Joel Salatin Quotes

The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.

When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol.

The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.

we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse. (quoting Joel Salatin)

How much evil throughout history could have been avoided had people exercised their moral acuity with convictional courage and said to the powers that be, 'No, I will not. This is wrong, and I don't care if you fire me, shoot me, pass me over for promotion, or call my mother, I will not participate in this unsavory activity.' Wouldn't world history be rewritten if just a few people had actually acted like individual free agents rather than mindless lemmings?

Realize that agendas drive data, not the other way round

You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.

The average person is still under the aberrant delusion that food should be somebody else's responsibility until I'm ready to eat it.

We don't need a law against McDonald's or a law against slaughterhouse abuse--we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.

The shorter the chain between raw food and fork, the fresher it is and the more transparent the system is.

This magical, marvelous food on our plate, this sustenance we absorb, has a story to tell. It has a journey. It leaves a footprint. It leaves a legacy. To eat with reckless abandon, without conscience, without knowledge; folks, this ain't normal.

Read things you're sure will disagree with your current thinking. If you're a die-hard anti-animal person, read Meat. If you're a die-hard global warming advocate, read Glenn Beck. If you're a Rush Limbaugh fan, read James W. Loewen's Lies My Teachers Told Me. It'll do your mind good and get your heart rate up.

Our animals don't do drugs. Instead, we move them almost daily in a tightly choreographed ballet from pasture spot to pasture spot.

Earthworms will dance

On a grander scale, when a society segregates itself, the consequences affect the economy, the emotions, and the ecology. That's one reason why it's easy for pro-lifers to eat factory-raised animals that disrespect everything sacred about creation. And that is why it's easy for rabid environmentalists to hate chainsaws even though they snuggle into a mattress supported by a black walnut bedstead.

A farm includes the passion of the farmer's heart, the interest of the farm's customers, the biological activity in the soil, the pleasantness of the air about the farm -- it's everything touching, emanating from, and supplying that piece of landscape. A farm is virtually a living organism. The tragedy of our time is that cultural philosophies and market realities are squeezing life's vitality out of most farms. And that is why the average farmer is now 60 years old. Serfdom just doesn't attract the best and brightest.

Farms and food production should be, I submit, at least as important as who pierced their navel in Hollywood this week. Please tell me I'm not the only one who believes this. Please. As a culture, we think we're well educated, but I'm not sure that what we've learned necessarily helps us survive.

Food security is not in the supermarket. It's not in the government. It's not at the emergency services division. True food security is the historical normalcy of packing it in during the abundant times, building that in-house larder, and resting easy knowing that our little ones are not dependent on next week's farmers' market or the electronic cashiers at the supermarket.

A farmer friend of mine told me recently about a busload of middle school children who came to his farm for a tour. The first two boys off the bus asked, "Where is the salsa tree?" They thought they could go pick salsa, like apples and peaches. Oh my. What do they put on SAT tests to measure this? Does anybody care? How little can a person know about food and still make educated decisions about it? Is this knowledge going to change before they enter the voting booth? Now that's a scary thought.

The same teen who can't legally operate a four-wheeler, or [ATV]...in a farm lane workplace environment can operate a jacked-up F-250 pickup on a crowded urban expressway. By denying these [farm work] opportunities to bring value to their own lives and the community around them, we've relegated our young adults to teenage foolishness. Then as a culture we walk around shaking our heads in bewilderment at these young people with retarded maturity. Never in life do people have as much energy as in their teens, and to criminalize leveraging it is certainly one of our nation's greatest resource blunders.

I saw a news report recently that measured average video game use by American men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five: twenty hours per week. Do you mean the flower of America's masculinity can't think of anything more important to do with twenty hours a week than sit in front of a video screen? Folks, this ain't normal. Can't we unplug already?

I'm suggesting that criminalizing chemically fertilized grass in favor of unnaturally-fed corn is not a rational trade off.

you know what the best kind of organic certification would be? make an unannounced visit to a farm and take a good long look at the farmer's bookshelf. Because what you're feeding your emotions and thoughts is what this is really all about. the way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview. You can learn more about that by seeing what is sitting on my bookshelf than having me fill out a whole bunch of forms." Joel Salatin

That many if not most people...who want fresh leafy greens in January buy them at the supermarket after they've been bleached and plastic-bag shipped from California or beyond is not a tribute to modern technology; it's an unprecedented abdication of personal responsibility and a ubiquitous benchmark of abnormality.

How many of us lobby for green energy or protected lands, but don't engage with the local bounty to lay by for tomorrow's unseasonal reality? That we tend to not even think about this as a foundation for solutions in our food systems shows how quickly we want other people to solve these issues.

