By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org. [This is the foreword to Joe Salatin's magisterial work Food Emancipation, newly published] Agronomy – a word no longer in much use – was at the core of the American experience from long before its Founding period through the early Progressive Era. We once had hands-on experience with the land and were shaped by everything about farm life. It's how we fed our families, neighbors, and communities. Today, we import most food, process it into edible chunks with a forever shelf life, shop at the superstore, chow down at restaurants, click to get food delivered, and grab takeout. As incredible as it seems, many people today haven't thought at all about food production, any more than driving gives us consciousness of car factories or wearing clothes makes us aware of cotton fields and robotic looms. When asked, people just assume food as we know it comes from some factory out there somewhere and who cares anyway? A laptop-class friend recently wrote, very innocently but with an air of intellectual arrogance, "How awful it would be if we still had to know how to farm!" My mind drifted back immediately to a few farm experiences I had as a kid, and the renewal of that experience recently at Joel Salatin's Polyface farm. Thank goodness someone remembers how to farm. The reason is that an entire way of life – a way toward health, well-being, and happiness – has been stolen from us. Not neglected, not outcompeted, but literally forced out of existence. This happened not by market forces as such, not by some impersonal mind of history, but by a labyrinth of regulations, mandates, taxes, controls, subsidies, and monopoly-creating controls, all conspiring to keep the way of life of our ancestors from returning. Food Emancipation Joel Salatin Buy on Amazon How and why this happened, and what to do about it right now, is the subject of this marvelous book by the farmer-philosopher Joel Salatin. It is revealing, thrilling, and destined to become a classic. It is a powerful manifesto on the production of food, a subject about which most people remain deeply confused, with real costs to health, liberty, and prosperity. It's gripping and wise, fun and serious, detailed and passionate, scientific and packed with stories, just the right combination to cause a true disruption in understanding, policy, and practice. You can grasp the essence in the fast-paced opening chapter, but don't stop there. The rest brims with profound insights, biography, history, and granular detail that will reshape how you see agriculture, government, big business, health, and technology. A few years ago, I was among the confused in thinking there were no real food issues that needed addressing, much less solving. The Covid era, with its seemingly endless layers of duplicity and propaganda, shattered many of my assumptions. I was ready to question everything. What if our lords and masters have done to food production what they have done to medicine and public health? Study a bit and one's worst fears are thus realized. The same class of people who managed the pandemic response have been managing our food supply for many decades. Today, I'm fully aligned with Salatin's vision, and I'm proud to call him my teacher. This book will likely challenge your own preconceptions just as radically. At its heart, Salatin calls for food emancipation: dismantling over a century of heavy regulation and cartelization that has throttled small farmers and traditional wisdom. What we face is not benign oversight but a destructive alliance between Big Government and Big Agribusiness, one that suppresses competition, diminishes quality, tramples on property rights and the right to trade, and robs consumers of knowledge and choice. If Salatin's agenda prevails, we won't just save existing small farms; we could spark thousands and millions of new ones, many right in our neighborhoods or on our own land. They would feed nations in healthier, more trad...
