Top 139 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

The mechanical food system externalizes a lot of costs like obesity or Type 2 diabetes.

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.

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

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

We're scared to death to try new things because we think we have to get it right the first time.

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.

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.

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

We can produce more per acre on a fifth of the fuel as the industrial food system.

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

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.

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.

Our biggest fear is that 'Food, Inc.' will move heavy-handed food-safety regulations forward.

We've created a tenfold core value protocol to make sure that we don't fall into an 'empire' attitude.

The farmers are older; they are under financial stress to produce more margins, yet they keep getting less.

Our main deal is pastured livestock. So we have beef cattle, pigs, turkeys, laying chickens, meat chickens, rabbit, lamb and ducks - egg-layer ducks.

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.

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

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

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.

We only want autonomous collaborators that are incentivized to make or break their own income.

No civilization on the brink of collapse has ever changed fast enough to avert collapse.

We need to respect the fact that cows are herbivores, and that does not mean feeding them corn and chicken manure.

The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker have been around a lot longer than supermarkets and Wal-Mart.

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

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.'

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.

The shorter the chain between raw food and fork, the fresher it is and the more transparent the system is.

I would suggest that if you get in your kitchen and cook for yourself, you can eat like kings for a very low cost.

Know you food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen. Start building up your larder! We don't even use that term any more.

Gluten intolerance and celiac disease are direct results of American agriculture policy and, specifically, the government's wading into the food arena.

I am libertarian, and Americans generally are, more than, say, Canadians and Australians.

Outrageous behavior, also known as the lunatic fringe, is the seed bed of innovation and creativity.

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.

Nature moves towards balance.

Oh, my goodness, when we came to the farm in 1961, I mean, it wouldn't even support one salary.

There's a short chain between field and fork, and the shorter that chain is - the fresher, the more transparent that system is - the less chance there is of anything from bio-terrorism to pathogenicity to spoilage.

We can't begin to feed ourselves with a local-centric system if we lock up land in royal manor models.

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.

I need people - theatrics and schmoozing and storytelling are part of my talent.

Unfortunately in the U.S., the courts have pretty much sided with the GMO lobby and suggesting that a farmer has no rights to be protected from GMO contamination.

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.

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.

The truth is, everything is eating and being eaten.

The cows shorten the grass, and the chickens eat the fly larvae and sanitize the pastures. This is a symbiotic relation.

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.

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?'

Nobody trusts the industrial food system to give them good food.

In general, we run the farm like a business instead of a welfare recipient, and we adhere to historically-validated patterns.

That's the joke about confinement pigs: they taste like whatever sauce you cook them with.

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.

We would be a much healthier culture if the government had never told us how to eat.

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.

It really disturbs me that the environmental movement has been co-opted by creation-worshippers instead of being encouraged by the Creator-worshippers.

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.

You wanna get diarrhoea? Eat industrial food.

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.

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.