Trump’s new Agriculture Department advisor: this ‘crazy farmer’?
“The American system considers itself a very successful culture because we have more people in prison than we have farmers. To feel smug about such statistics is utterly contemptible.”
Five years have passed, and I still remember the shock of first reading Joel Salatin’s *Everything I Want to Do is Illegal*. Anyone familiar with the American food movement, who has read Michael Pollan’s *The Omnivore’s Dilemma* or seen the documentary *Food, Inc.*, will likely be acquainted with this American farmer who mocks the agricultural regulatory system while slaughtering chickens for the camera. Recently, he was appointed as an advisor to the Department of Agriculture by the Trump administration.
I once believed that “moving away from agriculture” was the natural direction of development for most human societies. It wasn’t until 2019, following a health crisis and a miraculous journey of self-healing, that I realised agriculture is not only the foundation of health but also a sanctuary for the soul.
1
That day, in his speech, Salatin scathingly denounced the various ways the USDA suppresses and restricts small farmers, calling for them to take an active role in legislation. After the speech, I went to chat with him, introducing my background and education, and telling him how much his agricultural practices and writings had influenced me. He replied, “Your undergraduate degree was in English; mine was too.”
It struck me, and I said, “And Mr Wendell Berry also belongs to our ‘English lit club’.”
Anyone familiar with the American organic small-farming movement will be well-acquainted with the name and works of Mr Berry. Berry is an award-winning, deeply influential poet, novelist, and cultural critic. After graduating from the creative writing programme at Stanford University and teaching writing for a few years at New York University, he returned to his home in Kentucky to become a full-time farmer.
For me, the end of literature is agriculture. Literature is a concern for the human condition, and the “alienation” caused by the complete detachment of humans from agricultural production is the most pressing plight of modern people.
2
Should a farm owner wish to open their farm to student groups for paid visits as a way of generating income, then legally, the farm becomes a “theme park”. This requires applying for a theme park licence, submitting a mountain of applications, and installing a host of additional infrastructure.
The American technocrats have turned agricultural practice into an industrialised operation where every single link requires certification and regulation, yet each stage remains severely disconnected from the next. A smallholder who wishes to farm in the traditional way, using agricultural produce to build a local food and cultural system, finds themselves constantly under the judgment of agricultural bureaucrats.
Saladin points out that such bureaucrats typically “live in suburban residential areas, eat microwave meals, watch Hollywood reality shows, and hope the farm is as far from their home as possible”. Aside from enforcing legal clauses and regulations, they know nothing about farming—especially organic farming.
III
By the time I arrived at Nancy’s farm, the butcher, Ishmael, was already preparing. He had a large pot of water boiling to defeather the chickens, had set up a table for slaughtering and cutting at the edge of the woods bordering the pasture, and had tied a rope to the trunk of an oak tree.
Ishmael decided to start with my rabbits, taking the opportunity to teach me the craft. He picked a rabbit from the cardboard box, grasped its two hind legs, and gently lifted it up.
“If you let it hang upside down like this for a while, the blood will rush to its head, making the rabbit dizzy and stopping it from struggling,” Ishmael explained.
“It felt almost no pain,” Ishmael told me, “the key is for the blow to be forceful and precise.”
Ishmael’s method for the chickens was equally swift and precise; the bleeding, defeathering, gutting, eviscerating, and cutting were performed in one fluid motion. After rinsing the slaughtered chickens, he placed them in a large tub of ice water, while the offal and blood were put into a separate bag. Nancy would use these for composting, and within half a year, they would decompose into rich organic matter to serve as a base fertiliser for her vegetables and fruit.
In a large industrial slaughterhouse, such things would be discarded as factory waste and sent to landfills. Animal products that cannot be properly decomposed into organic matter are thus severed from life’s organic cycle, becoming an environmental burden through the emission of harmful gases.
It was an early summer afternoon. Texas was gradually heating up, but the shade beneath the great trees remained quite cool. From time to time, the lowing of Nancy’s cattle and sheep echoed around us. As I gathered the offal and fur Ishmael had left for me to take home, I watched him expertly slaughtering the chickens, humming a song to himself.
I suddenly felt that, compared to this natural and harmonious scene before me, those so-called “legal” slaughterhouses were utterly absurd: the pungent smell of disinfectant, slaughterhouse workers fully equipped with masks, livestock transported over long distances under immense psychological stress, the ruthless tension of the assembly line, the meager wages…
Four
I estimated that for those six hours of work on the farm, Ishmael earned around 400 USD (approximately 2,898 RMB). However, 2024 statistics show that the hourly wage for workers in large US slaughterhouses is only 18.97 USD; six hours of pay is roughly 825 RMB, less than a third of what Ishmael earned.
Yet, USDA regulations stipulate that livestock not slaughtered in an official slaughterhouse cannot be sold to the public. Consequently, butchers like Ishmael, who use simple tools for on-site slaughtering, can usually only provide part-time services for the domestic needs of surrounding small and medium-sized farmers; it is very difficult to make a full-time living solely through their butchery skills.
Establishing a USDA-certified slaughterhouse requires an investment ranging from several hundred thousand to several million dollars. This is a cost that an individual operator like Ishmael simply cannot bear.
In his book, he cites the example of a small slaughterhouse in Minnesota. According to regulations, the temperature of the meat must be measured and recorded every hour at every stage of processing. One day, an employee missed a single measurement and recording, and the USDA inspector ordered that the entire batch of meat be thrown away—even though temperature records from the hours both before and after showed that the meat had neither been contaminated nor spoiled. This cost the slaughterhouse 4,000 USD in one fell swoop, and small slaughterhouses struggle to survive such repeated enforcement actions and fines.
Later, a lawyer representing big food conglomerates and industry interests told Saladin that large slaughterhouses face similar harassment from USDA officials; their assembly lines also frequently suffer from oversights that violate USDA regulations and are no more “hygienic” than small slaughterhouses. The difference is that large slaughterhouses have deep pockets, allowing them to hire lawyers to negotiate and fight their way out of these issues.
This is the dilemma of modernisation facing all of humanity: in a modern world where slaughterhouses can only be owned and operated by international capital, the ancient profession of the butcher has vanished, replaced by workers on a slaughterhouse assembly line.
In these plants, slaughtering has become a mechanical operation dominated by the need to fill out paperwork to satisfy bureaucratic inspections. The butchery trade, where one could find individual dignity and meaning in their labour, no longer exists; there are only slaughterhouse workers earning minimum wage on a production line.
Five
Small communities where farmers, artisans, butchers, cooks, and millers each performed their roles and served one another have crumbled. In a world where every industry is industrialised and turned into a chain, we are all just assembly line workers to varying degrees. The industrialisation of the world over the past few centuries has given me a profound understanding of the absurd modernity described by Kafka.
Over the past few years, I have recommended Saladin’s “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal” to every new friend I make. It is a comprehensive and ruthless critique of the current US agricultural system by a farmer who has been engaged in organic agriculture for over half a century, and it serves as a warning to all civilisations.
In Mr. Berry’s poem “Manifesto: Liberation Front of the Indignant Farmer”, there is a line: “Praise ignorance, for that which mankind has not yet encountered has not yet been destroyed.”
Saladin’s book suffices to demonstrate that whatever has not yet been standardised has not yet been destroyed.
Editor: Zen