Eco Vegetarianism

The kicker about become Eco Aware is that you lose ignorance. Things as simple as eating and driving are now moral choices, and the choices are never nice and tidy. My current issue is food… my vegetarianism in particular.

Mia and I have been virtual veggies for years, getting more and more hardcore until the past 2 years Mia has been all but 100%-only very rarely breaking ranks to avoid being rude when we are eating at friends or family, with myself about 98%. While we both eat very similarly, we do so for different reasons. I started eating less meat for ecological reasons-I want to eat lower on the food chain to reduce the amount of acreage it takes to feed me fat arse. Mia is all about the ecological side as well, but is also an Ethical Vegetarian-she believes that killing an animal for her own food is wrong. Not to mention she has an at times irrational repugnance to turkey necks and chicken feet. I credit her greatly for stopping well short of condemning others for not doing so-its a personal choice for her.

So I sat safely ensconced in my ideals for several years, but my recent rash of agricultural reading is shaking my convictions. The acreage argument is still wicked strong. Drive I-80 across Iowa and you will see farms for 400 miles, and nary a single plant that humans can eat. Corn on Beans for mile after mile. The ecological impact of that much genetically modified monoculture is unprecedented. Erosion alone is averaging over 5 tons per acre per year to the extent that the silt field in the Gulf of Mexico is visible from space. But as I research large scale organic agriculture the more I am convinced that industrial anything is unsustainable. So we have switched to mostly local foods grown on small Wisconsin farms using the European slogan of Eat Your View as a motto and cutting about 1250 miles off the transport of much of our food in the process.

This is much better, but my resolve is weakening. The more I read about small scale agriculture, the more farms I tour, and the more books on Permaculture I research-the more I think that a vegetarianism based on pure ecological grounds is misplaced. So as is my wont, I’d like to explore these thoughts in more detail.

If you are an Ethical Vegetarian, or Gaia help me… a Vegan, you will find little to agree with here, and possibly even become spitting mad, because we are starting from different ethical worldviews. Personally, though I do not find killing animals for my food pleasant, I also know that humans are omnivores and I have no moral objection to eating meat. So for the curious among all groups, please read on.

In our quest to reduce our ecological footprint, and eat healthier to boot, we have spent much energy attempting to eat as local as possible. This trend has gotten us out to talk to several more farmers and tour their farms. All of this keeps pointing me to one conclusion: that farms work best, maximizing yield and minimizing inputs, when an integrated relationship is fostered between plants and animals. Our grandparents knew this to be self evident, Permaculture espouses it, and nature wouldn’t function any other way. The best way to cycle nutrients on a farm is to use our microbial friends (soil and compost) and animals to make nutrients available in a form that plants can use to create surplus calories from the sun which can then feed us humans and the other animals. It’s a nice, tidy system. Without animals on the farm, you invariably need to import fertilizer or organic matter to make the needed tons of compost, incurring transportation costs and burning more fuel. And even then, raw manure, especially urine, is still the best fertilizer. By splitting the system we are wasting energy to poorly mimic what nature will give us for free.

Permaculture gardening stacks vegetables in tightly to grow as many calories in as little acreage as possible to maximize yields and minimize inputs. One can grow corn, melons, and beans in the same area you could grow any one of the three and drastically increase your yield. Taking some of the learning’s I am getting from Permaculture, Joel Salatin, and Gene Logsdon I am beginning to think there is an even better way. Taking this out another step you can run geese thru the field while it is in production to eat slugs and weeds, and then post harvest run cattle or goats through to eat the roughage we can’t-increasing the yield of edible calories. But we aren’t done yet, while the cattle are in send in chickens and they will graze on weeds, eat insects, and keep the cows healthier by eating parasites out of their manure. Before you’re done send the swine thru to churn up the whole works for next year while they eat grubs and other pests. All four will add healthy quantities of manure (cows as much as 50lbs/day each) to replenish the soil with zero petrochemicals spent in processing or transport. Animals make sense on a farm, or even in the garden, as they increase on site resource use, food production, and cut back on imported resources: keeping it local and closing the resource loop.  Then there is the economic argument.

