Chris Newman is not the answer

From the rising star of regenerative agriculture to a business crisis and resultant scandal, Chris Newman’s vision has blinded us to a reality of alternative agriculture that works

Joel Salatin has been a fixture in the alternative agriculture scene for decades. He has written many bestselling books, was featured in Michael Pollan’s landmark alternative agriculture book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and even had a long spread written about him in the The New York Times Magazine. 

Salatin advocates for a method of family farming built around holistic management practices that can both produce food and enhance ecosystems. This set of principles is generally called agroecology or regenerative agriculture, and, due in part to Salatin’s many years of advocacy, is growing in popularity as a method to solve multiple environmental issues, including drawing down carbon. 

In mid-2019, self-identified Black and Indigenous farmer Chris Newman argued in a widely shared Medium post, “Small Family Farms Aren’t the Answer,” that although Salatin’s method of farming is sound, his ownership structure centered around the small family farm is problematic. Newman instead advocates for vertically-integrated agricultural cooperatives “with a particular focus on providing opportunities of ownership for people traditionally denied such roles in agriculture: people of color, LGBT folks, and women.”

Salatin responded to Newman’s piece with his own, “Whining and Entitlement” pointing out, “While I'm a huge believer in collaboration and building community, I'm equally excited about individual leadership and entrepreneurship.  The two are not mutually exclusive; they are indeed mutually beneficial.  But usually community coalesces around individual leadership.”  

Newman responded with a vicious attack on Salatin, “Everything I want to do is racist,” in which he called Salatin a racist and a bigot for critiquing his singular cooperative vision. Newman went particularly hard at Salatin for having inherited land, despite the fact that Newman himself began his farming career on his wife Annie’s parents land. Further, despite his lofty goals of vertically-integrated cooperative ownership, Newman’s business structure is currently in no way different from Salatin’s: it is a farm business owned solely by Newman and his wife.

Despite the lack of significant differences in the practicalities of Newman and Salatin’s farming businesses and methods, Newman continued to smear Salatin. Newman used his social media accounts to rally his supporters to pressure Mother Earth News into ending their longtime relationship with Salatin, which they eventually did. 

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The nail in the proverbial coffin for Salatin came in November of 2020 when a seminal article was published in Mother Jones by the respected food journalist Tom Philpott: “Joel Salatin’s Unsustainable Myth.” In it, Philpott sides firmly with Newman: Joel Salatin and his style of family farming is racist; and the solution to the problem of racism in agriculture lies in the cooperative farming vision of Chris Newman.

The logic of the racism accusation in the article is circular. Newman called Salatin a racist, demanded that Salatin’s longtime column at Mother Earth News be ended, and then Philpott uses the rift with Mother Earth News as evidence that Salatin is, indeed, racist. The core of the accusation relies heavily on Newman’s character assasination of Salatin. 

Deeper than the name calling, however, is the critique of Salatin’s agriculture as either complicit with, or actively perpetuating, power structures that disproportionately impact people of color. Drawing on Newman and others, Philpott weaves through themes of racism, land access, labor rights, generational wealth, economies of scale, externalized costs, extractivism, and more. Philpott argues that because the structure of Salatin’s operation does not solve all of these social ills at once, his family farm model is perpetuating them. 

Working from the assumption that Joel Salatin’s family farm model is a failure, Philpott ends his piece asking where this leaves the regenerative agriculture movement. He suggests that Newman’s vision of collectively-managed, blended public/private land ownership, vertically-integrated operation that emphasizes hiring “marginalized voices” is the way forward. According to Philpott, Newman and fellow BIPOC farmers have the unique vision that will solve the problems of racism, inequality and land access in agriculture. Newman has since been held up as a guru type figure, with multiple articles from high profile publications hailing his vision and leadership as the future of inclusive and fair agriculture.

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In early May 2021, stories began emerging on social media about Chris Newman’s utopian vision falling apart into a nightmare. Employees were resigning amidst allegations of mismanagement, animal abuse, labor rights violations, donor fraud, crisis and collapse. Two first-hand accounts by former employees reveal shocking details.  

Ambitious plans to scale up without adequate management left 400 broiler chickens rotting, rancid and discarded. A hired farm laborer slept in a flea-infested van parked in Newman’s driveway. Sixty hour workweeks, with the expectation that laborers should be organizing further business operations in “their spare time.” New employees, with less than two months experience farming, were put in charge of sections of livestock operation. Unregistered and uninspected farm vehicles driven by workers who were expected to be personally responsible for fines. Unchecked breeding among pigs leading to mass cannibalization, abusive living conditions, and mass shooting of pigs by untrained laborers. Entire butchered pig carcasses left to rot and mold. 

A culture developed around Chris Newman of hero worship and toxic masculinity paired with a widespread employee culture of secrecy, competition, and backstabbing. At the height of the crisis, Newman stepped away to focus on publicity and marketing. Secret plans revealed that Newman was allegedly intending on squeezing upwards of $500,000 from a wealthy donor to cover the costs of organizational failures. 

