A farmer’s faithful stewardship

NICK EICHER, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It… on this Earth Day … we consider the dominion mandate, found in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, the book of Genesis. Actor Max McLean reads for Crossway’s ESV translation:

MCLEAN: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Subdue it and have dominion. The Hebrew words speak of bringing creation under cultivation: that’s subduing; as well as ruling over and governing: that’s “having dominion.”

REICHARD: Yet, this is no “license to exploit.” Think of it as royal stewardship under Christ. The idea is, man is made in God’s image and we are called to act as His vice-regents: justly, generously, in a way that is lifegiving.

Augustine saw dominion as order. Calvin stressed responsible stewardship. And Kuyper declared, There’s not a square inch over which Christ does not cry, ‘Mine!’”

EICHER: Dominion, then, is a creational blessing and responsibility. So, with that theological framing, let’s consider how one farmer lives out the dominion mandate in practice.

REICHARD: A while back, my colleague Jenny Rough and I spent some time at Joel Salatin’s family-run operation called Polyface Farms. It’s located in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and it’s known worldwide for regenerative farming: animals, plants, soils— all integrated, in such a way as to restore the earth. Salatin folds his arms on his kitchen table like a philosopher in muck boots.

SALATIN: What do we do here? So we grow salad bar beef, piggerator pork, pastured poultry, and that’s eggs, broilers, and turkeys, pastured rabbits, lamb, and ducks.

And so we produce all this without chemicals, without vaccines, without medications, no antibiotics, and no mRNA either.

EICHER: Salatin looks to God’s design of the planet for instructions on how to run his farm.

SALATIN: There are principles involved in nature: moving, mobbing, mowing. When you honor all three of those you build soil, you increase pollinators, you increase vegetative diversity, you increase abundance. Everything increases. If you violate one of those, you turn the herbivore which built all the healthy soils on the planet, you turn it into a liability rather than an asset. And in most commercial livestock situations in the world now, they’re violating all three of those.

Moving, mobbing, mowing. Herbivores roam around (move), they bunch up together (mob), they eat the plants (mow). Salatin studied natural herds of the world … the wildebeests of the Serengeti, the bison of North America, and he observed that’s how they live.

SALATIN: A feedlot violates all three. You know, they’re not moving, they’re not mowing, well I guess they are mobbed up. But they’re not moving, they’re not mowing. In the average grazing situation, they’re not moving. They’re not mobbed up. They are mowing, but they’re not moving and they’re not mobbed up.

So all you have to do is violate one and you turn it from an asset to a liability. And so we’re looking at this. How do we mimic moving, mobbing, mowing? Well, we use electric fence as essentially a steering wheel, a brake and an accelerator to move that mower around the landscape to do positively what herbivores have done since the beginning of time.

REICHARD: I remained a tad skeptical, as I’d read some opposing views beforehand. No way this can be done on a large scale to feed the people of the world. So I asked him:

SALATIN: It’s completely scalable. You can do it with one cow. You can do it with 5,000 cows. Has nothing to do with acreage. It’s about management. It’s how you manage. So if you have one cow you might give him 50 square yards a day. If you have 5000 cows, you might give them 100 acres a day. The equity in this is not in infrastructure. The equity is in management.

Salatin sees farming as a kind of living parable.

SALATIN: Well, if I was God looking down on this, how would I feel about a dead zone the size of Rhode Island and the Gulf of Mexico? How would I feel about Eagle eggs that are DDT'd and can't hatch? How would I feel about three legged salamanders due to pesticide contamination or or frogs that can't breed because they're infertile due to chemical contamination? I think as I meditate on that question, I think I'd be upset with, with the folks that I entrusted my, my thing to and said it was beautiful and good in Genesis. I don’t want back a bunch of deserts, a bunch of tainted soil, a bunch of erosion, a bunch of gullies, a bunch of C diff Mersa. E coli tainted, right? I don't want that back.

And so does God care?

Salatin says yes He does, and so he runs this place in such a way as the creatures and land are honored in the way God made them.

How does that play out? Salatin says the marvelous pigness of pigs proves it. (He even wrote a book of that title!) And he walked us over to where his swine live and play.

SALATIN: Watch him lean into me—watch him, he’s wiggling his rear! They love that. (Jenny: Giving him little scratchies!) That’s good stuff, isn’t it? Yeeeeah! That’s good stuff!

EICHER: So, what is this marvelous pigness, this glory of which he speaks?

SALATIN: You don't go down the street and hear people using the word glory very often. Usually, that's, that's something used in church, right, glory. But the Bible doesn't make those kinds of distinctions. It talks about certainly the glory of God. But it talks about the glory of old men is their gray hair. The glory of nations is their kings, the glory of the heavens, the glory of the Earth, I mean, it, it doesn't just spiritualize and kind of academic, the term glory. The glory of something, is its distinctiveness. It's what's special about it that nothing else has. So the glory of God is he's omniscient. He's omnipresent. Well, what is the glory of a pig? Well, the glory of a pig is not to be lanked up in a confinement house on a slatted floor, with a cut -off tail, living in stress all of its days, and treated like some sort of a mechanical blob. The glory of a pig is its ability to respond, to be curious, to sniff in the ground and to dig up roots. And that's the glory of the pig.

AUDIO: Pig snuffling sounds…bucket kicked…”probably gonna eat that…” They’re so cute!

Salatin elaborated on the glory of an integrated farm system, to use another Salatin original: letting the “pigerators” turn waste into life-giving soil.

SALATIN: We add corn to it and the corn ferments ‘cause the cows are tromping out the oxygen and its fermenting…. And so when the cows come out in the spring then we put in the pigs the pigs then seek the fermented corn and in doing so they aerate it, the “pigerators” they aerate and this whole thing turns into a big compost pile.

…which is all part of the overall design:

SALATIN: It fully honors and respects the pig, so now instead of the pig being pork chops and bacon the pig is also a co-laborer in this great land-healing ministry.

REICHARD: This integrative farming method has drawn interest from people all over the world.

Life from life. That’s Salatin’s philosophy, a bulwark against the chemical ag model that he says ignores stewardship. Salatin is reclaiming dominion as he says God intended not in lording it over the earth and its creatures.

SALATIN: Water, soil, air, it’s the stuff that preceded me, and will be here after I’m gone. And so as a result of my footsteps here, I've been entrusted with whatever it is: a square yard, an acre, 500 acres. As a result of my being here is my legacy, am I leaving God a return on investment? What's his ROI?

Here’s the goal. I got this plate sittin’ in front of me. And I’m looking at this food. If I squint my eyes and imagine, and look through the food to the landscape on the other side, that grew it, that processed it, that distributed it, that brought it to me, and look at that landscape. Is that a landscape that lines up with my beliefs? And is it a landscape that I want children to inherit?

That’s the question.

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