We live in an upside down and backwards world. Something went terribly wrong, and it is high time for change.
Look at farming for instance. For thousands of years, people would work with mother Earth to grow their food in small family farms, by using crop rotation for pest control, animal manure for fertilizer, and collecting diverse seeds for a healthy gene pool. Everything was integrated and performed beautifully, with Nature happily taking care of much of the work.
But then, about a century ago, scientists discovered the effect of nitrogen on food crops, and we have been using it ever since. Out of the window went the use of ruminants for strategic grazing, rotating crops, and growing seeds for diversity. Instead, more and more chemicals were being discovered and used in huge fields of hybridized mono crops to kill pests, herbs, bugs. Every year, more chemicals were and are needed to counteract the natural adaptability of pests, sprayed on plants that are too fragile to survive on their own, leaving our food plants depleted of nutrients, even toxic.
Instead of integrating grazing animals into small diverse farms to improve the soil, many food animals are now held in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) where cattle are fed large quantities of corn – something their stomach is not able to handle, which leads to illness, which is counteracted with antibiotics. After farmers figured out that antibiotics have the added effect of fattening up their animals faster, they have been using them extensively even without medical needs, which leads to all sorts of medical problems for humans. Cattle that are held in this way of course have to defecate and urinate, which in these high concentrations lead to environmental toxicity as well as sick animals, exacerbating the need for medications even more.
Chickens raised in large farms have to endure a similarly sorry life. Their beaks are cut early in life so they can’t peck others in spaces that get tighter every day the chickens grow bigger. On the day they are collected to go to slaughter – they are just 4-6 weeks old – their legs often break and they have to spend the last hours of their lives in agony.
Selective animal breeding has been used for centuries to continuously improve upon lifestock. But in the 1950 farmers came together to pick the largest chickens to breed for broilers, the most avid layers to breed as laying hens, and the cows that gave the most milk, to set them up as as the nation’s main breeding stock. These very small gene pools have been inbred for decades, and have led to such inhumane excesses like 2 month old chickens who’s legs break because they have grown too fat to support their weight, and cows who’s udders drag in the dirt.
It is time for change!
Using chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides kills the soil. Now plants can’t grow there anymore without chemicals, leaving the dirt uncovered and prone to be blown away, or taken down the river by runoff. It’s a vicious cycle.
But there is a way out. Thank goodness for farmers like Joel Salatin, Gabe Brown and others like them who have been shown that by using a rotation of animals and plants, dead soil can be regenerated.
And it makes sense: Fields that are too poor to grow food often still have some grass and weeds growing on it. With cows eating this grass, trampling it down and fertilizing the soil while they graze, they add plant matter back into it as well as nitrogen and minerals. Next, chickens are going over the field, pecking the fly larvae and other bugs – essentially sanitizing it and spreading the manure. Now the field can be planted with a cover crop, which nourishes the soil even more, which at some point can be used to grow food crops. It’s a win-win-win and just like Nature intended.
There is no need to genetically modify our foods to ‘feed the world’. Nature can do that much better with its integrated systems of animals, bugs and plants. All we have to do is to turn away from chemicals, wean our fields off them and start growing soil again, bring back our insects and rediscover the joy that living with Nature brings.
Little Steps
If you don’t own a farm, consider growing some food in your backyard, or even in some pots on the balcony. It is fun and rewarding! At your next market day, visit your local farmers market and start making friends with your farmers. They not only have answers for all sorts of nutrition questions, they also have locally grown, in-season foods, which will always have the most nutrition. By choosing locally and regeneratively grown foods, you ‘vote with your dollars’ and make a big difference!