Members of the House of Delegates are looking for ways to help grow the state’s agriculture industry. A bill in the chamber’s Agriculture Committee would require the state to purchase more locally grown food.
House Bill 2566 creates the West Virginia Fresh Food Act. As introduced, the bill would require state funded institutions to purchase at least 20 percent of their produce from West Virginia farmers.
Members of the House’s Agriculture Committee amended the bill Tuesday to allow institutions to gradually increase their in-state purchases– starting at 5 and reaching 20 percent over a period of four years if it’s economically feasible.
Delegate Robert Thompson, a Democrat from Wayne County, is the bill’s lead sponsor.
“Not only are you cutting out transportation cost, you’re providing an economic stimulus for farmers in the state, and you’re also helping to reduce the possibility of contamination as well,” Thompson said.
The bill was passed out of committee and now goes to House Finance.
A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control offers a stark example of the declining power of medicine’s most important weapons against infectious…
A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control offers a stark example of the declining power of medicine’s most important weapons against infectious disease. The CDC noted that a patient who died at a Nevada hospital last year had an infection that was resistant to 26 different antibiotic treatments. That’s essentially the entire antibiotic arsenal doctors had.
There’s an antibiotic problem in the U.S. Some just aren’t working anymore as resistant bacteria, so-called “superbugs,” are growing. Part of the problem lies with farms, where massive amounts of antibiotics have been used on livestock, including animals that aren’t even sick.
A new regulation from the Food and Drug Administration taking effect this month aims at decreasing the agricultural use of medically-important antibiotics — the ones also used to treat people. The rule has raised questions in farm country and sparked debate among public health advocates who worry that the new mandate doesn’t do enough.
Path to Resistance
Dr. Rusty Ellis is an acute care physician at Baptist Health Hospital in LaGrange, Kentucky. Patients come in with staph infections, urinary tract infections, and sepsis. But the antibiotic quick fix for infections isn’t as easy as it used to be. He’s seeing a lot of patients with strains that resist antibiotics.
“This is Leviquin,” Ellis said, holding an intravenous sack of antibiotics. “It still works in some instances, but it’s become fewer and fewer pathologies we use this in.”
This story on antibiotic resistance hit close to home for ReSource reporter Nicole Erwin, who has firsthand experience of the illness that these bacterial strains can cause.
That’s because Leviquin has lost some of its effectiveness. Leviquin was also once widely used on livestock before the FDA banned its use on animals more than a decade ago.
“Whatever you’re giving your cows, those bugs can become resistant,” he said. “It’s not any different from us.”
Take enough antibiotics, and your system can build resistance. And those bugs can hop from person to person. The same thing can happen with livestock on farms. Over half of the antibiotics sold for livestock use in 2015 were also of the types used in human medicine, and a strain that becomes resistant in animals won’t necessarily stay down on the farm.
Read more about Nicole Erwin's experience here
It’s such a problem that the World Health Organization held its first summit on the subject last fall. The W.H.O. says resistant strains of bacteria can increase the likelihood of death and make people sicker for longer.
Ellis can’t make a direct link between resistant bacteria cases he sees in the hospital and the antibiotic use on farms in the surrounding county. But he knows resistance can arise with any indiscriminate use of antibiotics, and he knows the pressures doctors face to prescribe them.
“I had a patient that I didn’t have a reason to give them an antibiotic and that person got really upset with me,” Ellis said.
Credit Alexandra Kanik / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
It’s hard to say no to a patient. Doctors wrote 47 million prescriptions in 2015 for antibiotics that were medically unnecessary, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “You want to please the person that’s spending the money to come see you, because this is a service-based industry.”
Veterinarians face similar pressure. Many farmers have become accustomed to easy access to antibiotics mixed with animal feed to promote growth and prevent disease among healthy animals. The new FDA rule restricts that use and requires a farmer to get a vet’s prescription for preventative use.
Patrick Butaye, a professor and vet at Ross University on the Caribbean island St. Kitts, teaches a lot of students going into work on farms in the U.S. He doesn’t think antibiotics should be used on healthy animals and he tries to teach his students that. But he knows that with this regulation in place vets will have to make some tough decisions.
