Joel Salatin famous quotes

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

#Philosophy #Mcdonalds #Law

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

#Kitchen #Tvs #Turns

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.
-- Joel Salatin

#Knowing #Government #House

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

#People #House #Odd

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.
-- Joel Salatin

#Home #Garden #Long

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

#Moving #Animal #Drug

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

#Believe #Thinking #Important

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?
-- Joel Salatin

#Mother #Fire #People

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

#Animal #Knees #Joints

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?
-- Joel Salatin

#Flower #Mean #Men

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

#Food #Journey #Normal

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

#Responsibility #Average #Should

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

#Children #Food #World

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

#May #Want #Suits

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

#Mountain #Dew #Culture

Realize that agendas drive data, not the other way round
-- Joel Salatin

#Data #Agendas #Way

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.
-- Joel Salatin

#Philosophy #Passion #Heart

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.
-- Joel Salatin

#Children #School #Boys

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.
-- Joel Salatin

#Hate #Animal #Disrespect

Our community of rebels, of humble truth seekers, wants to turn our culture around. We don't despise our country. We don't desire failure. We desire light, a beacon to show the world that our wealth need not show the way to more rapid destruction, but can be leveraged to heal more acres, more backyards, more communities faster than any civilization on the right path has ever done it.
-- Joel Salatin

#Country #Humble #Light

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

#Forks #Chains #Raw Food

How dare you treat your soil like dirt!
-- Joel Salatin

#Dirt #Soil #Treats

One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.
-- Joel Salatin

#Assets #Ecstasy

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

#Reality #Thinking #Land

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.
-- Joel Salatin

#Teacher #Lying #Heart

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

#Wrestling #Animal #Important

The notion that processed food is cheap and integrity foods are prohibitively expensive is simply not true.
-- Joel Salatin

#Integrity #Processed Food #Notion

Respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig is a foundation for societal health.
-- Joel Salatin

#Pigs #Foundation

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

#Views #Giving #Minorities

Earthworms will dance
-- 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.
-- Joel Salatin

#Responsibility #Technology #California

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.
-- Joel Salatin

#Running #Country #Tunnels

When government gets between my lips and my stomach; I call that invasion of privacy!
-- Joel Salatin

#Government #Invasion #Lips

Men swagger around calling themselves "cattlemen" but abuse their grass like a rapist. And abuse their cattle with concrete fecal feedlots without any regards to rumen function. Vegetable growers plow thousands of acres, planting monocrops of annuals in a never-ending tillage routine that totally annihilates carbon wealth. Why? Why are we so enamored of things that destroy carbon and disrespect the animals under our care? Grass. Lowly grass. It just gets no respect. And yet it is the lifeblood of the planet.
-- Joel Salatin

#Men #Animal #Vegetables

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

#Animal #Pigs #Should

'Organic' doesn't mean what people think it means.
-- Joel Salatin

#Mean #Thinking #People

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.
-- Joel Salatin

#Roots #Oxygen #Ecosystems

Know you food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen.
-- Joel Salatin

#Kitchen #Farmers

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

#Pigs #Goal #Culture

Since chemical fertilizer burns out the soil organic matter, other farmers struggle with tilth, water retention, and basic soil nutrients. The soil gets harder and harder every year as the chemicals burn out the organic matter, which gives the soil its sponginess. One pound of organic matter holds four pounds of water. The best drought protection any farmer can acquire is more soil organic matter.
-- Joel Salatin

#Struggle #Years #Land

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

#Flower #Mean #Cutting

It's as if the whole notion of growing soil is something only lunatics would think about. But why not grow soil? Does anything make more sense than growing soil? Isn't that more important than tractors, trucks, silos, barns, county fairs and country music? Of course it is. And yet to the lion's share of American farmers, the very notion of growing soil is just plain silly.
-- Joel Salatin

#Country #Silly #Thinking

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

#Appreciate #Giving #Soul

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

#Animal #Cycle Of Life #Want

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

#World #Lessons #Way

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

#Mean #Doe #Needs

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

#Christian #Humorous #Libertarian

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

#Moments #God Is In Control

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

#Safety #Police #Wipe

Nobody trusts the industrial food system to give them good food.
-- Joel Salatin

#Giving #Good Food

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

#Jobs #Firsts

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

#Thinking #Voice #Community

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

#Tolerance #Stronger #Culture

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

#Favors #Corn #Grass

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.
-- Joel Salatin

#Moving #Air #Land

Remember, machines don't forgive.
-- Joel Salatin

#Forgiving #Machines #Remember

You can't chemical your way out of soil infertility
-- Joel Salatin

#Way #Soil #Infertility

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’s sitting on my bookshelf than having me fill out a whole bunch of forms.
-- Joel Salatin

#Long #Would Be #Looks

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.
-- Joel Salatin

#Responsibility #Government #Healthy

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

#Beer #People #Quality

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

#Land #Agriculture #Tools

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.
-- Joel Salatin

#Pigs #Views #Other Cultures

It's a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.
-- Joel Salatin

#Culture #Foolish #Simpletons

If you think the price of organic food is expensive, have you priced cancer lately,
-- Joel Salatin

#Cancer #Thinking #Organic Food

Even if you don't eat at a fast food restaurant, you're now eating food that's produced by this system.
-- Joel Salatin

#Eating #Fast Food #Restaurants

What happens is all these things we're seeing – campylobacter, E coli, mad cow, listeria, salmonella, that weren't even in the lexicon 30 years ago – that is the industrial paradigm exceeding its efficiency. So these Latin squiggly words that we're learning to say – bovine spongiform encephalopathy – are nature's language screaming to us: ENOUGH! And the question then is: what will it take for us to listen? And my contention is that Wall Street is still wearing conquistador mentality and uniforms, and nobody is listening to the pleadings of nature saying: 'Enough.'
-- Joel Salatin

#Wall #Latin #Years

If it doesn't rot, it's not real food.
-- Joel Salatin

#Real

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

#Hatred #Meat #Vegan

You wanna get diarrhoea? Eat industrial food.
-- Joel Salatin

#Diarrhoea

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

#Organization #Hype #Practice