Out to Pasture: The Future of Farming?

Transcript of Out to Pasture: The Future of Farming? Narrator (Margery McIver): Almost all of the animals we eat in this country are raised in confinement operations – indoor facilities that house thousands of chickens, cows or hogs. Unlike the diversified farms that once were the norm, confinement operations tend to be highly specialized. Considering that humans have raised domesticated animals for thousands of years, this style of production is a new experiment. There are rising concerns about the impact of industrial farming on our health, the environment, local communities, and the welfare of the animals. However, there are still farmers who raise animals outdoors, in diversified operations. Some would call them backward, but these farmers believe they are on the cutting edge of animal agriculture.   David Whitman: They’re not wantin’ to leave the shade. Can’t say as I blame them. John Ikerd: During the 1970s it was a boom time in agriculture. We’re opening up the export markets, farm fencerow to fencerow. There’s gonna be prosperity for farmers forever. But then during the 1980s, then we went into a global recession, the export markets dried up, agricultural commodity prices dropped like a rock. Farmers were caught with large loans at high interest rates and were committing suicide when they lost the farm. And so I came to the realization, hey, this kind of agriculture that I had been taught and that I had promoted wasn’t working. I began to realize that that kind of agriculture – which I call industrial agriculture now – not only was degrading and eroding the soil, but is polluting the natural environment. And that was destroying the ability of the land to feed people of future generations. Robert Lawrence: We’re now producing eight billion animals each year for human consumption. Unfortunately, a lot of the true costs of doing business this way is externalized to the environment. By that we mean that the costs are in the environment – pollution of water and air, degradation of soils, and general contamination with the enormous amounts of animal waste that go along with industrial agriculture. We need to worry about the ability of our farming system to produce food for our great grandchildren. How to do that is becoming more and more of a challenge. Of the eight billion animals that we raise and consume in the United States each year, over seven billion of them are poultry, mostly chickens. John Ikerd: Multinational corporations basically are controlling the production on farms, through comprehensive production contracts with people that operate the large-scale confinement animal feeding operations, or CAFO’s. Virgil Shockley: You’re on my farm right now. We have about 125 acres. You’re in one of my chicken houses. It has 20,000 capacity chickens in this house. And the chickens are two weeks old. It’s considered a medium-size farm. Your big, big mega-farms, I call them, the 10- and 12-house farms – they have 200, 250,000 capacity. Those are the farms that have been built up in the last five to six years. I wouldn’t own a farm that size. I think those people are very brave. You have to realize that it doesn’t matter how good you are – at anything – the possibility does exist that you can get a disease. And the diseases in a 20,000 house versus the disease on 250,000, that’s a huge loss for somebody. Kathy Phillips: This is not your family farm behind me here. This is industrial-sized agriculture. And it needs to be regulated to preserve the natural resources that we have here in the state. The biggest problem with poultry on the Eastern Shore is the manure. There’s more and more of these large-scale industrial operations coming in. Each of these houses behind me can hold almost as many as 30,000 birds. And each chicken throughout its lifetime generates three pounds to three and a half pounds of manure. So, now you’ve got a product that is full of nitrogen, phosphorus, arsenic, other heavy metals. It’s being used as fertilizer on the fields to grow the corn and the soybean to feed the chickens. And the corn and soybeans use up a lot of the nitrogen, but the phosphorus is the big problem. This particular operation behind me is in such an environmentally sensitive area. To my right is Dividing Creek, which is a tributary of the Pocomoke River, and the Pocomoke feeds into the Chesapeake Bay. And literally within feet of such a very low, wet, sensitive area, we have this high area of poultry operation. So, anything that’s on the ground, the rain is gonna carry it down into Dividing Creek. Why do we have to wait for a crisis to happen? Why can’t everybody get together now, admit that we’re all part of the problem. Don’t leave it on the backs of the poultry growers to have to figure out what to do with it. Virgil Shockley: Chicken is a very popular food. A lot of the meat that you see actually goes to these fast-food places. If people don’t step back and say, look, the farmers are doing everything they can. It’s more of a problem than just the farmers, then we’re gonna have a poultry industry that won’t be on the Shore in five years. Carole Morison: Cleckner Farms, owned by Duane and Sheila Cleckner, is an example that can be used for farmers locally. He went from being an industrial chicken producer, lost his contract, and had to find something to do with his farm. And, you know, out of need he started experimenting. Duane’s a risk taker in this operation of his that he’s doing now. But I think Duane’s going to be successful. Duane Cleckner: When I was a little kid, I remember my grandfather taking me out on the farm, and ridin’ me around on his tractor. But he sold the farm in 1957. The only farming I had was the backyard garden. Our farm is 12 acres. I sort of feel like I rescued it from corporate America, where they were polluting all the time, raising chickens that I was embarrassed