Chapter Eleven: The Animals: Practicing Complexity

"The sanitation crew"

1. TUESDAY MORNING Chores at Polyface begin promptly with the sun, at about five in the morning. Pollan dealt with the chickens in a way that Joel had actually developed in his book Pastured Poultry Profit$. Moving the chickens every day keeps them and the land healthy. Although the grasses, crickets and worms supply most of their vitamins and minerals, a ration of kelp, corn and soybeans is added into troughs for extra nutrition. This chicken feed is the only off-farm source of fertility Joel buys--it gives back to the chickens, the grass, the cows, the pigs and the hens. Next, Pollan helped move the Eggmobile to the patch of grass the cows just left. "In nature, you'll always find birds following herbivores. . . that's a symbiotic relationship we're trying to imitate." Here the birds eat nutritous larvae out of the animal droppings and eat insects that are pests to other animals. They break the cycle of disease. "I call these gals our sanitation crew." Clever, now there is no ned for Ivomectrin parasiticides, or toxic chemical wormings.
The relationship on Joel's farm is so different from any industrial farm that Pollan has a hard time describing it. It is not a this, then that, now this line. It's a loop, a series of cycles. And Joel says that this is the distinction between biological and industrial systems. "It's all connected. this farm is more like an organism than a machine, and like any organism it has its proper scale. . . Farming is not adapted to large-scale operations because of the following reasons: Farming is concerned with plants and animals that live, grow, and die." And if Salatin is not efficient because he cannot just bump up the production of eggs by tenfold, he is efficient in a different way. Diseases cancel, every organism gets fed the right food, there is a low polution rate, and food that exits his farm tastes good. ". . . in a world where grass can eat sunlight and food animals can eat grass, there is indeed a free lunch."
2. TUESDAY AFTERNOON
The animals do most of the work on Joel's farm, but there is still plenty of work for Joel and his interns. While Naylor works his farm 50 days a year, Joel is out there almost every day of the year, for most of the day. But they relish it, it varies day to day and is quite beneficial. In a season, Polyface produces: 30,000 dozen eggs, 12,000 broilers, 800 stewing hens, 50 beeves (representing 25,000 pounds of beef), 250 hogs (50,000 pounds of pork), 800 turkeys and 500 rabbits. That is a truly astonishing amound of food from only 100 acres of grass. But Joel said that he forgot to count in the 400 acres of woodland that prevent erosion, hold moisture, shady and cool for pigs, biodiversity to control predators. "One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life."