Quotes from Joel Salatin

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.

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

Don't you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Tolerably good workmen in any of those mechanic arts are sure to find employ, and to be well paid for their work, there being no restraints preventing strangers from exercising any art they understand, nor any permission necessary. If they are poor, they begin first as servants or journeymen; and if they are sober, industrious, and frugal, they soon become masters, establish themselves in business, marry, raise families, and become respectable citizens.

Look, if you need sexy egg cartons to sell our eggs, then you need to educate your customers. We don't intend to patronize big oil just so we can sell eggs at Whole Foods.

a risk-free life is a life that's not worth living.

A Virginia subdivision now has restricted deed covenants against 'farming and other nuisances'. Can you imagine? In our culture, we are actually labeling farming as a nuisance. What have we done to ourselves, that the oldest and noblest vocation on earth, the educated agrarian proletariat envisioned by Thomas Jefferson, has been reduced to nothing more than a nuisance?

Every day when I wake up and head out for chores, I'm struck by the beauty we enjoy on our farm. Based on visitors' comments, that's a shared awareness. Not one of our doors has a skull and crossbones. We want visitors to be struck not by what we've done, but rather by how we've caressed this beautiful niche of God's creation into a productive and profoundly inspiring place.

Love is not a thought; it is an action verb. It is not a thing, but an expression. You can't love in a vacuum; love demands an object. It demands a relationship. "N

When a container of foreign goodies arrives in the village, everyone mobs the freebies and takes the Western handouts. This collapses the local business and these displaced go-getters become the famous warlords we in the West have all learned are the nexus of all those people's problems.

This abnormal cheap energy petroleum age may appear to be a bonanza, but in the long run it has shredded boundaries and proximities that defined economic and social normalcy for centuries. In the continuum of human history, this petroleum age is a mere blip. Cheap energy, on a timeline, is scarcely a speck on the chart. Yet we have the audacity, the irrationality, to plunge forward with building designs, suburban designs, transportation designs as if this cheap

Today's orthodoxy thrives on someone else doing the cooking. The single-service packet from the supermarket has replaced the sit-down home-cooked meal as the most common food choice. Easy foodism disengages people from the process and creates a level of food illiteracy unthinkable just a few short decades ago.

I see it routinely when I get asked to speak at conferences. I'm supposed to come cheap because, after all, I'm just a farmer. If you're smart and capable, you become a doctor, engineer, lawyer, computer technician --- anything white collar. For goodness' sake, don't wear a blue collar. That makes your mother and me a failure and our friends will wonder about our family.