187 Quotes by Joel Salatin

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.

Every day when I wake up and head out for chores, I’m struck by the beauty we enjoy on our farm. Based on visitors’ comments, that’s a shared awareness. Not one of our doors has a skull and crossbones. We want visitors to be struck not by what we’ve done, but rather by how we’ve caressed this beautiful niche of God’s creation into a productive and profoundly inspiring place.

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

When a container of foreign goodies arrives in the village, everyone mobs the freebies and takes the Western handouts. This collapses the local business and these displaced go-getters become the famous warlords we in the West have all learned are the nexus of all those people’s problems.

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.

A Virginia subdivision now has restricted deed covenants against ‘farming and other nuisances’. Can you imagine? In our culture, we are actually labeling farming as a nuisance. What have we done to ourselves, that the oldest and noblest vocation on earth, the educated agrarian proletariat envisioned by Thomas Jefferson, has been reduced to nothing more than a nuisance?

Most of the earth’s land is not conducive to arable cropping. Only a tiny percentage is good enough for that. Grasslands are literally the lungs of the earth, and restoring them with animals is not only necessary, but it’s the most efficacious way to restore water cycles and the carbon cycle. Right now, nothing else comes close to remediating broken ecological systems as quickly or completely as restoring large herds of grazing animals through holistic, or long-term, management.

Tolerably good workmen in any of those mechanic arts are sure to find employ, and to be well paid for their work, there being no restraints preventing strangers from exercising any art they understand, nor any permission necessary. If they are poor, they begin first as servants or journeymen; and if they are sober, industrious, and frugal, they soon become masters, establish themselves in business, marry, raise families, and become respectable citizens.

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.