It may be worth highlighting in detail some of the allegations of one of Newman’s former employees:

“After weeks of unchecked illegal pork processing in an unregistered facility we underwent a chicken slaughter. 8 people were tasked with killing and processing 300 birds in a span of 4 hours. Needless to say it went sour. New processes were sent out the night before and put into practice with little to no input from anyone but Chris. With the new processes and new facility we only ended up finishing about 100 birds. We packed them into coolers with a mix of ice and warm water and walked away defeated. The 40 acre crew including myself came back the next day without Chris and finished dispatching the birds. 300 birds were put into warm water and ice and forgotten. Days passed. We slaughtered 100 more birds 2 days later that were packed into a cooler with ice and warm water. Days passed. Chris cut down more illegal pork and forgot about the birds. I think it was maybe 4 or 5 days before we opened the bird coolers again. After sitting in warm water for 5 days the smell was indescribable. Noone wanted anything to do with it so the 400 birds were tossed onto the back of the trailer and taken back out to the field where I and the 40 acre crew had raised them from 4 days old. I threw every single bird away and  piled them on the bones and remains of the piglets from the winter time. I had become desensitised to death; it was part of my daily routine.”

The situation came to a head in late April 2021, when Newman ousted half a dozen workers, which left them without pay or housing, facing instability and legal threats (presumably by Newman). The workers then proceeded to make housing arrangements with Newman’s extended family, which resulted in Chris Newman’s wife, Annie, calling the police on the group, which was determined to be a civil dispute by police.

Newman lashed out at former employees in typical, vitriolic fashion:

Newman then continually asked for donations to fund his operation via his venmo, paypal, patreon, a pitch deck for investors, and kickstarter, which has already raised over $42,000. Amidst a failing model, including: rotting and discarded meat products, hiring and firing individuals without relevant skills, and publicly hateful speech toward former employees, Newman’s response was to ask for more donations to prop up his operation? 

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At the end of his piece, which has deeply influenced the focus of the regenerative agriculture community, Philpott shockingly said that “Racism is embedded in the movement to create an alternative to industrial agriculture.” Many have adopted this dangerous and divisive belief, yet where does it lead us?

Newman’s presence in the world of alternatives to industrial agriculture has resulted in name calling, in-fighting, distress, and shifted the focus from the goals of the movement to petty politics and hero worship. Now that Newman’s organization has undergone such a catastrophic failure, can we allow ourselves to be freed from his incorrect assessment of the family farm as a model worth abandoning altogether?

I, like Philpott, wonder: where does the movement for an alternative to industrial agriculture go from here? Certainly, Newman is a master marketer, and has cast himself as the savior to the many overlapping, wicked problems we are facing in regards to agriculture. Unfortunately, his utopian vision didn’t mesh well with reality, and we can all draw lessons from the rubble.

I would argue that we cannot and should not throw out family farms as one of many models that can help us to navigate food production within ecological limits. This is a complex subject, but Chris Smaje, author of A Small Farm Future, argues in a brilliant essay critiquing Chris Newman:

“It’s easy to get dazzled by words like ‘commons’ or ‘cooperative’ into assuming that economic models where such words appear front and centre are somehow more sharing and less capitalistic, more ultimately dedicated to building community cohesion or – if it’s not too schmaltzy – to building love than ones explicitly combining private and common property. But it ain’t necessarily so.” 

Smaje suggests one hopeful scenario may be weaving together a tapestry of privately-owned farms within larger, voluntary cooperative associations, with a minimum amount of top-down structuring necessary to function.

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How can we move forward?  First, admit that visionaries should not be worshipped as heroes until they prove their model as possible. Next, outright reject blatant name-calling, as it is a clear attempt for supremacy and competition in a world where we need the utmost cooperation. Finally, build the system of alternative agriculture in the messy world we actually inhabit. The remedy is in collaborating with every possible tool and model, across differences, and finding ways to both work together and lift one another up.

Maybe Joel Salatin’s initial take on Newman was actually the correct one:

“If you really believe in something, you don't need affirmation from others. You don't need pats on the head. You just buckle down and do it, happily, gratefully, graciously, humbly. Plenty of ways exist to bring on team players that can do things you don't like to do or are not good at. To say that a whole has to exist before a piece of it can exist is simply casting blame on the world for your struggles.” 

It’s clear that Newman’s vision, which required painting Salatin and family farming as a villain in order to lift himself up as the hero, was trying to remake too many parts of the system at once. Salatin argues above that you must build, diligently, piece by piece. You must prove your vision by making it actually work, without blaming anyone but yourself if it fails, as many utopian models do.

Chris Newman’s piles of rotted chicken carcasses and piglet skeletons stand mute witness to the failures of an approach centered on hero worship and ideology. The real enemy of building an alternative agricultural system isn’t racism or the family farm or Joel Salatin, it’s a culture of name calling, competition and supremacy that stops experimentation and collaboration.