The Omnivore's Dilemma 2

While the first section of The omnivore's Dilemma was about industrial food, the second section looked at what the author called "pastoral" food. One might say that if the theme of the first section of the book was corn, then the theme of the second section is grass. Most of this section focused on a farmer named Joel Salatin. Joel farm produces beef, chicken, pork, turkey, rabbit, milk, eggs, and produce. But Joel considers himself first and foremost a "grass farmer" because the grass on his farm is what holds it together. The cattle are all grass-fed (as opposed to the corn-fed cattle in industrial agriculture). After they are finished feeding on grass in one section, Joel herds them to another section. A couple days later Joel lets the chickens into that section of the pasture and they peck at the cow pies to eat the insects, fly larvae and parasites out of them. This does a number of things. It spreads the manure around so that it acts as a natural fertilizer for the grass. This means he doesn't have to spread any artificial fertilizers on his farm. It also reduces the amount of chicken feed Joel has to buy and at the same time gives the chickens protein (making their eggs bigger and more healthy). It also gets rid of all the harmful parasites, making the farms safer for the cattle. Because of this, Joel says he doesn't have to spray his cattle with pesticides and other chemicals like most industrial farms.

That's only one part of how the whole farm functions together. Pollan goes on to explain how the pigs, the rabbits and all the other species work together and rely on each other. Because of this, Pollan says Joel's farm functions more like an organism than the industrial farm described in the first section. The industrial farm is like a machine - all the parts are discrete and abstract and efficient as possible. The machine is concerned with growing as much corn as possible and making cattle as fat as quickly as possible, amongst other things. Another way of saying this is that the industrial farm is linear - corn is grown in Iowa, which then heads off to another state to either a processing plant or to a farm to feed cattle. A farm like Joel's, however, is interconnected and circular. There is no "beginning" to Joel's farm since the grass relies on the chickens, which rely on the rabbits, which both rely on the cattle, which relies on the grass, which relies on the ... On the industrial farm, the corn is the beginning. Technically, we might say that the fertilizer factory is the beginning since the corn relies on fertilizer. They have to use fertilizer because 1) they need to pack as much corn on their farms as possible and 2) very often the manure from huge industrial cattle lots will kill the crops because it has too much nitrogen and phosphorus. One of the differences between the two types of farms is that the problems on industrial farms (like what to do with all the animal waste) aren't problems for farms like Joel's. Again, this is because all the parts of the farm are interconnected and work together, rather than separate and abstracted from each other.

There's a lot more I could write about this section (like how studies show that grass-fed beef tends to be better for your health than corn-fed beef), but I've probably already written to much. The next post will be about the final section of the book, where Pollan hunts for his own food.