The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [105]
At dinner I got Joel and Teresa talking about the history of Polyface, a history in which the roots of Salatin’s politics and agriculture become fairly easy to trace. “I’m actually a third-generation alternative farmer,” Joel said. “My grandfather was a charter subscriber to Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming.” Fred Salatin had farmed a half-acre in-town lot in Anderson, Indiana, supplying the local markets with fruit, honey, and eggs sold in boxes that bore the Salatin name. Fred Salatin, who was as much an inventor and tinkerer as he was a farmer, held the patent for the very first walking garden sprinkler.
To hear Joel and Teresa describe him, Joel’s father William was an ingenious and somewhat eccentric farmer, a man who wore bow ties and sandals and drove a ’58 Plymouth sedan that he’d converted into a pickup by removing all the seats and the lid of the trunk. (“He would drive it into town sitting on a bucket,” Joel explained. “It embarrassed us kids terribly.”) From the time he was a young boy, William had wanted to farm; after flying planes in World War II and earning an economics degree from Indiana University, he bought a farm in the highlands of Venezuela, where he and Lucille began raising chickens. Why Venezuela? “Dad felt he could farm the way he wanted there, get out from under both convention and regulations.”
The chicken farm thrived until 1959, when a leftist coup toppled the government and “we got caught as ugly Americans in the middle of this political mess.” Joel’s father refused on principle to buy protection from the local authorities, who proceeded to look the other way when guerillas came after the family’s property. “We fled out the back door as the guerillas were coming in the front. We stayed in the country nine or ten months after that, living with a missionary friend while my dad tried to get the government to return our land. We had a deed, but not a single official would look at us without a bribe. And the whole time the American ambassador was dutifully reporting that everything was under control.”
In 1961 the Salatins were forced to flee the country, leaving behind everything they’d built and saved. “Now that I’m hitting the age he was then, I just can’t imagine what it must have felt like to walk away from it all.” The episode clearly left its mark on Joel, undermining his faith that a government, right or left, could protect its citizens and their property, much less do the morally right thing.
Determined to start over again, William Salatin went shopping for farmland within a day’s drive of Washington, D. C., so that he might continue petitioning the Venezuelan embassy for compensation. He ended up buying 550 acres of badly eroded and hilly farmland on the western edge of the Shenandoah Valley, in the tiny town of Swoope. (It’s pronounced Swope.) After Drew Pearson, the muckraking journalist, publicized his case against the Venezuelans, Salatin won a small settlement that he used to buy a small herd of Hereford cattle.
“The farm had been abused by tenant farmers for 150 years,” Joel said. On land that was really too steep for row crops, several generations of tenant farmers had grown corn and other grains until most of the soil had been either exhausted or lost to erosion. “We measured gullies fourteen feet deep. This farm couldn’t stand any more plowing. In many places there was no topsoil left whatsoever—just outcroppings of granite and clay. Some spots you couldn’t even dig a posthole, so Dad would fill tires with concrete and sink fence posts in that. We’ve been working to heal this land ever since.”
William Salatin quickly discovered the farm couldn’t support both a mortgage and a family, so he took on work in town as an accountant. “He turned