Joel Huesby doesn’t look much like a radical. He’s a native eastern Washington rancher sporting the standard jeans, button-down shirt and cowboy hat. When he starts talking, you quickly notice that he seems unusually animated and voluble for a rancher. As phrases like “sunlight farming” and “active microbial life” start cropping up thick and fast – interspersed with raucous laughter – you realize that this is a different breed of rancher altogether.

Thundering Hooves sells pasture-raised beef, chicken and turkey directly to consumers and restaurants in the Seattle and Walla Walla areas. Joel has a grill in his butcher shop, and if he is uncertain whether a particular cut is worthy of steak, he’ll cook it up right then and there. “Because we are small, efficient and flexible, we can move animals into various products depending on how they taste,” he contends. Joel’s animals are raised without hormones or antibiotics, and roam on green pastures that have not seen chemicals or pesticides in years. But it wasn’t always this way.

The Huesby family has worked land in and around the Walla Walla Valley since 1883. Joel says, “I have been a farmer essentially all my life. I grew up around cattle and crops, with chemical farming and tractors – the whole nine yards.” Joel grew his first field of wheat when he was in high school, and made enough money to buy himself a pickup truck. But by the time he was starting his own family, the profit margins had dropped dramatically. Joel was farming the way his uncle and his grandfather had before him, but it wasn’t paying the bills.

Twelve years ago, Joel suddenly veered off the conventional farming path, without knowing where else to go. “My epiphany moment came when I was burning a field of wheat stubble; I was going to plant alfalfa that fall. Watching the smoke go up, something clicked in my mind.” Joel realized there was a fundamental flaw in his farming model: the chemical inputs he was putting on his fields were yielding diminishing returns. He began to do his own research and decided that soil fertility was better achieved by returning organic matter to the soil through grazing livestock and growing legumes. But it wasn’t an easy transition to make after years of conventional farming practices.

“I talk about conventionally-farmed soil as a drug addict,” he explains. “Without its next chemical hit it will fail to produce. Just like with an addict, it’s progressive and it’s terminal. And for the farmer, it’s ugly. There is a period of withdrawal. Weeds come, the soil is lashing out. And there is only one way to do it, and that is just enduring the time it takes to go through it. You will find life on the other side, but it can take several years – I know!”

During his soil’s rehabilitation period, Joel worked part time installing phone lines and computer networks with his father. He also tried his hand at horse farming, but after a spectacular accident that involved broken power lines, water mains, and skin and bones, Joel switched to smaller livestock. The big draft horses did leave their legacy in the farm’s name, “Thundering Hooves.” Today the operation includes a slaughter and meat processing facility, and employs Joel’s wife Cynthia, his brother Bryan, four other full-time employees, and part-time help from Joel’s sister, parents, and kids.

While the Huesby’s are fully wired when it comes to marketing and communications, relying on computers and the Internet to correspond, their farming techniques are less high-tech. Joel says, “Here on the farm we have embraced all the things that were good and productive about the traditional family farm, including diversity of livestock and putting animals back to work for us.” Joel uses older tractors and an immaculate egg incubator from the 1940s that wouldn’t look out of place in a living room.

Joel employs “biological efficiencies” on his farm.  One example is the way he feeds his cattle. Instead of cutting, drying, baling, and hauling alfalfa to his cows, he lets them do most of work. Joel mows a field, allows it to wilt a bit, and then lets the cattle feed themselves. He remarks, “This is a big no-no for most cattlemen, because you can lose a lot of animals to bloat that way. But I have found – through a few tricks and the school of hard knocks – you can get incredible gains in productivity letting them harvest their forage themselves. God gave them four legs and a mouth, let them go harvest their own!” Joel uses electric fencing to intensively graze small portions of pasture for short periods of time. It allows him the added benefit of having the livestock spread their own manure.

One challenge that Joel has encountered is that today’s livestock have been bred to fit the industrial model which selects for: average daily gains, high weaning weights, high yearling weights, and feedlot performance – all on a high-concentrate high-intake diet. “But I am more interested in pounds of steak sold per acre grazed, not per animal,” explains Joel, “so I am more of a natural resources manager. I am using cows to do the harvesting. The cattle in my grandfather’s day were smaller and proportionately shorter, wider, and longer; they fattened on grass much more easily and quicker. I have a long-term goal of bringing back the kind of genetics that works with grass.”

Four years ago, Joel figured out an innovative way to get some help rebuilding his soil. A paper recycling plant located nearby agreed to bring their paper waste to the farm, rather than hauling it to the landfill. “I put 36,000 tons of wet paper on this farm,” Joel remarks. “I prevented 1400 semi-truckloads of paper from going into a landfill, while also benefiting the soil by providing organic matter. I got a weed suppressive mulch, and they paid me! It was good for everyone.” Ultimately 215 acres of land were covered with two inches of paper mulch. Joel doesn’t need scientific proof to believe that it was the right thing to do. He explains, “It was cool and moist under the paper, it was hot and dry where there was no paper. The grass was green growing up through the paper, and brown where there was no paper.”

Joel’s neighbors have been tracking his progress with some interest. He says, “At first their reaction was, ‘This guy is a total nutcase. He’s going to lose the farm and we’re just waiting so we can buy it up from him.’” He continues, “Then there was a period of more tolerance within the neighborhood. And now, I have had several guys tell me, ‘You know what, people around here are not saying Joel’s such a nutcase anymore.’ They are actually looking at what I am doing.”

This was a good year for people to be watching Joel. Thundering Hooves sold out of beef early, and Joel is confident that demand for hormone- and antibiotic-free, vegetarian-fed, custom-slaughtered beef will not diminish anytime soon. He comments, “In order for this thing to really be sustainable for our family, the employees, the infrastructure that needs to happen, things have to ramp up some more. What we have been doing with 160 cattle, 7000 chickens, 2000 turkeys, and a few dozen sheep and goats – is really only done on 40 acres of the 400. So we have ten times the biologic potential, sustainably.”

Joel’s ready laugh softens his messianic enthusiasm, but there is no doubt he has been fully converted. He says, “I know what I am on to here is right, whether you are talking soil biology, whether you are talking about community, the farming environment, or social and environmental issues. I immersed myself and educated myself and had all these other failings, and learned from the process. I never make the same mistake twice, but I always make new ones. I am a big failure, but that’s because I know what it takes to succeed. This farm has grown and evolved. You can’t poke a flower back into its bud. It’s out there and it will never go back – that’s Thundering Hooves.”