by Tim Folger
Modern grass farmers almost universally rely on something called managed intensive rotational grazing. Polywire fences confine a herd of maybe sixty cows to an area the size of a suburban front lawn, typically for twelve hours. Then the grazier moves the fence, to cycle through a series of such paddocks every month or so. This reflects a basic ecological principle. Left to their own devices in a diverse ecosystem, cows will eat just a few species, grazing again and again on the same plants. As with teenagers at a buffet, cows that eat this way are not acting in their own best nutritional interests. Rotational grazing, which forces them to eat the two-thirds of available forage that they would normally leave untouched, produces much more beef or milk per acre than does laissez-faire grazing.
Quality, of course, is just as important as quantity. I watch Churchill hop a strand of fence to enter a pasture. He whips out a kitchen garlic press to smush a sample of grass, then spreads it on a slide and sticks this into what looks like a miniature telescope. The gadget is a refractometer, and he is testing the grass for sugar content; this varies widely according to a range of conditions, not the least of which is the skill of the grazier. Sugar content is key to quality beef, and it is affected by the mix of grass species, the matching of species to local climate and soil, the proper selection of complementary forbs (such as clovers), and proper rotation time.
"When we started with grass-fed, the quality wasn't that great," says Theo Weening of Whole Foods. "It has improved a lot in the last twelve months." And as the quality improves, so does the potential to scale up grass-fed farming, with all its environmental benefits.
Splendor in the Grass
Humans can't eat grass, an assertion that sounds odd, considering that something like three-quarters of all human nutrition comes from wheat, rice, and corn, all of which are grasses. But what we eat is actually their seeds, the dense package of complex carbohydrates that is the specialty of annual grasses. Perennial grasses, which are more common, devote a larger proportion of their energy to roots, stems, and leaves, and the building block of these is cellulose.
Humans cannot convert cellulose to protein, but cows can, thanks to their highly specialized stomachs—rumens, as in ruminants. "The rumen is the most magical chemical factory in the world," Winter says. "It can turn cellulose into meat." It is a highly specialized biodigester; if it didn't exist, biotechnologists would be trying to invent it.
The health of the miniature ecosystem inside the rumen parallels the health of the larger ecosystem of the perennial pasture. The health of that larger system sponsors a rich microbial world beneath the soil, where lowly creatures like dung beetles and earthworms grind away at the task of cycling nutrients. Perennial grasses build deep roots that can extend more than ten feet below the surface. Shallow-rooted annual crops rapidly deplete trace minerals such as calcium, magnesium, and iodine, but the roots of perennials act like elevators, lifting these minerals back into the system and making them available to plants and everything else on up the food chain.
Winter says almost every grain-fed cow has excessive acid in its body, largely because of the lack of calcium and magnesium in its diet. This acidity allows a whole range of parasites and diseases to gain a foothold. A grass diet neutralizes the problem and passes the benefits to humans, who, because of our narrow diets, are also short on these same trace minerals.
Grass-fed beef and milk also bring us the benefits of fat. The modern wave of obesity has made us fatophobes, but nutritional research is telling us we are obese and prone to heart disease not because we eat fat but because we eat the wrong kind of fat. Grain-fed beef is especially high in omega-6 fats and cholesterol. Grass-fed beef and dairy products are lower in both and higher in omega-3 fats and conjugated linoleic acid, which reduce the risk of heart disease and are lacking in our diets.
Unlike the industrial feedlot system, which is designed to channel all inputs into a single product—meat protein—grass-fed livestock operations must focus on a series of complex, interlocking ecosystems. By paying attention to these, grass farmers are rewarded with their byproduct: beef or milk. Ideally, health resonates throughout these systems, including the human body.
