Last Updated on May 19, 2021

We here at Farmhacker are big fans of Joel Salatin. Because of this, we’ve decided to share our favorite and best Joel Salatin quotes for you to enjoy and share with others.

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Joel Salatin is one of the leading voices of the sustainable agriculture movement. His no-nonsense, practical advice on sustainable farming has had a huge impact on how we run our own farm.

Joel has also written several books on our modern industrial food system that will cause a paradigm shift in the way you view food and farming and I highly recommend reading them.

With that being said, here are our favorite Joel Salatin quotes.

 

 

Joel Salatin Quotes From The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs

“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.”
– Joel Salatin, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God’s Creation

 

“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?”
– Joel Salatin, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God’s Creation

 

“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.”
– Joel Salatin, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God’s Creation

 

“Things that the religious right would abhor if they were promoted by churches are embraced warmly in the food system. While preachers rail against bringing junk into our homes via TV, the Internet, and pornographic literature, few bat an eye at a home stashed with high fructose corn syrup, potato chips, and Pop-Tarts. Indeed, some even suggest that the cheaper we eat, the more money we’ll have to put in the offering plate. And to top it off, they denigrate anyone who would suggest part of caring for children is caring about what they eat. Every”
– Joel Salatin, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God’s Creation

 

“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.”
– Joel Salatin, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God’s Creation

 

 

Joel Salatin Quotes From Folks, This Ain’t Normal

“The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.”
– Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World

 

“Our animals don’t do drugs. Instead, we move them almost daily in a tightly choreographed ballet from pasture spot to pasture spot.”
– Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World

 

“Industrial eggs are washed in a chlorine bath. Since the shells are permeable, some of that chlorine enters the egg. This is standard food safety protocol. In fact, some health department inspectors believe an egg not washed”
– Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World

 

“That ought to be our stewardship mandate, to create Edens wherever we go. That’s why humans are here. Our responsibility is to extend forgiveness into the landscape.”
– Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World

 

Food security is not in the supermarket. It’s not in the government. It’s not at the emergency services division. True food security is the historical normalcy of packing it in during the abundant times, building that in-house larder, and resting easy knowing that our little ones are not dependent on next week’s farmers’ market or the electronic cashiers at the supermarket.
– Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World

 

“a risk-free life is a life that’s not worth living.”
– Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World

 

 

Joel Salatin Quotes From Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal

“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.”
– Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front

 

“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.”
– Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front

 

“A farm regulated to production of raw commodities is not a farm at all. It is a temporary blip until the land is used up, the water polluted, the neighbors nauseated, and the air unbreathable. The farmhouse, the concrete, the machinery, and outbuildings become relics of a bygone vibrancy when another family farm moves to the city financial centers for relief.”
– Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front

 

 

Joel Salatin Quotes From Interviews

The mechanical food system externalizes a lot of costs like obesity or Type 2 diabetes.
– Joel Salatin, Tampa Bay Times

 

A pig has a plow on the end of its nose because it does meaningful work with it. It is built to dig and create soil disturbance, something it can’t do in a concentrated feeding environment. The omnivore has historically been a salvage operation for food scraps around the homestead.
– Joel Salatin, Tampa Bay Times

 

My advice to anyone who wants to join in on farming is diversify. Nature is diversified, and I know you’ll always have a core thing that you’ll really like, but hang stuff around the edges of it. It will make your place more interesting for people to come to, and it’s a lot easier to sell something else to an existing customer.
– Joel Salatin, Good Food Revolution

 

You know, in our culture today, our Western, reductionist, Roman, linear, fragmented… culture, we don’t ask how to make a pig happy. We ask how to grow it faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper, and that’s not a noble goal.
– Joel Salatin, ABC News

 

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?’
– Joel Salatin, The Guardian

 

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.
– Joel Salatin, The New York Times

 

“We must stop this incessant victimhood mentality. Somebody else will not fix things. Somebody else will not make me healthy. Somebody else will not make me happy. These things are my responsibility. Not the neighbor’s, not the government’s, not the church or the civic club.”
– Joel Salatin, Walking Times

 

Get in your kitchens, buy unprocessed foods, turn off the TV, and prepare your own foods. This is liberating.
– Joel Salatin, Occupy Big Food

 

 

Joel Salatin Quotes From Other Sources

If you think the price of organic food is expensive, have you priced cancer lately.
– Joel Salatin

 

Amazingly, we’ve become a culture that considers Twinkies, Cocoa Puffs, and Mountain Dew safe, but raw milk and compost-grown tomatoes unsafe.
– Joel Salatin

 

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.
– Joel Salatin

 

Casey

My name is Casey and I'm the creator of Farmhacker.com. I created this site so I could share with you everything I know about farming and hopefully help you become a better farmer in the process.

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Haddie

    This is a really great site! I am just a kid, Of about 12 years, and I am halfway through Joel Salatin‘s “folks this just a normal“ and I think it is amazing!

    1. Casey

      Hi Haddie! Thank you! I’m glad you like my site. I’m also glad to hear that you are reading “Folks This Ain’t Normal”. If you are reading that book at age 12 then you are way ahead of the curve. Keep it up!

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