COLLABORATIVE MARKETING

I have several neighbors who produce high quality food or crafts that compliment our own meat and poultry. Dried flower arrangements from one artisan, pickles from another, wine from another and first class vegetables from another. These are just for starters.

Our community is blessed with all sorts of creative artisans who offer products that we would love to stock in our on-farm retail venue. Doesn't it make sense to encourage these customers driving out from the city to be able to go to one farm to do their rural browsing/purchasing rather than drive all over the countryside? Furthermore, many of these artisans have neither desire nor time to deal with patrons one-on-one. A collaborative venue is the most win-win, reasonable idea imaginable-except for government agents.

As soon as our farm offers a single item-just one-that is not processed here, we have become a Wal-Mart. Period. That means a business license, which is basically another set of taxes on our gross sales. The business license requires a commercial entrance, which on our country road is almost impossible to acquire due to sight distance requirements and width regulations. Of course, zoning prohibits businesses in our agricultural zones. Remember, people are supposed to be kept away from agricultural areas-people bring diseases.

Even if we could comply with all of the above requirements, a retail outlet carries with it a host of additional regulations. We must provide designated handicap parking, government approved toilet facilities (our four household bathrooms in the two homes located fifty feet away from the retail building do not count)-and it can't be a composting toilet. We must offer x-number of parking spaces. Folks, it just goes on and on, ad nauseum, and all for simply trying to help a neighbor sell her potatoes and extra pumpkins at Thanksgiving. I thought this was the home of the free. In most countries of the world, anyone can sell any of this stuff anywhere, and the hungering hordes were glad to get it, but in the great U.S. of A. we're so sophisticated to allow such bioregional commerce.

This has been installment number three of six, posting on Sundays. Each is a sub-heading of the larger treatise, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal... by Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms.

ON-FARM SEMINARS & 'AGRITAINMENT'

In the disconnected mind of modern America, a farm is a production unit for commodities-nothing more and nothing less. Because our land is zoned as agricultural, we cannot charge school kids for a tour of the farm because that puts us in the category of "Theme Park" Anyone paying for infotainment creates "Farmadisney," a strict no-no in agricultural zones.

Farms are not supposed to be places of enjoyment or learning. They are commodity production units dotting the landscape, just as factories are are manufacturing units and office complexes are service units. In the government's mind, integrating farm production with recreation and meaningful education creates a warped sense of agriculture.

The very notion of encouraging people to visit farms is blasphemous to an official credo that views even sparrows, starlings and flies as disease threats to immunocompromised plants and animals. Visitors entering USDA-blessed production unit farms must run through a gauntlet of toxic sanitation dips and don moon suits in order to keep their germs to themselves. Indeed, people are viewed as hazardous foreign bodies at Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).

Farmers who actually encourage folks to come to their farms "threaten" the health and welfare of their fecal concentration camp production unit neighbors, and therefore must be prohibited from bringing these invasive germ-dispensing humans onto their landscape. In the industrial agribusiness paradigm, farms must be protected from people, not to mention free-range poultry.

The notion that animals and plants can be raised in such a way that their enhanced immune system protects them from kindergarteners' germs, and that the animals actually thrive when marinated in human attention, never enters the minds of government officials dedicated to protecting precarious production units.

Thanks again to our guest writer, Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms. 

We are re-"printing" his 2003 treatise, Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal...

Joel helps farmers and non-farmers alike to begin to understand the schizophrenic nature of the regulating agencies, the muddle headed logic that sickens us from the breakfast table to our midnight snacks, and is subsidized by government agencies from cradle to grave, burdening us all with the tragic costs of corporate welfare.

 Food is medicine, it is supposed to feed our metabolism and support the healthy development of our bodies. Eating sick critters, depressed animals or ones that have never been allowed to spend a day walking around or just lying in the sun has long term consequences for our society, our culture and the next seven generations.

Joel's insight and critique of "modern" agricultural practices is even more important today than it was ten years ago, but the big money still seems to be on the side of confinement operations and those that reflect a total lack of respect for the creatures which will one day grace our tables.

