Top 100 Joel Salatin Quotes
#1. The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker have been around a lot longer than supermarkets and Wal-Mart.
Joel Salatin
#2. I'm suggesting that criminalizing chemically fertilized grass in favor of unnaturally-fed corn is not a rational trade off.
Joel Salatin
#3. Gluten intolerance and celiac disease are direct results of American agriculture policy and, specifically, the government's wading into the food arena.
Joel Salatin
#4. A risk-free life is a life that's not worth living.
Joel Salatin
#5. In general, we run the farm like a business instead of a welfare recipient, and we adhere to historically-validated patterns.
Joel Salatin
#6. 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.
Joel Salatin
#7. I don't want to sound too mystical or weird but it's important to know what garlic smells like when it's cooking, or what eggs look like when they're cracked out of a shell.
Joel Salatin
#8. Outrageous behavior, also known as the lunatic fringe, is the seed bed of innovation and creativity.
Joel Salatin
#9. Oh, my goodness, when we came to the farm in 1961, I mean, it wouldn't even support one salary.
Joel Salatin
#10. If everybody walks into the room wearing crutches you don't know who can stand on their own two feet.
Joel Salatin
#11. When government gets between my lips and my stomach; I call that invasion of privacy!
Joel Salatin
#12. We only want autonomous collaborators that are incentivized to make or break their own income.
Joel Salatin
#13. It's a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.
Joel Salatin
#14. You can't have a healthy civilization without healthy soil. You can't have junk food and have healthy people.
Joel Salatin
#15. Know you food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen.
Joel Salatin
#16. The farmers are older; they are under financial stress to produce more margins, yet they keep getting less.
Joel Salatin
#17. I inherited Mom's verbal skills, and participated in forensics and essay contests in elementary school - and won every essay contest I ever entered.
Joel Salatin
#18. You wanna get diarrhoea? Eat industrial food.
Joel Salatin
#19. We would be a much healthier culture if the government had never told us how to eat.
Joel Salatin
#20. 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.
Joel Salatin
#21. If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing poorly first.
Joel Salatin
#23. Our biggest fear is that 'Food, Inc.' will move heavy-handed food-safety regulations forward.
Joel Salatin
#24. I see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture.
Joel Salatin
#25. 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.
Joel Salatin
#26. 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.
Joel Salatin
#27. Amazingly, we've become a culture that considers Twinkies, Cocoa Puffs, and Mountain Dew safe, but raw milk and compost-grown tomatoes unsafe.
Joel Salatin
#28. 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.
Joel Salatin
#29. I need people - theatrics and schmoozing and storytelling are part of my talent.
Joel Salatin
#31. 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.
Joel Salatin
#32. 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.
Joel Salatin
#33. If you think the price of organic food is expensive, have you priced cancer lately,
Joel Salatin
#34. We should be rolling in the dirt, gardening, wrestling with some brambles and skinning animals for supper. These are important immune system builders.
Joel Salatin
#35. 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.
Joel Salatin
#36. 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.'
Joel Salatin
#37. 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.
Joel Salatin
#38. Land degradation did not start with chemical agriculture. But chemical agriculture offered new tools for annihilation.
Joel Salatin
#39. 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.
Joel Salatin
#40. Don't complain about being unable to afford high-quality local food when your grocery cart is full of beer, cigarettes, and People magazine.
Joel Salatin
#43. 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.
Joel Salatin
#44. 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.
Joel Salatin
#45. I am libertarian, and Americans generally are, more than, say, Canadians and Australians.
Joel Salatin
#46. Nobody walks well first, nobody writes well first and nobody cooks well first.
Joel Salatin
#47. One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.
Joel Salatin
#48. We can't begin to feed ourselves with a local-centric system if we lock up land in royal manor models.
Joel Salatin
#49. That's the joke about confinement pigs: they taste like whatever sauce you cook them with.
