Lindsey Nair

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In 2006, journalist Michael Pollan published a book that challenged the way food is produced and consumed in America.

"The Omnivore's Dilemma" not only made Pollan a household name, it shined a light on a Shenandoah Valley farmer named Joel Salatin, who had been using and advocating sustainable agricultural techniques, such as rotational grazing of cattle, his entire career.

Now, Salatin's farm, Polyface Inc., near Staunton, has become a model farm for the local food movement. Salatin was featured heavily in "Food, Inc." and an independent documentary about the movement called "FRESH."

Both films aim to show that large scale, industrialized food production is harmful to consumers, the environment and the small-time farmer. They advocate a return to sustainable farming practices and support for local food producers.

I caught up with Salatin at a screening of "FRESH" at Rockbridge County High School in Lexington on July 28. We talked about how it feels to go from herding cattle to signing autographs, where Southwest Virginia fits into the local food scene and where he sees the future going.

Q: Did you ever see yourself in this position?

No, that certainly was not part of our plan. We were just wanting to be farmers. We absolutely never saw ourselves doing this.

Q: What's it like to see yourself and your family and your home and your animals on these nationally released films?

Well, it's pretty satisfying. It's obviously a joy. It's pretty humbling to think that we're kind of one of the spokespeople for this whole movement.

But it is very exciting to -- at this point in your life, and with all the naysayers out there -- to actually have people that think you are pretty cool instead of just a nut [laughs].

Q: Do you think we are uniquely positioned here in Southwest Virginia to take advantage of the local food movement?

Oh, no question. First of all, we have a tremendous amount of indigenous wisdom in our farming community; wisdom about temperature and what to grow and how to grow it.

Also, just the fact that we are located far away from major processing facilities gives us an unfair advantage. If we are going to patronize, for example, imported beef from IBP [Iowa Beef Processors] or XL [of Alberta] or Montfort [of Texas], rather than being in Kansas City where it is not that far away, we are way [out] here.

Courtesy of Participant Media

Joel Salatin owns Polyface Inc., a pastured livestock farm in Swoope. He and his farm were recently featured in two films, "Food, Inc." and "FRESH."

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So a local food system here doesn't have as far to bridge the gap, if you will.

Q: Would you say the climate here is also to our advantage?

Absolutely. Our climate here, again, is a neat feature in that we can raise probably as much diversity as anywhere.

I mean, you go to where a lot of the food is produced in the San Joaquin Valley of California and it all has to be irrigated, and here we can produce tremendous amounts of food without irrigation.

We have abundant water; we have clay that makes pond building easy. In a lot of areas of the country it is hard to build a pond to get it to hold water. We have winter runoff, we have elevation, we have mountains so we can gravity-feed this water out into the valley.

So yes, topographically and climatologically, we are in a really neat spot.

Q: Do you think that in our lifetime we will see the collapse of the industrialized farming system?

Oh, boy, these prophetic questions I always punt on, because one of the things I do is collect prophecies from experts that turn out to be totally nuts, where it turns out that the expert didn't know anything.

I mean, I know what I would like to see, but boy, whether or not we are going to get there is anybody's guess.

Q: Do you have faith in Americans being able to change the way we eat?

I have a lot of faith in Americans changing the way we eat. I think, though, that it has to get worse before it gets better, and I don't know how far that pendulum has to swing to a wrong side before it begins correcting itself.

Certainly one of the huge cracks in the system right now that is getting everybody's attention is the obesity, the Type 2 diabetes and the health crisis. And the fact is that -- what is it -- 80 percent of all health care costs are directly attributable to diet and lifestyle. That is a huge statistic.

So when you consider that ... we could, simply by changing diet and lifestyle, eliminate 80 percent of the visits to hospitals and doctors, what a major thing that would do in our culture.

So I think that as these statistics continue to escalate, and I think they invariably will because our bodies were not built to ingest things that we can't pronounce and things that we can't make in our kitchens ... they will continue to grab our attention until we will finally, as a culture, realize "Wow, we have been going down the wrong path awhile," and we will begin to change.

Q: I've talked to a lot of small-scale farmers over the past few years and I know how busy they are. Today I looked at your Web site and saw your speaking schedule [Salatin laughs], so the question I have is how has this fame that you have achieved affected your ability to actually run a farm?

Well, fortunately our son is there. We say, "Daniel runs the farm and I just run around." Our daughter [Rachel] is there, as well. She does my Power Point for me. So it's not like I'm doing this by myself. I've got a tremendous support team.

Teresa [Salatin's wife] does all of our accounting, our daughter-in-law [Sheri] does the marketing and selling, we have interns and apprentices and Matt [Rales] is our intern apprentice manager, so we have been blessed to have a team that is as enthusiastic as I am, and at this stage of my life [that] has freed me up to do a lot of other things.

So yeah, I am actually spending half my time not farming now, but I have a bigger pulpit and a bigger platform and I want to write some more books and I am gifted to do this and so here we are.

Trust me, the fame has changed our lives. People come to the farm and you get up in the morning and there's somebody looking in the window. It is unbelievable. But we really believe that we've been uniquely positioned to take this torch forward, so we are just praying for grace to metabolize this new responsibility with verve and enthusiasm.

Q: Do you ever get tired of repeating the same message over and over again?

You know, I was thinking about that this afternoon, and for sure, you can tell I go off into my little soliloquy sound bites. I've honed it. I lie awake at night thinking how can I say this more succinctly? How can I get this message clearer? Because I am constantly talking to journalists and media ... and for me it is a challenge of how to compress more convincing meaning out of every phrase and every second.

I love communication ... so the challenge of communication is absolutely part of who I am.

Q: To me, just in the past year, so much in the local food movement has changed. Do you ever stop and marvel at how quickly the message is being spread?

No question about it. I can well remember as a teen never having heard of the word organic, and now of course everybody knows what it is.

I am almost taken aback by the flocks of people that are coming to this. It is very exciting.

And that's the way innovation happens. You have what is called the lunatic fringe, and in this foodie movement we are now at the early adaptor stage, and once this hits some critical 10 to 12 percent, it all tips over. So I'm pretty excited about what is developing here.

It's all over the country, too. It's all over the country.

Lindsey Nair's column runs in Wednesday's Extra.