Words matter. These are the best Joel Salatin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I want people to think through issues. I’m just tired of blind alignment.
If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly first.
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.
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.
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.
Our main deal is pastured livestock. So we have beef cattle, pigs, turkeys, laying chickens, meat chickens, rabbit, lamb and ducks – egg-layer ducks.
‘Organic’ doesn’t mean what people think it means.
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.
Ecology should be object lessons that the world sees, that explains in a visceral, physical way, the attributes of God.
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.
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’ve got this cultural mentality that you’ve got to be an idiot to be a farmer.
I am libertarian, and Americans generally are, more than, say, Canadians and Australians.
In general, we run the farm like a business instead of a welfare recipient, and we adhere to historically-validated patterns.
New Zealand has incredible global recognition for grass-fed livestock.
My imperative is to seek every moment and to live so God is in control.
Know you food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen. Start building up your larder! We don’t even use that term any more.
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.
Nobody trusts the industrial food system to give them good food.
The truth is, everything is eating and being eaten.
I need people – theatrics and schmoozing and storytelling are part of my talent.
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.
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.
Know you food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen.
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?’
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.
We would be a much healthier culture if the government had never told us how to eat.
Oh, my goodness, when we came to the farm in 1961, I mean, it wouldn’t even support one salary.
I see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture.
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’m a Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic. It’s a humorous way for me to describe that I’m not stereotypical.
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.
Outrageous behavior, also known as the lunatic fringe, is the seed bed of innovation and creativity.
Our biggest fear is that ‘Food, Inc.’ will move heavy-handed food-safety regulations forward.
No civilization on the brink of collapse has ever changed fast enough to avert collapse.
