Allan Balliett wrote:
> And, hell, Patti, you oughta come up here on Sept 4 and catch JOEL
> SALATIN's presentation. Joel's "layering" concepts, coupled with
> local 'relationship marketing," allow a farmer to make a lot of money
> off from his acres without ever planting a vegetable...
>
> -Allan
Now this sounds great. I've been doing some research on Joel Salatin and
Polyface Farm. I like his concepts. Thanks for the tip Allan.
Patti.....
p.s. below is an excerpt from an interview done with Joel Salatin that I
found particularly interesting.
http://www.nutri-tech.com.au/Interviews/Interviews5.htm
Joel: Well, our successes have been based upon synergistic, symbiotic
enterprises, coupled with a marketing
mechanism that allows us to capture premium retail dollars. For example,
right now we produce about 100
dozen eggs a day from 2000 layers, and these are pasture-fed within feather
nets (which are electrified poultry
netting). A moveable shelter within the netting is moved every three days,
involving 1000 birds on a quarter acre
(one tenth of a hectare). This model allows one person, working seven hours
a week, on three acres, to net
$15,000 a year. Another example is called the "Biniary". This is bunnies,
vineyard and aviary all in one. This is a
quarter acre, totally enclosed with poultry netting. The vineyard trellis
poles hold up the netting. The bird netting
keeps predators away from the rabbits and keeps birds out of the grapes when
the fruit ripens, and it keeps the
pheasants in. The jumbo pheasants debug the vineyard, the rabbits mow the
vineyard - both of these fertilize the
vineyard. The grapes shade the rabbits, and the vine trellises are roosts
for the pheasants at night. The
pheasants are diurnal and the rabbits are nocturnal, so they are not even
competing for the same square
footage in any 24-hour period. The big cost of a vineyard is bug control,
dropped fruit (which overseasons the
pathogens) and ground cover maintenance. They are always mowing, mowing,
mowing. The rabbits take care
of that, the pheasants take care of the bugs and dropped fruit, and you get
this wonderful synergistic effect of
the three enterprises together. This model generates about $5000 net profit
per year from a quarter acre. The
rabbit house, where Daniel keeps his breeding stock, is two tiers of
production; breeding does (rabbits) at eye
level and chickens underneath. If you go to any commercial rabbitry, you�ll
find that you can�t walk in for the
smell. The beauty of this is that you have a standard two-car garage - a 700
square foot facility, and the rabbits
at eye level are dropping hay, urine and manure down into the bedding. Every
three weeks we add a carbon
source like woodchips, sawdust, leaves, straw, corn fodder, cotton trash,
rice hulls � whatever organic matter is
available to put in there. The chickens then incorporate it, scratch it and
fluff it with the rabbit urine and manure
and create a very low temperature decomposition. Very slow and gentle, it
gradually builds up during the year to
2 � to 3 ft deep. There is no smell, you get two tiers of production in the
same facility - rabbits and eggs. We�re
talking about grossing $9000, netting $4000 a year in a two-car garage. The
other thing is that neither species
is at a density that kicks in pathogen problems and smells - all of the
normal problems with factory-type farming.
The "eggmobile" is another example. The eggmobiles are two portable chicken
houses, which have 800 layers
in them. They follow the cows in the pasture rotation. The cows of course
are dropping manure, which is the
incubator for pathogens and parasitic organisms, so we run the eggmobile
behind the cows three days later.
The flies lay eggs in the manure and larvae hatch. The chickens scratch
through the cow patties hunting larvae.
This spreading process actually triples the land area covered by the animal
manure, and it is balanced on the
soil - you don�t have an over-fertilized repugnancy spot. The chickens
effectively eat out the parasitic worms, so
there is no spending on systemic wormers and grubicides to kill the bugs in
the cows. We are harvesting
$15,000 per year on eggs as a byproduct of this pasture sanitation program.
These are the type of symbiotic, synergistic models we can create. The point
is that we need to think holistically.
We need to think about interrelationships and interconnections, as opposed
to the linear, reductionist,
straight-line thinking that dogs modern agriculture.
