Don't mess with Polyface Farms! Salatin Fires back.....

[Guest guest]

This in response to the Op-Ed article that ran last week in the NYT and the Mpls

Trib which touted " industrial " livestock production. The author,

Mc, not only pooh-poohed grazing, pastured and outdoor animals, and

the small family farm, he also lobbed a grenade at the policies of PolyFace

Farm.... Here's :

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To the New York Times and everyone interested in truth:

The recent editorial by Mc titled THE MYTH OF SUSTAINABLE

MEAT contains enough factual errors and skewed assumptions to fill a

book and normally I would dismiss this out of hand as too much nonsense

to merit a response. But since it specifically mentioned Polyface, a

rebuttal is appropriate. For a more comprehensive rebuttal, read the book

FOLKS, THIS AIN'T NORMAL.

Let's go point by point. First, that grass grazing cows emit more

methane than grain-fed. This is factually false. Actually, the amount

of methane emitted by fermentation is the same whether it occurs in the

cow or outside. Whether the feed is eaten by an herbivore or left to

rot on its own, the methane generated is identical. 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 Mc 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, Mc 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.

Mc 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 Mc 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. Mc 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,

Mc 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 Mc 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

Mc 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 Mc 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.

Salatin

Polyface Farm