That ought to be our stewardship mandate, to create Edens wherever we go. That’s why humans are here. Our responsibility is to extend forgiveness into the landscape.

If every kitchen in America had enough chickens attached to it to eat all of the scraps coming out of that kitchen, no egg industry or commerce would be necessary in the whole country.

But the western mind can't bear an opt- out option. we're going to have to re-fight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt-out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate." Joel Salatin

President Barack Obama, supposed friend of the common man, has put Monsanto’s own vice president, GMO shepherd Michael Taylor, in charge of food safety.

A farm regulated to production of raw commodities is not a farm at all. It is a temporary blip until the land is used up, the water polluted, the neighbors nauseated, and the air unbreathable. The farmhouse, the concrete, the machinery, and outbuildings become relics of a bygone vibrancy when another family farm moves to the city financial centers for relief.

In my opinion, if there is one extremely legitimate use for petroleum besides running wood chippers and front-end loaders to handle compost, it's making plastic for season extension. It parks many of the trucks [for cross-country produce transportation]. With the trucks parked, greenhouses, tall tunnels, and more seasonal, localized eating, can we feed ourselves? We still have to answer that burning question.

You don’t have roosters with your laying hens. How do they lay eggs?” Dear folks, chickens don’t need roosters to lay eggs. They need roosters to hatch eggs, but not to lay them. Just like women don’t need men to lay eggs; they just need a man to hatch one. A mere century ago, not one in a hundred would have been ignorant of this common agrarian knowledge.

Look, if you need sexy egg cartons to sell our eggs, then you need to educate your customers. We don’t intend to patronize big oil just so we can sell eggs at Whole Foods.

a risk-free life is a life that’s not worth living.

Today's orthodoxy thrives on someone else doing the cooking. The single-service packet from the supermarket has replaced the sit-down home-cooked meal as the most common food choice. Easy foodism disengages people from the process and creates a level of food illiteracy unthinkable just a few short decades ago.

Radical Homemakers, Shannon Hayes describes

Love is not a thought; it is an action verb. It is not a thing, but an expression. You can’t love in a vacuum; love demands an object. It demands a relationship. “N

Tolerably good workmen in any of those mechanic arts are sure to find employ, and to be well paid for their work, there being no restraints preventing strangers from exercising any art they understand, nor any permission necessary. If they are poor, they begin first as servants or journeymen; and if they are sober, industrious, and frugal, they soon become masters, establish themselves in business, marry, raise families, and become respectable citizens.

When I first began to criticize small farming, a number of critics (most of them small-scale farmers) roundly condemned me for supporting agribusiness. In my favorite example to date, Joel Salatin, who figures prominently in the grass-fed-beef chapter, condemned my “love affair with confinement hog factories”! This reaction, while wildly inaccurate, is nonetheless important to take seriously. Most notably, it’s almost comically indicative of how narrowly we have framed our options. Joel was serious. His accusation shows that by constricting our choices to animal products sourced from either industrial or nonindustrial operations, by holding up the animal-based alternatives to industrial agriculture as our only alternative, we have silenced discussion of the most fertile, most politically consequential, and most reform-minded choice: eating plants. This alternative to the alternatives changes the entire game of revolutionizing our broken food system. It places the food movement on a new foundation, infuses it with fresh energy, and promotes the only choice that keeps agribusiness executives awake at night.

When a container of foreign goodies arrives in the village, everyone mobs the freebies and takes the Western handouts. This collapses the local business and these displaced go-getters become the famous warlords we in the West have all learned are the nexus of all those people’s problems.

I was on a radio talk show in Vermont one January and the host was giving me a hard time about organic food prices. “I had a party at my house last week and wanted to serve corn on the cob, so I went down to the supermarket and the regular corn was $2.49 for a dozen ears and the organic was $4.89. How can you justify that?” Wrong question. The question is, “Why do you need fresh sweet corn in Vermont in January? You should be eating canned, frozen, or parched corn that you made late in the summer when farmers could scarcely give their corn away because people were over that and going for the fall squash and potatoes.” He should have been feeding these guests from his own larder, amassed months earlier when farmers’ market vendors were feeding half their late-season success to the compost pile. It happens everywhere and all the time. Restoring normalcy is our problem—you and me—not somebody else’s problem.

A Virginia subdivision now has restricted deed covenants against 'farming and other nuisances'. Can you imagine? In our culture, we are actually labeling farming as a nuisance. What have we done to ourselves, that the oldest and noblest vocation on earth, the educated agrarian proletariat envisioned by Thomas Jefferson, has been reduced to nothing more than a nuisance?

