Farming+Grass

Tori Riggs Imagine the food you are going to buy for lunch today. Imagine where it came from and who grew or raised it. Imagine the long the journey it took to get to the Punahou snack bar. These thoughts are normally underlying questions no one ever really wonders about. Was it grown in America? Is it organic? What makes something organic? Does any of this matter, or are you just hungry? Whatever it is you are about to purchase for lunch, there is an almost guarantee that it came from a nonorganic farm that uses pesticides and processes food through machines. So? If it tastes good and its cheap, what is the problem? Well, it is not very good for you and there is a deeper relationship that should be focused on more between people and their food. What is the point of eating organic? Is it healthier, or is it simply a moral thing? True organic farming works through grass farming. Surprisingly enough, grass is "the foundation of [our] intricate food chain" (126); in other words, it is the main ingredient to everything we consume. If the grass is healthy, the bugs enjoy to live in it, which attracts chickens who get fat and become great food. If the grass is healthy, it also attracts cows and other animals like that, which also become great food. Farmers who concentrate on keeping the grass on their farms healthy and rich end up with healthier animals, better food products, and happier customers. "Grass is not a commodity. What grass farmers grow can't easily be accumulated, traded, transported, or stored, at least for very long. Its quality is highly variable, different from region to region, season to season, even farm to farm; there is no number 2 hay." (328)

"Grass to us is more ground then figure, a backdrop to more legible things in the landscape –trees, animals, buildings. It's less a subject in its own right than a context" (301).

""Grass," so understood, is the foundation of the intricate food chain Salatin has assembled at Polyface...By the end of the season Salatin's grasses will have been transformed by his animals into some 25,000 pounds of beef, 50,000 pounds of pork, 12,000 broilers, 800 turkeys, 500 rabbits, and 30,000 dozen eggs" (126).

"The chicken feed not only feeds the broilers but, transformed into chicken crap, feeds the grass that feeds the cows that, as I was about to see, feeds the pigs and the laying hens" (341-342).

"Curiously, we seem to like grass less for what it is than for what it isn't" (301).

"We think of the grasses as the basis of this food chain, yet behind, or beneath, the grassland stands the soil, that inconceivably complex communit of the living and the dead." (208)

"Grass farming done well depends almost entirely on a wealth of nuanced local knowledge at a time when most of the rest of agriculture has come to rely on precisely the opposite: on the off-farm brain, and the one-size-fits-all universal intelligence represented by agrochemicals and machines." (191)

"'To be even more accurate,' Joel has said, 'we should call ourselves sun farmers. The grass is just the way we capture the solar energy'" (306).

Will Loomis and Alisha Gonsalve