Thank You, Joel Salatin

Chef Steven with Joel Salatin at The Homestead Festival

We have him to thank for so much. The one and only Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms was there at the very beginning of our real food journey, way before Steven and I became farmers in Tennessee.

Here’s a little backstory…

“While watching the documentary Food, Inc. one evening in 2009 in the comfy two-seater chair in our Dallas living room, Steven and I stared at the TV screen wide-eyed. With gorgeous cinematography and golden hour footage of cattle happily grazing in bright-green grassy meadows, the film featured the story of farmer Joel Salatin and Polyface, his family's thriving, two-thousand-acre multigenerational farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Through organic and sustainable farming practices, they've built a six-figure business and helped define the "locavore" movement, which encourages people to support as many local farms and artisans as possible with their food choices.

Food, Inc. shined a light on corporate farming in the United States and how the big machine of industrial agriculture continues to produce unhealthy food, using chemicals and practices that are harmful to people, animals, and the environment. Many organic farmers in the US are suffering and struggling on their own while trying to help people connect to the land and provide them with real, nutritious produce and meat from healthy animals.

By the time the film finished, we were shocked and outraged. Organic and sustainable farmers were using ancient practices that contributed to healing the environment and people's health. Yet these farmers were seen as abnormal, weird, or on the fringes. All the while, chemically sprayed produce required that the land be stripped of life by industrial farming practices. Animals were being severely mistreated at factory farms and feedlots, and this was all being subsidized by the US government while organic farmers struggled.

It was a pivotal moment that woke us both up big time. We were suddenly and shockingly aware of the massive problems in the food system and how we were contributing to it as consumers. We had never been so aware of how much the way we spent our dollars mattered.

We couldn’t unknow the things we now knew. Would we sit on this new information, or would we change?

The desire to be a part of the change led to inspiration. I thought of the purity of the little backyard garden we were in the midst of building in our urban backyard - the shiny basil leaves and tomatoes and peas that were safe to pluck and eat straight off the vine. I thought of how our little garden already meant to us and so many others. How could we move beyond our backyard to a wider activism?

We did the first thing we could think of: look up who our local farmers were. Who grows organic produce within a fifty-mile radius of us? We began to passionately pursue organically and sustainably grown food from local farmers at the grocery store and researched which farms we could visit so we could purchase directly from them.

Plus, the idea of escaping the city on the weekend sounded really appealing!

So we filled the entire hatchback of our tiny, trusty green Volkswagen Rabbit with a giant cooler and hit the Texas back roads. This became our new favorite Saturday morning pastime: visiting local farms to pick up raw milk with the cream on top, fresh eggs, sourdough bread still warm out of the oven, organic berries, homemade raw cheddar cheese, and sweet potatoes with dirt still on them.

We loved meeting these brave farmers and learning about their worlds, their passions, and what they had to offer. And all week long, we looked forward to experiencing that peace and fulfillment again.

With the Dallas skyline in the rearvew mirror and the never-ending Texas horizon sprawled in front of us, I’d exhale.

I had no idea what was coming next - I just knew I loved these weekend mini road trips, venturing out of the concrete jungle into the wide-open spaces. A momentary escape from traffic and the hustle of city life. A chance to breathe fresh air. Three-hundred-sixty-degree beauty and a slower pace.

These were exactly what my soul craved.

We soaked up these farm visits each Saturday, peppering the farm families with questions while swooning over the pungent homemade cheeses and stuffing as much freshly baked sourdough as possible into our shopping basket. Mmm. ... can't wait to toast that with butter and make some bruschetta with tomatoes and basil from the garden later.

Our cooler now bursting with farm-fresh goodies in the back of our Rabbit, we left with renewed priorities and perspectives-and grumbling stomachs. We couldn't wait to share this with our friends. Once we got home, we'd scramble to unload the cooler, bust open the bags of warm, squishy bread, and invite some friends over for brunch.

As soon as we showed them our spoils, they wanted in on the farm's offerings. Farm-fresh eggs fried in coconut oil, the yolks bright-orange and creamy. Organic Texas cantaloupe slices with sweet juice that dripped down your hands. Savory pasture-raised sausage crackling in the pan. Homemade Russian black bread slathered in grass-fed butter and drizzled with local raw honey.

And once our friends tasted that food, there was no turning back. So they started placing orders: "Hey, will you grab me a gallon of raw milk, some fresh butter, and a loaf of sourdough while you're there?"

Soon, we were pushing the limits of what our little hatchback could hold, with not only the trunk but also the back seat stuffed to the gills. Our trusty green Rabbit had never seen so much action as she kept zipping up and down the Texas back roads.

Word quickly spread, and others wanted us to bring back farm goodies too. Before we knew it, we were distributing this nutritionally dense, beautifully raised food to friends and their friends.

We started to get so many orders that we decided to set up a bunch of coolers in a centralized pickup location in the only place that made sense: the parking lot of the training studio, smack-dab in the middle of Dallas off North Central Expressway.

And that's essentially how our future was born in a random Dallas parking lot. Within a handful of months, "a few friends and clients" turned into seventeen families, and we had unknowingly started our very own organic food co-op.

Of course, we didn't know then what was coming down the pipeline - that we were building a business that would eventually have thirty-five employees and lead us to work nearly round the clock for years to spread our collective passion of local, organic, and sustainable food all throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

With a whole lot of grit, scrappiness, and hard work, we were able to grow from seventeen families picking up bins of produce in a parking lot to a citywide organic produce co-op that served 2,300 families all over the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. And, eventually, it became our own organic market and café and quarter-acre urban farmstead with chickens, rabbits, aquaponics, and bees on the roof. All because of the farmers whose hands we had shaken, whose land our feet had touched.” ~ excerpt from The Kindred Life book ❤️🧡💛

Joel was the speaker at our very first farm dinner in a city brewery in Dallas, more farm dinners after that, and he was also the keynote speaker at our first sustainability conference we hosted in Dallas where he broke down an entire pasture-raised hog on stage! He cut the ribbon at the grand opening of our Urban Acres farmstead in 2014.

So, what a wonderful full-circle moment it was last week, after all these years, for Steven to get to cook for Joel and the other speakers at The Homestead Festival here in middle Tennessee!

Steven got to take a moment to thank Joel for his role in our journey to becoming regenerative farmers in Tennessee.

Would that young couple driving the Texas backgrounds have believed we would end up here?

We’ve raised pigs and chickens,

We’re regenerating land with pasture-raised farming,

Hosting 130-person farm dinners under the stars featuring local, seasonal produce,

Raising bees and carving honeycomb onto local sourdough on people’s plates,

Gathering the community at our farm store to help them connect more to the land.

All of it, a full circle expression of where we began with that little spark that grew into a raging passion.

Because someone was brave enough to share their story and light up the world for us in a way that was good and true. Thank you, Joel.

Here’s Joel at our ribbon-cutting ceremony of Urban Acres in Dallas in 2014…

And some more photos from the opening our our urban farmstead…I had just birthed our second daughter at home 4 days before this!