What is “Grass Farming”?
(The practice is based on the tenet that the diet of all the animals on a farm should stem from grass—the cows eat grass, the chickens eat grass and peck through the manure of the cows, which came from grass, etc. A viable grass farm uses a sophisticated system of animal rotation and pays good mind to the quality of the grass it grows—
how farm operates. system to rotate animals and the care you give to the grass?
our country, our agriculture—we do not honor grass. We honor corn and cotton and soybeans and rice [and] sugarcane.
“The problem with the environmental movement is it has demonized the cow as the instrument rather than demonizing the management style.”
Grass is naturally there and doesn’t have to be taken care of and animals normally eat the grass when in nature so it’s best that they do. Not corn which causes a nutritional hazord so it’s best to have the system rotate around grass.
Herbivores eat grass and not anything else like grain, manure or dead animals and when they do this they group up so fences are used to manage and move animals to different areas to let the grass grow back.
What’s the order you use to rotate the animals?
It depends on what we’re doing, but generally the cows come first and birds follow herbivores in nature. They’re following the herbivores, eating the newly exposed grasshoppers and crickets post-grazing. In other words, nature is always in a scavenging business. It doesn’t want waste, so there are all these wonderful symbiotic relationships to minimize waste, and one of them is birds following herbivores. The chickens) then free range out to scratch the cow patties, eat out the fly larva, sanitize it, harvest the grasshoppers and crickets and turn them into eggs. When the grass gets too long because chickens can’t eat grass that’s really long. They want young, tender sprouts, so we use the cows to graze the grass short. Whether it’s rabbits or pigs or chickens or cows or turkeys.
Not a lot is bought or brought into the farm; Using what you already have to sustain all those animals.
Grain for the omnivores—the pigs and the chickens. Don’t buy any grain for the cows. 70 percent of all of the grain grown in the U.S. goes through cows. Only 30 percent is poultry, pigs and people. So think what it would do to our agriculture if 70 percent of the cropland were returned to perennial prairie poly-cultures under intensive grazing management.
“Respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig is a foundation for societal health.”
We live in a culture in which the view of pigs or tomatoes or whatever is essentially a mechanistic view—Pigs are free to be manipulated however the human mind is clever enough to conceive to manipulate it. The USDA mantra is grow it faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper. And so when we view life from that perspective it disrespects that creature. And a culture that views its animals from that same assaultive, manipulative worldview will view its citizens from the same manipulative worldview and other cultures from the same. It’s no wonder that a culture that views its life as simply something to be manipulated will begin to have a foreign policy that’s manipulative. And so if we’re going to create a respectful, honoring culture, it starts with the least of these then creates a moral and ethical framework on which to construct a correct attitude toward the greatest of things. That’s where it starts.
Beef tastes amazingly different from beef that’s conventionally raised.
The beef raise in these grass farms are richer and actually have taste compared to the conventional way, the mass produced kind. Also the eggs are a better color and has a 1000 percent difference in nutrition.
There’s a difference in the taste depending on how the pig is raised, from being stuck in a small pen with
“ If we just increase soil organic matter on the pasture lands of the U.S. one percentage point, we could sequester all of that carbon that’s been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Age.”
You said earlier that you won’t eat chicken when you’re away because it’s the worst. Why is it the worst
Chicken is the most unnaturally processed as it’s manure covered feathers are plucked some of that manure goes into the carcass when the intestines burst. That’s why most salmonella and food-borne pathogens are from poultry—because it’s so filthfully processed.
“A culture that views its animals from that same assaultive, manipulative worldview will view its citizens from the same manipulative worldview.”
Why do you think all farmers don’t follow some of the same practices you do at your farm?
And people are always afraid of something different. They’re afraid to think differently, afraid to do differently, it’s the whole paradigm. Your paradigm is so much a part of you that even if I laid out a bunch of data and could prove to you that this would make you more money or would make you a better quality of life, your paradigm is a filter to your brain.
We have this saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” That’s actually backwards. You’ll see it when you believe it. What you believe is a future for what you will see. And that’s why two people can look at the same set of numbers and have two totally different headlines. It’s because you’re looking at things through your preconceptions. And that’s why farmers tend to not endorse things.
