The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan

I split this into two entries. I hope that it won’t discourage people from reading the other one 🙂

In Chapter Eleven, Pollan discusses the way that the animals work together at Polyface farm. He starts by talking about the chickens, who are moved in a way that is similar to the cows. There is portable fencing that is used to move them so that they evenly fertilize and clean the land.

Left to their own devices, a confined flock of chickens will eventually destroy any patch of land, by pecking the grass down to its roots and poisoning the soil with their extremely “hot,” or nitrogenous, manure. This why the typical free-range chicken yard quickly winds up bereft of plant life and hard as a brick. Moving the birds daily keeps both the land and the birds healthy; the broilers escape their pathogens and the varied diet of greens supplies most of their vitamins and minerals… Meanwhile, their manure fertilizes the grass, supplying all the nitrogen it needs. The chief reason Polyface Farm is completely self-sufficient in nitrogen is that a chicken, defecating copiously, pays a visit to virtually every square foot of it at several points during the season.

Doesn’t that make so much more sense? Just compare that to the “free-range” organic house that was discussed a few chapters ago. Which chicken do you think has a better life?

“In nature you’ll always find birds following herbivores,” Joel explained… “The egret perched on the rhino’s nose, the pheasants and turkeys trailing after the bison–that’s a symbiotic relationship we’re trying to imitate.” 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, breaking the cycle of infestation and disease. “To mimic this symbiosis on a domestic scale, we follow the cattle in their rotation… I call these gals our sanitation crew.”

Just like the life cycle for grass that I just spoke about in my last entry, there is something similar for the chickens.

It seems that chicken eschew fresh manure, so he waits three or four days before bringing them in–but not a day longer. That’s because the fly larvae in the manure are on a four-day cycle, he explained. “Three days is ideal. That gives the grubs a chance to fatten up nicely, the way the hens like them, but not quite long enough to hatch into flies.” The result is prodigious amounts of protein for the hens, the insect supplying as much as a third of their total diet–and making their eggs unusually rich and tasty. By means of this simple little management trick, Joel is able to use his cattle’s waste to “grow” large quantities of high-protein chicken feed for free; he says this trims his cost of producing eggs by twenty-five cents a dozen… The cows further oblige the chickens by shearing the grass; chickens can’t navigate in grass more than about six inches tall.

I love this. This is the kind of farm I tell myself I am supporting when I buy organic. The truth is, as I said before, that it is not necessarily what is meant by “organic”. Sure, some organic farms are like this, but the biggest producer of organic eggs is owned by the same company that made “Rosie” the chicken in my entry yesterday.

Joel also uses ingenious ways to make fertilizer and other inputs for the farm, rather than buying them or using fossil fuels. Pollan goes on to discuss how Joel adds layers of woodchips and corn to the manure that the cows are on in their barn. This slowly rises up and then keeps them warm as it decomposes during the winter. When the cows head out to pasture in the spring, Joel brings in the pigs who use their amazing sense of smell to get the fermented corn out. This is a delicious treat to them, and as they dig through for the corn, they mix it up and make an amazing fertilizer.

“This is the sort of farm machinery I like: never needs its oil changed, appreciates over time, and when you’re done with it you eat it.”

You can’t argue with that (assuming you aren’t Jewish or vegetarian… or both, in my case, lol).

I couldn’t look at their spiraled tails, which cruised about the earthy mass like conning towers on submarines, without thinking about the fate of pigtails in industrial hog production. Farmers “dock,” or snip off, the tails at birth, a practice that makes a certain twisted sense if you follow the logic of industrial efficiency on a hog farm. Piglets in these CAFOs are weaned from their mothers ten days after birth (compared with thirteen weeks in nature) because they gain weight faster on their drug-fortified feed than on sow’s milk. But this premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to suck and chew, a need they gratify in confinement by biting the tail of the animal in front of them. A normal pig would fight off his molester, but a demoralized pig has stopped caring. “Learned helplessness” is the psychological term and it’s not uncommon in CAFOs, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of earth or straw or sunshine, crowded together beneath a metal roof standing on metal slats suspended over a septic tank. It’s not surprising that an animal as intelligent as a pig would get depressed under these circumstances, and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point of infection. Since treating sick pigs is not economically efficient, these underperforming production units are typically clubbed to death on the spot.

