A piece in The American Spectator arguing that American farming needs to get back to both the market and the land prompted Dan Proft to bring on its author, Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface Farm in Virginia and self-described Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer who writes at thelunaticfarmer.com. Salatin joined Chicago’s Morning Answer to make the case that federal farm subsidies are misallocating resources, confining animals in factory conditions is producing unhealthy food through an unhealthy process, and that the ecological abundance North America sustained five hundred years ago offers lessons that modern agriculture has largely abandoned.
On subsidies, Salatin said the current $12 billion soybean subsidy program is a concrete example of everything wrong with government intervention in agriculture. The world is awash in soybeans. There is no shortage. Paying farmers to keep producing something the market does not need in sufficient quantity insulates them from the consequences of decisions that the market would otherwise discipline. The natural response to oversupply is to shift production toward what the market actually needs. Right now, Salatin said, what America needs is cattle. The national beef herd is at its lowest level since before 1950, which is why beef and ground beef prices are at the levels consumers are currently experiencing, with major processors losing money. Yet there is no subsidy for cattle, so the market signal pointing toward cattle production is being drowned out by the government signal pointing toward soybean production. The result is billions in taxpayer money flowing toward oversupply while genuine scarcity goes unaddressed.
On his own operation at Polyface Farm, Salatin said he raises beef, pork, chicken, lamb, duck, and turkey on pasture using a model he describes as biomimicry, meaning it reflects how nature actually manages animals rather than how industrial agriculture does. The core principle is that animals in nature move. They do not stand in confinement. When you pack animals into hog farms, poultry houses, or feedlots at industrial density, you generate rampant disease from fecal particulate in the air and the stress of confinement, which then requires systematic antibiotic use to keep the animals functional. His farm uses no antibiotics, no GMO feed, no glyphosate, and no vaccines, moving cattle through paddocks daily so that forages have time to rest and regrow between grazings. He contrasted this with the ninety-five percent of American cattle that are managed by turning them onto a field and leaving them, which is overgrazing regardless of whether it occurs on federal or private land, and which steadily depletes rather than builds the soil.
On the counterintuitive claim he makes in the piece that North America produced more food five hundred years ago than it does today, Salatin said archaeology and anthropology have confirmed this through consensus. The key is understanding what food production means in ecological terms. Five hundred years ago, North America sustained one to two hundred million bison, a wolf population of roughly two million animals consuming nearly twenty pounds of meat per day each, up to four hundred million beavers, dense populations of elk, deer, bear, and turkey, and bird flocks so enormous that an observer in Massachusetts around 1800 recorded in his diary that a single flock of passenger pigeons blocked the sun for three days. None of that food was consumed by people, but the sheer biomass and the ecological processes it sustained, including the eight percent of the North American landscape that was open water from beaver ponds, compared to less than four percent today, created the aquifer replenishment, evapotranspiration, cloud formation, and ambient temperature regulation that made the soil productive in ways that corn and soybean monocultures are steadily depleting.
He said the cattle-as-climate-villain narrative gets the causation backwards. There was significantly more animal weight in the world five hundred years ago than there is today, and the soils being mined by modern agriculture are the legacy of that animal activity. The problem is not animals but how animals are managed. Nature moved herds continuously, pushed by predators, fire, and insects. Industrial agriculture plants animals in place. The difference in soil impact is the difference between strategic pruning and destruction.
On where technology fits, Salatin said the seven to ten billion dollars spent annually fighting wildfires is a direct consequence of radical environmentalists shutting down timber harvesting and allowing biomass to accumulate until it combusts. He said if that biomass were harvested and chipped for composting instead, it could eliminate the entire American chemical fertilizer budget and build rather than deplete soils. He said the question his farm asks constantly is how to return to the level of natural abundance North America once sustained, and that the answer requires working with ecological processes rather than against them, which means moving animals, building soil, and treating the farm as a living system rather than an industrial extraction operation.