Joel Salatin is a third generation alternative farmer in the Shenandoah Valley who attracted national attention after being featured in Michael Pollan’s book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

The second day of the 15th Annual Water Conservation and Xeriscape Conference in Albuquerque was not only enlightening, uplifting and educational–it was a lot of fun.

The day started off with two keynote presentations, one by Dr. Robert Glennon, the Morris K. Udall Professor of Law and Public Policy at the University of Arizona and the other by Will Swope, the Vice President and General Manager of Corporate Sustainability at Intel. I plan to recap their talks, and others from the conference in future blogs, but tonight I wanted to write about Joel Salatin’s presentation and “A Sustainable Farmer’s Point of View.”

Joel calls himself a “grass farmer” on his family’s farm called Polyface or the Farm of Many Faces. He’s also an engaging  speaker and author of several books with titles like “You Can Farm,” “Family Friendly Farming,” and “Everything I want to do is illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front.”

Maude Barlow (left) presented
the Global Water
keynote address.

The first day of the International Water Conference helped 400 participants gain a global perspective of critical water issues and some of the work that’s being done to solve them. It’s difficult to sum up the entire first day in one short post, but it’s safe to say that each speaker gave us all much food for thought.

It seems the key is to go back to nature.

The keynote was given by Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and a “water warrior.” At turns she presented grim news and hope for the future. Currently there are water-related conflicts and crises around the world as evidenced by the headlines from newspapers that described water or drought problems in Israel, Iraq, Argentina, China, Kenya, Spain, Pakistan, southeast Asia and states in the western U.S. “It’s the greatest ecological crisis of all time,” she said.