Best 69 quotes of Joel Salatin on MyQuotes

Joel Salatin

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    Joel Salatin

    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.

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    Joel Salatin

    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.

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    Joel Salatin

    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.

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    Joel Salatin

    Amazingly, we’ve become a culture that considers Twinkies, Cocoa Puffs, and Mountain Dew safe, but raw milk and compost-grown tomatoes unsafe.

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    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.

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    Joel Salatin

    Don’t complain about being unable to afford high-quality local food when your grocery cart is full of beer, cigarettes, and People magazine.

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    Joel Salatin

    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?

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    Joel Salatin

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

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    Joel Salatin

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

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    Joel Salatin

    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.

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    Joel Salatin

    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.

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    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.

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    Joel Salatin

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

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    Joel Salatin

    How dare you treat your soil like dirt!

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    Joel Salatin

    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.

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    Joel Salatin

    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?

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    Joel Salatin

    I don't want to sound too mystical or weird but it's important to know what garlic smells like when it's cooking, or what eggs look like when they're cracked out of a shell.

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    Joel Salatin

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

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    Joel Salatin

    If every American for one week refused to eat at a fast-food joint, it would bring concentrated animal feeding operations to their knees.

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    Joel Salatin

    If everybody walks into the room wearing crutches you don't know who can stand on their own two feet.

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    Joel Salatin

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

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    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.

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    Joel Salatin

    If you have to put on a haz-mat suit to visit a farm, you may not want to eat what comes from it.

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    Joel Salatin

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

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    Joel Salatin

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

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    Joel Salatin

    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.

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    Joel Salatin

    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?

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    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.

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    Joel Salatin

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

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    Joel Salatin

    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.

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    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.

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    Joel Salatin

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

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    Joel Salatin

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

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    Joel Salatin

    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.

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    Joel Salatin

    My advice to anyone who wants to join in on farming is diversify. Nature is diversified, and I know you'll always have a core thing that you'll really like, but hang stuff around the edges of it. It will make your place more interesting for people to come to, and it's a lot easier to sell something else to an existing customer.

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    Joel Salatin

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

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    Joel Salatin

    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.

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    Joel Salatin

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

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    Joel Salatin

    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.

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    Joel Salatin

    Ours is certainly not an old culture. Yet in recent decades we've used more energy, destroyed more soil, created more pathogenicity (temporarily stopped some too, for sure), mutated more bacteria, and dumped more toxicity on the planet than all the cultures before us-combined. I love the United States, but I am not blind to the wrongs. I have no desire to live anywhere else, but that doesn't mean I think everything we're doing should be done or can be maintained.

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    Joel Salatin

    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.

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    Joel Salatin

    Realize that agendas drive data, not the other way round

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    Joel Salatin

    Remember, machines don't forgive.

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    Joel Salatin

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

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    Joel Salatin

    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.

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    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.

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    Joel Salatin

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

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    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.

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    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?'

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    Joel Salatin

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