Farmer Workshop - Sustainability Rant

The wife and I attended a Farmer's Workshop on sustainable food held in Dover, New Hampshire. We stayed for three speakers and lunch and the topics where:

• Organic seeds (and why not to use Conventional Seeds)
• Raw Milk (Pros and Modern Myths)
• Heritage Poultry (And Why the World is Going to Hell)

[Subtitles are my own]

I am about as nutty as they come when the topic is sustainable food, but these three speakers (who are all local farmers, by the way) really walk the walk. The overall theme of the day is one I have been picking up subtly from a variety of sources including Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Put simply, our food supply, our food culture, is not sustainable. The average food item in American cuisine travels 1500 miles. Every food calorie requires 15 energy calories (in the form of petroleum, and all ensuing wars) to produce it. This concept was echoed across the three disparate topics.

Organic Seeds
The pharmaceutical companies have patented seeds. They've done insidious things like bred in a "terminator gene" which prevents farmers from harvesting and keeping seeds. That means that the farmer no longer owns his or her food or future. Every year, they must pay for seeds (and conveniently, the pesticide to protect it). 90% of all corn seed in this country in genetically modified. What can one small farmer do?

Buy and collect heirloom seeds. Seeds that produce open-pollenated, self-propagating, fertile crops. Harvest them, dry them, and grow more crops. Stop paying for our future by buying seeds from the Monsantos and DuPonts. Stop buying fertilizers that are derived from petroleum. Take control of our food.

Raw Milk
Most dairy forms keep their cows on at least 80% genetically modified corn (which is NOT a natural part of a ruminant's diet). The average lifespan of a conventional dairy cow is 42 months. 42 months, people. The average lifespan of a "sustainably" maintained dairy cow is 13 years. Do you really want to drink the milk from an animal that is so sick, it's lifespan is cut by over 75%?? Plus, raw milk is regulated by law to contain a lower bacteria count than pasteurized milk. That means you are guaranteed to have less pathogens in raw milk than in conventional milk. By law.

But let's look again at that conventional cow who is fed non-sustainable, genetically modified corn. Her milk is then bundled with 1,000 other cows and shipped, via diesel truck, to a pasteurization facility, where it is super heated to destroy contaminants. The heat also destroys valuable enzymes and vitamins. In fact, more vitamin C is destroyed by pasteurization of dairy in this country than is produced in our entire citrus crop.

Once sterilized, the milk is homogenized which destroys more proteins, all because we don't like the cream to rise to the top, which indicates age. Then a protein powder is re-added to the milk, plus things like vitamin A and D (to make up for the lack of sunshine the confinement cows are getting). Of course, they don't have to label that the milk has powder added because it's a ubiquitous practice in the industry (kinda like dunking poultry carcasses in chlorinated water). Then, the milk is shipped, again via diesel truck, to a packaging facility. Finally it is shipped, more gas and oil please, to your local store.

After ultra-pasteurization, the milk is so "dead" that it does not need to be refrigerated, but they do it anyway because we're trained not to drink "warm" milk. No one will buy milk off a shelf, but it's just as safe as the refrigerated milk using expensive energy to keep it cold. You can't make home cheese from pasteurized milk, which is fine because they want you to buy cheese as well. This living, complete food is dead.

The raw milk we buy comes from 25 cows which, in the summer, graze on 40 acres. They are fed minimal grain and dry hay to offset the rich nature of the grass. They are milked twice a day and the milk runs through sterile lines, is chilled immediately, poured into glass jars and put up for sale from the farm. Zero diesel miles. The majority of the roughage fed to the cows, including hay and haylage, is produced on the farm, without pesticides. They use diesel to run the tractors, but nothing is shipped in and oil is not used for "chemical boosters".

During that part of the presentation, the farmer took his milk and gave everyone a taste test between it and store bought vit D fortified milk. Then he took some warm milk and using only a jar for shaking, made butter in about 10 minutes. Then, he took more cream and made whipped cream in about 3 minutes. He also brought samples of his Quark (European farmer's cheese), raw yogurt, and raw Sauerkraut. This man was a food producing machine, and all used living milk as a base.

Heritage Poultry
Our modern chickens are the product of hybridization that favors cheap and ubiquitous corn. Corn which is the product of cheap and ubiquitous oil. Oil goes away, corn goes away, and those monstrous meat birds which gain a pound a week until they die at 10 weeks from a heart attack (if not harvested first) will cease to exist. They cannot exist on forage and free ranging, which is something the heritage breeds have been bred, oh for millennia, to do. The heritage breeds are slower growing, but they produce for longer. A modern production layer, if kept well fed, will produce 300 eggs a year and then die, burned out, at 18 months from reproductive problems. Her body is just a machine, and longevity is not required. A heritage breed will produce 100 eggs a year but lay consistently for 5 years and live into her teens, on little to no grain, on bugs found in your garden, in your orchard, and on table scraps.

There's 2.5 chickens for every human on this planet and 99% belong to one of 4 breeds. We have a problem. A major biodiversity problem. There are two main milking breeds of cow, and 8 species of plant provide human food (down from about 80,000). In the next 10 years, 50% of the world's rare poultry breeds will go instinct.

Once we get off our petroleum kick, how we eat will have to change because the 12 oz of meat in every meal is just not sustainable. One heritage chicken can feed you for four meals, more if you count stock and dumplings. No more eating of the breast and discarding the rest. We won't be able to afford it.

We won't be able to afford to feed any of our animals corn, nor should we. It's not any better for them than it is for us. Sustainable, pasture raised, bio-dynamic farming, which uses the naturally occurring manures and doesn't require calories from the Middle East is the only way we will be able to afford to feed all these hungry people.

It's a hell of a lot of work. But I know it starts with me.