As with many things, the answer to the question in the title largely depends on how you look at things. I’m a man raised up in fairly small town USA, and that upbringing treated me well. Stands to reason that I would look at that lifestyle as a net positive and would desire something similar for my own children. But for those people raised up in the big city, they might completely disagree with me. They have that right (though, I must admit, having “the right” doesn’t mean they “are right”).

*Our youngest son affectionately petting our Kune boar, Boris.*

Each of us brings into adulthood, partly from our inbuilt nature and partly from the nurturing side of our upbringing, a certain world view which dictates what we are sympathetic toward, what we dislike, our future vision, our desires, our biases, etc. In this vein we will discuss the topic at hand: is farming messy?

If you asked me that question even just 10 years ago I likely would have answered with a resounding “yes”, though that would not have meant that I thought the enterprise fruitless or undesirable. Farmers get dirty. Caked in hay chaff on baling days, coated in dust on plowing and tillage days, knee deep in manure on mucking days… all this just comes with the territory. The job needs done because, well, quite frankly I’ve always enjoyed good food, and that cannot be afforded me unless the farmer do his dirty job willingly. There are many jobs cut from this cloth. In fact, I seem to remember a television series from a decade ago or so that explored many of them.

Today, however, my answer would absolutely NOT be the same. I do not think farming is messy. Farming is balance. Always was and always will be, if executed properly. Dust is not inherently bad. Manure-covered boots, hay chaff in your nostrils, sweat and grime caked on clothing and skin after a long days work is not dirt. It’s balance, for we do not have anything comfortable, tasty, convenient, or affordable if, on the “dark side of the moon”, there is not some icky task or dirty job we’d rather not think about. Cars drive down the road reliably because mechanics are willing to get covered in grease. Children become adults because there was a parent or caretaker somewhere willing to get spit up on, change diapers, etc. And we have good wholesome foods to eat because a farmer somewhere was willing to deal with what farming, either grain or livestock, requires

In my opinion, something is only messy if it is tainted by corruption, prominent disease, and inhumane practices. Most instances polluted by these human errors and malpractices could be avoided by wise council and no shortage of patience. Now we are getting to my own distinction between messiness and balance. Enter the vertically-integrated factory farming industry.

Chicken house operations which supply the bulk of our food supplies eggs and poultry products are messy. Industrial dairies which supply milk to all the shelves of the major supermarket chains are messy. Beef producers with stringent guidelines for their partner ranches requiring antibiotics, hormone therapy, and moonscape environments for cows fed nothing but grain are messy. And the government bureaucracy which dictates the legality of these practices vs. other options are messy.

Did you know that some studies have shown that as much as 10% carcass weight of your average store-bought chicken product consists of a “fecal sludge” that their product absorbs during processing in FDA-regulated facilities? Did you know that most eggs come from large-scale chicken houses where, if one bird gets ill with the H5N1 bird flu, the ENTIRE FLOCK, upwards of hundreds of thousands to millions of laying hens, must be exterminated per FDA regulations? Did you know that most of the milk you buy from the grocery stores is sucked out of holstein cows by machines that quite literally suck them dry in barns and small pens where they don’t even have access to sunlight? Did you know that pork producers developed the slogan of “the other white meat” because they needed a way to convince consumers that their extremely genetically modified, inhumanely raised excuses for pigs were the same pork they were used to even though its dull grey color when cooked is a far cry from the deep, rich, red color of pasture raised, ethically grown heritage breed counterpart? Did you know that large poultry houses are so bad at managing the fecal waste and offal (butchering bi-product), that they have to dig containment ponds outside their facility to store the sludge until it can be hauled away in tractor trailers to who-knows-where for “processing”?

