Joel Salatin Quotes

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

- Joel Salatin

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

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.

- Joel Salatin

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

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

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.

- Joel Salatin

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

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

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

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

The truth is, everything is eating and being eaten.

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

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

- Joel Salatin

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

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

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

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

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

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

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

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

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

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

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

I don't have money. Monsanto has money.

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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.

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

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

- Joel Salatin

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

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

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

- Joel Salatin

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.

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

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

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.

- Joel Salatin

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

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

- Joel Salatin

You wanna get diarrhoea? Eat industrial food.

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

Nature moves towards balance.

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

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

- Joel Salatin

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

- Joel Salatin

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

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

- Joel Salatin