The function of a farmer is not to grow bins and bushels — it’s to grow quality food that produces minds capable of thought and reason
Editor’s note: On the occasion of the 50th Acres U.S.A. Eco-Ag Conference, we thought it timely to include something from our organization’s founder, Charles Walters. This is one of his last addresses at the conference, in 2004.
When I started, there were about 300 farm magazines in the United States. Some were newsletters, and some were slick magazines — beautiful typographic work, as brilliant in their presentation as they were lacking in their substance.
And so the question was, what could I possibly say that is not being covered by these 300 different media serving agriculture? After examining many of them, I wondered whether we were operating on the same planet. These magazines were troubled to the point of ignoring sound technology and sound economics. And because they ignored it, farmers were seldom told the way it was.
I capsulized that for myself by remembering an old poem — a 16th-century poem by Tommaso Campanella:
The people is a beast of muddy brain,
That knows not its own force, and therefore stands
Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands
Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein.
One kick would be enough to break the chain;
But the beast fears, and what the child demands,
It does; nor its own terror understands,
Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.
Most wonderful! with its own hand it ties
And gags itself—gives itself death and war
For pence doled out by kings from its own store.
Its own are all things between earth and heaven;
But this it knows not; and if one arise
To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.
I think sometimes that Alexander Pope had a better poem to describe our lot in life. He looked at the political forums of his day and wrote,
See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,
The sot a hero, lunatic a king.
But,
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest.
This is our lot. Hope springs eternal.
Our Objective: To Prevail
I had a conversation the other day with George Siemon. George is the CEO of Organic Valley up in Wisconsin. He started out with not much more to pull himself up with than his own bootstraps, but that organic operation is now doing very close to $3 million a year. He has achieved the one thing that back in the old NFO [National Farmers Organization] days we only dreamed about. Not that he has mastered collective bargaining, which he has, but we often wondered what would happen if we could make an organization so valuable that people, instead of being recruited by teams going down the road, would stand in line in order to get in.
This is his situation today. People are standing in line to market their milk. Farmers who wouldn’t talk to me about organics 10 years ago now want to get in because here’s a man that showed them how he could collect the full tariff for a gallon of milk.
I’m told by Gearld Fry and some of his associates that a new breed is being formed. It’s going to be called Herbataurus — “herb” meaning grass-eating, and “taurus” of course is the generic name for cattle. The operation is now in the same posture that Mr. Siemen’s is up in Wisconsin. People are making application to get into the system.
This is the future of the organic business in the United States. Because it is being consumer driven for the first time in the last 34 years, it is going to go up from here on.
There’s no use talking about survival any longer. As a matter of fact, survival is not a fit objective for people in this audience, for this movement. Our objective should be to prevail. And prevail we will, because farmers are going to start making applications to get into organics in a meaningful way, rather than dragging their heels and sending the people who were selling the idea of organics packing.
A Disgrace to a Civilized Society
Oh, we still have plenty of obstacles. Don’t make any mistake about that. The press still refers to cow-pen operators as cattlemen. Alan Greenspan applauds concentration in agriculture the way he applauds Walmart taking over retailing. But we know that every equation has to have two sides, and there’s an equal in between them. In order to have the sales, you have to have the buyers. In order to earn the money, you have to have someone who earns money that can spend it, economically speaking. Landy Cook and I have computed that the shortage denied agriculture between 1950 and 2002 is very close to putting an increase in the public and private debt on the other side of the equal sign. That’s the broad-spectrum economic picture.
Eighty percent of the cattle are still being birthed on family farms with people that have herds of 20-25 or less. And yet, cattle and red meat production is the most concentrated of anything in the American economy. No more than three people control the feedlot system of the United States. What’s happened to hog production? Forty percent of the farmers went out of hog production during the first two years of the big drive by Smithfield and the other people to put hog production in concentrated feeding. We know that cattle in the feedlot require 25 cubic feet of air a minute, and they can’t get it. All they get is a lung full of fecal dust and pesticides. The dairy cows in concentrated feeding too often end up with Johne’s disease, which, if it’s carried by the cow, is very apt to go right past the pasteurization temperature.
We have a country full of kids that are lactose intolerant, and yet the day that they’re taken off a grocery-store milk and put on fresh milk with cream on top, they’re no longer lactose intolerant. How is this, that we have such fictions running around the country — that it’s destroying the health of the American people?
We have 300 chemicals out there that have been identified as inimical to the health of human beings, in, around and on the food supply. And those 300 farm magazines haven’t even made a sound about eliminating them. We have — we talk about it constantly.
Those chemicals, plus the others in our industrial society, have constructed a civilization in which, according to the Centers for Disease Control, one out of every 2.18 are destined to hear the terrible word “cancer.” That, ladies and gentlemen, is a disgrace to a civilized society and a monument to the stupidity of man.
It’s these unwholesome, almost repugnant practices that have brought our health profile to one of the lower ones in the civilized world. We were once third or fourth at the time of World War II. We’ve sunk down to something like 26th at this time.
Nor has this program been denied the cow-calf operator. He is constantly being assaulted by programs to take the cow-calves away from the independent farmer and put into massive production programs. In the most cases, has to sell his red meat to the feedlot, where it’s assaulted with high carbohydrates, develops acidosis to the point where E. coli is ever present, migrates through the rest of the red meat and requires the restaurants to cook every hamburger half to death. It’s totally tasteless because the contaminant flows with the system.
