Joel Salatin on Regenerative Farming and How to Make Food Healthy Again

White Oak Pastures’s regenerative farming methods are helping to restore the land’s biodiversity and water quality. Courtesy of Jenni Harris

The United States is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, but among the top 10 developed nations, it’s also one of the sickest.

Joel Salatin, the co-owner of Polyface Farm, a regenerative farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, believes that what’s driving American morbidity can be traced back to the soil.

“We’re so sick! All of us Americans, you know, we love to be first with our basketball teams, soccer, Olympic gold medals. But there are things you don’t want to be number one in,” Mr. Salatin told The Epoch Times.

“Noninfectious chronic morbidity … That is not the place that you want the first-place trophy. And so, as we have become sicker, more and more people are beginning to question the standard American diet. But food and farming go together. You can’t divorce food from farming.”

Mr. Salatin said if you want nutrient-dense food then you must first have nutrient-dense farms. However, since the mid-1950s, American farms have relied heavily on chemical fertilizers, and that’s not only destroyed the soil, it’s destroyed American health.

Junk-Soil Nation

The World Economic Forum (WEF) defines regenerative agriculture as “improving the health of soil, which has been degraded by the use of heavy machinery, fertilizers and pesticides in intensive farming.”

But Mr. Salatin said regenerative farming is simply “leaving [the land] better than you found it.”

Mr. Salatin said that as far back as the 1800s, people were worried about depleting the soil of nutrients. As a result, a German chemist named Justus von Liebig invented a nitrogen-based fertilizer in the 1840s. His initial fertilizer was made more viable by German scientist Fritz Haber and chemist Carl Bosch, who developed commercial-scale ammonia production in 1909.

Joel Salatin pictured with his pigs on Polyface Farm, a regenerative farm in Virginia. Courtesy of Polyface Farm

However, it wasn’t until after World War II that chemical fertilizer gained traction.

Mr. Salatin said that during WWII, the same ingredients used to make fertilizer—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK)—were used to make bombs. And after the war, there was a massive surplus of NPK.

Additionally, the war diminished the labor force, presenting farmers with a unique challenge—should they continue to use composting manure piles as fertilizer (keeping in mind that chippers and spreaders didn’t yet exist, so the manual labor requirement was extensive), or should they spread a bag of NPK fertilizer on their fields?

“My point is, be gentle to old grandpa,” Mr. Salatin said. “If you and I had the same position, we might have chosen [NPK over composting] too.”

Still, Mr. Salatin said that even in the 1940s, there were those, like Sir Albert Howard, who warned that using “chemical manure” would lead to the loss of soil fertility.

A local farm worker unloads Ukrainian-made fertilizer from a truck to use on a wheat field near Kharkiv, Ukraine, on April 5, 2022. Thomas Peter/Reuters

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources reports that in the mid-to-late 1940s, approximately 2 million tons of chemical fertilizers were used yearly. By 1960, that amount had grown to 7 million tons per year, and by 2014, over 20 million tons of chemical fertilizer were being used every year in the United States.

The result is nutrient-deficient soil, with the WEF estimating that more than half the world’s agricultural land is degraded, leading to productivity losses of $400 billion a year. It adds that in as little as 50 years, there may not be enough soil to grow enough food to feed the world.

“We’ve got a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico. That’s a direct toxic, chemical runoff,” Mr. Salatin said. Dead zones are places where no life exists due to a lack of oxygen in the water.

“And I would suggest that part of this, too, is the entire lexicon of everything from high pathogen avian influenza to campylobacter, listeria, E. coli, to food allergies, all of this is a lexicon—it’s nature on its knees, begging, ‘Enough! Enough of this disrespect!’ And the question is, will we listen?”

Nature’s Lost Balance

“The quickest way to destroy the land is to de-vegetate it, and plowing is number one,” Mr. Salatin said. The second fastest way to destroy the soil is by planting “mono-crops,” meaning only one type of crop, year after year. And the third fastest way to destroy the soil is chemical fertilizers.

“Throughout history, the Holy Grail of agriculture has been grain,” Mr. Salatin said. “Because until the last 100 years, grain was extremely laborious and expensive. But with cheap energy, mechanization, and infrastructure—like storage buildings, natural gas, and things like that—grain, for the first time in human history, is cheap. It’s never been achieved before until now. So, we are very much in an aberrant state.

“And of course, when the [U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)] told us what to eat, with the 1979 food pyramid, and Cheerios and Twinkies were on the bottom of the food pyramid—that greatly stimulated grain consumption.”

Mr. Salatin said that if you look at how nature works, it has a “tremendous amount of biodiversity within a system.” And that biodiversity—meaning a variety of plants and animals living together—keeps the plants, animals, and soil healthy.

