Review of “Family Friendly Farming” by Joel Salatin

The first time I saw Joel Salatin was at the Back to Patriarchy Conference in 1996. He had an incredible ability to throw enthusiasm at his audience that day, and they caught it like a flu bug in December. By the time he was done, everybody wanted to be a farmer.

“Alternative” is Joel’s middle name. He not only tries to think outside the box, he burns his boxes behind him. Joel has been a pioneer in the field of alternative agriculture, most notably in raising pastured beef and poultry. He promotes alternative agricultural models as economically profitable and healthy for the land and for feeding families. But this book, Family Friendly Farming, is about more than farming. Salatin has insights that apply to any home business and even for families without an enterprise.

Problems Joel Sees

Conventional farming doesn’t inspire children to continue farming:

• There’s no money in conventional farming.
• Modern farms are ecological disasters. They stink and people and animals are miserable.
• Modern farming puts a straight jacket on innovation. The innovative children leave to invest their creativity in other industries that are open to innovation.
• Farm children often have bad relationships with their parents.

Joel’s Solutions

• There is no way to change every conventional farmer’s mind. Change begins at home in your own mind. It begins by making changes in your own life.
• Any family business should think multi-generationally. Your practices need to work today, tomorrow, and for the next 200 years. It has to encourage strong family relationships and intergenerational interdependence. It has to encourage a healthy home life.
• Farming needs to be good for the earth. This means diversification (fields are used for more than one crop or animal), integration (each farm enterprise needs to help the other enterprises), etc. The soil, bugs and plants need to get healthier each year.
• Healthy animals and plants in a natural environment is the only way to produce truly healthy food. People need to build a relationship with their food sources. This helps them learn about quality food. Farming needs to produce nutritious food, not just volumes of food.
• There is nothing evil about wanting to make money.
• Children need a sense of ministry to motivate them into what they will be doing for the rest of their life. They need to know that their work is helping the world become a better place. Conventional farming doesn’t do this. The message that technology is improving farming is a lie. Children subconsciously realize this even if their parents don’t. The smart children move to the city where real opportunities for building a better world exist.
• Family businesses are wonderful places to raise children. And a farm is a wonderful place to raise children too. If these two are combined in a multi-generational vision, they can be awesome tools for culture change.
• A multi-generational vision also trains the best stewards of the land. If children grow up with a vision for what they want to see their family doing 200 years from now, they will see how they need to care for the land so that the land will be healthy when their great grandchildren take over in 200. Empowering children to love and cultivate the land in a natural way will build an ever-expanding culture of responsible stewards.
• A multi-generational vision and a sense of respect for nature will create paradigms – agricultural models – that will grow healthy food. Maybe not gobs and gobs of low cost food, but food that has all the nutrients we need to live long, productive, lives. Quality over quantity is the wave of the future. This comes after the failed paradigm of mega-farming and the cheep synthetic food substitutes grown today.

Joel’s principles for reaching his solutions:

What a farm (or any business) needs to be multi-generationally successful:

• There must be a healthy relationship between the parents and their children. Children must respect their parents, and parents must listen to their children.
• Things on the farm need to be open to change in a short time if the need arises. If one enterprise is not working, then the parents should not shackle their children to the old way of doing things. This means huge investments in buildings and machinery are dangerous. If one kid comes up with a better way of doing things, he needs to have the opportunity to try it. This creates an culture of creativity and hope.
• Parents should not tie up all their money in their retirement. They need to look at their children as their retirement. Early on, the kids need to know for certain that the farm is really theirs.
• Pay the kids! Don’t postpone rewards.
• Do not criticize mistakes. If an idea fails, help the kids move to something that works.
• Families need to set goals together. What does each family member want to see in the next six months, year, two years, and twenty years? Reevaluate your goals often.

Joel said many other things about the family, about work ethics, about vision for the future, about self-discipline, about business strategy, and other topics. I’ve only tried to summarize the points he made that applied to farming.

How this has helped me

I know more about why having a family business is important to me.

I understand how my decisions and sacrifices will economically impact many future generations. How I decide to make a living and what I do to transfer my wealth to the next generation can either help the next generation or destroy it. I need to reward the good and discourage the bad.

It has helped me understand how making money is not an evil goal. But this totally depends on how I want to make the money. Money is not a goal. It is a tool, a tool that can build hope for future generations, or destroy the character of future generations.

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