Tail docking is the USDA’s recommended solution to the porcine “vice” of tail chewing. Using a pair of pliers and no anesthetic, most–but not quite all–of the tail is snipped off. Why leave the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of tail biting so much as to render it even more sensitive. Now a bite to the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will struggle to resist it. Horrible as it is to contemplate, it’s not hard to see how the road to such a hog hell is smoothly paved with the logic of industrial efficiency.

Doesn’t that make you sick? Even if you eat pork (which I really don’t think is a good idea), that should make you think twice about random bacon or pork chops. That is just sick.

To close up the chapter:

At Polyface no one ever told me not to touch the animals, or asked me to put on a biohazard suit before going into the brooder house. The reason I had to wear one at Petaluma Poultry is because that system–a monoculture of chickens raised in close confinement–is inherently precarious, and the organic rules’ prohibition on antibiotics puts it at a serious disadvantage. Maintaining a single-species animal farm on an industrial scale isn’t easy without pharmaceuticals and pesticides. Indeed, that’s why the chemicals were invented in the first place, to keep shaky monocultures from collapsing. Sometimes the large-scale organic farmer looks like someone trying to practice industrial agriculture with one hand tied behind his back.

By the same token, a reliance on agrochemicals destroys the information feedback loop on which an attentive farmer depends to improve his farming. “Meds just mask genetic weaknesses,” Joel explained one afternoon when we were moving the cattle. “My goal is always to improve the herd, adapt it to the local conditions by careful culling. To do this I need to know: Who has a propensity for pinkeye? For worms? You simply have no clue if you’re giving meds all the time.”

On that note, I’ll say goodbye until my next entry 🙂 Thanks to everyone who has been reading and commenting! Its been great to hear from some new voices!

I wanted to get this entry up pretty quickly, because I don’t want to look like I am poo-pooing organic 🙂 These next few chapters have given me a ton of new books to read.

As a total aside: today my youngest (my daughter) turns 3. I am feeling depressed and old. So ancient am I… now 26 years old, lol. Still, I can’t believe she’s already 3! Time is going by so fast.

Back to the book:

To contrast “Big Organic”, Pollan goes and visits Joel Salatin, a man who calls himself a “grass farmer.”  His farm is called Polyface, and on it he has an amazing ecosystem where almost no outside inputs are required.  He and his father took a piece of land that was completely ruined by traditional farming, and now he has turned it into an amazingly efficient and beautiful piece of land.

Grass farmers grow animals–for meat, eggs, milk, and wool– but regard them as part of a food chain in which grass in the keystone species, the nexus between the solar energy that powers every food chain and the animals we eat…  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.

Its so simple, but such a revolutionary idea.  I am currently trying to figure out if there are any farmers like this in Colorado.  If there are, I’d love to do some kind of work share or something.  Wouldn’t that be sweet?

Pollan then goes into a fair amount of detail about grass and the “management-intensive grazing” that grass farmers use.  Basically they use fences and portable structures to move the animals in a way that best imitates nature.  It is a very precise science.  For example, after a cow eats grass, the grass goes through a time of very fast growth.  During this time, it is drawing on all of its energy reserves.  If it is eaten at this time, it will get weak and eventually die.  Many traditional ranchers allow cows to stay in the same area, which means that the more delicious grasses (who knew?) and ground covers like clover will die.  If you wait too long between allowing the cows to eat the grass, then it becomes too woody and less palatable.

One reason that this kind of farming is hard to convince people to try is because it takes a lot of knowledge.  The farmer must know which animal has been in each area, how long it has been, the time the paddock needs to recover, and all of this depends on rainfall amounts, the available sunlight, temperatures, time of year, and a million other variables.  It can’t be industrialized because it is a living unit.

The productivity of a pasture is measured by “cow days”: a unit that measures how much a cow can eat in a day.

As destructive as overgrazing can be to a pasture, undergrazing can be almost as damaging, since it leads to woody, senescent grasses and a loss of productivity.  But getting it right–grazing the optimal number of cattle at the optimal moment to exploit the blaze of growth–yields tremendous amounts of grass, all while improving the quality of the land.  Joel calls this optimal rhythm “pulsing the pastures” and says that at Polyface it has boosted the number of cow days to as much as four hundred per acre; the county average is seventy.  “In effect we’ve bought a whole new farm for the price of some portable fencing and a lot of management.”

Isn’t that tremendous?  The land is so much more efficient, and yet big business CAN’T do it.  Its not a big business kind of system.

