Everything I want to do is illegal...

[milktree]

by Joel Salatin

Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal’s office. And it doesn’t stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of governmnet agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought processs. ON-FARM PROCESSING I want to dress my beef and pork on the farm where I’ve coddled and raised it. But zoning laws prohibit slaughterhouses on agricultural land. For crying out loud, what makes more holistic sense than to put abattoirs where the animals are? But no, in the wisdom of Western disconnected thinking, abattoirs are massive centralized facilities visited daily by a steady stream of tractor trailers and illegal alien workers. But what about dressing a couple of animals a year in the backyard? How can that be compared to a ConAgra or Tyson facility? In the eyes of the government, the two are one and the same. Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor.

read the rest, it's worth it:

http://beginningfarmers.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/salatin_illegal.pdf

He goes on to decry the system that makes it illegal for kids to learn anything in the real world, impossible to sell anything to anyone without overwhelming paperwork, impossible to worth with your neighbors to sell products, and impossible to even sell your own stuff because of competing, contradictory laws and regulations.

I dare you to argue against what he's saying.