I see it routinely when I get asked to speak at conferences. I'm supposed to come cheap because, after all, I'm just a farmer. If you're smart and capable, you become a doctor, engineer, lawyer, computer technician --- anything white collar. For goodness' sake, don't wear a blue collar. That makes your mother and me a failure and our friends will wonder about our family.

Every day when I wake up and head out for chores, I'm struck by the beauty we enjoy on our farm. Based on visitors' comments, that's a shared awareness. Not one of our doors has a skull and crossbones. We want visitors to be struck not by what we've done, but rather by how we've caressed this beautiful niche of God's creation into a productive and profoundly inspiring place.

This abnormal cheap energy petroleum age may appear to be a bonanza, but in the long run it has shredded boundaries and proximities that defined economic and social normalcy for centuries. In the continuum of human history, this petroleum age is a mere blip. Cheap energy, on a timeline, is scarcely a speck on the chart. Yet we have the audacity, the irrationality, to plunge forward with building designs, suburban designs, transportation designs as if this cheap

Most of the earth's land is not conducive to arable cropping. Only a tiny percentage is good enough for that. Grasslands are literally the lungs of the earth, and restoring them with animals is not only necessary, but it's the most efficacious way to restore water cycles and the carbon cycle. Right now, nothing else comes close to remediating broken ecological systems as quickly or completely as restoring large herds of grazing animals through holistic, or long-term, management.

Erosion steals from my neighbor and my community. It impoverishes everyone. A food and farm system that encourages erosion is a direct assault on our neighbors and a direct assault on God's equity. Christians routinely lament an erosion of morality, but then patronize food that erodes the earth. How can we possibly steward morality if we can't even steward our dinner plate? We Christians extol the virtue of charity toward those less fortunate, but often help them with food that exemplifies greed and avarice.

The United States now has too few farmers to merit counting on the national census form. As a culture, we don’t cook at home. We don’t have a larder. We’re tuned in, plugged in, addicted to electronic gadgetry to the exclusion of a whippoorwill’s midsummer song or a herd of cows lying down contentedly on the leeward side of a slope, indicating a thunderstorm in the offing. Most modern Americans can’t conceive of a time without supermarkets, without refrigeration, stainless steel, plastic, bar codes, potato chips.

The sheer mystery and majesty of heritage wisdom, contained in each cell, each mitochondria, instills in the farmer who respects and honors the pigness of the pig a daily emotional high. The satisfaction of being nature's nurturer always trumps the short-lived adrenaline high of being nature's conqueror. Such an attitude offers spiritual ascendance over physical domination, which never really happens anyway. And that's why the industrial farmer, for all the smoke and noise and horsepower, never feels in control, but always dreads being drowned by the nature he thinks he's controlling.

I liken modern scientists to conquistadors. They have no idea what they're dealing with, but they're going to conquer it, whatever it is --- all in the name of God. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to scientific discovery and exploration. I love this stuff. What I despise is reckless disregard for how little we know. We create trans fats with nary a question about whether they're good for us or not. We develop a food pyramid with carbohydrates on the bottom and thirty years later we realize it created an obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemic. It should give us all pause that we would be a much healthier nation if the government had never told us how to eat.

I really like those old shows. I’ve decided the way to know you’re becoming an old fogey is when the only shows you like are sponsored by Depends, the Scooter Store, and Viagra.

Look in the mirror and decide once and for all: Am I biological or mechanical? Is my deepest essence a machine or not?

Delayed gratification is a powerful emotional reality, and tempers many things. Perhaps even things like road rage would lessen if we all tuned in to seasonal cycles. Perhaps even Wall Street, with its insatiable growth mentality, would see value in a rest cycle. Oh, sorry, we call that a depression, don’t we? Why must we be disappointed at anything except red hot? Hockey stick charts don’t last. The kitchen is where the normal person becomes grounded, joins the food team, and passes ultimate landscape connections to the next generation. Abdicating that responsibility creates a self-centered, myopic generation. I’ve

Industrial eggs are washed in a chlorine bath. Since the shells are permeable, some of that chlorine enters the egg. This is standard food safety protocol. In fact, some health department inspectors believe an egg not washed

Industrial eggs are washed in a chlorine bath. Since the shells are permeable, some of that chlorine enters the egg. This is standard food safety protocol. In fact, some health department inspectors believe an egg not washed in chlorine is not fit for human consumption.

