Farmer Joel Salatin Takes on the New York Times

Wetlands emit some 95 per­cent of all methane in the world; her­bi­vores are insignif­i­cant enough to not even merit con­sid­er­a­tion. Anyone who really wants to stop methane needs to start drain­ing wet­lands. Quick, or we’ll all per­ish. I assume he’s fig­ur­ing that since it takes longer to grow a beef on grass than on grain, the dif­fer­ence in time adds days to the emis­sions. But grain pro­duc­tion car­ries a host of mal­adies far worse than methane. This is sim­ply cherry-picking one neg­a­tive out of many pos­i­tives to smear the foun­da­tion of how soil builds: her­bi­vore prun­ing, peren­nial disturbance-rest cycles, solar-grown bio­mass, and decom­po­si­tion. This is like demo­niz­ing mar­riage because a good one will include some arguments.

As for his notion that it takes too much land to grass-finish, his fig­ures of 10 acres per ani­mal are assum­ing the cur­rent nor­mal mis­man­age­ment of pas­tures. At Polyface, we call it nean­derthal man­age­ment because most live­stock farm­ers have not yet joined the 20th cen­tury with elec­tric fenc­ing, ponds, piped water, and mod­ern sci­en­tific aer­o­bic com­post­ing (only as old as chem­i­cal fer­til­iza­tion). Hence, while his fig­ures com­par­ing the rel­a­tive pro­duc­tion of grain to grass may sound com­pelling, they are like com­par­ing the learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties under a ter­ri­ble teacher ver­sus a mag­nif­i­cent teacher. Many farm­ers, in many dif­fer­ent cli­mates, are now using space-age tech­nol­ogy, bio-mimicry, and close man­age­ment to get expo­nen­tial increases in for­age pro­duc­tion. The rain for­est, by the way, is not being cut to graze cat­tle. It’s being cut to grow trans­genic corn and soy­beans. North America had twice as many her­bi­vores 500 years ago than it does today due to the puls­ing of the predator-prey-pruning cycle on peren­nial prairie poly­cul­tures. And that was with­out any corn or soy­beans at all.

Apparently if you lie often and big enough, some peo­ple will believe it: pas­tured chicken has a 20 per­cent greater impact on global warm­ing? Says who? The truth is that those indus­trial chicken houses are not stand-alone struc­tures. They require square miles of grain to be carted into them, and square miles of land to han­dle the manure. Of course, many times that land is not enough. To indus­trial farm­ers’ relief, more often than not a hur­ri­cane comes along just in time to flush the toi­let, kill the fish, and send pathogens into the ocean. That’s a nice way to reduce the alleged foot­print, but it’s dev­il­ish sleight of hand with the data to assume that eco­log­i­cal tox­i­c­ity com­pen­sates for the true land base needed to sus­tain a fac­tory farm.

While it’s true that at Polyface our omni­vores (poul­try and pigs) do eat local GMO (genet­i­cally mod­i­fied organ­ism) free grain in addi­tion to the for­age, the land base required to feed and metab­o­lize the manure is no dif­fer­ent than that needed to sus­tain the same ani­mals in a con­fine­ment set­ting. Even if they ate zero pas­turage, the land is the same. The only dif­fer­ence is our ani­mals get sun­shine, exer­cise, fresh pas­ture salad bars, fresh air, and a respect­ful life. Chickens walk­ing on pas­ture cer­tainly do not have any more leg sprains than those walk­ing in a con­fine­ment facil­ity. To sug­gest oth­er­wise, as McWilliams does, is sheer non­sense. Walking is walking–and it’s gen­er­ally con­sid­ered to be a healthy prac­tice, unless you’re a tyrant.

Interestingly, in a lone con­ces­sion to com­pas­sion, McWilliams decries rang­ing hogs with rings in their noses to keep them from root­ing, lament­ing that this is “one of their most basic instincts.” Notice that he does not rec­on­cile this moral imper­a­tive with his love affair toward con­fine­ment hog fac­to­ries. Nothing much to use their noses for in there. For the record, Polyface never rings hog noses, and in the few cases where we’ve pur­chased hogs with rings, we take them out. We want them to fully express their pig­ness. By mov­ing them fre­quently using mod­ern elec­tric fenc­ing, poly­eth­yl­ene water pip­ing, high tech float valves, and sci­en­tif­i­cally designed feed dis­pensers, we do not cre­ate nor suf­fer the prob­lems encoun­tered by ear­lier large-scale out­door hog oper­a­tions a hun­dred years ago. McWilliams has appar­ently never had the priv­i­lege of vis­it­ing a first-rate mod­ern highly man­aged pas­tured hog oper­a­tion. He thinks we’re all stuck in the early 1900s, and that’s a shame because he’d dis­cover the answers to his con­cerns are already here. I won­der where his pay­check comes from?

