Feb. 15, 2015, from Joel Salatin:
Yesterday, our Staunton newspaper carried a lengthy article about the collapse of the Monarch
butterfly and the efforts to plant milkweeds in order to keep them from going extinct. While I'm excited about the awareness, research, and efforts at restoring milkweed numbers to help the Monarch, it's another example of fooling around with a faucet and teacup instead of using the fire hydrant located a dozen feet away. The house burns down during our own inefficiency.
Yesterday, our Staunton newspaper carried a lengthy article about the collapse of the Monarch
butterfly and the efforts to plant milkweeds in order to keep them from going extinct. While I'm excited about the awareness, research, and efforts at restoring milkweed numbers to help the Monarch, it's another example of fooling around with a faucet and teacup instead of using the fire hydrant located a dozen feet away. The house burns down during our own inefficiency.
Let me relate a story, a true story. Polyface rents several pieces of property nearby. Some are relatively large farms--more than 100 acres--and others are smaller parcels. We use these farms in our grazing program and operate them just like we do our home farm here at what we call Polyface central.
Generally, these land parcels have been continuously grazed for a long time before the landlord
asks us to manage them. Thistles, brambles, thin grass, and practically no clovers are the rule of the
day. Our practice is 180 degrees different: mob stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon
sequestration fertilization. In fact, it's so different that we usually have a section in our lease that describes
the kind of wild diversity, color, and blossoms the landlord will see.
For the record, if the cows like a plant, we don't call it a weed--even if it is registered as a weed. We
assume diversity is a good thing and mature plants maximize prairie expression. Fields full of chicory,
goldenrod, plantain, clover, fall panicum and milkweed provide a salad bar for the animals--both domestic
and wild.
On this particular farm, things had deteriorated in our relationship with the landlord, who preferred
a more golf course look. We'd been there three years and virtually wiped out the thistles through livestock
management and hand chopping. What had been a soil-deteriorating scant-vegetated land base had
turned into a cornucopia of diversity. But the landlord was not happy. All he could see was weeds.
Daniel and I went over for a final look-see and walked, with the landlord, up to the top of a hill. Daniel
and I were exulting in the deep, succulent forage. The explosion of color, variety, and blossoms indicated
slam-dunk ecological success. Meadowlarks had places to nest and rear young. Spiders abounded.
Earthworm castings covered the soil, hidden under the dense protective biomass canopy. And milkweeds
oozing and dripping dotted the forage-scape. Ah, this was heaven.
But the landlords only saw weeds. Daniel and I could not break through the prejudice. It was weeds,
just weeds. Where we saw a recovering and dancing ecosystem, they saw lack of control, lack of order, a
mess of weeds. Realize that we knew the cows would relish every single plant. Honeybees buried themselves
in a plethora of blossoms. It was the full expression of wildness, and we were blessed participants. But the
landlords saw only weeds. The result of this final encounter was that Daniel and I walked away from the lease.
We simply could not handle the tension and conflict of the arrangement, so we gave it up.
That evening, the phone rang and it was the president of the Virginia Monarch Association--or something
like that. She said she had a pallet of milkweed seed in her garage and could I help her find a place to plant it.
I couldn't help but laugh. An hour before, I'd stood in a field with thousands of vibrant milkweed plants,
an inherent result of our bio-mimicry pastured livestock rotations. I embraced her efforts, but then offered her
this advice: "Instead of trying to plant milkweeds, how about getting all your members to buy beef from farmers
whose practices encourage milkweeds? And how about promoting a milkweed-affirming protocol among
farmers in Virginia?"
She had no response. Silence. After all, she had a pallet of milkweed seeds to plant, and by gum, that
was all that mattered. I couldn't bother her with the idea that farmers--yes, those nasty, villainous farmers,
could actually be the cause of the problem and the cure to the problem if they'd just change their practices.
My brother, Art, who keeps the honeybees (17 hives and counting) here at Polyface that you see when you
come out to the farm, made an observation last summer I'd never thought about. His hives have thrived in
spite of the colony collapse disorder. He said that our kind of pasture livestock rotation creates a mosaic effect
that insures lots of blossoms throughout the season. With continuous grazing, which is practiced on 99 percent
of the pasture land in Virginia, plants seldom reach blossom stage. in addition, few species can survive the
constant grazing so the pastures tend toward simplicity rather than complexity.
He pointed out that because our grazing protocols create full plant expression, we have a constant supply
of blossoms of much greater variety. That creates a healthy foodscape for the honey bees. And it creates a
healthy ecosystem for spiders, worms, insects, and monarch butterflies.
Each one of us can become a healer. Often the answers are far more basic, more elegantly simple, than
scientists would have us believe. Collapses like this indicate broad, systemic error. They can only be healed
the same way. In our techno-sophisticated era, we've developed a religion of sterility and golf-course perfection.
