Joel Salatin

God doesn't just miraculously and physically intervene in the whole process, so if I just go and drop a bunch of chemicals and herbicides that leach into the groundwater, I can pray all day to keep my child healthy, but if the herbicides gone into the groundwater come up my well, my child's going to drink that water.

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.

New Zealand has incredible global recognition for grass-fed livestock.

The truth is, everything is eating and being eaten.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I want people to think through issues. I'm just tired of blind alignment.

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

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

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

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.

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.

There's a big difference between industrializing production of tractors and industrializing production of food. We like technology, but we really like technology that allows us to do better what nature does itself.

It's very common to implement mob grazing and double your production for a per-acre capitalisation investment... because it doesn't take any more corraling, no more electricity, rent, machinery or labour to double your production on an existing place.

The linear, single species idea of farming is an assault on ecological function. Something's going to break down in that system - anything from soil structure, in economics... but where to start is with true ecological function.

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.

Choose to patronise your local farmers; as eaters, you need to demand a different type of food. Appreciate the pigginess of the pig.

I'm incredibly optimistic about what individuals can do. We have technology that our grandparents would have given their eye teeth for.

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

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

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.

I don't have money. Monsanto has money.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.'

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.

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

Nature moves towards balance.

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.

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.

You can't have a healthy civilization without healthy soil. You can't have junk food and have healthy people.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

You wanna get diarrhoea? Eat industrial food.

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

I inherited Mom's verbal skills, and participated in forensics and essay contests in elementary school - and won every essay contest I ever entered.