Joel Salatin on why Cows are GOOD for our Soil
We have found ourselves currently living amidst a fairly sizable war on cows.
There are many activists yelling from the roof tops that meat and meat production (mainly cows) is the worst thing happening on our planet. Is this true? Is it fair?
I was fortunate enough to have an incredible interview with the one and only Joel Salatin. Many call him the most famous farmer in the world, the high priest of the pasture, and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson.
This is an excerpt from the discussion between Rob Carney and Joel Salatin on cows:
Rob Carney: “…and that makes me lean into the next topic to dive into, which is the fact that we have a war on cows right now. We have this mainstream idea that only conventional farming can feed the world. There's this idea being spread that cows are the worst thing has happened to this planet. But from my research, I think that's pretty far from the truth. Of course, grown in a conventional way and putting them in CAFOs, basically putting them in prisons, we have all this waste coming in to sewage piles. Yeah, that's not the best for our planet by any means, but how can we actually utilize cow's to help sequester carbon in the soil and actually utilize cows as a means for improving the soil, improving the overall health of the planet rather than destroying it?”
Joel Salatin: “Sure. What a fantastic question. And it's one that anyone who cares is struggling with. And I recognize that because overgrazing and livestock, well agriculture in general, you know, it, if you study the history of civilizations; generally agriculture has not been good for the planet. Now let's just say that and I get that. I understand the burden that caring people question over. “Can’t we eat without the destroying things?” I mean, that basic question is just such an important question.”
“So, how did we get rich soils? You know, these Virgin soils that were here, how did they arrive? And they arrived through this disturbance and rest cycle with perennials and annuals. Just to make sure we don't lose anybody, a perennial is a plant that you don't have to plant every year. And it stays alive year after year. An annual is a plant that you have to plant a seed every year in order for that plant to grow. So all of our major farm crops; corn, oats, wheat, barley, cotton, sugarcane, all of our crops are annuals.”
“There's a few vegetables that are perennial like the asparagus and rhubarb. Those are perennials, but squash and watermelon and green beans are all annuals. On the Prairie grasses, there were originally over 40 varieties of plants in every acre of Prairie. That's how, that's how a diversified they were. And those plants were primarily perennials, you know, grass, your lawn, okay. And you don't have to plant it every year, those are the perennials. And so the way nature and herbivores were designed to work is that these perennials, they have a real fast growth cycle.”
“Unlike a tree, they grow faster and then they'd turn brown. They go through the life cycle. And so these plants grow in an S curve of a sigmoid curve. They start slow, then they speed up and then they slow down. And that sine curve, and I call the first part, I call it a diaper grass. The second part is teenage grass. And the third part is a nursing home grass. So the reason that the planet has so many herbivores; bison, Wildebeest, giraffes, elephants, deer, elk, caribou, Guinea pig's.”
“The reason the planet has so many herbivore is to prune them back like, like a horticulturist would prune in a vineyard or an orchardists would prove to the apple tree. They don't do it to kill it. They do it to stimulate new, fresh growth. And so the pruning is what the herbivore did on the Prairie's in this mechanism. And they did with three kind of three principles. The first one was they were always moving. They were never in same place. These herbivores had to move from many factors. Flies, predators, annual cycles, you have the monsoons, the cold and heat, you know, different things, kept them moving.”
“The second is that they were mobbed up for protection from lion's and wolves, Jaguar's and whatever. And the third one is they were mowing; they weren't eating a flesh. An herbivore, which of course a cow is, is essentially a portable four-legged fermentation tank.”
“They have a mower on their front end that ferments it. And then they exhaust wonderfully concentrated nutrients at the other end. And so here's my point. Moving, mowing, mobbing is the pattern or the template we have in nature. And the problem is when you put these herbivores in a feed lot, or you don't move them around strategically; daily essentially. If you violate any of these three things, moving, mowing and mobbing, if you violate any of those three, then all of the blessings, the blessings of the herbivore convert to liabilities. It should give us all pause to realize that 500 years ago, north America had more pounds of animals than it does today!”
“So my point is that, that when we're trying to duplicate the mechanism by which nature built soil with this perennial biomass that was then constantly pruned and concentrated. That's the way nature built it. When we violate that template, then we have the negatives. And so these movies like Cowspiracy and things like that talk about how terrible cows are, every one of them concentrates on our current system, which violates one, two, and often times all three of these principles that I've articulated here.”
“When your database is based on a weird, dysfunctional system it is going to lead you to some weird conclusions. “Wow, let's get rid of all the cows, cows are bad!” No, actually herbivores are what built our rich soils that we're now mining with corn and soy beans and they built our rich soil through moving mobbing and mowing. And today with electric fence and waterpipe and nursery shade cloth, we can now run on our farms like we do here at Polyface, we we duplicate the moving, mobbing, mowing choreography of nature's millennial soil, building strategy.”
We can now duplicate that on a commercial, domestic farm, because we have the infrastructure to be able to do it. And so, in a half a century on our farm, we've gone from an average, a 1% organic matter in the soil to today, over 8% organic matter. That's mind boggling. It's substantial. Especially when you're in it, because it's organic matter that feeds the soil. That's what feeds the biology, and then the earthworms and the mycelium and all that in the soil. And not only that, but every, every 1% increase of organic matter holds an additional 20,000 pounds of water per acre, because that's the sponge of the soil.”
“It's the porosity of the soil. And so today we've gone from 1% to 8%, which is seven percentage increases. Times 20,000 gallons per acre is 140,000 gallons per acre of water that we can now hold in our soils here a more than we could in, in 1961, when we came and a that's a pretty cool thing. You know, when you look at droughts and floods and things like that, the porosity, the ability of the soiled to sponge water quickly, when it comes and hold on to it for a long time, when it's not there, that is probably the most critical part of environmental resiliency that we can even a where you can even imagine.”
The closing message: the cows are just cows. It is our management of the food systems in which cows are involved which leads to either a pro or con. In sustainable agriculture, a cow is often an invaluable asset to the entire function of the ecosystem.
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