Whenever an economic sector cloisters itself behind opaqueness, it will begin taking environmental, social, and economic shortcuts. Integrity occurs when people can see what’s going in at the front door and what’s coming out the back door. Absent that accountability, you lose integrity.

Things that the religious right would abhor if they were promoted by churches are embraced warmly in the food system. While preachers rail against bringing junk into our homes via TV, the Internet, and pornographic literature, few bat an eye at a home stashed with high fructose corn syrup, potato chips, and Pop-Tarts. Indeed, some even suggest that the cheaper we eat, the more money we’ll have to put in the offering plate. And to top it off, they denigrate anyone who would suggest part of caring for children is caring about what they eat. Every

I do think anger aimed at evil is a good thing. I do not think it helps any culture to dismiss elements that deprive the populace of righteousness.

This visceral, meaningful work makes the spirit soar with self-worth and accomplishment. This is the ultimate self-actualization. You won’t find that at the end of a video game, no matter how many times you play.

Nothing is as clean and nutritious as a customer-inspected facility and business. When the relationship marketer must pass the scrutiny of the discriminating patron, who personally looks over the entire operation, you’d better believe not one in a thousand would risk doing something unscrupulous.

Historians tell us that Talleyrand once told Napoleon, “You can do anything with bayonets, Sire, except sit on them.” In the language of the court this meant that obedience to the law ultimately depended on cooperation, not force.

I would suggest that a culture that views its pigs as just mechanical objects to be reprogrammed and manipulated will view its citizens the same way, and ultimately God the same way.

If we have to know every contingency before we move, we have the proverbial paralysis by analysis. The truth is that if everyone who could do what is noble and right would do it now, the cultural shift would be like an epic earthquake. And that would make room for the next set of changes. Defending our own intransigence to change by pointing out the desperate state of those who can’t is simply irresponsible at best and negligent at worst. We can make excuses until the cows come home. What we need to do is be faithful with what we know until the cows show up. They may show up and they may not, but we have a job list right now. Let’s get at it. Living food,

exhaustion. When the topic arises, I love using it as an opportunity to discuss the biblical invitation to rest. Often a person will ask for prayer to get rest. Quite frankly, I often feel tempted to refuse to pray for them. The fact that one is exhausted when overworking eighty hours a week and never keeping a Sabbath is not a prayer issue; it is an obedience issue. We should not pray for God to do what we are supposed to do. The problem remains that we are not entering into the thing, Sabbath, that very well could begin to repair our lives. Similarly, Joel Salatin, a Christian pig farmer, writes that when people ask for prayer to be made healthy but do not live in a healthy way and eat healthy food, God will not acquiesce to our petitions. In short, “we’re ingesting things that are an abomination to our bodies . . . and then requesting prayer for the ailments that result.”18 God is not likely to answer in prayer what you are unwilling to repent of.

The only way to ensure that our existence creates no harm in the world is…not to exist. Whoa. There was more to it than that, but that was the gist: I kill stuff (whether actively or passively), therefore I am. For the first time in twenty years of meat avoidance, I wondered: Is abstaining from meat more hypocritical than helpful? Was I pretending to help the world while denying the fact that my very existence caused, by extension, the death of animals, plants, insects, and microorganisms all the time? Another of my favorite writers, the farmer-philosopher Joel Salatin agrees: “The most inhumane perspective is the one that denies the life-death-decay-regeneration cycle. Everything is constantly eating and being eaten.”61

And everywhere on the whole 360 acres we have wonderful 10 gallon a minute water with great pressure. That's enough to handle a 600-head herd at any spot. And yes, we move the herd every day. And yes, weeds are leaving, the soil is building, earthworms are waking up and copulating. It's all marvelous. When the landlord saw our system compared to her malfunctioning system that she paid thousands of dollars into as her part of the government cost-share, she felt betrayed by the government conservationists. She called the head design engineer to come for a nonconfrontational walk-about to perhaps incorporate some of our ideas into future projects. He wouldn't come. After all, what can a government expert learn from a peasant farmer?

If you're in livestock, certainly Allan Savory, Jim Gerrish, Stan Parsons, Andre Voisin, and Allan Nation are high on the list. For general farming, J. I. Rodale, Ed Faulkner, Sir Albert Howard, Louis Bromfield, George Henderson, and Charles Walters come to mind. And for cultural anchoring, how about Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Ableman and Fred Kirschenman, Marion Nestle, Joan Gussow, Michael Pollan, and Gary Zimmer. In the culinary world, it's Alice Waters and Dan Barber. In the crop world, it's Colin Seis and Gabe Brown.