“When they go into the field, and the farmer wants this and the farmer wants that. We have to work on consciousness,” Butaye said. “The situation is going from bad to worse and it won’t change until we start using less.”
If doctors are known to give into patients begging for an antibiotic, who’s to say vets won’t do the same with farmers?
Credit Nicole Erwin / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Bacteria that gain resistance to antibiotics in livestock can leave the farm via manure runoff, human contact, or vehicles and equipment.
Vetting the Vets
“Antibiotic resistance should be a concern for everyone,” said Lucky Pittman, director of the Breathitt Veterinary Center. “But I think food animal production is unfairly targeted.”
The center provides diagnostic data to aid veterinarians in making appropriate treatment decisions. Pittman has a unique perspective on the matter. He is a scientist, veterinarian, and a cattle farmer. He said the new regulation means people will no longer be able to “just go buy tetracycline and feed it willy-nilly.”
But he also thinks it will be burdensome to both farmers and vets because of the paperwork it will generate.
Credit Nicole Erwin / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Veterinarian and rancher Lucky Pittman thinks animal production is being unfairly targeted.
Pittman said vets and producers alike will be required to keep all paperwork associated with any antibiotic orders for two years. This implies that a regulator might use the information gathered to perform an audit.
FDA spokesperson Juli Putnam said implementation of the rule will involve “risk-based general surveillance, as well as for-cause inspection assignments.” If an offender is caught, Putnam said the FDA would “collaborate with state regulatory partners and state boards of veterinary medicine” to enforce compliance, which could involve a fine or revocation of a vet’s license.
Some public health advocates are concerned that enforcement may be weak. However, some trends already underway in the industry show a willingness to move away from antibiotic use.
No Antibiotics – Ever
Nancy Butler still works on the Calhoun, Kentucky, farm where she was born. Back then, the family grew tobacco and soybeans. Now she raises chickens, one of the biggest agriculture money makers in this region. For the past 20 years Butler has contracted her two chicken houses to Perdue. Butler describes herself as a small producer, even though each of her houses holds 25,000 chickens per contract. Here’s the remarkable thing about those chickens: not one of them is raised with antibiotics.
Credit Nicole Erwin / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Farmer Nancy Butler raises her thousands of chickens without any antibiotic use.
“So many people are making that choice, to go antibiotic free, because we have a lot of sickness in this country,” Butler said. “I believe it can be remedied if we would just be more vigilant in what we are consuming.”
Perdue started moving away from antibiotics 14 years ago, well before the newest government regulation. Butler said the switch hasn’t been a problem. She can still meet the pressure to produce bigger birds at a cheaper rate.
“These chickens grow really fast,”she said. “It’s the conditions. The right air, the right temperature, the right feed, the right clean water.”
Butler’s farm shows that chickens can be produced efficiently and humanely without antibiotics.
“It has been a long journey,” Perdue senior vice president Eric Christianson said, explaining his company’s “No Antibiotics Ever” approach. “Fundamentally the challenge was: if we can raise healthy chickens and healthy animals without using antibiotics, then why wouldn’t we?”
Perdue growers do things public health advocates say the chicken industry should do in order to prevent disease.
“We have loosened up our flocks so the density is not as tight,” Christianson said. He admits that those practices lower efficiency somewhat. “But the trade-off is that you’re raising healthier chickens. We’re not trying to be a factory farm. We’re trying to do things the right way.”
Credit Nicole Erwin / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
For decades, many healthy chickens were routinely fed antibiotics to prevent disease outbreak and to promote rapid growth.
This is where the industry is divided. Some want to end all use of antibiotics, as public health advocates urge. Others say some medically-important antibiotic use — as the new FDA rule allows — is okay. For instance, Tyson Foods will comply with the regulation, but that’s as far as they and their farmers will go.
Christine Daugherty is Tyson Food’s vice president of sustainable food production. She said that by the end of this year Tyson will no longer use antibiotics used in human medicine.
“We know those are the ones that are the most sensitive and we want to try to eliminate those in our broiler chicken,” Daugherty said.
Too Little?
