Industrial agriculture and biological agriculture differ on one very fundamental point: ethics. At its most fundamental level, food is biological, not chemical. Wresting life from food leaves it devoid of life-giving properties.
Joel Salatin is known around most agricultural circles as the most famous farmer in the world and is the purveyor and owner of Polyface Farms in Swoope, Virginia. He calls himself a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer, which is a mouthful, both in words and in meaning.
On this week’s podcast,we thought it’d be good to turn back the clock to a talk from 2009 at our Eco-Ag conference. Jerry Brunetti, rest in peace, was a fearless advocate for soil management and gave a presentation then called “Soil as a SuperOrganism.” In other words, a super computer built to process everything efficiently and create answers for us that are accurate.
Susan Sink with the American Farmland Trust is a farmer who has diversified her cattle farm in hopes of finding a way to keep her farm going in a very challenging environment for cattle farmers, and works every day to advocate for the future of farming and family farms.
Charles Walters spoke with the help of Lee Fryer, and a few farmers in the audience. He will tell you that even today, the effort to, as he put it, “to liberate the organic farmers,” goes on. With truth on our side. That the challenge now is to return the burden of proof to the conventional agriculture systems, to those who want to coat our foods with poison, to prove that it is as safe as organic farming, and not the other way around