Industrial Organic Agriculture

Or: Why I Don't Sell Chickens

This post may ruffle some feathers (no pun intended) but that's never stopped me before so let us begin with some quotes from the August 2006 issue of The Stockman Grass Farmer, "Allan's Observations," p. 32:

Personally, I think an industrial agriculture is the natural end result considering where the industry started.

American organic agriculture has never had Nature as its model.

For the most part, all organic certification has done is to change the brand names of the inputs.

Crop farmers have no livestock. Organic livestock farmers grow no crops.

Such production segregation is totally unnatural and always results in weeds, pests, parasites and high costs.

Organic corn farmers rotate to organic soybeans just like conventional farmers and use expensive tillage to fight weeds and manure from industrial confinement feeding operations to drive their soil fertility program.

And, the same thing has happened to ruminant agriculture.
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The current organic dairy prototype [non-seasonal, grain-supplemented, confinement] is neither fish nor fowl but a hybrid that requires the costs of both confinement and pasture.

The reason it is so popular is that is allows us to drag as much of the past with us as possible.
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If we use Nature as a guide, we see that the incorporation of multiple years of grazed pasture is the only truly sustainable system because it can actually heal the soil and make it better than it was.

When we talk about sustainability or permanent agriculture (permaculture), we are talking about a closed system. The animals that eat the grain, hay or pasture also fertilize the fields that grow the grain, hay or pasture with their manure. When a farmer sells a feed sack full of grain, he is selling the fertility of his farm.

To get back to my sub-title, we don't sell chickens because we don't produce the food they eat. We do raise some chickens and eggs for our own use and we sell a few dozen eggs a week but we don't raise more than we do because to do so would be to buy the fertility of someone else's farm. In our case, we are net gainers because we are adding fertility to our farm at at the expense of another. We choose not to do so, however, because it does not make for a healthy, sustainable agriculture.

I'm not sure exactly how to put it together yet, but I've been thinking lately about rotating crops through our field. The recommendation in the article I quoted from is five years leguminous pasture rotated with three years of crops. We would have less overall grazing but more overall production because we would add more poultry and a few pigs to our livestock mix. The ultimate in sustainability would be to use the Fukuoka method. I'm not sure if that's ever been done in the west but it would be really cool to try.