Please share this information widely! This post is only the second in a six-part series that details the experience and insight of a true patriot, fighting with only truth on his side, the giant Goliath of corporate power, which is only a thinly veiled lie supported with unimaginable amounts of cash.

ON-FARM PROCESSING

I want to dress my beef and pork on the farm where I've coddled it and raised it. But zoning laws prohibit slaughterhouses on agricultural land. For crying out loud, what makes more holistic sense than to put abattoirs where the animals are? But no, in the wisdom of Western disconnected thinking, abattoirs are massive, centralized facilities visited by a steady stream of tractor trailers and illegal alien workers.

But what about dressing a couple of animals a year in the backyard? How can that be compared to a ConAgra or Tyson facility? In the eyes of the government, the two are the same. Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor. The fact that I can do it on my own farm more cleanly, more responsibly, more humanely, more efficiently, and in a more environmentally friendly manner doesn't matter to the government agents who walk around with big badges on their jackets and wheelbarrow-sized regulations tucked under their arms.

OK, so I take my animals and load them onto a trailer for the first time in their life to send them up the already clogged interstate to the abattoir to await their appointed hour with a shed full of animals of dubious extraction. They are killed and dressed by people wearing long coats with deep pockets with whom I  cannot even communicate. The carcasses hang in a cooler alongside others that were not similarly cared for in life. after the animals are processed, I return to the facility hoping to retrieve my meat.

When I return home to sell those delectable packages, the county zoning ordinance says that it is a manufactured product because it exited the farm and was imported back as a value added product, thereby throwing our farm into the Wal-Mart category, another prohibition in agricultural areas. Just so you understand this, remember that an on-farm abattoir was illegal, so i took my animals to a legal abattoir, but now the selling of the said products in an on farm store is illegal.

Our whole culture suffers from an industrial food system that has made every part disconnected from the rest. smelly and dirty farms are supposed to be in one place, away from people, who snuggle smugly in their cul-de-sacs and have not a clue about the out-of-sight-out-of-mind atrocities being committed to their dinner before it arrives in a microwaveable, four-color-labeled, plastic packaging. Industrial abattoirs need to be located in a not-in-my-backyard place to sequester noxious odors and sights. finally, the retail store must be located in a commercial district surrounded by lots of pavement, handicapped access, public toilets and whatever else must be requie=red to get food to people.

The notion that animals can be raised, processed, packaged, and sold in a model that offends neither your eyes nor noses cannot even register on the average bureaucrat's radar screen--or more importantly, on the radar of the average consumer advocacy organization. Besides, all these single use megalithic structures are good for the gross domestic product. Anything less is illegal.
-Joel Salatin

This concludes part one of six to be presented here on the next six Sundays. Since 2009, I have written seven posts per month. The next six weeks, I will let Joel speak for me. I need a break. Hopefully,when I return after a moon and a half, my material will be even more distilled. Rest and creativity are both necessary. Please find more about Polyface farms. It is always a treat to find that there are still people around who care about doing things right!

The Next Six Sundays

I will be posting six parts of Joel Salatin's Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal...
Joel raises grass-fed beef, pastured poultry, rabbits and more on a model diversified farmstead, Polyface Farms in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. His essay also contained a bit of introduction which I will include here, just to get things started and I would be remiss if I did not give credit to the courageous publication in which this first appeared, Acres Magazine, September 2003! It has guided me and come back repeatedly these nearly ten years and each time I read these words I am reminded of the sage words of Thomas Jefferson who said, "God help this nation if it continues twenty years without another revolution of this kind." (Of course, he was speaking of The Revolution)

"Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal's office.

And it doesn't stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented and linear thought process." states Joel.

