Old Man Hayek Had a Farm

[ROB GIBBSEN]

I’ve now read all of Joel Salatin’s book on the politics of farming, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front. I enjoyed it a great deal. One sentence review: This book could make a libertarian out of me . . .


The method of the book is anecdotal, the tone informal. The book has been indifferently proofread and about halfway through the font size and spacing changes completely. On the other hand, Salatin writes well enough that the casual editing doesn’t sabotage his meaning. Salatin covers just about everything from raw milk to bird flu, in discrete, subject-specific chapters. It adds up to an eyewitness account of Regulatory Capture at War, a Shenandoah-Valley repertory performance of Gabriel Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism. In Salatin’s telling, the entire agricultural and food safety apparatus exists to serve and sponsor industrialized food production, not just imposing large fixed costs a small producer can’t amortize, but scapegoating small producers for every conceivable risk. According to the federal government, for instance, raising chickens outdoors in plentiful space is a cause of virulent bird flu, not its solution. The whole apparatus of the USDA, the state extension services and the ag departments of land-grant colleges exist to encourage corporations to confine cows in their own $#!% while feeding them the $#!% of chickens and smoothing the whole repulsive process over with the public.

Salatin is very much a right-libertarian in most ways, and there are passages in the book that will challenge those of us to his left, and other passages that will just annoy more liberal readers. If you want to peg him, think of him as mostly a Ron Paul/lewrockwell.com type, against abortion, regulations, the minimum wage, drug prohibition and empire-building - only Salatin also cares about carbon sequestration. Lest I give you the wrong impression, I should state: Salatin’s focus really is on the politics of foodshed agriculture, with the less connected topics strictly subsidiary; also, Salatin is entitled to his own views.

Salatin’s maximal political program won’t fly with most lefties, but Greens and others who want to create space for alternatives to federally subsidized animal torture and soil depletion should think hard about how to help the Salatins of the world flourish. A set of points from his more modest, focused platform late in the book seems intriguing: allow the two sides in direct producer-consumer food transactions to opt out of the regulatory structure on an individual basis. If I place more trust in the chickens of Julie at the Silver Spring Farmer’s Market than in Tyson Foods because Julie has to look me in the eye on Saturday morning and knows I’ll be back next week while Tyson Foods can buy every politician that seems worth having, then I can accept the risk of assuring my own food safety, and if Julie would finds it less burdensome to encourage visitors to her farm and processing shed than entangling herself in the regulatory apparatus she can accept the risk that her choice will scare away buyers.

There are all kinds of reasons why leftists would not want to open this opt-out to me and Con-Agra. Leftists who read Salatin will wonder how much the regulatory state is really protecting anyone from Con-Agra, mind you. (Salatin points out that if you swab his chickens and chickens from confinement operations, the cell cultures of his swabs show orders of magnitude fewer e. coli bacteria per unit. But the USDA doesn’t determine safety by testing for bacteria. It determines safety by enforcing paperwork compliance.) But I’m not here to argue on behalf of Con-Agra. We can start with educated consumers and willing small farmers and see how that goes.

http://www.theartofthepossible.net/2008 ... ad-a-farm/

[ChelC]

I can relate to the title, everything I want to do is illegal too. And yet, none of them are immoral.

[Jenny]

I can relate to the title, everything I want to do is illegal too. And yet, none of them are immoral.

Well I just have to ask what illegal things do you want to do?