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pig on pasture that eats organic feed

Why is it so important to feed organic feed?…

  • January 30, 2021January 31, 2021
  • by Suzanne Nelson Karreman
This pig is smiling. Life in the dirt is great. It’s better with organic whole food. Our pigs’ food is truly chemical free, which means a whole lot more than just “non-GMO.”

What’s so special about our pasture-raised eggs and pork? In addition to living life outside, where 9-10 months a year we give them a fresh swath of pasture to graze every few days, our hens and pigs are also fed a ration of locally milled, certified organic feed from Reedy Fork Organic Farm. Why does organic matter if you can get non-GMO-fed and pastured eggs and pork, isn’t that just as good?

In a word, NO! The chemicals that are used to raise non-GMO grains are no joke, and it was actually the marketplace’s desire to avoid them that GMOs used to justify their own inception. Basically, it went like this: “These chemicals are really bad, so you need glyphosate, aka RoundUp, which is as safe to drink as water…” We now know, of course, that that’s not true. And now everyone is all up in arms about glyphosate and acting like non-GMO solves all those problems. Sorry, it’s not that simple, folks.

DDT can still be in non-GMO grains

If you don’t believe me, just look up chemicals like atrazine, acetoclor and metaolachor, which are known and suspected carcinogens. Even our good ol’ friend DDT is not totally banned from use in the U.S., as it it still used as a constituent element in the formulation of more complex chemicals.

“Believe it or not, a chemical company can manufacture a product in which DDT is a component, but since it’s only part of the whole formula, DDT is neither listed on the label nor identified in any way as the product.”

Beyond Labels by Sina McCullough, PhD and Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, p. 238

Do you know how that I know that I know that these non-GMO chemicals are really bad news? Because many of my friends who have applied them for their whole lives are now slowing dying of cancer. Just for the privilege of feeding the world the way the USDA told them to do it. These farmers are my friends. And they are dying.

Are you still okay with “non-GMO” poultry and pork? I’m not. We use organic feed because these are the eggs I would produce for my only family if I only had five chickens living off the back porch. And I cannot in good conscious buy a feed by the ton that I know was grown in a way that is destructive to our shared water supply when there’s an alternative that grows soil and gives our kids a future.

This is one of our two egg mobiles, which provide the nighttime housing and nest boxes for 300 free-range laying hens. The green buckets on the tractor forks are full of Reedy Fork feed.

Big organic is sometimes subject to big fraud, but compromising with pre-GMO chemicals isn’t the answer…

Certified organic isn’t perfect, by any means. If you want details, become a member of the Cornucopia Institute, an organization well-deserving of your money, as they hold the organic industry accountable. A few years ago the U.S. purchased more “organic” grain from Turkey than the country can produce, so shipments of conventional grain somehow became “organic” as they crossed the ocean.

I’m the first to say that local economies are always better because they have inherent integrity. If we had a local feed mill that that purchased all grain locally and wasn’t certified organic but tested all of the grains for all pesticide residues — and not just obtained a commitment from the farmers to not use GMO seeds — that would be a really good option.

But non-GMO feed in our area means merely no GMO seeds were used and glyphosate wasn’t used. It doesn’t mean chemical free. This is still conventional grain with conventional chemicals, just not that particular one (glyphosate). This is an excerpt from a corn-growing guide for farmers about growing non-GMO corn:

Remember, herbicides containing glyphosate and glufosinate should not be sprayed over the top of conventional corn, but nearly all other corn herbicides can be used on conventional corn.

Conventional Corn Production Guide by the the Farmers Business Network

Even non-GMOs are contaminated with GMOs

Organic already accounts for non-GMO. Although there can certainly be GMO drift into organic fields because of pollination, GMO seeds are not allowed to be used in certified organic production. Even the Non-GMO project allows contamination of ingredients to some degree (read the fine print) because the truth is that GMOs are so pervasive and their effects so permanent in the gene pool for each plant that there’s no putting that toothpaste back in the tube.

GMOs are here with us, and our only recourse is to stop making it worse and build sufficient organic matter back into our soils that the immune system of the earth’s surface — which is in living soil — is better able to metabolize and remediate the effects of our collective destructive choices.

