A Dirty Job
December 2nd, 2009 by Philip LoringReprinted with permission from the December 2009 issue of the Ester Republic.
My moms, recalling their recent visit to Polyface Farm in Staunton, VA, kept returning to one thing that struck them most about their visit to Joel Salatin’s icon of small-scale agriculture: it did not stink. There to purchase free-range turkeys for the holidays, they toured hoop-houses occupied by layers and roasters, walked pastures of grass-fed cows, even helped Salatin’s son to rotate pig stock, and through it all, they did not once encounter an unpleasant odor.
Those of us who tend our own gardens and farms aren’t surprised to hear this, of course. Farming should not smell bad. When we are turned by an odor we are experiencing a hard-wired evolutionary signal alerting us that something is unhealthy or unsafe: rotten food, rancid meat, poisonous plants, noxious fumes. Thus, smell is one of the best built-in tools we have for knowing when something is wrong on our farms. When our compost pile starts to smell, for instance, that is a pretty good sign that it is not composting but rotting, an important distinction that is relatively easy to remedy by aerating the pile and by adding dry grass clippings or some other carbon source to balance the nitrogen. And the reverse is true: when things smell good to us, it is a pretty good indication that they are healthful and nutritious. My Nana often says that she could not spend any time in my Papa’s gardens, because the soil smelled so good to her that she could hardly keep herself from eating it by the handful.
Yet, ignorance persists that anything related to producing food is dirty and smelly, thanks to the chemically-dependent processes and breakneck pace of industrialized farming. High-input farming systems and confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are not designed in a way that mimics a natural system—limiting external inputs and recycling wastes—and as a result, they stink. Consider the countless homeowner associations across the US that, despite ongoing social epidemics of malnutrition and obesity and an economic crisis that has more people in the US living with some degree of food insecurity than ever before1, continue to prohibit keeping gardens or small livestock like chickens. The rationale for such rules is that these activities will create a nuisance and a public health risk. It is industrial practices, however, not backyard ones, that are responsible for the emergence of Escherichia coli O157:H7. Natural systems farmers, on the other hand, who do not feed their cows food that causes them gastrointestinal stress, do not need to worry about managing chronic infection, do not need to pasteurize their milk, and do not need complex bureaucracies to provide quality control and assurance.
How ironic, that one of the seven most commonly-invoked myths of industrial agriculture is that industrial agriculture provides safe, healthy, and nutritious food. Sure, the modern supermarket produce aisle presents the perfect illusion of food safety. Consistency is hallmark. Foods look unthreatening, perfectly safe, even good for you. And for decades, agribusiness, the US Department of Agriculture, and the Food and Drug Administration, have all proclaimed boldly that the United States has the safest food supply in the world. Such proclamations betray reality, however. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), for instance, have reported that from 1970 to 1999, a period of unprecedented agricultural industrialization and agribusiness consolidation, food-borne illnesses increased more than tenfold. They also estimate that food-borne pathogens now infect up to 80 million people a year and cause over 9,000 deaths in the United States alone. And the FDA classifies at least 53 pesticides commonly used by industrial farmers as carcinogenic.
I do not necessarily believe that it is impossible to develop large-scale agricultural practices that are not dirty and smelly—that mimic natural systems and provide safe and healthful food. There is no one best method of farming, and a mix of approaches, small and large, community and commercial, local and foreign, must coexist to create broad and enduring food security. I do argue, however, that is impossible to create any kind of healthful food production within industrial and economic models of production that prioritize growth over self-sufficiency, and separate the producer from the consumer. The latter, the relationship that can occur between the farmer and the eater, is easily the most powerful mechanism of quality control available. Joel Salatin allowed my parents to tour his farm not just because he had nothing better to do, but because he cannot do his job effectively without them. We do not need scientists or certified inspectors to tell us if our food is safe, when the safety and quality of that food is the lifeblood of the farmer.
1Author’s Note: most who work on issues of food security internationally have a problem with considering the obesity epidemic in America as matter of food insecurity, a problem of the same order as that being experienced in sub-Saharan Africa, for example. I argue that whether quality of life suffers from chronic hunger or from chronic diabetes and hypertension, both are life threatening and both represent a failure of the food system. The poorest Americans may have more access to food, but the inadequacy of that food to support healthful outcomes is clear.
