The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [95]
This is not at all how grass looks to a cow or for that matter to a grass farmer like Joel Salatin. When one of his cows moves into a new paddock, she doesn’t just see the color green; she doesn’t even see grass. She sees, out of the corner of her eye, this nice tuft of white clover, the emerald-green one over there with the heart-shaped leaves, or, up ahead, that grassy spray of bluish fescue tightly cinched at ground level. These two entities are as different in her mind as vanilla ice cream is from cauliflower, two dishes you would never conflate just because they both happen to be white. The cow opens her meaty wet lips, curls her sandpaper tongue around the bunched clover like a fat rope, and with the pleasing sound of tearing foliage, rips the mouthful of tender leaves from its crown. She’ll get to the fescue eventually, and the orchard grass, and even to quite a few of the weeds, but not before she’s eaten all the clover ice cream she can find.
Joel calls his pastures the “salad bar,” and to his cows they contain at least as many different things to eat. As well as a few things not to eat. Though we might fail to notice the handful of Carolina nightshades or thistles lurking in this pasture, when the cows are done grazing it tomorrow, those plants will still be standing, like forlorn florets of cauliflower languishing on a picky child’s plate.
What watching this cow eat her supper tells me is that the scale argument doesn’t really hold. The reason we don’t see very much when we look at grass has less to do with our relative proportions than with our interests. The cow I’m following in Joel Salatin’s pasture this evening is a far sight bigger than I am, and in most matters a good deal less perceptive, yet she can pick a clump of timothy out of this illegible green chaos in less time than it would take me to remember that plant’s name. I don’t eat timothy, or even clover. But if I did I’d probably perceive the order and beauty and delectability of this salad bar as vividly as she does. Legibility, too, is in the eye of the beholder.
Joel doesn’t eat grass either—it’s one of the few nutritious things in nature the human omnivore, lacking a rumen to break down its cellulose, can’t digest—yet he can see the salad bar almost as vividly as his cows. That first day I spent on his farm, when he insisted that before I met any animals I join him down on his belly in a pasture, he introduced me to orchard grass and fescue, to red and white clover, to millet and bluegrass, plantain and timothy and sweet grass, which he pulled a blade of for me to taste (and a very sweet grass it is). Joel wanted me to understand why he calls himself a grass farmer rather than a rancher or a pig farmer or a chicken farmer or a turkey farmer or a rabbit farmer or an egg farmer. The animals come and go, but the grasses, which directly or indirectly feed all the animals, abide, and the well-being of the farm depends more than anything else on the well-being of its grass.
Grass farming is a relatively new term in American agriculture, imported from New Zealand by Allan Nation, the editor of Stockman Grass Farmer, in the 1980s. Stockman is a tabloid monthly, chock-full of ads for portable electric fencing, mineral supplements, and bull semen, that has become the bible for the growing band of livestock producers who practice something called “management-intensive grazing,” or as abbreviated in the pages of Nation