The Omnivore's Dilemma

by Michael Pollan

  “No, I don’t think you understand. I don’t believe it’s sustainable—or ‘organic,’ if you will—to FedEx meat all around the country. I’m sorry, but I can’t do it.”

  This man was serious.

  He explained that just because we can ship organic lettuce from California, or organic apples from Chile, doesn’t mean we should do it. Shipping food thousands of miles and burning up fossil fuels went against his whole philosophy as a farmer.

  “I’m afraid if you want to try one of our chickens,” he said, “you’re going to have to drive down here to Swoope to pick it up.”

  It turns out there’s another food chain in America, one that looks very different from the industrial farms I had been visiting. It’s based on small family farms like Salatin’s, which practice true sustainable farming. These farms aren’t owned by big agribusiness corporations. They don’t ship their vegetables and meat across the country or across the globe. In fact, they look more like the picture I had of an organic farm when I had started out. So I decided to take Joel Salatin up on the offer he’d extended when I told him about my book. I decided to go to Virginia to see his farm firsthand. My wife called it my Paris Hilton adventure. And she was right—I was about to do a lot of hard work I wasn’t quite ready for. I was also about to find out how different an organic farm could be.

  PART III

  The Local Sustainable Meal: Food from Grass

  12

  Poly face Farm

  GREEN ACRES

  Early in the afternoon on the first day of summer, I found myself sitting in the middle of a bright green pasture. The first day of summer is the longest day of the year. This day felt like the longest day of my life. I was more tired than I thought anyone could be.

  I’d spent the afternoon making hay. After just a few hours in the June sun lifting and throwing fifty-pound bales, I hurt. We think of grass as soft and friendly stuff, but once it’s been dried in the sun and shredded by machines, it becomes hay. And the ends of hay are like needles, sharp enough to draw blood. My forearms were dotted red with pinpricks and my lungs were filled with hay dust.

  Joel Salatin had gone off to the barn with his grown son, Daniel. That left me a welcome moment in the pasture to rest before we started up again. It was Monday, the first day of the week I would spend on the farm. After just half a day I knew I would never again complain about any price a farmer wanted to charge me for food. If the work was this hard, one dollar for an egg seemed reasonable. Fifty dollars for a steak was a steal.

  TIME TRAVEL?

  The farm machinery had fallen silent, and I could hear the sounds of songbirds in the trees, and also the low clucking of hens. Up on the green, green hill rising to the west I could see a small herd of cattle grazing. The meadows were dotted with contented animals. Behind them was the backdrop of dark woods. A twisting brook threaded through it all. It was an almost too-perfect farm scene. The only problem was that I couldn’t just lie there on the springy pasture for the rest of the afternoon.

  I thought about how amazing it was that the farm existed at all. This was exactly the way farms had been before industrial food and feedlots and giant wet mills. Yet I had not traveled back in time. This farm was living and thriving today just 150 miles from Washington, D.C.

  My first glimpse of the Salatins’ Polyface Farm.

  Joel Salatin the grass farmer with his cattle at Polyface Farm.

  I’d come to Polyface Farm to find out if it was possible for a non-industrial food chain to survive in the twenty-first century. Was this farm just a lone holdout against industrial food? Or did it represent a new wave of local organic farms that could survive outside the industrial food chain? In short, I wanted to know if this kind of farming was the past or the future.

  Looking at those green pastures that afternoon, I thought the only thing missing from the scene was a happy shepherd. But then I saw a tall fellow loping toward me, wearing broad blue suspenders and a floppy straw hat. It was Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface, returning from the barn. Most farmers wear a trucker’s cap marked with the logo of an agribusiness giant. Salatin’s hat had no logo and it was made of grass, not plastic. This was fitting because grass, not petroleum, is the foundation of his farm’s success.

  THE GRASS FARMER

  Polyface Farm raises chicken, beef, turkeys, eggs, rabbits, and pigs, plus tomatoes, sweet corn, grapes, and berries. They do all this on 100 acres of pasture mixed in with another 450 acres of forest. But if you ask Joel Salatin what he does for a living he’ll say, “I’m a grass farmer.”

  The first time I heard this I didn’t get it at all. People can’t eat grass, and he doesn’t sell any of his hay to other farmers. How could he be in the grass business? But of course, Salatin was right. As I was to learn during my stay, the cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and rabbits at Polyface (as well as Salatin and his family) all depend on grass in one way or another. (Grass, of course, is not a single plant. It is our name for the whole collection of plants that grow together in a pasture or meadow.)

  Polyface Farm is the opposite of an industrial farm like George Naylor’s or Earthbound. Those industrial farms grow giant monoculture fields. Their farms run like factories. They put in the seed and fertilizer (raw materials) and out comes corn or soybeans (product). It’s a pretty straight line from start to finish.

  Nothing at Polyface works in a straight line. The animals and crops seem to move in circles like some sort of complicated dance. Each plant and animal plays its part and Joel Salatin is the choreographer. The pastures are the stage and the main action of the dance is to rotate the animals through the pastures.

