Joel Salatin Quotations

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

Despite all the hype about local or green food, the single biggest impediment to wider adoption is not research, programs, organizations, or networking. It is the demonizing and criminalizing of virtually all indigenous and heritage-based food practices.

Land degradation did not start with chemical agriculture. But chemical agriculture offered new tools for annihilation.

The industrial food system is so cruel and so horrific in its treatment of animals. It never asks the question: Should a pig be allowed to express its pig-ness?

Know you food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen.

A pig has a plow on the end of its nose because it does meaningful work with it. It is built to dig and create soil disturbance, something it can't do in a concentrated feeding environment. The omnivore has historically been a salvage operation for food scraps around the homestead.

Outrageous behavior, also known as the lunatic fringe, is the seed bed of innovation and creativity.

There's a short chain between field and fork, and the shorter that chain is - the fresher, the more transparent that system is - the less chance there is of anything from bio-terrorism to pathogenicity to spoilage.

Get in your kitchens, buy unprocessed foods, turn off the TV, and prepare your own foods. This is liberating.

Ecology should be object lessons that the world sees, that explains in a visceral, physical way, the attributes of God.

Nobody trusts the industrial food system to give them good food.

You know, in our culture today, our Western, reductionist, Roman, linear, fragmented... culture, we don't ask how to make a pig happy. We ask how to grow it faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper, and that's not a noble goal.

From zoning to labor to food safety to insurance, local food systems daily face a phalanx of regulatory hurdles designed and implemented to police industrial food models but which prejudicially wipe out the antidote: appropriate scaled local food systems.

Industrial agriculture, because it depends on standardization, has bombarded us with the message that all pork is pork, all chicken is chicken, eggs eggs, even though we all know that can't really be true.

I want people to think through issues. I'm just tired of blind alignment.

My imperative is to seek every moment and to live so God is in control.

Our biggest fear is that 'Food, Inc.' will move heavy-handed food-safety regulations forward.

Our land-healing ministry really is about cultivating relationships: between the people, the loving stewards, and the ecology of a place, what I call the environmental umbilical that we're nurturing here.

Too often, parents whose children express an interest in farming squelch it because they envision dirt, dust, poverty, and hermit living. But great stories come out of great farming.

Our motto is we respect and honour the pigness of the pig and the chickenness of the chicken. That means not confining them in a house with hundreds of others.

We need to respect the fact that cows are herbivores, and that does not mean feeding them corn and chicken manure.

I see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture.

I'm a Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic. It's a humorous way for me to describe that I'm not stereotypical.

If we fail to appreciate the soul that Easternism gives us, then what we have is a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process that counts on cleverness.

I think it's important to understand that in the big historical context of things, there has been land degradation from civilisation since the beginning of history. I mean, the Rajputana desert in India is a manmade desert caused by overgrazing.

The cycle of life is death, decomposition and regeneration, and a person who wants to stop killing animals is actually anti-life because it's only in death that life can be regenerated.

'Organic' doesn't mean what people think it means.

Choose to patronise your local farmers; as eaters, you need to demand a different type of food. Appreciate the pigginess of the pig.

Frankly, any city person who doesn't think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer doesn't deserve my special food.

I always said if I could figure out a way to grow Kleenex and toilet paper on trees, we could pull the plug on society.

I am libertarian, and Americans generally are, more than, say, Canadians and Australians.

I inherited Mom's verbal skills, and participated in forensics and essay contests in elementary school - and won every essay contest I ever entered.

I need people - theatrics and schmoozing and storytelling are part of my talent.

I would suggest that if you get in your kitchen and cook for yourself, you can eat like kings for a very low cost.

I'm incredibly optimistic about what individuals can do. We have technology that our grandparents would have given their eye teeth for.

If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing poorly first.

In general, we run the farm like a business instead of a welfare recipient, and we adhere to historically-validated patterns.

Know you food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen. Start building up your larder! We don't even use that term any more.

New Zealand has incredible global recognition for grass-fed livestock.

No civilization on the brink of collapse has ever changed fast enough to avert collapse.

Oh, my goodness, when we came to the farm in 1961, I mean, it wouldn't even support one salary.

Our main deal is pastured livestock. So we have beef cattle, pigs, turkeys, laying chickens, meat chickens, rabbit, lamb and ducks - egg-layer ducks.

That's the joke about confinement pigs: they taste like whatever sauce you cook them with.

The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker have been around a lot longer than supermarkets and Wal-Mart.

The cows shorten the grass, and the chickens eat the fly larvae and sanitize the pastures. This is a symbiotic relation.

The farmers are older; they are under financial stress to produce more margins, yet they keep getting less.

The mechanical food system externalizes a lot of costs like obesity or Type 2 diabetes.

The pig is not just pork chops and bacon and ham to us. The pig is a co-laborer in this great land-healing ministry.

The truth is, everything is eating and being eaten.

We can produce more per acre on a fifth of the fuel as the industrial food system.

We can't begin to feed ourselves with a local-centric system if we lock up land in royal manor models.

We move the cows every day to a new spot which allows the grass time to recuperate and go through its what I call 'the teenage growth spurt.'

We only want autonomous collaborators that are incentivized to make or break their own income.