The cold truth is that farms don’t make a lot of money-they never have and they never will. That means, unless you are living off grants or subsidies, every single item on a farm needs to make money-and the more ways the better. This also means that you can’t afford to keep geese just to eat slugs-you also need to eat/sell the meat to make up for the added expense of their housing and care. Dairy cows (interchange goats as needed) once seemed like a great vegetarian alternative to me as you could make money off of them without the whole blood and gore piece. But this just proves that I am an ignorant city slicker-and a male one to boot. Why do cows give milk? Same reason all mammals do-to rear their young. That means that once a year you need to “freshen” the cow through having her “throw” a calf and then keep her in lactation for the rest of the year after you wean off the calf. If that calf is a heifer-great! You just expanded your herd. If it’s a steer or if you don’t need any more dairy cows, well, it gets raised for meat. Some farmers, like Gene Logsdon, will raise those calves all year on pasture and sell them in the fall as grass fed Baby Beef-very different than a veal calf raised in a 16 sq ft pen all its very short life. This fact has pushed Mia even closer to giving up dairy completely. There really is no way around this-no one really keeps cows for pets-too darn expensive.

Egg laying chickens are better, they are much more feasible for the gardener as a small flock is inexpensive, relatively low maintenance, and apparently their egg production goes on regardless of breeding. I have read of numerous families treating these chickens as pets, and burying them out behind the Oak tree by Mildy the Cat when their days are done. But for a money making enterprise you need a lot of chickens. Organic Valley won’t even pick up your eggs unless you have over 2000 birds (though this is manageable on as little as 4 prime acres), and that is a lot of chicken graves to dig. More likely you will sell them for low quality meat after they have lived out their egg laying lives because now you need to extra revenue to pay for all that extra fencing, feed, medication, and housing. The long and short of it is that unless you are raising animals for show, the only way to have most animals on a farm is to raise them, at least in a final gasp of revenue, for meat.

This is not to say that I think of all things on a cost benefit analysis, but with arable land prices in much of the country escalating past $3000/acre, and here in WI at more than $5000/acre if we want small family farms to succeed they simply must be profitable-and nothing on a farm will make as much money with as little effort (read family-not corporate- farm) as integrated, diversified livestock management alongside a vegetable and grain/pasture operation.

In all of the above I am utilizing Natural Capitalism, and accounting for the real costs of things like effluent flows from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’S) at right, transportation from buying your cattle feed from Argentina because its “cheaper”, or in dumping petrochemical fertilizer onto your field to increase yields while destroying the soil. You can make money off land that way, even at $3-5000/acre, but you are forcing future generations to foot the environmental bill-which should be criminal. Plus that is not the kind of farming I want to save anyhow. From one point of view farmers are artisans, combine operators are drivers, and CAFO operators just might be Evil.

If I became a vegetarian to reduce my ecological footprint it is becoming more clear that what I am protesting was not meat-but the eff’d up way that we are raising meat-growing the food thousands of miles from the cattle, and then forcing the cattle into CAFO’s to create massive effluent issues and intolerable living conditions. The degradation of energy argument losses some momentum if the energy being degraded was never in a form humans can consume-like fouled melons or corn stalks.

As I said in the beginning, raising meat humanely and offering the animal a clean death is not morally wrong to me. What we do to animals in CAFO’s makes me fighting mad and want to join PETA. This bears thought.

So I have poked some significant holes in my once solid convictions that eating vegetarian with whole foods was the most ecological choice. But since no man lives on an island, I would like to continue to delve into the economic and ecologic possibilities of this new (old?) small scale farming. I speak to the economics because an ideal that is not a fiscal reality is just arm chair fodder. I prefer to espouse workable solutions that will help move our country toward a less energy dependent future.

It is possible to make money on a purely vegetable farm, but the farming is amazingly intense making it virtually impossible to be long term sustainable due to the amount of resources removed from the land in produce versus what is given back from imported fertilizers. Much of the land is cultivated every 4-6 weeks for 8 months of the year leaving it exposed to erosion more often than it is covered. Furthermore, small vegetable operations often focus on higher value niche markets like micro greens, herbs, edible flowers, etc to be able to make ends meet and less on rows of spinach, radishes, beans or tomatoes that most vegetarians eat everyday. Even in Organic production the economies of scale favor industrial production of these ‘commodity’ items. And then you get into all the ecological messes inherent in large scale agriculture-massive soil erosion, processed fertilizers (like pelletized chicken manure), and long range transportation. Look at it this way: it takes a lot of radishes at $1.50 bunch to make the rent on a 40 acre farm ($650,000) farm. The fields of radishes at left is no ecologically better than a field of corn. The largest local vegetable operation I have visited was 30 acres, but it took a team of 5-10 workers 6 days a week to harvest the 200 CSA subscriptions and it was not profitable. Mixed vegetable operations for farmers markets are typically from much smaller farms, say 1-10 acres.

