The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [114]
I was struck by the fact that for Joel abjuring agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals is not so much a goal of his farming, as it so often is in organic agriculture, as it is an indication that his farm is functioning well. “In nature health is the default,” he pointed out. “Most of the time pests and disease are just nature’s way of telling the farmer he’s doing something wrong.”
At Polyface no one ever told me not to touch the animals, or asked me to put on a biohazard suit before going into the brooder house. The reason I had to wear one at Petaluma Poultry is because that system—a monoculture of chickens raised in close confinement—is inherently precarious, and the organic rules’ prohibition on antibiotics puts it at a serious disadvantage. Maintaining a single-species animal farm on an industrial scale isn’t easy without pharmaceuticals and pesticides. Indeed, that’s why these chemicals were invented in the first place, to keep shaky monocultures from collapsing. Sometimes the large-scale organic farmer looks like someone trying to practice industrial agriculture with one hand tied behind his back.
By the same token, a reliance on agrochemicals destroys the information feedback loop on which an attentive farmer depends to improve his farming. “Meds just mask genetic weaknesses,” Joel explained one afternoon when we were moving the cattle. “My goal is always to improve the herd, adapt it to the local conditions by careful culling. To do this I need to know: Who has a propensity for pinkeye? For worms? You simply have no clue if you’re giving meds all the time.”
“So you tell me, who’s really in this so-called information economy? Those who learn from what they observe on their farm, or those who rely on concoctions from the devil’s pantry?”
OF COURSE the simplest, most traditional measure of a farm’s efficiency is how much food it produces per unit of land; by this yardstick too Polyface is impressively efficient. I asked Joel how much food Polyface produces in a season, and he rattled off the following figures:
30,000 dozen eggs
12,000 broilers
800 stewing hens
50 beeves (representing 25,000 pounds of beef)
250 hogs (50,000 pounds of pork)
800 turkeys
500 rabbits.
This seemed to me a truly astonishing amount of food from one hundred acres of grass. But when I put it that way to Joel that afternoon—we were riding the ATV up to the very top of the hill to visit the hogs in their summer quarters—he questioned my accounting method. It was far too simple.
“Sure, you can write that we produced all that food from a hundred open acres, but if you really want to be accurate about it, then you’ve got to count the four hundred and fifty acres of woodlot too.” I didn’t get that at all. I knew the woodlot was an important source of farm income in the winter—Joel and Daniel operate a small sawmill from which they sell lumber and mill whatever wood they need to build sheds and barns (and Daniel’s new house). But what in the world did the forest have to do with producing food?
Joel proceeded to count the ways. Most obviously, the farm’s water supply depended on its forests to hold moisture and prevent erosion. Many of the farm’s streams and ponds would simply dry up if not for the cover of trees. Nearly all of the farm’s 550 acres had been deforested when the Salatins arrived; one of the first things Bill Salatin did was plant trees on all the north-facing slopes.
“Feel how cool it is in here.” We were passing through a dense stand of oak and hickory. “Those deciduous trees work like an air conditioner. That reduces the stress on the animals in summer.”
Suddenly we arrived at a patch of woodland that looked more like a savanna than a forest: The trees had been thinned and all around them grew thick grasses. This was one of the pig paddocks that Joel had carved out of the woods with the help of the pigs themselves. “All we do to make a new pig paddock is fence off a quarter acre of forest, thin out the saplings to let in some light, and