And I think one other reason farmers tend to not be innovative today is because the average farmer is 60 years old and people become less and less innovative the older they get because innovation is very costly. It’s very physically demanding, because when you innovate you fail lots of times. And because the older you get the harder it is to pick yourself up when you fall down. As you age, you necessarily become less aggressive at creativity. So as the [average] American farmer now approaches 60 years old, we’re losing youthful, emotional and physical energy that’s necessary for innovativeness.
Why is that average age increasing?
Young kids don’t look up to farmers, they’re seen as dumb and redneck not the heros that raise our food. Young kids are told to go become an attorney or accountant or engineer because those are seen as the important roles in our society.
How much does it cost to transform an operation from conventional to grass-based?
It’s expensive to change to the grass based when the farms are big because they are so invensted economically so it would be a really difficult change. The small farms can change because there’s less of a risk but the big farms are stuck.
You said earlier your farm is more cost effective. How does that work?
not buying any chemicals, not buying any fertilizer, not buying any seed. Our petroleum bill per growth sales is so low that petroleum could double and we would still be fine. Now, think of the average farmer … those are big expense items!
I mean, think about a cow out there grazing grass compared to tilling up a field, planting corn, applying chemical fertilizer, applying chemical herbicides and pesticides, and then mechanically combining that crop, trucking it to an elevator, drying [it] with petroleum, storing it and then trucking it to some place to feed it to the animal. There’s no comparison.
How well does this farming model work in a climate like New Mexico’s?
Every single climate has a liability. Your liability is that you just don’t grow as much volume, but there’s also an asset. In the arid climate, you don’t have leeching, so you don’t tend to have a calcium deficiency. In our area, we have a significant calcium deficiency. You have a real sweet soil because of the highly mineralized soil that doesn’t get leeched, out so your beef tends to be highly calcified, highly mineralized, which makes really succulent, tender beef.
There seems to be an antagonistic relationship between people who raise animals for consumption and environmentalists. But you seem to be both of those. Do you see that tension? How do you navigate it?
Oh, yeah. Well, you gotta understand that the mainline environmentalist agenda hates people and hates animals because they’ve seen what overgrazing has done; but the problem is not the animals, it’s the management of the animals. Animals can either be a tool for healing or a tool for destruction.
I hate to say animals are tools because now I sound like a machinist myself, but you see what I’m saying: They can either be an instrument of healing or devastation. Goodness, in a family a child can be an asset or a liability depending on if they’re wild or human.
So the problem with the environmental movement, the leadership of the environmental movement, is it has demonized the cow as the instrument rather than demonizing the management style. And so what happens is they have used their misperceptions to get the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to create grazing protocol that procludes animals as a healing instrument.
I have one last question: If there was just one thing people could do tomorrow to be more sustainable, what would that be?
I think the one thing that could be done would be to emancipate food. Emancipate direct-marketed farmer-to-consumer food from government regulation. The only reason we don’t have a more visible and prosperous local food economy is the food laws that were written to protect us from the industrial food system that are being applied to local food systems—embryonic food systems.
You know eBay? Just imagine if, in order to access eBay, to put something on eBay, you had to have a computer operator’s license, and you had to be zoned for business—so you had to have commercial parking access, you had to have a fire marshall-certified license in case your item got too hot, you had to have an electrician’s certification that your wiring and your plug-ins were up to code, you had to have an OSHA license [so] that when you jumped up from your chair when a great bid came in you didn’t get a splinter in your beheinie from a desk that was falling apart. You see where I’m going with this?
If this were required, how successful would eBay be? It wouldn’t exist. That’s what we’ve got right now in the local food system and that’s why I wrote the book Everything I Want to Do is Illegal—because the problem is that the regulatory climate, written for an industrial food system, cannot be scaled down to be capitalized in an embryonic business venture, whether it’s making some cheese in your kitchen or some cornbread muffins you’ll sell to the neighbors. All of these things have such a huge amount of required infrastructure wrapped around the very first pound of anything that the embryo, the prototype, has to be so big to capitalize the infrastructure costs that the embryo is too big to be born. And so what happens is the businesses never see the light of day because they can’t be born.
And so the one thing we could do is to emancipate food from the enslavement of these industrial-sized regulatory infrastructure requirements so that a local food commerce could proliferate. And if it were freed up to proliferate, we would spin circles around Wal-Mart, around Little Debbie, you name it—Archer Daniels Midland—we would spin circles around them.