by Larry Klein
Larry Klein was born in Wisconsin in 1950. For the last 20 years, he has worked at St. Benedict’s Acres which grows food for the 160 people at Madonna House, a Catholic religious community in Ontario, Canada.
Ecology is about relationships in nature -- God, man, plants, animals. To remove God from the relationship is “unecological.”
I want to talk about the practice of ecology -- in the sense of interdependence and interrelationship. Sin in the scriptures is a violation of relationship. It has the force of law. If we design a plane poorly, it crashes. If our farming is not in truth, the land is destroyed for the next generation. The same thing happens with people and societies -- they crash when relationships are shattered. Eventually, wars come as an unavoidable consequence of our violation of laws.
The “solution” of setting aside some areas of nature and life to be exploited by farming and industry and other areas to be preserved by the absence of man can only be a partial and occasional solution. Why do ecologists exclude agriculture? To me, it is the fundamental ecological activity. True, it has become modeled on industrial processes because of the money supporting bigness as well as the suppression of small, mixed family farms. This is the result of government grants to corporate farms, irrigation projects and research grants to develop industrial agriculture. It is better to have no government money at all than to allow what is happening to continue.
We have a farm called St. Benedict’s Acres at Madonna House, a Catholic religious community. I have lived and worked here for 20 years. I regret how slow I have been to catch this vision. But by God’s grace I have caught something and unless I pass it on something will die within me. It is only in the last few years that I have really gotten the conviction that all of humanity can feed itself without damaging the earth for the next generation.
We can farm in a sustainable, nonpolluting, community-building way that respects our human dignity. Many things have come together here at St. Benedict’s Acres -- grassland farming, spring calving and lambing; managed intensive grazing or rotational grazing; organic vegetable production with mulching and cover crops; forest management that keeps the forest at full growth by partial cutting according to good science, economics and logging techniques; recent work on human diet and disease; and human needs for prayer, music and community.
On our farm the dairy cows get fresh pasture up to twice a day, the chickens are pastured and are moved at least weekly and daily for those inside movable cages.
There are health benefits from pastured animals. The butter produced from cows pastured rather than fed grain in confinement is higher in fat-soluble activators as is the meat and milk and cheese. In Europe, yellower fat is already considered a premium product. The butter from grass fed cows is also high in conjugated linoleic acid -- now considered so beneficial that there is interest in delivering it in a pill form. A typical response is to say that red meat and butter are bad and then to develop a pill to replace what now becomes lacking in the diet.
We want ecological agriculture -- an integration of our scientific understanding of nature with a sense of human community and the conviction that the land needs more hands and eyes on it rather than more machines and chemicals. The same is true for forestry. We need more forestry done on the farm with intelligence and in small areas by farm tractors with winches or horses -- rather than large skidders. Small scale tree harvesting, done by land owners yearly, is better for our forests than stripping large tracts once every 20 years. It would be better to sell off the crown land -- our national forests -- and regulate its use as a condition of sale, than to do what has been done in the past in Ontario. Nature replaces the forest at 1% per year -- this should be the model.
Through Allan Nation, editor of Stockman’s Grass Farmer (1-800-748-9808) I have learned that the only way of farming that increases soil organic matter is grassland farming. Why? Because studies show that pasture soils have twice the organic matter of cultivated soils. Nothing could be worse for our land than the monoculture of plants, now being promoted as a way to “feed the starving millions.” We need to get animals back on our farms. Grassland farming is neither labor intensive nor capital intensive. It requires little outside input and few technologies other than moveable electric fencing. It does require understanding and a commitment to change.
From the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation I have learned the value of butter, milk and meat and the harmfulness of their substitutes -- hydrogenated oil products and white sugars. Our North American diet on average is composed of 500 calories per day from sugar and 500 calories per day from hydrogenated vegetable oils. These oils are banned in France and are strongly implicated as the cause of heart disease, stroke and other modern diseases.
From Charles Walters, editor of Acres (1-800-355-5313) I have learned that there are powerful political and economic forces behind modern soil-destroying agriculture.
From Lynn R. Miller, editor of Small Farmers Journal (541-549-2064), I have learned that to recover our agricultural traditions is the beginning of freedom from the industrial model of agri-business as it is rightly called.
For ecologically sound farming to grow, we need the development of new markets and changes in the regulation of these markets. In Ontario, Canada, the most viable and ecologically-right ways of farming are prohibited by law. In order for the farmer to sell meat, milk and eggs, he must buy a quota -- that is, a franchise to sell. Quota -- the right to sell -- is unavailable to small farmers and quasi-health regulations enforce the quota system. Chicken farmers must have a minimum quota for 120,000 broilers. An egg producer must have a quota for 500 hens with the quota priced at $62/hen. Dairy farmers have been told that small dairy herds are not viable and the cost of quota is about $16,000/cow.
It is OK to grow eggs, meat and milk for your family -- many do. It is not OK to sell the eggs at the farmer’s market, government inspected beef from a cooler or to sell milk to your mother. Is this not wrong? The system is so regulated that small farmers are forced to do things that are illegal. The impetus for change must come from the consumer, demanding quality farm products produced in ecologically sound ways -- which means small scale production, not factory farms.
Even herbs are under attack with the government of Canada coming forward with a plan -- now delayed due to public pressure -- to require a $2,000 fee with chemical analysis and a botanist’s analysis to sell mint tea! Again, such laws are designed to prohibit the market from the small grower and give the market share to the large players.
We know that the spread of human diseases can also be understood ecologically. Two ways that diseases are spreading in our times are by multi-partner sexual activity and by dirty hypodermic needles. Nature is an organic whole. Its relationships cannot be violated without consequences. These have the force of law. Nature is also full of wonder and meaning for the human person. To discover the relationships, to learn the laws of nature and to follow them is to become free. It is to choose life. As Weston Price said: “Life in all its fullness is Mother Nature Obeyed.”
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