Joel salatin Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: Joel Salatin
Quotes of Author: Joel Salatin

Joel Salatin _ The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs:
Gravity tends to pull fertility downhill. Hence fertile valleys and infertile hilltops. But wait, many times the most fertile soils are on hilltops. How could that be? Herbivores graze in the fertile valleys and then trudge up to the hilltops to chew their cuds and lounge. Why the hilltop? To watch for those nasty predators. The herbivore-grass, predator-prey relationships are foundational to moving those biomass-stored sunbeams around on the landscape. Without animals, the anti-gravitational movement would be impossible. Without the predator, it wouldn't be incentivized. Truly, this whole ecosystem is fearfully and wonderfully made.
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Joel Salatin _ The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs:
For decades now our produce research has been on ship-ability, not on taste, texture, or nutritional density. Genetic selection is skewed toward cultivars that can withstand bouncing around in the back of a tractor-trailer for a thousand miles. Tomatoes selected for long-distance transport must be genetically similar to cardboard, not those luscious garden-grown varieties that ooze juice down to your elbows when you bite into them. Our food system has completely ignored human health and opted instead for fast growth and convenient availability. Would anybody want to argue that nutritional density, taste, and tender texture are better than cardboard shipping qualities?
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Joel Salatin _ The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs:
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.
book-quote science plant-life
Joel Salatin _ Your Successful Farm Business:
If you're in livestock, certainly Allan Savory, Jim Gerrish, Stan Parsons, Andre Voisin, and Allan Nation are high on the list. For general farming, J. I. Rodale, Ed Faulkner, Sir Albert Howard, Louis Bromfield, George Henderson, and Charles Walters come to mind. And for cultural anchoring, how about Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Ableman and Fred Kirschenman, Marion Nestle, Joan Gussow, Michael Pollan, and Gary Zimmer. In the culinary world, it's Alice Waters and Dan Barber. In the crop world, it's Colin Seis and Gabe Brown.
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Joel Salatin _ Your Successful Farm Business:
How about the Weston A. Price Foundation's Nourishing Traditions? Oh, books, maybe you read books. Okay, how about Sir Albert Howard's An Agricultural Testament? Or perhaps Rodale's Complete Book of Composting? Never heard of them? Where have you been, under a rock?
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Joel Salatin _ The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs:
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.
book-quote soil-erosion
Joel Salatin _ The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a
And everywhere on the whole 360 acres we have wonderful 10 gallon a minute water with great pressure. That's enough to handle a 600-head herd at any spot. And yes, we move the herd every day. And yes, weeds are leaving, the soil is building, earthworms are waking up and copulating. It's all marvelous. When the landlord saw our system compared to her malfunctioning system that she paid thousands of dollars into as her part of the government cost-share, she felt betrayed by the government conservationists. She called the head design engineer to come for a nonconfrontational walk-about to perhaps incorporate some of our ideas into future projects. He wouldn't come. After all, what can a government expert learn from a peasant farmer?
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Joel Salatin _ Letters to a Young Farmer: On
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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Joel Salatin _ The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs:
I warn my Christian friends to be extremely careful about what they become righteously indignant about. When we demand salvation by legislation, the law of unintended consequences kicks in.
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Joel Salatin _ The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs:
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?
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Joel Salatin _ The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs:
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."
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Joel Salatin _ The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs:
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.
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