Joel Salatin

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?'

Think of all the mesquite in Texas, the pinyon pines, the acorns in Appalachia, every place has the possibility of mass production. It's an infrastructural system so nestled in ecology, it's a more beautiful ecology.

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 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 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.

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.

We've got this cultural mentality that you've got to be an idiot to be a farmer.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture.

'Organic' doesn't mean what people think it means.

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.

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

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 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.

Frankly, any city person who doesn't think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer doesn't deserve my special food.

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

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