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Joel Salatin discusses raw milk, farms, food freedom, and government intrusion with John Stossel. Joel Salatin is one of my favorite speakers and writers about both the culture of back-to-earth farming as well as libertarian philosophy.

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“We ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.” ~ Joel Salatin

Joel Salatin is recognized around the world as one of the leading voices for a return to common sense, earth-friendly farming. I had the opportunity to visit Salatin’s “Polyface Farm” this past March and walk around his beautiful land in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Salatin’s books are fun reads and full of provoking and practical thoughts for farmers and non-farmers alike. If you are interested in localism, sustainable farming, and realistic ideas to become self-sufficient in a practical manner, there is no better place to start than with Joel Salatin’s work.

Joel Salatin endorsed Ron Paul for President in 2008 and 2012.

My uncle, Robert, interacting with the pigs at Polyface Farm.

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Joel Salatin, founder of Polyface Farms (located in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley), is nationally recognized as one of the most influential local and naturally sustainable farmers in America. Salatin was featured in the films Food, Inc. and Farmageddon, which expose the corporate-government relationship in the field of agriculture. Salatin is also the author of eight books, including “Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal.”

Joel Salatin has endorsed Ron Paul for president twice, once in 2008 and again in 2012. This is what Salatin said of Paul in 2008:

I don’t think I’ve ever felt as comfortable with a Presidential candidate as I do this year with Ron Paul. Generally the conservatives worship Wall Street, the military industrial complex, and American empire building around the world. The liberals worship government agencies, government solutions, and never saw a tax they didn’t like or a baby worth saving. So where does a guy turn who wants small government, no subsidies, pro-life, no corporate welfare, and a hoe-your-own-garden military? Finally we have a candidate: Ron Paul.

The reason the mainstream can’t handle him is because he doesn’t fit the stereotypes. And therein lies his strength. As a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist, Ron Paul embodies the reasonable approach to thorny issues. He would rein in the globalists by unleashing grass roots entrepreneurs. That’s true free marketing, not pseudo free marketing via corporate welfarism and criminalizing small business. He thinks we should be able to choose what to eat and how to educate rather than big brother government being the only credible approval source.

Rather than squandering the nation’s treasury and goodwill to insure cheap oil, he would unfetter backyard tinkerers whose 100-mile-per-gallon carburetors and cottage-sized alternative fuel prototypes could make the U.S. energy independent. He understands that the real answers do not come from the top down, but always come from the bottom up. And that is why he often casts the solitary opposition vote in Congress. Bless him.

Salatin maintained nothing but praise when he endorsed Paul in the 2012 presidential election:

I’ve been a fan of Ron Paul for years, since the first day I learned about his positions.  He’s the only one with enough backbone to take on the entrenched corporate-government fraternity by attacking with the power of freedom, thereby unleashing entrepreneurial dreams on the marketplace.  Currently cowering under the withering fire of guns, badges, and bureaucracy, America’s home-based and back-yard innovators have plenty of antidotes to the problems that plague our culture.

Paul understands the power of bottom-up creativity.  Reducing the military, both foreign and domestic, reducing regulatory power, and reducing the penetration of prejudicial government interests in the culture is the balanced approach to restore constitutional normalcy.  Paul is the only national figure willing to go to the mat for these precious principles that will ensure tomorrow’s opportunities.

Joel Salatin is a pioneer in the growing local, sustainable, and natural food movement. His endorsement of Ron Paul is an endorsement of the principles of freedom and liberty, which Paul has strongly stood for since getting elected to Congress in 1976.

Joel Salatin photo made by Parkle Lee. 

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As a lifelong vegetarian, no style of meat production is particularly appealing or justifiable to me. However, despite my herbivore bias, I still see an ethical dilemma present in current industrial meat facilities. Little respect is given to the conditions and treatment of the animals in industrial facilities. Animals rarely see the light of day for any substantial amount of time and they are raised on concrete floors; they are treated as mere products without regard for their status as living, breathing beings. The greatest crime, however, is that industrial facilities survive purely out of price floors, legal code, and other direct government subsidies that hinder competition from natural, local food systems.

