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d79fdfc
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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.
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supermarkets
gardens
gardening
food
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Joel Salatin |
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aa75254
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Read things you're sure will disagree with your current thinking. If you're a die-hard anti-animal person, read Meat. If you're a die-hard global warming advocate, read Glenn Beck. If you're a Rush Limbaugh fan, read James W. Loewen's Lies My Teachers Told Me. It'll do your mind good and get your heart rate up.
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reading
disagree
opinions
disagreements
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Joel Salatin |
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521aabd
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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.
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education
farms
knowledge
food
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Joel Salatin |
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97fe362
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That many if not most people...who want fresh leafy greens in January buy them at the supermarket after they've been bleached and plastic-bag shipped from California or beyond is not a tribute to modern technology; it's an unprecedented abdication of personal responsibility and a ubiquitous benchmark of abnormality.
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responsibility
food-security
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Joel Salatin |
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9f2a0a2
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In my opinion, if there is one extremely legitimate use for petroleum besides running wood chippers and front-end loaders to handle compost, it's making plastic for season extension. It parks many of the trucks [for cross-country produce transportation]. With the trucks parked, greenhouses, tall tunnels, and more seasonal, localized eating, can we feed ourselves? We still have to answer that burning question.
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food-production
petroleum
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Joel Salatin |
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a552cca
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How many of us lobby for green energy or protected lands, but don't engage with the local bounty to lay by for tomorrow's unseasonal reality? That we tend to not even think about this as a foundation for solutions in our food systems shows how quickly we want other people to solve these issues.
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responsibility
food-security
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Joel Salatin |
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13ff5cd
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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.
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philosophy
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Joel Salatin |
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885fc22
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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.
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Joel Salatin |
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b1219cb
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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."
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Joel Salatin |
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c073fab
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President Barack Obama, supposed friend of the common man, has put Monsanto's own vice president, GMO shepherd Michael Taylor, in charge of food safety.
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Joel Salatin |
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b5f518e
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I was on a radio talk show in Vermont one January and the host was giving me a hard time about organic food prices. "I had a party at my house last week and wanted to serve corn on the cob, so I went down to the supermarket and the regular corn was $2.49 for a dozen ears and the organic was $4.89. How can you justify that?" Wrong question. The question is, "Why do you need fresh sweet corn in Vermont in January? You should be eating canned,..
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Joel Salatin |
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20d3182
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Tolerably good workmen in any of those mechanic arts are sure to find employ, and to be well paid for their work, there being no restraints preventing strangers from exercising any art they understand, nor any permission necessary. If they are poor, they begin first as servants or journeymen; and if they are sober, industrious, and frugal, they soon become masters, establish themselves in business, marry, raise families, and become respecta..
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Joel Salatin |
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39b1071
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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.
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Joel Salatin |
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c3593e1
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a risk-free life is a life that's not worth living.
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Joel Salatin |
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9294e0c
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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"
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Joel Salatin |
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3149d86
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The United States now has too few farmers to merit counting on the national census form. As a culture, we don't cook at home. We don't have a larder. We're tuned in, plugged in, addicted to electronic gadgetry to the exclusion of a whippoorwill's midsummer song or a herd of cows lying down contentedly on the leeward side of a slope, indicating a thunderstorm in the offing. Most modern Americans can't conceive of a time without supermarkets,..
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Joel Salatin |
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e74ddec
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The sheer mystery and majesty of heritage wisdom, contained in each cell, each mitochondria, instills in the farmer who respects and honors the pigness of the pig a daily emotional high. The satisfaction of being nature's nurturer always trumps the short-lived adrenaline high of being nature's conqueror. Such an attitude offers spiritual ascendance over physical domination, which never really happens anyway. And that's why the industrial fa..
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organic-farming
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Joel Salatin |
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1fe565e
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Radical Homemakers, Shannon Hayes describes
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Joel Salatin |
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8f91b43
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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.
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organic-farming
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Joel Salatin |
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e50e8fc
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When a container of foreign goodies arrives in the village, everyone mobs the freebies and takes the Western handouts. This collapses the local business and these displaced go-getters become the famous warlords we in the West have all learned are the nexus of all those people's problems.
