A Farming “Blueprint” to Attract Younger Farmers
- David Geiger
- 19 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Joel Salatin does not take a conventional approach. While discussing agriculture young people love, Salatin was an atypical figure on the stage at the lunch keynote session of the 2026 Land Investment Expo in Des Moines, Iowa. Salatin is a self-proclaimed “Christian, libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic farmer.”
He even sells “lunatic farmer’ t-shirts as part of his merchandising line.
Polyface Farm, the 500-acre spread near Swoope, Virginia, is Salatin’s devotion to doing things differently than most.
“I normally talk to greenie weenie, tree muffin, herb huffin’, commie, pinko foodies,” said Salatin. “But I think I have a message here for you today that will be hopefully challenging but also refreshingly enthusiastic about how we create farms that attract the next generation.”
Salatin has published 16 books and said his vision for agriculture started with his father in the early 1960s when they settled on their farm in Virginia. After 150 years of tillage agriculture, it had a topsoil problem.
Salatin said, “Dad asked for advice from people and all the advice was, ‘Well, plant corn, borrow money, build silos, graze the woodlot, buy chemicals.’ And he knew that that wasn't the answer. And so, we began a redemption process that looked at nature as a blueprint. What are some of those blueprints?”
RELATED: The Spirit of Jefferson dives into Joel Salatin’s efforts in leading regenerative agriculture.
The Blueprint of Nature
The blueprint of nature is straightforward according to Salatin: Plant perennials, move animals, improve soil carbon, add diversity, create short chains of custody, and let animals do the work.
He used the Serengeti -- the nearly 12,000 square mile ecosystem in Tanzania and Kenya known for its Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of zebras and wildebeests -- as an example of how nature works. There, he noticed birds follow behind the herbivores.
So, he made “eggmobiles,” where free-range chickens follow grazing cows, “[The chickens] scratch through the cowpats, eat out the fly larva, eat the grasshoppers and the crickets, sanitize everything, spread all the cowpats out for fertilization, and give us $100,000 worth of eggs as a byproduct of the pasture sanitation program.”
PoultryWorld looked at how eggmobiles work.
Thousands of tons of compost along with other pieces of carbon biomass are spread out on their fields. Salatin calls it the “carbonaceous diaper,” a mixture that ferments alongside a layer of corn.
He said the work is all done by nature, avoiding more costly equipment, “And then in the spring when the cows come back out to grass, we turn the pigs in. The pigs root through it, and aerate it, go through it like a big eggbeater, and convert it from anaerobic fermentation to aerobic compost, that becomes our fertilizer,” Salatin detailed.
Mobility as a Key Philosophy
Overall, mobility is a key, recurring theme of this farming philosophy. Salatin believes this approach is the best way to get more young people involved with farming. He points to a problem he sees getting young people in, “When young people can't get in, old people can't get out. And so, both generations are stuck.”
Salatin continued, “So, on our farm, we don't use stationary infrastructure, we use mobile infrastructure. Everything moves. And when everything moves, you divorce the farm from its land base. That way you separate property from the farm. Suddenly, you've eliminated the largest capital entry investment.”
This builds into another aspect of Salatin’s philosophy: a focus on management. “Our farm is very people centric. We have been trying to exclude people from America's farms for way, way too long,” he said.
According to Salatin, U.S. farmers need to spend about four dollars to earn a dollar in gross sales. On his farm, the ratio is 50 cents to a dollar. Still, that doesn’t mean they’re able to make a cheaper product.
“Because we take these savings and put them on people. So, the food is not cheaper, but it does bring people back to the land, to our rural communities that have been hollowed out, and flyover country can become the new heart and soul of the country,” he said.
The World Economic Forum considered getting more younger people involved in agriculture a “critical opportunity.”
Craft Verses Commodity
Salatin argues small farms cannot compete at the commodity level where larger farms benefit at lower cost and thinner margins. However, he believes they can thrive as a craft.
“And there are thousands and thousands of farm crafters around the country, food crafters,” Salatin said. “Our deal is differentiation, something better, something special, and high margin with a people-centric knowledge base, something that takes more knowledge and more skill.”
Whether it is a new way of meeting consumer demand, or an emphasis on the will of nature, Salatin thinks a farm is not successionally sustainable until it generates two salaries from two different people. His farm has 22 employees and generates over $5 million in sales.
As it stands, young people trying to break into farming face crippling debt and weak prospects. Salatin believes that to attract young people and incentivize them to stay, there needs to be an opportunity to work hard, a good purpose, and enough income to build for the future.
RELATED: Joel Salatin explored the purpose of Polyface Farm in this interview with American Farmland Owner and explained how creativity and not scaling is most important.