We will never sell or have an IPO. What that does is suddenly flushes you with cash. It makes you now work for a group of stockholders, who, again, put pressure and temptations on your true-blueness.

We would be a much healthier culture if the government had never told us how to eat.

We're scared to death to try new things because we think we have to get it right the first time.

We've created a tenfold core value protocol to make sure that we don't fall into an 'empire' attitude.

We've got this cultural mentality that you've got to be an idiot to be a farmer.

You can't have a healthy civilization without healthy soil. You can't have junk food and have healthy people.

An orchard can grow pastured poultry underneath. A beef cattle or sheep farm can run pastured poultry behind the herbivores, like the egret on the rhino's nose.

From my earliest memories, I loved the farm. My grandfather was a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine and had a huge, well kept garden with an octagonal chicken house in the corner.

Gluten intolerance and celiac disease are direct results of American agriculture policy and, specifically, the government's wading into the food arena.

God doesn't just miraculously and physically intervene in the whole process, so if I just go and drop a bunch of chemicals and herbicides that leach into the groundwater, I can pray all day to keep my child healthy, but if the herbicides gone into the groundwater come up my well, my child's going to drink that water.

I didn't really see a way to make a living on the farm. I always loved writing. I was the guy who won the D.A.R. essay contest and things like that, and it was the era of Watergate, and I decided I would be the next Woodward and Bernstein, and then retire to the farm.

Instead of buying into the global agenda, which is using food as just industrial stuff, we would say we view food as biological, a living thing, that belongs in smaller communities.

It really disturbs me that the environmental movement has been co-opted by creation-worshippers instead of being encouraged by the Creator-worshippers.

It's very common to implement mob grazing and double your production for a per-acre capitalisation investment... because it doesn't take any more corraling, no more electricity, rent, machinery or labour to double your production on an existing place.

Our culture doesn't ask about preserving the essence of pig; it just asks how can we grow them faster, fatter, bigger, and cheaper. We know that's not a noble goal.

The linear, single species idea of farming is an assault on ecological function. Something's going to break down in that system - anything from soil structure, in economics... but where to start is with true ecological function.

There's a big difference between industrializing production of tractors and industrializing production of food. We like technology, but we really like technology that allows us to do better what nature does itself.

Think of all the mesquite in Texas, the pinyon pines, the acorns in Appalachia, every place has the possibility of mass production. It's an infrastructural system so nestled in ecology, it's a more beautiful ecology.

Throughout high school, I peddled my eggs, had a vendor stand at the local curb market - precursor to today's farmers' markets - and competed in 4-H contests and interscholastic debate.

We believe that the farm should be building 'forgiveness' into the ecosystem. What does that mean? That a more forgiving ecosystem is one that can better handle drought, flood, disease, pestilence.

We can move water easily with plastic pipes. We can move shade around with nursery cloth like a tinker toy for animals and plants. Yet we have developed this necessity to grow food with chemical fertiliser because we have forgotten the magic of manure.

We control health and pathogenicity by complex multi-speciated relationships through symbiosis and synergy. Portable shelters for livestock, along with electric fencing, insure hygienic and sanitary housing and lounging areas, not to mention clean air, sunshine, and exercise.

What we're looking at is God's design, nature's template, and using that as a pattern to cut around and lay it down on a domestic model to duplicate that pattern that we see in nature.

Certainly, it's not for everybody, and we're not picketing Wal-Mart or anybody else. But what I am saying is that we need the freedom to opt out of the system.

Unfortunately in the U.S., the courts have pretty much sided with the GMO lobby and suggesting that a farmer has no rights to be protected from GMO contamination.

Our concern was that what has been a heritage occupation or hobby in this country would be destroyed in the paranoia of the avian flu story.

The bigger issue here is, to me, that when we can't access our neighbors with food, then farming just dries up. The fact is that all these hurdles that prohibit local food commerce keep what would be millions of dollars circulating in the rural local economy are therefore denied to the local economy. So farmers go out of business and sell to developers.

If you want government food, go to the supermarket and buy government food. But for those who want to have a relationship with their food, and the accountability that inherently comes with voluntarily and informatively opting out of the supermarket to go ask around, smell around, sniff around, look around and opt out of the government food system, they ought to have that right.

All of these farms all over this county used to supply Staunton with home-cured bacon and ham. That was the backbone of the rural economy 50 years ago, and nobody got sick.

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.

Don't you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?

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.

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.

Amazingly, we’ve become a culture that considers Twinkies, Cocoa Puffs, and Mountain Dew safe, but raw milk and compost-grown tomatoes unsafe.

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.

A culture that just views a pig as a pile of protoplasmic inanimate structure, and can be manipulated by whatever creative design humans can foist upon that critter, will probably view individuals within its community and other cultures in the community of nations, with the same type of disdain and disrespect and controlling-type mentality.

If every American for one week refused to eat at a fast-food joint, it would bring concentrated animal feeding operations to their knees.

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

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.

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.

We must stop this incessant victimhood mentality. Somebody else will not fix things. Somebody else will not make me healthy. Somebody else will not make me happy. These things are my responsibility. Not the neighbor’s, not the government’s, not the church or the civic club.

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

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.

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?

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

Realize that agendas drive data, not the other way round

If you have to put on a haz-mat suit to visit a farm, you may not want to eat what comes from it.