Trump’s Newly Appointed USDA Advisor Turns Out to Be This “Mad Farmer”?
“The American system considers itself a highly successful culture because we have more people in prison than farmers. To feel smug about such a statistic is utterly despicable.”
Five years have passed, and I still remember the shock of reading Joel Salatin’s Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal for the first time. Readers familiar with the American food movement—those who have read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma or watched the documentary Food, Inc.—will certainly recognise this American farmer who, chicken in hand, skewered the agricultural regulatory system to camera. Recently, he was appointed by the Trump administration as an advisor to the Department of Agriculture.
I, too, once believed that “leaving agriculture” should be the direction of development for most human societies. It was not until 2019, through a health crisis and a miraculous journey of self-healing, that I came to realise: agriculture is not only the foundation of health but also a place where the soul can find its rest.
One
That day, Salatin thundered in his speech against the US Department of Agriculture’s suppression of and restrictions on smallholder farmers, urging them to take an active part in the legislative process. After the talk, I went over to chat with him, introducing my background and education, and telling him how profoundly his farming practices and agricultural writings had influenced me. He said: “You studied English lit at undergrad, didn’t you? So did I.”
A flash of inspiration struck me. I said: “And Mr Wendell Berry—he’s a member of our English lit club, too.”
Anyone well-versed in the American organic smallholder farming movement would be familiar with Mr Berry’s name and writings. Berry is an award-winning, influential poet, novelist, and cultural critic. He graduated from Stanford University’s creative writing programme, and after teaching writing at New York University for several years, he returned to his hometown in Kentucky to become a full-time farmer.
For me, the end of literature is agriculture. Literature is a care for the human condition, and the “alienation” wrought by humanity’s complete severance from the act of agricultural production is the plight most worthy of our care in the modern world.
Two
If a farmer wishes to open the farm to school groups for ticketed tours, thereby generating additional income, then in the eyes of the law the farm becomes a “theme park”, requiring a theme-park licence, yet more applications, and yet more infrastructure.
American technocrats have turned every single stage of farming practice into an industrialised operation requiring permits and oversight at each step, with severe disconnection from the next. A smallholder farmer who simply wants to farm in the traditional manner, to build a local food and culture system from their produce, finds themselves perpetually subject to the judgment of agricultural bureaucrats.
Salatin points out that such agricultural bureaucrats typically “live in suburban housing estates, eat microwave meals, watch Hollywood reality shows, and hope the nearest farm is as far from their home as possible”—knowing nothing about agriculture, especially organic agriculture, beyond enforcing legal provisions and regulations.
Three
By the time I arrived at Nancy’s farm, Ishmael the butcher was already making preparations. He had set a large pot of water to boil for plucking the chickens, put up a table at the edge of the pasture beneath the trees for the slaughter and cutting, and tied a rope around the trunk of an oak.
Ishmael decided to start with my rabbits, using the opportunity to teach me as he went. He reached into the cardboard box, picked out a rabbit, gripped it by both hind legs, and gently lifted it up.
“Just let it hang upside down like this for a moment—the blood rushes to the rabbit’s head, it gets dizzy, and it stops struggling,” Ishmael told me.
“It barely felt any pain at all,” Ishmael told me. “The key is that the blow has to be forceful and accurate.”
Ishmael’s method for the chickens was equally swift and precise—bleeding, plucking, gutting, removing the innards, and cutting, all in one seamless motion. He rinsed the dressed chickens and placed them in a large bucket of iced water, then put the offal and blood into a separate bag. All of this Nancy would compost, and within half a year it would break down into rich organic matter to serve as base fertiliser for growing fruit and vegetables.
At a large abattoir, all of it would simply be discarded as factory waste and sent to landfill. Animal products that cannot be properly returned to the soil as organic matter are thus severed from life’s natural cycle, becoming an environmental burden that emits harmful gases.
It was an early summer afternoon, and Texas was already growing hot, but the shade beneath the big trees was pleasantly cool. The occasional lowing and bleating of Nancy’s cattle and sheep drifted in from all around. I was tidying up the offal and pelts Ishmael had left for me to take home, watching him work through the chickens with practised ease, humming a tune as he went.
It struck me suddenly how absurd those so-called “legal” abattoirs were next to this natural, harmonious scene before me: the acrid stink of disinfectant, slaughterhouse workers masked and clad in full protective gear, livestock and animals arriving after long-haul transport under enormous psychological stress, the relentless tension of production-line work, the paltry wages…
Four
I did some rough arithmetic: Ishmael had worked on the farm for six hours that day, earning around $400 (approximately RMB 2,898). Meanwhile, 2024 statistics show that workers at large US abattoirs earn a mere $18.97 an hour—six hours’ pay comes to roughly RMB 825, less than a third of what Ishmael took home.
But US Department of Agriculture regulations stipulate that livestock slaughtered outside a licensed abattoir cannot be sold to the public. So a butcher like Ishmael, who works with simple tools and travels from farm to farm, can usually only take on part-time work meeting the household needs of small and mid-sized farmers nearby, and finds it very hard to make a full-time living from his craft.
An abattoir certified by the US Department of Agriculture requires an investment of anywhere from several hundred thousand to several million dollars—far beyond what an independent tradesperson like Ishmael can afford.
In his book he cites the example of a small abattoir in Minnesota. The regulations require that, at every stage of meat handling, the abattoir must take and record the meat’s temperature every hour. One day, an employee missed one reading and entry, and a USDA inspector ordered the entire batch of meat to be discarded—despite the temperature records for the hours before and after showing that the meat had been neither contaminated nor spoiled. That single incident cost the abattoir $4,000 in one blow, and small abattoirs can hardly survive one enforcement action and fine after another.
Later, a lawyer representing the interests of major food corporations and industry told Salatin that large abattoirs are just as harassed by USDA officials, and that the production lines at large abattoirs are just as riddled with oversights that breach USDA regulations—no more “hygienic” than a small one. The difference is that large abattoirs have deep pockets and can afford lawyers to negotiate and fight back.
This is the modern predicament facing all of humanity: in a world where even abattoirs can only be owned and run by international capital, the ancient craft of the butcher has vanished, replaced by workers on production lines.
Inside an abattoir, slaughter has become a mechanical grind of filling in paperwork to satisfy bureaucratic inspections. The butcher’s trade—where a person could find individual dignity and meaning in their labour—no longer exists. There are only abattoir workers on the line, earning minimum wage.
Five
The small communities where farmers, craftspeople, butchers, cooks, and millers each did their own work, serving one another, have crumbled to dust. In a world where every industry has become factoryised and chain-run, we are all just production-line workers of varying degrees. The industrialisation of the world over the past few centuries has made me grasp, deeply, the absurdity of modernity that Kafka wrote about.
In recent years, I have recommended Salatin’s Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal to every new friend I have made. It is a comprehensive, ruthless indictment of America’s current agricultural system by a farmer who has practised organic farming for more than half a century—and a warning to all civilisation.
A line from Mr Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” reads: “Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.”
Salatin’s book makes the same case: what has not yet been regulated has not yet been destroyed.
Edited by: Zeyin