What’s New?
We formed our first program’s model (preview below). Every dollar donated will act twice. By paying a local nutrient-dense farmer fair price for their meat and eggs and delivering it to those of underserved communities, we back a more sustainable food system and boost food security!
I am counting down the days until we can finally show you the first impact story (a demo on how donor dollars are used). —After a few meetings with a couple of Orgs, we realized we’re going to have to do this our way: down and dirty grassroots— we’ll be hitting the streets of Chicago and communing with the people to build out our foundational network. (more on this in the future)
I’m not going to lie, I was offended…
I did a livestream a couple months ago and I was going on about how important eating local organic is. Allowing animals to graze makes for better soil, better nutrition and a better you. I glanced at the live chat and someone chatted, “do we have enough space for that?”.
What happened next, I can only describe after thinking about the matter retrospectively.
My heart rate rose, my speech picked up and I kind of rambled off an indirect response that can be summed up as: “Big Agriculture is lying: we keep buying their lies. Them telling us we don’t have enough space to feed everyone with sustainable practices is a lie!”
I now know the reason my nervous system got all wired up: I’m not going to lie, I was offended.
When we don’t know the answer to a question on a subject that matters deeply to us, we may become defensive.
I’ve learned now that when asked a question that activates my nervous system, to approach it with a sense of curiosity, virtually siding with the person. Taking a more explorative approach to my emotions surrounding the question helps for us to find a legitimate answer together.
And although the moment passed, the question still remains, do we have enough space?
Let’s look at things high-level first:
If animals graze, they take up more space. Consolidating them means we can save space and produce more. (In any context other than farming, this sounds like an incredible advantage, btw.)
Pastured Life Farm, FL
Now let’s look at things with a little more nuance:
Caged and crammed animals don’t necessarily produce more. The conventional logic is: cram ‘em and feed ‘em grain. This fattens them up (and increases egg laying rates in the case for hens).
The nuance: conventionally fattening an animal is not the same as increasing it’s nutritional density. Animals grazed on pasture naturally increase nutrient density because they’re given what their DNA expects. Look at it this way:
conventional grain feeding = more fat, less nutrients
Pasture-raising = more dense proteins, more nutrients
And in the case for egg-laying birds, conventional caging and grain -feeding arguably don’t produce more eggs over their life span when compared to birds that live on pasture.
Pasture-raising farmers keep their birds for longer, well past their peak laying days. Conventional farms remove the bird from the equation once it’s past it’s peak laying days. Older flocks get replaced with a younger, faster birds. It’s quite the wasteful system.
The contrast: on grass-feeding farms, those older birds are grown and then processed as stewing hens and meat chickens. I learned from my time visiting Pastured Life Farm in Florida that many ethnic groups prefer the meat of the aged hen.
Now let’s consider literal space.
A Pilgrim’s Pride Conventional CAFO house
Here’s a gif I just made of a farm we came across out in Florida. It’s conventional cramming. Thousands of birds in these covered barns as long as a couple football fields.
As you can see, there’s a crap ton of unused space for these birds to graze.
Turns out the idea that we save space going the conventional route is just an illusion.
Near every conventional system I’ve seen, there’s a large amount of grass field right next to the barn that could easily be utilized. The cramming system takes up the same amount of space, if not more.
But what fascinates me the most is this:
What and how much we eat. This is a huge player into how much food we grow.
You see, the U.S. has different dietary habits than the rest of the globe. We eat 3 meals a day, snack a lot, are chronically overfed, and most of what we eat is processed food.
Since we eat a ton of processed foods, the government indirectly subsidizes that Big Food by paying for farmers to grow miles and miles of corn, soy and wheat fields.
These commodity fields convert the crops into your favorite junk food’s enriched flour, corn syrup (and other starchy ingredient derivatives) and soybean oil.
These crops are also the crops used to feed animals in the conventional system.
It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. Government pays for the corn > the corn feeds the animals > we eat the meat and repeat. The conventional-raising plea of efficiency is actually just them propagating an illusion.
All those corn fields can, with time, be converted to pastures that animals grow and graze on and be fed their proper diets. But instead, you get the space taken up by crops grown with the intention of encouraging the processed food economy and grain-feeding systems that’s making us sick and our meat and eggs nutritionally inferior.
I rest easy knowing that there are operations grass-feeding at scale! Below are examples of farms managing tens of thousands of animals, many of which, I got to meet the farmers of.
Polyface farms, VA
Pasture bird, CA
Happy Hen, CA
And these are just some of the top dogs. You’d be surprise how many large farms are in your backyard growing pastured and grass-fed food.
Remember Big isn’t Bad. Big incognito industrialism is bad. All of these grass-feeding farms are farms you can walk up to and ask for a tour in which a farmer there will gladly oblige.
Try googling “local farm CSA” and look into what’s available near you!
The truth is that there is way too much nuance to even begin to calculate the answers to the question of “if there’s enough space”. But it certainly is a good and appropriate question.
Never did I think we’d convert the entire food system into a grass-feeding model, but there was a time when that was the only model.
95% of chicken is grown in a conventional concentrated animal-feedlot operation. If we can reduce that number by even 5%, then the amount of people that’ll be able to benefit from real food will increase dramatically.
We may never see a “majority grass-feeding” food system in our lifetime, but just because everyone can’t do everything does not meat some of us can’t do something.
Keep voting with your dollar in the best way you see fit.
Enjoy a video of chickens flocking to fresh pasture below.
Ain’t nuthin here generated by AI
Until next time,
Johnny - Feed The Land