This Land Is Your Land

You can find Joel Salatin's soul in his slaughterhouse. Just behind the oversize shed that serves as his farm's shop is what Salatin calls the chicken-processing center, where the living birds that squawked in the field this morning are killed, defeathered and cleaned in swift succession by a bucket brigade of young farming apprentices. The bloody work of slaughtering is usually hidden away from those who will one day eat the meat, perhaps in nugget form. But at Polyface Farm in rural Swoope, Va.--where Salatin and multiple generations of his family have tended the land for decades--the processing is performed in...