Economists illuminate this idea with the concept of "externalities"—costs that are invisible to the market. As a former CPA, Churchill knows that being attentive to ecosystem health is a way of bringing externalities into the accounting process. The enterprise has to be profitable, and it is. Churchill and hundreds of farmers like him have found that they can take productive corn and soybean land and convert it to perennial pasture, and in the process make more money than highly subsidized corn and soybean farmers. This flies in the face of the assumptions of agricultural economists worldwide, who have traditionally believed that the highest and best use of the world's most productive lands is row-crop agriculture.
Churchill's balance sheet says otherwise, raising the possibility that entire regions of the globe, including the American heartland, don't need to remain environmental sacrifice zones.
Flat and Flooded
Pouring rain notwithstanding, Francis Thicke wants to show me his herd of eighty Jersey dairy cows grazing a paddock on a summer day in 2008. Iowa farmers like Thicke became accustomed to rain last year. In June floods worked their way down the Mississippi River Basin, beginning in southern Minnesota and eventually in undating vast areas throughout the Corn Belt. The floods killed twenty-four people and caused damages running into the tens of billions of dollars.
It's not considered Minnesota-nice to say so, but this expensive inundation is simply another cost of corn and soybean agriculture. Iowa, with the best and flattest prairie topsoils in the nation, has the most altered landscape of any state; 65 percent of its land is planted to corn and soybeans. The state has less than 1 percent of its native habitat left, almost all of which was tallgrass prairie and oak savannah before European settlement. That earlier system included sinuous streams and riparian areas full of wetlands and flood-catching vegetation, but the thirsty prairie has been flattened and plowed into fields that shed rainwater almost as fast as parking lots do. Many of the fields have been underlain with drainage tiles that speed up the flow of surface water into rivers, exacerbating flooding. A stretch of pure prairie will absorb five to seven inches of rain an hour, meaning that twelve feet of rain in a twenty-four-hour stretch yields no runoff. Normal absorption on corn and soybean land ranges from a half inch to one and a half inches an hour, meaning that comparable rainfall yields catastrophic floods like those of 2008.
Thicke and I shed our drenched raingear and adjourn to his study, where he points to a framed black-and-white photograph. It shows a hill contoured with alternating strips of tilled and untilled land, with a pond at its base. The photo was featured in the 1957 U.S. Department of Agriculture's Yearbook of Agriculture, at a time when the department was touting this method of farming as the best way to prevent runoff and erosion. In fact, Thicke tells me, the pond in the photo flooded just about every time it rained hard. He knows this because it was his family's farm.
Thicke earned a Ph.D. in soil science and held an executive job at the Department of Agriculture, but he quit to buy a worn-out, eroded, and marginal farm near Fairfield, Iowa, in 1996. He allowed the tilled fields to revert to grass and started an organic dairy. Erosion stopped almost immediately. In the meantime, Thicke's brother kept the family farm and turned the neat strip plots into permanent pasture for beef and dairy. The pond no longer floods. Converting a significant share of corn and soybean lands to perennial pastures, as the Thickes have done, could go a long way toward eliminating flooding, especially if those pastures are strategically located in areas prone to flooding and erosion.
The traditional argument against farms like the Thickes' is that they cannot match the "efficiency" of industrial-scale grain production. But this argument does not take into account the productivity of managed rotational grazing. Todd Churchill says one reason he can make more money than a subsidized corn farmer is that he ca
n produce about two steers per acre. It takes roughly the same acreage to grow the 3,000 pounds of grain used to finish a single steer in a feedlot.
But can enough land be converted to pasture to make any real difference to the landscape? The swath of destruction that is corn agriculture occupies about 80 million acres, mostly in the Midwest, an area only slightly smaller than California. At least half of that acreage is used to grow corn for livestock. Is it really possible to imagine something so radical as the transformation of 40 million acres of land?