Public health advocates are urging industry to go further than the new FDA regulation, which they fear will not do enough to prevent the rise of superbugs.
“Our highest priority is to eliminate the routine use of medically important antibiotics on livestock and poultry because of the threat it poses to human health,” said Matt Wellington, a public health advocate with the environmental group PIRG.
Wellington said the new rule’s allowance for preventive use means medicines important for human treatment will still be used on animals that aren’t sick, potentially contributing to resistant strains that can easily escape a farm.
“They can spread from contaminated water off of farms, so from manure, and once they’re out there, they’re out there,” he said.
Credit Alexandra Kanik / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Get more details on these fast food grades from the Chain Reaction II report >>
PIRG and other public health groups are putting pressure on the big buyers such as restaurants and fast food chains.
“We want them to commit to only buy from farms that don’t use this routinely, only for sick animals,” Wellington said.
So when activists from the Natural Resources Defense Council visited various KFC locations last year, they weren’t out for an 8-piece meal. NRDC’s creative campaign used an advocate in a chicken costume covered with giant pills — that’s right: a chicken on drugs.
“We’ve been drugged enough!” the chicken character squawked in a video shot in front of a KFC store.
Credit NRDC
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NRDC
An NRDC activist uses a chicken costume to call attention to KFC’s use of animals raised with antibiotics.
The campaign generated a petition urging KFC to publicly commit to sourcing chicken raised without routine antibiotics.
Other industry leaders have already moved in that direction, including McDonald’s, Subway, and Chick-fil-A. KFC issued a written response: “Our position on antibiotics is currently being reviewed to determine the viability for our suppliers to go beyond the FDA guidelines for antibiotics usage.”
KFC wouldn’t provide the ReSource with any information regarding where they purchase chicken and many food companies protect information about where they buy or sell products.
How much do you know about your favorite restaurants? Use this Chain Reaction survey to ask your favorite restaurants how they source their meat >>
Large fast food chains may also buy meat from more than one company, making it more difficult for a concerned consumer to make an informed choice.
Perdue did identify one partner, Chick-fil-A. “They are very committed to [no antibiotics] and they’ve gone on record saying that,” said Perdue executive Christianson.
Less Rotten in Denmark
The US is not the first country to tackle this problem, and the experience of one other country offers a lesson. Denmark took action 20 years ago with a rule similar to the one the FDA just adopted. Karl Pedersen at the National Veterinary Institute in Copenhagen said the consumption of antibiotics on farms has decreased.
“Maybe the reasons for using these growth promoters were more on tradition, that there was really not the need for it that the industry had thought,” he said.
Credit Nicole Erwin / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
More than half the antibiotics used on livestock are drugs also used to treat people.
And the best news, Pedersen said, is that the prevalence of resistant bacteria has gone down in Denmark since that rule took effect.
Of course farms aren’t the only source of the problem. Over-prescription and improper use of antibiotics by people also contribute to resistant bacteria. So whether we’re doctors or patients, farmers or foodies, we all have a role to play in stopping superbugs.
Those who’ve eaten a pawpaw before often say that the creamy, tropical fruit resembles a mix of a mango and a banana, or a mango and an avocado. They often can’t believe that the fruit is native to Appalachia.
“It’s creamy, but you get that tropical fruit taste,” said Katie Wight, a resident of Athens, Ohio, upon eating her first paw-paw. “It’s not really mango, but mango-papaya – that kind of genre.”
To the rest of the country, the pawpaw is little-known. It’s not commercially grown, in part because it’s so tricky to eat – it’s not ripe until it looks rotten on the outside, and ingesting the seeds or the skin causes some to fall ill. But the Appalachian fruit is showing potential.
Credit Anne Li/ WVPB
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Katie Wight holding first pawpaw at the Ohio Pawpaw Festival
In Charleston, a locally-owned ice cream shop called Ellens Homemade Ice Cream increased its supply of pawpaw ice cream this fall due to increased demand. And every year, thousands flock to Athens, Ohio, to celebrate the Pawpaw Festival, where they can learn about the pawpaw and buy pawpaw art, saplings and raw pawpaws.
