Category Archives: Ranches & Farms

Riverland Farms: Pastured Chicken for Sale

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I just received a letter from Genevieve Stroulger of Riverland Farms. Next week she will be slaughtering about 300 pastured chickens. I know many readers of eatkamloops.org have asked us for information about local pastured chicken. Below is part of her letter and contact information:

We are writing this letter to give you a bit of background about Riverland Farms, in hopes that you will purchase our chicken and allow us to be one of your food providers now and in the future. We are located on the banks of the South Thompson River, east of Rivershore Golf Course.

We are passionate about raising quality meat from chickens who are raised in the pasture. Our pens are portable so that we can move them often throughout the season to provide them with fresh grass and alfalfa. We believe a chicken should live the life of a chicken: eating high quality locally raised grains, alfalfa, grass, and bugs, and waking up to the sun!  The quality of the meat produced is superior in texture and taste.

Our meat is processed at a local family owned processing plant in Pritchard, BC and is government inspected. This year the inspector was so impressed that she bought some of our chicken! Some local restaurants are trying out our chicken on their menus as well! We would be happy to answer any questions you have.

We are running a special. If you purchase 20 chickens we will give you 10% off. Our price is $4.00 per pound.

Riverland Farm
Genevieve Stroulger
4336 Stevenson Rd, Kamloops, BC, V2H 1S8
T: 250.573.3183, C: 250.571.3486
E: riverlandfarmskamloops(a)gmail.com
25km
pastured chicken, pastured eggs

Looking for cheap organic produce in Kamloops?

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freezing-tomatoes

Last year our tomato harvest failed due to an early frost. I had very few tomatoes for the winter. This year I bought about 75 pounds of Roma tomatoes from Gardengate.

This week I visited Gardengate for the first time. Gardengate is located in the heart of North Kamloops and produces an assortment of seasonal vegetables and fruit on 2.8 acres. The prices are very reasonable for certified organic produce. I will definitely be visiting Gardengate again. Here is more information about Gardengate.

Gardengate
David Hoar
915 Southill St, Kamloops, BC, V2B 7Z9
T: 250.554.9453
F: 250.554.9402
E: davidh@opendoorgroup.org
6km
certified organic STOPA farm no.157: THEO BC training program; farm stand: open Monday to Friday from July 6th to October 31st at 11:00am to 12:30pm; varieties of seasonal organic fruits and vegetables

Frugavore

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Some might see the word “peasant” as a derogatory term… In fact, the word is derived from the fifteenth-century French word “paisant”, meaning a person from the local “pays”, or countryside. By definition a peasant is any person who lives or works close to the land… The peasant diet has been described as “simple and nourishing,” and their health was all the better for it.
Frugavore by Arabella Forge

A few months ago, I wrote a posting called What’s a Starving Student to do About Food? This posting was to help the student, or anyone on a tight budget, find ways to eat nourishing traditional foods. I had just received my copy of Wise Traditions, a quarterly journal produced by the Weston A Price Foundation. The journal had a review about a new book called Frugavore. This book is written by Arabella Forge, the Weston A Price Leader in Melbourne, Australia. Frugavore has not been released in Canada yet, but you can get it through amazon.com.

A few days ago, my sister Christine surprised me with a copy of Frugavore. She ordered the book from Australia. I enjoyed reading the book. It was fun to read about regional specialties like Kangaroo-Tail Soup and finding a man to urinate on your garden’s lemon tree. At the beginning of each recipe Arabella has helpful advice for the new Frugavore. Each section begins with a philosophical discussion on how to be a frugal with our food dollars while maintaining a high quality food supply for our families. Arabella discusses small scale gardening, household waste reduction, methods of food preparation, and safe household cleaning. If you have problems with the Nightshades you will need to make some substitutions. If you are on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, some of the recipes will not be suitable. For those who can enjoy grains, legumes and beans, Arabella walks you through the process of traditional preparation for these peasant foods.

The first recipe I tried from the book was a success. Both of my girls, known for their dislike of squash, finished their bowls and asked for more. I have made some local changes to the recipe.

