness it through carbon.


8.  SICKNESS VERSUS HEALTH. Conventional agriculture’s overriding mentality is that nature is fundamentally flawed and we have to fix it.  The average farm conference focuses nearly all of its attention on disease and sickness.

If you attend an organic or sustainable—whatever buzzword you want to use—conference, you will hear little about sickness.  Although our farm has thousands of animals, we use a veterinarian only once every other year, and that’s for a calving problem beyond our ability.  While the average farmer buys tons of drugs and chemicals, I don’t buy any of it.  What I buy is seaweed as a mineral supplement. 

I run laying hens behind the cow herd in Eggmobiles to duplicate the bird-herbivore symbiosis seen throughout wild ecosystems.  The chickens scatter the dung, peck out the fly larvae to sanitize the field, and eat the newly exposed grasshoppers and crickets, turning it all into incredibly nutritious eggs.  Instead of paying vet bills we sell eggs.

Our animals move daily to new areas, away from yesterday’s toilet.  We’re constantly trying to mimic nature’s template.  When government agriculture experts told us to feed dead cows to cows in the early 1970s, farmers who believe like I do didn’t do it.  We were castigated for being anti-science, anti-progress.  I didn’t buy the expert advice because I couldn’t find a pattern in nature where herbivores eat carrion.  A couple of decades later, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow) stormed across the western world and a collective “Oops, maybe we shouldn’t oughtta done that” replaced the scientific hubris.

Somehow God’s design and modeling keeps things healthy.  Every sickness or malady we’ve had on our farm has been a result of our mismanagement.  It could be lack of sanitation, or selecting the wrong genetics, or nutritional deficiencies.  When we have a sickness issue, we don’t assume we failed to use the right vaccine or drug.  We look in the mirror and ask “what did we do to break down the immunological function of these animals?”  I suggest we learn far more by assuming it’s our fault than if we assume we’re victims of an incorrect concoction.

If we formed a diabolical committee to create a pathogen-friendly farm, what would we do?  We’d have only one animal or plant—a mono-species in order to make sure pathogens always had a host and weren’t confused with other species.  We’d grow them as close together as possible so pathogens always had proximate access to a host.  We’d eliminate sunshine as nature’s best detoxifier.  We’d make them breathe fecal particulate to abrade lesions into fragile mucous membranes.  You get the picture.  What have I just described?  Modern American agriculture.  It’s time for a parallel system.


9.  EXPLOITIVE VERSUS NURTURING. Ever since the Conquistadors exterminated indigenous populations in the New World in the name of God and the Queen, our European DNA loves short-term gain.  Sir Albert Howard said it is the temptation of every civilization to turn what nature spent millenia creating into cash for today.

Desertification, plummeting aquifers, erosion, and McDonald’s all represent a short-term valuation.  One of our problems is that as a society, for all our cleverness, we have not figured out an accounting system that measures liabilities against assets.  If I pollute the stream that runs through our farm, it’s positive for Gross Domestic Product because it creates economic activity.  Labor, trucks, fuel, infrastructure all come to fix the pollution, but it all goes on the national balance sheet as positive income.  What’s the dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico worth? 

We build a juvenile detention facility to house delinquents and call it an asset.  It should be treated as an expense.  A society that does not or will not measure ills across the land is destined for collapse.  If we can’t separate good and bad, evil and righteous, asset and liability, we’re headed for a bankrupt future, spiritually, economically, and ecologically.  Wendell Berry articulates this beautifully when he writes about the cost of divorce.  In a happy homestead with one income, one car, a milk cow, garden and woodlot, the family requires little money. 

But with divorce, now you have two homes, two cars, everybody works in town, spending more on gasoline.  No time is left for gardening or milking the cow, canning or cooking supper.  More meals out, more tranquilizers to suppress anxiety.  He concludes that what is good for us creates less GDP than what is bad for us.  Such a lopsided accounting system makes thinking people want a parallel universe. 

My goal as a farmer is to leave more soil, more pure water, more breathable air, more happy people in my community, more health, more immune strength as a result of my pilgrimage.  In short, more of the commons. True wealth isn’t cash as much as it is decoupling from cash.  Being able to step free of systemic enslavement.  Defunding the Conquistadors.


