The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

Author:Michael Pollan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Non-fiction, Politics, Health, Science, History
ISBN: 9781594200823
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2006-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

OF COURSE the simplest, most traditional measure of a farm’s efficiency is how much food it produces per unit of land; by this yardstick too Polyface is impressively efficient. I asked Joel how much food Polyface produces in a season, and he rattled off the following figures:

30,000 dozen eggs

12,000 broilers

800 stewing hens

50 beeves (representing 25,000 pounds of beef)

250 hogs (50,000 pounds of pork)

800 turkeys

500 rabbits.

This seemed to me a truly astonishing amount of food from one hundred acres of grass. But when I put it that way to Joel that afternoon—we were riding the ATV up to the very top of the hill to visit the hogs in their summer quarters—he questioned my accounting method. It was far too simple.

“Sure, you can write that we produced all that food from a hundred open acres, but if you really want to be accurate about it, then you’ve got to count the four hundred and fifty acres of woodlot too.” I didn’t get that at all. I knew the woodlot was an important source of farm income in the winter—Joel and Daniel operate a small sawmill from which they sell lumber and mill whatever wood they need to build sheds and barns (and Daniel’s new house). But what in the world did the forest have to do with producing food?

Joel proceeded to count the ways. Most obviously, the farm’s water supply depended on its forests to hold moisture and prevent erosion. Many of the farm’s streams and ponds would simply dry up if not for the cover of trees. Nearly all of the farm’s 550 acres had been deforested when the Salatins arrived; one of the first things Bill Salatin did was plant trees on all the north-facing slopes.

“Feel how cool it is in here.” We were passing through a dense stand of oak and hickory. “Those deciduous trees work like an air conditioner. That reduces the stress on the animals in summer.”

Suddenly we arrived at a patch of woodland that looked more like a savanna than a forest: The trees had been thinned and all around them grew thick grasses. This was one of the pig paddocks that Joel had carved out of the woods with the help of the pigs themselves. “All we do to make a new pig paddock is fence off a quarter acre of forest, thin out the saplings to let in some light, and then let the pigs do their thing.” Their thing includes eating down the brush and rooting around in the stony ground, disturbing the soil in a way that induces the grass seed already present to germinate. Within several weeks, a lush stand of wild rye and foxtail emerges among the trees, and a savanna is born. Shady and cool, this looked like ideal habitat for the sunburn-prone pigs, who were avidly nosing through the tall grass and scratching their backs against the trees. There is something viscerally appealing about a savanna, with its pleasing balance of open grass and trees, and something

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