I'm sorry, Joel. I couldn't finish this. Heck, I could barely get into it.

This actually IS a good primer on the war in the countryside that's being waged between local producers and government. If you can get past the tone: Joel alternates between teacher, preachy and screechy.

Make no mistake: there IS a war being fought over food production and the deck is stacked in favour of large producers, feed lot cattle, battery cage chickens and massive hog operations. You'd think that properly cared for, healthy feed animals would be a no-brainer. But, in a lot of cases, it's either prohibitively expensive, ridiculously difficult or simply illegal to sell you the healthy, quality food that you need.

Joel is a pioneer in the local food movement and I support everything he does. I just couldn't read this book. Mainly because I'm well aware of everything he talks about. That said, for someone just getting interested in the subject, it's worth wading through. ( )

Preachy, poorly written. ( )

The title of this book can be off putting, but the material is excellent. It is a discussion of the constant and pervasive intrusion of government into our lives, with particular focus on how it affects local farmers.

What is illustrated quite clearly is that any threat or nuisance is used as an excuse to clamp down and build distrust of our food sources, especially those produced by local sources, which (with a little thought and reasoning) are the most likely to be very safe. The local farmers reputation is on the line for everything they do, and especially when they are accused of something - the public will assume the worst, even when the facts are on their side.

As Salatin says, many of the bureaucrats assume that they are preventing all sorts of mischief. I tend to agree with Salatin's assertions that local grown food methods are proven over millennia, and if they were unsafe, they would have killed us off long ago.

Our technological innovations have led us to the false belief that everything is better with complexity and mechanization.

Salatin gives us many suggestions of what we can do to encourage local grown food which will be safer, more nutritious, humane to animals, and a great economic development.

This book has changed the way I view my own food consumption, and the way I look at the agrarian industries and local farmers. ( )

Okay, ignore the racism, misogyny, xenophobia, etc, and this is a really good book. The ideas pertaining strictly to agriculture are wonderful. If I could rewrite it to get rid of the former list of issues, it would be my bible. As such, the notes I took will have to do. ( )

Preachy, poorly written. ( )

i am surprised how much i liked this book. i don't know why i never got tired of his rants. maybe because i agreed with 90% of them. but usually books that are written in such a confrontational style end up making me annoyed at the author and finding ways to disagree with every point they make, no matter how much i really agree with it. i guess i was more impressed by the honesty of his style than i was annoyed by self-righteousness or one-sidedness. it didn't even annoy me too much when he went off on his rants about abortion, civil rights, labor laws, etc. even though i didn't agree with his stances on these issues, somehow i understood where he was coming from and i really appreciated his honesty, even though a lot of his audience probably disagrees with him on these issues.

and of course i'm totally into all of his ideas of local food and trusting and knowing the people that grow your food. and relying on neighbors. its really sad how much of what he wants to do is illegal. i mean every chapter was just another situation where he was trying to provide his customers with healthy food, and for some reason, it was illegal. he kind of convinced me of this libertarian stuff. but only in regards to food. i mean i guess a lot of his libertarian thoughts would work in a perfect world. i actually really liked his parts about child labor and letting kids work. but only becuase i've seen kids work on a farm, and i know they can do it, and i think its good for them. well now i'm just going on an on about not much at all.

this was a really good book, but i would recommend it if you are into local food systems and don't get easily annoyed by a lot of rants about the evils of bureacracy and government involvement. ( )

This book makes me want to be a farmer! Or, then again, maybe not... I am convinced more than ever that we have passed a point of no return in this country; we have gotten so big and bloated with bureaucracy and regulation that we are stifling innovation, initiative, and freedom. Joel makes a good case for returning to the roots of our country, our original values and principles, but also strikes a pessimistic, but realistic, note when he states that he is not optimistic about our future or about winning.

What can I do? Shop at the Farmer’s Market, buy locally, get to know neighborhood farmers; perhaps learn to collect firewood, even keep chickens? ( )

Salatin is the owner of Polyface Farms, "the farm of many faces," in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. He was featured in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and stole the show as the big-hatted farmer in Farmageddon.

He is quite a character. He describes himself as a "Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist" and pulls no punches when explaining his views on how farming should be done and people fed. Chapter by chapter, he explains how one-size-fits-all government regulations designed for large-scale, industrial, monoculture agriculture unfairly limit small farmers trying to serve local communities by providing a variety of healthy food, humanely produced.

Full review posted on Rose City Reader. ( )

Mr Salatin obviously has a good sense of humor, self-control, and patience. I would have smacked someone before I had a chance to write a book! Another book to frustrate me about the politics of government and business as it pertains to food and our health. ( )

This is a book that would make Robert Heinlein rolled over in his grave, yet he would completely agree with it. It is a book to make me, the mildly rebellious anti-authority person I am, become a raving Libertarian. It also will make you think twice, if not three times, before you buy meat at the grocery store again.
The author of this book is a farmer in Virginia. He is trying to run a small farm and sell the products from his farm. Most of the things he wants to do, sell eggs, fresh chicken and other meat, raw milk, are, in one way or another, illegal. The laws that in theory were set up to "protect" are just promoting the industrialization of food production. This month, with a mass hysteria over peanut products, we can see how safe the industry is. Unfortunately the result will be more regulation, resulting in more centralization and more areas where a large company can ignore the regulators and small ones can't get in at all.
The best part of this book is that the author is not writing a theoretical tract. He is no animal rights activist who has never seen animals in the wild, he is not a professor, years from getting mud on his shoes, he is a farmer first. He has become an activist only because of the years of fighting the system.
While the details of how ridiculous the regulations involving the production of food were, the parts of the book that really got to me were the places he discusses the ideology behind the regulations. For example:

One of my icons, Wendell Berry, makes the excellent point in his classic The Unsettling of America that ultimately the rabid environmentalist and the rabid factory farmer are cut from the same cloth: they both idolize a landscape devoid of humans. Ultimately they both hate people. . . Asked to supply a picture of the ideal landscape, neither group will include humans in the portrait.

Or this point,

As these types of laws proliferate, all of us find fewer and fewer spots of autonomy left. Being able to make self-directed decisions is critical for expressing our humanness. Not that any individual expression is okay. . . but these basic moral codes are a far cry from the kind of micro-behavioural codes emanating from today's politicians. The Romans had a saying that the better the government, the fewer the laws.

or this one,

Teddy Roosevelt used to say that nothing in government happens by accident. There is always an agenda. And especially today, the agenda usually involves more power and money to large corporate and bureaucratic interests with a parallel disempowering and impoverishing of smaller public and private entities.

I especially like that last paragraph, as he neatly skewers both the Left and the Right. This is a man who has thought deeply about our political process and the practical applications of it. All he wants to do is feed his neighbors and his family, the government will not allow it. While I think that a part of his problem is living in the East, even in the West more kneejerk reaction laws are passed every year. If I had a lot of money, I would buy this book for every person I know, as it is, get this from the library and read it, remember it when election time comes around and every time you have to deal with any sort of government bureaucracy. ( )