I'm a Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic. It's a humorous way for me to describe that I'm not stereotypical.
Too often, parents whose children express an interest in farming squelch it because they envision dirt, dust, poverty, and hermit living. But great stories come out of great farming.
There's a big difference between industrializing production of tractors and industrializing production of food. We like technology, but we really like technology that allows us to do better what nature does itself.
Our land-healing ministry really is about cultivating relationships: between the people, the loving stewards, and the ecology of a place, what I call the environmental umbilical that we're nurturing here.
The shorter the chain between raw food and fork, the fresher it is and the more transparent the system is.
No civilization on the brink of collapse has ever changed fast enough to avert collapse.
If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing poorly first.
We only want autonomous collaborators that are incentivized to make or break their own income.
I'm incredibly optimistic about what individuals can do. We have technology that our grandparents would have given their eye teeth for.
Our main deal is pastured livestock. So we have beef cattle, pigs, turkeys, laying chickens, meat chickens, rabbit, lamb and ducks - egg-layer ducks.
We believe that the farm should be building 'forgiveness' into the ecosystem. What does that mean? That a more forgiving ecosystem is one that can better handle drought, flood, disease, pestilence.
God doesn't just miraculously and physically intervene in the whole process, so if I just go and drop a bunch of chemicals and herbicides that leach into the groundwater, I can pray all day to keep my child healthy, but if the herbicides gone into the groundwater come up my well, my child's going to drink that water.
Our biggest fear is that 'Food, Inc.' will move heavy-handed food-safety regulations forward.
From my earliest memories, I loved the farm. My grandfather was a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine and had a huge, well kept garden with an octagonal chicken house in the corner.
An orchard can grow pastured poultry underneath. A beef cattle or sheep farm can run pastured poultry behind the herbivores, like the egret on the rhino's nose.
My imperative is to seek every moment and to live so God is in control.
Know you food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen.
In general, we run the farm like a business instead of a welfare recipient, and we adhere to historically-validated patterns.
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.
Ecology should be object lessons that the world sees, that explains in a visceral, physical way, the attributes of God.
We would be a much healthier culture if the government had never told us how to eat.
Oh, my goodness, when we came to the farm in 1961, I mean, it wouldn't even support one salary.
Outrageous behavior, also known as the lunatic fringe, is the seed bed of innovation and creativity.
The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker have been around a lot longer than supermarkets and Wal-Mart.
I didn't really see a way to make a living on the farm. I always loved writing. I was the guy who won the D.A.R. essay contest and things like that, and it was the era of Watergate, and I decided I would be the next Woodward and Bernstein, and then retire to the farm.
We will never sell or have an IPO. What that does is suddenly flushes you with cash. It makes you now work for a group of stockholders, who, again, put pressure and temptations on your true-blueness.
We control health and pathogenicity by complex multi-speciated relationships through symbiosis and synergy. Portable shelters for livestock, along with electric fencing, insure hygienic and sanitary housing and lounging areas, not to mention clean air, sunshine, and exercise.
We've got this cultural mentality that you've got to be an idiot to be a farmer.
Industrial agriculture, because it depends on standardization, has bombarded us with the message that all pork is pork, all chicken is chicken, eggs eggs, even though we all know that can't really be true.
Despite all the hype about local or green food, the single biggest impediment to wider adoption is not research, programs, organizations, or networking. It is the demonizing and criminalizing of virtually all indigenous and heritage-based food practices.
I need people - theatrics and schmoozing and storytelling are part of my talent.
A pig has a plow on the end of its nose because it does meaningful work with it. It is built to dig and create soil disturbance, something it can't do in a concentrated feeding environment. The omnivore has historically been a salvage operation for food scraps around the homestead.
We can't begin to feed ourselves with a local-centric system if we lock up land in royal manor models.
Throughout high school, I peddled my eggs, had a vendor stand at the local curb market - precursor to today's farmers' markets - and competed in 4-H contests and interscholastic debate.
Unfortunately in the U.S., the courts have pretty much sided with the GMO lobby and suggesting that a farmer has no rights to be protected from GMO contamination.
The cows shorten the grass, and the chickens eat the fly larvae and sanitize the pastures. This is a symbiotic relation.
I don't have money. Monsanto has money.
Nobody trusts the industrial food system to give them good food.
I am libertarian, and Americans generally are, more than, say, Canadians and Australians.
Gluten intolerance and celiac disease are direct results of American agriculture policy and, specifically, the government's wading into the food arena.
Our motto is we respect and honour the pigness of the pig and the chickenness of the chicken. That means not confining them in a house with hundreds of others.
I see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture.
Choose to patronise your local farmers; as eaters, you need to demand a different type of food. Appreciate the pigginess of the pig.
The pig is not just pork chops and bacon and ham to us. The pig is a co-laborer in this great land-healing ministry.
Frankly, any city person who doesn't think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer doesn't deserve my special food.
The linear, single species idea of farming is an assault on ecological function. Something's going to break down in that system - anything from soil structure, in economics... but where to start is with true ecological function.
You wanna get diarrhoea? Eat industrial food.
What we're looking at is God's design, nature's template, and using that as a pattern to cut around and lay it down on a domestic model to duplicate that pattern that we see in nature.
'Organic' doesn't mean what people think it means.
