Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front by Joel Salatin

Author:Joel Salatin [Joel Salatin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780963810953
Amazon: 0963810952
Publisher: Polyface
Published: 2007-09-16T20:00:00+00:00

As I stared at the public notice in the paper, my heart sank. We were already using the neighbor’s mill. We knew what it could do. We were ready to buy one for ourselves and enjoy its host of benefits. And we looked forward to offering this option to the local lumber market. But no. In the wisdom of the powers that guard the general welfare, all of this should be illegal.

This kind of policy decision-making occurs every day. Although it may start sincerely enough, the unintended consequence (if we give the policy wonks the benefit of the doubt) is to stifle innovation, creativity, and the local economy.

I decided to attend the hearing to see if I could persuade the zoning board to at least exempt sawmills operated by farmers milling logs from their own property. That seemed reasonable.

When the hearing date arrived, I cleaned up, shaved, put on a tie, left my farm work, and drove to the county building. When the amendment came before the zoning board and the chairman asked for public comment, I was the only one interested. I explained that I wanted to buy a little mill to saw my own logs from my own woods.

The board heaved a collective sigh. “We never thought of that.” You can’t imagine how far from reality many of these regulators actually are. Just like you and me, they live in their cocoons, too. They get up and go through their routine, read their little trade magazines, sit in their little pew at church, and become myopic just like most of us. The thought that their little amendment would cast such a broad net and scoop up a farmer like me had never even crossed their mind.

As with all industrialized paradigms, the mental picture conceived when hearing the word sawmill uttered is of mega-proportions. In our county, four sawmills operate employing 50-100 people each. Of course, they include debarking units that sell mulch to landscapers. They include giant chippers that reduce all the slabwood (soft outer cambium and bark discarded in the squaring of the log) to chips and blow it into tractor trailers that haul the material to industrial boilers. In our state, paper mills and prisons seem to be the boilers-of-choice for this material.

The words government officials hear contain a contextual component, a pre-understanding, if you will. In my experience, local commerce and small entrepreneurs never make it into their lexicon. We just don’t exist. When they say the word sawmill, they aren’t thinking about a $5,000, 800-lb. bandsaw powered by a 20 horsepower Honda engine. They are thinking 50 employees, tractor trailers, noise, dust and lots of infrastructure.

A few years ago when I was lobbying in the state capital for some concessions from these onerous regulations for small farmers, the senators asked the bureaucrat who headed up the state small farm agency, “What do you consider a small farm?”

His reply, forever etched in my memory, was simple, “Someone who only wants to sell one tractor trailer load.

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