Continued from: AGRICULTURE .... the correct way #3
But Salatin's latest book is not like his first ones, about how to build hoop houses or help your family learn to love farming. It's called Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal. His competition in the food world is industrial chicken farmers, whose birds never see the light of day. You don't want to know what's in the mess your broiler was fed, but feed often includes the manure and freshly-ground-up bodies of fellow chickens, as well as dead hogs and cattle.
Remember the first avian flu scare in 2002, when sharpshooters were waiting for flocks of wild geese and ducks to cross into the U.S. from Russia, ready to kill them to prevent them from infecting domestic birds? Ever notice how that story, and indeed all our fears of disease being spread by wild birds, suddenly vanished? It's ' because by 2003, serious researchers, including Michael Greger, who wrote Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching and Devlin Kuyek, of the agricultural NGO grain, had exposed the truth: that these viruses are emanating from the huge factory farms of chickens and turkeys that have sprung up around the world. The world's most prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, agreed with and cited Kuyek's impeccable research.37 But governments still'responded with legislation that increases the economic viability of industrial flocks and punishes the only possible solution: small, local ones.
Medical researchers have known for years that industrial farming conditions must inevitably lead to influenza epidemics. On hog farms -the animals are in crowded, unnatural conditions, and their airways are raw from the ammonia and pathogens in the barns' air from manure stored below the slatted floor or just outside in open lagoons. Their feed is laced with antibiotics to ward off infections and to artificially stimulate their appetites, which otherwise would barely exist. Their immune systems are taxed to the maximum by living without air, sunshine, or exercise, much less the social life an animal as intelligent as a dog requires, so their keepers are acutely-aware that the slightest germ or upset could lead to a chain of influenzas and viral mutations that could decimate the herd. The obsessive rules of an industrial farm are not a sign of care but of half-sick animals continuously on the brink of catastrophic disease.38
Whatever happens with HINI and its related swine flu variants in the future—all of which could jump to humans—people need to remember that it started in the industrial farm setting and developed the ability within that environment to infect humans. As long as we persist in producing meat this way, avian and swine flu viruses will continue to threaten the world population on a much higher level than they would normally.39 As grain, the NGO that exposed the unfair attacks on wild birds during the avian flu scare, says, "Factory farms are time-bombs for global disease epidemics. Yet, there are still no programmes in place to deal with them, not even programmes of independent, disease surveillance."40 If we were to include the price of pandemic management—the many tax dollars poured into vaccines and antivirals, all the hours lost at work and all the lives lost—the true cost of industrial pork would be a lot more than Joel Salatin's happily rooting, pastured variety. In fact ' there'd be no comparison.
Of course, organic producers like Joel Salatin are the first to admit that small doesn't necessarily mean safe. He says some of the dirtiest and-sickest chickens and cows he's ever seen were raised by Third World—or sloppy U.S.—smallholders. And that's the point. Size is no guarantee of safety; proper testing and truly healthy stock are. All .health legislation should take size into account, the way it has in Europe, and make sure regulations are not throwing millions of people off the land to satisfy rich industrialists. Even in the U.S., where farm labor has come to be disdained as too hard and nonremunerative, Salatin claims that one person can gather the eggs from an operation his size with only about seven hours' worth of labor a week. They will net up to $20,000 a year profit, and that income is even better for pork. Best of all, the animals get to live outdoors, have social lives, and eat what they evolved to eat.
So why do we continue with the ghastly business of burning beaks off and nailing chickens to their perches, feeding hogs ground-up cows in shiny white barns with cages so small they can't even turn over? Salatin says a good part of the answer is money and power, but it's also historical and cultural. Fifty years ago, the new industrial model set what was'perceived as the laudable goal of using as little human labor as possible.- "It's supposed to be nasty to work on a farm, so they try to use very few people," Salatin says. The fewer the humans, the worse that care will be; that's one of the ideas that the concept of "multifunctionality" addresses. Not enough farmers explains the need for all the antibiotics and other drugs, as well as the diseases coming out of livestock confinement facilities. Worst of all, Salatin says, "We think it's much better to be in some city apartment working a salary job." But today, "the industrial paradigm thinks that if you have lots of work, you're providing for your family—that's a liability."
The real liability is a system that works against smallholders. Many North American jurisdictions have decided to protect watercourses from feedlot contamination and erosion by demanding that cattle be fenced off from natural streams and ponds, even at on-farm waterholes. That means the only way a farmer can provide water for his cattle is to drill bore wells, for between $5,000 and $10,000 apiece, that suck up millions of gallons and rapidly deplete precious groundwater aquifers. This kind of legislation, which consumers are told will protect them, often intentionally works against the organic and smallholder methods that are the only viable form of agricultural production we will be able to turn to in the future. The laws in North America and many other jurisdictions force all farmers to "get big or die." In other words, based on all the highest-level studies reviewed by the IAASTD, these laws take us in exactly the opposite direction from where we need to go.