Bees and rabbits share a space at Polyface Farm. Courtesy of Polyface Farm

“In the natural template, the soil is almost never bare; it’s always covered with vegetation in the natural template. There is no real tillage in nature beyond wild pigs, or voles, or something. There are no chemicals in nature, and there’s no waste in nature,” Mr. Salatin said.

“Everything runs on decomposition, which is ultimately biomass—sunshine turned into biomass, plant material—and then that decomposes.

“Whether it decomposes on the ground or decomposes through the gut of an animal, true soil fertility is built by things decomposing. And that can be plant material, it can be poop, but it’s all decomposition-driven, whereas chemical agriculture assumes nothing has to die.”

He added, “For something to live, something has to die, which is a profound, mental ecological truth. It’s also quite a spiritual truth as well. How do we fully live? We live by serving someone; we live by dying sometimes to our own ambitions and giving ourselves over to caring for causes bigger than ourselves.”

Mr. Salatin said that industrial agriculture views biodiversity as a problem and operates “just about opposite to the natural template,” necessitating more pharmaceutical interventions, which ultimately pass to humans.

Restoring Balance

Mr. Salatin is deeply concerned about what’s been done to the land but does not subscribe to the narrative of culling all cows and subsisting on a plant and bug-based diet. Instead, he describes himself as a “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer” who wants to heal the land and provide a happy life to the animals under his care.

Polyface Farm’s website says that before Mr. Salatin’s parents purchased the farm in 1961, the land was the armpit of the county—having eroded after being over-tilled and abused.

But because of their keen understanding of how nature works, the Salatin family turned its back on conventional farming and committed themselves to regenerative agricultural practices like planting trees, digging ponds, building “huge compost piles,” and pledging to move their cows daily. The farm now supports three generations of farmers, and the land is lush and nutrient-dense.

As an example of how biodiversity works in regenerative farming, Mr. Salatin said that Polyface Farm houses rabbits, chickens, and pigs “all in the same hoop house” during the winter, instead of separating them like a conventional farm would do.

He explained that by doing so when a pathogen comes out in a rabbit’s droppings, it encounters chicken droppings, which is toxic to the rabbit pathogen. The chicken droppings then kill the pathogen before infecting another animal—all without chemical intervention.

“Diversity creates checks and balances in every facet of life. And that’s exactly how it is in an ecosystem where you want those complex relationships to create checks and balances,” Mr. Salatin said.

Forestal zones next to open fields are part of the regenerative practices at Polyface Farm. Courtesy of Polyface Farm

“Birds, for example—birds are God’s pesticides. They eat bugs. But birds don’t feel comfortable going more than 200 yards from cover. So, on our farm, for example, we’ve created Forestal zones within 200 yards of all the open land so that birds always have a shelter and a place to go. So, they will come out and eat bugs in the field because they have a habitat that’s sheltering for them within 200 yards. So those are the kinds of things that you get with diversity.”

He added that they move the livestock daily at Polyface Farm because animals in nature migrate.

“Look at the wildebeests on the Serengeti; look at the bison and the American plains; they moved around. They didn’t stay in the same place,” Mr. Salatin said. “They moved partly based on seasons, flies tend to push them, and predators—both humans and four-legged predators—and so there’s this movement going on, and the reason that’s so important is it moves them away from yesterday’s excrement.”

He added, “The only way you can have concentrated animal feeding operations, the only way that could develop back in the ‘40s and ’50s, and especially in the ‘70s, was because of antibiotics.

“You can’t put that number of animals in that tight of a confined situation. Living in their own manure, breathing in their own excrement. You can’t do that without crutches.”

Those industrial “crutches” also lead to increased carbon emissions.

Cows and Carbon

“The quickest way to eliminate organic matter, which is essentially carbon in the soil, is with plowing and monocropping,” Mr. Salatin said. He added that if every farmer practiced regenerative farming and the Polyface system, in “fewer than 10 years, we'd sequester all the carbon emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Age.”

Mr. Salatin said that the ancient model of agriculture involved a seven-year rotation—one year of an annual like barley or wheat and then six years of perennials to “put the organic matter back in the soil.”

“An annual is a squash, watermelon, wheat, corn. It only lasts one season, and then the plant actually dies, and it has to come back from a brand-new seed next year,” Mr. Salatin said. “Energy flow of perennials and annuals is completely different—an annual extracts fertility from the soil to build a big vegetable.

“A perennial’s energy flow is from the soil out. A perennial can’t depend on a big, pretty seed, like a watermelon, to propagate itself. It depends on the root crown surviving over time during floods, tornadoes, blizzards, and drought. And so, the perennial’s energy cycle is from outside and down into the soil.”

Mr. Salatin said that herbivores prune perennials when they eat them and that pruning causes the plant to get rid of some of its root mass so it can grow the crown. He said the process is similar to what viticulturists do when they prune their vines—the pruning causes the plants to grow healthier and store more carbon in the soil to facilitate additional growth. At the same time, the herbivores fertilize the perennials with their excrement.

