Down on the Biodynamic Farm

Posted by Katie Elzer-Peters
July 3rd, 2009
Filed in Savory and Sage Tidbits
Tags: organic gardening, organic pest control

Baby Cows in “Daycare”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve come face to face with almost every facet of gardening/eating/organic/conventional agriculture.  There was the trip to Tryon, NC for the BBQ and Bluegrass festival.  That was an awesome meat-eating fest if I’ve ever seen one!  We sampled lots of “chop,” which is BBQ code for “chopped pork straight out of the hog that is still roasting on the grill.”  I bought a shirt that also entered me into a raffle for a “smoked butt.”  Yep, you did read that correctly.

Shortly after visiting the friendly folks in Tryon, I headed off to the great Midwest, to visit my parents in Indianapolis.  Right off the plane, my Mom whisked me away to a dairy lovers paradise:  Traders Point Creamery. This is not, however, your run of the mill dairy farm.  No sirree!  It is a post-organic, uber environmentally friendly operation-a biodynamic farm that not only raises dairy cows and their calves from birth to milking to beef, but also produces award-winning yogurt, cheeses, milk, and grass-fed, grass-finished beef.  They also have true free-range chickens, and eggs, for purchase at their shop.  I’m lucky enough to be able to buy their yogurt in my local Fresh Market in Wilmington, NC, a fact which produces its own ethical dilemmas.  But, there’s nothing wrong with partaking of their sumptuous products when en-situ, which is what my Mom, her recipe group and I did in late June.

The Cows

The True Circle of Life on Display

While driving to Michigan to visit a client, I started listening to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollen. (Separate book review coming soon.)  I feel lucky to have visited Traders Point and taken the tour, because I was fully able to visualize the biodynamic farm, Polyface Farm, he visits during the middle section of the book.  Traders Point is a post-organic, post-industrial farm that is, in many ways, very similar to Polyface.  Hence the chickens, pastures and cows all living and thriving together.  Here’s the way it works, in a snapshot:

• The pastures are carefully cultivated with a mix of native grasses and legumes (clover etc.).
• The cows graze the pastures and leave their cow manure there for the chickens.
• 

  A good look at the chicken house and the pasture grass

  The chicken-mobile is on wheels, and can be wheeled around to the various pastures so that the chickens can eat the insects in the cow doo (and, according to the lady giving the tour, chickens are only too happy to do this.), while still having a safe place to roost at night.

• The chickens leave their doo, which is high in nitrates, a natural fertilizer for the pasture.
• The cows are milked once or twice a day, and their doo from the area where they wait to be milked is washed into the manure pond
• Where the manure is broken down by bacteria into nutrients that plants can take in.
• The water is used to irrigate and fertilize the pastures.
• Chicken eggs are gathered.  The cows are kept at the farm for their natural life span, except for steers, which are butchered after about two and a half years of eating a 100% pasture grass diet.
• No anti-biotics or growth hormones are used or needed.  Because they rotate the grazing, feed the cows according to their natural diet, and let chickens pick through the cow doo, gobbling up what could be harmful organisms for the cows, disease is almost non-existent.

It’s Good to Eat Beef

Undoubtedly, one of our favorite parts of the tour was learning about the nutritional content of meat, eggs and dairy products from  grass-fed, grass-finished animals.  Cows are naturally ruminants, which means they have a highly adapted stomach that perfectly digests grass.  Chickens are healthiest on a diet of grasses and insects.

Modern CAFOs (confinement farms) feed cows and chickens grain-based diets, for which they are completely un-adapted, and basically makes them sick.  Another ridiculous part of the CAFO system is that meat, dairy and eggs produced this way is not healthy for us.  These products are high in Omega-6 fatty acids that lead to heart disease, and low in Omega-3s.  Grass fed beef and dairy products have a normal ratio of the Omega-6 and Omega-3 fatty acids, and are good for you.  So, it isn’t that eating beef is so bad, it just depends on what the cow ate.  Ditto with dairy.  The fats in grass-fed dairy products have been studied, and the general conclusion is that they are good for you.  (I’m not a dietician, so you might want to read more about that elsewhere.)

Inside the Milking Parlor

While at Traders Point, we bought some packages of their ground beef from their grass-fed cows, and cooked up some DELICIOUS burgers.  I think I might have even converted my parents.  In addition to being better for you, grass fed beef just tastes better.  Up until the factories producing materials for bombs switched over to using the nitrogen to produce fertilizer, cattle and chickens, and other grass-eating animals only ate grass, because corn wasn’t cheaper.  And when did our health start to drastically decline due to our “western” diets? During the 1950s-post World War II “boom.”

Where There’s Smoke, There’s Probably Fire

The most remarkable thing about visiting this farm, aside from drinking a BUNCH of their chocolate milk, which tastes like melted chocolate ice cream, was observing that the farm did not smell bad.  If you’ve grown up in an area with lots of farms, you know what I’m talking about.  If you’ve taken a trip through the midwest, past CAFOs with chickens, cows, or hogs, you’ve gotten a whiff.  The whiff of too much waste, and not enough micro-organisms breaking it down, and nowhere for it to go.  Basically, my point is, where there’s smoke there’s fire.  The stink of a CAFO is the smell of agriculture gone amok.

Next time:  more about the Omnivore’s Dilemma and what all of this means to us.  In the mean time, if you have the chance to eat some of the Traders Point Creamery dairy products, seize the opportunity and eat!