The best news in food is that the dangers and limitations of industrial agriculture are being resisted with incredible energy worldwide; they're being discussed in every imaginable forum, from town council meetings and dinner tables to the highest levels of government and finance. For the first time since the Green Revolution of the 1950s the industrial model is being fundamentally challenged, not only by increasingly well-organized small-holders but by the largest and most prestigious international institutions.
In 2008 Slow Food guru Michael Pollan published a long letter in The New York Times reminding the newly elected president, Barack Obama, that the main thing that made food cheap and forced people off the land after World War 11 was government subsidies to staple crops. "The chief result... was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference." Artificial grain prices meant factory farmers could lock up cattle and feed them with more ease than traditional farmers, who had to move cattle off and on pasture. The main energy advantage for humans in eating meat is that animals like cattle and sheep can eat grasses we can't, grasses that don't need to be plowed and reseeded with expensive, patented hybrids every year. Cattle can put that cellulose into a high-protein form we can absorb. But under industrial systems, cattle are eating food grains and using up cropland the same way ethanol does. Moreover, a diet they weren't built to handle increases their production of methane, so this system has vastly increased livestock's contribution to global warming. If meat is artificially cheap, animals' lives are as well. A traditionally pastured dairy cow, for example, can be milked for eight or ten years and can live for fifteen or twenty. Today the dairy cows chained in megabarns and fed grain mixed with "protein derivatives," like chicken manure and rags, will produce for about two years; then they're thrown away like old shoes, ground up to feed chickens. This is cruel, wasteful, unhealthy, and stupid for everyone concerned. It could be stopped tomorrow if the subsidies on grain were removed. Pollan essentially argues that without artificially cheap grain, factory farming and all its attendant horrors—including emerging diseases—would disappear along with antibiotic use and relatedpollution woes.
What is coming out of the international dialogue on food is not "How can we afford to grow organically?" but "How can we possibly afford to keep growing food industrially?" Without the benefit of help of any kind (and facing an amazing number of obstacles), organic growers already produce between 80 and 100 percent the yield rate of industrial operations 'and are expanding at the rate of 20 percent a year. What would happen if organic growers had some favors thrown their way, or at least were on that level playing field that proponents of globalization are always talking about? Of course,.there's the fact that organic and polycultural or multifunctional farming models aren't as simple to manage as the current model of "driving and spraying" corporate-supplied seeds coated in corporate-supplied chemicals. "Sun" farming, as Pollan puts it— that is, not using fossil fuels but only the sun's energy—requires more knowledge and training and more rural workers. A lot of people are asking, What's wrong with that?41
Many people are looking for careers away from corporate or cubicle drudgery, and a lot of jobs would open up with a new model of agriculture. Most farmers' spouses are already balancing books, doing taxes and paperwork. With fair marketing systems and better farm-gate prices, a typical farm family could hire out some of this labor and end up with a pretty good life. In North America our farmers are disappearing; the average age is 55 to 60 years old, and new farmers are not coming in. It's not too attractive, as Joel Salatin puts it, to be "a serf for an agrochemical company." But true tenure and control over crops could be regained if government regulations favored the following: production based on sun rather than fossil energy; leaving many areas fallow or natural; water conservation through management practice and crop choice; cultivation of local varieties and markets; and legislation supporting these practices. Local government agencies could take care of regulating the new local markets, packaging areas, slaughterhouses, on-farm restaurants, and other food amenities and facilities that would spring up, all of them in need of full-time workers.
Such a revolution in food distribution is already happening in Europe and even in Canada. In 2006 Quebec held a commission on the future of agriculture and agrifood across the province. A lot of people came out, from grandmothers complaining about the closure of rural schools and businesspeople bemoaning the lack of services like high-speed Internet, to agricultural producers describing their extreme difficulties in accessing local markets and their distrust of chemicals and GMOS. The commissioners were particularly impressed by young farmers protesting the industrial monopoly enforced by Quebec's only farmers' union, the UPA, which they insisted has been captured by industrial interests and often no longer represents the interests of local Quebeckers. The three commissioners heard briefs for several months, deliberated, and then tabled twenty-seven recommendations. They called for more local production and access to local markets, more help for smaller operations, and a departure from industrial monocultures. No one expected these revolutionary changes to be implemented, but in spring 2009 word got out that the UPA would have its wings clipped; it's already been downsized from two important boards. More importantly, there's supposed to be a gradual withdrawal, like Germany's, of subsidies from grain monocultures, so farmers can adjust and retool. And there may be new subsidies: $10,000 if farmers save 8 percent of their land for habitat or keep 25 percent fallow; $10,000 for each separate "multifunctionality": that is, the more varieties you produce, the better off you'll be.42
In short, a new day just might be dawning. Cheap food is killing us. In fact it's killing the entire planet. Real food won't increase costs much more than a percentage point or two in a family's budget, once we stop paying for the cheap "food" of the industrialists. As Michael Pollan puts it, "eating less oil and more sunlight will rebound to the benefit of both."43
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To be continued
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