After this discussion of grass, Pollan goes out to help Joel “move the cows” to their new piece of land.  The idea behind moving the cows is that this is exactly what happens in nature.  A predator would come after the herd, and the herd would then flee to new land.  When they got there, they would eat all that they could, and then they’d soon be chased to a new area.

These intense but brief stays completely change the animal’s interaction with the grass and the soil.  They eat down just about everything in the paddock, and then they move on, giving the grasses a chance to recover.  Native grasses evolve to thrive under precisely such grazing patterns; indeed, they depend on them for their reproductive success.  Not only do ruminants spread and fertilize seed with their manure, but their hoof prints create shady little pockets of exposed soil where water collects–ideal conditions for germinating a grass seed.  And in brittle lands during the driest summer months, when microbial life in the soil all but stops, the rumen of the animals takes over the soil’s nutrient-cycling role, breaking down dry plant matter into basic nutrients and organic matter, which the animals then spread in their urine and manure.

Hmm, I guess God knew what he was doing  😉

The moment arrived.  Looking more like a maitre 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 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 snuffing 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.

Isn’t that so cool?  What a contrast.  Which cows would you rather eat?  (Assuming you’re the cow-eating type.)  😉

Those blades of grass have spent this long June day turning sunlight into sugars.  (The reason Joel moves his cattle at the end of the day is because that’s when sugar levels in the grass hit their peak; overnight the plant will gradually use up these reserves.)  To feed the photosynthetic process the grass’s roots have drawn water and minerals up from deep in the soil (some grasses can sink their roots as much as six feet down), minerals that soon will become part of this cow.  Chances are Budger has also chosen exactly which grasses to eat first, depending on whatever minerals her body craves that day; some species supply her more magnesium, others more potassium.  (If she’s feeling ill she might go for the plantain, a forb whose leaves contain antibiotic compounds; grazing cattle instinctively use the diversity of the salad bar to medicate themselves.)  By contrast 534, who never got to pick and choose his dinner, let alone his medications, depends on animal nutritionists to design his total ration–which of course is only as total as the current state of knowledge in animal science permits.

Its so amazing.  He goes into a TON more details, but I’m going to jump forward to a few more points so that this doesn’t become another infinitely long post.

…Grassing over the portion fo the world’s cropland now being used to grow grain to feed ruminants would offset fossil fuel emissions appreciably.  For example, if the sixteen million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the United States became well-managed pasture, that would remove fourteen billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year, the equivalent of taking four million cqars off the road.  We seldom focus on farming’s role in global warming, but as much as a third of all the greenhouse gases that human activity has added to the atmosphere can be attributed to the saw and the plow.

I want to go change the world now…. if only I could convince even my family that the price that they pay for cheap beef and chicken is actually much higher than they realize.  That 99 cent a pound roaster doesn’t take into account the cost of the fossil fuels that are being used, the pollution being put into our water, air, and soils, the inferior product that is going into our bodies which raises the cost of health care, of the cost of the sheer misery of the animals.  We are a society that values a low “bottom line”, but we are selling ourselves short.
I’m going to make a new entry for the next chapter  🙂

Wow, I am 5 chapters into The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and it is a great read. I would like to point out that this author is NOT a vegetarian, and even admits that he will probably go back to eating feedlot meat once the memories start to fade. I think that makes this book even more interesting. I did not write this entry to try to convince everyone to become vegetarian, but just to do your part when it comes to supporting grass-fed cattle ranches as opposed to the large factory farms.

After Mr. Pollan addresses some seriously fascinating stories about corn (who knew?!), he goes on to the next part of the food chain: the feedlot cattle. About 60% of the corn produced in this country goes to feedlots, so this is the next logical step. Although cows are not naturally corn-eaters, feedlot cattle have been forced into this way of life.

Economically, it is nearly impossible for a family farm to compete with feedlots. A big part of the reason is because feedlots (and everyone, thanks to government subsidies) get corn for less than it costs the farmers to produce. Even if farmers wanted to feed cattle corn, it would cost them more to feed their own corn to cattle than it would to buy corn for them.

Pollan decides to buy a steer and follow its life through the cycle. He gives its history. Steer 534 (the one he bought) was the product of a $15 mail-order straw of semen and a mother cow named “9534” since she was the 34th cow born in 1995 at her ranch. None of her male offspring are around long enough to be named individually, so they are all called 534.