Modern agriculture, however, has flipped that energy cycle on its head.

Cows in a field at Polyface Farm. Courtesy of Polyface Farm

“We’ve taken much of this prairie land, this perennial land, and turned it into monocultures. So, we’ve reversed the energy cycle, and the animals are not moved around for most of the land we’re grazing on. The grass never gets any links to the energy; it’s grazed completely off the ground,” Mr. Salatin said.

“So, there’s no injection of carbon. And so, whether it’s the annuals or the overgrazing, in both cases carbon is now no longer being pumped into the soil. It’s being extracted from the soil in an extracted process.”

The Noble Research Institute, an independent nonprofit agricultural research organization, confirmed that grazing animals through regenerative farming reduces greenhouse gasses.

“There is a lot of talk about removing animal agriculture to reduce greenhouse gases, but the truth is: The land needs animals,” it says on its website. “Proper integration of livestock on grazing lands—which make up 655 million acres of U.S. land (the single-largest land use)—can actually rejuvenate the land’s health.

“Part of this rejuvenation is through carbon sequestration. Plants have the ability to take in carbon from the air and store it in the soil with the help of soil microbes. Cattle and other livestock play roles in stimulating this carbon sequestration process through properly managed grazing. This makes regenerative ranching a solution in today’s climate conversations.”

The WEF further notes: “Regenerative farming can also reduce emissions from agriculture and turn the croplands and pastures, which cover up to 40 percent of Earth’s ice-free land area, into carbon sinks. These are environments that naturally absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.”

A Healthier Tomorrow

“Five hundred years ago, North America produced more food than it does today,” Mr. Salatin said.

“Everybody thinks, ‘Oh, we can’t do this, we can’t do that, we won’t produce enough food.’ Five hundred years ago, America produced more food than it does today. Now, it wasn’t all eaten by people. We had 2 billion wolves that eat 20 pounds of meat a day. We had 200 million beavers that ate more vegetables than all the people in North America today.

“But that’s before Tyson Purdue came out. And so, the sheer abundance of this landscape is actually hard to fathom. Here, with factory houses, with John Deers, chemical fertilizers, the truth is that we have not increased overall production; we have actually diminished the entire continent’s overall production.”

And that’s leading to an increase in noninfectious chronic morbidity.

“If you get Dolly Madison’s or Martha Washington’s cookbook, 60 percent of everything in there is stuff we’ve never even heard of. Because they didn’t have Wal-Mart to go to,” Mr. Salatin said.

“So, they actually ate way more variety than we do. I mean, you’ve got currant berries, June berries, and pawpaws, all these things throughout the season. They ate hundreds of different types of things. The average American now is only eating about 20 to 30 different foods.

Outdoor dinner at Polyface Farm. Courtesy of Polyface Farm

Mr. Salatin said a significant area of study for health and wellness is currently the microbiome, “The most constant thing that you hear from those studies is that if there’s a problem, it’s because you’re lacking this bug, or lacking that bug,” he said.

“It seems to me like one of the quickest ways to increase the diversity in our microbiome is with pastured eggs, pastured beef, pastured pork, animals that have been on the salad bar of diversity, so that they have all these different elements in them. So, when we eat that pork chop, that sausage, that egg, we’re now getting the benefit of this salad bar of variety that these animals picked up out on the pasture.”

Additionally, while non-communicable diseases are the leading causes of death and morbidity in the United States, the CDC says that most of them can be prevented by eating a healthy diet and exercising.

Despite that, the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) total investment in nutrition-related research is less than five percent of its total budget each year. In fiscal year 2020, the NIH spent $2 billion of its almost $41.7 billion budget on nutrition research.

In fiscal 2021, NIH spent $2.1 billion on nutrition-related research. Its total budget for that year was just under $43 billion.

Similarly, in fiscal year 2023, the USDA set aside $4 billion of its discretionary budget “To support research to advance the competitiveness of U.S. agriculture, promote food security, and increase climate change research.”

But only $1.9 billion of that was earmarked for the Agricultural Research Service’s “core projects” that it says cover a wide range of “critical problems facing American agriculture.” Those critical problems include “animal and crop protection and production, new product development, environmental stewardship, food safety, and human nutrition.”

For fiscal 2023, the USDA budgeted $102 million for research on human nutrition.

For comparison, the Food Safety and Inspection Services department of the USDA received almost $8.8 billion in funding. It’s charged with “ensuring that the nation’s commercial supply of meat, poultry, and egg products is safe, wholesome, and properly labeled and packaged.”

The USDA’s total budget for fiscal 2023 was just over $502.7 billion.

“The food we eat is what creates the farms that we have,” Mr. Salatin said. “If you want a farm that builds soil, that cleanses the water, that makes sure there’s plenty of pollinators and birds flying around, and air to breathe, and with nutrient-dense food, if that’s the kind of farm you want, well then you have to choose that kind of food.”