Mad farmer?

Like a million other readers, I first met Joel Salatin in Michael Pollan’s 2006 best seller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. To learn about what he calls the “pastoral food chain,” Pollan visited Salatin, an eccentric genius who has turned his farm into a nearly perfect perpetual motion machine using cows, chickens, pigs, rabbits, worms, grass, trees and portable corrals. At Polyface, Salatin’s 550-acre farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, nothing—not even waste—is wasted. Instead, it is converted to eggs, meat, milk, vegetables and rich soil.

Pollan’s depiction of Salatin’s farming methods is fascinating, as is his portrayal of the farmer who calls himself “a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic.” Salatin’s first book from a major publisher, Folks, This Ain’t Normal offers more than a taste of his methods and his madness. Here is the full banquet of Salatin’s opinions, prescriptions and rants—ideas he has already expressed in his small library of self-published books and in speeches heard around the world—laid out on one sumptuous table. One wonders how the man ever finds time to farm.

Reading Salatin is bracing. I don’t know if his wryly titled chapters—“Let’s Make a Despicable Farm,” for example, or “Sterile Poop and Other Unsavory Cultural Objectives”—are transcripts of his speeches or if he just writes in a folksy, conversational style. Either way, it’s easy to imagine you’re actually listening to him as he skewers factory farms, fast food, polluters, chemical fertilizers and genetically modified organisms. In fact, if you’re a green organic locavore, it’s pretty hard not to jump up and holler, “Preach it, brother!”