We all can agree or respectfully disagree about a lot of different things, but food choice and deciding how to feed our 3 trillion internal community of bacterial beings is one of the most fundamental freedom choices that each and every person should have.  With a passion for truth and fairness and recognizing that that right is under assault today in a myriad of ways, Pasture’s Delights’ mission is providing quality food that nourishes people’s bodies, minds, and souls so we can think straight and have the energy and will-power to protect the right that is so fundamental to each and every person.

In this, part 2 of a multi-part series started in January, I paraphrase from a talk given by Joel Salatin, a self-proclaimed “lunatic” farmer who can also best be described as the voice and face of the ecological agricultural movement. Farmer Joel Salatin will take it from here as he explains…

How Big Government enriches Big Business at the expense of our health

Despite a crushing national debt, we have a climate of cost-share programs. Many farmers are looking for grants and government assistance. Unfortunately, this paradigm – this disparagement against “all things natural” —filters down into the way money and protocols are handled.

For example, when the Cheasapeake Bay Foundation, one of the premier environmental groups in America, got the Virginia General Assemble to “clean up the bay,” they went to land-grant college Virginia Tech for advice on how to clean up the bay and handle manure. Of course the “official” (conventional) solutions to handle manure are slurry systems, lagoons, and pits that take a lot of concrete, industrial equipment, energy, and capital to install—and sadly lots of lost potential for the soil.

They didn’t consider starting a cost-share program to develop composting facilities.

Got a problem with weeds? The USDA’s solution is herbicides, nothing about eliminating weeds through bio-symmetry mob-stocking – like how the bison grazed their grasses. Of course if you do it this way, you’ve already solved the problem and there is no problem to write a grant for.

We are stuck in a cycle of programs that support capital intensive solutions.

Another hit to ecology and sustainability are government subsidizes annuals. Annuals are seeds/plants that need planted every year, unlike perennials that come back for many number of years. They are very different types of plants in terms of energy flows and things of that nature.

The 6 things that the Farm Bill subsidizes are corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, cotton, and sugar. All of those are annuals, and yet annuals deplete soil and perennials build soil. Herbivores (cows, goats, sheep) are supposed to eat perennials, not annuals. The herbivore-perennial relationship self-fertilizes without any chemicals, petroleum, or heavy machinery. It is the way the soils were built up in the great Americas before the Europeans came to rape it. We are still mining the soil that was built by this herbivore-perennial complex without replenishing it. So this bill is a back-door approach to subsidizing concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) which depend on grains and concentrated feeding of animals in houses. The apparent USDA policy for animals is that animals don’t need to move around. There is an orthodoxy of animal care that says animals should be kept inside, not outside—it’s more scientific, more efficient, more controlled, and more safe.

Unfortunately, we don’t have an accounting system that measures the pollution, the degradation, the MRSA, C-Diff, and all the problems that come from the pathogenicity of a pathogen friendly system. Words like listeria, campylobacter — you never heard those words 40 years ago. Today these outbreaks are a direct result of the confinement and over-“insiding” of animals. The system the Farm Bill supports skews the true cost of conventional farming, externalizing these damages to other places. This system makes the animals sick and us sick, and turns to another Big Player (Big Pharm) for remediation. And Big Money continues on…

Look for more of Joel’s message in future editions of Pasture Bites.

FULL DISCLOSURE. While in many ways Joel’s message is spot on, there are always exceptions. I would like to commend the many people employed in government and universities who do share similar beliefs and concerns for the environment and animal welfare as we do at Pasture’s Delights. Not everyone or everything government- or university-related is “anti-nature” and “pro big business.” Also, there are several “organic” and “environmentally friendly” cost-share programs available to farmers. Not every program is pro “conventional” farmer. However, from my first-hand experience in dealing with these programs—and for a myriad of reasons least of which is tax dollar waste— I do not support them, whether “environmentally friendly” or not. That is a whole other topic I can delve into at another time.

Also, so as not to mislead anyone, Pasture’s Delights does utilize existing “modern” structures, left from the farm’s conventional days under different ownership, to store and handle manure accumulated from our cows’ time in the milking parlor and winter-time feeding and housing areas. We look forward to investing in composting a good portion of our manure in the future. We are also considering having a manure pick up day each spring for herd owners looking for a source to fertilize their gardens.

In addition, while at this time Pasture’s Delights’ pasture and hays are 100% from perennial pasture there are some considerations to grazing or feeding some annuals which we may further explore in the future. For example, most perennial grasses are cool season – they grow well in the spring and fall when the temperatures are cooler—whereas there are some annual grasses that grow very well in the heat of the summer when our perennial cool season pastures are otherwise growing very slowly. These annuals may have a place in helping keep up with the animals’ appetite for pasture. More research is needed. Also so you know, we and all farmers—organic, graziers, or grain—do qualify for a minimal government subsidy. But because we graze our crops, we do not qualify for the majority of government subsidies and safety nets that benefit grain farmers.

The thing I love about the Pasture’s Delights farming model is we can “nourish the world” without needing subsidies or externalizing costly problems such as erosion, nutrient run-off, and flooding onto other people today or tomorrow.

Wishing you wellness and happiness!

Farmer Mark Grieshop
Bio-Entrepreneur
Pasture’s Delights

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