My loyal readers can appreciate the need for a break. Even though I have posted seven entries per moon, (month) this will allow me a bit of time to let my own thoughts on many matters settle a bit. For this respite, I'm forever indebted to Joel Salatin. I thank him in advance for my "vacation" and wish him an honored part in the exponential growth of wisdom in our culture. Listen well my friends, forces beyond our imagining have placed themselves in the seats of power around the planet, we need to reclaim the high ground and point out that it is immoral to not only refuse to sanctify Mother Earth, but to rape and pillage her.

Those of us who choose to adapt to the seasons, live within the cycles of an intact ecology, those who understand and follow a "higher calling", or for those who choose to treat the planet at least as well as the biosphere treats us, may never be understood by the pencil pushers who regulate them into "outsider" obscurity are finding more and more truth to the idea that there is a qualitative difference between treating animals with respect and not doing so. The Lord and Lady bless healthy soil with organisms.  These creatures sustain life. When their health becomes compromised, it can only work up the food chain to top predators like humans. The writing is on the wall about treating agriculture as most other manufacturing endeavors, getting bigger, and more technologically complex.

We all need to slow down and take a breath.

How Long Can You Keep A Dollar In Your Neighborhood?

I first grasped this concept relative to marbles. Oddly, the best marbles cycled out of the hands of the kids who wanted to play the most, ultimately being taken out of service by those who realized their unique value. Dollars today seem to emulate the same place in our attention span as marbles did back then, so likening them to one another seems appropriate. As I grew, I saw the same thing when living communally at the Ghetto's Palace Yoga Institute, we had multiple income streams including plant sales, incense, crafts and gifts, a laundromat, so occasionally, when someone would wash clothes for instance, we paid our money, but in a way, got it back. Although the value transfer was complete, it was within the family.

I always delighted in buying raspberries from the old lady next door, even though I had my own, hers were wickedly tax-exempt, all I had to do to get  "family price" was keep down the rabbit population which I did faithfully with snare and pellet gun. Favor for favor, we called into question whether even trying to ascribe a value to our helpfulness would desecrate our true neighborliness. I think it was six dollars per quart, one dollar off regular price. Having seen Ivy, picking in fingerless gloves into November on occasion, I knew the true cost of those morsels. If she needed furniture moved or plants divided, she would call me.

Another neighbor would always call me for the grape trimming time of year, I just had to let her have a few bunches in the fall so she could make some jam. These essentially non-taxable transfers of "goods" greatly enrich the environment, benefiting both parties, but not necessarily helping others, the way taxable goods do. I recently helped some friends with some money for helping me with work around the house. They are unemployed and jumped at the chance to work. It wasn't much, because we can't afford much, the long and short of the story is that they were next door, at a rummage sale, found a boat and needed cash to buy it. Essentially, the money had changed hand twice between our back door and the neighbors'. It is always a trust game when you go into the market-place, knowing those who benefit from your dollars, or your labor allows a certain kindness, a humanity that perhaps should remain tax exempt, just because of the person to person contact required to do business this way. The best way to "keep money on your block" is to live life as a series of favors, befriending one another in meaningful ways that are deeply appreciated and profoundly meaningful.

At our place, we would like to say, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you to all of our neighbors who put up with our home looking like the stubbed toe down at the end, but with our siding complete, we are coming into the home stretch on ten years of renovation. I still remember working the soil, if you can call it that, in the front yard, building up nearer the foundation and slowly tapering down and away... We were investing in a very real way, sweat for equity. The future of a neighborhood rested upon a few houses, eventually, two of which belonged to me, so there was no possibility of failure. I have continued investing in the homes, their gardens and the relationships with neighbors that build a sense of community. Several neighbors who became friends have taken on gardening projects and we help one another when projects need an extra hand, or better tools than we may have at hand. There are no rental receipts, and more often than not the payment is in beers per hour. Home brewers pay their debts in six packs.

