Year of the Cow (2 page)

What I came to understand is that this doorway doesn't exist. It's a road. And it's long. And like so many other trips, the journey is just as important as the destination.

And so one sunny Saturday afternoon, I set off. The project would grow well beyond a year, well beyond food, well beyond me, and well beyond anything I ever expected.

 

1

Meet the Meat

One cow is approximately one Prius-full of meat.

This is the latest fact I've learned in the past twenty-four hours. It's also the most pressing, as the aforementioned cow has been frozen, packed into eight neat boxes, and stacked into the back of my jet-black Prius. I'm behind the wheel, hell-bent for leather, racing against the cold pouring off the boxes in palpable waves. Due south. Los Angeles by sundown.

“Ben, do we have another blanket we can toss on top of the cow?”

“Yep. On it.”

Ben is my partner in a multitude of crimes. He's a spark plug of a man with forearms like footballs, thanks to his work as a film grip. If you're wondering what a film grip does, it's largely this: Grips solve problems. Ben's able to MacGyver his way out of nearly anything. He's also one of my oldest friends. If you need help with a project, but you don't know what you don't know—you need Ben.

Ben shifts in his seat and throws another blanket over the boxes in the back.

Outside the car, it's eighty-five degrees. Inside, it's about sixty. Regardless, I crank the air conditioner to MAX COLD. Foot on the gas.

*   *   *

Twenty-four hours earlier, Ben and I had headed in the opposite direction. Straight up the I-5, toward a small town about an hour and a half north of Sacramento. I needed to see a man about a cow.

The decision to buy this particular animal was the result of months of research. I had decided that I didn't know enough about where my food comes from and that I needed to address this ignorance head-on. Since, like many Americans, my go-to protein is beef, I started there.

As we zip north, we pass another of my potential beef supplier options: the largest beef facility on the West Coast. Harris Ranch, located along the I-5, is a textbook example of what most people think of when they consider beef production. Feedlots sprawling like agricultural suburbs—their soil a darker black than the soil outside due to the hooves and dung of countless cattle. They process up to a quarter-million cattle annually—handling every aspect from feeding to slaughter, packaging, and shipping.

Harris Ranch is a leading purveyor of corn-fed beef, the type to which most Americans are accustomed. If you've had a hamburger in a restaurant or bought beef at a supermarket and it wasn't otherwise labeled, it was fed on some mixture of corn and other grains. Beef fed on cheap corn can reach market weight in a little over a year. The result: lots of beef at low prices.

However, there are other costs. First, cattle aren't really built to eat corn—they're built to eat grass. The first of their four stomachs is called a rumen (hence, “ruminant”). It's like a gigantic beer keg in the animal's chest. The rumen holds beneficial bacteria that ferment the chewed grasses the cattle eat. These bacteria in turn become a major source of protein for the animal. That's how cattle are able to derive protein from a protein-free grass—they're eating the bacteria that feed on it.

When cattle eat corn, fermentation in the rumen stops. The rumen becomes more acidic in order to break down this suboptimal food. Effects are manifold: First, cattle stomachs become more like our stomachs. As a result, any potentially harmful bacteria in the rumen adapt to their new environment and become in turn more able to make humans sick. Bacteria like
E. coli.

An acidic rumen can also give cattle something roughly analogous to bovine heartburn, called
acidosis
. This disease keeps them from eating, defeating the purpose of feeding them corn. As a result, heavy preventative doses of antibiotics are introduced to keep acidosis at bay. An estimated 80 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are administered to livestock.

Remember the
E. coli
breeding in their rumen? The aforementioned antibiotics can make the bacteria antibiotic-resistant.

Further, corn-fed beef lose their source of protein as the beneficial grass-digesting bacteria in their rumen vanish, requiring their diet to be supplemented with other forms of protein. In industrial times, that protein has come from the ground-up carcasses of other animals, including other cattle. This bovine cannibalism turned out to be a spectacular way to spread mad cow disease (aka bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE)—which is transmitted by contact with infected brain or spinal tissue. Consumption of mad cow–tainted beef has been linked with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans—a degenerative and fatal brain disorder, symptoms of which include rapidly progressing dementia, loss of muscular coordination, personality changes, impaired vision, and a raft of other neurological impairments. Eating mad cow–tainted beef is a tremendously bad idea.

Because of fears over mad cow disease, in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prohibited the use of ruminant protein in cattle feed. Now, cattle protein is frequently fed to poultry and poultry protein is fed back to cattle. It isn't cannibalism, but cattle eating chickens isn't exactly natural, either.

Corn-fed beef also requires, well, corn, which is one of the most energy-intensive crops produced. Gigantic petroleum-dependent combines plant the corn and harvest it, petroleum-derived pesticides and fertilizers ensure a prodigious crop, and petroleum-driven vehicles transport it to feedlots. Some sources estimate that a single corn-fed beef steer is the product of 284 gallons of petroleum over the course of his life.

When you hear people say that beef production is energy-intensive—this is why.

I don't fault beef producers such as Harris Ranch for trying to make a living. Like any agricultural pursuit, ranching is a wildly risky proposal. The debt to get started can be tremendous, the competition intense. Nobody—no matter how altruistic—wants to go bankrupt.

Industrial beef producers are responding to market forces, and in a minuscule way I am a part of that market. With my food dollars, however, I'd like to vote for a different process.

*   *   *

Ben and I pull into Chaffin Family Orchards, a working ranch and farm just outside Oroville, California, after nine hours of driving. Chris Kerston, the ranch's chief marketing guy, has agreed to show us around.

