Trump’s Newly Appointed Department of Agriculture Adviser Turns Out to Be This “Mad Farmer”?
“The American system prides itself on being a highly successful culture because we keep more people locked up than we have farmers. To feel smug about such a statistic is utterly contemptible.”
Five years on, I still vividly recall the shock I felt when I first read Joel Salatin’s *Everything I Raise Is Illegal*. Readers familiar with the American food movement, who have read Michael Pollan’s *The Omnivore’s Dilemma* or watched the documentary *Food, Inc.*, will hardly be strangers to this American farmer, widely known for slaughtering a chicken on camera whilst mocking the agricultural regulatory system. Most recently, he has been appointed as an advisor to the Department of Agriculture by the Trump administration.
I too once assumed that moving away from farming ought to be the natural trajectory for human society. Yet in 2019, a personal health crisis and a remarkable journey of self-healing led me to a different realisation: agriculture is not merely the foundation of physical wellbeing, but also a sanctuary for the mind and spirit.
I
Later that day, Salatin lambasted the USDA for its relentless marginalisation and restrictions on smallholders, urging them to play an active part in the legislative process. After the talk, I approached him for a chat, shared details of my background and education, and told him how deeply his farming practices and writings had influenced me. He replied, “You studied English for your undergraduate degree? So did I.”
It suddenly struck me. “And Mr Wendell Berry,” I said. “He belongs to our English lit club, too.”
Anyone familiar with the American organic smallholder movement would instantly recognise Mr Berry’s name and work. A highly decorated and profoundly influential poet, novelist, and cultural critic, Berry has received numerous awards. After graduating from Stanford University’s Creative Writing Programme and teaching writing at New York University for a few years, he returned to his native Kentucky to become a full-time farmer.
To me, the culmination of literature is agriculture. Literature is a sustained reflection on the human condition; and the “alienation” resulting from humanity’s complete detachment from agricultural labour constitutes the most pressing dilemma facing modern and contemporary society.
II
Should a farmer open the farm to paying student groups to generate supplementary income, it legally becomes a “theme park”. This triggers a requirement for theme-park licensing, a deluge of paperwork, and further infrastructure investments.
American technocrats have transformed agricultural practice into a fragmented, industrialised operation where every stage demands separate licensing and oversight. For a smallholder who wishes to farm using traditional methods and cultivate a local food and cultural system through their produce, every move subjects them to trial by the agricultural bureaucracy.
As Salatin observes, these agricultural bureaucrats typically “live in suburban developments, eat microwave meals, watch Hollywood reality shows, and hope their farms are as far away from their homes as possible”. Beyond enforcing statutes and regulations, they know virtually nothing about agriculture—organic farming, in particular.
Three
By the time I arrived at Nancy’s farm, the butcher, Ishmael, was already setting up. He had a large pot of water heating to scald the chickens for plucking, had set up a table among the trees at the edge of the pasture for slaughter and cutting, and had tied a rope to the trunk of an oak tree.
Ishmael decided to start with my rabbits, using the opportunity to show me the process. He picked a rabbit from the cardboard box, grasped its hind legs, and lifted it gently into the air.
“If you hang it upside down like this for a moment, the blood will pool in its head. It’ll become dizzy and stop struggling,” Ishmael told me.
“It felt barely any pain,” Ishmael said to me. “The key is that the strike has to be forceful and precise.”
His technique with the chickens was just as swift and precise. Bleeding, plucking, eviscerating, removing the offal, and cutting were all executed in one fluid motion. He rinsed the dressed birds and placed them into a large bucket of ice water. The offal and blood went into another bag; Nancy would take these to the compost pile, where, in under six months, they would break down into rich organic matter to serve as a base fertiliser for her vegetables and fruit.
At a large-scale abattoir, this material would simply be discarded as industrial waste and sent to landfill. Animal by-products that aren’t properly broken down into organic matter are thus removed from the natural cycle of life, becoming an environmental burden that emits harmful gases.
It was a midsummer afternoon. Texas was already growing hot, but the shade beneath a few large trees provided welcome relief. The occasional lowing of Nancy’s cattle and sheep drifted through the air. As I gathered the offal and skins Ishmael had left for me to take home, I watched him skilfully process the chickens while humming a tune.
Suddenly, compared to the harmonious scene before me, those so-called “legal” slaughterhouses seemed utterly absurd: the pungent sting of disinfectant, workers clad in full protective gear, livestock arriving after long transports and reeling from immense stress, the relentless and tense rhythm of the assembly line, meagre wages…
Four
I did a rough calculation: spending six hours working at the farm that day would earn Ishmael around $400 (approximately ¥2,898). By contrast, 2024 statistics show that workers in large US slaughterhouses earn just $18.97 an hour. Six hours’ wages would amount to roughly ¥825—less than a third of what Ishmael takes home.
However, USDA regulations dictate that livestock not slaughtered in approved facilities cannot be sold to the public. Consequently, mobile butchers like Ishmael, who use basic tools to slaughter on-site, typically only take on part-time work to meet the household needs of nearby small- to medium-sized farms. It is exceedingly difficult to make a full-time living from mobile butchery alone.
Establishing a USDA-certified slaughterhouse requires a capital investment ranging from several hundred thousand to several million US dollars. This is simply beyond the reach of independent operators like Ishmael.
He cites the example of a small slaughterhouse in Minnesota. Regulations require that meat temperatures be measured and recorded every hour at every stage of processing. On one occasion, an employee missed a single reading, and a USDA inspector ordered the entire batch discarded, even though temperature logs from hours before and after showed no contamination or spoilage. This single oversight cost the facility $4,000. Small slaughterhouses struggle to survive such repeated enforcement actions and fines.
Later, a lawyer representing major food conglomerates and industry interests told Salatin that large slaughterhouses face the same harassment from USDA officials. Lapses in compliance with USDA regulations happen frequently on large-scale assembly lines too, making them no “cleaner” than small operations. The difference is that large facilities have deep pockets to hire lawyers to negotiate and push back..
This is the modern dilemma facing all of us: in a world where slaughterhouses can only be owned and operated by large-scale capital, the ancient trade of butchery has vanished, replaced by assembly-line workers in industrial plants.
Inside these facilities, slaughter has become a mechanical exercise filled with bureaucratic paperwork to satisfy regulatory inspections. The butchery trade, where practitioners once found personal dignity and meaning in their craft, no longer exists; there are only assembly-line workers earning minimum wage.
Five
The tight-knit communities where farmers, artisans, butchers, cooks, and millers each played their part to serve one another have crumbled. In a world where every industry has become factory-run and chain-owned, we are all just assembly-line workers at different levels. The industrialisation of the world over the past few centuries has given me a profound understanding of the absurd modernity depicted by Kafka.
Over the past few years, I have recommended Salatin’s *All I Want to Do Is Illegal* to every new friend I meet. It is a scathing, comprehensive critique of the current US agricultural system by a farmer who has practised organic farming for over half a century, and a warning to civilisations everywhere.
Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” contains the line: “Praise ignorance, for what humanity has yet to encounter has not yet been destroyed.”
Salatin’s book makes the same point: that which has not yet been regulated has not yet been ruined.
Editor: Zain