In fact, it's been done before. In the 1970s and 1980s, and at the urging of the federal government, farmers greatly increased the acreage under cultivation, plowing up land that had been idle since the Dust Bowl. This triggered a huge increase in erosion, which in turn triggered the federal Conservation Reserve Program. At present farmers receive about $1.8 billion a year and have converted a total of 34.7 million acres from row crops to grass. But high grain prices have spurred farmers to begin pulling those acres out of the program at an alarming pace, about 2 million acres in the last two years. The grass-fed beef and dairy market offers an opportunity to reverse that flow and at the same time insulate the land from plows driven by high grain prices. Moreover, the $1.8 billion subsidy that farmers receive from taxpayers nets them an average of $51 an acre. Grass farmers can net as much as eight times that amount on converted corn and soybean land.
The Good Earth
All these benefits—more humane livestock farming, healthier humans, fewer floods, a richer and more natural landscape—are powerful arguments for a return to perennial pasture. But then there is the greatest potential benefit of all: a massive reduction of carbon emissions.
Soil is a mix of minerals from Earth's crust, a bit of living matter, and dead and decayed plant mass. Pure prairie builds this matter: the richest of virgin soils in the Midwest once ran to ten feet deep and were about 10 percent organic. What's left of those soils now typically contains less than half that amount of organic matter. But perennial pastures can restore the original richness of the soil in a decade or so.
The heart of all organic matter—about half the total—is carbon, the very stuff of global warming. When we speak of farming's carbon footprint, we generally calculate such things as internal combustion in tractors, transportation, and processing. But this ignores the fact that row-crop farming releases into the atmosphere carbon that has been stored in the soil. Researchers have found that tillage releases not only carbon dioxide but also nitrous oxide and methane (both global warming gases) by triggering the decay and erosion of topsoil. Without exception, all of the tillage systems examined in a recent study published in Science contributed to global warming, and the worst offenders were conventionally farmed corn, soybeans, and wheat. Fields of perennial crops in the same study pulled both methane and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stashed them in the soil. There is even some evidence that perennial grasslands are often better at sequestering carbon than forests are.
The Rodale Institute has tracked the amount of carbon sequestered by organic farming for nearly thirty years. Working with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, it has found that such practices have an effect similar to that of perennial pasture in storing carbon in the soil in the form of organic matter. In 2008 researchers with the project concluded that converting all of the nation's cropland to organic agriculture would suck up enough carbon to offset 25 percent of our total fossil fuel emissions. In other words, we would have a continent-wide carbon sink. If that projection is right, such a shift would yield a net reduction of emissions greater than the Obama administration's target for 2020 and put us well on the way to meeting the target for 2050. True, these numbers are for organic farming, but perennial pastures arguably store even more carbon because of their deeper roots, and they almost eliminate the fossil fuel energy that organic farming uses for tillage.
There are good reasons to approach such landscape-level calculations with caution, however, simply because quantifying carbon sequestration is difficult. There are just too many variables. For instance, Randall Jackson, an ecosystem scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who specializes in the study of pasture systems, says evidence suggests that rising global temperatures are already stimulating microbial activity in soils, which in turn may be increasing decay and adding to the release of global warming gases. But even a skeptic like Jackson is confident that conversion of industrial corn and soybean fields to permanent pastures would head us in the right direction. Simply put, conventional cornfields are a carbon source; pastures are more likely to be a sink. If we can get our beef and milk from a sink instead of a source, we probably ought to do it.
Combining pasture and organic crop farming may further enrich the soil and improve the bottom line. While many of the producers from whom Churchill buys stock are pure grass farmers who have sold their tractors and converted all of their land to managed pastures, many are not. And Francis Thicke's operation is not pure grass but rather an organic dairy. He also grows some grain and sells it.
I talked about this with Fred Kirschenmann, whom I first met in the late 1990s at his 3,500-acre organic farm in North Dakota, an operation he took over in 1976 after getting his Ph.D. in religion. He told me then that try as he might, he could not make organic farming pay without livestock. By bringing cattle into the mix, he gained the manure, controlled weeds through grazing, decreased tillage and energy use, and found a use for low-market-value crops such as grass and alfalfa, which can help build soil and stop erosion. These crops were also once regarded as critical to prudent crop rotation. But on conventional farms, nutrients lost to depletion and erosion are simply replaced by chemical fertilizer.
