The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [96]
When Allan Nation went to New Zealand in 1984 and heard sheep ranchers there refer to themselves as grass farmers something clicked, he says, and he began to regard the growing of food in a completely fresh light. Nation promptly changed the name of his little journal from the Stockman to Stockman Grass Farmer and “got pretty evangelical about grass.” He gathered around his magazine a group of like-minded grass evangelists, including Joel, Jim Gerrish, an Idaho rancher and teacher (who coined the phrase “management-intensive grazing”), Gerald Fry, a breeding specialist, Jo Robinson, a health writer who studies the health benefits of grass-fed meat, and an Argentine agronomist named Dr. Anibal Pordomingo. Many of these people first encountered the theory of rotational grazing in the work of André Voisin, a French agronomist whose 1959 treatise, Grass Productivity, documented that simply by applying the right number of ruminants at the right time pastures could produce far more grass (and, in turn, meat and milk) than anyone had ever thought possible.
Grass farmers grow animals—for meat, eggs, milk, and wool—but regard them as part of a food chain in which grass is the keystone species, the nexus between the solar energy that powers every food chain and the animals we eat. “To be even more accurate,” Joel has said, “we should call ourselves sun farmers. The grass is just the way we capture the solar energy.” One of the principles of modern grass farming is that to the greatest extent possible farmers should rely on the contemporary energy of the sun, as captured every day by photosynthesis, instead of the fossilized sun energy contained in petroleum.
For Allan Nation, who grew up on a cattle ranch in Mississippi, doing so is as much a matter of sound economics as environmental virtue. “All agriculture is at its heart a business of capturing free solar energy in a food product that can then be turned into high-value human energy,” he recently wrote in his column, Al’s Obs; here each month he applies the theories of a decidedly eclectic group of thinkers (ranging from business gurus like Peter Drucker and Michael Porter to writers like Arthur Koestler) to the problems of farming. “There are only two efficient ways to do this,” he wrote in his column. “One is for you to walk out in your garden, pull a carrot and eat it. This is a direct transfer of solar energy to human energy. The second most efficient way is for you to send an animal out to gather this free solar food and then you eat the animal.
“All other methods of harvest and transfer require higher capital and petroleum energy inputs and these necessarily lower the return to the farmer/rancher. As Florida rancher Bud Adams once told me, ‘Ranching is a very simple business. The really hard part is keeping it simple.’”
The simplest way to capture the sun’s energy in a form food animals can use is by growing grass: “These blades are our photovoltaic panels,” Joel says. And the most efficient—if not the simplest—way to grow vast quantities of solar panels is by management-intensive grazing, a method that as its name implies relies more heavily on the farmer’s brain than on capital—or on energy-intensive inputs. All you need, in fact, is some portable electric fencing, a willingness to move your livestock onto fresh pasture every day, and the kind of intimate knowledge of grass that Joel tried to impart to me that early spring afternoon, down on our bellies in his pasture.
“The important thing to know about any grass is that its growth follows a sigmoid, or S, curve,” Joel explained. He grabbed my pen and notebook and began drawing a graph, based on one that appears in Voisin’s book. “This vertical axis here is the height of our grass plant, okay? And the horizontal axis is time: the number of days since this paddock was last grazed.” He started tracing