10.  TYRANNY VERSUS LIBERTY. Government intervention in the marketplace puts everyone at risk.  Subsidies, now called crop insurance, identify only six commodities worthy of protection.  Why?  This skews the market, making the protected items cheaper than they otherwise would be and the unprotected ones more expensive than they otherwise would be.

No government agency has been more successful at annihilating its constituency than the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).  That President Abraham Lincoln, when instituting the USDA, thought government agents were necessary to make farmers successful is perhaps one of the most profound examples of elitist naivete.  We have fewer farmers, worse food, more sickness than we did in the the 1860s. 

The domestic larder no longer exists.  Replaced by the supermarket warehouse, Americans generally are completely dependent on a three-day supply of food in their urban supermarkets.  Neighborhood abattoirs and canneries are gone. Most households don’t even have freezers anymore.  Half of all American households can’t put their hands on $400 right now, so buying half a beef for the freezer is as undoable as walking on water. 

When someone like Amish farmer Amos Miller in Pennsylvania or a food buying club like Rawsome Foods in California tries to offer true choice to the system, government agents and swat teams show up to confiscate and eradicate integrity food.  It’s not all food police.  Some of it is zoning.  On our farm, we can’t legally make and sell a chair from our own trees milled into lumber on our own sawmill because such work is classified manufacturing, which is illegal in an agricultural zone.  The national Rogue Food Conference movement is an antidote to the madness.  These conferences promote circumvention rather than compliance.

I’m in favor of a Food Emancipation Proclamation guaranteeing to every American the right to purchase the food of their choice from the source of their choice.  If you want to come to my farm as a voluntary consenting adult, look around, smell around, ask around and then buy a pound of sausage from a backyard-processed pig or a pot pie from my kitchen, we should be able to transact that trade without a bureaucrat between us.  When the government gets between my spoon and my throat, I call that an invasion of privacy.  What good is the freedom to speak and assemble if we can’t choose our bodies’ fuel to give us the energy to go preach and pray?

In a day when freedom of choice rules the day, when we want the government out of our bedrooms and our womb, surely it’s time to get the government out of our stomachs so we can feed our microbiome the fuel it needs.  We’ve lived under an enslaved food and farming system ever since Lincoln gave us the USDA and it’s time to put the opt out choice on the table.  If I prefer backyard butchery, I should have the right to get it.  If I prefer raw milk, I should have the right to get it.  If I prefer Aunt Matilda’s chicken pot pie, I should have the right to buy it and she should be able to sell it to me if she wants to.

When Governor Tim Kaine, now one of our Virginia Senators, visited our farm toward the end of his tenure, I toured him around and he was totally smitten by what we were doing.  He asked me what he could do for me.  I told him his responsibility was the same as every other elected official:  to act as a hedge of protection for the minority view.  I don’t want chlorine on my chickens.  I don’t want to vaccinate my calves.  I don’t want to cram my pigs in a house.  I don’t want to use GMOs or anti-microbials.  People ask me routinely if I fear Monsanto, Bayer, Cargill, Tyson.  No because they have no power over me. 

The power is from the government regulatory and judicial enforcement agents who are not independent non-partisan objective people.  Subject to emotions, politics, and corporate protection agendas, these powers can terrorize marketplace competition, food choice, and alternative agriculture models.  These powers don’t like compost because it isn’t sterile.  They don’t like cheese that can mold.  They certainly don’t like raw milk.  They don’t want pigs to roam outside.  I told Governor Kaine that his job was to protect the minority view, to keep diversity and creativity alive in our social and agricultural landscape, and to offer Americans choice in their most intimate decision:  what to eat.

The parallel agriculture I advocate embraces a whosoever will mentality.  What can possibly be wrong with enjoying a vibrant minority along with a larger majority?  If we really are fringe, fine; what have the big boys to fear?  Oh, but what if we represent gunpowder in front of these castles?  What if what we have is really better than what they have?  In either case, protecting a parallel option preserves innovation.  The minority view, known as the lunatic fringe, has always provided the answers to society’s problems.  When we look through our plate at dinner, what do we see?  Imagine the farms on the other side, the foodscape on the other side, the nutritional commitment on the other side.  Dear folks, we need to make our menus agree with what we know and believe in our minds.

What I propose here is a long term solution, an abundant solution, a people-affirming solution.  God help us to love it, do it, embrace it.