  PASTURES OF PLENTY

  The pasture I was resting in was a good example. It was the third week of June and the field had already been occupied several times. It had been grazed twice by beef cattle. After the cattle it had been home to several hundred laying hens. Later, the grass had been cut to make hay that would feed the farm’s animals through the winter.

  I asked Salatin why the chickens had been let loose in the pasture instead of fed in a chicken coop. “Because that’s how it works in nature,” he explained. “Birds follow and clean up after herbivores.”

  Joel calls the hens his “sanitation crew.” In the pasture, they pick tasty grubs and fly larvae out of the cowpats. (Larvae are one stage in the life cycle of insects. For example, caterpillars are butterfly larvae.) Eating the grubs and larvae cuts down on bugs and parasites—in this case, tiny organisms that live on or in the cow—that would bother the cattle. And while the chickens are nibbling on the grasses, they add a few thousand pounds of nitrogen to the pasture with their own droppings—and produce several thousand rich and tasty eggs. After a few weeks’ rest, the pasture will regrow and feed the cows again.

  By the end of the season Salatin’s animals will have transformed his grasses into an astounding amount of food. Yet even more amazing is the fact that this pasture will be in better, not worse, shape. Its soil will be deeper, more fertile, and even springier underfoot (this thanks to the increased earthworm traffic). And the whole process is powered by the sun. No fossil fuels or added fertilizer or chemicals needed.

  GRASS AND HUMANS—BFF?

  When we looked at beef ranching, we learned how grasses and herbivores formed a partnership over millions of years of evolution. In the same way, human beings and grasses also have been partners. People in prehistoric times often hunted the big herbivores that dined on grass. Those hunters would regularly set fire to the prairie to keep it free of trees and nourish the soil. In a sense, they too were “grass farmers.” They helped the grass, and the grass in turn fed the animals they hunted.

  The bonds between humans and grass grew even stronger about 10,000 years ago. About that time people learned to plant and grow grasses like wheat, rice, and corn. These grasses were different because they produced big, rich seeds. Humans could harvest and eat those seeds. They didn’t need herbivores to turn the grass into meat.

  Grains li
ke wheat and corn are grasses, but they’re different from the grasses in Joel Salatin’s meadow. Meadow grasses can reproduce even if they are eaten (or mowed) before they can make seeds. They do this by sending out shoots or runners that become new plants. They also have deep root systems that help them to recover quickly from grazing or prairie fire. These roots survive through the winter and then start growing new leaves in the spring. Plants that do this are called perennials because they come back year after year.

  Wheat, rice, and corn are annuals. That means they don’t put down a deep root system. Instead, they survive by making seeds, which have to be planted every year. Because these seeds are edible, human beings took these annuals and helped them spread across the globe. We cut down forests and plowed up the prairies to make room for the giant seed-bearing grasses. They are the backbone of our agriculture and our food supply.

  INDUSTRIAL VS. ORGANIC

  So if you think of corn as a big, annual grass, then George Naylor in Iowa is also a grass farmer. But Naylor’s farm is one link in a chain that includes fossil fuels, artificial fertilizer, pesticides, heavy machinery, feedlots, antibiotics, and processing plants. The oil comes mostly from the Middle East, the corn comes from Iowa, the beef is slaughtered in Kansas, and then the meat has to be shipped by truck across the country to a Wal-Mart or McDonald’s near you.

  You can think of the industrial food system as a great machine. It’s a machine that stretches over thousands of miles. It runs on fossil fuel and creates tons of waste and pollution.

  Polyface Farm stands about as far from industrial agribusiness as you can get. Almost everything the farm uses is grown on the farm. Almost all of the energy used to make the food comes from the sun. There are no pesticides, no artificial fertilizer, no pollution, and no extra waste. Everything is recycled. Just compare the two farms:

  ORGANIC VS. BEYOND ORGANIC

  As I discovered in that first phone call, Polyface is so outside the industrial food chain that Salatin won’t even sell his beef, chicken, or pork by mail. You can’t order them on a website.

  “We never called ourselves organic,” he went on to explain. “We call ourselves ‘beyond organic.’” He talked about the difference between one of his chickens and an organic chicken you can buy in a supermarket. The supermarket chicken is raised in “a ten-thousand-bird shed that stinks to high heaven.” His chickens do eat non-organic grain, but they “see a new paddock of fresh green grass every day.” Then he asked, “So which chicken shall we call ‘organic’?”

  13

  Grass

  MONDAY

  We see grass all the time—on lawns, by the side of the highway, on baseball fields (if they aren’t artificial turf). But have you ever really looked at grass?

  During my week at Polyface, I learned to look at grass from lots of different angles. For example, I learned to look at a field of grass the way a cow does. You might think a field of grass is all the same. But to a cow, a fresh pasture is like a salad bar, with lots of different things to eat.

  From the mix of green leaves and stems, a cow can easily pick out a tuft of emerald green clover next to a spray of bluish green fescue. These two plants are as different to her as vanilla ice cream is from cauliflower. The cow opens her meaty wet lips, curls her sandpaper tongue around the bunched clover like a fat rope, and rips the mouthful of tender leaves from its crown. She’ll get to the fescue, but not before she’s eaten all the clover ice cream she can find.