“At my place, a Belgian gentleman comes and buys all my seeds,” said one attendee who traveled from his home in the Netherlands for the eighteenth annual Pawpaw Festival this year. He spoke of the growing market for pawpaws in Europe. “Before that I threw them away but he pays me 15 cents a piece. I ask him (why) and he says he (uses it) for curing cancer.”
Credit courtesy Katie Wight
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pawpaw teapot by artist, on display at the Ohio Pawpaw Festival
According to Andy Moore, a writer who recently published a book called Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit, pawpaws have been consumed in the United States for generations. Towns are named after the fruit, and folk songs, like “Way Down Yonder in the Pawpaw Patch,” have been written about them.
Writer Andy Moore in Phyllis, Kentucky at the Lucky Penny General Store. Credit courtesy Andy Moore
In the last few years, pawpaws have started to be cultivated on a very small scale. “People are growing them in orchards now, just like you would any other crop, which will hopefully give people more opportunity to taste it and experience it,” Moore said.
Credit courtesy Katie Wight
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A man dressed as a tree was available to take photos with children at the Ohio Pawpaw Festival
Some pawpaw fans hope that pawpaws can be included in the forest farming or agroforestry movement, which means growing and harvesting crops like ramps or pawpaws in the forest that many West Virginians landowners own. Walt Helmick, the West Virginia Commissioner of Agriculture, says that they haven’t looked into pawpaws as a commercial fruit yet, even though they are unique to the Appalachian region.
“We need to see what we can do with agriculture in the forest more than we have in years gone by,” Helmick said.
The USDA estimates that 6,000 West Virginia farmers suffered damage as a result of the flooding in late June. Farmers lost over $3 million worth of crops,…
The USDA estimates that 6,000 West Virginia farmers suffered damage as a result of the flooding in late June. Farmers lost over $3 million worth of crops, livestock, and fencing. But more than the monetary cost- there’s also an emotional toll that’s affecting some of these farmers. One couple in Greenbrier County says they almost gave up after losing two dozen of their rabbits, and all of their vegetable crops, in the high water.
Caroline Smith is smiling as she holds a tiny charcoal-colored bunny close to her chest.
This bunny was part of a litter that was born just 2 weeks after the flood. It’s mother was one of the few females to survive.
Another survivor rabbit is a plump silver bunny named Joplin who managed to swim, or float, fifty feet from her cage during the flood. Caroline and her husband Michael Buttrill raise these meat rabbits on their small farm, called Bootstraps Farm, located in an area of Greenbrier County that’s heavily logged.
Caroline and Michael admit that farming hasn’t been the most lucrative career path. They invested about $140,000 into the land and equipment. They’re able to scrape by and pay the bills partly because Caroline works two part time jobs off the farm. They’ve put all of their savings and most of their free time into this farm. Then in June, they lost it all to the flood.
“It’s been extremely difficult. These are the most challenging things we’ve ever been through, easily,” said Michael Buttrill.
Credit Roxy Todd/ WVPB
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Farmer Michael Buttrill says rebuilding after the June flood has been the toughest thing he and his wife have dealt with
Michael and Caroline were spending a rare weekend out of town at a family reunion when waters began to rise. Back at home, their neighbor drowned, and their farm was submerged in water.
Michael says their friends called and tried to prepare them for what lay ahead.
“I thought, ok, I’ll prepare myself, I’ll expect the worst and hope for the best as you try to do. I tried to think about the worst and it didn’t even come close. Our valley was the Mississippi river for about three hours, and our lives were in between the banks. “
Michael and Caroline lost thousands of dollars in tools and equipment. Their greenhouse- gone. The topsoil in their garden was washed down the valley.
Credit Roxy Todd/ WVPB
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There hasn’t been much down time in the last month and a half for Caroline and Michael. They’ve been too busy rebuilding fences, and trying to rebuild their farm after June flooding to stop and rest.
But worst of all, Michael says he almost lost his will to farm.
“I expect this to happen again in 50 years. And I kind of feel foolish now. You know, I feel like…why…am I living here? Why am I building this organic farm in a drainpipe? And I don’t want to feel that way.. but you got to face the facts.”
