Joel F. Salatin (born February 24, 1957) is an American farmer, lecturer, and author whose books include Folks, This Ain't Normal; You Can Farm; and Salad Bar Beef.
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.
The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.
Even if you don't eat at a fast food restaurant, you're now eating food that's produced by this system.
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.
While vegans and meat-eaters disagree, we can all be united in our fear and hatred for the horror that is factory farming.
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?
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.
We should be rolling in the dirt, gardening, wrestling with some brambles and skinning animals for supper. These are important immune system builders.
It's a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.
Always listen to your customers.
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.
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.
You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.
When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol.
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 need to respect the fact that cows are herbivores, and that does not mean feeding them corn and chicken manure.
The wealth of any ecosystem is its perennials. The primal herbivore-predator-disturbance-rest dance is literally the breath and pulse of the earth. Grasses recycle oxygen far more efficiently than trees. The turnover is faster. Grass reaches out and turns solar energy into carbon. Tillage hyper-aerates the soil, burning out carbon. But because a plant creates bilateral symmetry at the soil horizon, it sloughs off root mass when the top gets chopped off.
My imperative is to seek every moment and to live so God is in control.
The shorter the chain between raw food and fork, the fresher it is and the more transparent the system is.