Book Review: You Can Farm, by Joel Salatin
You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise
, by Joel Salatin, is a meaty book, filled with meaty advice. Perhaps the most helpful part for me was Chapter 4, titled Do It Now. An excerpt:
The message to me is that what is really essential to getting started is... getting started. If farming is a life, the most important step is to start living it. Salatin continues with examples of people who started small ventures with little or nothing in order to fund their larger farming objectives. An eye-opener for me was that I can farm without owning land. This was the source of my inspiration to design the trailers I will eventually use for milking and bottling milk on leased pasture land.
Chapter 10 was also inspiring. In it, Salatin lists his idea of the top ten centerpiece enterprises today. This book was written in 1998, but I believe this list is still as valid today as then. Number one on the list is pastured broilers. Number four is a grass-based dairy. If it were not for government regulations, he says, or if you live in a state where the regulations are reasonable, this would be a better opportunity than pastured broilers. It happens that Washington state regulations are amenable to raw milk micro-dairies. Public awareness of the health benefits of raw milk has been steadily growing over the last ten years, thanks to the efforts of the Weston Price Foundation. More people are becoming interested in locally produced foods, and more people are becoming aware of the dangers of soy products. These trends bode well for startup micro-dairies. For Washington, then, I believe a pasture-based raw milk micro-dairy is the number one best opportunity in farming today.
Chapter 11 continues with Salatin's list of the ten best complementary enterprises, and again, I think the list is as valid today as in 1998. Together, these two lists and the many other ideas scattered throughout the book should inspire any would-be farmer, with or without land, animals, equipment, or market. Start Today!
David Field
, by Joel Salatin, is a meaty book, filled with meaty advice. Perhaps the most helpful part for me was Chapter 4, titled Do It Now. An excerpt:- I wish I had a nickel for every time someone has asked me, "How do I get started?" My response: "What are you doing NOW?"
[...]
Fundamentally, you must look around yourself and ask, "What am I doing NOW? What can I do NOW?" You see, most folks I've dealt with, who really want to farm, have the notion that if they just had some land, or if they just had more land, they could farm. It's as if an elusive something - land, equipment, buildings, markets - is always just beyond their grasp and they are just stuck until they can acquire that magic "thing".
[...]
Farming is not a "thing". It is a life, and a business.
The message to me is that what is really essential to getting started is... getting started. If farming is a life, the most important step is to start living it. Salatin continues with examples of people who started small ventures with little or nothing in order to fund their larger farming objectives. An eye-opener for me was that I can farm without owning land. This was the source of my inspiration to design the trailers I will eventually use for milking and bottling milk on leased pasture land.
Chapter 10 was also inspiring. In it, Salatin lists his idea of the top ten centerpiece enterprises today. This book was written in 1998, but I believe this list is still as valid today as then. Number one on the list is pastured broilers. Number four is a grass-based dairy. If it were not for government regulations, he says, or if you live in a state where the regulations are reasonable, this would be a better opportunity than pastured broilers. It happens that Washington state regulations are amenable to raw milk micro-dairies. Public awareness of the health benefits of raw milk has been steadily growing over the last ten years, thanks to the efforts of the Weston Price Foundation. More people are becoming interested in locally produced foods, and more people are becoming aware of the dangers of soy products. These trends bode well for startup micro-dairies. For Washington, then, I believe a pasture-based raw milk micro-dairy is the number one best opportunity in farming today.
Chapter 11 continues with Salatin's list of the ten best complementary enterprises, and again, I think the list is as valid today as in 1998. Together, these two lists and the many other ideas scattered throughout the book should inspire any would-be farmer, with or without land, animals, equipment, or market. Start Today
!David Field
Labels: centerpiece enterprise, grass-based dairy, Joel Salatin, micro-dairy, pasture-based dairy, pastured dairy, pastured poultry, raw milk, salad bar beef, Weston A. Price, Weston Price, You Can Farm
posted by Farmer Field at 11:01 PM
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