A farmers’ perspective on raising, slaughtering and eating meat

Is it possible for animals and people to live together sustainably?
Is it possible for them not to?

By Shannon Hayes

Shannon Hayes is the author of Radical Homemakers, The Grassfed Gourmet and The Farmer and the Grill. She is the host of grassfedcooking.com and radicalhomemakers.com.  Hayes works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm in Upstate New York.

Last month I released a new book, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture. The result of three years of obsessive research, the book is something of a manifesto for a movement of Americans who believe that a household can survive – thrive, in fact – on a single income or less; they can live happily and equitably, influence social and ecological change, and minimize their reliance on a consumer culture by reviving their domestic skills and redefining what constitutes “having enough.”  The people profiled in the book were single and married; with children and without; rural, urban and suburban; vegetarians and omnivores.

While the book has received a delightfully warm reception, that last description – omnivore – has raised the eyebrows of a few folks, particularly when they consider my personal and professional background. It involves a lot of meat.  My family raises and processes our livestock. I have written two books about cooking sustainable meats.  I maintain grassfedcooking.com to answer people’s questions about working with local livestock farms and purveyors of local meats.   I’ve achieved some regional notoriety, if not for my writing, then for my artisanal sausages.  Every Saturday from Mid-May through Mid-October, I can be found at a farmers’ market in the Catskill Mountains, standing beside my husband, selling my family’s meats.

Not surprising, then, that since the book’s release, a common question I have been asked regarding sustainable living is, to paraphrase:  I agree with your premise that Radical Homemaking is possible and important.  But, really, do you honestly think animals and people can live together sustainably?

Anyone who has ever leaned their cheek against the side of a dairy cow, breathing in her sweet scent while squeezing her milk into a pail; who has watched a crowd of spring lambs prance across pasture, punctuating their dance with spontaneous four-footed leaps; who has witnessed the amazing fertility of a manure-nourished garden, who has wiped grease off her chin after secretly feasting on cracklings before presenting a fresh roasted leg of pork to the family at Easter dinner; who has reached under a hen and found a warm fresh egg after delivering a bowl of kitchen scraps to the flock — might ask a different question:  Is there any sustainable way that humans and animals could not live together?

Meat as a Community Affair
Historically, in my community, humans and livestock have been nearly inseparable.  West Fulton, NY is a series of frosty hollows surrounded by forested hills and rocky, steep pasture lands.  When agricultural industrialization swept through the country, our small fields and pitched slopes made machine cultivation not only problematic, but treacherous.  A previous owner of our own farm was killed by a tractor rollover decades ago – a not uncommon death for earlier generations around here.  But even when local farms were deemed “non-viable” decades ago by agricultural officials who saw the ground couldn’t be adapted to big technology (the eleven months of frost didn’t help), many of them stayed in production.  And although most incomes were well below the poverty line, people in West Fulton could feed themselves by maintaining hand-cultivated vegetable patches and small herds of livestock.  Cattle, sheep, chickens, goats and pigs were well adapted to our landscape and trying climate.  And they could produce food on fields that never saw a plow.

In an era that faces fossil fuel shortages, climate change concerns, swelling population, food security problems and economic hardships, the symbiosis between animals and humans becomes even more important to understand.

Ruminants and the Environment
The consumption of meat has come under ecological scrutiny on a variety of fronts, from resource efficiency to water pollution to global warming.  Livestock, particularly ruminant animals, like cattle and sheep, play a critical role in all of these current global problems.  Managed improperly, as we’ve seen, they are a big part of the problem; but stewarded properly, they can be a big part of the solution.

For at least three decades, the use of these animals as a food source has been criticized by some as a ruinous misuse of cropland, because ruminants are not efficient animals to raise on grain. In animal science, the calculated ratio of the amount of grain an animal requires to gain a pound of weight is called the conversion factor.  When grain is fed to fish, the conversion ratio is about 1.25 to 1; for every 1 ¼ pounds of grain product fed to a fish, there is a pound of weight gain.  The conversion ratio for chicken is 2 pounds of feed per pound of gain on the bird.  Pork requires 4 pounds per pound of gain.  And when ruminants enter the equation, it skyrockets:  estimates may vary, but generally lambs require 8 pounds of feed for a pound of weight gain, and beef requires 9 pounds of feed per pound of gain.

When assessed by this principle alone, red meat does presenta serious ecological problem.  Grain production is extremely taxing on the environment, particularly when considering use of the chemical fertilizers and pesticides, soil degradation, nitrous oxide emissions, and the fossil fuel-intensive mechanized farming and transport.  In this paradigm, a lot more people could be nourished with that grain if it weren’t being dumped into livestock first.

But there is a problem with relying solely on this equation to evaluate the efficacy of meat production:  ruminants are not designed to eat grain. By the nature of their digestive systems, sheep and cattle thrive best on lands suited to grow only pasture.  They can even convert crop waste, such as corn stalks, into food.  Industrialized agriculture relies on grain-feeding, not because the animals require it (in fact, it is harmful to their health), but only because it makes cattle gain weight uniformly faster. In short, raised on properly managed pastures, ruminants don’t compete with humans for grain-producing acreage, and in turn, they supply us with bountiful nutrients, and leave the earth better for having walked upon it.  Out on intensively-managed pasture, they have been shown to restore vegetative cover, increase biodiversity, and to improve soil fertility, thereby making our fields more resistant to both drought and flood.  Seen from this viewpoint, grassfed ruminants are arguably the most efficient way to convert sunlight and water to quality protein.

