When FDA investigators visited a hatchery in Iowa last August they found the source of the massive Salmonella outbreak that forced the recall of 500 million eggs and left more than 1,600 people sick: hens caged in manure pits overrun by rodents, swarmed by thick clouds of flies and containing maggots “too numerous to count.”
That image of a factory farm was just the latest in a series that have provoked a national conversation about the problems plaguing the system that produces our meat, eggs and dairy, and the reforms necessary to solve them. Both will be discussed at the 31st Annual EcoFarm Conference Jan. 26-29 at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove.
Nicolette Hahn Niman (once of Niman Ranch fame) will be giving the conference’s opening talk with author Dan Imhoff. Niman says she will use the opportunity to discuss alternatives to the dominant high-density livestock model. “What’s happening more and more now,” Niman says, “is a much more sophisticated discussion about integrated systems where animals and plants work together to maximize food production in an ecologically sound way—a way that kind of mimics nature.”
Niman is author of the book Righteous Porkchop: Finding Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms; she first became acquainted with the problems of factory farms as a lawyer with the organization Waterkeeper, which battles water and air pollution at industrial hog farms. She is also married to Bill Niman, the founder of Niman Ranch, a brand that is synonymous with sustainably, humanely raised meat. Bill Niman left the company that still bears his name in 2007 after a dispute over animal treatment. The Nimans now sell beef, goat and heritage turkeys under their own label, BN Ranch.
Nightmarish images of crammed factory farm pens and lakes of manure are associated with one model of livestock production, but there are others, Niman says, that are not just low-impact—they can actually have a positive effect on the land.
“I think a lot of what we’re going to be showing is that it’s incredibly variable depending on how it’s done. It’s not necessarily, ‘Oh, it’s not as bad as you think.’ It actually can be incredibly beneficial.”
Soft Landing
The trick is to take a holistic, integrated approach that matches land to its appropriate use. Consider, for example, the tract the Nimans work in Bolinas. It is grassland, the kind of terrain from which it would take extremely energy-intensive means—chemicals, machinery and manpower—to coax ground crops.
Instead, the Nimans graze cattle and goats on the land. They don’t irrigate; what little water they do use is collected via a catchment system and a small pond from which the animals drink. They use almost no heavy machinery and no chemicals. “So not only is that better from a pollution standpoint,” Niman says, “but it’s also much better from a resource use standpoint, because it takes a lot of fossil fuels to create those kinds of chemicals.”
Minimizing an operation’s footprint is just the start, though; Niman argues that livestock farms can take it a step further by fostering a symbiotic relationship between the land and the animals. Grassland ecosystems depend on grazing animals to distribute seeds and trample vegetation that enriches the soil; without grazing herds, grassland will turn to desert. So, she says, farming this way “actually maintains the appropriate ecology of this area.
“Even if you just took all the animals off this land and just left it fallow and said, ‘OK, we’re just going to let it return to the wild,’ that would not be, in our view, environmentally better because this is actually a natural grassland that used to be maintained by large herds of deer and elk and is now maintained by the cattle and the goats.”
Niman offers the integrated method practiced on their ranch as just one example of an alternative to the factory farm model. She considers in “one of the emerging frontiers in the whole sustainable food movement.” Other alternatives will be up for discussion during the EcoFarm conference (the theme of which this year is “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, E-lectrical”) in the more than 60 workshops and lectures presented over four days.
The EcoFarm Conference is Wednesday-Saturday, Jan. 26-29, on the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove. Single-day and full conference registration are available at Eco-Farm.org.
