Why Small Farmers Are Disappearing | Joel Salatin

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 02:26:34 +0000

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Family farms in America are slowly disappearing, with a 2022 USDA census reporting that America lost 142,000 farms over just five years. The average farmer in America is now nearly 60 years old.

But it's not government subsidies that farmers need to stay afloat, says Joel Salatin. What small farmers really need is the freedom to innovate and sell directly to local consumers—without facing a morass of red tape, regulations, and mandates.

Salatin, co-owner of Polyface Farms in Virginia, is widely recognized as a leading pioneer of sustainable or regenerative farming practices that enrich the land, rather than depleting it.

Over the last half century, Salatin has seen his fair share of what he calls the “food police.” He discovered it was illegal to sell a couple dozen homemade pot pies at the farmers’ market without proving he had a certified $50,000 septic system; illegal to process his own meat without sending it to a licensed butcher; illegal for his 17-year-old apprentices to operate a cordless drill—even though they were legally allowed to drive a car; and illegal to build housing without a permit on his farm—an agricultural zone—for his highly popular farmer apprenticeship program.

The result? Small farmers have to fight for survival, factory farming wins, and America is less healthy, he says.

“In my lifetime I have watched this erosion of farmer access to retail dollars. Meanwhile, we’re seeing farmers go out of business hand over fist,” Salatin says.

What America really needs is a “Food Emancipation Proclamation,” he says.

Salatin is the author of 17 books, including “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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