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The second phase of the marriage of grasses and humans is usually called the “invention of agriculture,” a self-congratulatory phrase that overlooks the role of the grasses themselves in revising the terms of the relationship. Beginning about ten thousand years ago a handful of particularly opportunistic grass species—the ancestors of wheat, rice, and corn—evolved to produce tremendous, nutritionally dense seeds that could nourish humans directly, thereby cutting out the intermediary animals. The grasses accomplished this feat by becoming annuals, throwing all their energy into making seeds rather than storing some of it underground in roots and rhizomes to get through the winter. These monster annual grasses outcompeted not only the trees, which humans obligingly cut down to expand the annuals’ habitats, but bested the perennial grasses, which in most places succumbed to the plow. Their human sponsors ripped up the great perennial-polyculture grasslands to make the earth safe for annuals, which would henceforth be grown in strict monocultures.

3. INDUSTRIAL ORGANIC

Hard to believe, but Joel Salatin and George Naylor are, if regarded from a great enough distance, engaged in much the same pursuit: growing grasses to feed the cattle, chickens, and pigs that feed us. Compared to Salatin, however, Naylor participates in an infinitely more complex industrial system, involving not only corn (and soybeans), but fossil fuels, petrochemicals, heavy machinery, CAFOs, and an elaborate international system of distribution to move all these elements around: the energy from the Persian Gulf, the corn to the CAFOs, the animals to slaughter, and their meat finally to a Wal-Mart or McDonald’s near you. Considered as a whole this system comprises a great machine, transforming inputs of seed and fossil energy into outputs of carbohydrate and protein. And, as with any machine, this one generates streams of waste: the nitrogen and pesticides running off the cornfields; the manure pooling in the feedlot lagoons; the heat and exhaust produced by all the machines within the machine—the tractors and trucks and combines.

Polyface Farm stands about as far from this industrialized sort of agriculture as it is possible to get without leaving the planet. Joel’s farm stands as a kind of alternative reality to George’s: Every term governing a conventional 500-acre corn-and-bean operation in Churdan, Iowa, finds its mirror opposite here on these 550 acres in Swoope, Virginia. To wit:

NAYLOR FARM

POLYFACE FARM

Industrial

Pastoral

Annual species

Perennial species

Monoculture

Polyculture

Fossil energy

Solar energy

Global market

Local market

Specialized

Diversified

Mechanical

Biological

Imported fertility

Local fertility

Myriad inputs

Chicken feed

For half a century now, which is to say for as long as industrial agriculture has held sway in America, the principal alternative to its methods and general approach has gone by the name “organic,” a word chosen (by J. I. Rodale, the founding editor of Organic Gardening and Farming magazine) to imply that nature rather than the machine should supply the proper model for agriculture. Before my journey through the organic food industry I would have thought that virtually any organic farm would belong on the Polyface side of this ledger. But it turns out that this is not necessarily the case: There are now “industrial organic” farms that belong firmly on the left-hand side. Then there is this further paradox: Polyface Farm is technically not an organic farm, though by any standard it is more “sustainable” than virtually any organic farm. Its example forces you to think a lot harder about what these words—sustainable, organic, natural—really mean.

As it happened, the reason I found my way to Polyface Farm in the first place had everything to do with Joel Salatin’s unusually strict construction of the word sustainable. As part of my research into the organic food chain, I kept