Rick Snuffer is the state executive director of the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) in West Virginia. He’s talked with farmers who, like Michael, have been beaten down by this flood.
His agency has requested $3 million from the federal government to help compensate farmers who lost livestock, crops, fencing in the floods. But that money has not been released yet. Snuffer says they hope to being granting compensation to farmers in about a month.
Out-of-state farmers have also pitched in to help. Many are offering hay and animal feed to support West Virginia farmers. The FSA is working to coordinate those donations to farmers whose animals need food this winter.
A month after the flood, a FSA employee visited Michael and Caroline on Bootstrap farm. The assistance worker helped Michael fill out a claim to help pay for some of their losses. Michael and Caroline also received a $500 check from Farm Aid.
Still, the biggest help came from a go fund me campaign that their friends started online. Michael says it’s giving them more than just money. “There was a time there right after the flood when I thought, I’m moving, I’m giving up. But I said, all these people believe in what we’re doing. I can’t give up. I’m gonna stay.”
So Bootstraps farm is starting to come back. Caroline and Michael have replanted their garden, and as long as they don’t get an early frost, they’re hoping to be able to sell vegetables throughout the autumn harvest. And they’ve learned from this flood. They’ve moved their rabbit hutches higher in the air, and they hope that next time, they’ll be able to protect their bunnies from flood waters.
Farmers who want more information about how to file claims for crop or livestock damages from the June floods can contact their local Farm Service Agency office, or call 304-284-4800.
Tracey Lea Frisch loves her pet chickens, which she keeps in her yard on the side of her house in the Hopecrest neighborhood in Morgantown.
“This is Pudding and Vanilla and Mr. Looster and Lucky and Star and Moonlight and that’s Roadrunner, and that’s Fluffy – the big one,” she said as she fed them grapes. “I have one broody; she’s pretending to have chicks. It’s not going to happen.”
But last fall, thirty of Frisch’s neighbors sued her, alleging that the chickens smelled bad, were noisy, ran wild and brought down property values. Locally, the chickens have become a sort of cultural phenomenon. They are now known as the “Hopecrest Chickens” – some dedicated community members have even created a Facebook page and a Youtube channel on their behalf. Fun aside, the issues brought up in the case represented a larger discussion about growing vegetables and fruits and raising livestock in cities, a practice known as urban agriculture.
More cities in the U.S. are experimenting with urban agriculture, by growing crops on roofs or indoors with the help of LED lighting. Rick Snuffer, the state executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency, said that the USDA’s push for urban agriculture isn’t only fueled by aesthetic and environmental concerns, but by a sustainable one too. As the country’s population grows, there’s less land on which to grow food to feed them.
Credit Jodie Rose
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Morgantown residents Jodie Rose and Jonah Katz dressed up as the Hopecrest Chickens for Halloween in 2015.
“There are six million dollars in food that has to be brought into West Virginia every year that could be grown here in West Virginia,” he said. “It’s imported from other states or countries. And, that’s one of the things the Commissioner of Agriculture is very concerned about – how can we create more of those crops at home?”
Yet urban agriculture is rare in West Virginia, and in Morgantown, a proposed urban agriculture ordinance combined with the Hopecrest Chicken lawsuit has sparked a prolonged debate between neighbors about who can garden what and where. The ordinance first entered the public’s eye in April 2015, and was modeled after an urban agriculture ordinance passed in Charleston.
“It was viewed as an opportunity to put land into productive use that was otherwise sitting vacant, and to encourage home gardeners and others to practice some of their own food production,” said Jim Kotcon, a professor of plant pathology at West Virginia University who also serves on the Morgantown Municipal Green Team. He helped draft the original version of the ordinance. “Given the long-running desire for fresh vegetables and fruits, and the ability to promote local foods, it was viewed as a positive opportunity and many viewed it as such at that time.”
Then, a couple of months before the Hopecrest Chickens lawsuit was served, city council discussed a more restrictive draft of the ordinance. It would put tighter limits on how much livestock residents could own, possibly require permits to build structures like doghouses or trellises and restrict how close those structures could be to the neighbor’s yard. Though some gardeners believe that this ordinance discourages urban agriculture, others appreciate some restrictions.
