I'm incredibly optimistic about what individuals can do. We have technology that our grandparents would have given their eye teeth for.
— 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.
We can produce more per acre on a fifth of the fuel as the industrial food system.
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.
It really disturbs me that the environmental movement has been co-opted by creation-worshippers instead of being encouraged by the Creator-worshippers.
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.
That's the joke about confinement pigs: they taste like whatever sauce you cook them with.
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.
You can't have a healthy civilization without healthy soil. You can't have junk food and have healthy people.
New Zealand has incredible global recognition for grass-fed livestock.
We can't begin to feed ourselves with a local-centric system if we lock up land in royal manor models.
We've created a tenfold core value protocol to make sure that we don't fall into an 'empire' attitude.
The cows shorten the grass, and the chickens eat the fly larvae and sanitize the pastures. This is a symbiotic relation.
We're scared to death to try new things because we think we have to get it right the first time.
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.
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.
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.
The mechanical food system externalizes a lot of costs like obesity or Type 2 diabetes.
The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker have been around a lot longer than supermarkets and Wal-Mart.
Our biggest fear is that 'Food, Inc.' will move heavy-handed food-safety regulations forward.
Choose to patronise your local farmers; as eaters, you need to demand a different type of food. Appreciate the pigginess of the pig.
We've got this cultural mentality that you've got to be an idiot to be a farmer.
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.
Nature moves towards balance.
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.
I want people to think through issues. I'm just tired of blind alignment.
The truth is, everything is eating and being eaten.
No civilization on the brink of collapse has ever changed fast enough to avert collapse.
We only want autonomous collaborators that are incentivized to make or break their own income.
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.
Know you food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen. Start building up your larder! We don't even use that term any more.
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.
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.
I inherited Mom's verbal skills, and participated in forensics and essay contests in elementary school - and won every essay contest I ever entered.
I would suggest that if you get in your kitchen and cook for yourself, you can eat like kings for a very low cost.
I don't have money. Monsanto has money.
The farmers are older; they are under financial stress to produce more margins, yet they keep getting less.
I am libertarian, and Americans generally are, more than, say, Canadians and Australians.
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.'
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.
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.
Frankly, any city person who doesn't think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer doesn't deserve my special food.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing poorly first.
We would be a much healthier culture if the government had never told us how to eat.
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.
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.
