The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [63]
The wail of farm machinery had fallen silent, and in the space it left I could hear the varied sounds of birds: songbirds in the trees, but also the low gossip of hens and the lower throat singing of turkeys. Up on the green, green shoulder of hill rising to the west I could see a small herd of cattle grazing, and, below them on a gentler slope, several dozen portable chicken pens marching in formation down the meadow.
Laid before me was, I realized, a scene of almost classical pastoral beauty—the meadows dotted with contented animals, the backdrop of woods, a twisting brook threading through it all—marred only by the fact that I couldn’t just lie here on this springy pasture admiring it for the rest of the afternoon. (Wasn’t leisure supposed to be a big part of the pastoral idyll?) Our culture, perhaps even our biology, disposes us to respond to just such a grassy middle landscape, suspended as it is halfway between the wilderness of forest and the artifice of civilization. “The argument of the verdurous vista,” Henry James once called it. He had just returned from Europe to tour rural New England, and found himself beguiled by Connecticut’s pastoral charms in spite of himself and all he knew—about history, about the inevitable triumph of the machine, about “the bullying railway.” A century earlier, of course, Thomas Jefferson had made the argument of the verdurous vista with a force some of us still feel: His agrarian ideal was an attempt to make a literal American reality out of the old world’s pastoral dreams, though even he sometimes doubted the middle landscape could survive the advent of industry. But then, the pastoral idyll was already in trouble even in Virgil’s time, threatened by the encroaching marshlands on one side, the corruptions of civilization on the other.
The wonder really is that it survives at all. Two centuries and a one-hour drive over the Blue Ridge from Monticello, Joel Salatin, a self-described “Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer,” is attempting again and against all odds to put real-live grass under the old agrarian-pastoral ideal, to try to make it new long after the triumph of the industrial system Jefferson fretted over has been completed. I’d come here to the Shenandoah Valley to see whether such a farm, and the alternative food chain it is part of, belonged to the past or the future.
Taking in Salatin’s verdurous vista that afternoon, it occurred to me that the only thing missing from the scene was a happy shepherd, but then, wasn’t that the tall fellow loping toward me in the broad blue suspenders and the floppy hat? Salatin’s broad-brimmed straw hat did more than protect his neck and face from the Virginia sun: It declared a political and aesthetic stance, one descended from Virgil through Jefferson with a detour through the sixties counterculture. Whereas a feed company cap emblazoned with the logo of an agribusiness giant would have said labor, would have implied (in more ways than one) a debt to the industrial, Salatin’s jaunty chapeau—made of grass, note, rather than plastic—bespoke independence, sufficiency, even ease. “On our farm the animals do most of the work,” he had told me the first time we talked. At the moment, too tired to stand, the claim sounded to me like a pretty empty pastoral conceit. But as I would understand by the end of my week on Salatin’s farm, the old pastoral idea is alive and, if not well exactly, still useful, perhaps even necessary.
2. THE GENIUS OF THE PLACE
Polyface Farm raises chicken, beef, turkeys, eggs, rabbits, and pigs, plus tomatoes, sweet corn, and berries on one hundred acres of pasture patchworked into another 450 acres of forest, but if you ask Joel Salatin what he does for a living (Is he foremost a cattle rancher? A chicken farmer?) he’ll tell you in no uncertain terms, “I’m a grass farmer.” The first time I heard this designation I didn’t get it at all—hay seemed the least (and least edible) of his many crops, and he brought none of it to market. But undergirding the