Pumpkin Soup
1/2 acorn squash, steamed and peeled
1 small sweet pumpkin, steamed and peeled
1T fat or butter
1tsp sea salt
1 large onion, chopped
2 medium carrots, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1-2tsp allspice, freshly ground
fresh parsley or chives, chopped
4-6c chicken stock or bone broth
In a large soup pot, saute the onions and salt in the fat until golden brown. Add the carrots and garlic near the end of the cooking. In another large pot, put about one inch of water in the bottom. Quarter the squash and steam until soft. Remove the squash from the pot and peel after the squash has cooled. Puree the squash with a food processor. Use the steaming water to thin out the squash, if needed. Add the sauted vegetables to the squash and puree until smooth. Return the mixture to the large soup pot and add enough broth to have a smooth soup.

Just One Sit-Down Family Meal

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This is a posting I wrote back in early October. It is quite a contrast from today, since we are pulling out our winter boots, snow pants and jackets after the first snow of the year:

Shaen and I spent the afternoon working at cutting back the tomato plants. We removed leaves and extra green growth from the tomato plants in an attempt to encourage the plant to put its energy into ripening the tomatoes before the first killer frost. Shaen found a monster eggplant and numerous hot peppers hiding in the greenhouse. Sonja worked on pulling up beets and baby carrots. Erika found a potato plant and dug up the tubers. Erika danced through the garden collecting ripe cherry tomatoes like some sort of fairy nymph. The girls cleaned and processed their vegetables.

For dinner, I made a mixture of baked vegetables in a glass baking dish. Most of the vegetables came from Farmhouse Herbs an organic farm that sells at the Kamloops Farmer’s Market. It hasn’t been a good year for our garden and Farmhouse Herbs has supplied my household with much of our vegetables. The vegetables included: parsnips, onions, green onion tops, garlic, beets and carrots. (By the way, those golden beets were the best beets I have ever eaten.) I added herbs gathered by the garden nymph, and mixed in sea salt and fat from my grease bucket. Please read The Great Grease Bucket: Something for Nothing for more information. In another glass baking dish, I cut the freshly dug potatoes and added sea salt and fat. I used our own garden carrots, lightly cooked in butter and dressed with fresh garden parsley.

When Shaen came in at the end of the day, he cooked three chuck steaks on the barbecue. Chuck steak is normally not grilled because it is considered a tough cut of meat but these steaks were tender and very juicy. We got the grassfed veal from Jocko Creek Ranch last winter. For more information please read Grassfed Veal and Cooking With Grass-Fed Meat and Fowl.

When we sat down to our meal, we each enjoyed a glass of fresh cow’s milk. There was a salad of sun ripened cherry tomatoes and herbs. The girls loaded their potatoes with raw butter I made last year. (I privately thanked Patty, our Jersey cow, for the wonderful dairy products.) It was a delicious meal. The meal was wonderful because so much of the food came from our own land or from the land of people we know and trust. We were hungry after working the afternoon in the garden. What also made the meal special is that we ate it together and enjoyed each other’s company.

I just wanted to tell about one sit-down family meal. It wasn’t a special meal but the way we eat normally. This meal might seem odd to the modern eater, rushing between the office, take-out, and home but this meal would have been the norm a generation ago.

Oven Baked Seasonal Vegetables
4-6 large carrots, cut into large 3″ pieces
4-6 parsnips, cut into large 3″ pieces
2 orange beets or turnips, cut into wedges
1 large onion, cut into wedges
1-2 leek tops, cut into large 3″ pieces
2-3 large garlic cloves, cut in half
1T fresh rosemary, chopped
1tsp sea salt
1tsp fresh growing black pepper
1T grease from the grease bucket
1-2 potatoes, cut into wedges, optional
The trick to this meal is to use the best seasonal vegetables you can find. Cut all the vegetables into pieces about the same size so they will cook evenly. Use a large glass baking dish and mix all the cut vegetables together with the grease, black pepper, sea salt and rosemary. Cook at 350F and stir every 15 minutes for about 45 minutes or until the vegetables are cooked through.

Sun Ripened Tomato Salad
2-3c sun ripened cherry tomatoes, whole
1/2c garden parsley, finely chopped
1/4c red onion, finely chopped (optional)
Add all ingredients together in a wooden salad bowl. Add 2-3T of Whole Seed Mustard Dressing. The recipe can be found in Making Homemade Lacto-Fermentation Whole Seed Mustard.

