Joel F. Salatin – The Farmer and Thinker
Joel F. Salatin is an American farmer, lecturer, and author. He calls himself a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer. Others call him the most famous farmer in the world and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson.
Polyface Farm – Sustainable Farming
Salatin purchased the farm in 1961. When Salatin manages a 2,000-acre organic farm grossing $2 million per year. He raises livestock on Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia. Cows are moved from one pasture to another rather than being centrally corn fed. Polyface Farm produces salad bar beef, pastured poultry and eggs, forage based rabbits, and forestry products. Salatin’s philosophy emphasizes healthy grass on which animals can thrive in a symbiotic cycle of feeding. The farm grosses $350,000 per year.
Perspective on Salatin’s Work
Some view Salatin as promoting Black and Indigenous erasure and nostalgia for a mythologized agrarian past. Along with white food politics writers, I glorified Salatin, chalking up his occasional illiberalism to eccentricity. These things can’t be separated from his ideas about sustainable farming. Tiring of writing for the newspaper, he decided to try farming full-time. The farm began to turn a profit.