At What Price a Cucumber?

I'd like to ruminate for a bit on sustainable agricultural practices, specifically; the relative advantages and disadvantages of locally raised, organic, grass-fed beef as compared with commercially produced grain-fed. I'm not lobbying for one or the other practice but simply trying to lay out the relative merits of both and their impact on the environment, society, and the economy. I also want to talk about cucumbers.

Sustainability

First of all what do we mean by sustainability? The simplest definition I found was on a website called, “Sustainable Table” and it reads:

“Sustainable agriculture is a way of raising food that is healthy for consumers… does not harm the environment, is humane for workers, respects animals, provides a fair wage to the farmer, and supports and enhances rural communities.”

When a process is sustainable, it can be maintained indefinitely. Sustainable food production can be maintained indefinitely because sustainable farmers do not take more resources to produce food than they give back.

Remember the circle of life? Grass grows, cow eats grass, cow poops on grass; new grass grows…cow eats new grass and so on. That’s a sustainable system. Now in a small rural community a family raises a cow on a small but adequate parcel of land. The family kills the cow, eats the cow, poops on the grass and it is still a sustainable process. The problem arises because we urbanized Americans can’t stop at just one cow. We are so infatuated with the flavor of beef that we are willing to change the natural balance of things just to be able to eat more cow than is …sustainable. We do this in part by eliminating competition from insects, fungus, and plant diseases that attack the plants that cattle graze on by dousing them with petroleum based chemicals- a wholly “in-organic” process. 

Organic

So what do we mean by the term organic?

“Organic farming is the form of agriculture that relies on crop rotation, green manure, compost, biological pest control, and mechanical cultivation to maintain soil productivity and control pests, excluding or strictly limiting the use of synthetic fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, plant growth regulators, livestock feed additives, and genetically modified organisms.” - Directorate General for Agriculture and Rural Development of the European Commission

Simply put: Organic agriculture is farming without chemicals or, farming as it had been from the dawn of civilization until the 20th century. There is nothing new about organic agriculture; my great, great, great, grandfather was probably an organic farmer.

Grass fed vs. feed-lot Beef

Now that we have a working definition of sustainable agriculture (don’t take out more than you put in) and we know that organic farming is just natural farming let’s get back to the subject at hand: the sacred cow.

There are two ways of bringing a head of cattle to slaughter weight: first you can let it wander around the pasture eating grass for four or five years, take it down to the local butcher, have him slaughter it and cut it into steaks for you, and then figure out how you’re going to cook all the different cuts of meat to get the most out of your cow. This is the old fashioned way- the organic way, the sustainable way.

But if you’re like most people you go down to Pick-N-Save, grab a lb of ground beef or a sirloin steak, go home and fire it up, put a glass under the wine box, draw some off, sit down with a friend and enjoy. This is the modern way, the immediately gratifying way, the conventional way.

Most of us don’t have to think about the fact that the cow was force-fed a product it was never designed to eat (corn and soybeans) injected with antibiotics to keep it from getting diseases brought about by close confinement with hundreds of other cattle, and growth hormones to help bring it quickly to slaughter weight within a year and a half of birth (one third of the time it takes to raise grass-fed cattle). We don’t usually notice that the animal was treated inhumanely since most of us have never looked at a cow up close, let alone raised one from calf to adult. In fact, that shrink wrapped lb of chuck doesn’t look much like a cow anyway.

Let me stress that I’m not an animal rights activist- I’m simply saying that many of us would approach our dinner differently if we had to kill it ourselves. There is a symbiotic relationship between humans and the animals that feed us. It is a natural, organic relationship- it does not have to be a cruel or unusual one.

In a natural, sustainable scenario the costs of producing a lb of beef would prevent most people from developing such a dependence on cattle for food. However, modern agricultural practices combined with American prosperity have made beef cheap and plentiful- the costs are hidden ones and mostly environmental.

Below are listed some of the disadvantages of both locally raised, organic grass-fed beef and commercially produced grain-fed beef.

