Last weekend my friend and fellow devotee Jenny and I made what felt like a religious pilgrimage to the farm for their "Milkapalooza" event. We got to take a tour of the farm and see the cows and all of their grazing land (and it takes a LOT of land to grass feed cows; no wonder the stuff is so expensive). The event also included a mini ecology lesson, where attendees were taught all about the way that traditional grazing benefits the land and the region as well. From an ecological standpoint, so-called "conventional" milk production is somewhat of a nightmare. I'm sure you've heard at least pieces of this story before. The corn and soy used as feed are typically grown in huge, chemically-intensive monocultures, and contribute to the whole collection of environmental issues that beset "conventional" agricultural practices, including erosion and loss of topsoil, nutrient runoff from fields and nutrient loading in waterways, habitat loss and fragmentation, the impact of pesticides on non-pest species, and more. Said corn and soy then become feed for cows confined in huge, crowded dairies, and are rapidly converted into vast quantities of excrement. Rich in nitrogen, manure has traditionally been used as a fertilizer, but the scale of modern dairy operations makes this difficult from a transportation perspective—who wants to cart hundreds of tons of cow crap all across the land to be spread on fields? (In some cases, when a there is a farm nearby that can take the excrement, this does happen, but it is often not an economical option.) Instead, it sits in huge piles, leeching nitrates into the groundwater (this is bad, and can cause blue baby syndrome), and emitting methane (a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide) as it decomposes anaerobically. Which is pretty much just bad for everyone, including the cows, who spend their lives up to their knees in their own excrement. The same is true of large scale "conventional" beef operations as well.
In contrast, grass-fed dairy (and beef) operations avoid nearly all of these problems by "closing the loop". Rather than importing environmentally-destructive feed and ending up with environmentally-destructive waste products, traditional grazing works as a system, where inputs and outputs are part of a nutrient cycle; the result is a healthy, functional ecosystem, above and below ground, which benefits other resident species and the surrounding land.Fodder for the cows is not grown through large-scale intensive agriculture and trucked in; what the cows eat comes from right under their feet (the farm bales and stores hay for winter). At CSF, the pastures, many converted from "conventional" agriculture, were initially seeded with a mix of grasses and other nutritious plants (like clover), but have been self-propagating ever since. As polycultures, they are less susceptible to "weeds", or unwanted plants, and are more easily managed without chemicals. Cows excrete right in the field, where the manure is fertilizes the soil and is incorporated back into the plants with little to no nitrate leaching or methane emissions. Plant cover reduces soil erosion and nutrient runoff. Studies of streams in this watershed and others with significant organic farm representation have confirmed that stream health improves considerably when nutrient runoff is reduced. CSF's management practices have apparently also resulted in a number of native bird species moving in, which help out by catching and eating the flies that gather around the herd. And over time, well-managed pastures such as this one will accumulate organic matter in their soils, which (on a global scale) represents a significant carbon sink—a way to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it in a form where it won't contribute to climate change.
The men who covered this territory with visitors to the farm that day—a retired DNR worker and a cattle farmer who's been crusading for this type of "alternative" approach to beef and dairy production for decades—were clearly just enthralled by the elegant simplicity of this approach. And if you think about it, it is pretty cool. We hear so much about the countless, extraordinarily complex environmental problems that beset modern culture that it's sometimes hard to believe that such elegant solutions exist—until you learn how all the pieces fit together, and realize that it's really not such an incredible, improbable thing that everything would work out so nicely, because it evolved that way. Pastures and the animals that graze on them evolved to compliment each other, each giving and taking nutrients in moderate quantities. Soil systems evolved under full plant cover, not in tilled and weeded monoculture rows. Etc. It really is quite elegant. So why are we not doing it more?
These two men asked the same question, and were seemingly unable to come up with what I think is the very obvious answer: money. Despite my fanatical devotion to this farm and its dairy products, I can definitely understand why paying $8/gallon for milk would put most people off. I'm not saying that the milk is overpriced—after seeing how much land goes into producing it, I can't imagine how it could possibly cost less. But it is a significantly more expensive way to produce milk than "conventional" methods, whether you measure in dollars or land and resources required, and that is not going to change.
Our two teacher/tour guides professed to have great faith in the ability of the market to address the issue. It's not that farmers want to farm the conventional way, they kept telling us. It's just that that's where the demand is. They insisted that once people realize all the benefits to this alternative way—health, environmental, and otherwise—demand for it can't help but go up.
And I'm sure this will prove to be true, to an extent. Interest in organics is growing. Awareness is growing. Notions of the negative impacts of "conventional" ag are entering the cultural lexicon. Farmers' markets, local foods, and small farms are all growing. But I'm willing to bet that at the end of the day, a very significant percentage of Americans will still balk at the idea of spending $8/gallon on milk when they can get it on sale at the grocery store for $2.50. Even if it's REALLY GOOD milk.
Which brings me (finally) to my point: the perverse incentives provided by this country's agricultural subsidies, which make it far cheaper to consume unhealthy food produced through environmentally-destructive practices than to consume the opposite. A land-intensive milk production method like the one described here is always going to be more expensive than a "conventional" method using fewer resources, but the scales are tipped even further in favor of the "conventional" method when the government subsidizes the cost of the corn and soybeans the "conventional" cows eat. I think it will be extremely difficult (read: nearly impossible) for agricultural and livestock production to shift significantly towards ecologically-friendly, organic, and closed-loop methods until the playing field is leveled somewhat. Ideally, the government would shift subsidies toward better practices, but even just eliminating agricultural subsidies altogether would at least fix the problem of perverse incentives, and allow food prices to more accurately reflect the cost of producing them. (Of course, eliminating food subsidies altogether has a host of other implications that I won't get into here, and not all of them are good; my point is only that it's one approach to addressing the issue of perverse incentives in food pricing.)
And when might we expect such a thing to happen? Pardon my cynicism, but I don't think it can. The various agricultural lobbies are just too powerful for me to really be hopeful that this type of change ins possible. Jenny and I discussed this in the car on the way home, asking ourselves what the tipping point is going to be. "Conventional" ag is literally unsustainable—it both relies on limited resources like natural gas-derived and phosphate rock fertilizers to operate, and it is currently blowing through other, theoretically renewable necessities like topsoil faster than they're being created. Eventually, something's got to change. So the question is, will we notice in time that things are looking a bit desperate, and take action? Will we finally see a shift in agricultural subsidies? Or are we just going to run our fields into the ground, work them dead, suck every last nutrient out of them? Is it going to take an agricultural collapse for things to change? And at what cost?
I want to say I'm hopeful that things won't turn out that way, but I'm not especially. It's not like we don't know what's going on today—we're just choosing not to do anything about it.
This is why I keep apocalypse food in my basement.