Born on March 13, 2001, in the birthing shed across the road, 534 and his mother were turned out on pasture just as soon as the eighty-pound calf stood up and began nursing. Within a few weeks the calf began supplementing his mother’s milk by nibbling on a salad bar of mostly native grasses…

It sounds pretty good. I’d say that’s a pretty good mental picture.

Pollan then goes on to discuss the way that cows and pastures have a perfect relationship. The cows eat the grass, but also keep trees and bushes from growing and crowding out the grass. The manure fertilizes it, and as long as there is a proper amount of pasture rotation, life is good. Cows are made just for grass

…cows …have evolved the special ability to convert grass-which single-stomached creatures like us can’t digest– into high-quality protein. They can do this because they possess what is surely the most highly evolved digestive organ in nature: the rumen. About the size of a medicine ball, the organ is essentially a forty-five gallon fermentation tank in which a resident population of bacteria dines on grass.

Its perfect and it works for the cow, the grass, and even the bacteria 🙂 The whole chain is solar-powered and transforms sunlight into protein. You really can’t beat that.

So then why is it that steer number 534 hasn’t tasted a blade of prairie grass since last October? Speed, in a word, or, in the industry’s preferred term, “efficiency.” Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and for half a century now the industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef animal’s allotted span on earth. “In my grandfather’s time, cows were four or five years old at slaughter,” Rich explained. “In the fifties, when my father was ranching, it was two or three years old. Now we get there at fourteen to sixteen months.” Fast food, indeed. What gets a steer from 80 to 1,100 pounds in fourteen months are tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs.

Fourteen months. That is crazy. That is so young. It is this age difference that has enabled Americans to go from eating beef as a luxury item to eating it as everyday fare.

In October, two weeks before I made his acquaintance, steer number 534 was weaned from his mother. Weaning is perhaps the most traumatic time on a ranch for animals and ranchers alike; cows separated from their calves will mope and bellow for days, and the calves, stressed by the changes in circumstance and diet, are prone to getting sick.

I think every nursing mother can cringe at this. Yes, they are “only” animals, but obviously they aren’t bellowing and moaning just out of instinct. They are truly upset. Even their immune systems respond to this stress.

So next the calves go into a “backgrounding” pen, where they are, for the first time in their lives, confined to a pen, “bunk broken”–taught to eat from a trough–and where they learn to eat a new and unnatural diet: corn.

Pollan goes on to describe the sight and smell of a feedlot. Let’s just say it smells like poop and operates much like a big city in the dark ages. You can always read the book for more details 😉 I don’t want to give away all of the good stuff, haha. Anyways, so back to the corn…

We’ve come to think of “corn-fed” as some kind of old-fashioned virtue, which it may well be when you’re referring to Midwestern children, but feeding large quantities of corn to cows for the greater part of their lives is a practice neither particularly old nor virtuous. Its chief advantage is that cows fed corn… get fat quickly; their flesh also marbles well, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have come to like. Yet this corn-fed meat is demonstrably less healthy for us, since it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than the meat of animals fed grass. A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef. (Modern-day hunter-gatherers who subsist on wild meat don’t have our rates of heart disease.) In the same way ruminants are ill adapted to eating corn, humans in turn may be poorly adapted to eating ruminants that eat corn.

Seriously, if you eat meat, then that should be enough to convince you to buy grass-fed cattle, even if you don’t care about their living conditions or quality of life.

The economic logic behind corn is unassailable, and on a factory farm there is no other kind. Calories are calories, and corn is the cheapest, most convenient source of calories on the market. Of course, it was the same industrial logic–protein is protein–that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as mad cow disease. Rendered bovine meat and bonemeal represented the cheapest, most convenient way of satisfying a cow’s protein requirement (never mind these animals were herbivores by evolution) and so appeared on the daily menus… until the FDA banned the practice in 1997.

So you might think that now cows aren’t fed cows, but you’d be wrong.

The FDA ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants makes an exception for blood products and fat; my steer will probably dine on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he’s heading to in June. (“Fat is fat,” the feedlot manager shrugged, when I raised an eyebrow.) …The rules still permit feedlots to feed nonruminant animal protein to ruminants. Feather meal and chicken litter (that is, bedding, feces, and discarded bits of feed) are accepted cattle feeds, as are chicken, fish, and pig meal. Some public health experts worry that since the bovine meat and bonemeal that cows used to eat is now being feed to chickens, pigs, and fish, infetious prions could fine their way back into cattle when they’re fed the protein of animals that have been eating them.

