The Omnivore's Dilemma

by Michael Pollan

  These are just some of the incredible things that happen because Joel Salatin doesn’t let his cows graze in the same spot too long. The amount of time it takes grass to recover is constantly changing too. It can vary depending on temperature, rainfall, sunlight, and the time of year. And of course, Joel has to figure in that different size cattle eat different amounts of grass.

  This is another way “grass farming” is very different from the “ride and spray” farming on big industrial farms. It takes a lot of thought and planning to make sure the cows get to the right piece of pasture at the right time. It sometimes seems like grass farmers need to know personally every single blade of grass on their farms.

  MONDAY SUPPER

  Once the cattle were settled in their paddock for the night, we rolled down the hill to dinner. We ditched our boots by the back door and washed up in a basin in the mudroom. Then we sat down to a meal prepared by Joel’s wife, Teresa, and Rachel, the Salatins’ eighteen-year-old daughter. Joel began the meal by closing his eyes and saying his own version of grace. It included a fairly detailed list of what had been done on the farm that day. The farm’s two young interns, Galen and Peter, joined us at the big pine table. They focused so intently on eating that they uttered not a word. The Salatins’ son, Daniel, twenty-two, is a full partner in the farm, but most nights he has dinner with his wife and baby son in their house up the hill. Joel’s mother, Lucille, lives in a trailer home next to the house. It was in Lucille’s guest room that I was sleeping.

  Everything we ate had been grown on the farm, with the exception of the cream of mushroom soup that was the sauce in the chicken and broccoli casserole. Rachel passed a big platter of delicious deviled eggs. Though it wasn’t even the end of June, we tasted the first sweet corn of the season. It had been grown in the hoop house where the laying hens spend the winter. There was plenty of everything, and there were a lot of jokes about the interns’ giant appetites. To drink, there was a pitcher of ice water.

  The Salatin family and farm crew. From left to right: Peter, Daniel, Lucille, Galen, Teresa, and Joel.

  I told everyone that this was probably the most local meal I’d ever eaten. Teresa joked that if Joel and Daniel could just figure out how to make paper towels and toilet paper from the trees on the farm, she’d never have to go to the supermarket. It was true: We were eating almost completely off the grid. The farm and the family was a self-contained world, in the way I imagine all American farm life once was.

  At dinner I got Joel and Teresa talking about the history of Polyface. “I’m actually a third-generation alternative farmer,” Joel said. His grandfather Fred Salatin had farmed a half-acre lot in Anderson, Indiana. Joel’s father, William Salatin, bought the land that would become Polyface in 1961. Back then, the 550 acres were in bad shape.

  RESTORING THE LAND

  “The farm had been abused by tenant farmers for 150 years,” Joel said. The land is hilly and really too steep for row crops. Still, several generations of tenant farmers had grown corn and other grains there. As a result, most of the soil was either no longer fertile or had washed away. “We measured gullies fourteen feet deep,” Joel explained. “This farm couldn’t stand any more plowing. In many places there was no topsoil left whatsoever—just outcroppings of granite and clay. We’ve been working to heal this land ever since.”

  William Salatin worked in town as an accountant while he figured out how to build the farm. A lot of his accounting clients were farmers too. When he saw the trouble they were having staying in business, he decided to try a different approach. Instead of building silos and growing grain, he started growing grass. He stopped buying fertilizer and started composting. He also let the steeper, north-facing hillsides return to forest.

  Gradually the farm began to recover. Grasses colonized the gullies, the thin soils deepened, and the rock outcrops disappeared under a fresh layer of sod.

  “I still miss him every day,” Joel said. “Dad was definitely a little odd, but in a good way. He lived out his beliefs. But you want to know when I miss him the most? When I see all the progress we’ve made since he left us. Oh, how proud he would be to see this place now!”