  A cow also knows there are things in the pasture to avoid, plants that will make her sick. We might fail to notice the handful of Carolina nightshades or thistles among the other plants. But when the cows are done grazing tomorrow, those plants will still be standing, like forlorn pieces of broccoli left on a picky eater’s plate.

  THE LAW OF THE SECOND BITE

  Joel Salatin calls himself a grass farmer. In the end everything he raises on his farm comes from grass. How do the grasses perform this miracle? They do it by capturing the energy of the sun and using it to make leaves cows can eat. So maybe he’s really a sun farmer.

  To Joel, sustainable organic farming means using this free solar energy instead of fossil fuel energy. “These grass blades are our photovoltaic panels,” he says. He’s built a complex farm system around this simple idea. To make it work, he needs to know an awful lot about grass. And the most important thing to know about grass, he told me, is when it likes to be eaten.

  As I explained, grass has evolved to be in partnership with grass eaters. It survives very well if its leaves are chewed off. The secret, Joel told me, is not to let the cows take a second bite until the grass has had time to recover. That takes about fourteen days. He calls it the “law of the second bite.”

  If this were a real law, most of the world’s ranchers and dairy farmers would be outlaws, because they let their cows stay in the same pasture without stop. Without a chance to recover, clover and other cow favorites soon disappear. The root system of the entire field weakens. Instead of a lush pasture, the farmer soon has a field full of brown bald spots and plants that cows won’t touch.

  Joel keeps his cows from getting that second bite by moving them every day. Near the end of my first day as a Polyface farmhand, when all I really wanted to do was lie down, there was still one more important chore to perform. We had to move the cows.

  A MOVING EXPERIENCE

  Throwing and stacking fifty-pound bales of hay all afternoon had left me bone tired, so I was mightily relieved when Joel proposed we drive his ATV to the upper pasture where the cows had spent their day. (It’s a basic rule that the more weary you feel, the more kindly you look on fossil fuel.) We stopped by the toolshed for a freshly charged car battery we’d use to power the electrified fence. Then we sped up the rutted dirt road and soon bumped to a halt at the upper pasture. Eighty or so cattle were bunched together in a section of a much larger field. A portable electric fence kept them from roaming.

  The cows had been in that spot for only one day. During that time they had eaten down just about everything within reach. Now it was time for them to move on, giving the grasses a chance to recover. Moving every day also keeps the cows healthier, because they can get away from their droppings, which can contain unhealthy parasites.

  Joel disconnected the electric fence from its battery and held down the wire with his boot to let me into the paddock. Clearly Joel’s cattle knew what was about to happen. The cows that had been lying around roused themselves, and the bolder ones slowly lumbered over in our direction, One of them stepped right up to nuzzle us like a big cat. “That’s Budger,” Joel told me. You wouldn’t mistake Joel’s cattle for show cattle. None of them are purebred. Instead they’re a mix of Angus, Brahmin, and other breeds. Yet their coats were sleek, their tails were clean, and they had remarkably few flies on them.

  It took the two of us no more than fifteen minutes to put up a new fence around an area next to the old one, drag the watering tub into it, and set up the water line. 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 restaurant maître d’ than a cowboy, Joel opened the gate between the two paddocks. He 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 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 around for their favorite grasses. They lowered their great heads, and the evening air filled with the muffled sounds of smacking lips, tearing grass, and the low snuffling of contented cattle.

  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. At Poky, the feed had to be harvested by machine, transported by train, processed in a mill, then trucked to the feedlots. Joel’s cows were harvesting their own feed: grasses that had grown right there, powered by little
more than sunlight. The food chain in this pasture could not be any shorter. And at the end of their meal there’d be nothing left to clean up, since the cattle would spread their waste exactly where it would do the most good.

  UNDER THE GRASS

  The food chain at Polyface is short and simple. But there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye. For example, Joel moves his cattle in the evening because he knows that’s when the grass is sweetest. The leaves spend the whole day using sunlight to make food—sugars. Mixed in with the sugars are important minerals the grasses have drawn up from the soil.

  If you could look underground, you’d see even more. When cattle eat the leaves of a grass, the plant will kill off some of its roots, to balance itself out. Part of the root system dies and begins to decay. Then the bacteria, fungi, and earthworms will get to work breaking the old roots down into rich brown humus. (Humus is the part of soil that used to be living organic matter.) So by taking a bite of grass, a cow actually helps create new soil.

  Because the cattle move on every day, they don’t wipe out their favorite types of grass. As we’ve seen, this means that a pasture holds a dozen or more types of plants—a real example of biodiversity. A mixture of tall and short plants means that more of the solar energy that falls on the pasture is turned into growth. Biodiversity also means the pasture is green almost all year long. Some grasses grow more in the spring, others have their growing season in the summer. For this reason, an acre of mixed grasses can actually produce more carbohydrate and protein in a year than an acre of field corn. And a field of mixed grasses with a deep root system is much more likely to survive dry spells and droughts.