Joel Salatin and Novella Carpenter

FEAST had the opportunity to meet two of our heroes in the last few weeks-- Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms in Virginia and Novella Carpenter who started an urban farm in downtown Oakland. We saw Joel at the Santa Barbara Public Library; a bit of a drive but definitely worth it. He is the farmer featured in Omnivore's Dilemma and Food Inc.. He described himself as a Libertarian, Environmentalist, Christian Lunatic. Those are not adjectives that I would typically attribute to being my "hero" but Joel had a lot to say about supporting small farmers, saving the environment and reconnecting with each other, food and the land. The main point he wanted to get across was the small, organic farms must abide by the same regulations as big corporate farms-- which often means buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment that really is not necessary when you are working on a smaller scale. This explains why food from small farms is often more expensive-- their output is nothing close to those of huge farms yet they are still expected to buy all the equipment necessary to process huge amount of food and on top of it they are not receiving the same types of subsidies as these large farms as they do not produce commodity crops. It was inspiring to hear someone with such a clear vision of a better world who spends every waking moment working toward creating that world.

Novella was inspiring in a similar way but was a very different type of person. We visited her farm in Oakland and got a personal tour of the garden and animals. She has about an eighth of an acre. Not much land but she packs it in. The gates to her garden are always open and her neighbors (many of whom could not afford to regularly buy greens in the supermarket) are encouraged to come a take what they would like. The garden itself would have given Bruce a heart-attack-- raised beds every which way and every size with all sorts of manure all over the place; definitely a chaotic type of beauty. The highlight was meeting her goats. She has three lovely female goats who provide milk and manure for the garden (which does not even need to be composted first!). She described slaughtering and "braising the hell" out of one goat that she had always found annoying. She will be teaching a course of raising rabbits for the table in March-- it would be cool if we could get some FEAST people there. Some ideas to take away from this morning. One, we should get goats and rabbits. Both produce great manure that does not even need to be composted. Two we should start planing more produce in all the beds. We could have a lot more diversity within each bed and a lot more output that way too.