The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [106]
His instinct to go against conventional agricultural wisdom was confirmed by his accounting clients, many of whom were struggling farmers. “One look at their books convinced him that all the advice he’d been hearing from consultants and extension agents—to build silos, graze the forest, plant corn, and sell commodities—was a recipe for financial ruin.”
“So instead of building bankruptcy tubes”—farmer lingo for silos—“he started down a whole other path.” William read André Voisin’s treatise on grass and began practicing rotational grazing. He stopped buying fertilizer and started composting. He also let the steeper, north-facing hillsides return to forest.
“Dad was very much a visionary and an inventor. He figured out the key to success on a farm like this was first, grass, and second, mobility.” This last guiding principle, which Joel claims goes all the way back to Frederick Salatin’s patented walking sprinkler (“moving things must be in our genes”), inspired his father to invent a movable electric fence, a portable veal calf barn, and a portable chicken coop for the laying hens Joel raised as a boy. (Until he went off to college, Joel sold eggs every Saturday at a farmer’s market in Staunton.) When William noticed that on hot days the cattle gathered under the trees, concentrating their manure in one place, he built a portable “shademobile”—basically a big section of canvas stretched over a steel frame on wheels. Now he could induce the cattle to spread their manure evenly over his pastures, simply by towing the shademobile to a new spot every few days.
Innovations like these helped rebuild the fertility of the soil, and gradually the farm began to recover. Grasses colonized the gullies, the thin soils deepened, and the rock outcrops disappeared under a fresh mantle of sod. And though William Salatin was never quite able to support his family from the farm, he did live to see Joel make a success of the place by building on his example, especially the devotion to grass and mobility—and a determination to go his own way. Joel had returned to the farm in 1982 after four years at Bob Jones University and a stint as a newspaper reporter. Six years later, when Joel was thirty-one, William Salatin died of prostate cancer.
“I still miss him every day,” Joel said. “Dad was definitely a little odd, but in a good way. How many other Christian conservatives were reading Mother Earth News? He lived out his beliefs. I can remember when the Arab oil embargo hit in 1974, Dad rode his bicycle thirty-five miles back and forth to work every day because he refused to buy another drop of imported oil. He would have been a wonderful tent dweller, always living on less than you have and more lightly than you need to.” I felt a tiny flush of embarrassment at ever having asked Joel to FedEx me a steak; I also better understood why he had refused.
“But you want to know when I miss him the most? When I see thick hay and earthworm castings and slick cows, all the progress we’ve made since he left us. Oh, how proud he would be to see this place now!”
ELEVEN
THE ANIMALS
Practicing Complexity
1. TUESDAY MORNING
It’s not often I wake up at six in the morning to discover I’ve overslept, but by the time I had hauled my six-foot self out of the five-foot bed in Lucille’s microscopic guest room, everyone was already gone and morning chores were nearly done. Shockingly, chores at Polyface commence as soon as the sun comes up (five-ish this time of year) and always before breakfast. Before coffee, that is, not that there was a drop of it to be had on this farm. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d even attempted to do anything consequential before breakfast, or before caffeine at the very least.
When I stepped out of the trailer into the warm early morning mist, I could make out two figures—the interns, probably—moving around up on the broad shoulder of hill to the east, where a phalanx