Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 8464 Plough Quarterly • Autumn 2016 The average American farmer is age fifty- seven. Why aren’t more young people taking up farming? Joel Salatin: Our culture sees being a farmer like being a janitor. The Jeffersonian intellectual agrarian has been replaced by the redneck hillbilly persona. We get calls from parents of interns: “I sent my kid to college so he would get a decent job, not go out and put his hands in the dirt.” There is this condescending spirit. What they don’t realize is that humility and common sense come with participating in the awesomeness of nature. That’s why I’m a big fan of children’s gardens. For a child, it’s powerful to plant a tomato seed, nurture the plant, watch the bees pollinate the blossoms, and see the little green orb grow and turn red. And in the end, I get to eat it, and the juice runs down my elbow. I become aware of having a place in something much bigger than me. That’s so much more profound than being the top points getter in Angry Birds. When we move into a virtual thought pattern we lose our moorings. We forget that we are fundamentally dependent on literally trillions of mycorrhizae, mycelium, nematodes, and bacteria in the soil. Your grandchildren are growing up on the same farm on which you raised your own two children, as part of a multi-generational enterprise. What advice do you have to parents about how to teach children to love to work? First of all you have to like to work yourself. We have to appreciate that all we do, from cleaning the toilet to planting the tomato plant, is all sacred stuff. It is an extension of God’s partici- patory hand in life. We do it all as unto the Lord. Do the kids help on butchering day? We have never sheltered our kids from the most visceral aspects of farming. We have pictures of our kids in diapers dragging chickens on butch- ering day. There is no aversion to it. We are born with a primal sense of life and death – it’s just a fact that something has to die for something to live. In a compost pile microbes are ingesting and being ingested by others. All of creation is pulsing with sentience: when the sunflower tracks the sun across the sky, when the maple tree withholds its sap in a windstorm so that if a big branch falls it will have enough sap to run to the wound. Appreci- ating these things elevates our reverence, awe, and wonder. That’s a paradoxical way to learn the value of life! When you kill something on a video game, you wait five seconds and it gives you a new icon. But when you go out to the garden and the tomato plant is dead, that’s it. When you slaugh- ter a chicken, it won’t wake up when you press a button. The gravity of that situation helps to create a frame of reference for how we interact with each other. Sometimes we become so disconnected that we don’t have a frame of context for what true sacrifice is. Part of blessing our food is being grateful for the sacrifice, whether it is a carrot, a pig, or a chicken. The ultimate purpose of living things is to give themselves for something else. The ultimate gift we give to each other is that we sacrifice ourselves in service for each other. And then, of course, there can be no eternal life without the sacrifice of Christ. There’s the ultimate example of life.  Interview by Kevin Keiderling on June 29, 2016. Watch the interview or read it in full at plough.com/salatin. Questions for Joel Salatin Image from Wikimedia Commons (public domain).