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This article is about two guys in their fifties who are revolutionizing health care and agriculture – Joel and Joel. That’s Dr. Joel Fuhrman and Joel Salatin. And about a little known but profoundly important scientist – Professor Antoine Bechamp and his much more famous rival – Louis Pasteur. What the two Joel’s are doing is so profound, we really need trumpets to announce it, but I don’t have any, so I’ll make do with my humble blog. I first heard of Joel Salatin back in 1993 when a friend gave me a magazine that advertised one of his books. As the years passed, I kept hearing more about him and in 2008, went to his Field Day with 2 of my kids. Then in 2010, Joel wrote “The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer” and it was that book that really made me realize what a revolutionary thinker Joel really is. Joel is doing some really remarkable things with his farm. First and foremost, he’s Healing the Land. Joel is using herbivores and perennials to actually BUILD soil, in a time when the vast majority of other farmers are DESTROYING soil. That’s huge because one day if we have no soil, we won’t eat. Secondly, Joel is raising animals with no corn (cows aren’t supposed to eat corn), no antibiotics, no immunizations and no chemical fertilizers. And his animals rarely get sick and he raises a lot of them. Last I heard his farm revenues were something like $2 million a year. So Joel Salatin is revolutionizing agriculture and healing the land.

Now in one of Joel’s books where he’s talking about animal health, he mentions a scientist by the name of Antoine Bechamp. And basically what Joel gleaned from Bechamp is that animals don’t need drugs to stay healthy, they just need their “terrain” to be controlled correctly. In other words, they must be fed the right food and managed the way God intended them to be managed. If they are not, then the microbes mutate and become virulent and animals get sick and die unless we medicate them heavily. So Joel took Bechamp’s advice and began moving cows around the pasture and letting them eat what they were designed to eat – grass. And since he does this, he doesn’t have to medicate and he has generally healthy cows. He takes a similar approach with chickens, hogs and rabbits. Brilliant. Why isn’t everyone doing this? Read more »

My fascination with agriculture continues … How many lbs of tomatoes can you get from a single plant? I would have said 30 until last week … But the real answer is 342!! Just finished reading this book “How to Grow World Record Tomatoes” by Charles Wilber … Incredible! The picture is of Charles Wilber standing on a large step ladder by his tomato plants! The secret is to do it organically, that is, without chemical fertilizer … Wilber uses Kudzu compost and other organic mulches. He also uses indeterminate tomato varieties like Better Boy VFN and trains the plant to have 18 stems which are fastened to 3′ diameter X 5′ high cages stacked on top of one another to make a 15 to 20′ tall cage system. The only things I don’t like about Wilber’s system is digging the soil and making compost manually. I like Patricia Lanza’s “Lasagna Garden” system for soil building. For my 2012 garden season, I am experimenting with a 5′ x 5′ Lasagna bed made with alternating layers of shredded newspaper, peat moss, horse manure, hay and soil from an accidental Hugelkultur bed in my back yard. It’s accidental because it was formed by Curtis Clemons’ bulldozer 11 years ago when he cleared my back yard forest of smaller trees to make it look like a park. He didn’t know he was inadvertently making a Hugelkultur bed, but that’s exactly what he made and now I’m benefiting from it. What used to be a pile of brush and tree trunks is now a mound of beautiful humus full of earthworms and organic material. Google Hugelkultur for more info. I will finish my bed with some wood ashes and blood/bone meal. I wonder if digging some soil from where I buried our dead goat 2 years ago would work just as well as blood/bone meal? I bought some red wigglers (earthworms) from the bait store and layered them into my 5′ x 5′ bed. My plan is to let the earthworms and friendly bacteria work their magic all winter, then hopefully set my own tomato production record next summer. I am thinking about “cooking” the bed by covering with black landscape fabric. Stay tuned for a full report!

In 1776, the same year of the American Declaration of Independence, Adam Smith wrote “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” generally referred to by its shortened title “The Wealth of Nations.” What makes a nation wealthy? According to this summary of Smith’s work, “Smith held that the wealth of a nation, what we today call the income of a nation, depends upon (1) the productivity of labor and (2) the proportion of laborers who are usefully or productively employed.” Smith was all about division of labor and productivity and the origin of money and such.

But hold on. What is wealth? What is it really? At it’s core? Am I wealthy because I have indoor plumbing? Or because I drive a Volvo? Or because I can choose between a hundred different kinds of boxed cereal at the grocery store? Or because I have a cell phone? Or because I have a big bank account? Hmm. Is my nation (America) wealthy because most people in America have all these things? Is my nation wealthy because we have thousands of massive farms which grow millions of bushels of corn and soybeans using huge combines with air conditiong, TV and GPS? What if those farms (and those farming practices) are destroying our soil instead of building it? Then what? What if 100 years from now America is like the Sahara Desert? Will we be wealthy then? Something tells me that indoor plumbing and Volvos will be irrelevant if we cannot eat.

So what is real tangible wealth? (I’m interested in TANGIBLE wealth in this article, which is to be distinguished from REAL wealth, that is, Treasure in Heaven. See Matthew 6:19-21.)

I would have to say that at the bottom of it, at the foundation of of it … THE (TANGIBLE) WEALTH OF NATIONS IS LAND. Let me repeat that in bold type.

