Joel Salatin - Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front

Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal

by
Joel Salatin

Copyright 2007 by Joel Salatin

Other books

by

Joel Salatin

Pastured Poultry Profit$
Salad Bar Beef
You Can Farm
Family Friendly Farming
Holy Cows & Hog Heaven

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or by special order from your local bookstore.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Thank you, lovely bride of 26 years, Teresa, for encouraging me and sharing this farm passion with me. Thank you for your unconditional support, your brainstorming, and your righteous indignation about the things that deserved contempt.

I thank my mother Lucille, daughter Rachel, son Daniel, and daughter-in-law Sheri for helping keep me sane in an insane world. Dad, I wish you could see this book. Youd love it. Thanks for all the political discussions growing up. This apple didnt fall far from the tree.

Thank you apprentices Nathan Vergin, Jordan Winters and Matt Rales for picking up the slack during the winter of 2006-7 so I could stay inside and plug away at this project.

Thank you friend and co-conspirator Jeff Ishee for your consistent desktop publishing miracle. And for being the quintessential encourager.

Thank you Deborah Stockton and Sheri for proofing the original manuscript. I wonder how many things we all missed.

Thank you Robin Leist for taking Rachels cover idea and really making it work. Its a beautiful job.

Thank you grandsons Travis (3) and Andrew (1) for lighting my life anew. May your world be better than mine.

Thank you Polyface patrons for sticking with us, for not caring about labels, inspections, or any of that other stuff. You make our world better. Bless you all.

FOREWORD

H istorians tell us that Talleyrand once told Napoleon, You can do anything with bayonets, Sire, except sit on them. In the language of the court this meant that obedience to the law ultimately depended on cooperation, not force.

In this marvelous little volume, farmer, journalist, philosopher Joel Salatin makes a good case for withholding that cooperation. Without once saying so, he seems to tell us, Run those solipsistic dweebs out of budget.

Salatins journal is truly a handbook for young people who have a passion for the farm. Like Prince Hal, Joel Salatin achieved a maturity capable of crowding his adversaries into the fatal flaw of contradiction.

He sucked up rural wisdom like a sponge, first from his progenitors, then by plugging in a rare commodity uncommon good sense. It told him that the greatest impediment to the resettlement of America was capitalization, a Gordian knot that not even a hostile bureaucracy has been able to unravel entirely.

Salatins capitalization was started by granddad, continued by dad, then by Joels own prudent upbringing. Capitalize on savings, expand on earnings, cut costs to the bone, then watch the doors fly open. Joel and his wife shared a two-apartment home with his parents for seven years to reach freedoms launching pad.

But theres much more to the story. In the real world, he found that power obsessed otherwise unemployable rent-a-cops, who treated farmers small-scale and large like fungus on the left small toe. Soon enough, these types became instant lawyers and judges, grammarians and Aristotelean logicians. Precedents meant nothing to these automatons with their every-ready Eichmann defense. The way these come-lately Javerts saw it, they were the law because they said so.

As Joel Salatin walks the reader through workaday reality, it becomes transparently obvious that the character Peter Stuyvesant in Knickerbocker Holiday was right: Governments, one and all, partake of the nature of rackets. They become partners in crime and ultimately annihilate the civilization over which they preside.

Sell a chicken, a pound of beef, fresh milk, and chances are youre performing an illegal act. I recall a TV program of a few years back in which the fellow was raising cattle, growing feed grains, and literally starving. You say, Theres something wrong with that picture. Why didnt he slaughter a beef cow and spare his wife the humiliation of standing in a food commodity line? Well, its illegal. He cant slaughter a critter on his own farm.

Everything is illegal now unless you pick up a pail of permits, licenses, certificates and nods of approval from a bureaucrat who doesnt know the difference between bleeding a chicken and condemning the meat to mediocrity by killing with electric shock.

Even those compromised by the IQ inhibitors in their junk food know that real food contamination takes place in CAFOs, huge slaughter houses, massive processing plants and warehouse storage. As a consequence, the federal and state governments single out small farmers, local food production and local sales facilities for compliance with draconian measures.

For a real lesson in social science and mendacity, read these pages. I am usually slow to anger, but honest to God, I fantasize about that legendary steer:

His far hind leg in Buffalo,

His front one in Tacoma,

His left rear half in Jacksonville,

His front one in Pomona.

And after that steer et all that hay

Wouldnt there be a fuss,

If what that steer did to Washington

Was what Washington did to us?

This much said, I continue to wonder aloud what stretch of the imagination caused organic growers to ask Washington for an Organic Standards Act. It had blunder written all over it from the start, and Joel Salatin explains why. He explains the NAIS oppression coming up, the war on fresh milk, on sound education in a word, on freedom.

I have recently been asked to name 100 books essential to a good eco-farming library. I would name Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal as numero uno. All the knowledge about cation exchange capacity, the carbon cycle, nitrogen uptake, and the rubrics of working with nature mean nothing unless one understands how the bureau people cold-deck him or her in the card game of life.

Cold-decked or not, there is power in numbers. Gandhi told us this. How can a few thousand Brits control millions unless we comply? We now propose to withhold compliance! The words are approximate; the thought is not.

Salatin suggests more than a wave of discontent. As consumers come to the aid of their suppliers of bio-correct food, numbers can discourage the bureaucrats and defuse their Eichmann excuses.

This book is only partially an angry testament. It is full of Mark Twain humor, and it surely contains a bit of Joseph Hellers Catch 22, and Milo Minderbinder to boot Milo, the crafty scofflaw who, like many bio-correct producers, elude their own Catch 22s.

Charles Walters

INTRODUCTION

B ut is it legal? This is by far and away the most common question I am asked after doing a workshop on local food systems and profitable farming principles. My blood boils every time that happens. Not at the fearful farmer, but at the system that thinks were a successful culture because we have more prisoners in America than farmers. To applaud ourselves for such a statistic is despicable.

Would-be local food farmers literally spend their days looking over their shoulders wondering what bureaucrat will assault them next. And yet, what could be more noble, more right, more good than neighbor-to-neighbor food sales?

If a little girl wants to make cornbread muffins and sell them to families in her church, why should the first question be but is it legal? As a culture, we should praise such self-motivated entrepreneurism. We should be presenting her with awards and writing stories about her creativity.