The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [102]
For the time being, though, I’ll have to eat Budger herself if I want to make use of the food energy contained in the grasses growing in Joel Salatin’s pastures. For me, Wes Jackson’s audacious vision of an agriculture that might someday feed us without diminishing the earth’s substance (its soil), as even the most sustainable annual agriculture must do, only deepens my appreciation for the grass-based food chain we already have—the one, I mean, that links Budger to the soil and sun and, eventually, to me. It’s true that prodigious amounts of food energy are wasted every time an animal eats another animal—nine calories for every one we consume. But if all that energy has been drawn from the boundless storehouse of the sun, as in the case of eating meat off this pasture, that meal comes as close to a free lunch as we can hope to get. Instead of mining the soil, such a meal builds more of it. Instead of diminishing the world, it has added to it.
ALL OF WHICH begs a rather large question: Why did we ever turn away from this free lunch in favor of a biologically ruinous meal based on corn? Why in the world did Americans ever take ruminants off the grass? And how could it come to pass that a fast-food burger produced from corn and fossil fuel actually costs less than a burger produced from grass and sunlight?
I asked myself these questions standing there in Joel’s pasture that evening, and in the months since I’ve thought of several answers. The most obvious answer turns out not to be true. I had thought that the victory of corn over grass might owe to the fact that a field of corn simply produces more total food energy than an acre of grass; it certainly looks that way. But researchers at the Land Institute have studied this question and calculated that in fact more nutrients are produced—protein and carbohydrate—in an acre of well-managed pasture than in an acre of field corn. How can this be? Because a polyculture of grass, with its wide diversity of photosynthesizers exploiting every inch of land as well as every moment of growing season, captures more solar energy and therefore produces more biomass than a cornfield; also, only the kernels are harvested from a cornfield, whereas virtually all the grass grown in a pasture finds its way into the rumen.
Even so, the temptations of cheap corn are powerful, as irresistible as the temptations of cheap energy. Even before the advent of the feedlot, farmers had begun using a little corn to finish their cattle—fatten them for slaughter—whenever they ran out of good grass, especially in the fall and winter. “When you’re trying to finish cattle,” Allan Nation pointed out, “corn covers a multitude of sins.” Cattlemen found that corn, being such a dense source of calories, produced meat more quickly than grass; it also produced a more reliably consistent product, eliminating the seasonal and regional differences you often find in grass-finished beef. Over time, the knowledge that went into growing grass good enough to finish cattle all the year round gradually was lost.
Along the way corn kept getting more plentiful and ever cheaper. When the farmer found that he could buy corn more cheaply than he could ever hope to grow it, it no longer made economic sense to feed animals on the farm, so they moved into CAFOs. The farmer who then plowed up his pastures to grow corn to market found he could take off to Florida in the winter, not work so hard. To help dispose of the rising mountain of cheap corn farmers were now producing, the government did everything it could to help wean cattle off grass and onto corn, by subsidizing the building of feedlots (through tax breaks) and promoting a grading system based on