When I
first ventured into organic farming, “farming” would not have been the correct
label for my activity. At that time, I had intended to open a restaurant. In
the time it takes to find investors and such, I decided to investigate… in the
ground… exactly what growing organic produce would take. I really had no idea
whatsoever. The example on how to grow vegetables was watching my parent’s
garden activity when I was a child.
That
was over two decades before at the time. My father spread out the proper NPK
formula for garden growth… (for those unfamiliar with NPK, that is the
synthetic formula for fertilizer, something I would never, I reiterate NEVER
use today)… and then the garden was tilled and seeded with all of the bland
vegetables sworn by in the Burpee catalog… Oh! And before I leave that very
aged memory… the scent of Sevin, that carcinogenic powder that was dusted on
almost all of the crops that accosted my sense of smell like… something
COMPLETELY non-natural…
I
mention all of that as an introduction on my own knowledge of farming. Farming
itself was quite close in the vicinity. Just behind the border of our property,
luckily protected by multi-flora rose bushes, otherwise known in our local vernacular
as “sticker bushes”… (perhaps I’ll get back to THAT ill-judged situation in the
future…) was corn. Corn always grew behind our property, but not all of the
neighboring parcel was dedicated to corn. There were also fields of grass,
which would eventually be turned into hay. I have to relay, that these are the
memories of my early youth that I divulge. It never struck me as odd that the
corn that surrounded my parent’s property was inedible. I was informed that it
was feed corn, which meant the cows ate it. There were some cows here and there
on the various farms, so the statement seemed plausible. But corn was
everywhere. And I was not a farmer… at that point. Those cows must sure be
hungry…
The
issue for this entry, however, is grass. Why grass? Well, it was while reading
Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma that grass was presented in a very
different light than any of my previous thoughts on the subject had ever
considered. (By the way, if you have not read this amazing book, do yourself a
favor and do so… as soon as possible. Most of our current farming issues are
explained quite thoroughly… and it is extremely well written.)
In part
“II” of the book, “Grass” is the focus. It is in this section that Joel Salatin
of Polyface Farm is introduced. Joel Salatin is a grass farmer who uses the
grass he nourishes to feed his livestock, most specifically his cattle. This
may not seem all that impressive at first sight, but it truly is. I will
restate, Joel Salatin is a grass farmer…
I will
get back to the grass farmer bit, but in order to relay the point of this
entry, that of “Post Industrial Agriculture”, the other side, the nefarious
side, that of Industrial Agriculture will be addressed. There is an incredible
amount of complexity involved in the situation, but I will attempt to sum it up
as briefly as possible… historically.
Before
Industrial Agriculture, family farms ruled the agriculture front. For this
entry, livestock rearing will be the focus. Farms averaged in size, depending
on the region, for our point the Mid-Atlantic, Mid-Maryland region, from fifty
to one hundred and fifty acres. A portion of the farm was used as pasture for
cattle, (and for ease of description, I will keep to the cattle focus), a
portion was used to grow the hay to feed those cattle through the winter, and
most often a portion was used for grains and such for other uses, flour, etc.
As technology evolved, more and more of the labor which was for many years
provided for by horses or oxen began to be replaced by machinery. Humans
invented machines to make the labor part of the issue easier. For example, why
have a barn to hold horses, along with growing the food they need to eat, when
a gasoline powered tractor could do the work at lightning speed, so to speak?
The
times were changing, and they changed quite quickly. As machinery took over the
landscape of farming, it changed the practices of farming. The focus grew
dimmer and dimmer on the health of the situation, and more and more on the ease
and profitability of the farm. After all, why does anyone farm except to make a
healthy profit?... Anyone?...Anyone? Ah, alas, farmers, that is, the original
stewards of the earth began to fade from the horizon. Instead of the healthy
giving back to the environment which was required to sustain a farm before the
advent of human industrial technology, the age had steamrolled into the new
realm of chemistry. Now, synthetic fertilizers were created, which were so much
easier to apply to the fields than the manure farmers had spread in the past.
That is but one example, and somewhere along the line a new development
appeared…
“Let’s
finish the cattle on corn!” What a brilliant idea! Instead of allowing the
cattle to grow accordingly with the natural diet of grass, corn was inserted
into the equation. And it gets very nasty from there. I realize I may have lost
some readers here, but this is the advent of Industrial Agriculture. To
explain, the cow’s stomach has evolved in such a manner that it can digest
grasses in a manner our human stomachs cannot. Humans can digest grains in a
way that a cow’s stomach cannot. These are natural guidelines arranged by
nature in a complex manner that for anyone bearing the ability to reason beyond
the simplistic level of money making would comprehend quite easily. Such reason
was not involved in Industrial Agriculture.
