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Joel Salatin

Joel Salatin Books

American farmer

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“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.”

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Book:Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World
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“Read liberal and conservative news sources; business, history, religion. All of this creates a renaissance persona that can stand toe-to-toe with any Fortune 500 executive. Get a nice suit and wear it; don't see yourself as a blown-in hayseed. View yourself as a modern Jeffersonian intellectual agrarian. What's on your bookshelf? How many hours a week do you read? Readers are leaders. Cultivate friendships across disciplines, politics, and religion. Entertain guests often; that's a cheap way to receive cosmopolitan information without having to travel.”

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Book:Letters to a Young Farmer: On Food, Farming, and Our Future
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“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.”

FoodCookingHome Cooking
Book:The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation
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“I liken modern scientists to conquistadors. They have no idea what they're dealing with, but they're going to conquer it, whatever it is --- all in the name of God. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to scientific discovery and exploration. I love this stuff. What I despise is reckless disregard for how little we know. We create trans fats with nary a question about whether they're good for us or not. We develop a food pyramid with carbohydrates on the bottom and thirty years later we realize it created an obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemic. It should give us all pause that we would be a much healthier nation if the government had never told us how to eat.”

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Book:The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation
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“The sheer mystery and majesty of heritage wisdom, contained in each cell, each mitochondria, instills in the farmer who respects and honors the pigness of the pig a daily emotional high. The satisfaction of being nature's nurturer always trumps the short-lived adrenaline high of being nature's conqueror. Such an attitude offers spiritual ascendance over physical domination, which never really happens anyway. And that's why the industrial farmer, for all the smoke and noise and horsepower, never feels in control, but always dreads being drowned by the nature he thinks he's controlling.”

Organic FarmingIndustrial Farming
Book:The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation
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“I challenge you to go to any industrial farm. You'll see anti-microbial shoe dips, shower in shower out, plastic suits. Whenever we get scientists visiting our farm, they invariably remark about how seemingly nonchalant we are about bio-security. The industry is paranoid about bio-security because their animals and plants are fragile. If our farm plants and animals had as dysfunctional an immune system as that found in industrial facilities, I'd be paranoid, too.”

Organic FarmingIndustrial Farming
Book:The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation
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“An ecological farmer once told me that he quit industrial farming when he realized that his first waking thought every morning was: 'I wonder what's dead up there in the hog house today?' He couldn't hear the birds chirping. He couldn't enjoy the sunrise, or the rainbow after a thunderstorm. And his kids wanted nothing to do with the farm. But after this epiphany, he closed down the pig concentration camp and devoted himself to pasture-based farming. Suddenly his children wanted to be involved. His thoughts turned lofty. He developed a can-do spirit. And his emotional zest returned.”

Organic FarmingIndustrial Farming
Book:The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation
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“When the farmer bores the tap hole into the trunk, the tree sends sap to heal the wound. Sure enough, by the next spring, only an extremely observant and knowledgeable person can find the old tap scars. When the wind blows, the tree senses that a branch might break. A broken branch is a much more serious wound than a little clean tap hole in the trunk. Therefore, the tree withholds the sap from the tap hole in case it needs to rush a bunch of sap to a broken limb somewhere. Once the wind subsides, the sap starts flowing again through the little tap hole. Sentient beings, anyone? You bet. Fearfully and wonderfully made.”

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Book:The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation
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“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.”

FarmingOrganic Farming
Book:The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation
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“Intuitively we all know that nothing operates most efficiently at full throttle. Is it any wonder that a food system predicated on faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper would create an ignorant, duplicitous, harried, obese citizenry? A culture's people carry in their heads and physiques the manifestation of the food system's objectives.”

Organic Farming
Book:The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation
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“Erosion steals from my neighbor and my community. It impoverishes everyone. A food and farm system that encourages erosion is a direct assault on our neighbors and a direct assault on God's equity. Christians routinely lament an erosion of morality, but then patronize food that erodes the earth. How can we possibly steward morality if we can't even steward our dinner plate? We Christians extol the virtue of charity toward those less fortunate, but often help them with food that exemplifies greed and avarice.”

Christian BehaviorSoil Erosion
Book:The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation
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“Long after we've experimented with the final bizarre thing to feed cows, they will still do best eating grass. After we've exhausted the drugs, vaccines, and transgenic modification, our animals will still want to express their distinctives, live in historically normal habitats, and fill their traditional role. Long after the final i-gadget has been discovered, we'll still yearn for hugs, kisses, and personal conversations. When we've traveled to the last exotic place and finished participating in the last recreational or entertainment venue on our list, we will want a haven and we will call it home. ...I'm surrounded by loving family - multiple generations. I'm surrounded by enthusiastic young people. I'm surrounded by land that I've watched heal over these last fifty years, from a worn-out, gullied mess to verdant pastures supporting poultry, cows, pigs, and rabbits. The intensity of my feelings springs from the intimacy of my knowledge of this place, its surroundings, the weather patterns, the seasons. I believe this is historically normal, and I covet that for others. Now go be a normal person.”

