agriculture

Is that chicken really free range?
11/05/2011 - 10:08

 So after the silly article in NPR, a lot of people simply said that paleo is definitely not about grain-fed meat. But I find a lot of people who purchase "alternative" products are eating grain-fed meat without even knowing it, simply because it's pretty hard to do commercially viable chicken or pork without it. I and others have worked on models, but they aren't coming to a store near you anytime soon. 

And for poultry, even if it's from a farmer's market, it's not often free-range in the way you might think of it. In NYC there was one farm selling poultry and I read about how they wouldn't allow people tours to their farm. When I looked closer, I realized that was because while the poultry wasn't in individual cages, they were kept in dark sheds. But it was a small family farm, so what can you say? I guess it's hard for people to believe that such a place could do wrong. 

Philosophically, I like to have livestock living as close to how an animal would live in nature as possible. I know people will argue that chickens are safer in dark sheds, but people argue people are safer with irradiated food. In a natural system, some animals don't come home. Some animals die. They fall prey to raccoons or coyotes or accidents. That's a loss economically, but philosophically I'd rather have the animals survive on their own terms, fully using all their muscles and ancient survival instincts, than shut up in a shed. Perhaps I'm more sentimental than I give myself credit for. 

Historically chickens and pigs were secondary production methods. They ate waste from the other crops produced on the farm. This was a sustainable method and what is highlighted in Simon Fairlie's book. 

But if I were supplying a cafeteria this way, most of the time they wouldn't get chicken and when they did, it would be a smaller mostly-dark meat chicken. As I've written before, I think it's not a bad thing to have less chicken or pork, as these meats are generally nutritionally inferior to ruminant meats. I think these birds are delicious and most of the world agrees with me, but Americans want their chicken breasts. 

And so even small sustainable farmers are giving it to them. And I think it's at the expense of making the pastured model truly grass-fed and truly pastured. If you are putting deformed modern industrial chicken breeds (the Persians or Pugs of chickens in terms of their deformities and health problems acquired because of breeding to please humans rather than overall function) in a cage on pasture and feeding them grains...that's better than factory farming, but how much?

Here are some pictures of farms I've dealt with: 

This is the chicken tractor with Cornish Cross method Salatin made famous. These birds are being produced for a "green" restaurant that serves chicken every night. I didn't talk with this farmer about the behavior of these chickens, but at these densities I think bullying becomes an issue, but maybe not since this breed is basically a catatonic walking breast. In Eating Animals, a pastured poultry farmer named Frank Reese says:

Michael Pollan wrote about Polyface Farm in The Omnivore’s Dilemma like it was something great, but that farm is horrible. It’s a joke. Joel Salatin is doing industrial birds. Call him up and ask them. So he puts them on pasture. It makes no difference. (113)

Salatin responded:

"OK," he concedes. "You know what, that's fine if you want to do that. I'm not opposed to heritage breeds. We have some heritage breeds. Here's the problem though: marketability. When you say: 'Can we feed the world?', we're not going to turn around the system by feeding only 10% of the population. We gotta feed 90%."

You don't think people will pay…

"Double?" he says, finishing my question. "No, they won't. And besides, it's all dark meat. No double breast. Hey, 40 years ago, every woman in the country – I'll be real sexist here – every woman in the country knew how to cut up a chicken. When we started doing these pastured chickens, it was a moot point. Nobody asked for breast – it didn't exist! I mean as a separate item. Now 60% of our customers don't even know that a chicken has bones! I'm serious. We have moved to an incredibly ignorant culinary connection."

Salatin is hitting his stride now. "We tried heritage chickens for three years and we couldn't sell 'em. I mean, we could sell a couple. But at the end of the day, altruism doesn't pay our taxes. And I'm willing to say: 'You know what? I don't have all the answers and I pick my battles and compromises.' If you want to get brutally honest, in my opinion we shouldn't even have egg sales in America! Every restaurant and every home should have two or three chickens. I mean, you got a parakeet, why not have two chickens? You get eggs instead of a parrot keeping you awake at night. In a perfect world, that's how it would be."

Which sounds exactly like the arguments factory farmers or Barbara King make. Is this really all going back to bare efficiency? Maybe we should rethink chicken's place in the production system in the first place. Thousands of pastoral cultures did grass-fed quite fine without it. But Salatin would not be able to sell to conventional restaurants if he didn't use this method probably. How many restaurants are willing to have chicken on the menu only 1/8th of the year and mainly in the form of broth?

These chickens are on Veritas farm in New York. They are eating apples that were damaged in a hail storm. They go pretty much wherever they want.

