The Omnivore's Dilemma Part 7

During my week at Polyface, I learned to look at gra.s.s from lots of different angles. For example, I learned to look at a field of gra.s.s the way a cow does. You might think a field of gra.s.s is all the same. But to a cow, a fresh pasture is like a salad bar, with lots of different things to eat.

From the mix of green leaves and stems, a cow can easily pick out a tuft of emerald green clover next to a spray of bluish green fescue. These two plants are as different to her as vanilla ice cream is from cauliflower. The cow opens her meaty wet lips, curls her sandpaper tongue around the bunched clover like a fat rope, and rips the mouthful of tender leaves from its crown. She'll get to the fescue, but not before she's eaten all the clover ice cream she can find.

A cow also knows there are things in the pasture to avoid, plants that will make her sick. We might fail to notice the handful of Carolina nightshades or thistles among the other plants. But when the cows are done grazing tomorrow, those plants will still be standing, like forlorn pieces of broccoli left on a picky eater's plate.

THE LAW OF THE SECOND BITE.

Joel Salatin calls himself a gra.s.s farmer. In the end everything he raises on his farm comes from gra.s.s. How do the gra.s.ses perform this miracle? They do it by capturing the energy of the sun and using it to make leaves cows can eat. So maybe he's really a sun farmer.

To Joel, sustainable organic farming means using this free solar energy instead of fossil fuel energy. "These gra.s.s blades are our photovoltaic panels," he says. He's built a complex farm system around this simple idea. To make it work, he needs to know an awful lot about gra.s.s. And the most important thing to know about gra.s.s, he told me, is when it likes to be eaten.

As I explained, gra.s.s has evolved to be in partnership with gra.s.s eaters. It survives very well if its leaves are chewed off. The secret, Joel told me, is not to let the cows take a second bite until the gra.s.s has had time to recover. That takes about fourteen days. He calls it the "law of the second bite."

If this were a real law, most of the world's ranchers and dairy farmers would be outlaws, because they let their cows stay in the same pasture without stop. Without a chance to recover, clover and other cow favorites soon disappear. The root system of the entire field weakens. Instead of a lush pasture, the farmer soon has a field full of brown bald spots and plants that cows won't touch.

Joel keeps his cows from getting that second bite by moving them every day. Near the end of my first day as a Polyface farmhand, when all I really wanted to do was lie down, there was still one more important ch.o.r.e to perform. We had to move the cows.

A MOVING EXPERIENCE.

Throwing and stacking fifty-pound bales of hay all afternoon had left me bone tired, so I was mightily relieved when Joel proposed we drive his ATV to the upper pasture where the cows had spent their day. (It's a basic rule that the more weary you feel, the more kindly you look on fossil fuel.) We stopped by the toolshed for a freshly charged car battery we'd use to power the electrified fence. Then we sped up the rutted dirt road and soon b.u.mped to a halt at the upper pasture. Eighty or so cattle were bunched together in a section of a much larger field. A portable electric fence kept them from roaming.

The cows had been in that spot for only one day. During that time they had eaten down just about everything within reach. Now it was time for them to move on, giving the gra.s.ses a chance to recover. Moving every day also keeps the cows healthier, because they can get away from their droppings, which can contain unhealthy parasites.

Joel disconnected the electric fence from its battery and held down the wire with his boot to let me into the paddock. Clearly Joel's cattle knew what was about to happen. The cows that had been lying around roused themselves, and the bolder ones slowly lumbered over in our direction, One of them stepped right up to nuzzle us like a big cat. "That's Budger," Joel told me. You wouldn't mistake Joel's cattle for show cattle. None of them are purebred. Instead they're a mix of Angus, Brahmin, and other breeds. Yet their coats were sleek, their tails were clean, and they had remarkably few flies on them.

It took the two of us no more than fifteen minutes to put up a new fence around an area next to the old one, drag the watering tub into it, and set up the water line. The gra.s.ses in the new paddock were thigh-high and lush, and the cattle plainly couldn't wait to get at them.

The moment arrived. Looking more like a restaurant maitre d' than a cowboy, Joel opened the gate between the two paddocks. He removed his straw hat and swept it grandly in the direction of the fresh salad bar, and called his cows to their dinner. After a moment of hesitation, the cows began to move, first singly, then two by two, and then all eighty of them sauntered into the new pasture, brushing past us as they looked around for their favorite gra.s.ses. They lowered their great heads, and the evening air filled with the m.u.f.fled sounds of smacking lips, tearing gra.s.s, and the low snuffling of contented cattle.

