April 20, 2025
Parallel Polis Publishing
By Joel Salatin, Plain Values
Water is the prerequisite to life. Some living things don’t need sunlight, some don’t even need soil, but all living things need water. Certainly, when we think about water, the first source that comes to mind is rain. But rain is not consistent, and most plants need water routinely. Indeed, some plants need more water than others, but scarcity is often the limiting factor in farm and garden production.
By Joel Salatin, Plain Values
In 1961 as our family looked out over this newly-acquired farm property with its rocks, gullies, and weeds, we needed a roadmap to healing. In our imagination, we could see fertile fields, filled-in gullies, and soil-covered rocks, but how to get there was intimidating. Our redemption project seemed impossible.
My dad contacted both private and public (government) agriculture experts to receive as broad a range of counsel as possible. Every advisor recommended borrowing more money, planting corn, building silos, grazing the woods, and feeding the soil chemical fertilizers.
By Joel Salatin, Plain Values
Does God Care How I Farm? That question defines my life’s work and vision because it moves the visceral, practical decisions I make in my farming vocation to a place of sacredness and godly living. If God cares about physical and practical things in my life, then my theology and belief structure are more than academic pursuits.
They are not just discussion groups and conversations. If God cares how I farm, then I should enthusiastically embrace searching for techniques and protocols that please Him. After all, it’s all His stuff. The courthouse may say I own this land, but ultimately I don’t. Legally and culturally, I may advocate for property rights, but really it’s all God’s property. Does He care how it’s handled? Does He care how I leave it? Does He care what I do with it?
The other day I was hauling a couple of cows to the slaughterhouse when a new-model truck with blacked-out windows blazed past me on the left. Big block letters on the rear window read: “LIONS NOT SHEEP.”
It was a nice truck, and I’d guess that the driver was an impressive guy — strong bench press, profitable business, maybe no exogenous mRNA in his bloodstream — but I’m also sure this truck bro is actually a particular type of sheep. A sheep in lion’s clothing, if you will, and I know that precisely because he considered himself to be a lion.
When animals become numbers, human numbers are not far behind. For the past several hundred years since the imaginations of Descartes and other enlighteners permeated our power structures, people have been treated as machines or numbers – abstract variables that can be subtly manipulated, to achieve certain goals. This is how the modern government exercises its power through an upside-down form of Christian “pastoral” leadership.
What if the way a culture treats livestock is an indication of how its political leaders will treat people?
Nature is under God’s control, and all the parts of nature are part of His symbolic language. This means that all of creation offers spiritual lessons. To farm, log, or fish is to interact with an animated parable of Christ, spoken by wordless creatures. A Christian culture needs this natural engagement, because if nobody stoops down and gets their hands dirty in the earth, then nobody can build cathedrals and gather together to pray heavenward.
IF YOU’RE READING THIS, you’re probably an American that eats meat. If that’s the case, your meat is probably too simple. Or rather, the system that produced your meat is too simple. And this oversimplification causes serious problems for your health and our country’s soils.
Want to enjoy truly healthy meat? Embrace the simple complexity of pasture husbandry.
This may sound counterintuitive. Scripture tells us to live simply. The Righteous Job was a “simple” God-fearing, upright man, the type that the book of Proverbs exhorts us to be. So simplicity is good. Indeed, in all of Steadfast Provisions’ pemmican products, we aim for simplicity. Simple ingredients, processed in simple, traditional ways. But here’s the paradox: to live simply, we must embrace the complexity of God’s creation. Otherwise, things get very complicated, very fast.
There is a quiet storm wreaking havoc in the world of food and farming. Processing plants, warehouses, and refineries are burning down at suspicious rates. Two of the world’s largest producers of wheat (and fertilizer) are currently in a war with no end in sight. Countries like China are hoarding all the grain they can get, while western governments use environmental regulations to throttle farm production and raise prices.
At a time like this, we need prayerful repentance, first of all. Second, we need to cultivate our local networks of capable food producers. And third, we need to obtain truly mighty food. Food that’s ready for anything. This article is a quest to answer an ancient, but ever-relevant question:
What is the one food to rule them all?
As Christians, we know that “climate change” is obviously real. It’s so real that it can devastate entire nations in the span of a week. And the realest part of all is that climate change is anthropogenic: human-caused. But we also know that climate change has nothing to do with carbon dioxide.
In fact, climate change is not at all what the UN’s “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” says it is. It isn’t caused by overpopulation, it isn’t caused by a “Greenhouse Effect,” and it doesn’t threaten humanity with extinction. We can tell that the entire mainstream narrative of climate change is demonic, because of its purpose: it is designed to trigger anxiety and fear. This narrative is in direct opposition to the Lord’s command to “Let not your hearts be troubled nor fearful.” (John 14:27)
by Jesse Dustin, of Heartland Goats
If anything has become clear over the last few years it is that certain points of view have become censored, banished, and wiped from our society and our online sphere. While the woke crowd can be as extreme as it wants, without any fear of reprisal, God-fearing Americans have been bloodied in the streets and tossed in jails for simply expressing a different opinion. This brings about a need for those who have been alienated. An urgent need to provide these folks with a life net or even just a basic means of survival. Folks’ abilities to earn a living, or even provide necessities for their own families have been hindered by a media and government that wants them destroyed.
“And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord will set His hand again the second time to recover the remnant of His people”
Isaiah 11:11
