Everything He Wants to Do is Illegal
(Page 6 of 8)
Oct. 1, 2008
Megan Phelps Interview with Joel Salatin
All About the Farm
RELATED CONTENT
Joel Randall PREFORM-INFORM March/April 1971 July 11, 1969 was my last day of institutionalized emp...
Contrary to popular belief, children in sport utility vehicles (SUVs) are no safer than those in tr...
Few in US spell out how they want to die; House health bill includes end-of-life counseling...
Lifestyles Food Digest...
Where's the good stuff? Medical marijuana explosion creates booming review business...
How have you been affected (or not affected) by the recent increase in grain prices?
This depends on which species we’re talking about. Let’s start with the poultry. Broilers will pick up only 15 percent of their diet off the pasture; layers 20 percent; turkeys 30 percent or more. Since birds are omnivores, they can’t survive on grass alone. Waterfowl jump on up to more than 50 percent. We’ve watched our local genetically modified-free grains double in price over the last 24 months. In response, we’ve raised our chicken and egg prices about 25 percent. Grain is only a portion of the cost, so all we have to do is raise the price enough to compensate for the grain. The amount required to cover these exceptionally high grain prices only amounts to less than $2 per bird. A family buying 50 chickens a year would only pay an additional $100 to cover all the additional feed costs. Of course, the industrial food poultry giants say they can’t pass along these costs to their customers. I don’t know why, but I think it has to do with the idea that people will only pay so much for junk.
Typically, hogs are similar to chickens, but here at Polyface we’re making an end run by finishing pigs on acorns. Just in the nick of time, we discovered an efficient, cheap way to fence out sections of forest with electric fence. Using quarter-inch nylon rope as poor-boy insulators, we zig-zag a single 12.5 gauge Tipper Tie aluminum wire from tree to tree and erect three- to five-acre finishing glens. In our native Appalachian oak forests, each acre displaces $500 worth of grain. That translates to about $50 per hog in expense, which is enormous. It has allowed us to keep our hog prices fairly stable even with the huge increase in grain prices. We put the pigs in for one month and remove them for 11 to rest and to let the next acorn crop fall. It actually helps the trees, because the pigs root out competing brush and brambles for their starchy roots, in effect weeding the woodlot. All parties win. Very exciting. And if you think about the millions of acres of forests and realize that they could displace tilled, petroleum-based, subsidized, annual grain cropland, you begin to see the potential of this model.
Finally, salad bar beef. This is the most exciting, because it is completely immune to grain prices. It requires no tillage, no fertilizer, no feed transportation or drying costs. It runs on real time solar energy, self-harvesting with four-wheel drive self-propelled sauerkraut tanks. At Polyface, we believe we’ve become the least-cost producer in an artisanal market, which pushes the gross margin both ways. That’s pretty cool. As a result, we have not raised our beef prices at all, and are watching with great satisfaction the squirming and postulating within the feedlot industry. They don’t need any bailouts. Let them die. To place all of this in historical context, we should all realize that until cheap energy, beef was always the cheapest meat while pork and poultry were the luxuries — especially poultry. When President Roosevelt said his vision for America included “a chicken in every pot,” he was talking about today’s filet mignon. With cheap fuel, cheap grain, cheap labor and cheap pharmaceuticals came cheap poultry. In the continuum of human history, poultry-cheaper-than-beef is a veritable blip. For nutritional, environmental and social reasons, I think it would be fine for the historical beef-poultry relationship to be restored. And most things do eventually find a way of coming home.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 | 6 |
7 |
8 |
Next >>
