Words by Joel Salatin
As long as we live, we serve something. We can’t choose to abandon service; our every thought and deed move interests outside of ourselves. Stated bluntly, service demands an object and a choice. That sounds silly to say, but it’s the crux of our service legacy.
Moses admonished to choose today what we would serve: life or death. Jesus said we could not serve competing masters: God and money. Nobody questions that during our lifetimes we will serve something; the question is what, who, how, when, where?
Generally, we don’t pick only one interest to serve; we serve multiple interests. If we’re married with children, we serve our spouse as well as our children. Normally that service is complementary but occasionally it can be competitive, and we have to prioritize which interest has first dibs. Most of us serve an employer and we would normally agree that if the employer wants us to do something that is sinful (against God) or hurts our marriage, we’d prioritize our allegiance to God or our spouse.
Virtually all our decisions wrestle with service priorities because we don’t have unlimited time, money, and energy. Fortunately, God is unlimited and can listen to all His children at once, respond with unlimited attention and power at once, dealing with any and every issue in the universe with the proper intervention at precisely the right moment. That’s pretty cool.
But we mere mortals do not live in that transcendent state. We must make choices among competing interests and sometimes we don’t even know in the moment the relative worth of these interests. We might learn later that our decision to serve an interest was actually detrimental. For example, two homeless people asking for money might tug at our heart strings and we give them both $20. But we learn later that one purchased a bus ticket to get to family that led to complete healing and vibrant living, while the other spent it on alcohol to get stone drunk for a day. Our service helped one and hurt the other.
One of our most basic service needs is our own physical requirements: food, water, rest, exercise. Our service to others depends mightily on our own vigor and mental acuity. To be sure, we’ve all encountered completely dependent people who radiate joy, don’t complain, and serve us joy in their hardship. They’ve made a dramatically positive choice even in difficulty, and we honor that.
But for the rest of us, the world cries out for service, and part of that world is the creation ecology, our physical nest, into which each of us is immersed. I enjoy a more visceral relationship and a more intimate responsibility to this physical creation because I’m a farmer. I have both the privilege and responsibility of touching the very soil, plants, and animals that not only impact physical creation but provide sustenance for people. Yes, people, God’s creative epitome.
As a farmer, the service questions I must ask myself are: Does God care about the quality of provenance I produce to feed people? Does God care how I treat the soil, plants, and animals He’s entrusted to my stewardship? And if He does, what compelling interests must I serve? What’s the objective in my service?
These are heady questions and not always easy to answer because competing interests vie for my attention. For example, the tax man cometh. I have an interest to stay in business, provide for my family, pay my bills—even the taxes. That means I have an objective to produce and sell enough to make enough money to keep shoes on my children’s feet. The service need, then, is to turn my God-given resources like soil, air, and water into cash. No one would deny that this is a noble and necessary service need.
But what if inflation or a destructive weather calamity or unexpected financial emergency demands additional cash and my production needs exceed the long-term capacity of the resource base? As farmers and businesspeople, we can justify having to generate more income fairly easily; in doing so, we may head down a slippery slope that uses up our resources rather than replenishing them. Today, the average acre of corn in the U.S. loses roughly 4 tons of soil per year. Agriculture dropped soil organic matter from a North American average of nearly 8 percent 500 years ago down to today’s 1-2 percent.
In order to get the same nutrition out of a serving of broccoli today that you would have gotten out of a serving in 1940, you have to eat nearly 5 times as much; the nutritional quality of our foods has deteriorated that much. Every apple, grape, strawberry, and egg is today dramatically lower in nutrient content than it was a century ago. When we arrived on our farm in 1961, gullies 16 feet deep marred the hillsides plowed for grain during the early 1800s. Farmers traded the soil for cash in the debauchery of resource assault; nearly all these farmers were good church-going people and probably sponsored missionaries to foreign lands.
If this is pinning your ears back, good. It’s time for someone to stand up for the service needs of God’s gift to us: the precious soil and water that nurture our physical needs in order to give us the energy to serve Him. Many years ago, searching for a sound bite for the oft-asked question, “What do you do?” I finally came up with: “I grow dancing earthworms.” That always piqued some interest.
“I thought you were a farmer,” they’d respond. I’d then explain that, while I was a farmer, my first and foremost objective was growing happy earthworms, because if I did that right, everything else would fall into place. It may not be wholly true, but it did stimulate conversation about stewardship and the ultimate objective. Some folks suggest that elevating happy earthworms to a benchmark of sacred living cheapens the more unseen spiritual elements of doctrine and evangelism. But I would suggest that if we can’t, won’t, or don’t care first for the obvious visible parts of God’s interests, we probably will miss something major in the more mystical parts of His interests. Redemption is not limited to the soul; it should extend to the soil. It should permeate every aspect of God’s realm, both visible and invisible. My goal should be to grow food as nutrient dense as King David enjoyed. Corn-fed beef has a completely different nutrient profile than forage-finished beef. In Austria and Bavaria, hay milk commands a premium price because grain and silage change the enzymes enough for cheese makers to notice. Shouldn’t farmers serve people by trying to produce better nutritional food rather than filling stomachs with deficiencies?
That means my mandate as a caretaker of a piece of land—and all of us do it either directly or indirectly—is to leave it healthier and more productive than it was. This is a tall order since the history of agriculture, if not civilization, is one of predatory natural resource destruction. A conquistador mentality did not start with the Spaniards; it went back to the most ancient civilizations. Indeed, every desert is manmade.
Every toxic riparian dead zone is manmade. Fortunately, we know how to increase hydration and how to build soil. God didn’t build soil with John Deere tractors and the mold board plow or hybrid corn. He built it with perennials–primarily grasses and trees—and animals like pond-building beavers. But God also endowed humans with intellectual and mechanical ability that could either be harnessed to serve death and destroy the hydration and soil fertility, or could be harnessed to caress, massage, and partner with redemptive capacity.
Abundance does not depend on pesticides, herbicides, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), and wildlife extermination. The patterns and platforms created in nature can be enhanced by human inventions if they are respected and honored as the blueprint for our interventive service. We can build ponds with excavators. We can stimulate soil development with compost. We can enhance forests with thinning and chipping to bring more carbon to strategic needy areas even better than static nature can do. This is exciting stuff, exciting opportunity.
With electric fence, we can move domestic herbivores across the landscape more precisely and productively than the native wild bison. In half a century, our farm took a landscape that could only support 20 cows to one that now supports 100 cows. That’s not bragging; it’s humbly acknowledging that God’s designs work and as we serve His creation, our most important objective is to figure out what those magnificent models are and duplicate them on our slice of His creation. That seems about as basic as it gets.
What about farming, then? If you’re a farmer, what’s the state of pollinators on your property? Are they increasing or decreasing? Are you doing anything that hurts them, like spraying pesticides? What’s the state of the earthworms in your soil? Are you applying anything that hurts them, like chemical fertilizer, slurry manure, or herbicides? Or overgrazing?
How about the water? In a flood, does it run clean or is it brown and murky with silt? What can you do to increase water-retentive organic matter, build ponds, diversions, or increase protective vegetative biomass? Raindrops are like bombs hitting the soil; if they hit dense vegetation, they splatter into tiny droplets and mist onto the soil surface gently. These are things we think about when considering how to serve God’s creation.
If ever our food and farming systems needed a renewed heart for service, it is today. From COVID’s empty store shelves to high pathogen avian influenza, as both farmers and eaters, we choose models and menus that promote life or death. Let us choose to serve life.