Hey farmer farmer
Put away the DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell

What’s a Starving Student to do About Food?

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Recently, I was contacted by Mimi Nakamura, a fourth year journalism student at Thompson Rivers University. She was working on a story in her journalism class regarding local foods in Kamloops. After the interview, I started wondering if other people on a budget might find the information useful. Here is our interview.

1. How did you decide to start the website eatkamloops.org?
I started the eakamloops.org website because I was new to Kamloops and I was finding it difficult to find local food. I wondered if other newcomers were having the same problem. I was a member of the Weston A Price Foundation and decided I wanted to do more for my community so I became a WAPF Chapter Leader. Part of my responsibilities is to maintain a list of local food producers. (Local food producers can be found here.) Doing a website is beyond what the WAPF requires but I thought it would be easier for people to get information about local food this way.

2. Do you personally buy local food? If so, what do you usually get?
My family gets most of our fresh produce and meat locally. We look for organic, un-sprayed and/or pasture-based food. We tend to do large bulk purchases once or twice a year for dried goods and “exotic” foods. When we buy food from farmers we don’t know, we buy certified organic. We buy whole foods and avoid processed foods:
Winter Storage I
Winter Storage II
Presently, we produce a number of products for our own personal use: raw dairy, pastured eggs, pastured fowl, and some produce. We use organic grains, legumes and un-sprayed hay. We give the animals whole food supplements such as kelp, unrefined sea salt, oyster shells, rock minerals, etc.

3. What is the importance of consuming local food?
Local food is important but it is just as important how the food is grown. Ideally, buy local food that is grown using organic principles and/or pasture-based. What’s the good of “local” food that is loaded with herbicides and pesticides filling the local environment with poison? There is a new good reason to buy certified organic foods. Certified organic foods do not allow GMOs. There is mounting evidence that GMO crops are contaminating non-GMO crops, including organically grown crops. No one really knows what will happen to our ecosystem due to these changes in the basic genetic structure of our food crops. (This is a scary thought. These genetic changes are permanent and cannot be stopped.)

4. What is the challenge that local farmers are facing right now?
The greatest barrier for small farmers and ranchers is government regulators with their one-size-fits-all-regulations. We will not have a local food system if those guys get their way. Many of the regulations now needed in the Industrial Food System was caused by the practices of the Industrial Food System itself. I would like to see consumers being able to buy directly from the farmer or rancher without onerous government regulations. Read some of my postings on raw milk. Just remember, this issue has nothing to do with “safety” and everything to do with “control”. I talk about this sad state of affairs in Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick.

5. Do you have any suggestions for university students to buy local food but stay on their grocery budget? (Any suggestions for cheap but healthy local food diet?)
Everyone’s situation is different but I would suggest a student read 25 Steps to Nourishing Traditional Foods and Where to Start: Limited Time and Budget. The student should try to work on one new step every two weeks. Some steps are easy, others are costly, and some require planning. Many of these steps will save money in the short and long term. Having a stable household would be ideal but for many students this would be difficult. Before looking for “cheap” food, a student should get reacquainted with their kitchen and learn how to cook real food. Without the skills to cook whole foods, the food will go to waste which would be costly for the student. After the student masters cooking with whole ingredients, the student should stop eating processed foods out of the Industrial Food System. The Industrial Food System specializes in “cheap” convenience foods but the student will pay again and again with their health. Cheap food isn’t very cheap when a student is always sick and weak.

At the same time, my family eats extremely well, cheaply. We produce many expensive foods ourselves by putting in our own labor. We are very careful about how we feed and treat our animals so the food we produce is of the highest quality. Foods we do not produce ourselves, we get in bulk from quality sources. We eat our meals together at home and we almost never eat out. When we are traveling we bring our own food.

I have another suggestion for the starving students looking for good, cheap food. I just found a new website by Arabella Forge. She is the WAPF Melbourne Chapter Leader and has just written a new book called Frugavore. Unfortunately, her book is not available in North America yet, but her website is very helpful. Take the Frugavore Challenge!
Frugavore introduces modern readers to the fundamentals of peasant cuisine, in which nothing is wasted, every part of the animal eaten, abundance from the garden preserved in traditional ways, and delicious meals prepared from scratch with fresh, local ingredients.
Thumbs Up Book Reviews by Sally Fallon

Updated December 9, 2010: Wendell Berry has been writing passionately about local food and farming issues for over forty years. For more information please read Wrong Turn and Are you a producer or a consumer?