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Book:Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World
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“It's as if the whole notion of growing soil is something only lunatics would think about. But why not grow soil? Does anything make more sense than growing soil? Isn't that more important than tractors, trucks, silos, barns, county fairs and country music? Of course it is. And yet to the lion's share of American farmers, the very notion of growing soil is just plain silly.”

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Author:Joel Salatin
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“Since chemical fertilizer burns out the soil organic matter, other farmers struggle with tilth, water retention, and basic soil nutrients. The soil gets harder and harder every year as the chemicals burn out the organic matter, which gives the soil its sponginess. One pound of organic matter holds four pounds of water. The best drought protection any farmer can acquire is more soil organic matter.”

GivingYearsMatterWaterStruggleFourLandHarderProtectionSoilAcquirePoundsChemicalsFarmersDroughtBurn OutNutrientsFertilizerRetention
Author:Joel Salatin
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“Men swagger around calling themselves "cattlemen" but abuse their grass like a rapist. And abuse their cattle with concrete fecal feedlots without any regards to rumen function. Vegetable growers plow thousands of acres, planting monocrops of annuals in a never-ending tillage routine that totally annihilates carbon wealth. Why? Why are we so enamored of things that destroy carbon and disrespect the animals under our care? Grass. Lowly grass. It just gets no respect. And yet it is the lifeblood of the planet.”

MenCareWealthAnimalPlanetsCallingAbuseFunctionRegardPlantGrassRoutineVegetablesConcreteCarbonDisrespectCattleNever EndingAnnualsAcresSwaggerNo RespectEnamored
Author:Joel Salatin
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“The wealth of any ecosystem is its perennials. The primal herbivore-predator-disturbance-rest dance is literally the breath and pulse of the earth. Grasses recycle oxygen far more efficiently than trees. The turnover is faster. Grass reaches out and turns solar energy into carbon. Tillage hyper-aerates the soil, burning out carbon. But because a plant creates bilateral symmetry at the soil horizon, it sloughs off root mass when the top gets chopped off.”

EarthTurnsEnergyWealthTreeMassRootsBreathsPlantBurningFasterGrassSoilHorizonReach OutCarbonOxygenPulsePrimalEcosystemsPredatorDisturbanceSymmetryHyperSolar EnergyTurnoverSlough
Author:Joel Salatin
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“Ours is certainly not an old culture. Yet in recent decades we've used more energy, destroyed more soil, created more pathogenicity (temporarily stopped some too, for sure), mutated more bacteria, and dumped more toxicity on the planet than all the cultures before us-combined. I love the United States, but I am not blind to the wrongs. I have no desire to live anywhere else, but that doesn't mean I think everything we're doing should be done or can be maintained.”

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Author:Joel Salatin
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“How much evil throughout history could have been avoided had people exercised their moral acuity with convictional courage and said to the powers that be, 'No, I will not. This is wrong, and I don't care if you fire me, shoot me, pass me over for promotion, or call my mother, I will not participate in this unsavory activity.' Wouldn't world history be rewritten if just a few people had actually acted like individual free agents rather than mindless lemmings?”

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Author:Joel Salatin
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“On a grander scale, when a society segregates itself, the consequences affect the economy, the emotions, and the ecology. That's one reason why it's easy for pro-lifers to eat factory-raised animals that disrespect everything sacred about creation. And that is why it's easy for rabid environmentalists to hate chainsaws even though they snuggle into a mattress supported by a black walnut bedstead.”

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Author:Joel Salatin
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“A farm includes the passion of the farmer's heart, the interest of the farm's customers, the biological activity in the soil, the pleasantness of the air about the farm -- it's everything touching, emanating from, and supplying that piece of landscape. A farm is virtually a living organism. The tragedy of our time is that cultural philosophies and market realities are squeezing life's vitality out of most farms. And that is why the average farmer is now 60 years old. Serfdom just doesn't attract the best and brightest.”

YearsHeartPhilosophyRealityPassionInterestPiecesAirActivityTragedyAverageCustomersLandscapeOur TimeSoilFarmsTouchingFarmersOrganismsVitalityLiving OrganismsSqueezing
Author:Joel Salatin
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