A biography for Joel Salatinhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“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 farmers are older; they are under financial stress to produce more margins, yet they keep getting less.”
“I see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture.”
“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.”
“When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol.”
“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.”
“Get in your kitchens, buy unprocessed foods, turn off the TV, and prepare your own foods. This is liberating.”
“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.”
“We can produce more per acre on a fifth of the fuel as the industrial food system.”
“We've created a tenfold core value protocol to make sure that we don't fall into an 'empire' attitude.”
“'Organic' doesn't mean what people think it means.”
“I don't have money. Monsanto has money.”
“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 same teen who can't legally operate a four-wheeler, or [ATV]...in a farm lane workplace environment can operate a jacked-up F-250 pickup on a crowded urban expressway. By denying these [farm work] opportunities to bring value to their own lives and the community around them, we've relegated our young adults to teenage foolishness. Then as a culture we walk around shaking our heads in bewilderment at these young people with retarded maturity. Never in life do people have as much energy as in their teens, and to criminalize leveraging it is certainly one of our nation's greatest resource blunders.”
“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.”
“The truth is, everything is eating and being eaten.”
“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.”
“Oh, my goodness, when we came to the farm in 1961, I mean, it wouldn't even support one salary.”