And these are chickens on my family's farm, hanging out stupidly with cows. They also go wherever they want. Luckily, as heritage breeds, they are a little smarter. Of course both these examples also eat grain, but not human-food-quality grain and not a lot compared to other models. And it's possible to go-grain free on this model with some ingenuity. Socially, they are much less interested in pecking at each other because a bullied chicken can easily go elsewhere on the farm.

Truly free range chickens like these are going to have more dark meat (which I like). If you consume chicken this way, you don't consume it often, though you make great pains to extend it by making soup from the bones and other less-edible parts. You won't have enough of them to eat them every week or possible even every month. 

Maybe if you can't produce something well in a commercially viable way, you shouldn't produce it at all? 

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Wisconsin, 2022
10/14/2011 - 17:55

Wisconsin 2022. Things have gotten bad since 2011. The economy recovered somewhat, employment didn't. Outsourcing, automation, productivity per person, and general economic stagnation have produced a dire economic situation, particularly among young people. The dream of productivity gains allowing people to work less has turned into a nightmare. It's more productive to have fewer employees than to let people work less. Few young people are getting married. Fertility is dropping. Resource prices, particularly for fossil fuels and synthetic fertilizer, just reached an all-time high.

What do things look like? I think in 2011 we are at a crossroads: how to could we deal with a potential "Lights in the tunnel" chronic structural unemployment situation? More and more, this looks like a future reality. A full-time job might not be available to everyone in the future. The job system might collapse.

What will we rely on then? I think this depends on the regulatory climate. I think a favorable realistic situation would be that more and more people become self-reliant for basic needs such as food. For income they rely on various odd jobs and gigs. I see many people moving towards this system right now, including me. Young people with part-time jobs have more time than money, so they are more likely to engage in things like urban homesteading. They cook more at home and care more about things like eating good food, spending time with their families, and exercising. They are likely to live longer than their wealthier hard-working Boomer parents. 

Unfortunately, the government seems to want to ignore or quash this sort of thing. For example, a Wisconsin judge ruling in a raw milk case said: "Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to produce and consume the foods of their choice." He later went to work for Monsanto. Many government authorities are part of this revolving door that keeps the government in tune with corporations.

I wonder what sort of system that philosophy leads to? I'm afraid Martin Ford describes it in Lights in the Tunnel. It's a government-based economy where corporations produce everything and in order to keep the consumer system from collapsing (unemployed people are terrible consumers), people are supported by government subsidies that are tied to government-approved incentives. Ford isn't sure what those incentives would be, but thinks they might involve paying people to be eco-friendly or something. Sounds like a dystopia to me.

We are at a crossroads here. The Occupy Wall Street movement is a perfect example. I share OWS's distaste for the fact our government has largely been captured by a small number of elites and corporations. But what are we going to do about it? I have a feeling the government will put social programs in place to distract people from the fact it hasn't changed, that it's still captured. And those social programs are often cleverly disguised corporate subsidies. Notice they never fix the systems that are broken, they just pour more money into them. Universities fail to provide student with real skills, so let's pour more money into them so they can be the new beer and circus for the lost generation. Dairy farms failing? Put in place price supports and regulations that reinforce the failed high-capital industrial systems. 

And then we have to "protect" people from everything under the sun, which is a great excuse for all manner of injustices. I wouldn't be surprised if by 2022 you can't buy non-irridiated raw meat at the grocery store because the government has to "protect" people who might not cook it properly. 

I was looking at this gallery of photos of young people from China and India holding up signs and this one really struck me:

I looked at it and thought that this is why my creativity is crippled. I am afraid. I am afraid to invest in the things I love, because I know they can be unjustly taken away. I'd rather just not have them in the first place than have my heart broken. 

I've eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge and it has poisoned me. I've read Mad Sheep, which is about a farm family that worked hard to bring a rare breed of sheep to the United States and build a business around them, before the government seized and killed them all based on seriously doubtful science. I've read about Joel Salatin's struggle to build a business in a world of regulations designed for giant corporate farms. I've seen footage of armed raids on small farms because people sold things that the government doesn't approve of. I've had friends investigated by Animal Control and Ag & Markets, because someone reported them. Their business suffers no matter if the accusation is correct or not, and the accuser faces no consequences. They can't even know who the accuser was. I've known farmers who lost land to eminent domain because the government decided they weren't important enough. 

Why should I bother to work hard? Or to plant walnut trees on our farm in Wisconsin that won't bear nuts for twenty years? What if in twenty years everything has been taken away? It's no wonder young people are occupying wall street insteading of getting out there and building new and interesting things. 

