JOEL SALATIN

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

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 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.

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.'

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Nature moves towards balance.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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