Did you know that orange juice was developed because, at the time, the California Fruit Growers Exchange was producing more oranges than were being consumed. An advertiser by the name of Albert Lasker created a campaign centered around “Drink an Orange” to promote the use of the excess oranges in the form of cheap, easily consumed orange juice. He also changed the name of the company to, wait for it, Sunkist. Today, what is a ubiquitous breakfast drink that most people think is full of health benefits, was spawned from a profit-hungry marketing wiz to help a struggling orange producer line its pocket books. They even went as far as to suggest, all baseless claims, that orange juice would increase libido and was the ONLY cure for a disease called “acidosis” which doctors at the time thought just about everyone was at risk of suffering from. In reality, the disease was largely made up, but that’s a surefire way to sell a boatload of oranges when your company is flat out growing way too many of them. The aforementioned examples are what I vehemently consider to be messy farming.

What was once thought of as “Organic” farming, which has now largely been coopted by bureaucratic regulating mechanisms to mean something it absolutely is not, is better characterized today as “Regenerative” farming. I ascribe to great value to the adjective and subscribe wholeheartedly to this method of farming. You see, I don’t ever want to plant row crop, or even a simple garden, in such a way that I have to purchase bagged fertilizer from a feed or farm store in order to put back enough nutrients into that same soil to effectively grow crops again the following season. Can you imagine living in a home where, just by living there, you had to replace several 2x4’s in the walls every year to keep the house standing?

Industrial fertilizers, mechanized agribusiness, profit-centered short-term farming practices like mono-crop grain agriculture, feed lot beef production, chicken house poultry raising, and the like, are to blame for a lot of the ailments of our society and our environment if you ask me. Much of the pollution we point out today in water supply doesn’t come from plastics or chemical plants, but rather from agribusiness malpractice and unsuitable waste management and containment. Much of the erosion from field runoff and improper drainage is due to a complete disregard for true soil health and sustainability on the part of large row crop producers, especially in corn production which is largely subsidized by the government in order to produce the now known-toxin called “high fructose corn syrup”. Much of the health issues and scares in recent decades could largely be avoided if FDA regulation wasn’t so hairbrained when it comes to things like bird flu, mad cow, swine flu, E. coli, and the like. Can you imagine an entire city of people being exterminated because one person got COVID? No, that’s ridiculous. We all know that many, if not most of the people in that city would either be survivors of the disease if not already immune all together. Yet that’s exactly what’s being done to chicken flocks in the vertically-integrated poultry operations when just one bird comes down with H5N1.

Regenerative agriculture, regenerative farming, has all the potential in the world to replace the existing infrastructure that is our global food supply if we but have the gall to do it as a grass-roots initiative and put the bureaucrats in their place, inch by inch taking up ground and eating up marketshare. The hunger for locally produced food supply has not been greater in the modern era. And so, as one great politician once said, “we must do what we must” to “unburden ourselves from what has been.”

Soil erosion is a huge concern of mine. I’ve lived, and have family that still do live, in traditional row crop farm land plagued in recent years by unprecedented flooding. The news media and climate activists would have you believe that it is because the end is nigh and climate catastrophe is but a few short years away. But what I know now about soil health will blow your mind. Organic matter, anything that was alive and is now in decay or has decayed, is integral to the function of the land on which we grow and raise our food, both plant and animal. Organic matter can be put back into the soil by many different means, most commonly as compost spread across the land, crimping cover crops to act as a mulch for later grain growth, running animals who will deposit their fecal matter and other excrement onto the soil, and by avoiding chemical remedies for weeds and other things. Needless to say, corn and soybean producers are not putting any significant amount of organic matter back into the soil at all, which is why they need to buy lime and other fertilizers, spray untold amounts of chemicals like glyphosate (known to be toxic), and ultimately leave the soil progressively worse than they found it year after year.

Increasing the amount of organic matter by 1% in the soil increases that soils ability to hold water tremendously. Your average soil will hold an additional 3,400 gallons of water per foot of soil depth per acre with that amount of organic matter increase. As the seasons ebb and flow and water evaporates or runs down into deeper into the earth, that means your soil will retain that much extra water in any given rainfall event. That means that 3,400 gallons of water will NOT end up as runoff, eroding away soil and depositing silt in rivers, lakes, and streams causing a whole host of problems of their own. To put that into perspective, 3,400 gallons of water per foot of soil per acre is equivalent to about 1/9th an inch of rainfall.

