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Salatin addresses
farming techniques
By Galen C. McBride
Rappahannock News Staff Writer j>
Innovative farmer and relationship marketer Joel Salatin presented an indepth look at environmentally-based, animal-friendly farming operations to an enthusiastic standing-room-only crowd at the county library last Friday night.
Sponsored by the Ragged Mountain Resource Center’s Educational Speaker Series, Salatin, an award-winning alternative farmer, lecturer, and author, spoke from his own experience. His Polyface Farm, Inc., in Swoope, is considered the “Mecca of innovation, sustainability and profit,” for people who can appreciate high quality, nutritious agricultural products and imaginative management techniques.
Salatin’s slide show and lecture focused on his family’s considerable success in developing and implementing healthy farming practices that pay off in the bottom line. From “salad bar beeF — cattle raised on the finest, most succulent grass — to “eggmobile eggs” — produced by foraging, pasture-sanitizing hens — Polyface Farm brings in full retail dollars for everything it produces.
A natural industrial engineer, Salatin’s innovations bear a decidedly agricultural thrust. He challenges the modem linear mentality, reminding his audience that life is circular, with everything dependent on everything else, the land, the animals, the total environment.
“As people become more and more specialized," he explained, “they know more and more about less and less.” When they have no interdisciplinary approach, they lose track of “the big picture.”
By analyzing the processes and adapting Mother Nature’s examples to his farm operation, he “lets the animals do the work,” and takes advantage of multi-use,
See FARMER, Page A7
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