Ruminants make more life than they take

Does your food create, restore, caress and nurture life in you and around you? I’m about to say a radical thing… Maybe two or three or six!

Victory the bull contemplates me as I contemplate the majesty of the morning and the incredible symbolism of this photo.

There is so much about this scene that makes me happy. Moving the bulls and steers to a fresh break of grass before the sun was really up. The massive improvement in the pasture in just a year. This is the third year of adaptive grazing on this property, and the fifth property I’ve witnessed this principle come true: during the third year, things start coming alive. It’s a long slog to get there, and you feel like you are not making any progress.

The natural laws of disturbance and rest are not interested in our impatience. They are laws and they work. The earth’s crust needs the right kind of disturbance — and the cloven hooves of bovines are especially adept at this responsibility — and the right kind of rest. Ruminants make more life than they take.

Too little and the grasses don’t have time to bank carbon from the air in the form of sugars in their roots to store up enough energy to grow again. Too much rest and the plant goes to seed and the nutritional value of the forage for the animal goes by. It’s a delicate and intricate dance.

The plow is a violation, too big of a death for too little life in return. Centuries worth of bison following their instinctive pattern of disturbance and rest created a rich loam that is the key to our survival. Ruminants make more life than they take.

We are willing to sacrifice everything — massive, incomprehensible amounts of life — for a few years of corn and beans. And then tell ourselves that we aren’t killing anything to eat as we go on consuming non-foods manufactured with machines that tore up the earth to create substances that make us feel good while they are killing us. Bread and circus. The annihilation of the substrate that sustains us on the earth’s surface is so complete that we cannot even see our participation in our own destruction. Hubris wrapped in delusion.

Everything, everything, is always being created or being destroyed. There is no static in a dynamic universe. And ruminants make more life than they take.

Yet… Yet. It can come back. The soil can come back. We put the genie back in the bottle. The toothpaste can go back in the tube. All the carbon that doesn’t belong in the air BELONGS UNDER OUR FEET. And we must collaborate with four-footed wonders (aka ruminants) to do it. I’m tired of the lies that eating less meat is going to save us. “Eat less meat, eat better meat.” It’s not true! Eating plants takes the plow. The plow is death. The life in these picture makes more life, in us, and in the world. Ruminants make more life than they take.

A fresh break of grass. A fresh measure of hope. The truth will wrestle you to the ground until you listen. There is more life because these animals lived and grazed and yes, eventually die, than there would be without them. There is life-giving and life-taking death. We choose.

I say these words with both boldness and trepidation. Long ago I learned that we make decisions about food in the same place in our brains that we make decisions about God. I don’t think that is an accident. And I also know that means that there’s a whole lot of emotion for a lot of people when they learn that their beliefs may not line up with natural laws. There are some things that are true whether we believe them or not.

Life takes life. There is no escaping this law. We can destroy the soil, ground-dwelling birds, thousands of species of soil critters that are food all the way up the food chain, bunnies, frogs and insects by the trillions so we can tell ourselves that nothing died so we can eat. That is a lie. Something died so you could eat today. And despite popular opinion, the further down the food chain you eat — unless you are no-till gardening in your backyard with a shovel to grow your own vegetables, and even then there is death every time you put a spade in the ground — the more death you are participating in because eating lower on the food chain requires the plow. And make no mistake, the plow is death.

“The fact is that no one has ever advanced a scientific reason for plowing.” And so began this tome, July 5, 1943. It soon became a best-seller, but the ideas therein are so radical that it wasn’t until the 1970s that they began to gain acceptance.

We are living in radical times. Radical really just means “root.” I believe we are getting to the root of the matter, in so many places, in so many ways at one time that it is dizzying. But there are two things about truth that I’ve learned: It always sets you free. And truth always comes out. Winston Churchill said that the truth is so valuable that it is protected by a bodyguard of lies.

If we all ate a traditional diet, including a lot of meat raised in keeping with natural laws, the planet could support more of us. If we eat more processed food, the planet can support less of us. Check out this really well-referenced scientific paper by our friend Fred Provenza. If it comes in the box, it’s processed. If it’s in the center of the grocery store, it’s likely processed. If it’s even sold in a grocery store at all, it likely contributes to your ill health and that of the planet.

As I was contemplating all of these before breakfast, I thought of the wonderful Alice in Wonderland quote about believing impossible things before breakfast.

 So these are the impossible things I am going to imagine before I go get intimate with 2.5 eggs (an extra yoke, just because I can; the third white goes to the piggies), carmelized onions, cheese made by friends, mushrooms grown by other friends and bok choy grown by still other friends… Because I’m about to be late for my meeting. (Yes, farmers have meetings….) Then I’ll have a steak or hamburger for lunch, from an animal that grazed these very pastures. Here we go: 

1. It’s possible to heal the earth and not nearly as difficult as you may imagine. 2. We can heal the earth while also healing ourselves. And nobody loses. Through the alchemy of grass, everybody actually wins. Ruminants make more life than they take. 3. Eating higher on the food chain is more healing to the earth and ourselves when done in keeping with natural laws than eating lower on the food chain. 4. Intimacy with what sustains us is beautiful, edifying and life-affirming. 5. All death is not the same. There is death that affirms life and death that destroys life. 6. We can choose in every moment to move towards the healing of ourselves, our relationships with one another and our ecological umbilicus. Things really can get better, and the more we believe that the more powerful that truth becomes. I know this because the world is too beautiful to have not been created on purpose by a loving God, who is Love itself. Creation is groaning for us to retake our rightful place as stewards. 

We can choose to live in a garden or in a wasteland. How we choose to eat — and thus live — is a reflection of how we see ourselves.