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Cows, Carbon and Climate | Joel Salatin | TEDxCharlottesville

This year, Salatin was featured at a TEDx Talk in Charlottesville, entitled Cows, Carbon and Climate, which places a large focus on the grass-herbivore relationship.

He immediately calls out his listeners (and today’s society) for being disconnected from grass. Not golf course, manicured-lawn grass, but the grass like that found when the first explorers entered Virginia centuries ago. He paints an attractive picture for listeners of historic pastures so lush the grass could be tied in knots above a horse’s head, where the land was filled with millions of bison, deer, elk and poultry.

Salatin points out that grass is the pinnacle of efficiency when it comes to converting sunlight into biomass. Grass goes through a growth cycle — a slow infantile stage, followed by fast-growing grass and then a more stumped stage. Without herbivores such as cows, sheep, etc., the biomass (grass) would stop growing and die. Any herbivore will prune back the grass to restart the life cycle. In today’s age, we create this symbiotic relationship through electric wire, restraining cows to a certain spot. These modern pastures create about 2,500 pounds of biomass per year per acre. At Polyface Farms, however, they produce 10,000 pounds of biomass per acre per year. So, how do they do it?

Those who think that cows (and also the consumption of beef) are the destroyer of the planet are targeting the wrong victim. Herbivores are simply doing what they’ve always done. Rather, correct management is what herbivores need in order to mimic the environment they would have experienced in centuries prior — moving away from the grazing area long enough for the biomass growth cycle to begin again, recreating a nomadic, migratory lifestyle. On most pastures, the grass can rarely grow past the infantile stage. At Polyface Farms, he says, they respect the “cowness of the cow,” and allow them to move to adult-stage pastures the moment they prune back the grass in another. The result? More biomass per acre, per year; more efficiency; and increased sustainability.

He leaves his listeners with a few final, thought-provoking questions, asking us what would occur within our environment if McDonalds, Burger King and the other fast-food conglomerates around the world began serving the type of beef produced by systems such as these and, then, in turn, what would happen if we, as consumers, began eating it?

About Joel Salatin

Joel Salatin is a well known American farmer and lecturer, based out of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. It’s there that Salatin raises livestock practicing holistic methods of animal husbandry.

However, he wasn’t always in the eco-friendly farming business. Salatin started out as a journalist, working for a local newspaper, writing obituaries and police reports. Once tired of that lifestyle, he decided to take over his family’s farm, which he still uses today, that was purchased by his parents after they lost their own farm in Venezuela. Salatin’s parents themselves were proponents of J.I. Rodale, one of the first sustainable farming advocates in the United States, giving Salatin the background he needed to become a true crusader for the country’s current sustainable agriculture movement.

If Salatin’s name looks familiar, you may have seen him in the ever-popular Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. When Salatin refuses to ship Pollan a chicken, saying that it’s not sustainable to “FedEx meat all around the country,” Pollan is forced to travel down to Virginia himself to see what was up at the operation. The subsequent book chapter put Salatin and his Polyface Farm in the public eye, on a wider scale than ever before.

Even more recently than Omnivore’s Dilemma, Salatin was featured in Cowspiracy, a documentary created in part by Leonardo DiCaprio and available on Netflix. The documentary has received quite a lot of criticism, with the Union of Concerned Scientists claiming that inflated statistics are used as scare tactics within the film. However, similar, lower statistics provided by the Union of Concerned Scientists are not as all-inclusive as those used in the documentary.

Salatin has been on the receiving end of his own criticism as well, and from the same sustainable community for which he’s fought. In Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, a heritage-only poultry farmer, Frank Reese, references Polyface in a negative light. “That farm is a joke,” he says. “Joel Salatin is doing industrial birds. Call him up and ask him. So he puts them on pasture. It makes no difference. It’s like putting a broken-down Honda on the autobahn and saying it’s a Porsche.”

Salatin had his own words to offer in response, after the criticism was addressed in an interview by The Guardian. “I’m not opposed to heritage breeds,” Salatin assures readers. “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 per cent of the population. We gotta feed 90 per cent…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 your taxes.”

Defending his decisions and beliefs is a habit Salatin’s become quite good at. He penned quite a popular response to a New York Times editorial, “The Myth of Sustainable Meat” by James McWilliams, which specifically called out Salatin and his farm. McWilliams says Salatin’s process, which includes rotating his chickens around his grazing land to ensure a large number of steps in the farming process receives the correct care, from the chickens to the cows to the land itself, “appears to be impressively eco-correct, until we learn that he feeds his chickens with tens of thousands of pounds a year of imported corn and soy feed.”

“While it’s true that at Polyface our omnivores (poultry and pigs) do eat local GMO-free grain in addition to the forage, the land base required to feed and metabolize the manure is no different than that needed to sustain the same animals in a confinement setting. Even if they ate zero pasturage, the land is the same. The only difference is our animals get sunshine, exercise, fresh pasture salad bars, fresh air and a respectful life,” Salatin rebutted in a lengthy post.

5 Comments

  1. Actually 6 inch grass compared to a forest canopy is highly inefficient in creating food stuff. IT is more permaculture based polycultures that utilize every ray of sun, not DeForest grasslands, that will feed a growing planet

    1. Super large areas, such as in Mongolia to name one, will grow only grasses. Trees and crops won’t really make it there. And it’s not necessarily a matter of feeding the planet but of regreening it and/or preventing desertification. A green planet will not heat up and will consume excess carbon dioxide.

  2. so feeding the wrong, “unnatural” fodder like grains makes them probbably produce more methane, that right ? I experience the same when feeding myself with the wrong stuff.. pardon me. If thats true it would be another facepalming opportunity when havng some “xperts” claiming cow farts responsible for climatedisruption..

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