Updated Feburary 13, 2011: I got out of school during in the late 1980s during a really bad recession. It was impossible to find work and it was one of the reasons I ended up starting my own business. During those early years I read a book that changed the way I looked at money. The book is called Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicke Robin. I would highly recommend this book for any young person getting out on their own and trying to get control of their finances. I also got a chance to read Frugavore. It’s a fun book with great money saving recipes.

Pasture-to-Plate.com and the Chilcotin Plateau

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This summer I had the great pleasure of visiting the Chilcotin Plateau. We traveled through historic Gang Ranch, reputed at one time to be the largest ranch in the world, controlling four million acres. Dale Alsager wrote a book called The Incredible Gang Ranch. Dale Alsager talked about the problems facing the modern rancher. He felt the only way for a ranch to survive and be profitable in the present bureaucratic environment was to control the whole food system including: production, processing and distribution. Considering the modern complexity of completely controlling a food distribution system, I have rarely seen a small family-run company capable of this task. Pasture-to-Plate.com is one example.

Pasture-to-Plate.com was started by Felix and Jasmin Schellenberg, owners of Rafter 25 Ranch, located just north of Redstone, BC. Their ranch is beyond organic, chemical free, biodynamic and pasture based. The family has lived on the ranch for over 28 years. This is the “pasture” part of the business.

Felix and Jasmin Schellenberg have three daughters: Dominique, Barbara and Fiona Schellenberg which run different parts of the family business. Dominique runs Chezacut Wilderness Adventures, an ecotourism part of Rafter 25 Ranch. Barbara and Fiona help run the Drive Organics Retail Outlet and Ethical Kitchen and out of Vancouver, BC. This is the “plate” part of the business. These “spin-off” businesses have been described by Arthur Koestler and later Joel Salatin as holonic development.

Recently, I drove up to Redstone, BC for the grand opening of the Chilcotin Harvest Abbattoir. This is a beyond-state-of-the-art slaughtering facility. This facility has been the dream of Felix and Jasmin Schellenberg for many years. Big projects like this do not happen without help. The Schellenberg family enlisted the help of a Master Butcher from Switzerland. Jakob Jud moved his whole family to Redstone, BC and they all work at the abbattoir.

The Schellenberg family have a deep appreciation of the suffering of animals and want the animals to be as comfortable as possible before slaughtering. Long distance shipping is very stressful for animals so slaughtering on the ranch or very near the ranch is ideal. It’s also cost effective. (Unfortunately, our government regulators are not as concerned about the welfare of your dinner.) The amount of government regulation the family would have had to contend with boggles the mind. Controlling the processing of the food was the final part of the chain. This is the “to” part of the business.

I had a chance to try some of their products. I tried European-style Wieners, Bratwurst, Pepperoni, Bresaola, Land jäger, Jerky, and pork lard. If you are looking for cheap food, you will not find it here. If you want the highest quality product, made with organic additives, by extremely skilled people, this is the place to buy. Barbara Schellenberg is the Weston A Price Foundation Chapter Leader for Vancouver, BC so the family values nourishing traditional food preparation methods. Their products are traditional. Try their wieners if you want to know what a wiener should look and taste like.

If you follow the Specific Carbohydrate Diet please be careful to read the ingredient list. Their ingredients are the best you will find commercially but could cause problems for sensitive people. Just because the food is organic, pasture based, and made by knowledgeable people doesn’t mean the food will be problem free. I reacted to those same delicious wieners. It is possible something in the “organic spice mixture” was the problem. If you interested in what kind of additives can be put into an “organic spice mixture” please read Canadian Organic Standards: 32.311 Permitted Substances Lists. Be warned, it is a long document.

If you would like to read more about holonic business development please read two articles in the Stockman Grass Farmer: Ghost in the Machine and 50 Steers a Year is a Good Living. In the case of Pasture-to-Plate.com the “mother-ship” is the Rafter 25 Ranch.