Seriously yucky.

Compared to all the other things we feed cattle these days, corn seems positively wholesome. And yet it too violates the biological …logic of bovine digestion. …Bloat is perhaps the most serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on corn. The fermentation in the rumen produces copious amounts of gas, which is normally expelled by belching during rumination. But when the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, rumination all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime forms in the rumen that can trap the gas. The rumen inflates like a balloon until it presses against the animal’s lungs. Unless action is taken promptly to relieve the pressure (usually by forcing a hose down the animal’s esophagus), the animal suffocates.

A concentrated diet of corn can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike our own highly acid stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen cow is neutral. Corn renders it acidic, causing a kind of bovine heartburn that in some cases can kill the animal, but usually just makes him sick. Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant, and salivate excessively, paw and scratch their bellies, and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, rumenitis, liver disease, and a general weakening of the immune system that leaves the animal vulnerable to the full panoply of feedlot diseases— pneumonia, coccidiosis, enterotoxemia, feedlot polio.

Mmm, makes me hungry 😛

Cattle rarely live on feedlot diets for more than 150 days, which might be about as much as their systems can tolerate. “I don’t know how long you could feed them this ration before you’d see problems,” Dr. Metzin said; another vet told me the diet would eventually “blow out their livers” and kill them. Over time the acids eat away at the rumen wall, allowing bacteria to enter the animal’s bloodstream. These microbes wind up in the liver, where they form abscesses and impair the liver’s function. Between 15 percent and 30 percent of feedlot cows are found at slaughter to have abscessed livers; Dr. Mel told me that in some pens the figure runs as high as 70 percent.

And yet since corn is so cheap, it is used. We demand cheap meat, and by buying cheap meat, we encourage this treatment of animals.

In order to keep the animals alive, they are given antibiotics, and a lot of them. These antibiotics are now becoming ineffective in humans and animals as the bacteria become more resistant to them. That means we have to take more powerful antibiotics, all because animals must be given them in order to boost their immune systems which are only weakened because we insist on feeding them corn.

So 534 was not at the feedlot and not looking his best. His eyes were bloodshot from the dust of the feces that lines the pens. 534 slept on manure that is full of bacteria.

The bacteria… can find their way from the manure on the ground into his hide and from their into our hamburgers… The speed at which these animals will be slaughtered and processed–four hundred an hour at the plant where 534 will go–means that sooner or later some of the manure caked on these hides gets into the meat we eat. One of the bacteria that almost certainly resides in the manure I’m standing in is particularly lethal to humans. E. Coli 0157:H7 is a relatively new strain of the common intestinal bacteria (no one had seen it before 1980) that thrives in feedlot cattle, 40% of which carry it in their gut. Ingesting as few as ten of these microbes can cause a fatal infection; they produce a toxin that destroys human kidneys.

Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the strong acids in our stomachs, since they evolved to live in the neutral pH, environment of the rumen. But the rumen of corn-fed feedlot steer is nearly as acidic as our own, and in this new, man-made environment new acid-resistant strains of E. Coli, of which 0157:H7 is one, have evolved… The problem with these bugs is that they can shake off the acid bath in our stomachs–and then go on to kill us. By acidifying the rumen with corn we’ve broken down one of our food chain’s most important barriers to infection. Yet another solution turned into a problem.

This is so scary. This is why man should not be interfering with God-made systems. We are not here to recreate systems, we are here to take care of the earth. I know I sound like a total hippie, but c’mon, look at the name of my domain.

…Petroleum is one of the most important ingredients in the production of modern meat, and the Persion Gulf is surely a link in the food chain that passes through this (or any) feedlot. Steer 534 started his life part of a food chain that derived all of its energy from the sun, which nourished the grasses that nourished him and his mother. When 534 moved from ranch to feedlot, from grass to corn, he joined an industrial food chain powered by fossil fuel–and therefore defended by the US military, another never-counted cost of cheap food. (One fifth of America’s petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food.)

So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.

It is estimated that EACH COW uses 1 barrel of oil to be sent to market as beef. This oil is in the form of petroleum to fertilize the corn as well as the oil to transport and convert his food from corn into the flakes that they eat, along with the other manufactured products put in his food. That is scary.

I know this is a looooooooong post, and I should probably split it up, but there was just SO much to talk about in this chapter. I hope it makes you think twice, I know I am.