The Return on Investment of Isolation

The Return on Investment of Isolation
by Joel Salatin at Brownstone Institute

In his iconic Brave New World, one of Aldous Huxley’s recurring themes is the desire and mandate to never be alone. The whole life is taken up with working at a pre-determined vocation and otherwise being entertained in large groups. The eventual hero, The Savage, gravitated finally to an old lighthouse and hung himself when people came to gawk at him.

Although we don’t have the breeding centers and embryo development factories in that book, we appear, as a culture, to embrace the “never alone” aspects. Social media and TikTok addiction crowd out quiet contemplation and solitude’s many benefits. Nearly all strategically results-oriented self-worth remediation programs include periods of solitary meditation, thought, and self-awareness discovery. Quiet contemplation not only stimulates innovation but also helps us know who we are within our relational context.

As a full-time farmer, I spend many hours alone and find this time especially rewarding. Unplugging from the hurried-harried frenetic-frenzied life brings healing and progress on many levels. But one time in my life launched everything since.

In our home, I grew up on The Freeman for economics and Organic Gardening and Farming for agriculture. While I embraced compost over chemicals, my real soul conversion occurred when I was 24.

Dad was an accountant; Mom was a schoolteacher. The off-farm jobs paid the property mortgage during my growing-up years. We had a glorified homestead and experimentation platform to try portable infrastructure, composting, and pastured livestock production. Our family had not and did not make a full-time living from the farm but always aspired to. As a teenager, I began dreaming and scheming about that possibility.

With a flare for writing and communicating, I began working weekends at our local daily newspaper as the newsroom receptionist writing obituaries, police reports, and whatever other tidbits came in during my hours. I loved it. Then came Watergate and Nixon’s downfall, and I decided I’d find my Deep Throat, bring down the next president with a best-selling muckraking journalistic tome, and retire to the farm. 

The newspaper staff liked me, liked my work, and offered me a guaranteed reporter’s job after graduating college. Suddenly, I had a live-at-home option to stay at the farm and continue things part-time. And that’s exactly what I did, graduating in the spring of 1979 and returning to the old newspaper haunt. My, how I loved the newsroom. But I loved the farm more and lived in the tension of both worlds.

As one of five reporters on staff, I was the only one with any interest in agriculture. Much to my joy, I received all the ag-related assignments. Teresa and I married in 1980, fixed up the farmhouse attic as an apartment – we called it our penthouse – and began saving voraciously. By growing all our food, heating with our own firewood, driving a $50 car, no TV, never eating out, never going on vacation, we saved half of my paycheck.

In the fall of 1981, a big ag story developed in our county. A black walnut processing company from Missouri had decided to expand into western Virginia, where many black walnut trees grow. They needed more walnuts to process, and our region had lots of walnuts.

The local Southern States Cooperative store agreed to host a buying station for the company and found two local FFA boys to operate it on Saturdays, beginning Oct. 1 and going through November. A week into the new venture, I interviewed the boys, the store manager, and did a story on this new way for farmers to make some money around the edges of their businesses. 

One of the biggest problems was the hulls. Operating the hulling machine on a parking lot, the boys had to somehow dispose of all the hulls, which are 2/3rds the volume of a dropped walnut. I knew grass always grew well under a walnut tree, so Dad and I went down with our dump truck and brought as many hulls home as we could – being ecological farmers, we were always looking for cheap sources of organic material as fertilizer.

The buying station was a local sensation. It became a traffic hazard on that end of town, with cars lined up nearly half a mile blocking intersections. It was a blessing and a curse for the farm store, bringing in lots of people but snarling the parking lot. As part of my story sleuthing, I found out the economics of the situation and was told in no uncertain terms by the store manager that the following year, they would have to be open six days a week during store hours to relieve the congestion.

I did some quick math and realized I could make $20,000 in two months running the station. Plus, that much value in fertilizer with the hulls. Here was my chance to leave the newspaper and farm full-time. Over the next year, Dad and I secretly developed my exit plan. On Sept 10, 1982, I handed in my two-week notice to leave the newspaper and walked out of the office on Sept 24, a dreamy full-time farmer. [Teresa and I had saved a nest egg that would enable us to live for one year without a salary in case things didn’t go as planned.]

They didn’t. What no one told me during my walnut buying station interviews was that a bumper crop like 1981 only happens once in seven years. In my naivete, I figured walnuts are walnuts and we’d have a similar run the following year. The other thing nobody told me is that following a bumper year, a couple of years are inordinately low in production as the trees rebuild energy reserves.

Instead of busily making $20,000, I had to sit on that farm store dock for two months for a measly $2,000. I was obligated to be there in case someone came in with a load of walnuts. A handful of people a day came in, but I suddenly had hours and hours to find a comfy seat among soft bags of feed on the dock…and read.

And read. And read. This was long before the Internet. We had snail mail and phone calls. The media was still on paper. What did I do? With this self-imposed two-month solitude, I read the ecological farming classics. The 1,200-page Complete Book of Composting. The scientific Acres USA Primer. The insect-communication Tuning Into Nature. Wendell Berry’s iconic The Unsettling of America. All the Louis Bromfield books: Malabar Farm; Out of the Earth; Pleasant Valley. D. Howard Doane’s classic book on direct marketing and value adding: Vertical Farm Diversification.

Day after day after day, I devoured the foundations of farming eco-think. Two things happened. First, I drank the Kool-Aid. In other words, I bought it, completely. I owned the practice and philosophy of ecological farming; or perhaps it owned me. But I was totally converted; I went to the altar and baptized myself into this wonderful world.

Second, I became knowledgeable enough to articulately and confidently defend and promote a chemical-free food and farming paradigm. Even today, much of my writing and speaking repeats phrases and concepts originally discovered during that solitary two-month reading marathon. No question, those two months made me the committed devotee I am today, but also armed me to be a leading spokesman in the movement. And ultimately to write 16 books (as of today) on my own. 

Did I miss the income? Yes, desperately. But I had something far more valuable – information and confidence. I’ve leveraged that every day since then. Fortunately, between a wife more frugal than I am and my own confident stubbornness and persistence, we weathered the financials and survived…barely. In three years, we exhaled. We could breathe and realized we would make it on the farm.

I wonder what personal development young adults and even teens might enjoy, being locked away, reading classics and contemplating. Just thinking. Just vicariously going on the adventures of the masters. I’m grateful every day for those two months. I’ll never forget them or regret them. Solitude leveraged with strategic self-developmental learning beats TikTok and social media addiction any time of day. I highly recommend it as the best Return On Investment.

The Return on Investment of Isolation
by Joel Salatin at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society