A Bit Of History

I know most of you are aware that there is a very real difference in food quality. It seems obvious to me now, but it wasn't always. My grandpa farmed conventionally, as did his father. Both sides of my family worked in Tyson and Cargill operations. My grandpa used to get mad when he heard about alternative farmers. I mean really. Alternative farmers are just a bunch of yankee liberal hippie environmentalists anyways right? They can't grow food. They just grow environmentally friendly marigolds. I was taught that erosion was a myth. And I have nothing against my grandpa. That's what he was taught. That's how he survived. But there is a time for a shift of paradigm. And it is a shift indeed.

Believe it or not, I used to aspire to run a Tyson chicken farm. I mean, I wanted the privilege of walking into a chicken house four hundred foot long and forty wide, making my way through a congregation of 16,000 plump, mindless chickens, looking at a 400 foot row of feeders to be sure that the medicated feed was not bridging in the hopper. I looked forward to that. That's our industry right? That's what keeps northern Arkansas going. 

Four years ago, I had never heard of Joel Salatin, Justin Rhodes, Gene Logsdon, or anyone like that. We were doing things "as they should be done". We didn't need their help. Papa kept me sheltered from the influence of yankee liberal hippie environmentalists. But we were doing our own experiments. 

We had taken the floor out of the Omaha High School gym so that it could be rebuilt. As payment, we got all the wood. So we had plenty of tongue-and-groove boards that were 3/4" thick. We slapped together some chicken tractors (I didn't know what a chicken tractor was at the time, we called them "mobile chicken houses") for free out of that and some feed bags for a roof. And then we tried it. We put the chickens in these A-frame houses, and started moving them every few days. We thought this was our idea, mind you. But we never got it quite right. We still had the mainstream agriculture mentality. The result was that we wanted to get the very last penny of profit from the land that was possible. So we let the chickens graze too long on one spot. They would bare the ground in two days. We had four of these "mobile chicken houses"  with twenty birds in each. Let me tell you, when you leave twenty birds to eat down grass in an 8x10 square for two days, they can do some serious damage to your grass. But we uninformed, conventionally paradigmed farmers did not understand the problem. We thought we were getting maximum profits from our land by making the chickens eat every last scrap of green from the earth. Sort of like mining. We were so wrong. 

The grass grew back weak and scraggly. We gave up on "mobile chicken houses" right then, thinking it could never work. Still hadn't heard of Joel Salatin. We put those "mobile chicken houses" under the porch and they have never been used again as far as I know. We failed because we still had that conventional "use it up" paradigm. Now the Johnsons, family friends, did not have that paradigm at all. They did all sorts of strange things:

• They didn't use Sevin dust, but used some other dust called "diarrheaceous earth". Gross. 
• They used mulch in their garden to keep the weeds down. 
• They tried to avoid tillage. 
• They got heirloom seed (heirloom was a four letter word)
  
  
  

Folks, that stuff might seem normal to you, but if you think like a conventional farmer, this is the sort of thing you gripe about in the feed store. These are the things that the yankee liberal hippie environmentalists do to try to "do us in". So we just kept it to ourselves when we were at the Johnson's house. 

But at home, we planned our conventional farm ideas. Our neighbors had two fields in the bottomland by Cricket Creek.  I would estimate about twelve acres total. And we were going to plow it up and plant corn. We were just waiting for spring, hoping for a bumper crop. We had the idea in the fall of 2021,  and we were going to carry it out the following spring. I was excited, and Papa was excited. We had a big old McCormick tractor that could pull a two bottom plow and harrow, and were prepared to do the work. But we never did it. Papa died that winter.

We ended up moving in with the Johnsons. Of course, I found the farming section in the Johnson Family Library. The only book I had ever seen about farming was a really boring book on farm accounting. Folks, that's not an exaggeration. I had a sheltered life. But at the Johnson's... that was a different story. I started reading books by Joel Salatin and I found out that he is not a yankee liberal hippie environmentalist at all. In fact, he calls himself a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer. And that is when I really changed paradigm. I mean it was a total swap. I found out that we had not just been a little off course, but we were going the opposite direction we should have been. 

Honestly, I still have a bit remaining of that conventional paradigm. Environmentalist is a four letter word. The climate is designed to change. Tillage is not a sin. But the difference is very apparent between a farmer that stewards the land and a yankee liberal hippie environmentalist. I did not see it before, but I do now. And I'm glad I didn't carry out my plans with Tyson before I realized that, because those contracts can be hard to get out of. So thank you LORD for introducing me to the Johnsons, and thank you Mr. Johnson for introducing me to Joel Salatin. And if any of you readers have that anti-alternative paradigm, because you think that alternative farmers are yankee liberal hippie environmentalists, I challenge you to look past it. It's hard at first but worth it. But I doubt you do or you wouldn't read this.