Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal
August 31st, 2007 | Published in Agrarianism, Agriculture, Animals, Health, Politics | 3 Comments
Joel Salatin, a farmer in Virginia (one of the best in America, as far as I know), wrote an interesting diatribe about how everything he wants to do is illegal. He can’t slaughter his own animals, collaborate marketing with neighbors, charge for farm tours, or build the house he wanted without government interference. If you don’t know much about how government makes life hard for small, environmentally-conscious farmers, you should definitely read this.
I learned about Joel in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and was really taken with his permacultural methods of farming. Someday my wife and I hope to visit his farm and attend one of his seminars.
This article made it on the homepage of del.icio.us, which is very encouraging. In fact, I have been very encouraged over the past year about how environmentally / agriculturally-aware our culture is becoming. It is still a very small segment to be sure, but it is starting to catch on. Thank God.
My hope is that someday feedlots, industrial agriculture, pollution, and destructive mining and foresting practices will be as reprehensible to us as racism.
September 5th, 2007 at 3:26 pm (#)
Hi Josh,
I very much sympathize with you when it comes to feedlots, industrial agriculture, etc. — in fact, you might say I’ve largely defined my career around my opposition to these things — but I’m nonetheless uneasy when you make a point like this. It’s pretty much the same thing that makes me uneasy with Salatin.
The problem I have is how easily these kinds of things are said, i.e. how little attention is paid to the costs, either as if industrial agriculture could be done away without requiring any major societal changes, or as if the costs would just be pushed off on other people, or as if we intend to neglect all the changes that don’t come easy.
Industrial agriculture has been able to dominate, because by superficial dollar accounting it’s extremely efficient. If we turn away from industrial agriculture, we’re going to need to invest a whole lot more labor in agriculture. Unless we can find a way to shift that cost onto somebody else (and, of course, there are huge moral problems with that), investing a whole lot more labor in agriculture is going to mean a whole lot of white collar workers becoming manual laborers getting dirty. It’s going to mean forfeiting life in a consumer society. It’s going to mean forfeiting vacations in Europe, life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical procedures, advanced telecommunications, convenient forms of transportation, forty hour work weeks, etc., etc. Insofar as we say we want to see the end of industrial agriculture without accepting these kinds of costs, I think we can only be preparing to commit fraud against the people we intend to push these costs onto.
There’s definitely an elitism to Salatin’s model that concerns me. He said somewhere that he wouldn’t even consider any farm enterprise that didn’t return at least thirty-some dollars per hour (I can’t remember exactly, only that it was very high). To me, that amounts to insisting on highly exploitive enterprises. The exploitation may not seem as bad, because he’s apparently selling mostly to rich people, but in any case he seems to be demanding his “fair” share of the proceeds of industrial exploitation of the world. Obviously, there’s something very un-egalitarian about insisting on getting at least thirty-five times the average global per capita income. And that un-egalitarian something must be industrialism.
I think the fundamental problem with industrial agriculture, etc. is a moral problem: the problem is selfishness, gluttony, laziness, greed, a lack of concern for our neighbors, vanity, etc. The industrial means of exploitation are here and they’re not going to go away. All we can do now is starve the system, i.e. not to feed industrialism through our selfishness, laziness, vanity, etc. That’s not a superficial fix.
September 5th, 2007 at 3:34 pm (#)
Great points, Eric. I think I agree with you.
October 31st, 2007 at 1:36 am (#)
I’m a grass-fed livestock farmer living near Joel Salatin and have visited his farm and bought his products many times. His new book “Everything I Want to Do is Illegal” does accurately reflect who Joel is: funny, blunt, knowledgeable (about some topics), charismatic, certainly a pioneer.
However, beware of making assumptions about Joel. The vast majority of his customers and fans are interested in organic foods, have an environmentalist bent, and are politically liberal. They may assume that Joel is like them — but be assured that he certainly is not. Joel hates all those things. He is a fundamentalist Christian creationist and his politics are somewhere to the right of Dick Cheney.
A few examples: He shoots any non-farm animal that comes on his property (including dogs, rare martens, and birds of prey), and does it with an enthusiasm that is disturbing for a so-called “poster boy for humane agriculture.” This “ecological farmer” opposes wilderness areas, endangered species protection, and farmland preservation and would like to see all land privatized to be milked for all its worth in the name of “property rights.” He compares animal-rights supporters and vegetarians to abortionists. And that’s just a few of the chapters!
While I agree with a number of his points — for example, that small-scale farmers should be exempt from regulations designed for corporate agribusinesses like Cargill or Tyson — his simplistic libertarianism is more appropriate for a college sophomore.
Yes, he pioneered pastured poultry and popularized grass-fed farming in general. The number of different profitable enterprises on his farm is remarkable. And anybody who can make a living farming these days should be congratulated. But this book shows him as a generic, naive libertarian wanna-be who has a persecution complex and a far higher opinion of himself than is deserved.
I highly recommend his other, more practical, books — “Salad Bar Beef” etc — instead of this angry right-wing rant. Let’s hope a more moderate farmer steps up as a spokesman for this critical paradigm shift in agriculture.