Joel Salatin
Nobody trusts the industrial food system to give them good food.Collection: 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.Collection: Food
The shorter the chain between raw food and fork, the fresher it is and the more transparent the system is.Collection: Food
It really disturbs me that the environmental movement has been co-opted by creation-worshippers instead of being encouraged by the Creator-worshippers.Collection: Environmental
Know you food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen.Collection: Food
You can't have a healthy civilization without healthy soil. You can't have junk food and have healthy people.Collection: Food
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.Collection: Gardening
We've created a tenfold core value protocol to make sure that we don't fall into an 'empire' attitude.Collection: Attitude
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.Collection: Forgiveness
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.Collection: Environmental
We would be a much healthier culture if the government had never told us how to eat.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Food
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.Collection: Food
You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.Collection: Children
This magical, marvelous food on our plate, this sustenance we absorb, has a story to tell. It has a journey. It leaves a footprint. It leaves a legacy. To eat with reckless abandon, without conscience, without knowledge; folks, this ain't normal.Collection: Food
The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.Collection: Home
We don't need a law against McDonald's or a law against slaughterhouse abuse - we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.Collection: Philosophy
I think it's one of the most important battles for consumers to fight: the right to know what's in their food, and how it was grown.Collection: Fighting
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?Collection: People
Amazingly, we’ve become a culture that considers Twinkies, Cocoa Puffs, and Mountain Dew safe, but raw milk and compost-grown tomatoes unsafe.Collection: Mountain
If you think the price of organic food is expensive, have you priced cancer lately.Collection: Cancer
Get in your kitchens, buy unprocessed foods, turn off the TV, and prepare your own foods. This is liberating.Collection: Kitchen
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.Collection: Government
One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.Collection: Assets
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.Collection: Pigs
If you have to put on a haz-mat suit to visit a farm, you may not want to eat what comes from it.Collection: May
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?'Collection: Animal
If it doesn't rot, it's not real food.Collection: Real
The average person is still under the aberrant delusion that food should be somebody else's responsibility until I'm ready to eat it.Collection: Responsibility
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.Collection: Country
While vegans and meat-eaters disagree, we can all be united in our fear and hatred for the horror that is factory farming.Collection: Hatred
If every American for one week refused to eat at a fast-food joint, it would bring concentrated animal feeding operations to their knees.Collection: Animal
Don’t complain about being unable to afford high-quality local food when your grocery cart is full of beer, cigarettes, and People magazine.Collection: Beer
A farm includes the passion of the farmer's heart, the interest of the farm's customers, the biological activity in the soil, the pleasantness of the air about the farm -- it's everything touching, emanating from, and supplying that piece of landscape. A farm is virtually a living organism. The tragedy of our time is that cultural philosophies and market realities are squeezing life's vitality out of most farms. And that is why the average farmer is now 60 years old. Serfdom just doesn't attract the best and brightest.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Pigs
You know what the best kind of organic certification would be? Make an unannounced visit to a farm and take a good long look at the farmer’s bookshelf. Because what you’re feeding your emotions and thoughts is what this is really all about. The way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview. You can learn more about that by seeing what’s sitting on my bookshelf than having me fill out a whole bunch of forms.Collection: Long
Our animals don't do drugs. Instead, we move them almost daily in a tightly choreographed ballet from pasture spot to pasture spot.Collection: Moving
Respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig is a foundation for societal health.Collection: Pigs
I'm a Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic. It's a humorous way for me to describe that I'm not stereotypical.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Flower
The notion that processed food is cheap and integrity foods are prohibitively expensive is simply not true.Collection: Integrity
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.Collection: Animal
What happens is all these things we're seeing – campylobacter, E coli, mad cow, listeria, salmonella, that weren't even in the lexicon 30 years ago – that is the industrial paradigm exceeding its efficiency. So these Latin squiggly words that we're learning to say – bovine spongiform encephalopathy – are nature's language screaming to us: ENOUGH! And the question then is: what will it take for us to listen? And my contention is that Wall Street is still wearing conquistador mentality and uniforms, and nobody is listening to the pleadings of nature saying: 'Enough.'Collection: Wall
When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol.Collection: Views
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.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Teacher
How dare you treat your soil like dirt!Collection: Dirt