Read liberal and conservative news sources; business, history, religion. All of this creates a renaissance persona that can stand toe-to-toe with any Fortune 500 executive. Get a nice suit and wear it; don't see yourself as a blown-in hayseed. View yourself as a modern Jeffersonian intellectual agrarian. What's on your bookshelf? How many hours a week do you read? Readers are leaders. Cultivate friendships across disciplines, politics, and religion. Entertain guests often; that's a cheap way to receive cosmopolitan information without having to travel.

I think it’s a much more consistent and reasoned approach to distrust everything that comes from the government, and everything that comes from multi-national globalists, and everything that comes from the media and talk show hosts, and everything that comes from mega-charitable organizations. And why do I seem to have such a prejudice against the empire guys? Because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Every time we eat, we participate in farming.

But make no mistake, this book is geared toward any home-based multi-generational business. The principles apply to plumbers, advertising agencies and landscapers. Truth is truth.

Deep down, very few of us want safety to suffocate freedom.

Originally planning to go with a small house concept, we found it was illegal to build a house of less than nine hundred square feet. Why? By what authority can anybody tell me what kind of house I have to live in?

It was the fact that we were selling dead animals. You see, farmers are only supposed to sell live animals to processors and marketers who are supposed to make all the money—those notorious middlemen. After all, we couldn’t have all that middleman money going to farmers. No, that wouldn’t be right. Farmers are supposed to be peasants, serfs, impoverished dolts, remember?

For decades now our produce research has been on ship-ability, not on taste, texture, or nutritional density. Genetic selection is skewed toward cultivars that can withstand bouncing around in the back of a tractor-trailer for a thousand miles. Tomatoes selected for long-distance transport must be genetically similar to cardboard, not those luscious garden-grown varieties that ooze juice down to your elbows when you bite into them. Our food system has completely ignored human health and opted instead for fast growth and convenient availability. Would anybody want to argue that nutritional density, taste, and tender texture are better than cardboard shipping qualities?

How about the Weston A. Price Foundation's Nourishing Traditions? Oh, books, maybe you read books. Okay, how about Sir Albert Howard's An Agricultural Testament? Or perhaps Rodale's Complete Book of Composting? Never heard of them? Where have you been, under a rock?

Gravity tends to pull fertility downhill. Hence fertile valleys and infertile hilltops. But wait, many times the most fertile soils are on hilltops. How could that be? Herbivores graze in the fertile valleys and then trudge up to the hilltops to chew their cuds and lounge. Why the hilltop? To watch for those nasty predators. The herbivore-grass, predator-prey relationships are foundational to moving those biomass-stored sunbeams around on the landscape. Without animals, the anti-gravitational movement would be impossible. Without the predator, it wouldn't be incentivized. Truly, this whole ecosystem is fearfully and wonderfully made.

Intuitively we all know that nothing operates most efficiently at full throttle. Is it any wonder that a food system predicated on faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper would create an ignorant, duplicitous, harried, obese citizenry? A culture's people carry in their heads and physiques the manifestation of the food system's objectives.

An ecological farmer once told me that he quit industrial farming when he realized that his first waking thought every morning was: 'I wonder what's dead up there in the hog house today?' He couldn't hear the birds chirping. He couldn't enjoy the sunrise, or the rainbow after a thunderstorm. And his kids wanted nothing to do with the farm. But after this epiphany, he closed down the pig concentration camp and devoted himself to pasture-based farming. Suddenly his children wanted to be involved. His thoughts turned lofty. He developed a can-do spirit. And his emotional zest returned.

I challenge you to go to any industrial farm. You'll see anti-microbial shoe dips, shower in shower out, plastic suits. Whenever we get scientists visiting our farm, they invariably remark about how seemingly nonchalant we are about bio-security. The industry is paranoid about bio-security because their animals and plants are fragile. If our farm plants and animals had as dysfunctional an immune system as that found in industrial facilities, I'd be paranoid, too.

When the farmer bores the tap hole into the trunk, the tree sends sap to heal the wound. Sure enough, by the next spring, only an extremely observant and knowledgeable person can find the old tap scars. When the wind blows, the tree senses that a branch might break. A broken branch is a much more serious wound than a little clean tap hole in the trunk. Therefore, the tree withholds the sap from the tap hole in case it needs to rush a bunch of sap to a broken limb somewhere. Once the wind subsides, the sap starts flowing again through the little tap hole. Sentient beings, anyone? You bet. Fearfully and wonderfully made.

I warn my Christian friends to be extremely careful about what they become righteously indignant about. When we demand salvation by legislation, the law of unintended consequences kicks in.

Too many folks view home as a pit stop between specific happiness activities occurring elsewhere.