“They haven’t mowed. They have not weeded at all,” said Kevin Downey, a longtime Morgantown resident, of his neighbor’s front yard. “You can see the watermelons has grown through there so you can’t get a lawn mower in there. The trellis – you can see it’s made out of pipes, metals, plastics, pieces of wood, pieces of anything. I don’t know, personally I don’t think it belongs in the front yard.”
Credit Anne Li / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Axel Anderson, 10, picks raspberries from his mother’s garden in Morgantown.
Kotcon says the issue of who gets to garden what isn’t a petty one at all. On a global scale, being able to self-sustain is important to a country’s national security. On the backyard scale, he thinks gardening is a radical act, and being able to grow one’s own food especially resonates with young people.
“It is the fundamental right of each person to wrest a living from the land, free of any corporate control, working with nature to create their food and perhaps a surplus for sale and profit,” he said. “That is something inherently American.”
It’s unclear when Morgantown’s proposed ordinance will return to the city council agenda. But until then, some residents will continue doing what they love best – growing and eating the food they grow in their own backyards.
On 120 acres in Marion, Kentucky, small-scale farmer Joseph Mast is taking an innovative approach to provide for his growing family of nine.Mast belongs…
On 120 acres in Marion, Kentucky, small-scale farmer Joseph Mast is taking an innovative approach to provide for his growing family of nine.
Mast belongs to an Amish community and is reluctant when it comes to media. He makes a concession, however, when the conversation involves sustainable farming.
“I’ll talk grass any day,” said Mast.
Mast is a grass farmer using something called high intensity grazing, also known as rotational grazing. Herds of animals are left to graze on a small area of pasture, but moved several times a day to new forage, mimicking the way grasslands and grazers naturally interacted long ago.
Rotational grazing conflicts with conventional thinking on livestock and overgrazing. The theory has always been that too many animals on a plot will trample and destroy fertile grounds. But Mast sees evidence that the practice is working and he believes that his small farm is becoming a part of much larger solution for sustainable agriculture.
It’s a lot of work. Intensive grazing requires him to move his 20 cattle up to 6 times a day. But before Mast began this more intensive management style he was working even harder. Much of his energy was spent growing grain to feed his animals and earning additional income for medicine to treat livestock diseases such as foot rot, pink eye and worms. Since he began relying on his farm’s grasses, he says his cattle and land are more resilient to disease and drought.
“That drought we had in 2012, a lot of people were feeding hay, I never ran out of grass,” Mast said.
Credit Alexandra Kanik / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Livestock and Living Soil
The concept seems fairly simple.
After the animals have eaten about half of the grasses in one area, they are moved to another. The grasses provide natural feed for the animals and their manure fertilizes the soil. The “hoof action” of the animals gently tramples the ground, increasing the soil’s ability to hold water.
As the livestock move along the grasses begin to grow again and their root systems do as well, locking into the ground and reducing erosion. The larger plants create a cover, sheltering the micro-organisms that feed off the manure.
Credit Alexandra Kanik / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
What was just dirt becomes healthy organic matter, soil that invites other beneficial organisms. Mast has found that this reduces his dependence on expensive medicine to treat livestock for things such as parasitic worms.
“I don’t worm period,” Mast said. “No wormers, that’s harmful to the dung beetles.”
The dung beetle is just one part of a process in fly and parasite control. Dung beetles dry up manure patties that would otherwise be breeding grounds for fly larvae, which spread disease. Dry up the dung, you dry up the larvae.
“There are different kinds, there’s one called a roller,” Mast explained. He’s become a close observer of the tiniest parts of his farm’s ecosystem.“ They will take the fresh dung and roll up their egg and put it down that hole and that’s for their young to feed off. And if it rots down there, its fertilizer for the grass underneath,” he said.
Outstanding in His Field
When Mast looks out at his farm, he says the land speaks to him. It has always, but he hasn’t always understood.
“That’s the biggest issue, I mean it’s not easy. It’s a learning curve in this,” Mast said. “Years ago I wouldn’t see any of that [grass diversity] or I might not have been looking for them either. But, try to work with nature and she will work with you.”