If we want to live, we have to support an agriculture that supports living soil. It’s really that simple, and willful ignorance about what is in “non-GMO” feeds isn’t going to get us there.

However imperfect, organic affirms life

As a guiding philosophy, organic agriculture — for all of its challenges and dilemmas related to scale and integrity — is focused on growing crops with healthy soil.

Non-GMO is simply limiting a certain chemical, glyphosate, and the GMO seeds that are designed to withstand its repeated application. Non-GMO is an important movement, but it’s not sufficient to account for all of the other chemicals that came before GMOs, which are hugely destructive to our internal microflora and the ecological web of which we are inextricably a part.

I am not willing to go backwards. The next Silent Spring we may not recover from. We must go forward by deliberately growing food on living, healthy soils. Any chemicals (“-cides” mean death) that are designed to kill and destroy part of that soil life — even the parts we futilely war against as “weeds,” which are really just plants out of balance in an ecosystem — are antithetical to our ability to sustain life.

The grain we choose to provide for our laying hens and pigs is our very best effort to support life — including yours.

Suzanne from Reverence Farms and Howard from Faithfull Farms

Back to basics and onward to the new agriculture

  • August 6, 2020August 6, 2020
  • by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

When we opened a cafe almost four years ago, it had a simple premise: real food belongs to real people. We still believe that. The economic reality of putting the kind of food that we eat at our own table on a table to share, and paying those serving it a living wage, in a rural county, was every bit as challenging as we imagined. We opted to close rather than compromise on our food or our labor values. Neither opening, nor closing, was a decision that we regret. We loved serving food that we believed in to our friends and neighbors — especially our fellow farmers, who appreciated the depth of care and mountains of logistical and regulatory obstacles that had to be navigated to provide it. 

The decision to close the brick-and-mortar retail farm store on Hwy 87 was a simpler one: we determined that utilizing the space for the duration of our cafe lease as a farm store still stretched us too thin, and it didn’t allow us to do what we most desired: welcome you to the farm, to partake in its beauty, and to share in its joys. Sometimes doing what is right and what makes sense requires us to give up some things, including a retail space and a commercial kitchen. It’s a bit awkward in the transition, but it’ll be worth it. Connecting people to their food so that all may prosper is our highest calling. We can’t do that honestly at any place other than the farm itself. 

A2 jersey grass-fed dairy cows grazing in field at sunset

Closing rather than compromise was the same premise, actually, that almost prevented me from farming commercially seven years before, when I brought my first two pigs to the processing plant, walked them into “the box” and watched them die in fear because the plant didn’t follow the procedures that were on the wall and for which they had third-party certifications. The horror I saw for the six sheep (not mine) that followed them is forever etched in my mind. I thought to myself, I don’t need a USDA stamp that badly that I’m willing to compromise who I am to these animals — I had nursed Mr. & Mrs. Pig back to health as piglets with hourly drenches of yogurt after they had fallen behind at another farm. Dying, like living, is an art to be done well.

pastured pigs in a homemade shelter from the elements
Mr. & Mrs. Pig, in a dry shelter during the winter months.

A meat-handler’s license was required only if I wanted to sell to the public. I had been homesteading and was happy to go back to it again. I was willing to trade scale for ethics, so that animals could die in peace, never knowing what was coming to, often with their head in their favorite snacks as I told them, “Thank you for your lives — the ground you walked on will be forever altered for your having lived. Go in peace, back into the peace from which you came.”

But callings have a way of calling you, whether you agree to the fine print, or not. I was able to find two plants that handled the slaughter portion of the processing with the respect with which I had raised the animals. (We use those two plants to this day, driving an extra distance. That said, God willing and the creek don’t rise, we will be able to have the animals die on the farm under USDA inspection within the next couple of years. No animal should have to leave home in a trailer to give it all.)

When I started using managed grazing to feed my first cow, Greeley, I realized that agriculture could be a regenerative act. Freely, this revelation of beauty and truth was given to me, and freely I wanted to share it. It’s not enough for me to eat well and for my backyard to be bountiful. Malnutrition — and its corollary, obesity, the same problem just with an abundance of calories — anywhere is a threat to nourishment everywhere.