A superior product in the marketplace should not require extra help from a government agency, whether it be in the form of a price guarantee for corn (the main substance fed to livestock in industrial facilities), legal code that mandates industrial farming (or heavily restricts other methods of non-industrial farming), or other government subsidies. The fact that industrial livestock facilities rely on government assistance for survival is a testament to their flawed, unnecessary, and undesirable business practices. (If they don’t require government assistance for survival, why continue providing subsidies and other competitive advantages to these corporate industrial livestock giants?) If people prefer to purchase industrial livestock meat over locally grown free range meat, there is no need for subsidies or other governmental involvement. Clearly, subsidies are needed only when a corporation or industry (such as industrial livestock producers) offers a lousy product that people won’t normally desire.

Government subsidies merely provide the illusion of cheap prices, which goes a long way in distorting the prices and actions of people in the marketplace. The fact that industrial meat is the cheapest does not mean it’s a better product or business model, particularly when you account for the government assistance needed to lower the price in the first place. Of course, it is us, the taxpayers, who are providing the subsidies, so the cost we pay for “cheap” food at the grocery store isn’t actually very cheap. We pay taxes to provide farm and grain subsidies, fund the bureaucracies who regulate and administer fines to farmers who don’t cooperate with the industrial system, among other taxpayer-funded programs.

Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water- of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food. – Joel Salatin [i]

Clearly the industrial food system has government tilted in its favor; its products are cheap not because of their superior taste or flavor, but because they have managed to successfully crawl into bed with government to dismantle other legitimately competitive businesses. The philosophy of the industrial food system can be summed up in this statement: if people won’t buy your lousy, nauseating product, lobby government for subsidies and other protectionist interventions to dismantle competitors who actually offer a product desirable to the public.

In a true free market of limited or no government intervention and subsidies, a product only survives so long as it appeals to the demands of the general public. As soon as a company offers a product that people do not desire or demand, the company is hit with losses and will go bankrupt so long as it doesn’t change its practices. This occurs because other competitors can easily take the place of a lackluster company who fails to please its customers. Corporations in the industrial food system face no such market competition and customer input, because they are guaranteed government assistance regardless even if people resist their product. Industrial livestock corporations succeed financially based on how well they please government bureaucrats and follow government regulations, not how effectively they can please customers with a quality product. Are you beginning to see the apparent flaws in this industrial, bureaucratized food system of ours? Our current system has come at the demands of government bureaucrats and corporate lobbyists, rather than the demands of people in their local communities yearning for sustainable, clean, tasty food systems.

Industrial Cattle Feeding

The inherent immorality in our current food system is that individuals cannot simply choose to opt out of the system and be done with it. Sure, if a few million of us chose to never again purchase industrial-raised meat, some corporations would face a loss of millions or billions of dollars. However, what would be the corporate reaction? Would they actually change their business practices to match the public’s desire for a local, sustainable, earth-friendly food system? Or would these Agribusinesses lobby government for an extra several billion dollars in subsidies and beneficial regulations to stay afloat? Unfortunately, history has shown the latter is the opted path, as it is with all politically-connected corporations and industries, because it demands little change or adaption on the part of the corporation. As a result, today we are stuck with an uncreative, unsustainable, and frankly undesirable industrial setup that very few people would actually choose over a more natural local food system.

In a true free market system with open competition and no government assistance to businesses, I believe industrial livestock and food systems would be run out of the market within a matter of one or two decades. They would be forced to reallocate their resources to fit the demands of a local food system, or suffer the consequences of consistent losses and, eventually, bankruptcy. The free market is a powerful moral force, because it cumulates the demands and desires of the people by giving each individual the power of choice. The fact that we evidently don’t have a free market within the industrial agriculture system proves that the system must indeed be immoral, unsustainable, or impractical to at least some degree. If it was a moral, worthwhile system, government subsidies would not be necessary to sustain the practices of industrial livestock and agriculture.

The industrial livestock system in place today is not justifiable for one basic reason: it requires government subsidies to stay afloat. I find the greatest moral dilemma with the fact that the system brings in billions of dollars of government support whether customers demand such a product or not. Government’s involvement and propping up of the system has essentially eliminated the power of individual choice, leaving the public susceptible to the whims and desires of corporate lobbyists, government bureaucrats, and our oh-so-wise politicians. The treatment of the animals, the conditions of the factories, the wages of the workers are all secondary. If people are forced to participate in and fund a system they find morally or ethically reprehensible with no option of withdrawal, it is absolutely not justifiable. It is tyrannical.

