Top 70 Joel Salatin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Always listen to your customers.”

— Joel Salatin

2. “Everything I want to do is Illegal.”

— Joel Salatin

3. “If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly first.”

— Joel Salatin

4. “While vegans and meat-eaters disagree, we can all be united in our fear and hatred for the horror that is factory farming.”

— Joel Salatin

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

— Joel Salatin

6. “How dare you treat your soil like dirt!”

— Joel Salatin

7. “The shorter the chain between raw food and fork, the fresher it is and the more transparent the system is.”

— Joel Salatin

8. “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.”

— Joel Salatin

9. “The average person is still under the aberrant delusion that food should be somebody else’s responsibility until I’m ready to eat it.”

— Joel Salatin

10. “This magical, marvelous food on our plate, this sustenance we absorb, has a story to tell. It has a journey. It leaves a footprint. It leaves a legacy. To eat with reckless abandon, without conscience, without knowledge; folks, this ain’t normal.”

— Joel Salatin

11. “Ecology should be object lessons that the world sees, that explains in a visceral, physical way, the attributes of God.”

— Joel Salatin

12. “Know you food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen.”

— Joel Salatin

13. “We don’t need a law against McDonald’s or a law against slaughterhouse abuse – 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

14. “Most of the earth’s land is not conducive to arable cropping. Only a tiny percentage is good enough for that. Grasslands are literally the lungs of the earth, and restoring them with animals is not only necessary, but it’s the most efficacious way to restore water cycles and the carbon cycle. Right now, nothing else comes close to remediating broken ecological systems as quickly or completely as restoring large herds of grazing animals through holistic, or long-term, management.”

— Joel Salatin

15. “One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.”

— Joel Salatin

16. “Land degradation did not start with chemical agriculture. But chemical agriculture offered new tools for annihilation.”

— Joel Salatin

17. “Respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig is a foundation for societal health.”

— Joel Salatin

18. “When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol.”

— Joel Salatin

19. “Just because we can ship organic lettuce from the Salinas Valley, or organic cut flowers from Peru, doesn’t mean we should do it, not if we’re really serious about energy and seasonality and bioregionalism.”

— Joel Salatin

20. “The notion that processed food is cheap and integrity foods are prohibitively expensive is simply not true.”

— Joel Salatin

21. “I see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture.”

— Joel Salatin

22. “If every kitchen in America had enough chickens attached to it to eat all of the scraps coming out of that kitchen, no egg industry or commerce would be necessary in the whole country.”

— Joel Salatin

23. “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

24. “I’m suggesting that criminalizing chemically fertilized grass in favor of unnaturally-fed corn is not a rational trade off.”

— Joel Salatin

25. “Farms and food production should be, I submit, at least as important as who pierced their navel in Hollywood this week. Please tell me I’m not the only one who believes this. Please. As a culture, we think we’re well educated, but I’m not sure that what we’ve learned necessarily helps us survive.”

— Joel Salatin

26. “When government gets between my lips and my stomach; I call that invasion of privacy!”

— Joel Salatin

27. “Love is not a thought; it is an action verb. It is not a thing, but an expression. You can’t love in a vacuum; love demands an object. It demands a relationship. “N.”

— Joel Salatin

28. “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

29. “If it doesn’t rot, it’s not real food.”

— Joel Salatin

30. “Radical Homemakers, Shannon Hayes describes.”

— Joel Salatin

31. “Don’t you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?”

— Joel Salatin

32. “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.”

— Joel Salatin

33. “You can’t chemical your way out of soil infertility.”

— Joel Salatin

34. “Look, if you need sexy egg cartons to sell our eggs, then you need to educate your customers. We don’t intend to patronize big oil just so we can sell eggs at Whole Foods.”

— Joel Salatin

35. “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.”

— Joel Salatin

36. “If you have to put on a haz-mat suit to visit a farm, you may not want to eat what comes from it.”

— Joel Salatin

37. “We need to respect the fact that cows are herbivores, and that does not mean feeding them corn and chicken manure.”

— Joel Salatin

38. “It’s a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.”

— Joel Salatin

39. “I saw a news report recently that measured average video game use by American men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five: twenty hours per week. Do you mean the flower of America’s masculinity can’t think of anything more important to do with twenty hours a week than sit in front of a video screen? Folks, this ain’t normal. Can’t we unplug already?”

— Joel Salatin

40. “You don’t have roosters with your laying hens. How do they lay eggs?” Dear folks, chickens don’t need roosters to lay eggs. They need roosters to hatch eggs, but not to lay them. Just like women don’t need men to lay eggs; they just need a man to hatch one. A mere century ago, not one in a hundred would have been ignorant of this common agrarian knowledge.”

— Joel Salatin

41. “Remember, machines don’t forgive.”

— Joel Salatin

42. “Even if you don’t eat at a fast food restaurant, you’re now eating food that’s produced by this system.”

— Joel Salatin

43. “Don’t complain about being unable to afford high-quality local food when your grocery cart is full of beer, cigarettes, and People magazine.”

— Joel Salatin

44. “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

45. “We should be rolling in the dirt, gardening, wrestling with some brambles and skinning animals for supper. These are important immune system builders.”

— Joel Salatin

46. “You wanna get diarrhoea? Eat industrial food.”

— Joel Salatin

47. “Nobody trusts the industrial food system to give them good food.”

— Joel Salatin

48. “Earthworms will dance.”

— Joel Salatin

49. “Get in your kitchens, buy unprocessed foods, turn off the TV, and prepare your own foods. This is liberating.”

— Joel Salatin

50. “Nobody walks well first, nobody writes well first and nobody cooks well first.”

— Joel Salatin