Earlier I wrote about integrated farms-the kind of operation that virtually all farms were before 1950 and the rise of Industrial Agriculture. The bucolic scenes I painted of waves of different animals going over the vegetable field begged the question of where the heck the cattle, chickens, and hogs were prior to their dance thru the corn and melons. The answer is that the vegetable ‘fields’ are just one or two paddocks in a rotational grazing system as espoused by Allan Nation at the Stockman Grass Farmer, Jo Robinson at Eatwild.com, Gene Logsdon in All Flesh is Grass, and others. These are just a few of hundreds of farmers that are fine tuning the art of grazing to out compete the CAFO’s. I will spare you all the details-which are legion and beyond my expertise and present just a high level overview to give you an idea, if you want to learn more, as I feel any omnivore should, the Eatwild site is fairly user friendly.

Grass Farming

In my unhumble opinion Grass Farming is the future of farming. (I love that turn of phrase-the philosophical importance in the shift from calling oneself a Cattle Rancher to a Grass Farmer is immense.) By rotating grazing animals (yes, poultry and hogs graze!) through paddocks you greatly increase the holding capacity of the land. This is done by pulsing the pasture, much as the bison of old did. The farmer ‘mobs’ the field forcing the animals to eat everything, including the weeds, and then moves them to the next paddock before they can do any permanent damage from over grazing, while also keeping them there long enough to not just eat the tasty plants which encourages weed growth. The farmer keeps enough paddocks to rotate the animals while letting paddocks recoup, and this diversity also allows him to keep some paddocks sown with summer tolerant grass, and others with cold hardy varieties. There is even enough surplus in spring that the farmer can cut hay enough to tide them over thru the month or so of deep winter where the pasture may not be available. Other than moving the light electric fencing (easily run on solar) and animals daily the farmer can spend their energy on other areas like the vegetable patch or wood lot while the animals do the weeding, harvesting, and fertilizing for him. This is the animal husbandry equivalent of Masanobu Fukuoka’s “Do Nothing” rice farming: let nature do the work for you.

The reason that Grass Farming seems to me to be the holy grail of ecological eating is this: once the pasture is established, the land is never cultivated, never fertilized, never herbicided, and you can grass farm a small 20-40 acre farm without a tractor because the animals are doing most of the work. The farmer isn’t importing feed, or exporting waste-it is essentially a closed system. It works for beef and dairy operations, for goats, sheep or cattle, as well either broiler chickens or laying hens and with some tweaking I think hogs might work as well.

My main concerns with large scale agriculture are erosion from regular cultivation which also uses massive farm equipment, and the need to import resources- GMO seed, fertilizer, and herbicide supporting a grossly polluting chemical industry. A grass fed animal system can literally grow calories 100% on solar power in a 1) closed system that 2) heals the soil (permanent pasture can make 750-1000lbs of topsoil a year) and actually 3) removes carbon from the atmosphere (some studies have shown that established prairie can capture as much carbon as the same acreage of hardwood forest). These 3 factors are something that growing annual vegetable crops cannot accomplish-even on small scale 2-5 acre farms. The only approximation I have read about would be a Permaculture Garden, which I have never seen presented in a workable commercial system. And frankly, if it isn’t profitable, at least enough to support a modest family income, it will never work in society as a whole.

21^st Century Animal Farm

So here is my version of the Utopian Organic Farm-and it is not, nor could it be vegetarian. A 20-100 Acre plot divided into 15-30 paddocks containing everything from traditional pastures of alfalfa, clover and fescue, to fruit orchards, vineyards, brambles and 1-2 paddocks of vegetables grown on a rotating basis in paddocks that need replenishing. The pastures that are being put out of rotation next season would house the hogs which would tear them up sufficiently thru their rooting, while the orchards would be mown by sheep and geese, and the vineyards weeded by chickens. Dual purpose goats or cattle would graze thru the remaining pastures providing a surplus of both milk and meat to help make the mortgage along with the seasonal income of fruits from the perennial orchards and small fruit diversifying the farm’s income enough that a blight in the beans won’t bankrupt them. Costs would be kept down by having no, or a very small, tractor-and possibly just using some oxen (I am not kidding-most tractor use would only be for moving hay and harvest wagons) and no imported fertilizer. Efforts would be made to establish a local market that could meet many needs in one place-meat, dairy, fruit, veggies, eggs, and possibly even fiber from the goats or sheep. Niche markets could be established in artisan cheeses, goat milk soaps or heirloom vegetables for restaurants depending on the inclination of the farmer. A profitable agriculture enterprise is thus created (I realize how idealistic this is…) that is 100% solar driven on a closed system that builds community and cuts food transportation miles from 1500 to about 15. Joel Salatin is already doing this on his farm and producing more surplus than I had ever thought imaginable off of 100 acres-so maybe I am not too crazy after all.

