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.

You wanna get diarrhoea? Eat industrial food.

I always said if I could figure out a way to grow Kleenex and toilet paper on trees, we could pull the plug on society.

We can move water easily with plastic pipes. We can move shade around with nursery cloth like a tinker toy for animals and plants. Yet we have developed this necessity to grow food with chemical fertiliser because we have forgotten the magic of manure.

If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing poorly first.

We've got this cultural mentality that you've got to be an idiot to be a farmer.

In general, we run the farm like a business instead of a welfare recipient, and we adhere to historically-validated patterns.

Our culture doesn't ask about preserving the essence of pig; it just asks how can we grow them faster, fatter, bigger, and cheaper. We know that's not a noble goal.

Oh, my goodness, when we came to the farm in 1961, I mean, it wouldn't even support one salary.

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 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.

The farmers are older; they are under financial stress to produce more margins, yet they keep getting less.

We only want autonomous collaborators that are incentivized to make or break their own income.

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.

We need to respect the fact that cows are herbivores, and that does not mean feeding them corn and chicken manure.

I inherited Mom's verbal skills, and participated in forensics and essay contests in elementary school - and won every essay contest I ever entered.

Gluten intolerance and celiac disease are direct results of American agriculture policy and, specifically, the government's wading into the food arena.

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.

It really disturbs me that the environmental movement has been co-opted by creation-worshippers instead of being encouraged by the Creator-worshippers.

Land degradation did not start with chemical agriculture. But chemical agriculture offered new tools for annihilation.

We've created a tenfold core value protocol to make sure that we don't fall into an 'empire' attitude.

There's a short chain between field and fork, and the shorter that chain is - the fresher, the more transparent that system is - the less chance there is of anything from bio-terrorism to pathogenicity to spoilage.

From zoning to labor to food safety to insurance, local food systems daily face a phalanx of regulatory hurdles designed and implemented to police industrial food models but which prejudicially wipe out the antidote: appropriate scaled local food systems.

I think it's important to understand that in the big historical context of things, there has been land degradation from civilisation since the beginning of history. I mean, the Rajputana desert in India is a manmade desert caused by overgrazing.

My imperative is to seek every moment and to live so God is in control.

Get in your kitchens, buy unprocessed foods, turn off the TV, and prepare your own foods. This is liberating.

Nobody trusts the industrial food system to give them good food.

'Organic' doesn't mean what people think it means.

I see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture.

The shorter the chain between raw food and fork, the fresher it is and the more transparent the system is.

I'm a Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic. It's a humorous way for me to describe that I'm not stereotypical.

I need people - theatrics and schmoozing and storytelling are part of my talent.

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.

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.

It's very common to implement mob grazing and double your production for a per-acre capitalisation investment... because it doesn't take any more corraling, no more electricity, rent, machinery or labour to double your production on an existing place.

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.

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 would be a much healthier culture if the government had never told us how to eat.

Know you food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen. Start building up your larder! We don't even use that term any more.

We're scared to death to try new things because we think we have to get it right the first time.

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.

We can't begin to feed ourselves with a local-centric system if we lock up land in royal manor models.

New Zealand has incredible global recognition for grass-fed livestock.

Instead of buying into the global agenda, which is using food as just industrial stuff, we would say we view food as biological, a living thing, that belongs in smaller communities.

I want people to think through issues. I'm just tired of blind alignment.

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.

Nature moves towards balance.

Think of all the mesquite in Texas, the pinyon pines, the acorns in Appalachia, every place has the possibility of mass production. It's an infrastructural system so nestled in ecology, it's a more beautiful ecology.

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.

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.