The last time I had stood watching a herd of cattle eat their supper I was standing up to my ankles in cow manure in Poky Feeders pen number 43. At Poky, the feed had to be harvested by machine, transported by train, processed in a mill, then trucked to the feedlots. Joel's cows were harvesting their own feed: gra.s.ses that had grown right there, powered by little more than sunlight. The food chain in this pasture could not be any shorter. And at the end of their meal there'd be nothing left to clean up, since the cattle would spread their waste exactly where it would do the most good.

UNDER THE GRa.s.s.

The food chain at Polyface is short and simple. But there's a lot more going on than meets the eye. For example, Joel moves his cattle in the evening because he knows that's when the gra.s.s is sweetest. The leaves spend the whole day using sunlight to make food-sugars. Mixed in with the sugars are important minerals the gra.s.ses have drawn up from the soil.

If you could look underground, you'd see even more. When cattle eat the leaves of a gra.s.s, the plant will kill off some of its roots, to balance itself out. Part of the root system dies and begins to decay. Then the bacteria, fungi, and earthworms will get to work breaking the old roots down into rich brown humus. (Humus is the part of soil that used to be living organic matter.) So by taking a bite of gra.s.s, a cow actually helps create new soil.

Because the cattle move on every day, they don't wipe out their favorite types of gra.s.s. As we've seen, this means that a pasture holds a dozen or more types of plants-a real example of biodiversity. A mixture of tall and short plants means that more of the solar energy that falls on the pasture is turned into growth. Biodiversity also means the pasture is green almost all year long. Some gra.s.ses grow more in the spring, others have their growing season in the summer. For this reason, an acre of mixed gra.s.ses can actually produce more carbohydrate and protein in a year than an acre of field corn. And a field of mixed gra.s.ses with a deep root system is much more likely to survive dry spells and droughts.

These are just some of the incredible things that happen because Joel Salatin doesn't let his cows graze in the same spot too long. The amount of time it takes gra.s.s to recover is constantly changing too. It can vary depending on temperature, rainfall, sunlight, and the time of year. And of course, Joel has to figure in that different size cattle eat different amounts of gra.s.s.

This is another way "gra.s.s farming" is very different from the "ride and spray" farming on big industrial farms. It takes a lot of thought and planning to make sure the cows get to the right piece of pasture at the right time. It sometimes seems like gra.s.s farmers need to know personally every single blade of gra.s.s on their farms.

MONDAY SUPPER.

Once the cattle were settled in their paddock for the night, we rolled down the hill to dinner. We ditched our boots by the back door and washed up in a basin in the mudroom. Then we sat down to a meal prepared by Joel's wife, Teresa, and Rachel, the Salatins' eighteen-year-old daughter. Joel began the meal by closing his eyes and saying his own version of grace. It included a fairly detailed list of what had been done on the farm that day. The farm's two young interns, Galen and Peter, joined us at the big pine table. They focused so intently on eating that they uttered not a word. The Salatins' son, Daniel, twenty-two, is a full partner in the farm, but most nights he has dinner with his wife and baby son in their house up the hill. Joel's mother, Lucille, lives in a trailer home next to the house. It was in Lucille's guest room that I was sleeping.

Everything we ate had been grown on the farm, with the exception of the cream of mushroom soup that was the sauce in the chicken and broccoli ca.s.serole. Rachel pa.s.sed a big platter of delicious deviled eggs. Though it wasn't even the end of June, we tasted the first sweet corn of the season. It had been grown in the hoop house where the laying hens spend the winter. There was plenty of everything, and there were a lot of jokes about the interns' giant appet.i.tes. To drink, there was a pitcher of ice water.

The Salatin family and farm crew. From left to right: Peter, Daniel, Lucille, Galen, Teresa, and Joel.

I told everyone that this was probably the most local meal I'd ever eaten. Teresa joked that if Joel and Daniel could just figure out how to make paper towels and toilet paper from the trees on the farm, she'd never have to go to the supermarket. It was true: We were eating almost completely off the grid. The farm and the family was a self-contained world, in the way I imagine all American farm life once was.

At dinner I got Joel and Teresa talking about the history of Polyface. "I'm actually a third-generation alternative farmer," Joel said. His grandfather Fred Salatin had farmed a half-acre lot in Anderson, Indiana. Joel's father, William Salatin, bought the land that would become Polyface in 1961. Back then, the 550 acres were in bad shape.

RESTORING THE LAND.