  14

  The Animals

  TUESDAY

  It’s not often I wake up at six in the morning and find I’ve overslept, but it happened to me on my second morning at Polyface. By the time I hauled my six-foot self out of the five-foot bed in Lucille’s guest room, everyone was already at work. In fact, morning chores were nearly done. Shockingly, chores at Polyface start as soon as the sun comes up. Even worse, they start before breakfast. Before coffee!

  I stepped out of the trailer into the warm early morning. Through the mist I could make out the figures of the two interns, Galen and Peter. They were moving around on the hill to the east. That’s where a group of portable chicken pens sat on the grass. One of the most important morning chores was feeding and watering the chickens and moving their pens. I was supposed to be helping, so I started up the path, hoping to get there before they finished.

  As I stumbled up the hill, I was struck by how very beautiful the farm looked in the hazy early light. The thick June grass was coated with dew. The bright green pastures stood out against patches of black forest. It was hard to believe this hillside had ever been the gullied wreck Joel had described at dinner. One type of farming had destroyed the land. Now another type of farming was restoring it.

  WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE PASTURE?

  By the time I reached the pasture Galen and Peter had finished moving the pens. Luckily, they were either too kind or too timid to give me a hard time for oversleeping. I grabbed a pair of water buckets, filled them from the big tub in the center of the pasture, and lugged them to the nearest pen. Fifty of these pens were spread out across the damp grass. Each was ten feet by twelve feet wide and two feet high, with no floor. Inside each one were seventy broiler chickens. (Broilers are raised to be, well, broiled—or grilled or fried.) The pens are floorless to allow the birds to get at the grass.

  Joel had explained that the pens were arranged very carefully. Each one would be moved ten feet a day. At the end of fifty-six days the pens would have covered every square foot of the meadow. Fifty-six days is the amount of time it would take the chickens to grow big enough to be slaughtered.

  Directly behind each pen was a rectangular patch of closely cropped grass. That was where the pen had been the day before. The ground there looked like a really awful piece of modern art, thickly spattered with white, brown, and green chicken poop. It was amazing what a mess seventy chickens could make in just one day. But that was the idea: Give them twenty-four hours to eat the grass and fertilize it with their droppings, and then move them onto fresh ground.

  Joel moves the chickens every day for the same reason he moves the cows every night. The chicken manure fertilizes the grass, supplying all the nitrogen it needs. But left in one place, the chickens would eventually destroy the soil. They’d peck the grass down to its roots and poison the soil with their “hot,” or nitrogen-rich, manure. This is why the typical chicken yard quickly winds up bare and hard as brick.

  Joel says the chickens get about 20 percent of their diet from the fresh grass, worms, grasshoppers, and crickets they find. He also feeds them a mixture of corn, toasted soybeans, and kelp, which we scooped into long troughs in their pens. The chicken feed is one of the only raw materials he buys for the whole farm.

  THE INCREDIBLE EGGMOBILE

  After we had finished watering and feeding the broilers, I headed up to the next pasture, where Joel was moving the Eggmobile. The Eggmobile is one of Joel’s proudest innovations. It looks like a cross between a henhouse and a covered wagon from the old west. The Eggmobile is home to four hundred laying hens. On each side of the wagon are rows of nesting boxes. The boxes open from the outside so someone can get at the eggs. Every night the hens climb the little ramp into the safety of the coop and Joel latches the door behind them. In the morning he moves them to a fr
esh pasture.

  When I got there, Joel was bolting the Eggmobile to the hitch of his tractor. It wasn’t quite seven a.m. yet, but he seemed delighted to have someone to talk to. Talking about farming is one of his greatest pleasures.

  “In nature you’ll always find birds following herbivores,” Joel had explained. In the wild, turkeys and pheasants follow bison herds. In Africa, you’ll see birds like egrets perched on the nose of a rhinoceros. In each case the birds dine on the insects that would otherwise bother the herbivore. They also pick insect larvae and parasites out of the animal’s droppings.

  The Eggmobile is home to four hundred laying hens.