The ranch looks like many small-scale farms. Though the landscape is picturesque, the farm buildings themselves are weather-beaten and worn—the effort put into building this place has clearly gone into function over aesthetics. A small house sits by an enormous barn. Dirty pickups crowd a gravel driveway. A road leads up a grassy slope to parts unknown.

I walk toward the barn. A small lean-to in front houses their farm stand, offering nectarines, fresh eggs, chickens, olive oil, and a few other items. Notably, there is no one here. There is, however, a box with a slit in the top.

I point at the cash box. Despite the fact that we're alone, I whisper to Ben, “Dude, I think this place works on the honor system.”

“That's awesome. I don't think you could do that in LA.”

“Isn't that how we pay for the subway in LA?”

“Who pays for the subway in LA?”

“Touché.”

The front door of the house opens and a tall, thin man walks out. I wave as I approach, as one only does in the country. “Morning.… Chris around?”

“I'll get him.”

The thin man disappears back into the house. I shove my hands in my pockets and take in the view. Across the road, rows of fat, gnarled trees stretch all the way to the horizon. There is no sound but the wind.

The door to the house clangs open and Chris ambles out. He's probably thirtyish but looks younger in a red button-down shirt and jeans. He sports the dirty ball cap of a man who works outside, but he rocks a soul patch like he might have followed Phish once upon a time. At his age, that couldn't have been too long ago.

When he sees us, he grins like it's his default response to the world. “Hey, I'm Chris.”

“Hey, man. Jared. This is Ben.”

“Great to meet you guys. Ready to go for a ride?”

The three of us jump onto a carryall, and Chris shows us around the ranch, very little of which is dedicated to raising cattle. It turns out they don't raise cattle for their own sake; they do it to produce better fruit.

Chaffin Family Orchards started about a hundred years ago when its founder, Del Chaffin, bought the land from UC Berkeley, which had an agricultural research station there. The research station grew olive trees, and those trees still stand—I spotted them from the barn.

Olive trees have needs. They need fertilizer and pruning. The area between them must be kept mown, otherwise grass and shrubbery will grow and choke out the trees. And once every three months, the trees like to be petted and told that they're pretty. Because they are.

Most commercial farms handle these needs through chemical or mechanical means. They plant gigantic fields with a single crop—say, peaches. They spray their crop with chemical fertilizers to help the plants grow and hire a guy to mow between the trees to keep out competing plants. The result? A broad expanse of bare dirt growing exactly one species of plant. That's called a monoculture. (And monocultures are never told they're pretty.)

Because from an ecological perspective, monocultures aren't especially efficient. The system to create them requires huge energy inputs from the grower: for the tractor, the guy who drives the tractor, the fuel for the tractor, and the fertilizer for the trees. It isn't just an environmental burden on the grower—it's an economic burden.

Chaffin Family Orchards does things differently. Rather than hire a guy to mow between the trees, they send in goats. One of the main threats to orchard trees is shrubbery. The goats roam through the field and clear out any shrubbery that would otherwise choke out the trees. They also climb through the lower branches—yes, they're tree-climbing goats—and keep the lower six feet of branches pruned of green shoots, which would, if they were allowed to bloom, decrease the yield of the tree. Further, the goats fertilize the soil, eliminating much of the need for chemical fertilizer.

“But,” you may ask, “what about predators?” As was the custom long ago, the shepherds at Chaffin raise and socialize livestock guardian dogs that live with the herd and protect them from coyotes and whatever else might go bump in the night.

As a result, rather than paying for a tractor, fuel, and extra manpower, the farmers produce an additional crop—chevon, or goat meat. This is in addition to the services the goats provide trimming the trees and fertilizing the soil.

After the goats, the ranchers send a herd of cattle through the orchard to mow down the grass that the goats leave behind. These cattle further fertilize the orchard while providing another crop: grass-fed beef.

The steer that I will be taking home once grazed here. Chris takes us to see the current herd—a group of about thirty, reddish-brown, eleven-hundred-pound steers cavorting through century-old olive trees. I try to get closer, but they aren't having it. They canter off into the distance, weaving behind trees to get away from me. They're remarkably graceful. Like bovine ninjas.

The cattle will live on this land for most of their life. After sixteen months or so, they'll be moved to an adjacent pasture for finishing—eating their fill of bright green clover and grass until they come up to harvest weight. At that point, they'll be taken one at a time to a local processor, quickly stunned into unconsciousness with a bolt stunner, and then slaughtered. The processor—colloquially known as a “butcher”—is an Animal Welfare Approved (AWA) local businessman. And per the AWA standards, the animal should have absolutely no awareness of the event. Afterward, the butcher partitions and flash-freezes the carcass according to Chris's instructions.

We leave the herd and wander farther afield to the mobile henhouses, newly arrived to this bit of acreage. After Chaffin sends the cattle through the orchard, they follow up a few days later with chickens. Chickens are omnivores, and they're at their best when they eat both grass and animal protein in the form of bugs—like the bugs that hatch from the cattle and goat manure. The chickens, in turn, lay eggs in the mobile henhouse that travels around the farm with them.

“We don't play Easter morning every day out here,” says Chris.

Truly free-range eggs, another crop, and the chickens also further fertilize the trees.

This system of crop rotation means that Chaffin is able to produce each individual crop for less than it would cost if they tried to produce that crop in isolation.

From a beef-production perspective, this agricultural system has distinct advantages. Cattle raised on pasture evade most of the pitfalls of feedlot cattle—no acidosis, so far less need for antibiotics. No need for protein supplementation, so dramatically reduced risk of mad cow. The cattle eat the lawn, so no need to plant, grow, harvest, and ship corn.