Sustainability

Farmer Joel Salatin: Why Changing the Food System is Up to You

Joel Salatin talked to YES! about how animals can help us restore our land and food if we honor them. Listen to him in his own words here.

Joel Salatin is no simple farmer. Since Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the film Food, Inc. brought him to fame as the man who raises meat the right way, Salatin has become a sought-after speaker. But he still spends most of his time on his rural Virginia farm—with the chickens, baling hay, moving cows from one paddock to another.

It is perhaps Salatin’s unwillingness to compartmentalize that has made him such a compelling moral voice for the food movement. For Salatin, farming is inseparable from ethics, politics, faith, or ecology.

Salatin’s farm, Polyface or “the farm of many faces,” has been in his family for 50 years. At its heart is a practice called “holistic range management,” where cattle mimic the grazing patterns of wild herd animals. The strategy cuts feedlots out of the equation altogether and stores carbon deep in the roots and soil of Polyface’s lush perennial pasture.

Salatin talked to YES! about how animals can help us restore our land and food if we honor them. Listen to him in his own words here.

Check back for more of Joel's interview from our Spring 2011 issue, Can Animals Save Us?, or buy it herenow.