to eat. So, right now I do it the way I’d like to, which is no antibiotics, no hormones, no medications. I’m sort of raising chickens the way I thought my grandfather would, with minimal inputs. I probably work just as hard or maybe just a little bit harder now, but my quality of life is a little bit better because I’m working for myself, instead of the man. But when I worked for them, THEY controlled my destiny. It was like I was a serf working for the king, whereas now I’m a duke working for myself. Robert Lawrence: I don’t think there’s anything that captures the attention of the urban dweller in America quite like a picture of a bucolic dairy farm. And, sadly, those dairy farms are rapidly disappearing. Herd size of 40 to 60 cows, where the dairy farmer had a name for every cow, where the cows spent most of the day out on pasture, came in twice a day for milking, is being replaced by cows that spend their entire time standing on concrete, inside a closed barn, never see a blade of green grass. Their entire lives is spent eating specially prepared food that combines soy cake with corn and with various other things, with roughage that sometimes includes bits of plastic rather than anything digestible. Kim Seeley: I’m Kim Seeley and I live in north-central Pennsylvania, Bradford County, and our farm goes back – it’s a fourth-generation farm now – and it goes back, my grandfather and my grandmother bought this farm in 1928. We will see a resurgence in small family farms milking anywhere from 10 to 30 cows, that sell their own cheeses, their own butters, and that they regionalize and take back their co-ops. Before we quit using chemicals, the birds weren’t fertile and didn’t reproduce, and the birds didn’t want to come to our farm. Well, if the birds don’t return to the nest every year, then pretty soon the ecosystem collapses. And if our young people, being the birds, don’t return to the nest and return to the farms and wanna propagate the model, then the model’s not good. We used to plant grain and rotated our pastureland with our cropland, but we quit growing corn years ago, and so our pastures are blends of native species. Shon Seeley: As our farm develops, our seed bank grows every year, more and more. So, a lot of the weeds we’ve noticed – that seem to be unpalatable to our mind-set – have turned out to be a very specific part of the cow’s diet. Kim Seeley: You just stand back and observe the cows. They can teach us more than maybe we can teach them. Ron Holter: You’re on Holterholm Farms in Jefferson, Maryland. We’re just at the foothills of the Allegheny Mountain Range. And we have been farming this land since 1889, the Holter family. We had been a confinement dairy until 1995, and then in 1996 we converted to a pasture-based dairy, became certified organic in 2005 when the market opened up in Maryland for organic milk. So, we’re now a seasonal, no-grain, pasture-based dairy. We made that decision back in the fall of ’97, mainly because when you read the Bible, cows were not created to eat grain. Grain was created to feed people. And if He would have told me in 1996, when He told me “I want you to graze your cows,” that by 2007 or 2008 you would be a seasonal, pastured-based, organic, no-grain dairy with Jersey cows, my head would have exploded – NO WAY! It can’t happen. I don’t work near as hard as I used to. Have all kinds of family time. I can see my children grow up. And that was a real blessing. Adam Holter: When other young people hear that I’m gonna be a farmer, they’re not sure about that, because what they’ve grown up seeing is the conventional farmer, the confinement farmer. I guess what made me want to come back is when Dad did switch to organic in 2005. If we were a confinement farm, I definitely would not have come back to the farm. I can guarantee you that. Ron Holter: My entire life, we have been strictly a dairy farm. When we transitioned to grazing, and had time to actually think again, rather than just chase our tail all the time, it kind of opened up many, many possibilities for us. We have a tremendous amount of biology in our soils now – now that it’s permanently vegetatively covered. We have earthworms and dung beetles, and all kinds of bugs and critters down there that are beyond counting. It’s alive. The soil is alive. And that’s something I never saw until we were pasturing. So, the smaller farms, if they are going to stay in business, are going to have to move toward a pasture-based system. It would be my dream that all farms would move to a pasture-based and we’d get rid of the big dairies, because they’re not a sustainable, healthy type of a system, something permanent that can exist without government subsidies. John Ikerd: There’s a lot of people in all aspects of industrial agriculture today that don’t really feel good about what they’re doing. They really feel caught in this system, and they don’t know how to get out. And when people like myself or other people talk about sustainability, and sustainable agriculture, and organic and local foods, the so-called agricultural establishment kind of marginalizes that. Most of the people in conventional agriculture, they’ve seen neighbor after neighbor after neighbor fail, and they know sooner or later it’s going to be them. Joe Corby: They claim to have 11 million hog population in the state of North Carolina. I’m Joe Corby. I’m a private pilot, and I fly for the Neuse Riverkeeper Foundation. Okay, we’re flying over a hog farm in Duplin County – probably population of 20,000 hogs here. A hog produces many times the sewage that a human does. I mean, there is a factor of something in the order of maybe five times what a human produces, or more. And no actual treatment plants to process the stuff. It’s amazing. Devon Hall: A lagoon is a waste pit, and it’s just a hole in the ground, clay-lined, where the hog waste is flushed out of the confinement