I know a farm whose organic matter in the 1980’s was at about 1%. Today, that soil rests between 7 and 8%. That’s an equivalent of more than 23,000 gallons of water his soil can absorb rather than allow to runoff, or in simpler terms, his ground can absorb nearly an inch of rain at any given time. Runoff isn’t all bad. It has its place. But there is no environment where, 200 years ago with a much higher organic matter, the soil could absorb something like that 23,000 gallons of water and today is forced to let run off where erosion and all sorts of other ecological detriments and risks are not present. In our area, whole towns have flooded, ruining homes and businesses and causing millions of dollars in damage, and all the city councilmen and so-called “experts” can come up with is to dredge the river bottom to remove the silt. I’m sorry pal, you’re just delaying the inevitability that another catastrophic rain event will cause the same amount of damage if not more to some date in the future where hopefully you won’t be in a position of responsibility. Quite frankly all of these instances are because of the negligence and profit-hungry row crop farmers who don’t want to change their ways and adopt more sustainable regenerative practices.

Let’s face it, animals produce waste. Even Fido leaves little bombs in your back yard when you let him out. A lot of folks pick it up with a plastic bag and throw it in the trash where it will rot away in a landfill somewhere, allowing all the microorganisms within it to die and leach their nutrients out into the ether. If your back yard is prone to puddle up, may you should rethink that method of his waste disposal and let the bugs and earth worms and other microscopic critters do what God intended for them to do: turn it into valuable rich soil.

The fecal matter excreted by our pigs as we rotate them from paddock to paddock remains on the ground for rot and decay to come for them. That’s adding organic matter back to the soil. We want that to happen, as building organic matter is a long slow trudge up hill to see results over the course of decades. But someone has to do it. We intentionally move the paddocks and allow at least 45 days between moving the pigs back onto that area again to give the microorganisms time to do their necessary work of breakdown and transformation. In fact, a good sign of healthy “living” soil is the amount of earth worms present. The more organic matter we leave behind, the better our soil will become. We also run our broilers in chicken tractors on pasture, moving them twice daily to spread their nitrogen-rich manure evenly across the landscape.

In addition, the deep litter method in our chicken coop allows the composting to happen inside a contained, relatively controlled environment. By the time we clean our the chicken coop once a year or so, a good portion of the composting has already taken place. This material we pile up in a heap and let the chemical reaction further break down the material until, after a couple months, we have some of the best top soil ready for the garden that you’ve ever seen. One other benefit we have where we live, nestled among the trees, is an abundance of leaves in the fall. I won’t go into the details at the moment but there is actually a science to how much manure (nitrogen) and the amount of wood chips (carbon) required for optimized composting. Leaves are just about right on the money in terms of that ratio for break down that we simply pile them up each fall in November and leave them there all winter. By June those leaves are some of the best soil you could ever ask for. We’ve even filled raised garden beds with nothing but this broken down leaf mixture and planted garlic there directly. Germination happened immediately.

All this to say that regenerative farming is a much better solution. A time-tested solution, as this is largely how small family farms would have done things several hundred years ago, before the advent of heavy machinery in farming, though they certainly did not know all the chemistry behind why it worked so well. We’re just beginning our journey down “regeneration road” but in the end I suspect our property, the soil, the grass, the trees, the wildlife, our livestock, and thereby, us, will be reaping the fruits of our labors evermore abundantly for years to come. I hope this article was informative for you. I hope you learned something, and maybe if nothing else I hope I grossed you out a bit (just kidding). All of this is food for thought, as we can only control so much in our sphere of influence. But every small change we make toward a more sustainable, regenerative lifestyle, the better off our health, our environment, and therefore, our lives will be in the end. Have a wonderful day and I’ll chat with you again next time.

Cheers,

Jake Miller

Is Farming Messy?

Oh, What a Beautiful Morning