Nature is messy. Watch your cat catch a mouse--it's messy. Those of us who prefer to drink raw milk, use regular soap (instead of anti-bacterial), encourage our kids to play in the dirt, refuse vaccinations for our children or livestock, and use alternative wellness rather than drugs are often vilified by the hubris manipulators.
Isn't it fascinating that the answer to the Monarch butterfly, arguably one of the most beautiful and magnificent
creatures in our ecosystem, depends on a messy weed to thrive? Isn't that just like risk and security? Living with people and things different than us is messy, but it produces a thriving world of ideas and freshness. Let's drink to the milkweed, the symbol of pasture wildness, and sustainer of Monarch beauty.
Generally, these land parcels have been continuously grazed for a long time before the landlord
asks us to manage them. Thistles, brambles, thin grass, and practically no clovers are the rule of the
day. Our practice is 180 degrees different: mob stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon
sequestration fertilization. In fact, it's so different that we usually have a section in our lease that describes
the kind of wild diversity, color, and blossoms the landlord will see.
For the record, if the cows like a plant, we don't call it a weed--even if it is registered as a weed. We
assume diversity is a good thing and mature plants maximize prairie expression. Fields full of chicory,
goldenrod, plantain, clover, fall panicum and milkweed provide a salad bar for the animals--both domestic
and wild.
On this particular farm, things had deteriorated in our relationship with the landlord, who preferred
a more golf course look. We'd been there three years and virtually wiped out the thistles through livestock
management and hand chopping. What had been a soil-deteriorating scant-vegetated land base had
turned into a cornucopia of diversity. But the landlord was not happy. All he could see was weeds.
Daniel and I went over for a final look-see and walked, with the landlord, up to the top of a hill. Daniel
and I were exulting in the deep, succulent forage. The explosion of color, variety, and blossoms indicated
slam-dunk ecological success. Meadowlarks had places to nest and rear young. Spiders abounded.
Earthworm castings covered the soil, hidden under the dense protective biomass canopy. And milkweeds
oozing and dripping dotted the forage-scape. Ah, this was heaven.
But the landlords only saw weeds. Daniel and I could not break through the prejudice. It was weeds,
just weeds. Where we saw a recovering and dancing ecosystem, they saw lack of control, lack of order, a
mess of weeds. Realize that we knew the cows would relish every single plant. Honeybees buried themselves
in a plethora of blossoms. It was the full expression of wildness, and we were blessed participants. But the
landlords saw only weeds. The result of this final encounter was that Daniel and I walked away from the lease.
We simply could not handle the tension and conflict of the arrangement, so we gave it up.
That evening, the phone rang and it was the president of the Virginia Monarch Association--or something
like that. She said she had a pallet of milkweed seed in her garage and could I help her find a place to plant it.
I couldn't help but laugh. An hour before, I'd stood in a field with thousands of vibrant milkweed plants,
an inherent result of our bio-mimicry pastured livestock rotations. I embraced her efforts, but then offered her
this advice: "Instead of trying to plant milkweeds, how about getting all your members to buy beef from farmers
whose practices encourage milkweeds? And how about promoting a milkweed-affirming protocol among
farmers in Virginia?"
She had no response. Silence. After all, she had a pallet of milkweed seeds to plant, and by gum, that
was all that mattered. I couldn't bother her with the idea that farmers--yes, those nasty, villainous farmers,
could actually be the cause of the problem and the cure to the problem if they'd just change their practices.
My brother, Art, who keeps the honeybees (17 hives and counting) here at Polyface that you see when you
come out to the farm, made an observation last summer I'd never thought about. His hives have thrived in
spite of the colony collapse disorder. He said that our kind of pasture livestock rotation creates a mosaic effect
that insures lots of blossoms throughout the season. With continuous grazing, which is practiced on 99 percent
of the pasture land in Virginia, plants seldom reach blossom stage. in addition, few species can survive the
constant grazing so the pastures tend toward simplicity rather than complexity.
He pointed out that because our grazing protocols create full plant expression, we have a constant supply
of blossoms of much greater variety. That creates a healthy foodscape for the honey bees. And it creates a
healthy ecosystem for spiders, worms, insects, and monarch butterflies.
Each one of us can become a healer. Often the answers are far more basic, more elegantly simple, than
scientists would have us believe. Collapses like this indicate broad, systemic error. They can only be healed
the same way. In our techno-sophisticated era, we've developed a religion of sterility and golf-course perfection.
Nature is messy. Watch your cat catch a mouse--it's messy. Those of us who prefer to drink raw milk, use regular soap (instead of anti-bacterial), encourage our kids to play in the dirt, refuse vaccinations for our children or livestock, and use alternative wellness rather than drugs are often vilified by the hubris manipulators.
Isn't it fascinating that the answer to the Monarch butterfly, arguably one of the most beautiful and magnificent
creatures in our ecosystem, depends on a messy weed to thrive? Isn't that just like risk and security? Living with people and things different than us is messy, but it produces a thriving world of ideas and freshness. Let's drink to the milkweed, the symbol of pasture wildness, and sustainer of Monarch beauty.