  Joel climbed onto the tractor, threw it into gear, and slowly towed the rickety henhouse fifty yards or so. He placed it in the middle of a paddock where his cattle had been three days ear-lier. It seems the chickens don’t like fresh manure, so he waits three or four days before bringing them in—but not a day longer. “Three days is ideal,” he explained. “That gives the larvae a chance to fatten up nicely, the way the hens like them, but not quite long enough to hatch into flies.” Fly larvae may not seem appetizing to you and me, but that protein-rich diet makes the chickens’ eggs unusually rich and tasty.

  Every morning the broiler pens are moved to fresh pasture, following the cattle around the farm. Each pen is home to seventy chickens.

  THE SANITATION CREW

  Once the Eggmobile was in position, Joel opened the trapdoor, and an eager, noisy parade of Barred Rocks, Rhode Island Reds, and New Hampshire Whites filed down the little ramp, fanning out across the pasture. The hens picked at the grasses but mainly they were all over the cowpats. They performed a crazy kind of dance with their claws to scratch apart the caked manure and expose the meaty grubs within.

  “I’m convinced an Eggmobile would be worth it even if the chickens never laid a single egg,” Joel told me. Because of the chickens, Joel doesn’t have to treat his cattle with toxic chemicals to get rid of parasites. This is what Joel means when he says the animals do the real work on his farm. “I’m just the orchestra conductor, making sure everybody’s in the right place at the right time.”

  Eggs bring in more money than anything else Joel sells. To take advantage of that, most farmers would buy more chickens to lay more eggs. But Joel knows if he added a lot more chickens to the farm it would throw the system off balance. Too much chicken manure could kill the grass. Suddenly the manure would become a waste product. Plus, where would the new chickens get larvae for their protein? Joel would have to buy more cows. But how could he grow enough grass to feed them?

  “It’s all connected,” he told me. “This farm is more like an organism than a machine, and like any organism it has its proper scale. A mouse is the size of a mouse for a good reason, and a mouse that was the size of an elephant wouldn’t do very well.”

  LETTING CHICKENS BE CHICKENS

  Most industrial farmers don’t worry about keeping things in balance. Their main concern is paying for inputs and getting the most possible outputs. If that means forcing cows to eat corn, even when it is unnatural for them, then that is what must be done.

  At Polyface, the Salatins try to work with the natural instincts of their animals, not against them. When Joel lets his chickens loose in a pasture, he is using their natural instinct to clean up after herbivores. The chickens get to do, and eat, what they evolved to do and eat. Instead of treating chickens as egg-laying (or meat-growing) machines, Polyface honors their inborn “chickenness.” It is the same for all the animals on the farm.

  The Salatins also raise rabbits. Like the hens, the rabbits spend part of their time in portable rabbit hutches in the pastures. The rest of the time, they live in cages suspended over a deep bedding of woodchips. The woodchips are home to earthworms, and of course, there are hens loose in the woodchips, eating the worms. The scratching of the hens turns the chips and the rabbits’ nitrogen-rich urine into valuable compost.

  The Polyface turkeys also spend time in the pastures. They are moved every three days. Joel has built them a moveable shademobile, which he calls the Gobbledy-Go. The turkeys rest under the Gobbledy-Go by day and roost on top of it at night. Joel likes to put his turkeys in the orchard, where they eat the bugs, mow the grass, and fertilize the trees and vines. Putting turkeys and grape vines together means getting two crops off of the same piece of land.

  Polyface turkeys emerging from their moveable shademobile, called the Gobbledy-Go.

  During the winter, the cows and other animals come off the pastures and into the barns. But Polyface’s “beyond organic” methods don’t stop, they just move indoors. The cow barn is a simple open-sided structure where the cattle eat twenty-five pounds of hay and produce fifty pounds of manure each day. (Water makes up the difference.) Joel just leaves the manure where it falls. Every few days he covers it with a layer of woodchips or straw. This layer cake of manure, woodchips, and straw gradually rises beneath the cattle. By winter’s end the bedding, and the cattle, can be as much as three feet off the ground. As the manure/woodchip mix decays it heats up, warming the barn. Joel calls it his cattle’s electric blanket.

