Stuck By Joel Salatin

I recently had an encounter that revealed an ugly side of agriculture. It jolted me and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind ever since. Let me set the stage. 

I was speaking at a homestead self-reliance festival. After coming off the stage, I went to my book table to chat with folks and hopefully sell some books. It was a typical conference vendor set-up and my table was sandwiched between a youth-in-nature organization and a business selling prepper paraphernalia. 

You know how folks congregate around these vendor tables; conversations are seldom private as people share their ideas and problems. Listening in is acceptable. Since most of the people in the cluster are strangers, they speak with unguarded frankness. Nobody knows the others’ baggage; often these are the most honest dialogues you’ll encounter. Anonymity creates its own safe spaces. 

A middle-aged lady bought a book and engaged me in conversation about her farm. She was second generation, living near the homeplace and watching her dad age out. He was trying to hold the farm together but having become a widower it was increasingly difficult. Several years ago she encountered The Stockman Grass Farmer material and other cutting-edge thinking. She totally bought in. 

Enthusiastically she mentioned her 17-year-old son was on board as well and chafing at the bit to help grandpa on the farm. Since they lived only a couple of miles from the homeplace, the arrangement was handy for collaboration. 

At that moment, a fellow who had been standing there listening to the story interjected “That’s what we need. We need these young people to learn from the old farmers how to do things. These young people think they know it all and don’t want to learn what has worked.” 

The lady wheeled like a lioness and accosted the well-meaning stranger with a bitterness pent up from years of frustration: “I don’t want my son to learn ANYTHING from my Dad. He’s run that land into the ground, filled it with poison chemicals, and never tried anything new in his life. No sir, I want my son to go the opposite direction and do everything differently.” Her verbiage was somewhere between hissing and lecturing. 

The man had no idea the years and depths of frustration built up in this daughter and her family. Who knows how many conversations she’d had with Dad about everything from chemicals to controlled grazing? Who knows how many issues of SGF she’d taken him to read: “Look at this article, Daddy. We could do this and it would be far more profitable.”

Only to have him reply: “Do you know how much work it is to build fence? Do you know how expensive water pipes are? And moving cows? Give me a break; you know how hard it is to get those wild cows up to the corral to work them? And you think I can move them every day? What planet are you living on?” You know these conversations happened over and over. 

I think the lady shocked herself as her heart’s frustrations poured out on this stranger who thought he injected positive helpfulness into the conversation. I stood there behind my table watching the drama unfold, not sure what to say. The man realized he’d unleashed something he didn’t expect and kind of backed a few steps away, wanting to flee but too self-conscious to leave. 

With the man now a couple of steps away, the lady turned away from him and back to me. “My dad has demeaned me, called me ignorant and foolish. All he does is complain about the weather, prices, weeds, the government. He’s built himself a victim fort and crawls in there every night after working hard all day, feeling sorry for himself and utterly incapable of trying new things. And now he doesn’t have energy just to maintain things, let alone try something different.” 

I felt like a psychologist with a patient, although we were standing with a table between us and not me on a chair and her on a couch. 

But it was similar in content as, from the depths of her soul, she verbalized anguish accumulated over years of dismissive conversations. In a few minutes she caught herself and emotionally dusted herself off. 

Where do you go from here? The man wandered off to another table, extricating himself from what must have been a profoundly shocking revelation: old farmers sometimes don’t know what they could or should know. The lady, a bit embarrassed I think, thanked me for the book and headed on down the line of vendor tables as well. What to make of this interchange? 

As I pondered it, I realized how common this kind of inter-generational conflict is. Wouldn’t it be nice to think this was a one in a million aberration? That this was a one-off context with no similar situations? Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens all too often. I’ve always said that if the young people don’t want the farm, they aren’t the problem. It’s us old folks who are the problem. 

We set the tone. We set the agenda. We set the vision. We set the context for whether or not experimentation is acceptable or not. If I may be vulnerably transparent, I’d say this was the singularly wonderful gift my dad gave me. He was always experimenting. Sometimes to a fault because if he did something one way one year he wanted to do something different the next year. Good farming requires both repetition and experimentation. He literally wasn’t content unless he was trying something new. 

I’m not quite that addicted to the new. I kind of like routine, especially if it seems to be working. But on too many farms things aren’t working. The worst thing you can do is continue the routine that isn’t working. What’s the benchmark of “it’s not working?” 

I suggest it’s whether or not the farm attracts young people. Yes, your own kids are wonderful. But what about other kids? Goodness, what about your own sense of its attractiveness? Would you want to inherit or buy into your farm? Does it generate equity? Does it generate spiritual and emotional satisfaction? 

You can tell a lot by listening to yourself talk about your own farm. If this older farmer - the Grandpa in my story above - could listen to himself talk, what would he hear? I guarantee you he would not hear phraseology that would attract a younger him to the farming vocation. His older version of himself would probably talk the younger version of himself off the farm and into the city. 

Make no mistake, the drama I encountered at my book table did not stem from Grandpa’s laziness. He worked hard. It didn’t stem from his lack of perseverance. He’d stuck it out long after it wasn’t fun or satisfying. He’d done his duty. Or had he? Perhaps his biggest duty, his most important obligation, was to listen to new ideas. To carve out a place in his heart for experimentation. Maybe the most important thing he needed to do was exchange his negative attitude for a positive one. 

Too many farmers are emotionally invested in “feeding the world” and forget how to feed their own heart. Their own spirit. Burdened by the corporate industrial agenda, they labor for someone else every day, fulfilling obligatory pounds and bushels, unable to find what feeds their soul. 

All of us are attracted to can-do, positive people. Although my dad never made a full-time living from our Virginia property, he always tried new things. A constant and voracious reader, he would throw out ideas to discuss just for the fun of it. Some we would dismiss outright but others we’d turn over upside down and inside out. Poking around creative ideas just for the fun of it became on-farm entertainment. He died young; I was only 31 when he passed. I’d staked my claim, buried my town job, and jumped off the cliff with a young wife and toddler son at 25 years old. 

Dad never wavered. I have tears in my eyes as I write this. He didn’t waver because he was confident that the platform of experiments he’d instigated over his life would bear fruit in mine. They have. And I’m incredibly grateful. I lost him after only five years on the farm fulltime and I miss his optimistic can-do spirit every day.

When this lady at my book table went off on her dad, my heart broke for what could have been. I hope the grandson does indeed love and nurture and take that farm to places Grandpa never imagined. Why? Because it is possible. That’s the SGF message. What we put in these pages is not about doing it over... unless it’s really working. It’s about experimenting. It’s about believing that no matter what we’re doing, we can do it better. We never arrive; we keep poking around, experimenting, trying new things but tethered to nature’s patterns.

If I could wave a magic wand over the farmers of America, the average of whom are 60 years old, I would wish for two things:

1. Listen to yourself. Are your words attractive and inspiring?
2. What new ideas have you experimented with in the last two years? 

As I approach three score and ten, my prayer is that these two wishes would be front and center on our farm. That young people by the thousands will want to love the land, do better by it, and then pass it off to another generation of young bright eyed bushy tailed entrepreneurs. 

Joel Salatin is a full-time grass farmer in Swoope, Virginia, whose family owns Polyface Farm. Author and conference speaker, he promotes food and farming systems that heal the land while developing profitable farms. To contact him, email polyfacefarms@gmail.com or call Polyface Farm at 540-885-3590