Know you food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen.
Joel Salatin
Outrageous behavior, also known as the lunatic fringe, is the seed bed of innovation and creativity.
The cows shorten the grass, and the chickens eat the fly larvae and sanitize the pastures. This is a symbiotic relation.
You can't have a healthy civilization without healthy soil. You can't have junk food and have healthy people.
Our main deal is pastured livestock. So we have beef cattle, pigs, turkeys, laying chickens, meat chickens, rabbit, lamb and ducks - egg-layer ducks.
If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing poorly first.
The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker have been around a lot longer than supermarkets and Wal-Mart.
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.
The mechanical food system externalizes a lot of costs like obesity or Type 2 diabetes.
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.
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.
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.
You wanna get diarrhoea? Eat industrial food.
Frankly, any city person who doesn't think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer doesn't deserve my special food.
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.
An orchard can grow pastured poultry underneath. A beef cattle or sheep farm can run pastured poultry behind the herbivores, like the egret on the rhino's nose.
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.
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?'
No civilization on the brink of collapse has ever changed fast enough to avert collapse.
That's the joke about confinement pigs: they taste like whatever sauce you cook them with.
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 truth is, everything is eating and being eaten.
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.'
Nature moves towards balance.
It really disturbs me that the environmental movement has been co-opted by creation-worshippers instead of being encouraged by the Creator-worshippers.
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.
We've got this cultural mentality that you've got to be an idiot to be a farmer.
In general, we run the farm like a business instead of a welfare recipient, and we adhere to historically-validated patterns.
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.
Oh, my goodness, when we came to the farm in 1961, I mean, it wouldn't even support one salary.
The shorter the chain between raw food and fork, the fresher it is and the more transparent the system is.
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.
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.
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.
We can produce more per acre on a fifth of the fuel as the industrial food system.
Ecology should be object lessons that the world sees, that explains in a visceral, physical way, the attributes of God.
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.
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.
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.
The farmers are older; they are under financial stress to produce more margins, yet they keep getting less.
We only want autonomous collaborators that are incentivized to make or break their own income.
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.
We need to respect the fact that cows are herbivores, and that does not mean feeding them corn and chicken manure.
I inherited Mom's verbal skills, and participated in forensics and essay contests in elementary school - and won every essay contest I ever entered.
Gluten intolerance and celiac disease are direct results of American agriculture policy and, specifically, the government's wading into the food arena.
Throughout high school, I peddled my eggs, had a vendor stand at the local curb market - precursor to today's farmers' markets - and competed in 4-H contests and interscholastic debate.
Land degradation did not start with chemical agriculture. But chemical agriculture offered new tools for annihilation.
We've created a tenfold core value protocol to make sure that we don't fall into an 'empire' attitude.
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.
I think it's important to understand that in the big historical context of things, there has been land degradation from civilisation since the beginning of history. I mean, the Rajputana desert in India is a manmade desert caused by overgrazing.
