Joel Salatin has recieved considerable press lately. The latest release features an interview segment with the ABC Landline program scheduled to coincide with the release of Food Inc in australian cinemas. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to spend two full days with Joel Salatin by attending our upcoming RegenAG Local Farms & Community workshop.

Food for Thought – Landland
Joel Salatin on ABC LandLine
6th June 2010

ANNE KRUGER, PRESENTER: It’s just over a decade since Landline first caught up with US organic farmer Joel Salatin.

Back then he made quite an impression at a holistic farming conference at Orange as much for the staggering returns from his tiny family farm in the Shenandoah Valley as for his down-to-earth approach.

JOEL SALATIN, ORGANIC FARMER (Landline, 1999): If you can get 12 worms per cubic foot you can build an inch of soil every couple of years.

ANNE KRUGER: Now thanks to a provocative new documentary Joel Salatin is on his way to becoming one of the best-known farmers in the world.

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CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE LANDLINE SEGMENT

Joel Salatin on TODAY
Joel Salatin is interviewed live on National TV
TODAY on Channel 9
28th May 2010

In a new film called Food, Inc, American documentary makers have lifted the lid on the often shocking truth behind what we eat, how it’s produced and the cost to our health.

Joel Salatin, a 53-year-old third-generation alternative farmer from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley who features in the film, joined TODAY to talk about the food industry.

With almost 80 percent of the Australian grocery market being soaked up by Coles and Woolworths, which import much of their produce, local farmers are being driven out along with their healthy produce.

Salatin’s farm services more than 3000 families, 10 retail outlets, and 50 restaurants through on-farm sales and metropolitan buying clubs, with “salad bar” beef, pastured poultry, “egg mobile” eggs, pigaerator pork, forage-based rabbits, pastured turkey and forestry products using relationship marketing. Salatin is campaigning to make people aware of what really goes into the food they eat.

Food, Inc reveals how a handful of corporations control the food supply while scientists are manipulating the DNA of the animals we eat so the animals grow more quickly, feed more efficiently and even taste different. We now have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, and even tomatoes that won’t go bad. The reality is that the food we eat has been injected with growth hormones and antibiotics.

FOOD INC is Released in Australia on May 20
Joel Salatin is conducting 2-day workshops across Australian and New Zealand exclusively with RegenAG. For full workshop details, click here.

CLICK HERE FOR THE VIDEO INTERVIEW

The Lunatic’s Manifesto
by Necia Wilden
Published in The Australian
17th April 2010

Joel Salatin is labelled a crank and a “bio-terrorist” for his views on industrial farming. But he makes perfect sense to Necia Wilden as he heads to Australia

THERE are downsides to being both a farmer and a film star. Joel Salatin is telling me that recently he rang up to order a tractor-load of sawdust and copped a stream of rather surprising vitriol. “The guy got on the phone and said, ‘I wouldn’t bring you a delivery for a million bucks,’?” he recalls. “He said, ‘You abuse your cows and chickens by not giving them medicines, you leave your cows out on the grass’ … it was an extraordinary outburst, the phone was melting in my hand.”

Such is the price of thinking outside the paddock. Salatin, who’s coming to Australia this year, is not only a farmer who’s more controversial than most; he has the distinction of being the most famous farmer in the world right now, thanks to his role in the hard-hitting Oscar-nominated documentary Food, Inc, an exposé of industrial food production that releases in selected Australian cinemas on May 20….

READ THE FULL STORY

Beating the Drought
by Barry Kennedy
Published in the Macedon Ranges Leader
13th April 2010

Ben Falloon, who runs the 162ha Taranaki Farm, will show 45 Australian and International farmers around his property this week in a three-day Keyline & Carbon Farming workshop taught by Darren Doherty.

Mr Falloon has turned his farm into a demonstration site in advance of the ongoing Regenerative Regenerative Agriculture Workshop Series. He said the drought had forced his hand four years ago and he had looked for alternatives to combat soil degradation.

“Super phosphate has created a big obstacle for farmers because it implies that you till, seed and fertilise while hoping for rain, which has turned farmers into gamblers.” he said.

The drought has shown the limitations of fertilisers he said. “There are paddocks where one more plough will blow off the last layer of top soil so farmers need to think of other ways and there is a strong revival in Keyline principles,” he said.

Mr Falloon is reconfiguring his farm to Keyline principles, a technique first developed by Percival Yeomans, who lived near Sydney in the 1950s.

The technique is governed by the natural contours of the land. Irrigation is aligned to the lie of the land. He said the lie of the land had been thought of in rebuilding fences and roadways while 3000 trees had been planted and a creek running through the property fenced off.

The cost was being easily recouped by improved grass coverage and soil health.

“Ultimately farms have to produce more to support greater populations so you really aren’t looking at sustainability any more, it’s regeneration,” Mr Falloon said.

He said keeping grass on the soil at all times meant soil biology improved, allowing the soil mass to increase, which would store vast amounts of carbon.

Mr Falloon said he planned to bring leading agricultural thinkers Peter Andrews and American Joel Salatin to future seminars. Details : FusionFarms.com