Introducing other animals to the pasture helps too, because many harmful organisms only affect specific animals.
“If a cow eats a parasite from the sheep that’s the end to that thing, you see it doesn’t pass on through, it can’t multiply,” Mast said.
As Mast explores his farm, doing what he calls a “pasture walk,” he moves from plot to plot pointing out the growth in grass diversity.
Credit Nicole Erwin / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Mast says the variety of grasses on his farm has increased with rotational grazing, benefiting his animals.
“Last week I was out in my field and come up with 15 different species of grasses without even trying to look,” he said. This diversity in grasses allows him to graze longer into the winter without feeding them hay.
Mast’s acreage isn’t limited to grasslands. Walk to the back of the farm and you will find 4 wooded acres, subdivided into 16 paddocks. He has sectioned off the forest to the hickory trees to work feeding his hogs.
“Something the hogs relish is the hickory nuts. They will crunch them down just like candy,” Mast said.
The hickory nuts and the grasses are all free. Like many small-scale farmers, Mast finds it tough to compete with the larger farms. Rotational grazing proponents argue that this approach can help level the playing field.
Credit Nicole Erwin / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Mast’s hogs feed on hickory nuts in the wood lot.
Farm to Classroom
Murray State University Animal Equine Science Chair O.L. Robertson became a “stockman” because he had grown up mostly raising tobacco on his family farm in west Tennessee. Pretty much anything is better than working in a tobacco patch, according to Robertson. That was around 60 years ago. Robertson said he didn’t become a real stockman until the last 15 years when he began paying attention to the interactions between the livestock and the plants they forage upon.
“Sometimes you have to look backward to be able to see forward, and the further back you can go the further forward you can see,” Robertson said in his gentle Kentucky drawl. “How we do things today, those animals aren’t capable of the migrations that they were in those days,” said Robertson.
Robertson is talking about prehistoric herds, like bison, that used to roam freely on prairies before the animals were hunted to near extinction and the land was divided by ownership. He believes it was those interactions among animals, plants, and soil interactions formed the deep, rich soils that we have available to us today. He is doing what he can to mimic those interactions via high intensity grazing with the hope of passing on the information to the next generation.
Robertson has been heavily influenced by another ecosystem grassland pioneer, Allan Savory. The South African born biologist has won wide acclaim for his idea that high intensity grazing is more than just sustainable farming, that it is actually a solution to climate change.
Robertson shows a video of a Savory TED Talk to his students each semester, in which Savory takes the grazing message to a much larger scale–fighting desertification, or the drying up of Earth’s soil. The United Nations says that the world is losing 57 acres of arable land to desertification every minute.
Savory believes that by replenishing the plant life with high intensity grazing, we are also able to trap carbon dioxide in the grassland roots, counteracting the climate-harming methane production associated with herds of livestock. In essence, using cows to combat climate change.
Pastures for Profit
All of this raises a question: If this simple grazing practice is so beneficial at so many levels, why aren’t more people implementing the system?
“Rotational grazing is not something that grabs the attention of university researchers,” Robertson answered. He said part of the reason that there is not yet a robust body of science behind the idea is because academic study often follows available funding. “There is not a company that is really pushing this that is willing to put research dollars into a university to obtain the data,” he said.
Rotational grazing doesn’t require herbicides and pesticides that can be offered by a company looking for product support. That’s because the only thing needed to structure a rotational grazing pattern is some good polywire.
“We can take a 100 acres and split it up into 10 paddocks and we may even need to subdivide those paddocks, but we do that with one single strand of polywire,” Robertson said.
Farmers have enough to worry about competing in an already saturated market, explains Robertson, and eliminating costs by relying on resources that are readily available just makes sense.
“The easiest dollar you will ever make is the one you don’t spend,” said Robertson.
High intensity grazing isn’t high in spending. While it is viewed as labor intensive, Robertson and Mast say it’s really intensive management, respecting the animals and the earth by working smarter, not harder. It might even be saving the planet.
“Man has thought he was so smart, and that we don’t need all this, but actually we hurt ourselves if we try to work against nature,” Mast said.
