aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, March 09, 2007

Georgia Organics tonight

We’re off to Douglas, Georgia for the Georgia Organics conference where Joel Salatin is the keynote speaker. I became familiar with Joel through reading the chapter devoted to him in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (we’ll be rereading that chapter on the way down). An interview with Salatin is in the Winter Georgia Organics newsletter:

GO: The name of your farm is Polyface, meaning “many faces.” How do you describe the way you farm?

Salatin: We call it simply pasture-based, grass-based, local, bioregional, or foodshed. The local component is something that, as the government has become involved in organics, is a component that creates parameters, accountability, and transparency in the system beyond what just a set of standards can accomplish. In other words, an organic Wal-Mart, an organic Twinkie, and an organic outsourced food system don’t make sense in a holistic approach. It’s hard to say what we call ourselves, but we tend to say that we’re pasture-based livestock that tries to serve its foodshed. […]

GO: What would you say makes your farm different from the farms where most people in the US get their food? Is it the local aspect?

Salatin:  I think for us, the main difference is the grass-based [part]. Everything rotates, everything moves on the pasture. So what we’re trying to do is mimic the movement of the animals that you’d have in nature. Even most organic beef is still finished on grain, and it’s an herbivore. Herbivores don’t eat grain in nature. So what we’re trying to do is really use nature as a template, if you will, and lay it down over our commercial domestic production and say “How can we most closely approximate what you would see in a natural wild system?”