Creating Sustainable Agriculture Without Government Subsidies
An interview with “Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic” Joel Salatin
Facebook
Twitter
Tumblr
Blogger
StumbleUpon
Digg
Delicious
Reddit
Google(Page 2 of 4)
Reason: You’re known to sometimes tell an audience something they might not want to hear. You told me a couple years ago about the message on the drug war you delivered to students at a conservative, religious university law school. What was your message, why did you deliver it to those particular students, and what was their reaction?
Salatin: It was the law school at Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s school in Lynchburg, and now run by his sons. The reason I went out on that limb there was partly penance for my two great aunts who devoted their lives to the Women’s Temperance Union and certainly played a part in creating Prohibition nearly a century ago. They are both deceased now, but I think it’s important to realize that their religious outrage over alcohol created the legal precedent to allow the federal government to come between my lips and my throat. In essence, to tell me what I could and could not ingest.
That such a precedent would morph in our day into illegal raw milk, homemade pickles, and home cured charcuterie certainly never crossed their minds. But this is why we must be very careful when we ask for the government to remedy our outrage. Outrageous behavior, also known as the lunatic fringe, is the seed bed of innovation and creativity. A government that can take away alcohol can also take away heritage food.
The drug war in the America is precisely like prohibition. I’ve never taken drugs and don’t intend to, but I absolutely defend the right of someone to take them if they want. By the same token, I don’t eat McDonald’s food, but I vehemently defend the right of people to eat it. As soon as the government becomes the arbiter, by edict, of what we can and cannot ingest, the frenzy in the marketplace to gain concessionary privileges never ceases. Indeed, the incessant cry to demonize one thing over another, criminalize one food over another, thunders in the ears of politicians as businesses jockey for favors and indulgences from legislative priests.
The moment the government determines that you do not own yourself, that society owns your body, you give up all personal choice and autonomy. You are no longer a citizen, but a slave. Not a person, but a pawn.
Reason: What’s a typical dinner at the Salatin household look like? What’s your favorite meal?
Salatin: We all eat together around a table laden with Teresa’s [Joel's wife] finest. We ask a blessing, pass bowls and platters, and converse on topics of interest. We eat at an appointed time every day to respect Teresa’s time and gift. Most of our food is grown right here on the farm. These are not complex meals, but simple and basic with world-class home grown ingredients.
Perhaps my favorite meal is honey baked chicken, home made applesauce, sweet potato casserole (or butternut squash casserole), sweet pickles, and fresh-picked lettuce with Teresa’s cooked dressing. Yum, yum.
Pork tenderloin, battered and fried, with all the above side dishes, is also great.
All that said, my favorite meal is breakfast. Sausage, eggs, apple juice, raw milk. It doesn’t get any better than that unless you throw in a slice of warm buttered zucchini bread. Yum, yum.
Reason: Have you ever eaten a fast food meal? If so, where? How’d you (dis)like it? Did you ever take your kids to a fast food restaurant? If so, how did they like it?
Salatin: I’ve eaten at Arby’s and Wendy’s, but not McDonald’s or Burger King—at least not in any recent decades of memory. About the only place we’ll go for fast food now is Chipotle or Five Guys Burgers and Fries. You evolve over time. I can tell you that when I’m traveling (which is now a third of the time) I routinely go a day or more without eating. Oh, of course everyone likes fast food. It’s engineered to please our taste buds, kind of like teen sex and inhaling.
Reason: What’s the worst food law in America right now? I know there are many from which to choose.
Salatin: The prohibition on raw milk specifically and direct producer-eater food commerce generally. If I could do one thing and only one thing legislatively for the food system, it would be to create a Constitutional Amendment called the Food Choice Emancipation Proclamation which would guarantee every citizen the inalienable, fundamental right to consume any product of their choice and legalizing the direct unregulated commerce between consenting adults of said product. Right now, farmers can give away raw milk and home made pickles; the prohibition is on sales. What is it about taking money for something that suddenly turns it from a wonderful charitable product into a hazardous substance?