"The farm had been abused by tenant farmers for 150 years," Joel said. The land is hilly and really too steep for row crops. Still, several generations of tenant farmers had grown corn and other grains there. As a result, most of the soil was either no longer fertile or had washed away. "We measured gullies fourteen feet deep," Joel explained. "This farm couldn't stand any more plowing. In many places there was no topsoil left whatsoever-just outcroppings of granite and clay. We've been working to heal this land ever since."

William Salatin worked in town as an accountant while he figured out how to build the farm. A lot of his accounting clients were farmers too. When he saw the trouble they were having staying in business, he decided to try a different approach. Instead of building silos and growing grain, he started growing gra.s.s. He stopped buying fertilizer and started composting. He also let the steeper, north-facing hillsides return to forest.

Gradually the farm began to recover. Gra.s.ses colonized the gullies, the thin soils deepened, and the rock outcrops disappeared under a fresh layer of sod.

"I still miss him every day," Joel said. "Dad was definitely a little odd, but in a good way. He lived out his beliefs. But you want to know when I miss him the most? When I see all the progress we've made since he left us. Oh, how proud he would be to see this place now!"

14.

The Animals

TUESDAY.

It's not often I wake up at six in the morning and find I've overslept, but it happened to me on my second morning at Polyface. By the time I hauled my six-foot self out of the five-foot bed in Lucille's guest room, everyone was already at work. In fact, morning ch.o.r.es were nearly done. Shockingly, ch.o.r.es at Polyface start as soon as the sun comes up. Even worse, they start before breakfast. Before coffee!

I stepped out of the trailer into the warm early morning. Through the mist I could make out the figures of the two interns, Galen and Peter. They were moving around on the hill to the east. That's where a group of portable chicken pens sat on the gra.s.s. One of the most important morning ch.o.r.es was feeding and watering the chickens and moving their pens. I was supposed to be helping, so I started up the path, hoping to get there before they finished.

As I stumbled up the hill, I was struck by how very beautiful the farm looked in the hazy early light. The thick June gra.s.s was coated with dew. The bright green pastures stood out against patches of black forest. It was hard to believe this hillside had ever been the gullied wreck Joel had described at dinner. One type of farming had destroyed the land. Now another type of farming was restoring it.

WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE PASTURE?.

By the time I reached the pasture Galen and Peter had finished moving the pens. Luckily, they were either too kind or too timid to give me a hard time for oversleeping. I grabbed a pair of water buckets, filled them from the big tub in the center of the pasture, and lugged them to the nearest pen. Fifty of these pens were spread out across the damp gra.s.s. Each was ten feet by twelve feet wide and two feet high, with no floor. Inside each one were seventy broiler chickens. (Broilers are raised to be, well, broiled-or grilled or fried.) The pens are floorless to allow the birds to get at the gra.s.s.

Joel had explained that the pens were arranged very carefully. Each one would be moved ten feet a day. At the end of fifty-six days the pens would have covered every square foot of the meadow. Fifty-six days is the amount of time it would take the chickens to grow big enough to be slaughtered.

Directly behind each pen was a rectangular patch of closely cropped gra.s.s. That was where the pen had been the day before. The ground there looked like a really awful piece of modern art, thickly spattered with white, brown, and green chicken p.o.o.p. It was amazing what a mess seventy chickens could make in just one day. But that was the idea: Give them twenty-four hours to eat the gra.s.s and fertilize it with their droppings, and then move them onto fresh ground.

Joel moves the chickens every day for the same reason he moves the cows every night. The chicken manure fertilizes the gra.s.s, supplying all the nitrogen it needs. But left in one place, the chickens would eventually destroy the soil. They'd peck the gra.s.s down to its roots and poison the soil with their "hot," or nitrogen-rich, manure. This is why the typical chicken yard quickly winds up bare and hard as brick.

Joel says the chickens get about 20 percent of their diet from the fresh gra.s.s, worms, gra.s.shoppers, and crickets they find. He also feeds them a mixture of corn, toasted soybeans, and kelp, which we scooped into long troughs in their pens. The chicken feed is one of the only raw materials he buys for the whole farm.

THE INCREDIBLE EGGMOBILE.

After we had finished watering and feeding the broilers, I headed up to the next pasture, where Joel was moving the Eggmobile. The Eggmobile is one of Joel's proudest innovations. It looks like a cross between a henhouse and a covered wagon from the old west. The Eggmobile is home to four hundred laying hens. On each side of the wagon are rows of nesting boxes. The boxes open from the outside so someone can get at the eggs. Every night the hens climb the little ramp into the safety of the coop and Joel latches the door behind them. In the morning he moves them to a fresh pasture.