So yes, I'd like to see the end of crony capitalism, but let's be careful what we ask the Leviathan for. 

Part 2 is here.

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World Food Faileo
08/14/2011 - 22:39

From a New Yorker article I was reading about eating bugs

At the conference, Dunkel talked about her frustration working in West Africa, where for decades European and American entomologists, through programs like U.S.A.I.D. and British Locust Control, have killed grasshoppers and locusts, which are complete proteins, in order to preserve the incomplete proteins in millet, wheat, barley, sorghum, and maize. Her field work in Mali focusses on the role of grasshoppers in the diets of children, who, for cultural reasons, do not eat chicken or eggs. Grasshoppers contain essential amino acids and serve as a crucial buffer against kwashiorkor, a protein deficiency that impedes physical and neurological development. In the village where Dunkel works, kwashiorkor is on the rise; in recent years, nearby fields have been planted with cotton, and pesticide use has intensified. Mothers now warn their children not to collect the grasshoppers, which they rightly fear may be contaminated.

Fail. If you rely on insects you can be perfectly healthy. Near the equator, insects are an important food source for foraging people. There are even several species that are very rich in important fats. I'd rather eat locusts than a grain like millet, which is responsible for goiter in many Africas. 

For more info on stupid food aid mistakes, I highly suggest The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by Wililam Easterly. 

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Coconut Agrobiodiversity
06/23/2011 - 07:49

 Coconuts of French Polynesia is a fascinating blog I found though the coconut Google group. Unfortunately, it's in French, so I read in in Google Translate. Since most of us eat coconut products imported and processed far away, we don't really think about what kind of coconut those foods came from. Apparently many traditional cultures use many types of coconuts. There are oil coconuts, water coconuts, medicinal coconuts, and fiber coconuts for example. I asked the author what these rare red coconuts taste like and he said they are very tasty and sweet, with a pink color inside. 

Personally the only difference I have tasted in commercial coconut waters is between coconut water from Brazil and Thailand. The latter tastes so much better to me, particularly the Taste Nirvana brand. Perhaps someday we will be able to chose from coconut water from different places and different types of coconut. 

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Meat: A Benign Extravagance
05/30/2011 - 19:12

So you've heard eating animals is bad for the environment. The scientific and economic reality is that sustainable food is more complex than cutting out animal products- some animal foods are good for the environment and sustainable to produce. An extensive academic treatment of what this means.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1603583246/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=trevresa...
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Nuts + Nuts and Kings County Jerky
05/02/2011 - 21:41

I hate to admit it, but I am not impressed by most farmer's markets. Particularly in NYC where an overwhelming number of them seem to have poor oversight of their vendors. Local is nice and all that, but it's certainly not by first priority and living near a major agricultural state (New Jersey), some of the local produce is pretty much what you can get at the grocery store. If you quiz most "farmers" are the farmer's market you will find most are paid vendors, not farmers, and most don't know jack about their production processes. 

So honestly, I don't bother going to the market much. Not to mention how is someone who works a normal job supposed to shop on a weekday morning and carry their eggs on the subway to work and then back home at the end of the day? 

An exception I'll go out of my way for is the New Amsterdam Market, a market curated for quality rather than location. I certainly don't buy staples here, but for treats and condiments it's fantastic. 

You can get some great pig fat at Mosefund. Rilettes at Brooklyn Cured. And great sausages and other meats at Fleisher's.

One of the newest vendors is King's County Jerky. I hosted a meetup at their kitchen in Brooklyn recently and it was super cool. They are completely transparent about their sources of meat too, which is completely local and grassfed. I can definitely endorse their tasty product. 

My other favorite is Nuts + Nuts, a fair trade cashew company. Their nuts are sourced by small quality farmers and roasted with coconut oil and other traditional ingredients. I wasn't a big fan of cashews until I had these. They are definitely richer. I wonder if it's because they are more fresh? 

I won't be posting much in the next week or replying to email because I am working on some important projects :( 

 

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Should there be a Vegan/Omnivore Alliance against Animal Factories?
03/24/2011 - 07:35

 Tom Phillpott proposes an omnivore/vegan alliance against animal factories. I think a lot of vegans who believe in animal rights would reject that. And I'm going to be the rare sustainable farming advocate omnivore to reject it. 

First of all...what is an animal factory and what makes them bad? Is is bad management or is all mass production of meat inherently bad? 

In the US it's usually bad management, because for some reason it's totally legal here to destroy things you don't even own like nearby wetlands and our ability to use antibiotics in humans effectively. 

