Reprinted with permission from the December 2009 issue of the Ester Republic.

My moms, recalling their recent visit to Polyface Farm in Staunton, VA, kept returning to one thing that struck them most about their visit to Joel Salatin’s icon of small-scale agriculture: it did not stink. There to purchase free-range turkeys for the holidays, they toured hoop-houses occupied by layers and roasters, walked pastures of grass-fed cows, even helped Salatin’s son to rotate pig stock, and through it all, they did not once encounter an unpleasant odor.

Those of us who tend our own gardens and farms aren’t surprised to hear this, of course. Farming should not smell bad. When we are turned by an odor we are experiencing a hard-wired evolutionary signal alerting us that something is unhealthy or unsafe: rotten food, rancid meat, poisonous plants, noxious fumes. Thus, smell is one of the best built-in tools we have for knowing when something is wrong on our farms. (more…)