The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [99]
The mob-and-move routine also helps to keep the ruminants healthy. “Short-duration stays allow the animals to follow their instinct to seek fresh ground that hasn’t been fouled by their own droppings, which are incubators for parasites.”
Joel disconnected the electric fence from its battery and held down the wire with his boot to let me into the paddock. “We achieve the same objective domestically with our portable electric fences. The fence plays the role of predator in our system, keeping the animals mobbed up and making it possible for us to move them every day.” The technology for this light, inexpensive electric fencing (elements of which Joel’s father invented in the 1960s) was the breakthrough that made management-intensive grazing practical. (Though much earlier, dogs allowed shepherds to practice a rough approximation of rotational grazing.)
Clearly Joel’s cattle knew the drill; I could feel their anticipation. Cows that had been lying around roused themselves, and the bolder ones slowly lumbered over in our direction, one of them—“That’s Budger”—stepping right up to nuzzle us like a big cat. Joel’s herd is an exceptionally amiable if somewhat motley crew of black, brown, and yellowish animals, crosses of Brahman, Angus, and shorthorn bloodlines. He doesn’t believe in artificial insemination or put much stock in fancy genetics. Instead he picks a new bull from his crop of calves every couple of years, naming him for a celebrated Lothario: Slick Willie had the job for much of the Clinton administration. You wouldn’t mistake Slick’s progeny for show cattle, yet their coats were sleek, their tails were clean, and for cows on a steamy afternoon in June, they had remarkably few flies on them.
It took the two of us working together no more than fifteen minutes to fence a new paddock next to the old one, drag the watering tub into it, and set up the water line. (The farm’s irrigation system is gravity-fed from a series of ponds Joel’s dug on the hillside.) The grasses in the new paddock were thigh-high and lush, and the cattle plainly couldn’t wait to get at them.
The moment arrived. Looking more like a maître d’ than a rancher, Joel opened the gate between the two paddocks, removed his straw hat and swept it grandly in the direction of the fresh salad bar, and called his cows to their dinner. After a moment of bovine hesitation, the cows began to move, first singly, then two by two, and then all eighty of them sauntered into the new pasture, brushing past us as they looked about intently for their favorite grasses. The animals fanned out in the new paddock and lowered their great heads, and the evening air filled with the muffled sounds of smacking lips, tearing grass, and the low snuffling of contented cows.
The last time I had stood watching a herd of cattle eat their supper I was standing up to my ankles in cow manure in Poky Feeders pen number 43 in Garden City, Kansas. The difference between these two bovine dining scenes could not have been starker. The single most obvious difference was that these cows were harvesting their own feed instead of waiting for a dump truck to deliver a total mixed ration of corn that had been grown hundreds of miles away and then blended by animal nutritionists with urea, antibiotics, minerals, and the fat of other cattle in a feedlot laboratory. Here we’d brought the cattle to the food rather than the other way around, and at the end of their meal there’d be nothing left for us to clean up, since the cattle would spread their waste exactly where it would do the most good.
Cows eating grasses that had themselves eaten the sun: The food chain at work in this pasture could not be any shorter or