Response to an op-ed

I have a few people on facebook asking what my thoughts are on a recent op-ed, and I find I cannot shrink my thoughts down. The following is a paragraph-by-paragraph response to an op-ed in the New York Times coming hard on the heels of the ethics of meat essay contest. I had never heard of the author before reading this article, and I have not read his book, so I cannot assume to know much about his opinions or his data except what he expressed on the pages of the NY Times.

It works just fine to avoid factory farmed meats by simply not eating meat. In fact, it works better than trying to get non-industrial meat in a lot of cities and towns where there just are not other options. There’s nothing wrong with going vegetarian. But vegetarians should be aware that their choices are not without repercussions, too. None of us can live an existence free of repercussions. Most vegetarians by their eating choices are still supporting industrial agriculture to some extent, just not industrial meat production.

I want to see the author's numbers on how grass-fed cows produce more methane. Until I see the scientific study that produced the data on this, I simply don’t believe it, because it goes against every other piece of data I’ve ever seen.  I also want to see his numbers on pastured chickens. When he says we cannot possibly pasture all the cows because that would take half our land, he’s right: Which is why we should EAT LESS MEAT. Americans eat more red meat than other countries. 

If the author is approaching this entire thing using the same thinking that got us in this mess in the first place, no wonder he thinks small-scale ag can’t save us! It can’t! Not if what we want is to continue to produce beef and commodities such as corn like we have been. Now, I am not a statistician, so I don’t know the numbers that might come out of a study on how many people a well-run, diversified farm can feed year-round, so I won’t even begin to argue that point. But the author is literally thinking from the wrong place if he is crunching all these numbers and coming to all these conclusions based on the assumption that in order to feed America we have to continue feeding Americans as we have been. That system is BROKEN. We cannot replace it with the organic version of itself and nor can we hope to replace it with small farms. The small farmers that I know are part of a wave of people that are literally re-imagining what the food system could look like. Can we feed all of America with small farms? Honestly, I don’t know. But I do know that we would be wrong to assume that we cannot based solely on the fact that we cannot use small farmers to produce all the same stuff in the same ever-increasing quantities as the industrial ag machine.  And yes, a huge amount of land that was rainforest is now pasture for cows in Brazil. He’s right. It’s horrifying. But that’s not small farming, that’s part of the industrial system. And he should look into where much of the soy he probably eats is grown—IN BRAZIL.

Yes, many farmers raise the same breed of chicken as the industrial farms, and because of that have to feed a lot of grain, and the birds end up with leg problems because they were not bred to walk around on pasture. It’s not a great system. As they realize there are alternatives, some small chicken farms are moving away from the genetic mutant that is the Cornish Cross chicken and going back to old dual-purpose or large breeds. They grow more slowly, but they also cost less because they need less grain, because they know what to do with grass and bugs.  And on the subject of pigs, I have NEVER seen a pig with a nose ring to keep it from rooting, no matter its living conditions.  

To say that going small will only lead to the small farmers wanting to get bigger, and putting us back where we are now is so clearly out of touch with reality and could have been written by an economist. Yes, in the old capitalist paradigm, the only thing a business can or should ever want to do is get bigger. In fact, they have to! That thinking is what got us in this mess in the first place. But every farmer I’ve met wants to get to a certain size and stay there, whatever size needed to not burn our too fast, but allow them to pay their bills. The old model of grow-grow-grow is what put their daddy’s dairy farms out of business; they are wary of it. The author is wrong and missing the point again.

The nutrient cycle is not interrupted if a deer moves on from your back yard to someone else's back yard; it’s just taking its excrement elsewhere. A pasture full of meat cattle is not suddenly impoverished the moment the animals move to another pasture or are taken to slaughter. Their waste slowly integrates into the nutrient cycle, and the next spring, when new cattle are put out to pasture, the grass is all the richer. Clearly the author does not understand that farms do not experience perpetual growing seasons, that even grass needs to rest or it will become over grazed, and that the nutrients in animal waste do not instantly evaporate if they are not constantly being deposited. 

He says, “…it’s not how we produce animal products that ultimately matters. It’s whether we produce them at all.” It’s how AND whether. Unless he was planning on having all the cows in the US magically disappear to a happy place over night, what exactly does he think happens to male dairy cattle? They get killed and used for burger. Are we all going to go vegan? He must realize that it will take a lot of nuts and soy to replace our meat protein. How much water stolen from the Colorado River goes into growing California’s almonds? Is it ok that most organic soy is grown in a clear-cut from the Amazon? What about the cost in energy and the environment to get that soy here? As I see it, he did not approach the subject from a broad enough lens and at the same time did approach the subject from the assumption that we must continue to, in one way or another, perpetuate the current broken industrial food system in order to feed ourselves an omnivore diet. I don't know if we can feed America or the world from small, diversified farms. But I do believe that the thinking that the author evinces is the same sort of thinking that got us in this mess to begin with, and thus will not help solve our problems.