Dan Barber

After learning about this, Dan’s fish tasted exclusively of chicken. He decided to look elsewhere. This sustainable fish wasn’t sustainable at all, it still created pollution and required industrially produced feed to grow.

Not all was lost, however, in Dan’s quest for sustainable fish. He happened upon a fish farm in Spain where the fish are farmed in land, the water from the system leaves it cleaner than when it enters, and local birds are allowed to eat the fish. And they do, up to 20% of it. Veta la Palma is in a natural park and is a very different environment to pretty much all farms we know.

Now eating fish may not seem very Zen, and indeed it is not, but the interesting point here is how a sustainable farm system was created. A lot of the concepts used are very similar to Joel Salatin’s ideas of how to create a sustainable farming system at Polyface farm.

These farmers are more than simple farmers. They are conducting a whole ecosystem to provide the inputs it needs from natural sources rather than artificial ones, such that the participants are all living in as much a natural harmony as possible. We need to take these principals and try to apply them to all of our agricultural systems, whether growing hens, beans or broccoli. We will then have a really Zen relationship with nature and our food supply.