Yet, how does one market food without parallel in a marketplace that values sameness? Where is the sweet spot so that the people raising the food can also afford to purchase it? These are big questions.

I’ve spent more than a decade trying to answer them. We haven’t totally cracked the nut yet, but we are getting closer. 

baby Ossabaw piglet. pastured pigs
Ossabaw piglets. These guys are actually 1/4 Pot-bellies, because some wondering boars bred their purebred Ossabaw grandmothers. This generation is starting to look more Ossabaw.

How do we reach people in a distracted, glossy, convenience-obsessed culture? How do we meet people where they are, when many don’t even know that the predominant food culture is actually killing them slowly?

The cafe’s premise was that we could cook it for them. Never cooked a pork shank at home? No problem! You can still enjoy eating it, or so the idea went. We closed the cafe right before Covid-19. What already had made itself manifest to me from a marketing perspective, the pandemic has laid bare: people can only afford to choose one “luxury”: food without comprise or “food” someone prepares for you. Convenience almost always wins. Many can now choose neither. There’s precious little overlap, and we salute those food business who are doing it well.

Living in the tension between three things we were unwilling to compromise about — how food was raised, how food was prepared, and how people are paid — was not sustainable for us as a farm, which was and will always be, our first love. We were trying to both farm and cook without compromise. Doing one alone is difficult enough. 

What is rejuvenating is checking our very pregnant Jersey, Tulip 715, before the sun came up the other morning (every day we think that baby is going to be here!), after prayerfully and tearfully saying goodbye to four fat, healthy Red Devons, long before sunup, that had arrived a couple of years ago needing some TLC. They wouldn’t have all survived the feedlot, where they were otherwise headed. (We had to treat a few of them for minor issues that wouldn’t have been minor in that environment.) They shined up and shined on and left the soil better than they found it. They will go on to nourish people, a worthy calling.

Bulls and steers grazing. New Zealand Red Devon and South Poll steers, Jersey bulls.
A New Zealand Red Devon looks at the camera while a Jersey bull (Lester-PP) and a South Poll steer grab some breakfast before a hot summer day in the shade.

The highest honor you could give them, from my perspective, is to buy their meat by the quarter or eighth, cook it for your family, your neighbors and someone in need, and then bring the bones back to our compost pile (1568 Haw Ranch Rd., find the white “compost here” sign near the big pile by the barn), and complete the cycle for the soil. Seeing the bones from Left Bank Butchery and the scraps from the Saxapahaw General Store on our compost piles always makes my soul smile. This is how I want to relate to my community. 

hiking and road map of Reverence Farms
This map adorns the farm entrance at 1568 Haw Ranch Rd, just 1/2 mile up the road from Saxapahaw proper, and across from Haw Village. The farm hugs 1 mile of the Haw River.

Want to know a little secret? Part of the reason I wanted to own a cafe is so that I could own the waste stream… true story. What happens at restaurants is that same thing that happens in most homes: organic material, meant to nourish the very earth that sacrificially produced it, by hands and bodies that bleed and sweat and toiled for it, is instead thrown into a landfill to putrefy and create a liability for everyone (air pollution) where an opportunity once beckoned (creating top soil that sustains all of us).

We are what we do with what we throw away. There is no “away.” If we are willing, what we consume and what we discard can all be done reverently, and in the Great Economy of our Creator it is all increased in the giving. Compost applied to the land continues to capture carbon from the atmosphere many years after application, and in an exponential way. That’s grace. Let’s start participating in that economy, together.

Thank you for coming along for the ride. In the meantime, stay tuned. A new agriculture is emerging, and it’s going to be wild and delicious and nourishing and reverent. We will see you on the farm.

Howard Allen of Faithfull Farms, who also happens to have been the first chef at the cafe, came to the farm the other morning to look at the transformation of the soil from a barren wasteland a few years ago to a verdant eden today. He brought me a bounty from his intensely productive farm, including this amazing celery — that tastes like, celery… Celery is supposed to have a taste! We talked about how we are going into a new agriculture and his prayer is that we go willingly. The new agriculture is going to be collaborative, restorative and full of grace and truth. Willing or not, we are going, because the old isn’t serving.

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1568 Haw Ranch Rd
Graham, NC 27253
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336-266-9416

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