When I got there, Joel was bolting the Eggmobile to the hitch of his tractor. It wasn't quite seven a.m. yet, but he seemed delighted to have someone to talk to. Talking about farming is one of his greatest pleasures.

"In nature you'll always find birds following herbivores," Joel had explained. In the wild, turkeys and pheasants follow bison herds. In Africa, you'll see birds like egrets perched on the nose of a rhinoceros. In each case the birds dine on the insects that would otherwise bother the herbivore. They also pick insect larvae and parasites out of the animal's droppings.

The Eggmobile is home to four hundred laying hens.

Joel climbed onto the tractor, threw it into gear, and slowly towed the rickety henhouse fifty yards or so. He placed it in the middle of a paddock where his cattle had been three days ear-lier. It seems the chickens don't like fresh manure, so he waits three or four days before bringing them in-but not a day longer. "Three days is ideal," he explained. "That gives the larvae a chance to fatten up nicely, the way the hens like them, but not quite long enough to hatch into flies." Fly larvae may not seem appetizing to you and me, but that protein-rich diet makes the chickens' eggs unusually rich and tasty.

Every morning the broiler pens are moved to fresh pasture, following the cattle around the farm. Each pen is home to seventy chickens.

THE SANITATION CREW.

Once the Eggmobile was in position, Joel opened the trapdoor, and an eager, noisy parade of Barred Rocks, Rhode Island Reds, and New Hampshire Whites filed down the little ramp, fanning out across the pasture. The hens picked at the gra.s.ses but mainly they were all over the cowpats. They performed a crazy kind of dance with their claws to scratch apart the caked manure and expose the meaty grubs within.

"I'm convinced an Eggmobile would be worth it even if the chickens never laid a single egg," Joel told me. Because of the chickens, Joel doesn't have to treat his cattle with toxic chemicals to get rid of parasites. This is what Joel means when he says the animals do the real work on his farm. "I'm just the orchestra conductor, making sure everybody's in the right place at the right time."

Eggs bring in more money than anything else Joel sells. To take advantage of that, most farmers would buy more chickens to lay more eggs. But Joel knows if he added a lot more chickens to the farm it would throw the system off balance. Too much chicken manure could kill the gra.s.s. Suddenly the manure would become a waste product. Plus, where would the new chickens get larvae for their protein? Joel would have to buy more cows. But how could he grow enough gra.s.s to feed them?

"It's all connected," he told me. "This farm is more like an organism than a machine, and like any organism it has its proper scale. A mouse is the size of a mouse for a good reason, and a mouse that was the size of an elephant wouldn't do very well."

LETTING CHICKENS BE CHICKENS.

Most industrial farmers don't worry about keeping things in balance. Their main concern is paying for inputs and getting the most possible outputs. If that means forcing cows to eat corn, even when it is unnatural for them, then that is what must be done.

At Polyface, the Salatins try to work with the natural instincts of their animals, not against them. When Joel lets his chickens loose in a pasture, he is using their natural instinct to clean up after herbivores. The chickens get to do, and eat, what they evolved to do and eat. Instead of treating chickens as egg-laying (or meat-growing) machines, Polyface honors their inborn "chickenness." It is the same for all the animals on the farm.

The Salatins also raise rabbits. Like the hens, the rabbits spend part of their time in portable rabbit hutches in the pastures. The rest of the time, they live in cages suspended over a deep bedding of woodchips. The woodchips are home to earthworms, and of course, there are hens loose in the woodchips, eating the worms. The scratching of the hens turns the chips and the rabbits' nitrogen-rich urine into valuable compost.

The Polyface turkeys also spend time in the pastures. They are moved every three days. Joel has built them a moveable shademobile, which he calls the Gobbledy-Go. The turkeys rest under the Gobbledy-Go by day and roost on top of it at night. Joel likes to put his turkeys in the orchard, where they eat the bugs, mow the gra.s.s, and fertilize the trees and vines. Putting turkeys and grape vines together means getting two crops off of the same piece of land.

Polyface turkeys emerging from their moveable shademobile, called the Gobbledy-Go.