I am becoming convinced that Organic 100% Grass Fed meat and eggs, along with perennial fruits are the ecological ideal. And that blows massive logical holes thru my stance on vegetarianism for ecological reasons.

So by now you will be aware that I am struggling with my former belief that eating local organic vegetables was the most ecological way to receive sustenance. I no longer think that is true. Perennial pastures build soil fertility, lock carbon in the soil, and grass fed meat can be raised with virtually no petroleum inputs. But I also think that the difference between eating whole, local produce exclusively and getting a percentage of your calories from grass fed meat is very small. If I had to make an unscientific spectrum from least ecological to most, I would have CAFO meat (and if it doesn’t say 100% Grass Fed-it’s almost certainly spent at least some time in a CAFO) and processed foods (if you have to open it- it counts [processing adds another factor of 10 to the embodied energy]), then imported fruits (typically flown in), to processed organic foods, then a huge jump up in eco-friendliness to regional Organic Produce in season, then local conventional produce, then up to local organic foods and finishing with local Grass Fed Meats. Further more, raising animals on an integrated farm actually makes local organic produce more ecological by producing the fertilizer on site. Plus animals add enough profitability to actually make a livable farm-only income feasible for a thrifty family. Sustaining a populated rural countryside is very important for biodiversity and our ability to produce our own food as a nation. Supporting these enterprises is a patriotic as well as ecological act.

But here is the kicker. I am still a vegetarian. The largest reason is that, for cattle and hogs at least, there simply are no humane slaughterhouses. Because the USDA and FDA mandate that their must be an inspector in each facility, and those inspectors are expensive, only the big One Size Fits All slaughterhouses can run. Guess who sets the ethical standards for these facilities? McDonald’s. No, I am not kidding. In an effort to forestall PEDA, they have set some ‘minimum’ standards:
Potentially graphic content warning-but if you want to eat meat you need to know this: Readers of Michael Pollan will find this familiar. When the cows are led into the slaughterhouse, they are sent through a chute that has them enter single file. Each cow is then killed by a piston shot into their forehead. When it works, it really isn’t too bad a way to go in my book: brain dead within seconds. But the piston misses. A lot. Because of McDonald’s there are now inspectors watching as the now dead cows are strung up for processing. It is typical that they shake around as their dead nerves fire, but these are not still alive. However, some of the cows will be visibly trying to get upright again. Those cows aren’t even stunned and they head in to the processing, which starts with skinning, very much alive. McDonald’s standards are maximum 5% still alive. That is about 1 out every 20 cows, and I refuse to support that industry. Though I do not find eating meat immoral, I find immense ethical problems with torturing animals in our care. Therefore I do not eat beef.

Chickens are not as regulated and it is feasible and, here in Wisconsin rather easy to find local grass fed chicken. I can think of three farms off the top of my head within 10 miles where I could drive up to their door and buy a humanely slaughtered chicken. So why am I not doing it? Frankly, I am not sure if even I know why. Perhaps after all these years I find animal carcasses distasteful. Perhaps I am lying to myself and I do have an ethical issue with eating meat. Maybe it is just culinary inertia.  I guess it is best summed up that I can think of no reason to start eating meat in our current lives. I also know that if we move out onto a farmette, we will need to keep animals to build soil fertility. At that point I will eat meat-animals will be necessary in our lives and I will personally be able to oversee their ends ensuring a quick, clean death solving most of my concerns. This is still untidy in my mind, which bothers me, but that is where I am right now.

Hopefully this has helped some in their quest for more ecological eating, or at the least spread some knowledge on sustainable agriculture. Those interested in further reading on that topic can check out:
Gene Logdson’s The Contrary Farmer and All Flesh is Grass. Gene is a cool guy.
Joel Salatin’s books are designed for those wanting to farm, but he is a blast to read.
Periodicals to check out include Acre’s USA, and the Stockman Grass Farmer

And those interested in ethical eating should check out Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. The book is great, but he gives Whole Foods a raw deal.

Remember-eating is a political, ethical, and ecological act.
Be the Change.