But while living in Europe I toured some animal facilities that were dare-I-say quite nice. And it's a myth that letting animals do their own thing outside is always the best thing for them. It's also spit in the face of people like Temple Grandin that have worked to make mass meat production better. 

It is also quite regressive to suggest that all meat production besides free-range should be banned. It's easy for us rich folks to advocate for, but tell everyman that chicken is now $14 a lb and you might not get much support.  I do think free-range meat production could be ramped up, but once you start asking for infrastructural reforms with regards to slaughterhouses, the vegan side of the coalition won't be much help.

I'd like to see greater transparency and accountability in meat production, but people who want to destroy people's food choices are not our allies. 

This vegan quote on the article says it best

"as vegans we would be banding together with the owners of slaves kept in relative comfort against the concentration-camp style slave-owners."

Sorry, I'm allying myself with people who believe animals can be slaves and it's skirting the issue to call these people merely "vegans". They are animal rights activists plain and simple. I'll continue to ally myself with people who call on humans to be good stewards and to be conscious of our consumer decisions. 

As an aside, I find it very amusing that anti-locavore James McWilliams has come out of the animal rights closet and said the reason he thinks pastured meat is bad is because it's "killing" now that his fake economics arguments have been refuted. If you want to see him attack local farming live, he'll be debating local chefs and farmers in NYC on Friday. I'll be there. 

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EGGS: NOW FEATURING MORE PUFA!
02/10/2011 - 22:46

 It's funny because when I started reading Fanatic Cook I was vegan and she was a low-carber. I thought she was wrong, but just liked reading her stuff (I read a bunch of vegan blogs still). Now she is a nutritarian and I'm the carnivore. Most of the time I think she is missing the bigger picture, but she picks up interesting articles. 

Either way, her latest post on eggs caught my eye. It's about a news item that's bound to annoy both paleos and vegans: "Eggs Are Now Naturally Lower in Cholesterol," which talks about the newest analysis of the average nutrient content of eggs. Paleos who think the lipid hypothesis is bunk are bound to be unimpressed. And vegans are annoyed that USDA is saying that this now makes eggs a health food. 

Either way, seems like we both lose. As Bix points out, the Brave New Egg is just soy repackaged. Instead of 574 mg of omega-6, it has 792mg! Yes, omega-3 has increased a bit, but I don't think this is good news since total PUFA (polyunsaturated fatty acid) content has increased. It also has less of the best fat ever, monosaturated fat, which is seriously sad. But wait, now you get more glucose for free! Instead of a measley 105mg, you get 180mg per egg. 

"Hens are fed a high-quality, nutritionally balanced diet of feed made up mostly of corn, soybean meal, vitamins and minerals." Hmmm, no thanks.

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Meat Book Club: Meat- A Benign Extravagance
12/29/2010 - 18:00

Occasionally I'll encounter a book so dense with interesting info that it's hard to write just one post about it. That's the deal with Simon Fairlie's Meat: A Benign Extravagance. This is an important book and I believe it has the potential to positively influence both culture and policy. For too long anti-meat crusaders have dominated the environmental movement. Now it's time to look into whether or not meat really deserves the bad rap.

You can read George Monbiot's excellent review and an interview with the author.

I've read quite a bit at this point, but I thought why not invite you guys to read it with me?

The first meat book club?

So here is the deal: I'll post a chapter assignment every week. And then every blogger who is participating can do a post on that section. Every blogger doing a post can link to all the other book club posts. To sign up to be a blogger, post in the comments. Everyone else can discuss the book on comments, Facebook, and twitter.

I'm really curious about what everyone has to say about this book. I'm sure plenty of us will disagree with some of Fairlie's ideas, but there is so much through provoking stuff in this book that we will learn a lot.

And we can also have a tweetchat using the #meatbc hash tag. If you are interesting in doing anything else, let me know. In person meetups are a possibility! Definitely in NYC, at least! If you want to organize one in your town, let me know.

My goals for posting are:

Intro: Post about this whenever, I'll probably post about it soon.
Section 1: The Land Requirements of Livestock: January 8th
Section 2: Food Security: January 15th
Section 3: Energy and Carbon: January 22nd
Section 4: Land Use Change: January 29th

Who is in?

EDIT 2: Join our FB page group here!

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Live Tweeting from Wise Traditions
11/13/2010 - 10:05

FYI I'm at Wise Traditions this weekend and live Tweeting it here! Blog post afterwards!

I've enjoyed hanging out with John Durant, Alison from Crossfit Black Box, Chris Masterjohn, and SCDKat. Still haven't met Stephan Guyenet, but he's supposedly around here somewhere.

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