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Joel Salatin |
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0011e43
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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.
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home-cooking
food
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Joel Salatin |
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e7b8426
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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.
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Joel Salatin |
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38c46df
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I see it routinely when I get asked to speak at conferences. I'm supposed to come cheap because, after all, I'm just a farmer. If you're smart and capable, you become a doctor, engineer, lawyer, computer technician --- anything white collar. For goodness' sake, don't wear a blue collar. That makes your mother and me a failure and our friends will wonder about our family.
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Joel Salatin |
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0b9004f
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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 thro..
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grasslands
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Joel Salatin |
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624a626
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I liken modern scientists to conquistadors. They have no idea what they're dealing with, but they're going to conquer it, whatever it is --- all in the name of God. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to scientific discovery and exploration. I love this stuff. What I despise is reckless disregard for how little we know. We create trans fats with nary a question about whether they're good for us or not. We develop a food pyramid with ca..
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science
healthy-living
humility
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Joel Salatin |
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eba8c04
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Whenever an economic sector cloisters itself behind opaqueness, it will begin taking environmental, social, and economic shortcuts. Integrity occurs when people can see what's going in at the front door and what's coming out the back door. Absent that accountability, you lose integrity.
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Joel Salatin |
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c0d622c
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I really like those old shows. I've decided the way to know you're becoming an old fogey is when the only shows you like are sponsored by Depends, the Scooter Store, and Viagra.
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Joel Salatin |
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193969d
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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..
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Joel Salatin |
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8925387
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Delayed gratification is a powerful emotional reality, and tempers many things. Perhaps even things like road rage would lessen if we all tuned in to seasonal cycles. Perhaps even Wall Street, with its insatiable growth mentality, would see value in a rest cycle. Oh, sorry, we call that a depression, don't we? Why must we be disappointed at anything except red hot? Hockey stick charts don't last. The kitchen is where the normal person becom..
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Joel Salatin |
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de0877c
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Look in the mirror and decide once and for all: Am I biological or mechanical? Is my deepest essence a machine or not?
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Joel Salatin |
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bf22e71
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It was the fact that we were selling dead animals. You see, farmers are only supposed to sell live animals to processors and marketers who are supposed to make all the money--those notorious middlemen. After all, we couldn't have all that middleman money going to farmers. No, that wouldn't be right. Farmers are supposed to be peasants, serfs, impoverished dolts, remember?
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Joel Salatin |
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fcda03b
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Originally planning to go with a small house concept, we found it was illegal to build a house of less than nine hundred square feet. Why? By what authority can anybody tell me what kind of house I have to live in?
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Joel Salatin |
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94b0d56
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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
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Joel Salatin |
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ba7337a
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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 in chlorine is not fit for human consumption.
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Joel Salatin |
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23e214d
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This abnormal cheap energy petroleum age may appear to be a bonanza, but in the long run it has shredded boundaries and proximities that defined economic and social normalcy for centuries. In the continuum of human history, this petroleum age is a mere blip. Cheap energy, on a timeline, is scarcely a speck on the chart. Yet we have the audacity, the irrationality, to plunge forward with building designs, suburban designs, transportation des..
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Joel Salatin |
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7aa4ebd
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I challenge you to go to any industrial farm. You'll see anti-microbial shoe dips, shower in shower out, plastic suits. Whenever we get scientists visiting our farm, they invariably remark about how seemingly nonchalant we are about bio-security. The industry is paranoid about bio-security because their animals and plants are fragile. If our farm plants and animals had as dysfunctional an immune system as that found in industrial facilities..
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organic-farming
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Joel Salatin |
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97313bf
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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-base..
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organic-farming
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Joel Salatin |
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8853059
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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 |
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5015661
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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 |
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f6e7045
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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 |
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889e550
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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 ..
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reading
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Joel Salatin |
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73971f0
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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 ..
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Joel Salatin |
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069daa3
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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 fortuna..
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soil-erosion
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Joel Salatin |
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5f9aeb0
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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 |