Joel Salatin has said yes to essentially every interview request for twenty years. He has a website called thelunaticfarmer.com. He is the most accessible person in American agrarianism. I have no reason to believe he will not respond.
I am publishing this letter anyway, before I know, because the letter is the real thing. The interview would be nice. The letter is what I actually want to say.
Dear Mr. Salatin,
My name is Matt Headley. I write for Southern Legends, a publication about Southern life, land, and culture based in Northeast Alabama. I am also a flower farmer in Calhoun County, and I used to be a pastor, and these three things together make me, I think, an unusual correspondent.
I want to interview you for Southern Legends.
I am not primarily interested in the chickens. I know about the chickens. Most people who know your work know about the chickens. What I am interested in is the theological argument that is underneath the farming argument, which I think you make explicitly and which almost none of the coverage of your work engages with directly.
Your father was a missionary-agricultural entrepreneur in Venezuela before your family settled Polyface. That is not background. That is the foundation of everything you have built. The farm as stewardship, the land as gift rather than commodity, the obligation to future generations, these are not add-ons to your agricultural model. They are the reason for it.
Wendell Berry endorsed your book The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer. Berry does not endorse often and he does not endorse performers. He endorsed you because you are doing the thing, not describing the thing, and because the underlying theological argument, that the earth is not ours to destroy, is one he has been making for sixty years and that he recognizes in your work.
I would like to ask you about the theology. About your father. About what the Christian frame does for your understanding of the work that a secular environmentalist frame does not. About the difference between stewardship as a concept and stewardship as a daily practice in red clay in the Shenandoah Valley.
I write for an audience that includes farmers, former pastors, people who have read Berry and Salatin and are trying to figure out what to do with what they read. Northeast Alabama is not the Shenandoah Valley but it has known the same dispossession, the same evacuation of the farming knowledge, the same hollowing out of the rural community that your work diagnoses.
I would welcome thirty minutes on the phone or a written exchange. Either works.
With respect for the work,
Matt Headley Calhoun County, Alabama matt@southernlegends.blog
He will likely say yes. The interview, if it happens, will run on Southern Legends under the profiles section.
The letter is already the most honest thing I could say about why his work matters.
Joel Salatin's books: Folks, This Ain't Normal, You Can Farm, The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer. See the full profile: Joel Salatin Is What Happens When Wendell Berry Gets a Megaphone.
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