Continued from post 2
EVERYTHING I WANT TO DO IS ILLEGAL
Everywhere, [our] would-be clean food producers are hampered, stymied, and petrified of getting crossways of some labeling or food police. It is absolutely the most significant reason, especially in the livestock sector, why our movement has not displaced more industrial farming systems. Joel Salatin33
Today, especially across North America, were dealing with dan: gerous emerging diseases like avian flu, hini, and mrsa, as well as a resurgence of old ones, like Listeria and E. coli contamination, throughout modern food systems. This is almost entirely because of industrial practices and is happening even though health and hygiene rules abound. Any American or Canadian farmer knows that every aspect of agriculture is regulated, from manure disposal on the farm to meat-packing and cheese-slicing conditions. Mad cow disease is caused by grinding up cows and other dead animals and feeding them to cattle, to save small amounts of money in an integrated production-feed-slaughterhouse-packaging system that, despite its many regulations, did not and still does not prevent the disease's continued occurrence. The reason mad cow is still affecting Western beef, and the eu and Japan don t want to buy our animals, has to do an insistence on minimal testing and maximum "efficiencies of scale" and industry integration across Canada and the U.S. The recent Listeria, E. coli, and Salmonella outbreaks, which have killed hundreds of people in North America over the past few years and are a long way from being under control, also . come out of our vertically integrated food system. It throws the production of thousands of farms into a centralized processing or packaging facility, so one microbe in one animal, plant, or piece of cheese can contaminate millions.
Scientists know perfectly well that hini and avian flu viruses originate in the crowded, airless conditions of mass confinement facilities for hogs and poultry which have long been seen as the perfect way to breed new viruses that can jump to humans. But governments in most industrialized countries respond by continuing to subsidize these operations with tax dollars, while making it illegal for backyard poultry to be let outside their pens. And while most state and provincial livestock regulations support and abet such operations, they also make it illegal or economically impossible for a smallholder to raise a few chickens, turkeys, pigs, or beef cattle, to keep for him- or herself, or to sell eggs or slaughter a few animals for a local market. In fact, in most of Canada and the U.S., it has actually. become illegal for a few grandmothers to get together to bake pies for a school or church bake sale.34 To be certified as clean, food has to be packaged and proven to come out of an official, government-sanctioned, and therefore corporate, probably vertically integrated, and far more dangerous kitchen than Grandmas. Yet the old-fashioned practices of backyard stock raising and casual local market selling are completely legal in the eu, where the population enjoys the benefits of the safest food in the world.
Joel Salatin would take advantage of this European agricultural model if only he could. He's a remarkable farmer who found a way to apply Allan Savory's Holistic Management principles, developed for dryland ranches, to mixed farming in crowded Virginia. He's also a celebrity, author of a dozen books on how to farm organically and sustainably in order to benefit the local community and the world's ecology. His "pastured chickens" were the first to popularize hoop houses and "feather nets" as a way of moving chickens across a landscape so that they could eat bugs and help the soil while being protected from predators.
Agro-specialist E. Ann Clark says, "I think Salatin is a genius. His great gift is enterprise stacking or ecological energies'; that's the way he uses the natural instincts and productions of two or more species in the same barn, on the same land base. His outcomes—that is, the production of eggs, meat, even cultivation and weeding—are synergistic and impressive."35
Salatin raises farm stock on a 550-acre spread in Swoope, Virginia. He produces hundreds of pounds of pork and beef every year. The farm also raises broiler chickens and produces eggs from three thousand layers. Salatin s farm embodies almost every quality we ve been discussing in this book: Holistic Management (he makes his goals consistent with his highest aspirations); biomimicry (he experiments with production systems that mimic natures); and values (he pays attention to the real bottom line of happy animals, satisfied customers, and a healthy community and land base). And he realizes a healthy profit. The farm "grosses $250,000 a year, which supports four adults at salaries commensurate with what each person could make in a $35,ooo-a-year city job.
The farm has to be viable economically or Salatin couldn't keep it going. Tm an unabashed capitalist," he says, "But capitalism without ethics is just greed." He sees the animals on his farm not as economic units to be exploited but as partners helping keep the land and his family healthy36 Salatin knows about Allan Savory's methods of mimicking the patterns of grazing animals being chased around by predators in order to increase pasture fertility. He says, "On our farm we ve got these areas that are all brambles, briars, shrubs, and bushes. We don't use bulldozers; we use pigs to convert that forested scrub to healthy pasture. We put thirty pigs on a quarter acre at a time; what they do at first looks awful. You'd think we'd wrecked the land. But we're providing them with the kind of habitat that they would have in nature. A couple of weeks later, the way they've torn things up has stimulated the succession of more valuable species than were there in the first place. The land evolved with this kind of disruption. So in just one season our pigs have converted the overgrown scrub to the kinds of perennial grasses and clovers we can put the cows on."
Salatin says he's read the management classics and he understands that the great plains and pastures of the world that support agriculture became endlessly fertile not by plowing and fertilizer but because of co-evolution with large populations of herbivores. The antelope and wildebeest on the African plains, the huge herds on the Steppes, the buffalo here—there's always been a symbiotic relationship between herbivores and foragers." So Salatin follows Savory's basic grazing principles, bunching up the grazers so that they disturb the soil, then moving them off so that the land can rest. Calculating the amount of land needed per cow demands real skill. "It's an art, not a science," he says. "It depends on whether the cows are dry or not, the time of year, the type of pasture [but]... if you know your land and animals, you can figure it out. You'll never get the right balance if you're starting from-the industrial paradigm-treating living, individual creatures as if they were dead things, numbers in your profit margin."
Salatin's brand-name broilers are called Pastured Poultry, and they get to move from place to place just like the cows and pigs. They follow the cows in order to eat fly larvae and other insect life hatching in the cow pies. This not only creates dark, glossy yolks in their eggs, it spreads the manure and takes care of any pests attacking the pasture—grasshoppers, caterpillars, and the like. He says a hundred birds will eat up seven pounds of insects a day, and he uses them to "improve the pasture, while making good chicken meat."
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To be continued
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