SEJ2008

Healthy Foodshed: Joel Salatin's Farm

By Joseph A. Davis

The "Healthy Foodshed" tour left Roanoke at dawn with a full bus, headed for the farm of Joel Salatin, in the woody foothills of the Appalachians, where meat cattle seem to be grazing in every field.
Salatin gained fame as poster-child for sustainable farming when he was featured in Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. He has invented (and inherited) a unique form of agriculture, the polar opposite of large-scale corporate farming and CAFOs. Salatin quickly established that he considers most livestock and poultry production in the U.S. as the moral equivalent of the slavery that was practiced in Virginia 200 years earlier.
Not only are Salatin's chickens "free-ranging," but he has invented "egg-mobiles" (mobile houses) to ferry them around from spot to spot in his fields so they can forage and fertilize evenly. He has invented a number of other methods for raising pigs and cattle in ways that require minimum input (no fertilizer) and still produce more output than conventional hi-tech agriculture.

Healthy Food Shed Challenges America's Food Practices

By Sharon Stringer

The visit to Joel Salatin's 550 acre Polyface Farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley was awesome.  What a wonderful way to get indoctrinated to SEJ's conference day tours.  The trip was worth  waiting stand-by to board the 7:30 a.m. bus.

Joel Salatin is a character in his own right ,who is not bashful about sharing his disdain with Washington's farm policy makers. He said that if it comes out of Washington, don't believe it.

SEJ08 Awards Dinner

By Christine Heinrichs

The opening dinner blew me away.  Kathy Mattea sang from her new album, Coal. I'm not a very demonstrative person, but her version of The Coming of the Roads had me sobbing. Great food -- three kinds of pasta, pate, salmon, both as hors d'oeuvres and as steamed whole fish, displayed complete with heads, with a lemon in their jaws! So many desserts. I was strong, and sampled as many as I could.

Carol Nolen, SEJ senior programs associate, was awarded a bouquet of roses and the assembled membership's undying gratitude for her devoted and efficient service. Personally, I'll never forget how she recovered the jacket I lost in Burlington, a significant problem at that chilly conference!

SEJ 2008 Roanoke Party Guide

As always, the SEJ conference team has respected the fact that alcohol is the better part of journalism, and thus has arranged for some evening festivities at various cool locations while we're all in Roanoke.

Here's what's happening where, and when...