Heritage Hogs and Ranfurly Farm

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skinning-pig

Joel Salatin would be happy to know we had ourselves a hog kill. This was a traditional practice just a few generations ago. Now people are reclaiming the skills of slaughtering and butchering. Here is a Chris giving Sonja a quick explanation of skinning a hog.

Near the beginning of August we picked up two, eight week old English Big Black Hogs from Ranfurly Farm. Ranfurly Farm is located near Chase, BC in Turtle Valley. Mike and Margaret Fryatt moved onto the farm just over a year ago, but they have done a lot in a very short time. They are breeders of heritage livestock. They are specializing in pasturing animals and growing part of their animal feed as green crops. Using electric fencing to control access, they let the animals into the green crops for a self-service buffet. Their daughter Jennifer Fryatt and her partner Adam Cooke, moved onto the property and are running the only Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program in the area that I know about. This makes them a multi-generational farm, which is a very good thing.

hog-parts

This was the first time we cut up an animal bigger then a turkey. By the way, Ranfurly Farm doesn't require you to butcher your own animals. They will send them to the butcher for you. Our group just has an insatiable appetite to learn new skills.

At Ranfurly Farm they use electric fences for their pasture management so the hogs were trained to electric fences. We have been using a paddock and a small electric fenced pasture area for the hogs. We feed the hogs organic mixed whole grains from Fieldstone Granary. We soak the grains overnight and feed the mash directly to the hogs and chickens. This soaking improves digestibility and if the hogs do not eat everything the whole grains will sprout producing greens for the animals. We also feed the pigs kitchen and garden waste and the occasional feast of chicken offal. Hogs, like chickens, are omnivoresand need animal products to be healthy. Traditionally, hogs would also be fed the waste products from cheese and butter making.

We have never handled hogs before and we have come to love these sweet animals. I can’t understand why someone would dislike hogs. Hogs are very clean animals and, if given the option, they will go to the bathroom in only one area of their living quarters. I don’t know how the two hogs come to a consensus about where to go to the bathroom, but they do.

The hogs were very wary of us at first. They have these big floppy ears that hang over their eyes. I don’t know how they manage to see where they are going. But now when we come, they jump around and bounce their ears so they can see us better. After their fill of soaked grain mash, the hogs will stand still for a back scratching. The hogs will grunt with delight and wiggle their back ends with pleasure, not unlike a dog.

I must admit I am getting attached to Bacon and Sausage. These are the only names I allow the girls to use for the hogs. (We have a policy of never naming livestock destined for our table. At the same time, names such as Bacon and Sausage, helps the children understand where their food comes from.) I don’t know which will win out, growing the sows into breeding stock, or my hunger for homemade smoked bacon.

If you are looking for heritage livestock or pastured beef, pork or lamb, here is their contact information. If you are interested in CSA please contact Jennifer Fryatt and Adam Cooke directly:

Ranfurly Farm
Mike and Margaret Fryatt
797 Bailey Rd, Chase, BC, V0E 1M0
T: 250.679.2735
E: mfryatt(a)hotmail.com
E: marg.fryatt(a)hotmail.com
60km
pastured beef from Galloway cows, pastured pork from English Big Black and Berkshire pigs, fibre from Blueface Leceister sheep and meat from North Country Cheviots Cross sheep, free range eggs from Black Australorps and Silver Laced Wyandottes chickens, breeders for English Big Black, Berkshire pigs and Blueface Leceister sheep; soon to be breeders of Bourbon Reds, Ridley Bronze, and Blue Slate turkeys; soon to be breeders of heritage Sussex and Wyandotte chickens
Jennifer Fryatt and Adam Cooke
E: ranfurlycsa(a)gmail.com
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) weekly box program for vegetables and pastured poultry

Industrial Food Sickness

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All disease begins in the gut.
Hippocrates

Since my family has been eating exclusively whole, unprocessed foods for over three years, I have noticed a strange occurrence. When my girls go to birthday parties or indulge in holiday festivities such as Halloween or Easter, they don’t feel very well afterward. After eating the processed foods out of the Industrial Food System, the girls become nauseous and complain about stomach pain within a few hours. My eldest daughter has vomited a number of times after these meals. My youngest daughter is very sensitive to something in these foods. More often than not, it causes behavioral problems for a day or two after eating the processed food. My husband occasionally eats out at restaurants and complains about not feeling well after most meals. Even our cat Tabs, who has been on a raw meat diet since we got her, has become sick from getting into a friend’s processed cat food. As I observe their sickness, I notice it is like a mild flu that includes stomach upset or vomiting.

