FIELDS OF FARMERS

by JOEL SALATIN

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New softcover book, 328 pages, published 2013.

Interning, Mentoring, Partnering, Germinating

Do you own a piece of land? Are you an aging farmer without a young partner? Are you a young person interested in becoming a farmer? Would you like to love and heal the land? If farming provided a white collar salary, would you do it? Do farm internships interest you? Are you concerned about the average farmer being nearly sixty years old?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, this book is for you. The aging farmer phenomenon is new and presents both unprecedented crisis and opportunigy. Opening his heart and life, Joel Salatin uses his Polyface Farm experience to encourage multi-generational farm relationships and germinate a new generation of young farmers.

America's average farmer is sixty years old. When young people can't get in, old people can't get out. Approaching a watershed moment, our culture desperately needs a generational transfer of millions of farm acres facing abandonment, development, or amalgamation into ever-larger holdings. Based on his decades of experience with interns and multigenerational partnerships at Polyface Farm, farmer and author Joel Salatin digs deep into the problems and solutions surrounding this land- and knowledge-transfer crisis. This book empowers aspiring young farmers, midlife farmers, and nonfarming landlords to build regenerative, profitable agricultural enterprises..

Joel Salatin is a third generation farmer from the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. He provides a serious examination of the origin of the nation's current food supply and advocates for rebuilding America through family farms, sustainable living and fresh and natural eating. Provides an examination of the origin of the nation's current food supply and advocates for rebuilding America through family farms, sustainable living, and fresh and natural eating.

About the author

Joel F. Salatin (born 1957) is an American farmer, lecturer, and author. He raises livestock using holistic methods of animal husbandry, free of potentially harmful chemicals, on his Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. Meat from the farm is sold by direct-marketing to consumers and restaurants.

After graduating from college, Salatin married his childhood sweetheart Teresa in 1980 and became a feature writer at the Staunton, Virginia newspaper. He then decided to try farming full-time. His grandfather had been an avid gardener, beekeeper and a follower of J. I. Rodale, the founder of regenerative organic gardening. His parents had bought the land that became Polyface after losing a farm in Venezuela to political turmoil. They had raised cattle using organic methods, but could not make a living at farming alone.His father worked as an accountant and his mother taught high school physical education.

Salatin describes himself as a "Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist farmer". He produces high-quality "beyond organic" meats, which are raised using environmentally responsible, ecologically beneficial, sustainable methods. His philosophy of farming emphasizes healthy grass on which animals can thrive in a symbiotic cycle of chemical-free feeding. Cows are moved from one pasture to another rather than being centrally corn fed. Then chickens in portable coops are moved in behind them, where they dig through the cow dung to eat protein-rich fly larvae while further fertilizing the field with their droppings.

Joel works his land with his mother, wife, children and grandchildren, plus employees, subcontractors, apprentices and interns. . The farm services more than 4000 families, ten retail outlets and fifty restaurants through on-farm sales and metropolitan buying clubs. Joel is the author of many books including Family Friendly Farming, You Can Farm, Holy Cows & Hog Heaven, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal and Folks, This Ain't Normal. He spends a hundred days a year lecturing at colleges and to environmental groups. He has visited Australia several times. Fields of Farmers is his latest book.

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Fields of Farmers by Joel Salatin