EVERY animal has a job on Joel Salatin's farm, writes GENEVIEVE BARLOW
US farmer Joel Salatin hasn't sown a seed on or bought fertiliser for his family farm for 50 years.
He owns just 222ha, 182ha of which is woodland and the remanding 40ha is open pastures.
He also leases another 404ha.
The second-generation farmer from Virginia produces cattle, pigs, broilers, eggs, turkeys and rabbits in a system which is gaining the world's attention partly for the way he farms, his refusal to be bullied by food safety authorities and his philosophy that farming is a truly noble profession.
He has also had success in drawing young people back to farming.
Describing himself as a Christian, libertarian, environmental, capitalist lunatic, Joel addressed farmers, food producers, chefs and consumers at seminars in Victoria recently.
At the same time, the anti-industrial food movie, Food, Inc., which features Joel's farm is being screened across Australia.
The farm, Polyface Inc, is based in the Shenandoah Valley, rising 300m in a long, narrow strip.
The farm has a 787mm average annual rainfall and is covered in snow up to 150cm for part of the year.
It is cell grazed intensively, using an electric fence to form boundaries.
The cattle are moved daily at 4pm by a self-employed farmer who in return operates his mini-mobile dairy farm on the property.
Symbiosis is vital to the Polyface operation.
The farm's woodland is harvested to build the farm's many mobile animal houses, for custom-made timber and firewood sales. A portable sawmill does the milling.
All the animals are grazed under free-range conditions, except in winter when the cattle are housed on woodchips under an awning.
Cattle are fed hay set on a vertically portable cantilevered platform which is raised and lowered to accommodate the bedding that builds up underneath the cattle.
As the bedding builds up, corn is added and ferments anaerobically to produce a "warm blanket" effect that stays about 13C. The fermenting corn also grows moulds and fungi which produce natural antibodies in the animals, keeping their hooves and udders clean.
In spring when the cows are removed, pigs come in to stir up the bedding in their hunt for corn. Sand, trace minerals and wood ash are added and this is spread across the farm.
Poultry netting is then put up in the paddock and chickens are raised using portable housing. Polyface sells US$20,000 of chickens every year.
Joel said diversity was vital for keeping the farm disease-free.
The combination of pigs, cattle and poultry confused disease-bearing pathogens because they would not cross species.
"One of the biggest problems in industrial agriculture is that we use single use mono-species structures (year round)," Joel said.
"The pathogens never become confused or have to figure out a way to survive because they are always within a metre of a host so they become more and more virulent and prolific."
Polyface's pigs are also cell-grazed.
Electric fences are used to confine 30-50 pigs on 1-2ha of woodland for a month.
"They stimulate decomposition, root out the brambles and low growing plants and eat the starchy roots," Joel said.
"They pick up 45 per cent of their diet off the land and that's a tremendous saving in feed costs."
Joel said this concept of disturbance and rest, like all others on the farm, mimicked nature.
Portable housing and multiple-use buildings were essential.
Pigs, chooks and rabbits were sometimes housed together.
Joel said capital-intensive, single-use infrastructure enslaved the next generation to the same kind of farming as the previous generation.
"What happens when the new generation says 'hey Dad, Grandpa why don't we let the cows go out and graze themselves instead of having all these concrete and building and bankruptcy tubes (silos)?" he said.
"Dad and Grandpa go into apoplectic seizures because they have spent their whole life on their knees to bankers, pouring concrete and building all this infrastructure.
"When we have multiple-use equipment and multiple-use buildings it frees the next generation to be able to use them for other uses.
"That's a critical factor in profitability and the ability to be innovative."
During his seminars Joel rallied against industrial farming, declaring it amoral and disrespectful.
"How can we expect our school kids not to practise violence against each other if we build a culture that teaches them it doesn't matter if we practice abusiveness to the things that are under our care," he said.
Perhaps the most appealing of Joel's philosophies is that he believes farming is a noble profession.
It's this acknowledgment alongside profitability that farmers are craving. Joel was brought to Australia by local food system advocate Alla Wolf-Tasker and Daylesford Macedon Produce, a collective of farmers, food producers, restaurateurs and consumers.