Joel Salatin
#50. Our main deal is pastured livestock. So we have beef cattle, pigs, turkeys, laying chickens, meat chickens, rabbit, lamb and ducks - egg-layer ducks.
Joel Salatin
#51. 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.
Joel Salatin
#52. Choose to patronise your local farmers; as eaters, you need to demand a different type of food. Appreciate the pigginess of the pig.
Joel Salatin
#53. We're scared to death to try new things because we think we have to get it right the first time.
Joel Salatin
#54. I think it's one of the most important battles for consumers to fight: the right to know what's in their food, and how it was grown.
Joel Salatin
#55. You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.
Joel Salatin
#56. 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?'
Joel Salatin
#57. We've got this cultural mentality that you've got to be an idiot to be a farmer.
Joel Salatin
#58. 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.
Joel Salatin
#59. I'm incredibly optimistic about what individuals can do. We have technology that our grandparents would have given their eye teeth for.
Joel Salatin
#60. We can produce more per acre on a fifth of the fuel as the industrial food system.
Joel Salatin
#61. Even if you don't eat at a fast food restaurant, you're now eating food that's produced by this system.
Joel Salatin
#62. We've created a tenfold core value protocol to make sure that we don't fall into an 'empire' attitude.
Joel Salatin
#63. 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.
Joel Salatin
#64. 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.
Joel Salatin
#65. The truth is, everything is eating and being eaten.
Joel Salatin
#66. While vegans and meat-eaters disagree, we can all be united in our fear and hatred for the horror that is factory farming.
Joel Salatin
#67. 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.
Joel Salatin
#68. 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.
Joel Salatin
#69. 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.
Joel Salatin
#70. The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.
Joel Salatin
#72. The cows shorten the grass, and the chickens eat the fly larvae and sanitize the pastures. This is a symbiotic relation.
Joel Salatin
#73. 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.
Joel Salatin
#74. 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.
Joel Salatin
#75. 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.
Joel Salatin
#76. We need to respect the fact that cows are herbivores, and that does not mean feeding them corn and chicken manure.
Joel Salatin
#77. Get in your kitchens, buy unprocessed foods, turn off the TV, and prepare your own foods. This is liberating.
Joel Salatin
#78. If you have to put on a haz-mat suit to visit a farm, you may not want to eat what comes from it.
Joel Salatin
#79. 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?
Joel Salatin
#80. 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.
Joel Salatin
#81. I want people to think through issues. I'm just tired of blind alignment.
Joel Salatin
#83. 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.
Joel Salatin
#84. It really disturbs me that the environmental movement has been co-opted by creation-worshippers instead of being encouraged by the Creator-worshippers.
Joel Salatin
#85. 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.
Joel Salatin
#86. 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.
Joel Salatin
#87. I'm a Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic. It's a humorous way for me to describe that I'm not stereotypical.
Joel Salatin
#88. Nobody trusts the industrial food system to give them good food.
Joel Salatin
#89. Ecology should be object lessons that the world sees, that explains in a visceral, physical way, the attributes of God.
Joel Salatin
#90. 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.
Joel Salatin
#91. The shorter the chain between raw food and fork, the fresher it is and the more transparent the system is.
Joel Salatin
#92. Just because we can ship organic lettuce from the Salinas Valley, or organic cut flowers from Peru, doesn't mean we should do it, not if we're really serious about energy and seasonality and bioregionalism.
Joel Salatin
#93. No civilization on the brink of collapse has ever changed fast enough to avert collapse.
Joel Salatin
#94. 'Organic' doesn't mean what people think it means.
Joel Salatin
#95. 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.
Joel Salatin
#96. 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.
Joel Salatin
#97. My imperative is to seek every moment and to live so God is in control.
Joel Salatin
#98. If every American for one week refused to eat at a fast-food joint, it would bring concentrated animal feeding operations to their knees.
Joel Salatin
#99. Frankly, any city person who doesn't think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer doesn't deserve my special food.
Joel Salatin
#100. 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.
Joel Salatin
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