During the winter, the cows and other animals come off the pastures and into the barns. But Polyface's "beyond organic" methods don't stop, they just move indoors. The cow barn is a simple open-sided structure where the cattle eat twenty-five pounds of hay and produce fifty pounds of manure each day. (Water makes up the difference.) Joel just leaves the manure where it falls. Every few days he covers it with a layer of woodchips or straw. This layer cake of manure, woodchips, and straw gradually rises beneath the cattle. By winter's end the bedding, and the cattle, can be as much as three feet off the ground. As the manure/woodchip mix decays it heats up, warming the barn. Joel calls it his cattle's electric blanket.

HAPPY PIGS.

There's one more secret ingredient Joel adds to each layer of this cake: a few bucketfuls of corn. Over the winter, the corn ferments. That means fungi in the manure turn some of the corn into alcohol. (This is the same fermenting process used to make wine or beer.) Why does Joel want fermented corn in his manure pile? Because there's nothing a pig enjoys more than getting tipsy on corn, and there's nothing a pig is better equipped to do than root it out with his powerful snout and exquisite sense of smell. "I call them my pigaerators," Joel told me proudly.

As soon as the cows head out to pasture in the spring, several dozen pigs come in and hunt for the corn in the manure pile. As they dig, they turn the compost over and air it out. This kills any harmful bacteria and after a few weeks the rich, cakey compost is ready to be spread on the fields.

"This is the sort of farm machinery I like," Joel told me one afternoon as we watched his pigs do their work. "It never needs its oil changed, grows over time, and when you're done with it you eat it." Buried clear to their b.u.t.ts in composting cow manure, the pigaerators were a bobbing sea of wriggling hams and corkscrew tails. If pigs can be happy, these were the happiest pigs I'd ever seen.

Salatin reached down deep where his pigs were happily rooting and brought a handful of fresh compost right up to my nose. What had been cow manure and woodchips just a few weeks before now smelled as sweet and warm as the forest floor in summertime. Joel will spread the compost on his pastures. There it will feed the gra.s.ses, so the gra.s.ses might again feed the cows, the cows the chickens, and so on until the snow falls. That handful of compost was proof that when gra.s.s can eat sunlight and food animals can eat gra.s.s, there is indeed a free lunch.

The type of farming the Salatins do isn't easy. George Naylor works his fields maybe fifty days a year; Joel and Daniel and two interns are out there sunrise to sunset almost every day.

Yet Joel and Daniel plainly enjoy their work. One reason is that their type of farming takes a lot of thought and problem-solving. They like the challenge of getting all the pieces of their farm working together. They also get great satisfaction from the care they give to their land and their animals. Over and over again, I was struck by how healthy their animals were-all without a single ounce of antibiotics or chemicals. Because they are not raising identical chickens or cows in giant, crowded sheds, a single illness doesn't represent a threat to them. Instead, when an animal gets sick, the Salatins try to figure out what is going wrong in their system. As Joel puts it, "Most of the time pests and disease are just nature's way of telling the farmer he's doing something wrong."

TREES GROW GRa.s.s.

All of this produces some pretty impressive results. I asked Joel how much food Polyface produces in a season, and he rattled off the following figures: 30,000 dozen eggs 10,000 broilers 800 stewing hens50 beef cattle (25,000 lbs of beef) 250 hogs (25,000 lbs of pork) 1,000 turkeys 500 rabbits It was hard to believe they got that much food from one hundred acres of gra.s.s. Then Joel corrected me. He said that the 450 acres of forest were also an important part of the farm operation. I didn't get that at all. What in the world did the forest have to do with producing food?

Joel counted off the ways. First, the forest held the farm's water supply. Many of the farm's streams and ponds would simply dry up if not for the cover of trees. Second, the trees keep the farm cooler in the summer. That reduces the stress on the animals from too much heat. The trees also act as a windbreak-when the gra.s.s is sheltered from the wind it can grow higher. It doesn't stop there. More trees mean more wild birds. More birds on a farm mean fewer insects. Forests mean that coyotes and weasels have plenty of chipmunks and voles to eat, so they don't hunt chickens. And some of the trees are made into woodchips that go into the farm compost.

I had thought of the farm as just the hundred acres of pasture. For Joel, it was all one biological system, the trees and the gra.s.ses and the animals, the wild and the domestic. On an industrial farm, the trees would have been thought of as a waste of valuable crop land. But at Polyface, it was understood that the trees helped the gra.s.s to grow and the forest fed the farm.

15.

The Slaughterhouse

WEDNESDAY MORNING.

I woke up Wednesday and wished for a moment I had overslept again. It wasn't because I was tired, although I was. It was because I knew this was the day we were going to "process" the broilers. To put it plainly, we were going to spend the morning killing chickens.