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
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
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
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
I am libertarian, and Americans generally are, more than, say, Canadians and Australians. – 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
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 see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture. – 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
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
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
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
Our biggest fear is that ‘Food, Inc.’ will move heavy-handed food-safety regulations forward. – 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
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