Excerpts from "The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals"


I’m dozing, as I often do on airplanes, but the guy behind me has been
broadcasting nonstop for nearly three hours. I finally admit defeat and
start some serious eavesdropping. He’s talking about food, damning
farming, particularly livestock farming, compensating for his lack of
knowledge with volume.

I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope
instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to
raise food. Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and
dirty. It still is.

But now we have to listen to self-appointed experts on airplanes
frightening their seatmates about the profession I have practiced for more
than 30 years. I’d had enough. I turned around and politely told the
lecturer that he ought not believe everything he reads. He quieted and
asked me what kind of farming I do. I told him, and when he asked if I
used organic farming, I said no, and left it at that. I didn’t answer with
the first thought that came to mind, which is simply this: I deal in the
real world, not superstitions, and unless the consumer absolutely forces
my hand, I am about as likely to adopt organic methods as the Wall Street
Journal is to publish their next edition by setting the type by hand.

Critics of “industrial farming” spend most of their time concerned with
the processes by which food is raised. This is because the results of
organic production are so, well, troublesome. With the subtraction of
every “unnatural” additive, molds, fungus, and bugs increase. Since it is
difficult to sell a religion with so many readily quantifiable bad
results, the trusty family farmer has to be thrown into the breach, saving
the whole organic movement by his saintly presence, chewing on his straw,
plodding along, at one with his environment, his community, his
neighborhood. Except that some of the largest farms in the country are
organic—and are giant organizations dependent upon lots of hired stoop
labor doing the most backbreaking of tasks in order to save the sensitive
conscience of my fellow passenger the merest whiff of pesticide
contamination. They do not spend much time talking about that at the Whole
Foods store.

* * *

Lynn Niemann was a neighbor of my family’s, a farmer with a vision. He
began raising turkeys on a field near his house around 1956. They were, I
suppose, what we would now call “free range” turkeys. Turkeys raised in a
natural manner, with no roof over their heads, just gamboling around in
the pasture, as God surely intended. Free to eat grasshoppers, and grass,
and scratch for grubs and worms. And also free to serve as prey for
weasels, who kill turkeys by slitting their necks and practicing
exsanguination. Weasels were a problem, but not as much a threat as one of
our typically violent early summer thunderstorms. It seems that turkeys,
at least young ones, are not smart enough to come in out of the rain, and
will stand outside in a downpour, with beaks open and eyes skyward, until
they drown. One night Niemann lost 4,000 turkeys to drowning, along with
his dream, and his farm.

Now, turkeys are raised in large open sheds. Sheds are expensive, and it
was easier to raise turkeys in open, inexpensive pastures. But that type
of production really was hard on the turkeys. Protected from the weather
and predators, today's turkeys may not be aware that they are a part of a
morally reprehensible system.

* * *

Michael Pollan, in an 8,000-word essay in the New York Times Magazine,
took the expected swipes at animal agriculture. But his truly radical
prescriptions had to do with raising of crops. Pollan, who seemed to be
aware of the nitrogen problem in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, left
nuance behind, as well as the laws of chemistry, in his recommendations.
The nitrogen problem is this: without nitrogen, we do not have life. Until
we learned to produce nitrogen from natural gas early in the last century,
the only way to get nitrogen was through nitrogen produced by plants
called legumes, or from small amounts of nitrogen that are produced by
lightning strikes. The amount of life the earth could support was limited
by the amount of nitrogen available for crop production.

In his book, Pollan quotes geographer Vaclav Smil to the effect that 40
percent of the people alive today would not be alive without the ability
to artificially synthesize nitrogen. But in his directive on food policy,
Pollan damns agriculture's dependence on fossil fuels, and urges the
president to encourage agriculture to move away from expensive and
declining supplies of natural gas toward the unlimited sunshine that
supported life, and agriculture, as recently as the 1940s. Now, why didn't
I think of that?

Well, I did. I've raised clover and alfalfa for the nitrogen they produce,
and half the time my land is planted to soybeans, another nitrogen
producing legume. Pollan writes as if all of his ideas are new, but my
father tells of agriculture extension meetings in the late 1950s entitled
"Clover and Corn, the Road to Profitability."  Farmers know that organic
farming was the default position of agriculture for thousands of years,
years when hunger was just around the corner for even advanced societies.
I use all the animal manure available to me, and do everything I can to
reduce the amount of commercial fertilizers I use. When corn genetically
modified to use nitrogen more efficiently enters the market, as it soon
will, I will use it as well. But none of those things will completely
replace commercial fertilizer.

Pollan thinks farmers use commercial fertilizer because it is easier, and
because it is cheap. Pollan is right. But those are perfectly defensible
reasons. … Farmers have reasons for their actions, and society should
listen to them as we embark upon this reappraisal of our agricultural
system. I use chemicals and diesel fuel to accomplish the tasks my
grandfather used to do with sweat, and I use a computer instead of a lined
notebook and a pencil, but I'm still farming the same land he did 80 years
ago, and the fund of knowledge that our family has accumulated about our
small part of Missouri is valuable. And everything I know and I have
learned tells me this: we have to farm "industrially" to feed the world,
and by using those "industrial" tools sensibly, we can accomplish that
task and leave my grandchildren a prosperous and productive farm, while
protecting the land, water, and air around us.

by Blake Hurst, a farmer in Missouri. In a few days he will spend the next
six weeks on a combine.

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