Kirschenmann still runs his farm, but he also serves as a distinguished fellow at Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. He told me last year that his earlier assertion about livestock has been strongly borne out. Studies throughout the Midwest have shown sharp increases in profitability when live stock is factored in—not just beef and dairy cattle but free-range chickens, hogs, goats, and sheep. Permanent pasture, in other words, is not an all-or-nothing proposition. The important point is to bring back the grass, and that can be done with full-scale grass-fed dairy and beef operations or by introducing a little bit of pasture here and there on organic or even conventional farms. This flexibility means that the benefits of pasture can evolve incrementally.
The presence and diversity of livestock on grass farms make the whole business a lot more interesting and plain pleasant, says Richard Cates, who teaches the operation of grass systems at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and is himself a grass farmer. He sees interest in his classes rapidly building among farm-raised students who are looking to become free-range people. And that is really the last of the many benefits of grass farming: it may stem the flight of the brightest and best young people from the small farm towns of the Midwest.
True, not every farmer can do it. Grass farming is more intellectually demanding than conventional farming. It deals in complexity and in the end is more an art than a science. But Cates and others believe that's one of its appealing features.
And while it may be complex on the level of an individual farm, the idea seems simple and eminently doable when compared with the vast array of costly technologies on the table for reducing our energy use and combating global warming. To be sure, enlightened federal farm policy could go a long way toward encouraging a shift to grass. Our current system of subsidies encourages industrial agriculture, which is to say that our nation's worst environmental problem is taxpayer funded. What is most impressive, though, is that the solution is a bootstrap operation; it is developing in spite of bad policy. The driver is the market pull, and it is gaining strength. Everyone I spoke to for this story agreed that demand for grass-fed products is well ahead of supply. Todd Churchill says the market could easily support ten times the number of grass farmers now in business. We tend to associate exponential
growth with environmental harm, but in this case it would be good news, an economic solution designed by nature's economy and scaled up by market demand.
BURKHARD BILGER Hearth Surgery
FROM The New Yorker
TWO MEN WALKED INTO A BAR called the Axe and Fiddle. It was a Thursday night in early August, in the town of Cottage Grove, Oregon, and the house was full. The men ordered drinks and a vegetarian Reuben and made their way to the only seats left, near a small stage at the back. The taller of the two, Dale Andreatta, had clear blue eyes and a long, columnar head crowned with gray hair. He was wearing a pleated kilt festooned with pockets and loops for power tools, and he spoke in a loud, unmodulated voice, like a clever robot. His friend, Peter Scott, was thinner and more disheveled, with a vaguely biblical look. He had long brown hair and sandaled feet, sun-baked skin and piercing eyes.
None of the locals paid them any mind. Cottage Grove, like much of Oregon, is home to hippies and hillbillies in equal measure. At the Axe and Fiddle, lumbermen from the local Weyer-haeuser and Starfire mills sat side by side with former Hoedads—free-living tree planters who'd reforested large tracts of the Bitterroot and Cascade mountains. The bar was flanked by a bookstore and, a few doors down Main Street, a store that specializes in machine guns. "I can't imagine that his market's that big," the bookstore's owner told me. "I mean, how many machine guns does a guy need?"
The featured act at the bar that night was a burlesque troupe from New York called Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad. Just how they'd landed in the Oregon woods wasn't clear, but they stuck stubbornly to their set list. They sang a song about gefilte fish ("Fear Factor for Jews") and danced suggestively to Yiddish hip-hop. They promised to put the whore back in hora, and when that met with only polite applause—"Look it up on Wikipedia"—they asked for a show of hands from local Jews. There were five. Finally, near the end of the show, one of the performers—a spindly comedian with thick black glasses and a T-shirt that said FREAK —peered out from under the spotlight and fixed her eyes, a little desperately, on Peter Scott. "Do you have a job?" she said, almost to herself.