The more we establish tribal societies within a dominant "state" or "nation", the more we will keep wealth on our block. True wealth is being surrounded by people who have skills that you do not, tools you do not own and time to help one another. More than you would expect, the people on your block need skills that you could share. If only, the art of perseverance, or stick-to-itiveness that drives someone to take in their last quart of raspberries in November. When you slow down long enough to meet your neighbors, it is always amazing how tenacious they are. We are all really working hard to keep our dreams alive. Perhaps all we really need is to take the time to listen to other stories. By offering to help, we are undertaking one of the most radical and revolutionary acts one can imagine. It is one of the only ways I know of making sure that everyone is better off. Let the dollars rest, value things by how much they make the recipient smile!

The Cult of Ignorance

The times we are living in are rife with examples of utter blindness to facts. there has been much hoopla about the President's approval rating moving due to the price of gas. As if  one person could possibly affect the price of a commodity that trades, at times, in volumes per day that dwarf the use characteristics of our nation for weeks. The roulette wheel that is the oil market burns as many fortunes as it creates. What the fiction reflects is the need for another lie to be "supported". You know, the one about thousands of years of oil available if we would only allow more drilling. It is far easier to blame someone for something instead of realizing that every single barrel of oil that we get from now on will cost more to get than what we have used up already. Peak oil has passed, the debate is over exactly when it occurred.

The entire concept of austerity in the face of crippling economic conditions is considered reasonable, only if we buy into nearly five hundred year old ideas. Have we not progressed one whit since the end of the dark ages? An individual, or family can benefit from reigning in spending during lean times, but the government must not, unless it is willing to raise a generation of less educated, sick people and let them drive on bad roads, waste more and neglect the infrastructure that civil society rests upon. Any functioning government must assist us in doing together, what we could not alone. Has anyone been paying attention? Equally disturbing, the propensity of people willing to say "All politicians are crooks." I have met politicians who are honest. Sadly, less than half, but there are good choices out there. When those who could make a difference are scared off from voting by a lie, who can we blame? Some are in too big a hurry to say, "We get the government that we deserve." On the face of it, it sounds plausible, but think, if we all understood, in our bones, that the dead from all of our wars died to give us the right to vote. If we had been educated about what democracy is, as well as what it requires, would we deserve anything more? I think it is just a convenient lie that we tell ourselves, just to get back to the life we know. Perhaps if people wrestled with any truth, it would create uncomfortable ripples across the ocean their entire conceptualization of the world around them.

I often try to understand where others are coming from, but the supposed majority who, we are told, think that we can ascribe responsibility for the current economic downturn to a black man in the White House; that Obama is a foreigner; climate change is make-believe; or that there are vast reserves of resources that we can only blame government for keeping out of our hands. These are the same folks who still claim that the trickle down effect is valid. As if the extravagant feasting of the wealthy will eventually drop enough crumbs for the masses to be better off. I heard the best analogy about "philanthropy". The real philanthropists are the maids and waitstaff, the cooks and dry cleaners who give their entire lives, so that the wealthy can be taken care of! Just because the majority of the population has no face for the wealthy, cannot mean that they have no voice either. We the People did not join in order to form a corporation. We did not include unequal power and influence as inalienable rights. Whoever has been changing the language that we use for our collective discussion, has been selling product as surely as churches peddle salvation. Problem is, there isn't even hope to rest their beliefs on, just a pack of lies.

Eyes of the World are On Wisconsin!

This week there will be one of the most important elections in Wisconsin history, the repercussions of which will resound around the planet. Wisconsin has been artificially split by the current administration. They have pitted working men and women against one another in ways that defy conscience. I am a resident who talks to hundreds of people each month. Not just, "Hi, how about that weather." talk. Ya know? We talk about jobs and the environment, hunting, the economy, what their family is doing to make ends meet in the tough times we face daily. There is an overwhelming consensus that emerges if you listen. Each and every person who has had their tax dollars spent, bailing out the banks is furious that there is no ability to refinance to the more reasonable rates of today. Most home owners are entrenching in their homes, if they are at all able, spending money on refurbishing their places, if they can, so that perhaps in seven to ten years they can sell for what they owe. Many have resorted to buying at big box stores whose profits leave the area and rarely return. Many are living in multi-family groups, taking in relatives or friends who have lost their homes, or are unemployed. The few who can afford to, are buying gas sipping cars, riding their bikes a lot more, making more meals at home and trying to walk more.

