I recently found this cool little four page article by an organic farmer named Joel Salatin.  According to Wikipedia he describes himself as a Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer.  Sounds like my kinda guy.  He is apparently featured prominently in the book The Omnivores Delima which a coworker recommended to me as he thought it would be “right up my line”.

If you read the article you can learn how…

• the government is biased towards big players in the farm industry.
• our societal fear of freedom prevents people from experimenting in environmentally sustainable living.
• legally raising and selling meat is damn near impossible for the small farmer.
• learning how to be a small time farmer as a youth is also almost impossible.

It’s particularly interesting as I was recently discussing with bile and laur the viability of local small-scale agriculture.  The conclusion was that it wasn’t worth it.  I think many of the possible benefits of local small-scale agriculture are being actively destroyed by over-regulation.

Here is my argument (and Salatin’s) in a nut shell:

If people want to live a certain way which actually has less impact on others than all our current methods of living, why stop them?

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