Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes: When I left the farm Tuesday, our sow, Miranda, extremely pregnant, her udders swollen with milk, was barely stirring herself out of her farrowing hut, not showing her usual enthusiasm for her beloved apples. I returned Friday to see her adorable new litter of Ossabaw Tamworth piglets, born Wednesday, burrowing in the straw of the hut. Counting backward, we estimate that she got pregnant just about the time we went to Turkey in September. The timing is not ideal from our perspective or from the piglets’. But then, we are not the most rigidly structured operation, and we don’t make maximum efficiency our highest goal. Sometimes at Turkana Farms, nature has a way of taking its course. I’ve been thinking a lot about efficiency lately, in part because I’ve been reading The End of Food, by Paul Roberts (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), in which examining the efficiency of food production is a major theme. I’ve been incredibly impressed by Roberts’ breadth of vision, depth of knowledge, and high quality of analysis. So far (I’m about two thirds of the way through), it’s not prescriptive at all. He doesn’t argue for particular production methods. He simply describes in exquisite detail, placed in the broadest context, the interaction between prevailing methods of food production with a host of other interdependent factors which include: the demands of a growing world population, the constraints of our resources, the dynamics of our political economy, the changes in our climate, our changing tastes, and the effects on us (not just our health, but our body size and our evolution as a species).
The mind boggling aspect of his endeavor is the complexity of it all. Changing one element causes adjustments in all the others. I can see why Roberts avoids proposing solutions. Trying to determine a rational course of action taking into account all the components is probably the road to madness. And yet, the book has helped crystallize for me some of the basic choices we face at the farm. As Roberts reminds us, we are used to thinking about efficiency as a positive value. And often it is. Devoting less time or fewer resources to making a product is almost universally viewed as a good thing. Competition in commodities almost always revolves around who can sell a product more cheaply, because they have been able to produce it more efficiently.
In exploring the quest for efficiency in food, Roberts compares the industrial production of beef (raising it in feedlots and processing it in large mechanized slaughterhouses) with raising it on grass and processing it locally. The differences are stunning. Cattle fed on cheap grain in feed lots can be brought to market at the age of about 10 months, reaching larger sizes than the grass fed beef which take two years to get to market size. Large mechanized slaughterhouses can process thousands of carcasses a day far more cheaply than local abatoires whose skilled workers may process twenty or fewer cows a day. (Part of the price advantage lies in the mechanized operations’ use of undocumented workers paid substandard wages, and dismissed—like disposable parts—if they are rendered inefficient by injury). If you were to see our packets of hamburger placed next to industrially produced burger at a supermarket, they would seem quite similar. But if the two products were priced according to their cost of production, the prices would be radically different. As Roberts makes clear, in competition between the super-efficient and the relatively inefficient, the super-efficient always wins and drives the inefficient producer and its methods out of business. So how is it that we’re still here, and selling beef? Because the two packets while seeming similar are not actually in competition. In fact, I would argue that the two products may share the label “beef,” but that they are not the same products at all, and our customers apparently seem to have realized this. Consider some critical differences: The body fat of animals fed on grass contains a much higher proportion of omega-3 fatty acids than animals fed on grain, because grass is a natural source of such acids and corn and soybeans are not. Experts believe monosaturated and polyunsaturated fats (such as omega-3 fatty acids) promote heart health, lowering triglycerides and increasing the right kind of cholesterol in the blood stream. Fat from grain-fed beef has no such benefits. Further, grain contains far more sugar than grass or hay. A diet of grain makes the guts of the cows that eat it sweeter and more acidic, leading to the evolution of new, more acid-resistant pathogens, including more deadly strains of e-coli, such as O157:H7. As Roberts explains, humans traditionally were able to fend off the effects of ubiquitous e-coli because our stomachs are acidic enough to kill the pathogen. But the pathogens that can resist the more acidic bovine guts can also resist the highly acidic human stomach, and can cause severe illness.
Confinement in feed lots, where the animals spend their lives standing in manure, increases the transmission of these pathogens. Half of all feedlot cattle harbor the O157:H7 strain of e-coli, and in summer 80% of them do. The feed provided in many feedlots also includes litter from the floors of chicken coops (because feathers and corn are cheap sources of protein and calories). But the feed provided to many of those chickens may include offal and bones from none other than slaughtered cattle. Those parts, too, end up being recycled to the cattle as feed. This indirect feeding of cattle parts to cattle increases the risk of BSE (mad cow disease). Industrially raised cattle are routinely fed low levels of antibiotics to enhance growth and prevent the diseases inherent in the unsanitary conditions of their confinement, thus contributing to the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Industrial methods of processing also increase the risks to human health. High speed highly mechanized meat processing significantly increases the risk of contamination, because animal intestines are routinely punctured by the machines, as Roberts notes, “coating carcasses and equipment with bacteria-loaded feces.” Contamination in mass-produced meat also spreads easily because of a processing system in which hamburger is made in huge batches, using trimmings from multiple carcasses obtained from multiple suppliers. Roberts cites a Colorado State University study of DNA in burger, which found the average 4 ounce patty to contain tissue from 55 cows, with some containing tissue from as many as a thousand animals. These differences reflect many, but not all of the reasons for preferring grass-fed, locally processed beef to the industrial beef product. There are, of course other reasons, such as the environmental side effects of concentrated animal feeding operations, the degradation of our land from intensive production of corn with excessive amounts of manufactured nitrogen fertilizer. As for the relative taste of the two products, another matter for discussion, we leave that judgment to you, the consumer.
While no food production method is risk free, I would say that the disparity of risk and quality between grass fed locally processed beef and feedlot mechanically mass-processed beef is so great that you simply can’t consider them to be the same product. Efficiency in production has created not merely a cheaper product, but an entirely different one. That is why we at Turkana Farms and other similar growers obviously have opted for “inefficient” methods. True, the product is more expensive, but the obvious solution (from the standpoint of not only budget, but also health and environmental responsibility) is to eat less than the 220 lbs of beef the average American consumes annually. Good beef is special, and should be enjoyed as such. Chicken is a more efficient way to produce protein, but efficiency in that context raises a number of different questions, which I’ll address in my next post. —Mark Scherzer