THE WEALTH OF NATIONS IS LAND

And it so happens that our land – our farmland that is – is being destroyed. Year by year. Inch by inch. If you don’t believe me, read Joel Salatin’s book “The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer.” He’s the guy who Chipotle buys their meat from. And in my opinion he’s one of the most important visionaries of modern times. He should get a Nobel prize but I’m sure that will never happen. After all, he’s a lunatic. Anyone who says they are a farmer but doesn’t own a plow is a lunatic, right? Read more »

** NEWS FLASH ** AMERICAN FARMERS ARE DESTROYING OUR ABILITY TO FEED OURSELVES AND THEY DON’T EVEN KNOW IT.

In 2008, I went to Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm (Joel is the guy who sells meat to Chipotle) for Field Day. I came back very inspired and wanted to join his movement somehow. My wife thought I was crazy talking about “healing the land” and such. But is “healing the land” a crazy idea? Is the land even “sick”? Why does it need to be healed?

Well … yes … the more I read, the more I realize that yes, it IS quite sick and yes, it DOES need healing. What am I talking about? Well Joel Salatin has made me realize that tillage and row cropping destroys soil. Let me say that again …

TILLAGE AND ROW CROPPING DESTROYS SOIL Read more »

My close friends know that I have over the years had a fascination with agriculture – i.e. food production. My first foray into food production was with greenhouse tomatoes. My friends will tell you that the tomatoes were wonderful but making a living at it was hard and I sold that business. My next attempt in agriculture was with grass fed beef. This enterprise was inspired by Joel Salatin and his revolutionary agricultural practices. Unfortunately – again – my specific enterprise failed, but I continue to be inspired by Joel Salatin, my latest read of his being “The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer.” Since about 2001 or so, my father has been praying and encouraging me – of all people – to help the Wai Wai Indians (he’s a missionary to them) improve their agriculture. This year I made my first visit to the Wai Wais in 31 years and my visit made a profound impact on my view of how people feed themselves. Shortly after my return, I was given information by a lady at our church about how the American diet with it’s refined foods and excessive protein and dairy is literally killing Americans by the truckload — by causing heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune disorders and the like. A month or so later, I watched “Food Inc.” So my fascination with food production continues. I don’t know where it will lead, but I have a funny feeling that God has plans for me related to agriculture.

With that background, I would urge you to read the following insightful article which I ran across just today …

Getting Used to Life Without Food, Part 1
Wall Street, BP, Bio-Ethanol and the Death of Millions
By William Engdahl06/29/2011
http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/william-engdahl/2011/06/29/getting-used-to-life-without-food-part-1 Here’s a snippet from the article …

The record rise in grain and food prices in recent years is not a mere Wall Street profit gimmick, although obscene profits are being made. Rather, it is apparently an integral part of a long-term strategy whose roots go back to the years just after World War Two when Nelson Rockefeller and his brothers tried to organize the global food chain along the same monopoly model they had used for world oil. Food would henceforth become just another commodity like oil or tin or silver whose scarcity and price could ultimately be controlled by a small group of powerful trading insiders. At the same time the Rockefeller brothers were expanding their global business reach from oil to agriculture in the developing world through their technology-driven Green Revolution scheme after the war, they were also financing a little-noticed project at Harvard University. The project would form the infrastructure for their plan to globalize world food production under the central control of a handful of private corporations.

Its creators gave it the name ‘agribusiness,’ in order to differentiate it from traditional farmer-based agriculture — the cultivation of crops for human sustenance and nutrition. The push to place world national governments’ emergency grain reserves into private hands was merely a logical expansion of the original Rockefeller agribusiness strategy, as was their highly mis-represented “Green Revolution” which at day’s end merely promoted a huge sale of US agriculture products from John Deere tractors (using large volumes of Standard Oil Rockefeller products) to US chemical fertilizers made by other companies in the Rockefeller orbit—forcing a trend to large scale farming and forcing millions off the land into cities where they former a cheap labor pool for large multinationals. The highly-touted harvest yields turned out to be actual losses after several harvests. 1

Many of my close friends know that I think Joel Salatin is the most ahead-of-his-time, revolutionary, forward thinker in agriculture today. He describes himself as a “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer.” (Michael Pollan, author of Omnivore’s Dilemma). When asked what he does for a living, he replies: “Mob-stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization.” (Salatin, Joel, “Tall Grass Mob Stocking: An Aggressive Approach to Controlled Grazing,” Acres USA Magazine, May 2008, p. 16) Gotta love it. You’ll have to read the article to find out what he’s talking about. Joel strikes so many chords with me I feel like a piano.  Home school father. Unbelievably frugal. Out of the box thinker.  Bob Jones grad. Contrarian. Not afraid to get his hands dirty, and he can string together some pretty powerful paragraphs to make a point. I have a hard time deciding which book of his to recommend first, but way up there is Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front which will make you laugh, cry and get mad all at once. Then there’s Family Friendly Farming: A Multi-Generational Home-Based Business Testament which I think is destined to motivate hordes of Dilbert Cubicle Workers (Joel’s term) to once and for all tell their Faceless Bureaucrat Companies to take a hike and don a permanent pair of overalls.

Here’s a little more about Joel …

Called “the high priest of the pasture” by The New York Times, Joel Salatin likes to refer to himself as a “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer.” He lives with his family on Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.  Salatin has developed a system of pasture rotation that produces nutrient-rich grass and maximizes the composting of animal waste. Each species on the farm is dependent on another. The cows, for example, eat the nutrient rich grass in Pasture A and then are moved to Pasture B. The chickens then move to Pasture A where they pick through the cow pies … LINK HERE

NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE

I want all my blog readers to notice that I have added a new Post Category — Healthy Food & Agriculture — of which this post is the first of many to come. And with that … I’m off to Polyface! See you soon!