Then McWilliams moves on to the argu­ment that eco­nomic real­i­ties would kick in if pas­tured live­stock became nor­mal, dri­ving farm­ers to scale up and end up right where we are today. What a clever ploy: jus­tify the hor­ri­ble by elim­i­nat­ing the alter­na­tives. At Polyface, we cer­tainly do not dis­cour­age scal­ing up–we actu­ally encour­age it. We think more pasture-based farms should scale up. Between the cur­rent abysmal state of mis­man­age­ment, how­ever, and effi­cient oper­a­tions, is an astro­nom­i­cal oppor­tu­nity to enjoy eco­nomic AND eco­log­i­cal advan­tages. McWilliams is bas­ing his data and assump­tions on the poor­est, the aver­age or below. If you want to demo­nize some­thing, always pick the low­est per­form­ers. But if you com­pare the best the indus­try has to offer with the best the pasture-based sys­tems have to offer, the fac­tory farms don’t have a prayer. Using portable infra­struc­ture, tight man­age­ment, and techno-glitzy tools, farm­ers run­ning pas­tured hog oper­a­tions prac­ti­cally elim­i­nate cap­i­tal­iza­tion costs and vet bills.

Finally, McWilliams moves to the knock-out punch in his dis­cus­sion of nutri­ent cycling, charg­ing specif­i­cally that Polyface is a cha­rade because it depends on grain from indus­trial farms to main­tain soil fer­til­ity. First of all, at Polyface we do not assume that all nutri­ent move­ment is anti-environmental. In fact, one of the biggest rea­sons for ani­mals in nature is to move nutri­ents uphill, against the nat­ural grav­i­ta­tional flow from high ground to low ground. This is why low lands and val­leys are fer­tile and the uplands are less so. Animals are the only mech­a­nism nature has to defy this nat­ural down­ward flow. Fortunately, preda­tors make the prey ani­mals want to lounge on high ground (where they can see their ene­mies), which insures that manure will con­cen­trate on high look-out spots rather than in the val­leys. Perhaps this is why no ecosys­tem exists that is devoid of ani­mals. The fact is that nutri­ent move­ment is inher­ently nature-healing.

BUT, it doesn’t move very far. And herein lies the dif­fer­ence between grain used at Polyface and that used by the indus­try: we care where ours comes from. It’s not just a com­mod­ity. It has an ori­gin and an end­ing, start to fin­ish, farmer to eater. The closer we can con­nect the car­bon cycles, the more envi­ron­men­tally nor­mal we will become.

Secondly, her­bi­vores are the excep­tion to the entire neg­a­tive nutri­ent flow argu­ment because by prun­ing back the for­age to restart the rapid bio­mass accu­mu­la­tion phot­syn­thetic engine, the net car­bon flow com­pen­sates for any­thing lost through har­vest. Herbivores do not require tillage or annu­als and that is why all his­tor­i­cally deep soils have been cre­ated by them, not by omni­vores. It’s fas­ci­nat­ing that McWilliams wants to demo­nize pasture-based live­stock for not clos­ing all the nutri­ent loops, but has no prob­lem, appar­ently, with the hor­ren­dous nutri­ent tox­i­c­ity like dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey cre­ated by chem­i­cal fer­til­izer run off to grow grain so that the life of a beef could be short­ened. Unbelievable. In addi­tion, this is one rea­son Polyface con­tin­ues to fight for relax­ing food safety reg­u­la­tions to allow on-farm slaugh­ter­ing, pre­cisely so we can indeed keep all these nutri­ents on the farm and not send them the ren­der­ing plants. If the gree­nies who don’t want his­tor­i­cally nor­mal farm activ­i­ties like slaugh­ter to occur on rural acreage could under­stand how dev­as­tat­ing these gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions actu­ally are to the envi­ron­men­tal econ­omy, per­haps McWilliams wouldn’t have this bul­let in his arse­nal. And yes, human waste should be put back on the land as well, to help close the loop.

Third, at Polyface, we strug­gle upstream. Historically, omni­vores were sal­vage oper­a­tions. Hogs ate spoiled milk, whey, acorns, chest­nuts, spoiled fruit and a host of other farm­stead prod­ucts. Ditto for chick­ens, who dined on kitchen scraps and gar­den refuse. That today 50 per­cent of all the human edi­ble food pro­duced in the world goes into land­fills or greenie-endorsed com­post­ing oper­a­tions rather than through omni­vores is both eco­log­i­cally and morally rep­re­hen­si­ble. At Polyface, we’ve tried for many, many years to get kitchen scraps back from restau­rants to feed our poul­try, but the logis­tics are a night­mare. The fact is that in America we have cre­ated a seg­re­gated food and farm­ing sys­tem. In the per­fect world, Polyface would not sell eggs. Instead, every kitchen, both domes­tic and com­mer­cial, would have enough chick­ens prox­i­mate to han­dle all the scraps. This would elim­i­nate the entire egg indus­try and cur­rent heavy grain feed­ing par­a­digm. At Polyface, we only pur­port to be doing the best we can do as we strug­gle through a deviant, his­tor­i­cally abnor­mal food and farm­ing sys­tem. We didn’t cre­ate what is and we may not solve it per­fectly. But we’re sure a lot far­ther toward real solu­tions than McWilliams can imag­ine. And if soci­ety would move where we want to go, and the gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tors would let us move where we need to go, and the indus­try would not try to crim­i­nal­ize us as we try to go there, we’ll all be a whole lot bet­ter off and the earth­worms will dance.

Joel Salatin
Polyface Farm