Every once in a while, the government will issue a recall. “We’re going to recall X number of tons of hamburger by such and such a provider.” What they don’t tell you is that recall is not the same as reclaim, because by the time the recall goes out, most of that hamburger has been cooked to death and sold to people at Wendy’s and McDonald’s.
The Consumer Will Make This Real
And standing off in the wings are our small producers who are starting to market direct to consumers. The venue is grass. Grassfed is the coming thing. The cows that are genetically disposed to live off grass will do much better than the ones that are simply returned to grass. But that’ll have to work itself out over the same period of time it took to get into the impasse we’re in.
The truth of the matter is there should be a slaughtering operation in every county in the United States. Right now, IBP, Tyson, ConAgra, Cargill and one or two others keep combining until one will end up with it all. Back in Theodore Roosevelt’s day, if 20 percent of an industry was concentrated, it was marked for antitrust intervention. Here we have a red meat industry with 80 percent in the hands of a few operators, and the Justice Department says times have changed. The antitrust laws should no longer prevail.
I’ve talked to maybe 350, 400 different people, interviewing them in Acres U.S.A. in the last 35 years. I’m sorry to tell you that probably 30 percent of those people have departed the scene. We wouldn’t know what they knew if we hadn’t taken the trouble to write it down. When Acres U.S.A. was started, there was the Natural Foods Association, which is now closed down and left its work to succeeding organizations, and that was just about it for the United States. They only had three or four chapters. Today there are organizations in every state in the union — usually not just one, but several.
Thirty-five years ago, there wasn’t a college in the United States that had coursework in organic agriculture. Today there are about 24 universities that teach the very subject we’re talking about or attempt to teach various coursework in it. Like up in Ohio, a young professor that I interviewed for Acres U.S.A. took the initiative to put in a pastures course to teach people how to manage pasture. Everybody was against him when he started, and now it’s one of the best-attended classes there is. Because the coming thing is going to be cattle on grass. And as I mentioned earlier, the better they are genetically disposed to live on grass, the more back fat they’ll have, the better we’ll taste the steak. But even the worst-case scenario will be several steps up from what’s happening in the feedlots.
Sally Fallon was honored tonight. She’s one of the best things that’s happened to eco-agriculture in these many years because she’s taking this whole message to the consumer. And the organic movement is being consumer driven right now for the first time. It’s the consumer that will get off his swivel chair on Saturday morning and go find himself a gallon of whole milk. It’s the consumer who will make an extra trip to pick up a turkey that’s grown properly or chickens that are range fed. It’s this consumer that will make the whole thing we’re talking about real.
Thirty-five years ago, after publishing the first issue of Acres U.S.A., I went out to talk to the Jackson County Fruit Growers Association. Now, you think you run into some hostility today — I thought they were going to throw me out of the place and skate me down the gravel road on my naked shoulder blades! You didn’t dare mention the word organic. They were not in a mood to listen.
But today, even the hard-sell farmers are in a mood to listen because they now know what a fraud LV 50 is. LV 50 means the dose that will kill 50 percent of the test animals. And if it only kills 50 percent, then, if used as directed, it’s safe. That’s the government’s position. If you take mercury LD 1 — the lethal dose that’ll only kill 1 percent, not 50 percent, of the test animals — and combine it with LD 1 for lead, and you combine those two LD 1s, you know what you have? LD 100. Who in God’s name knows what these various poisons in combination are doing? They can’t possibly know.
I’ve argued over the years that fluoride in the drinking water makes a combination out of everything in the medicine cabinet, and no one has an answer. They don’t have an answer because they’ve never asked the question.
Minds Capable of Thought and Reason
Why has this gone as slow as it has? One of the problems I’ve detected is that farmers quite frequently have the outlook of a Russian peasant. God came to Ivan and said, “Ivan, you’re the salt of the earth. You feed the people. You bring in the crops. I wish to reward you. You want to be rich? I’ll give you more rubles than you can spend. You want a better crop so you can tell other people? I’ll give you double the crops, or triple — whatever you want. If you want more land, I’ll give you more land. But Ivan, know this: whatever happens to you, that same thing happens double to your neighbor, Vladimir.”
Well, Ivan went home and started to think, “That scoundrel Vladimir would get double what I get. I don’t know if I can deal with that.” And finally, after tormenting himself with a sleepless night, he went back and told God, “God, put out one of my eyes.”
We have a lot of people out there that are worrying about their neighbor instead of worrying about their customer. But they are coming to the party one at a time, as they reason things out. More specifically, as they find out how, as one person told me this morning, he’s getting $10 for a gallon of milk, and people are standing in line to buy it. How do you do this? He makes yogurt. He gets twice as much for that. You can’t start with a hundred milking cows and do these things. You have to start small and build your business an inch at a time. But the consumer is ready. He’s been ready for a long time, but now he knows it. And when does that, we’re on the way.
I would just remind you that the function of a farmer is not necessarily to grow bins and bushels. It’s to produce minds capable of thought and reason. And this takes quality food.
My dad used to grow 18 percent protein wheat. Today the average wheat producer has 9 or 7.5 percent protein wheat. He has chickens in the big chicken houses that have about a 1,000 percent more fat than they did during the pre-concentration days — fat going in the wrong direction. The omega-3 to omega-6 ratio is completely out of whack for the red meat production you get from the feedlot.
These things can only be straightened out by moving into organic agriculture. We’ve endured 60 years of the dumbing down of agriculture, and the only answer to it is what we are doing in a meeting such as this, and the publications that are available, and the books that are available.