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People often use the quote, “The only constant is change.” Sometimes this phrase (or something similar to it) is used to bash over the head those who prefer liberty and freedom to government interventions. We are told that those who don’t embrace social change through government must love the rich, hate the poor, and enjoy seeing people remain in their current undesirable status quo living situations. The irony is that government is not what initiates true change on the human level. Collective government force is no more convincing than an individual thief holding a gun to your head – you may do what he tells you to do, but you’re not going to suddenly change your view of the world because of it. If anything, you will increasingly resent the thief the longer he holds a gun to your head and tells you how to live. True change comes on an individual basis, and the only “system” in a social sense that ever truly embraces and supports this change is freedom.

I like to think of freedom as a natural river. It creates and develops its own course while adjusting to storms and other barriers that may present themselves over time. The river may choose to run off into countless tributaries, just as various human civilizations throughout history have chosen to pursue different goals. However, all those tributaries come from the same source somewhere high in the mountains no matter how far they may stray during their journey to the sea. The many smaller streams cover wide portions of land and make their own paths, but they are all part of that initial head river.

Think of the government as a dam in this scenario. A group of enlightened, flawless, and selfless people (kidding) with the greatest of intentions decide the river is best served by molding it into a lake by creating a dam. The freedom of the river is impeded, but the source and flow of the river remains the same (however minor and ignored it may be). This is a key concept to grasp when trying to understand freedom and the free market. No matter how much government intervenes in the marketplace and civil liberties of individuals, the natural forces of freedom are always at work. A dam may hinder the river’s progress, but no matter how big the dam the natural river will always maintain its usual flow. In other words, no matter how grand and daunting the government may appear, the natural flows of freedom will always be in the background chipping away at the inevitable flaws of a nanny state.

This is exactly why every communist, socialist, and any other big government society built on coercion either has or always will fail. These governments are built and survive purely on force and coercion. You’d be hard pressed to find a government that could remain intact were people allowed to choose tomorrow whether or not to support it with their lives and labor. People naturally choose freedom and liberty, and collective government force is the dam to that natural course.

Freedom is the only “system” built on the assumption of human change and creativity. Government programs lock people unnaturally into one way of thinking; governments do their best to convince us that they just need a little more power over the people to end some sort of misery in the world. Governments also attempt to plant the idea that without them the whole world would enter sheer and utter chaos, as if governments haven’t already been able to achieve that with countless wars, displacement and slaughter of millions of people, and now the buildup of trillions of dollars of debt and worthless paper money to pay for bankrupt and corrupt systems.

Regardless of your political or economic views, true sustainable change will only come through freedom on an individual level. Change will not come from these central geniuses who somehow are qualified to solve all of humanity’s problems; change will come from individuals on a local scale utilizing their unique creative expressions. Top down movements never last because they are not built by the people for whom they are intended. Freedom’s beauty is that it unleashes individual creativity in ways that a government bureaucrat could not begin to comprehend. Freedom gives people the chance to create the life and world they want to live in; it doesn’t force them into a Utopian society as imagined by a few politicians and bureaucrats. One of the odd things that crosses my mind as a 17 year old is: why am I forced to pay taxes (when I haven’t even been able to vote yet) for programs created before my grandparents were born, by some politicians I never would have supported, all of which will probably be bankrupt within the next 20 years? At least I can look forward to voting on the next crook who will manage my own money even though he didn’t do a thing to earn it.

As farmer, lecturer, and author Joel Salatin explains in his book Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal, government laws currently discourage local cooperative farms, sustainable living techniques, and even prevent people from building a house smaller than 900 square feet. Both national and local government laws, regulations, and codes prevent individual creativity and actual change from being unleashed as it would in a true free market situation. The primary side effect of all government intervention is that the state essentially mandates that things be done a certain way, no questions asked. You either farm this way or it’s illegal. You either build the house this way or it’s illegal. You want to grow hemp and use it for ethanol, plastics, and clothing? Sorry, it’s illegal. What kind of a boring, confining, pitiful setup is this? Such a system is guaranteed to put a damper on the creativity and ingenuity of individuals, and that is exactly what it does.

Remember that each individual in this world is unique in some way, shape, or form. You can try to put the perfect system on paper, who will manage it, how you will enforce it, how you’re going to have everyone else pay for your Utopia, and what you’ll do to people who don’t accept your line of thinking. Now consider; is the most successful social system or principle going to be the one that uses a top down, bureaucratic, centralized power approach? Or is it going to be the one that encourages individual creativity, responsibility, and initiative? Most likely the latter will appear more attractive. In reality, all you need to achieve these honorable goals is one simple but very powerful tool: freedom. A society built from the ground up on the daily voluntary interactions of free individuals. That is where real change will begin.