Everywhere I go I meet thousands of farmers ready to grow and process homemade food items for their neighbors and fellow church members. But they can’t due to these prohibitions, epitomized by raw dairy regulations. If this country allowed an opt-out spot for consenting adults to take personal responsibility for the food ingestion, it would unleash an entrepreneurial cottage-based localized tsunami on the marketplace. Wal-Mart would never know what hit it. If the foodies and greenies could only imagine what bottom-up freedom could create, they’d forget their demands for more inspections, more regulations, and more food police and instead campaign for true free markets. We haven’t had free markets in America certainly since Abraham Lincoln started the USDA, but maybe not ever.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
-
FIll your hands you son of a FIST!
-
What's the thinking on Salatin's next encounter with our masters? Drone, or SWAT?
-
Why can't it be both?
-
Your comment contains a word that is too long (50 characters).
He won't eat McDonalds but he eats at Arby's? Gross
-
Anyone else read that name as Joe Stalin the first time?
-
Nyet.
-
Stop drinking. For a while.
-
Not exactly, but I did think of it.
-
Or... drink more. For a while.
-
I like the way you think, good sir.
-
Yep.
-
I disagree about his disrespecting GMOs (for one thing, cross-species sharing of genes occurs naturally), but he is absolutely correct that it is outrageous that Monsanto is able to sue farmers for being the unwilling recipients of GMO crops. I am also doubtful whether it should be legal to patent genes, period.
-
"he is absolutely correct that it is outrageous that Monsanto is able to sue farmers for being the unwilling recipients of GMO crops."
I would agree. Did it ever happen?
(my post certified by reason squirrels to contain no words longer than 50 characters) -
-
-
Ah, link isn't working. Schmeiser planted non-Roundup Ready seeds on his farm, and pollen from Roundup Ready seeds pollinated his plants. Schmeiser saves seed to replant year after year, and after a time most of his crop had become Roundup Ready due to cross-pollination from another farm. Monsanto successfully sued him for using Roundup Ready seeds without a license. He battled and lost, and after 50 years of breeding and perfecting his own seed (his crop was canola), he had to destroy his seeds and purchase new ones, hand his '97 and '98 seed harvest over to Monsanto, and paid 400K Canadian in legal fees.
-
"Monsanto successfully sued him for using Roundup Ready seeds without a license. He battled and lost,"
Yep. As well he should have.
As far as any critical reading of the story goes, he's a thief. -
Of all the stupid comments that could be made about the Schmeiser case, this one takes the cake. Back to the farm Salatin's intern, Sevo, and don't come back until you understand the fundamentals of seed-saving and property rights.
-
How long before people like that are extinct and even home gardening is illegal? People will be shot not for growing pot but tomatoes.
-
I wish you wouldn't exaggerate like that.
I'm sure they will only shot their dogs for the illegal growing of tomatoes.
-
We're all thinking it, so I'm going to come out and say it. We should all going to muster at Polyface when the zombie apocolypse hits. We'll build a wall around it and hold out until the zombies play themselves out outside the fence.
-
Ha! In such a situation if you think he'd be welcome to a lot of freeloaders taking up space and eating up all his food, you're probably going to be disappointed. You'd probably be standing on the wrong end of a 12-gauge being politely told to move along.
-
outside the fence?
dont we ALL carry the virus?...or please pass the FoE & taters & sum pepper! -
Not to worry, FEMA camps will be set up to protect us from the "zombies."
-
What the heck? Why can't I share this interview on Facebook? Reason ain't getting along with Zuckerberg?
-
Huh, that is interesting. Anyway, I would just get the Share Bookmarklet for your browser and go that route.
-
Hey, thanks.
-
Why won't you post my comment?
-
Because you think everything in a blockquote or italic is one word?
-
WTF? where is this 50 character word you refuse to post?
-
I think it thinks everything cut and pasted is one word.
**************************
ATTENTION SERVER SQUIRRELS
**************************You need to fix this
-
Give 'em a break, they're working through their "Dummies" books as fast as they can.
-
Quotation marks and apostrophes are usually the culprits - replace the copy/pasted ones with fresh characters and the problem should go away.
-
The old adage "your fist ends at my nose" actually works for a lot of things. The first time Monsanto's life form when across a fence and adulterated my plants, they should have been held liable for their fist hitting my nose.
