Last week I posted 4x about Joel Salatin and Polyface Farms. Below Joel tells how his farm was transformed from bare rock and 16' gullies - which yielded enough to keep his family in poverty - to a transformed farm which now supports four generations, and inspires farmers and wanna-be-farmers.
As a boy, he ate concord grapes from his grandfather's lush garden in Indiana. Then his parents in 1961 bought the cheap farm in Virginia, which over the past 200 years had lost 3-5' of topsoil.
Expert advice told them to plant corn, borrow money for chemicals and silos, the factory farm model. But his parents took the opposite path, using "nature's template to harness the patterns and the beauty." As he puts it, nature is not an enemy, but a loving partner to caress instead of coerce.
Polyface Farms is today abundant in diversity of life, in productivity. The soil used to have 1% organic matter, today it has 8% organic matter. The food products, soil, biomass, all have been case studies of state schools.
(cont'd tomorrow)
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