Now my family has not eaten unprocessed foods our whole lives. We used to eat processed foods everyday without feeling sick. (Okay, my family wasn’t the picture of health, but we weren’t vomiting after a meal either.) One would hope that eating nourishing traditional foods regularly would strengthen a person’s constitution so an occasional meal of highly processed foods would have no effect. But the reverse appears to be true. The longer my family eats nourishing traditional foods, the more sensitive we become to these processed foods.

Why are they now having industrial food sickness? Why in the past did these same processed foods not cause sickness? What has changed? I have been thinking about this question for quite some time. It is hypothesized that the healing action of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet is that it changes the composition of gut flora or reverses gut dysbiosis. Gut dysbiosis is the lack of gut flora or an unhealthy gut flora imbalance which causes illness.

What if this progressive industrial food sickness is caused by changes in the gut flora community? Do the processed foods damage or kill healthy gut flora? Does the gut flora “communicate” this damage to the “gut brain” causing the feeling of sickness? The gut brain is an extensive grouping of neurons in the digestive system, which gut flora attaches to and chemically communicates with the nervous system. What if the gut flora community is causing the feeling of being sick after my family eats the processed foods?

This would explain the progressive nature of industrial food sickness and why it seems to worsen the longer my family eats nourishing traditional foods. The longer my family eat better, the stronger the population of healthy gut flora becomes. As the healthy gut flora population increases, it can send a very strong message to the nervous system that the processed food is making the gut flora’s environment poisonous to them. The reason why the processed food did not cause illness before eating nourishing traditional foods is because of gut dysbiosis. There was not enough healthy gut flora to send a strong message of dismay to the nervous system about our food choices.

One thing I notice is that it is getting easier to get my children to eat better. Every round of industrial food sickness reinforces good eating patterns. The sad part is thinking about all of the people walking around with very sick gut flora communities, too weak to send a danger warning. Most people are not aware that we are indeed “individuals” but our bodies are a vast and complex microcosm of interrelating organisms. We are in peril if we forget that we interface with the environment on a microscope level and our first line of defense is our symbiotic gut flora community.

For more information about this topic please read What is a Healthy Gut? For more information about gut dysbiosis please read Gut and Psychology Syndrome and GAPS In Our Medical Knowledge. For more information about the gut brain connection please read Breaking the Vicious Cycle.

Boxing Day: You Are What You Buy (Believe)

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christmas-2009

We try to make Christmas a simple affair with just a few presents for the girls. This year we made our Christmas decorations from colored paper. It is wonderful to watch the tree change each year as the girls learn how to make different decorations.

Boxing Day has a long history but is now primarily known as a shopping holiday in North America. I haven’t participated in Boxing Day “celebrations” for decades. But at this time of year, I can’t help but think about what we “buy into”, will make the world we live in.

I dream about a world where my needs can be met without those needs costing someone else dearly. I dream about food that will nourish the body and community that will nourish the spirit. I dream about producing food for our families in a way that won’t cost “the world”. I dream about a world where our children are surrounded by a caring loving community that thinks about our shared future.

How do we become more enlightened about our behaviors so we can live our dreams? How can we change our thinking so our actions will follow? Maybe we need to just “buy into” a new vision. Of course, this vision isn’t new but very old. Maybe we need to learn how to tame our technology and harness our brilliance. All the answers are out there, we just have to apply them.

While I was at the Weston A Price Foundation 2008 Conference in California, I had the opportunity to see some new ideas being worked out in the real world. I visited the Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley, CA. They are running a Community Supported Kitchen (CSK). Jessica Prentice is one of the co-founders of Three Stone Hearth and author of Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection. I hope you enjoy an interview with Jessica Prentice Part I and Part II. If you would like to see inside the Community Supported Kitchen run by Three Stone Hearth please watch Business With Passion.