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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.” – Joel Salatin

The deepest experience and impression of nature only arises on an individual level. There are many different stages of awakening awareness in nature, the most basic being the food we eat on a daily basis. Consider the packaged, wrapped, dehydrated, heavily processed food people commonly purchase. From the very beginning, people eating a majority of food of this sort are likely to be detached from nature, not to mention unhealthy. Modern industrial farms have concentrated themselves into a centralized business model relying on packing animals into small cages, spraying fields and crops with chemical pesticides, all of which is propped up through bureaucratic regulations that destroy local farms. My belief is that the nature experience, on a most basic and individual level, begins with local farms. People will have a much greater respect and understanding of nature when they regularly eat and observe whole, natural foods that come from a local source.

“Part of our responsibility as stewards of the earth is to respect the design of creation… That’s something you can devote your life for.” – Joel Salatin

Operating the Polyface Farm on 550 acres of land in the Shenandoah Valley, Joel Salatin is defying just about everyone when it comes to producing organic food. Salatin describes himself as a “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist farmer,” and has focused his career on sustainable, environmentally-friendly, animal-friendly organic farming. One of the many unique aspects of Salatin’s approach is that he only sells food to individuals, restaurants, and other outlets within a four-hour-drive radius of his farm, in an effort to encourage people to purchase their food from local farms in their area.

“We think there is strength in decentralization and spreading out rather than in being concentrated and centralized.” – Joel Salatin

Salatin’s “secret” is feeding livestock a rich and diverse mixture of grass, which is supported with no pesticides or chemicals whatsoever. The cattle freely roam among the fields, restrained only by a portable electrified fence that can be easily moved in less than an hour with one or two people. The farm’s chickens are housed in portable coops that are transported with tractors. Salatin maintains a rotation of sorts by first letting cattle graze a portion of the field, and then letting the chickens roam that same area the following day. This simple process provides an easily maintained and renewable source of daily fresh grass for the cattle, gives the animals freedom to move around without much restraint, and it leads to incredibly tasty meat and eggs.

“I appreciate the fact that you obviously love life and the living.” – Polyface Farm customer

“You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.” – Joel Salatin

This is a breath of fresh air compared to the industrial meat facilities today. In these facilities cattle are heavily restrained, the farmers hardly interact with the animals, and a huge portion of the cattle is fed corn (which is often grown with questionable techniques using pesticides and GMOs). Salatin has a tremendous respect of and connection with his animals; a connection that cannot come through the detached and horrific slaughtering processes in industrial meat facilities today. Clearly there is an importance in the environment animals are raised in and its impact on the taste and vibration of the food. Salatin sees and treats animals as free creatures, not soulless drones waiting to be eaten.

“I am a caretaker of creation. I don’t own it, and what I’m supposed to do is leave it in better shape for the next generation than I found it.” – Joel Salatin

The greatest gift Joel Salatin is giving to the world, however, is not his food. He is showing people that there is an alternative. What kind of impact would Salatin have if he simply held signs and protested to a corporate or government building? What effect would he have if he simply lobbied government to mandate his farming beliefs? Probably none at all, and no one would remember him for it. Salatin is taking action. He is not waiting around for someone else to implement his vision; he is taking initiative and proving that low-tech, sustainable, organic, animal and environmentally-friendly farming is not a lost cause. He is a living example that it is actually a tremendous success.

“I see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture. 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. Now, how’s that for a mouthful?” – Joel Salatin

Joel Salatin’s relentless pursuit of self-sufficiency has given us a remarkable example of how to happily and prosperously live in tune with the environment. All the buildings on his farm are constructed with lumber from the forest resting on his land. His animals are fed natural grass. The land is irrigated by its own ponds. He prospers through a local customer base who jump at the opportunity to support such a venture. Salatin’s achievements are laying the groundwork for the future of localism: respecting and appreciating the beauty and freedom of nature, working sustainably with animals on a very personal level, supporting both inner happiness and the local community, all through operating a profitable business. With individual initiative and creativity, nothing is impossible. Such is the story of Joel Salatin.

“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?” – Joel Salatin

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