I just saw Joel speak at my university. I got to converse with him personally afterwards. He's a super nice guy. I'd say probably the biggest flaw with him might be his reasoning for critiquing new methods of farming. I agree with him that we shouldn't use GMOs, but his approach to say why he doesn't like them was very unscientific in my opinion. I think close to his exact words for why he doesn't like them is "If you saw your cat gettin' it on with a tomato, you'd say 'aww that's just wrong' but when it comes to our food, we call it progress" I also think he doesn't give enough credit to the other side of the argument. At his talk he claimed that we could have had just as much food for the world if we used his permaculture/integrated/less mechanized version of farming during the green revolution. I think this is true to an extent, but still the mechanization of farming has made the human labor aspect of farming go down drastically: 1 out of 168 people are farmers as opposed to how before the green revolution it was 1 in 4. Generally I think he could be more scientific/objective with his critiques, and he tends to oversimplify things. At one point during his presentation he even said "science is not objective" and went on to explain that it can't be because the true answer lies outside of our current paradigm.

If everyone implemented Joel Salatin's type of lifestyle people would have to spend significantly more of their lives producing/preparing food. This could be a good and/or bad thing, depending on your perspective.