buildings into this holding pond. There’s some farms that will have as many as 12 barns or confinement buildings itself. The waste that those animals are producing, and it’s being flushed out into a hole in the ground called a lagoon. That same hog waste is being sprayed with big guns that propels this waste hundreds of feet across fields. There’s been research to prove that these particulate matters – dust from these CAFOs – can cause some severe respiratory problems. I believe that this industry is polluting the water now. I wouldn’t want to drink water from a shallow well. The one thing that we’ve always wanted is clean water, clean air, and a clean environment. Come have a picnic in my backyard, and tell me if that smells like bacon, or whether that smells like money, or if it smells like hog waste and urine, you know. The contract grower owns the building, but the industry owns the hogs, the feed, veterinarian supplies. So, I began to use the term that the contract grower is caught between a rock and a hard place. But at the same time, I didn’t want to bash the industry – still don’t – because I still want them to continue to raise hogs. Twenty-five years ago there was a lot of hogs raised on the ground here in Duplin County, and I believe that there is still some people that would like to go back to that. Jeremiah Jones: My name’s Jeremiah Jones, from Duplin County. We’re in actually a little community called Cedar Fork. I’ve been raising hogs for six years. I’ve been farming for 10. I started fresh out of college. I went to State. I was just turning 21 when I started farming. I ain’t ever been interested in contract farming. To me all you do is you’re owning the buildings and everybody else has to tell you what to do. And your contract reads you’re only guaranteeing one flock. But you’re signing your name to all that money for the barns, lagoon, all the responsibility and the environmental problems, and all they’re guaranteed to do is put you one flock or one bunch of hogs in there. And they can cut you off at any time. It’s hard nowadays to have a bank lend you money on anything like this. They want a contract, you know, hog houses and stuff like that. That’s what they look for. I enjoy having a little bit more control about everything I deal with. I got a buddy I went to college with. His family’s got 15 hog houses. We’ll go out to eat or something, but we don’t go around each other’s farms. Us versus confinement? We’re not allowed to use antibiotics, growth hormones or animal byproducts. We have to use basically all-natural feeds. David Whitman: My name is David Whitman. We are standing in front of my boar, slash, gestation pen. I have grown hogs down here, for the most part, since I was 14, and I’m 49 now, so you do the math. Hogs on the ground, they’re easier to keep ’em healthy. They get iron out of the clay soil, which is good for ’em. Minerals out of the roots, you know, from trees and bushes and stuff. They’re healthier. We don’t get the volume that you get with the indoor, commercial farms. In the hog houses, they’re more confined. They’re on cement. Cement is not a hog’s natural desire to be on cement. They like dirt, they like mud. It’s just better for ‘em. It’s also better meat for us. I have many friends that grow hogs in the larger facilities. I don’t discuss growing hogs with them very much. They do it their way and I do it mine. I was walkin’ down the path one day and all of a sudden a lid come up a little bit, and I was like, “What was that?” and there was a pig in there. Hey, bud. What’s up? He’s chowin’ down. First and foremost, I treat my pigs in a humane way. We cannot use hog shockers. We can’t kick ’em. We can’t shove ’em. We cannot mistreat ’em physically. We cannot use animal meat byproducts in their food. We cannot use steroids or any other growth hormones. We have to provide something they can graze on, forage on. We have to have certain size pens to provide so many square feet per pig. Hogs, in a lot of ways, are like people. One way, they have personalities. In about six to six and a half months of age, these boys and girls is gonna be going to the slaughter market. You know, so, they’ve got such of a short life. So, I do the best for ’em that I can while they’re with us. It ain’t all about the money. This is a hog haven. Not a worry in the world. Eliza MacLean: I’m Eliza MacLean. We are at a combination farm. I own Cane Creek Farm, which has become nationally known. So, I now own and run a large, multi-species intensive grazing operation, and I raise four, five different species of poultry and four or five different species of four-legged, red-meat animals for human consumption, which is actually a bit of a shift for me. I was actually a vegetarian for a while, but it just really became one of those things that I understood that boycotting that, for me, was not going to be the answer. I needed to be the change I wanted to see. John Ikerd: Well, the industrialization of the food system came about like the industrialization of agriculture. Agriculture, it was one farmer at a time deciding to grow something different in a different way, deciding they were going to market it a different place, buy different inputs. And, so, when we transform and change the food system of the future, it’s gonna be one consumer at time, one person at a time, saying rather than buying this product, I’m gonna buy this product because it’s more consistent with my ethical, social, ecological values. Eliza MacLean: I’ve seen such change in the seven years that I’ve been running this Cane Creek Farm. It’s gonna work. The food system is probably gonna be the first thing that needs to change, for the health benefits of all of us, so that we become long-lived again. Things are gonna taste better, things are gonna cost more, but we’re gonna eat less of them. And we’re gonna savor life a little bit more, you know?