Uh huh. And when the wind shifts and your life form goes across that same fence and adulterates their plants, you will be only too happy to be held liable. Right?
Too bad. I was really on board with you up till then. Turns out, you're just another rent seeker.
-
I wouldn't call it rent seeking, but his views on the subject are extreme.
I don't know how it is here, but I've seen that in other countries this can be a huge problem because farms have to be certified in order to call their produce organic (and therefore get the higher price that organic produce commands).
-
"I don't know how it is here, but I've seen that in other countries this can be a huge problem because farms have to be certified in order to call their produce organic (and therefore get the higher price that organic produce commands)."
In which case, he needs to enclose his fields. It's he who wishes to be 'certified'; he bares the costs of that.
-
So it's OK to spray pesticides onto somebody else's property?
-
Fatty Bolger|5.5.12 @ 1:41PM|#
"So it's OK to spray pesticides onto somebody else's property?"
I would presume most farmers, having paid for pesticides, would spray them on calm days. But if a breeze came up,you going to sue? For what damage? -
For turning your organic produce into non-organic produce. For costing you your certification as an organic farm.
-
Fatty Bolger|5.5.12 @ 1:55PM|#
"For turning your organic produce into non-organic produce. For costing you your certification as an organic farm."Sorry, if farmer A *chooses* to 'certify' what he cannot deliver at his own cost, either he loses the cert, or he pays the costs to the surrounding farmers to maintain that cert.
Any bozo who gets a certification that can be voided by a wind carrying normally-used compounds is either too dumb to have any certification, or should be willing to cover the entire cost of maintaining it. -
Why isn't it "if farmer B chooses to spray his farm, either he guarantees the chemicals stay on his farm, or he pays damages for any chemicals that get on somebody else's land"?
-
Whose farm was there first? If you set up your organic farm right next to a commodity farm field expect a little spillover. It's like moving next to an airport and complaining about the noise.
-
SIV|5.5.12 @ 3:53PM|#
"Whose farm was there first?"
Sort of.
If farmer A gets his cert and thereby can claim damages from neighboring farms *prior to* any neighboring farms, the value of that land is reduced by that liability. Farmer A has used the government (cert) to 'take' value from the current owners.
If farmer A gets his cert *after* neighboring farms are established, and claims damages from those neighbors, farmer A is using the government (cert) as a rent-seeking device.
Either way, the government-granted cert is a way to 'take' from others. -
Joshua|5.5.12 @ 3:43PM|#
"Why isn't it "if farmer B chooses to spray his farm, either he guarantees the chemicals stay on his farm, or he pays damages for any chemicals that get on somebody else's land"?"For the same reason you don't pay 'damage' if moisture from your lawn sprayer ends up on your neighbor's lawn; there's no 'damage'.
The 'damage' in this case is only to a certification which farmer A chooses to get.
Farmer A can make that choice, but he cannot transfer the costs of that choice to his neighbors. -
Like if a neighbor paints his house and the overspray lands on your house. There's no 'damage', it's just got a little different color on it now. If the owner *chooses* to maintain a single color on the house, well, he just have to cover the costs for doing so.
-
What is your logic here. The damage is not to the certification, the damage is to the crops. Also, the chemicals would be polluting the other farmer's land.
-
where did he claim any hold harmless standing?
-
Actually his reasoning is valid because he isn't patenting his crops.
-
OT: Julia's circle of life, courtesy of Iowahawk
-
That's fantastic.
-
I saw this guy on some food documentary which was pretty good actually. The comments above are funny and all over the place! The guy has a unique name though :)
Ryan @ Portable Solar Generator
-
If Gary Johnson wins the Presidency, might there be a role for Joel Salatin as Secretary of Agriculture (perhaps the last occupant of the post)?
-
I have a better chance of winning the Powerball lottery.
-
just as Jeffrey explained I am alarmed that a mom able to profit $5474 in one month on the computer. have you seen this site makecash16.cøm
-
Perennials rather than annuals form the basis of our program. http://www.nikewinkel.com/trai.....-c-58.html Perennials build soil; annual deplete soil. American ag policy only subsidizes annuals.