Over
the decades, through government intervention and subsidies, corn was decided to
be the “manna” for all life on the planet. I may be exaggerating here, but for
humans and cattle that is certainly the case. Through the government subsidies,
corn was cheap, damned cheap! Let’s put corn in everything! Let’s force feed
cattle on corn! It will fatten them up! Brilliant! Thus was the simplistic
thought on the situation. This led to the CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding
operation) as described in Michael Pollan’s previously mentioned book in quite
alarming detail! Essentially, cattle are born and raised on the grass pasture
for which they are naturally adapted, then they are shipped to CAFOs where they
are fed a diet of mostly grain, corn, which fattens them up before being sent
to slaughter.
The
point is that with the industrial agriculture approach, health has been eradicated
from the process. Cattle cannot live on grain. In fact, the cattle that are
fattened up in the CAFOs are actually dying from the diet they consume. They
are slaughtered at their peak, just before their bodies give out from
malnutrition. And there is so much more involved with this than what I describe
here. All of the e-coli nonsense, mad cow disease, that is simply not natural,
and all result from Industrial Agriculture in the attempt to maximize profits.
The
other side of the situation is… HEALTH. Now I will go back to Joel Salatin and
the other grass farmers mentioned in Michael Pollan’s book. Whereas Industrial
Agriculture seeks profitability at the expense of anything natural, the next
level of farming seeks health first.
Before
I proceed, profitability is very important for many of the farmer’s in the Post
Industrial Agriculture mindset, only they have a different means to their end.
My personal exhaustion over the never ending quest for money should be ignored
at this point, because Post Industrial Agriculture is also based in the reality
of capitalistic society.
That
said, I always envisioned a “return” to the way things used to be when it came
to agriculture. Before our chemical infatuation, life was life, let’s return to
that. Through investigation, learning in general, I have personally discovered
that I was woefully naïve. What I have learned is that science CAN lead us to
improving our situations in the agricultural realm, only it is not the science
of chemicals! That science is naïve and simplistic. What we need is a much more
complex understanding… and a much more complex approach to the reality that is
agriculture.
It was Omnivore’s
Dilemma that first presented me with the notion of Post Industrial
Agriculture. After describing how he orchestrates his pasture rotation for his
cattle, Pollan asked, “So is this sort of low-tech pastoralism simply a
throwback to preindustrial agriculture? Salatin adamantly begged to differ: ‘It
might not look that way, but this is all information-age stuff we’re doing
here. Polyface Farm is a postindustrial enterprise. You’ll see.’” (p.191 Omnivore’s
Dilemma)
And
just what were these “new” farming practices? Salatin uses a pasture rotation
where cattle stay on a pasture for one day, then are moved to a new pasture the
next day, etc. Instead of having cattle stay in the same pasture day after day,
moving the cattle to different pastures allows for the previous pasture to
“heal”, to grow back naturally, that is. This style of pasture rotation mimics
the natural style of the herd, which travels from place to place, and does not
stay in one spot endlessly. The manure fertilizes the freshly eaten grass,
which grows back… better than before! Joel Salatin has been able to show that
by this type of pasture rotation, the pasture improves, and he can add more and
more cattle to graze the same land.
This is
very different than industrial agriculture, which attempts to find a simple
formula to take care of all the issues of farming. Such an approach is
extremely simplistic and naïve… and INFERIOR! Pasture rotation is by no means
the only “different” approach Salatin takes for his farming venture. His
approach is to learn how nature acts, allow nature to act accordingly, but to
steer it in such a manner to improve the farm. The point is that through
industrial agriculture, humans have attempted to dictate to nature how it
should act, which does not work… especially in the long run. The post
industrial approach uses nature’s complexity to improve upon itself.
We will
learn more and more about the negative effects of industrial agriculture as
time progresses. In the meantime, those of us on the ground, on the organic
farm land, us stewards of the earth will continue to marvel at the wondrous
ways of nature… and to steer her accordingly. There are more examples to come
on post industrial agriculture. This entry reflects only a portion of the
animal husbandry side. Once again, if you have not already, read Michael
Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and you will learn quite a bit more about
Joel Salatin and what he is up to at Polyface Farm, along with many other
fascinating farming facts.
No comments:
Post a Comment