The few who believe that all will be well, if we just cut taxes on the wealthiest, so it can trickle down to the rest of us refuse to understand economic forces and the nature of capital to flow upward rather than downward under those conditions. A slippery slope is being traversed politically. There has been a long held belief in our country that "All politicians are crooks." and because of this pervasive myth, the vast majority stay home on election days because they really don't understand that there are good people to choose and others who should not be trusted with administering anything. The turn out for the election that put Wisconsin's Governor in office was just a little under half, of that half, about half of them decided to unleash corporate power in the State House, Our House! We have had nothing but disasters in virtually every area since then. Wetland protection laws were gutted, hundreds of hours were spent fighting the proposed mine that the governor wanted to shove down our throats (illegally),salaries for teachers were put in the cross-hairs, thousands of lives have been turned upside down, unions (currently representing less than 12% of all U.S. workers) were demonized, fees for virtually everything the average citizen pays for went up, but the handouts to wealthy corporations and big business multiplied as well. While virtually every cost borne by citizens went up, food, energy, housing, etc. the cost of "doing business" in Wisconsin went down. One tax loophole alone that the Governor signed into law allows corporations to funnel profits to out of state shell companies, in states with low or no income tax, to avoid taxation in the State of Wisconsin! This one change alone is estimated to cost the state (taxpayers) approximately 130 million dollars in the next biennium (two year budget cycle).

Supposedly, Wisconsin faced a dire budget situation. A growing majority understand that these charges were trumped up to fan the flames of division between the tea party activists and the rest of us. Because of the deft control that corporate influence has been able to exert over both the meanings and messages that we are bombarded with daily, some have begun to believe the rhetoric, without regard for the facts of the matter. What we need is the 100% turn out that would have kept the ship of state on course. We are proud people, who nearly always help one another. We the people of Wisconsin, get to know our jumper cables and always offer to use them when folks need a jump, so that when the shoe is on the other foot, there will be someone to do the same happily, for us. I have known neighbors to mow one each others lawns when they go on vacation, take in the mail and newspaper so it doesn't look like they are away. Heck, growing up in most of Wisconsin a generation or two ago, all the kids in the neighborhood ran in packs, listening to whatever parent was closest. we were kept in line by the fact that we had pride in being good people. now the "supreme leader" has deemed at least half the people as "enemy" and has set out to make our lives more difficult at the same time he enriched his friends, his contributors, and out of state interests that only want us to dance to their tune.

Today, the news surfaced that our governor spurned a lover who dared to get pregnant by him in college. None of these are behaviors of a person who can be trusted. The inconvenient truth of the current sate of affairs here is that we are truly in a fight between what is right and good about our state and what is dark and hidden from view behind the eyes of a psychopath. The good can only come to the surface, as any dairyman will tell you if you let things rest. Continued agitation keeps the cream in suspension. Wisconsin has always been known for letting things alone and watching the cream rise to the top. It was important to us to take care of the less fortunate, regard our children as the hope for the next generation, and leave behind us a lasting legacy of a land more beautiful than we found it. Perhaps losing all of our forests instilled an ethic of rebuilding and growth. giving a little bit more than we probably should, but doing it with the hope that someone else would benefit by our exuberance. How we ever let a greedy, selfish, corporate stooge get into office here only proves to the world that we must use our democratic voice to put down the wealthy, take back our rights and freedoms, reaffirm what generations of Wisconsinites have fought and died for, and kick out the folks who just want to enrich themselves at great cost to the majority of state residents.

The only hope we have is to vote. Educate yourself, and vote! Reasonable people may differ about who the best choice may be, but it is unreasonable to expect the people with the money to tell you the truth about their candidate. Generations of young men have died for our right to vote, they did not die for the rights of corporations to take whatever they want and leave us as little as possible.