  HAPPY PIGS

  There’s one more secret ingredient Joel adds to each layer of this cake: a few bucketfuls of corn. Over the winter, the corn ferments. That means fungi in the manure turn some of the corn into alcohol. (This is the same fermenting process used to make wine or beer.) Why does Joel want fermented corn in his manure pile? Because there’s nothing a pig enjoys more than getting tipsy on corn, and there’s nothing a pig is better equipped to do than root it out with his powerful snout and exquisite sense of smell. “I call them my pigaerators,” Joel told me proudly.

  As soon as the cows head out to pasture in the spring, several dozen pigs come in and hunt for the corn in the manure pile. As they dig, they turn the compost over and air it out. This kills any harmful bacteria and after a few weeks the rich, cakey compost is ready to be spread on the fields.

  “This is the sort of farm machinery I like,” Joel told me one afternoon as we watched his pigs do their work. “It never needs its oil changed, grows over time, and when you’re done with it you eat it.” Buried clear to their butts in composting cow manure, the pigaerators were a bobbing sea of wriggling hams and corkscrew tails. If pigs can be happy, these were the happiest pigs I’d ever seen.

  Salatin reached down deep where his pigs were happily rooting and brought a handful of fresh compost right up to my nose. What had been cow manure and woodchips just a few weeks before now smelled as sweet and warm as the forest floor in summertime. Joel will spread the compost on his pastures. There it will feed the grasses, so the grasses might again feed the cows, the cows the chickens, and so on until the snow falls. That handful of compost was proof that when grass can eat sunlight and food animals can eat grass, there is indeed a free lunch.

  The type of farming the Salatins do isn’t easy. George Naylor works his fields maybe fifty days a year; Joel and Daniel and two interns are out there sunrise to sunset almost every day.

  Yet Joel and Daniel plainly enjoy their work. One reason is that their type of farming takes a lot of thought and problem-solving. They like the challenge of getting all the pieces of their farm working together. They also get great satisfaction from the care they give to their land and their animals. Over and over again, I was struck by how healthy their animals were—all without a single ounce of antibiotics or chemicals. Because they are not raising identical chickens or cows in giant, crowded sheds, a single illness doesn’t represent a threat to them. Instead, when an animal gets sick, the Salatins try to figure out what is going wrong in their system. As Joel puts it, “Most of the time pests and disease are just nature’s way of telling the farmer he’s doing something wrong.”

  TREES GROW GRASS

  All of this produces some pretty impressive results. I asked Joel how much food Polyface produces in a season, and he rattled off the following figures:30,000 dozen eggs

  10,000 broilers<
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  800 stewing hens

  50 beef cattle (25,000 lbs of beef)

  250 hogs (25,000 lbs of pork)

  1,000 turkeys

  500 rabbits

  It was hard to believe they got that much food from one hundred acres of grass. Then Joel corrected me. He said that the 450 acres of forest were also an important part of the farm operation. I didn’t get that at all. What in the world did the forest have to do with producing food?

  Joel counted off the ways. First, the forest held the farm’s water supply. Many of the farm’s streams and ponds would simply dry up if not for the cover of trees. Second, the trees keep the farm cooler in the summer. That reduces the stress on the animals from too much heat. The trees also act as a windbreak—when the grass is sheltered from the wind it can grow higher. It doesn’t stop there. More trees mean more wild birds. More birds on a farm mean fewer insects. Forests mean that coyotes and weasels have plenty of chipmunks and voles to eat, so they don’t hunt chickens. And some of the trees are made into woodchips that go into the farm compost.

  I had thought of the farm as just the hundred acres of pasture. For Joel, it was all one biological system, the trees and the grasses and the animals, the wild and the domestic. On an industrial farm, the trees would have been thought of as a waste of valuable crop land. But at Polyface, it was understood that the trees helped the grass to grow and the forest fed the farm.