Joel Salatin

Salatin Calls for Food Integration

Ever since farms became dependant on petroleum, Joel Salatin of Polyface farm said the U.S. food system has become segregated.

On June 2, 2012, the Bainbridge community-based organization Friends of the Farm helped bring Salatin to Bainbridge, WA, for the day. After speaking at a luncheon benefit for the 16-acre Manzanita Farm, Salatin spoke at the Bainbridge Performing Arts Theater to a packed theater of farmers and farm enthusiasts.  

“Now we have a food system floating precariously on a barrel of oil,” Salatin said. “We need to see integrated systems.”

For example, he suggested people living in apartments should throw out their aquariums and put in a chicken pen instead. 

Furthermore, he said he notices people’s kitchen waste is taken to the landfill instead of being recycled back into feeding chickens.

Salatin speaks to farmers at an intimate gathering 

at Suyematsu/Bentryn Family Farm in the evening of June 2. 

Instead, he wants to see people feeding their chickens that food waste, who in turn would turn that waste into manure that then would fertilize their gardens. And then the chickens would lay eggs that would cycle back into the kitchen. This kind of system that cuts out the petrol that it takes to transport waste to the landfill and grain to the farm for feed, Salatin said.

But it goes beyond the use of petroleum on farms. He explained how cheap energy and transportation has allowed the majority of people in this country not to think about their food system. Right now, for example Salatin said, there are twice as many people in prison than there are farming. He said, “we are functionally divorced” from the food system.

It sounds like a ripple effect. Salatin said if food waste is used to feed animals, then the grain input would go down, and so petroleum input would go down accordingly.

He said rather using petroleum like “drunken sailors” in the here and now, we should make our systems more efficient and save the petroleum for other, more important things.