When It Comes to Agriculture, Size Does Matter -
A Rebutal to the Dairy Business Association (DBA) and the Factory Farm Lobby in WI
By: Tony Schultz, Stoney Acres Farm in Athens, WI and FFD board member
Last week the executive director of the Dairy Business Association Laurie Fischer wrote a seemingly polite yet defensive editorial to many newspapers and media outlets across the state as a response to the increasing attacks against the rise of factory farming and the environmental issues that accompany them. Although the editorial tried to say “size is not the issue” it continually referred to pollution concerns surrounding larger farms and flat-out stated large farms are better for the environment. This is because no matter how much they use neutral phrases like trying to “keep cows in Wisconsin” or say “regardless of size” they are an organization that represents factory farming and the aggressive expansion of that particular type of agriculture.
Much of DBA’s funding comes from corporate donors. Its website says they include Land O'Lakes Purina Feed LLC, Pfizer Animal Health, Accelerated Genetics, Wick Builders, Bayland Building, insurers, financial-service firms and a host of other agribusiness interests that view big farms as big accounts that buy lots of stuff. Anyone questioning or challenging them is told to shut up, get out of the way of the natural course of “progress” and portrayed as an enemy of all of Wisconsin agriculture.
However, there are obviously environmental, economic and social reasons to question the DBA’s logic. Small farms by the very nature of their size, are inherently more environmentally sustainable for three very fundamental reasons.
First, as the economist E.F. Schumacher has said, “small -operations, no matter how numerous, are always less likely to be harmful to the environment than large-scale ones, simply because their individual force is small in relation to the recuperative forces of nature.” Small farms don’t produce as much manure in one spot as the city of Milwaukee, they don’t create superfund sites, and they simply don’t cause disastrous pollution precisely because they are small. Factory farms aren’t regulated because they want to be but because the concentrations of manure they produce are a distinct threat the ecological landscape and human health.
Second, it is the matter of scale that allows small farms to incorporate animals in a much more environmentally harmonious way. For instance, when properly managed, raising animals on pasture instead of concentrated feedlots is a net benefit to the environment. To begin with, a diet of grazed grass requires much less fossil fuel than a feedlot diet of dried corn and soy. On pasture, grazing animals do their own fertilizing and harvesting. The ground is covered with greens all year round, so it does an excellent job of harvesting solar energy and holding on to top soil and moisture. Grazed pasture removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere more effectively than any land use, including forestland and ungrazed prairie, helping to slow global warming. On well-managed pasture-based farms, the animals spread their manure evenly over the soil where it becomes a natural source of organic fertilizer. The manure improves the quality of the grass, which increases the rate of gain of the animals. It’s a closed, sustainable system. Family-scale farms, even if they do confine their animals, have a much more manageable volume of manure in much closer average proximity to the absorbing landscape.
On factory farms, the excrement builds up in the feedlots and sheds where it fouls the air and releases ammonia and other gasses to the ecosystem. The fumes stress and sicken the animals and farm workers, and they lower the quality of life of people in nearby homes as well as their property values. To get rid of the waste, it is shipped to nearby fields where it overloads the land with nutrients. The excess nitrogen and phosphorous pollute the soil and ground water and drain off into streams, rivers, and estuaries where it can create “dead zones” that threaten the fish population. Concentrated animal feeding operations cannot graze and large-scale operations look at their concentrations of manure as a matter of disposal rather than fertility. Factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution.
As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off pasture and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution — animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete — and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter continues to stink.
Finally, broad ownership translates into broader specific knowledge of the land and, therefore, broad care. It is this pride of ownership for many and the accompanying ability to know spaces intimately and care for them responsibly and lovingly as one’s own that allows many small farmers to manage the landscape more closely and carefully than few factory farmers.
Beyond the environmental issue; what is better for the local economy and the economic order of society as a whole; 1 factory farmer controlling 3,000 cows and employing low-wage highly exploitable labor often denied the rights and dignity of citizenship or 50 families controlling 60 cows each on farms of their own? What is better for our 4-H chapter, the FFA, our small town businesses and cooperatives, our fairs local celebrations and culture, and the small rural communities that we live in?
The reason we’ve got a little red barn and silo on our license plates, and that iconography is featured on so many packages, food labels and is image at the top of the Rural Living insert is not simply because it is ascetically more pleasing than an 8,000 animal manure lagoon. That pastoral red barn and silo represent a vastly superior economic, social, and ecological order than an agricultural landscape dominated by factory farms.
Fellow family farmers, beware of organizations like the Dairy Business Association that would smile at you, claim your legacy, and at the same time pursue policies and promote a type of agriculture that would drive you into extinction. The expansion of larger and larger farms is not simply the course of development but a consequence of national, state and local policies. To protect our land and preserve our communities choose family farms.