People who feel themselves in chains, with no hope of ever getting them off, want to put chains on everyone else.
John Holt

Joel Salatin’s Vision of a Local Food System

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This last weekend I had the great pleasure of meeting Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm. He was speaking to a sold-out crowd hosted by the Cowichan Agricultural Society in Duncan, BC. Joel Salatin speaks passionately about family run, grass-based farming. In his own words, he is “in the redemption business: healing the land, healing the food, healing the economy, and healing the culture.” The guiding principles behind “Polyface are:
TRANSPARENCY: Anyone is welcome to visit the farm anytime. No trade secrets, no locked doors, every corner is camera-accessible.
GRASS-BASED: Pastured livestock and poultry, moved frequently to new “salad bars,” offer landscape healing and nutritional superiority.
INDIVIDUALITY: Plants and animals should be provided a habitat that allows them to express their physiological distinctiveness. Respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig is a foundation for societal health.
COMMUNITY: We do not ship food. We should all seek food closer to home, in our foodshed, our own bioregion. This means enjoying seasonality and reacquainting ourselves with our home kitchens.
NATURE’S TEMPLATE: Mimicking natural patterns on a commercial domestic scale insures moral and ethical boundaries to human cleverness. Cows are herbivores, not omnivores; that is why we’ve never fed them dead cows like the United States Department of Agriculture encouraged (the alleged cause of mad cows).
EARTHWORMS: We’re really in the earthworm enhancement business. Stimulating soil biota is our first priority. Soil health creates healthy food.”

My husband Shaen has read most of Joel Salatin’s books, so much of the information in the lecture wasn’t new to him. Near the end of the lecture, Shaen asked Joel Salatin if there was any big differences in his thinking now compared to when he wrote his books. Joel Salatin answered that in the past he believed thousands of farmers would communicate directly with customers. But most farmers find marketing and distribution very difficult and don’t like the work. Now he sees “clusters of farms” working with “local streams of marketing and distribution”. Joel talked about a six part system for a successful local food supply: producer, processor, accountant, marketer, distributor and customer. My husband and I looked at each other and wondered if there is a place for GO BOX Storage and eatkamloops.org in this new vision.

We realized we could become a local food distribution center for Kamloops. We could form a buyer’s group for Kamloops. We could increase the size of our orders and get better prices for everyone. We could run pocket markets or personal deliveries for a cost. If you do not know about pocket markets please read: Pocket Market Toolkit.

It was exciting thinking that we could become part of a successful local food system which helps all of us get the best in local food at a reasonable price. If we could develop a successful local food system, Joel Salatin believes “we could give the big-box stores a run for their money.”

Update November 25, 2009: I contacted Sally Fallon and asked if she knew of anyone who could mentor me to start a buyer’s group for Kamloops. She suggested John Moody who started a buyer’s club called Whole Life Buying Club. Before a new member can join the Whole Life Buying Club, they recommend the new member watch The Story of Stuff. The Whole Life Buying Club follows a Food Philosophy which defines the type of products the buying club will bring in for members. John Moody has written an essay for the journal Wise Traditions called Building a Local Food Buying Club.

Updated December 23, 2009: I have just learned from Sandra Burkholder that Joel Salatin will be coming to Quesnel, BC on March 27, 2010. Joel Salatin will be speaking at the 2nd Annual Poultry and Rabbit Forum being put on by the Cariboo Central Interior Poultry Producers Association. Sandra Burkholder and her husband Chris Newton are building a earthship house in Darfield, BC. An earthship house is made from recycled materials and is designed to be completely self-sufficient housing system requiring no outside support. The earthship is the brain child of Mike Reynolds of Earthship Biotecture.

Updated February 28, 2010: I found a series about Polyface Farm on Watch.MeetTheFarmer.TV. You will get a personal tour of Polyface Farm with Joel Salatin. There is an incredible amount of information in this video series about his pasturing systems for the watchful viewer. He will go into the types of grasses and herbage plus the effect of mass group grazing and resting of the pasture. He goes in to some theory but most of the videos are very practice. If you are interested in the theory behind his practices please read his books for more information. Here is Part I, Part II and Part III.

[The road to] hell is paved with good intentions.
English Proverbs