Locally raised, organic grass-fed:

• cost- it takes four to five years for a grass fed steer to reach slaughter weight making it 20-100 % higher in price than grain fed

• land- grass fed cattle require much more land to graze for longer time

• soil erosion- more land requires more de-forestation to sustain large herds of cattle for longer time

• displacement of wildlife- also a by-product of extended land usage and longer production time

• pollution- grass fed cattle produce triple the amount of methane as grain fed

• taste- inconsistent, some describe it as gamey, bitter, and sour- certainly less appealing than grain fed

Commercially produced grain fed:

• saturated fat- grain fed beef is higher in cholesterol causing (delicious) fat than grass-fed

• inhumane- feed-lot cattle are held in close confinement, there is a painful adjustment to feed, and cattle are prone to sickness

• waste- concentration of waste from feed lots can be a biohazard to local air and water quality

• fossil fuel consumption- growing feed, producing petro-chemicals, and transporting livestock to slaughterhouses contribute to 284 gallons of oil being consumed per head of cattle (According to David Pimentel, Professor of Ecology and Agriculture, Cornell University.)

• human diseases- the parasitic bacteria E. coli is a phenomenon of the modern feed-lot method of cattle production

Concerning the prevalence of E. coli in feedlot cattle Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma writes:

"Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids - and go on to kill us. By acidifying a cow's gut with corn, we have broken down one of our food chain's barriers to infections."

Local vs. Commercial

Leaving the debate over grass-fed vs. grain-fed beef aside let’s look for a moment at the issue of locally produced agriculture vs. industrial. When you’re talking about the merits of sustainability (not taking out more than you put in) no one does it better than your local, organic farmer.

It never ceases to amaze me that in July and August I can have more cucumbers than I know what to do with in my back yard and yet when I look at the boxes of cucumbers arriving at the local Pick-n-Save grocery chain they say, Product of California, USA. I recently  disovered  a term for this phenomenon, and it is: “transaction costs”. Again, Michael Pollan:

“Big supermarkets want to do business only with big farmers growing lots of the same thing, not because big monoculture farms are any more efficient (they aren't) but because it's easier to buy all your carrots from a single megafarm than to contract with hundreds of smaller growers. The "transaction costs" are lower, even when the price and the quality are the same.”

And so we ship our cucumbers across the country at exorbitant costs to the environment just to make a lousy salad. The sheer volume of mega farms cucumbers also have the effect of driving the price so low that it becomes economically infeasible for the small scale, local farmer to sell his cucumbers to Pick-N-Save. Thus we have a created an economic climate in which the small family owned farm is disappearing in part because the "transaction costs" associated with distribution to 'mega-grocery' are prohibitive.

Victor Davis Hanson, professor of classics at Stanford University, war historian and farmer, author of The Land Was Everything put it this way:

“We American agrarians of the latter twentieth century fought a war for land we did not even know we were in. Yet apparently we have lost it nonetheless. In the next century… [democracy and capitalism]…will ensure to the millions of the world material prosperity, entertainment, and leisure undreamed of by any generation in the planet’s history […] Family farming, ancient and deemed inefficient, is gone.”

So it seems that although modern agriculture has given the world a cheap and plentiful supply of nutritious, if sometimes tasteless, food, the real question is for how long and at what price? Perhaps sooner than later the cost of fuel to ship cucumbers across the world in February will become prohibitive- and I’m just speaking of the monetary and not the environmental cost. The relevant question may soon become, ‘How many gallons of gasoline does it take to get a cucumber from Fresno to Milwaukee?’

Conclusion

Organic, sustainable agricultural practices were the norm for thousands of years of human history. Civilization itself probably owes its existence to the agrarian community; farmers who came together to fight against the elements, build barns, and fend off enemies who would attack their crops. With the technological advances of the twentieth century have come incredible means of feeding people around the world. But there is a trade off in the net effects on the environment. The age old Platonic dilemma remains, 'Just because we can do something, doesn’t necessarily mean we should.'