Thanksgiving

The older I get, the more grateful I am for my parents who embraced different.  I mean they weren't reluctant different; they immersed in different.  In a day when TikTok and social media ramp peer dependency to new levels, nonconformity seems like a lost art.

Please indulge me a couple of stories from our family's past to illustrate how we relished "maverickness".  

Mom grew up in a terrible home situation with an alcoholic father who abandoned her, her sister, and mom.  Life was tough. As she grew older, she loathed alcohol.  During WWII, when she was in college, as a bright, smart, outgoing co-ed, all the women's sororities courted her for membership.

To her dismay, she learned that these were primarily social drinking clubs and wanted no part of them.  She went to the Dean and asked permission to start a women's sorority that didn't use alcohol.  Instead of encouraging her, the college leadership marked her resume up with "rebellious; isn't satisfied with what the college offers."  Weird.

Dad wanted to farm.  No land, no money.  What to do?  After his stint in the Navy in WWII, he conceived a plan to become a bilingual accountant, get on with an outfit in South America where land was cheap and government regulations fewer, and buy land.  The GI Bill funded his degree in business and then a semester at Middlebury in Vermont to study Spanish.  He hitchhiked (got that?) from Vermont to Mexico and spent six months with a family there honing his Spanish.

He returned home, sat for the foreign civil service language exam, passed it, and was hired on with Texas Oil Company as a bilingual accountant in the wildcatter fields on the coast of Venezuela.  

He married mom and within seven years saved enough to buy 1,000 acres in the highlands of Venezuela. Mom's mother, my grandmother, always joked that Dad stole Mom to take her down with the monkeys.  Actually, Mom loved adventure and went happily.

I was four when we returned to the U.S. in 1961 due to civil unrest and the rebels taking our land and driving us off with machine guns.  Dad was 39 and lost everything.  He'd been there for 12 years and mom for 10.  

We found the cheapest, most worn out, gullied rockpile property in the Shenandoah Valley and started over.

Most farmers buy pickup trucks.  Dad didn't want an open bed so he bought a 1957 four-door Plymouth from a neighbor for $50, took off the doors, and threw out the seats.  That makes a pretty big compartment.  When vehicle inspection was passed in the late 1960s, he was so incensed by the governmental intrusion that he bought 4 rims and new tires and kept them in a shed.  When the annual inspection came due, he'd put the new tires on and get the sticker, then come home and put the bald tires back on.  "The government's not going to keep me from getting my money's worth," he quipped.

In the early 1970s, the Arab Oil Embargo during Jimmy Carter's presidency made gas a centerpiece issue in the country.  Prices went up and availability was scarce--you could only get gas on every other day (odd and even that matched your license tag). Dad was 54 years old, driving 17 miles across Staunton to the metal fabrication shop where he did the accounting and job bidding.  He bought a 10-speed bicycle and rode it to work.  "If everyone would just get a bicycle, the Arabs can keep their oil," he said.

As a teenager at the time, of course, I rolled my eyes.  But now, looking back, I realize what a privilege it was to grow up in a home that didn't give a thought to what others thought.  

An inveterate experimenter, Dad's different thinking formed the background to most of the innovative farming practices Polyface uses today.

When all the other farmers bought chemicals, he started building compost.  

When other farmers built Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), he invented portable electric fencing and mobile field shelters.  

When other farmers planted corn, he let perennials grow and moved cows rapidly from field to field.  

When other farmers bought fertilizer, he bought a wood chipper to build compost.  

And when other farmers sold to nameless faceless industrial middlemen, he developed a local customer base with direct marketing.

Everything, everything, everything our family has done and continues to do trace their lineage back to the courage and fortitude to look at problems and contrive a different solution; to walk a different path.  

So when Teresa and I got married in 1980, we drove a $50 car for three years.  In fact, we'd been married 20 years before we spent a cumulative total of $10,000 on automobiles.  Today, self-respecting farmers are supposed to have $20,000 side-by-side ATVs (All Terrain Vehicles) to get around.  I have a $2,000 1987 Ford Bronco with the windows knocked out.  Coolest thing in the world.

Teresa and I are still using flip phones.  I've never used an app, never texted, and never taken a picture of a QR code.  My brand handle, "Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer" proudly carries the iconoclastic legacy forward.

I've been called a Typhoid Mary, bioterrorist, and starvation advocate all my life by conventional farmers.  

Does it frustrate me?  No.  

I laugh all the way to the lush compost-fertilized fields, the unvaccinated livestock, and to patrons who love weird.  Yes, weird enough to not buy meat at Wal-Mart.  Weird enough to cook from scratch.  Weird enough to care.  Now that's really weird.

So welcome to our maverick family.  I embrace you and thank you for joining in this grand revolutionary idea and practice called nutritious food, soil-building farming, and relational provenance.  These are completely foreign to our mainstream conventional culture, but they offer beacons of hope and help to cure the symptoms of dysfunction.

As you enjoy this Thanksgiving with your family and friends, offer some gratitude for the mavericks of society.  Those who are willing to say unpopular things.  Those who are willing to do unpopular things.  All solution breakthroughs start with different.  

I'm eternally grateful to have grown up with parents who embraced different.  Thank you for investing in that difference on your table.  Now you're weird.  Love it. Embrace it.  Be thankful for it. The lunatic fringe is life's exciting edge.

Happy Thanksgiving from our fields to your fork.

Joel Salatin