Interestingly, one of the latest concerns about ruminant livestock production has been methane emissions.  Enteric fermentation, the fermentation of forage in the rumen, is a natural part of the digestion process for ruminant animals.  Because their diet is naturally high in roughage, grassfed animals will belch more than their factory-farmed counterparts (the process is unnaturally suppressed in factory farming due to a coating of slime that grain-feeding causes in the rumen).  This belching has generated some negative publicity for ruminants, which is unfortunate (and incredible!), since they and their ancestors have been roaming the earth for tens of thousands of years, long before there was a methane problem.  Undoubtedly, there are other sources of methane that are more serious culprits to contend with: oil, coal and gas consumption and landfills being some of the more salient.  On her website eatwild.com, Jo Robinson reports on research that was conducted by Dr. Rita Schenck at the Institute for Environmental Research and Education which shows that, when we account for the carbon sequestration resulting from grazing animals (where well-managed pastures pull excess carbon from the atmosphere), even with increased enteric fermentation, there is still a net reduction in greenhouse gases. Interestingly, researchers also now suspect that the great spike in atmospheric methane concentrations in 2007 is a result of thawing permafrost in the artic.  These scientists speculate that one way to slow the melting of permafrost is to re-introduce herds of herbivorous animals to the region.  “Snow is like a down jacket that keeps the ground warm,” says University of Alaska-Fairbanks researcher Katey Walter, in an interview with Scientific American, “As the activity of animals compresses the snow or removes it through their foraging, the cold winter temperatures can penetrate deeper into the ground and keep the permafrost frozen”.

Pigs and Chickens: Omnivores and the Sustainable Household
While they don’t forage the same way as ruminants, omnivorous animals, like pigs and chickens, can also play a part in regaining global sustainability.  Raised in concentrated factory farm settings, these animals require large amounts of grain to be processed and trucked in, that could be more efficiently fed directly to people.  Kept in these horrific densities, their accumulated wastes are also a potent source of pollution. But dispersed on small farms and backyard or urban farm settings, these animals have a greater purpose.  Their grain requirements are minimized because they forage and recycle human food waste and turn it into more food.  The backyard pig is a common phenomenon in rural communities all over the world.  Allowed controlled foraging, the pig will eat mast like fallen nuts and acorns, dropped apples, insects, tuberous weedy plants and household food scraps.  In exchange, they yield meat, skin for cracklings, bones for stocks, and lard for cooking and soap making.  Chickens perform similarly, if on a smaller scale.  The backyard hen magically converts household food scraps into eggs.  Later, when her egg-laying begins to fail, she adds sustenance to the soup pot.  Both animals produce nutrient-rich manure, which then invigorate household gardens, the surplus of which (along with some protein) then goes back into the livestock.  These animals help us to round out our household and local ecosystems, enabling us to constantly regenerate nutrition on a local scale without having to draw excessively on fossil fuels to provide commodity grain.

The Union of Life and Death
While I hope the above points will reassure the human omnivore eager for a pasture-raised pork chop or some free-range eggs and hash, I suspect they might ring hollow to those who are averse to the killing of animals for meat – period.

Any vegetarian who has ever challenged face to face the morality of a livestock farmer (especially one in the sustainability movement) can probably report receiving a touchy and defensive retort. This is because – contradictory as it might seem – we choose this because we like animals – not because we enjoy killing them or see slaughter as a means to a profitable end.

Sadly, those of us who make our lives farming have become a national cultural anomaly.  From my own view from my family’s land, it seems that mainstream American Culture harbors incongruous ideas about life and death.  The culture has a quirky tendency toward adulation of life, and abhorrence of death.  When daily life is directly tied to the ebbs and flows of nature, as they are in agriculture, one cannot help but observe that life and death are forever in service to one another.  We cannot have one without the other.  We nurture the newborn livestock, and we process the ones that are ready for market.  We harvest one crop, we plant seeds for another.

All beings, whether human or other-than-human, have an inherent right to a natural existence in the world, and each has a way to contribute to the welfare of the greater whole.  Inevitably, a time will come when every life must give way to sustain balance on the earth. On the farm, there is an understanding that nothing we eat to sustain ourselves comes without the sacrifice from another living being, be it animal, plant or microorganism.  Thus, we take all food, whether it is a hamburger, a pork chop, a carrot, a spoonful of yogurt or a slice of an apple, in moderation and gratitude.  Nothing is eaten without an understanding of the sacred life and spirit that created the nourishment, and the ecosystem that was required to sustain it.

I understand that there are many vegetarians out there who will disagree with me.  Our divergences are a necessary, important tension.  Conscientious eaters long before the locavore movement, vegetarians can be thanked for helping draw attention to the ecological havoc and travesties to animal welfare that have come to define our conventional livestock production system. Their criticisms and questions have also assisted small family farms, like my own, to devise ways to improve our practices and to reflect deeply upon the nature of our work. When it comes to the livelihood professed in Radical Homemakers, the lessons taught by vegetarians have entered my own kitchen.  Meat will always be a part of my life, but I believe that it should not be taken in the extreme and wasteful way our culture has defined as acceptable.  We cannot produce such tremendous volumes of meat sustainably, and wasteful and nonchalant consumer habits fail to honor the sacrifice of the animals’ lives.

I understand that no amount of explanation of the hows and whys of grassfed livestock production will convince the person who is opposed to killing animals that eating meat is okay.  Unless they or someone they love manifests a nutritional need that can only be met by animal proteins, they may never cross that philosophical divide.  Life on my family’s farm and in my own household is informed by and is reflective of the concerns of such folks; I remain thankful that those perspectives and questions continue to come forward.  But to answer the question: Can animals and humans sustainably live together? My personal vote is “yes.”

Shannon Hayes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.