Analysis of X) Grass: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pasture

Joel Salatin is a grass farmer.

How could this possibility be? The exports that makes Salatin money to feed his family are the beef, chickens and eggs?

As it turns out, the entire philosophy of the Salatin farm, as the author found out, is that: if you take care of the ecosystem in which the animals thrive on, most important from the base level of food production, the animals that's half of the game won already.

Before reading this section, most people, like the author himself, did not think growing grass can be such a complex methodology. Most North Americans take grass for granted: it is readily seen everywhere before all the suburban houses.

Putting a patch of pasture under a microscope, the author starts to appreciate the true elegant greenness behind all the hard work and thought put behind the scene to take care of the grass.


source: Panoramio

As in example to illustrate this: allowing the cows to eat too early and you risk killing the grass by not giving it enough of a chance to recover; wait too long and the grass will become too fibrous and the cows won’t eat it! This single concept here explains the title "grass farmer", so much work and dedication is pouring into organizing and managing the food source. Instead of bring the food to the animals, like what the feedlots are doing the Iowa, the grass farmer brings the animal to the food.

It turns out that, the Salatin grass farm can produced the same, if not more food energy per acre of land than that of a corn field.

The author questions the obvious: why did American turn her head away from the productive and environmentally friendly way of producing food? Because it does not conform the mechanisation religion of industrious processing.


source: African American Environmentalist Association

Grass farming method of raising animals is against one of the principles of industry: time is money. The animals don't fattened fast enough to be a good source for the process food machine. On top of that, animals raised form various pastures means less homogeneity, violating yet another industry standard.

The author makes raises yet again, his main thesis thus far in the book: the irrationality complying with the industry when it is clearly inefficient.

We can see that the author is suggestion America is following the industry for the sake of following it: “our civilization and, increasingly, our food system are strictly organized on industrial lines” that prize consistency, mechanization, predictability, interchangeability and economies of scale. Corn works within this system; grass does not.