Happy New Year!
In this first letter of 2014 (Part 1 of a multi-part series), I'm paraphrasing from a talk given by Joel Salatin, a self-proclaimed “lunatic” farmer can also best be described as the voice and face of the ecological agricultural movement.
The paradigm of ecological farming that Joel Salatin's Polyface Farms and our Pasture’s Delights is engaged in often smacks of environmental, tree hugger, snooty, elitist or “cliquish” type of stereotype. To be clear, Pasture’s Delights embraces an environmental, capitalist, personal freedom (response-able), spiritually centered way of doing things. We aim to connect with any and all people with no personal prejudices promoted or implied.
Pasture’s Delights is in the business of producing and serving food. Food is a bridge to connect with people. We can live without a lot of things, but food is one thing we cannot live without.
Food choice and deciding how to feed our 3 trillion internal community of bacterial beings is one of the most fundamental rights that we have, and that right is under assault today.
I’ll let Farmer Joel Salatin take it from here as he explains…
How Big Government is enriching Big Business and harming your health
“There is an official disparagement on the government’s part, and Big Business. You have heard of the military industrial complex. Well there is a FOOD industrial complex, not to be a conspiracy theorist, rather this complex is a fraternity of IDEAS. The fact is, the BIG FOOD companies and the United States Department of Agriculture (U-S-duh) and the Food and Drug Administration (F-duh) as they play golf together they also share a fraternity of ideas. In the movie Food Inc., you will see the revolving door between big food company executives and Big Government – how they work in industry and then they work in regulations, and then back to industry. [From Mark: Perhaps you have heard that the reason some people get into politics is for self-serving interests. One appalling example of this is how GMO “science” did not have to pass the full gamut of FDA peer reviewed testing and trials, and those regulators then went back to work for Monsanto. Back and forth, back and forth these executives and political foxes go between government and their own industry.]
"There is an official disparagement on the government and Industrial fraternity of ideas that disparages against compost, pasture based, “free range”, “all-natural” and all those kinds of things stemming from the idea that “organic farming can’t feed the world.” We are not going to debate that notion for now and save that topic for another day. Let’s just agree for now that this fraternity marginalizes and disparages alternative, free-range production as if though it is Neanderthal and barbaric – very similar to the idea in the 1950s that breast feeding babies was barbaric and Neanderthal. We squandered an entire generation of breasts….by not breast feeding babies and giving instead a generation of asthmatic sufferers now Enfamil and Similac back then.
"The fact is, if we had had a “Manhattan” project for compost [organic agriculture] not only would we have fed the world we would have done it without 3-legged salamanders, infertile frogs, and a dead zone the size of New Jersey in the gulf of Mexico.”
Look for more in the next issue of Pasture’ Bites.Full Disclosure: Pasture’s Delights is not a certified organic farm and currently uses conventional chemicals and methods where we believe it makes sense for us to do so. As a general rule we subscribe to organic practices and here will make full disclosure of any and all practices that would be considered non compliant with Organic standards.
We are in the process of switching our mastitis treatment protocols from conventional antibiotic remedies to all-natural remedies that essentially involve a lot of vitamin fortification and medicinal herbs. We do use conventional herbicides to spray vegetation along the main fences and around building areas. We feel our limited amount of time is better spent in other ways to improve the health of the herd and the land than using a manual weed-eater to chop-down unsightly vegetation that impacts both the “working environment” and the electrical conductivity for the electric fences. We look forward to learning more about alternative / organic methods of fence-line vegetation management to give them a try some point in the future. All other practices we believe are in the good standing and spirit with consumers’ organic standards and expectations.