"My
great-grandfather owned and operated a mid-sized organic dairy farm
outside of Great Falls, Montana. My grandfather took the farm over
from him, and my father took it over from my grandfather. I knew
from the time I was knee-high to a grasshopper that someday that
farm would belong to me and my brother.
When
I was three or four years old, my mother used to wake me up at
dawn and bring me to the cow barn, in order, I suppose, to have
someone to talk to as she milked the cows. From the time I was
five, I was doing real chores around the farm. Often I worked
under the wing of my brother, Dick, who was a year older and a
lot bigger. When he wasn't beating me up, he was telling me what
to do. It was my job to feed the calves buttermilk, and since
we didn't have buckets with nipples in those days, I used my hands.
Every weekend I'd have to clean the calf barn of manure; in the
winter it froze and that could make the work particularly unpleasant.
I still remember a time when I was about seven, working in the
fields late on a frigid afternoon. I allowed myself to cry a few
tears, and my father told me, "You might as well grit your teeth,
because cryin's only going to slow you down, and we're not quittin'
till we're finished." It was a lesson I burned into my heart.
At
eight or nine I began milking cows and branding calves. At ten
I learned how to castrate calves. At harvest time, I'd work long
past dark cutting the grain. I'd rake hay and stack it, and I
learned to drive a tractor and a team of horses. I worked every
day of the year but two: July Fourth and Christmas. On those days
all I had to do was feed the animals--and that took just a few
hours, so I looked forward to those holidays with great patriotism
and Christian feeling, respectively.
At
the end of his sophomore year in high school, Dick was diagnosed
with Hodgkin's disease. In those days, the disease was always
fatal. We didn't talk about it much in my family, but it was a
quiet fact around which much of our lives revolved. From that
point on, Dick always did exactly what he wanted to do, and nobody
questioned him. He loved the woods more than anything, and he'd
go hunting and fishing at the drop of a hat. I stayed behind and
did more than my share of the farmwork.
My
confidence in my farming future stood behind the disastrous academic
record I achieved in high school. I excelled in football, but
I didn't do much else well. When I somehow managed to graduate,
I was delighted to be back on the farm I loved. But when my father,
nervous about the prospect of my someday taking over the 540-acre
spread, prevailed upon me to look seriously at all the business
aspects of actually running a farm, I realized how ill-equipped
I was. I decided to do what any self-respecting red-blooded American
boy does who's partied and daydreamed his way through twelve years
of school without learning a damn thing: I went to college.
At
Montana State University I wasn't about to repeat the mistake
I had made in high school. This time, I paid attention and did
my homework. I took courses at the College of Agriculture. The
late Fifties and early Sixties was an exciting time to be launching
into agricultural studies. We learned to spurn the old-fashioned,
inefficient methods of farming--the organic methods of my father,
grandfather, and great-grandfather. There was not one course offered
in organic agriculture. In its place, a bold new age of chemically
enhanced agriculture was dawning. We learned the most up-to-date
methods of using pesticides and herbicides, hormones and antibiotics.
My professors, all chemists and academicians, were so good at
what they did, I figured, they didn't even have to get their hands
dirty. I bought it all, hook, line, and sinker.
When
I came home after college and a stint in the Army, my brother
was dying. My father was getting older and, burdened with more
than he could handle, he needed me to run the farm. I studied
the farm's books, and I suddenly understood something that had
simply never occurred to me before. We were poor. My old man was
barely making ends meet. I told him that if I was going to take
over this operation, I sure as hell wasn't going to keep running
it on a hand-to-mouth basis as an organic dairy farm. I was going
to deficit-finance, expand, and employ all the brand-new chemical
farming techniques I'd learned about in college.
My
father had no choice. He handed over the farm. But as he shook
my hand on the deal, he had a few short words for me.
He
told me I was wrong.
Crop
rotation was the first principle of the old-fashioned organic
method of dairy farming employed by my father, grandfather, and
great-grandfather. A field that was used to grow alfalfa one year
got planted with, say, wheat the next, and corn the following
year. Farmers paid particular attention to nitrogen-fixing crops,
like beans or clover or alfalfa, which pulled nitrogen out of
the air and put it into the soil, thus naturally fertilizing it.
The second principle was leaving fields fallow, usually at least
once every few years. Doing so restored moisture in the soil,
made weeding simple, and let the micro-organisms and earthworms
in the soil go to work regenerating it. The third principle was
best expressed in the old farmer's saying: "When you raise an
animal on grass, take half and leave half." In other words, don't
let cattle overgraze. By leaving roughly half the grass alive
in the grazing field, the grass would come back each year and
its roots would hold the soil and protect it from erosion.
Finally,
farming organically meant working with Nature, not against it.
Organic agriculture is predicated on doing things in Nature's
time frame. Crops are harvested when they're ripe, and fields
are cut into small sections so that each crop can be picked at
its peak condition.
Those
of us who had been schooled in the ways of the Green Revolution
were going to bury these quaint old ways just as electricity had
buried the kerosene lamp. I found beauty in the almost mathematical
precision of the new chemical agriculture. I would take a hollow
tube, three feet long and maybe an inch in diameter, and press
it into the ground to obtain a soil sample. By bringing this sample
to a soil testing lab, I could determine which of the three basic
soil nutrients--nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium--were needed
in the soil, at what depths and in what percentages. I'd spread
the fields with a customized mixture of fertilizer, and it would
seep down into the soil like a time-released medicine.
Fertilizing
this way worked like a dream, especially after I'd had a few years
to fiddle around and discover the best mixtures. I found that
by loading the soil with about 100 pounds per acre of "33-0-0"
in the spring, and then "rotating" that with an equivalent amount
of "16-20-0" in the fall, I was doubling the yields per acre of
all our crops. And I didn't have to waste any acreage by leaving
it fallow.
I
handled the problem of weeds with something called 2-4 D, a chemical
weed-control product. I just sprayed it throughout the farm, covering
five or six hundred acres a day. If a little was good, more was
better. Before long I was looking for new and more powerful concoctions
of 2-4 D. Then I began using an excellent variety of herbicide
called 2-4-5 T. In Vietnam they called it Agent Orange.
Once
I had the extra crop yield, of course, I was faced with the problem
of what to do with it. Except occasionally for wheat, none of
the crops I was raising fetched much of a price on the market.
They were more useful as livestock feed, but it was more feed
than I needed for the fifty head of cattle I then had. You didn't
have to be a brain surgeon to come up with the solution: Buy more
cattle.
Around
1970, after I acquired more cattle than I could possibly allow
to graze on my fields, I simply put them in confinement and converted
a grazing operation into a feedlot. I corralled the animals in
roofless pens, 100 or 200 in each, with a trough for feed on one
side of the pen. And I embraced the fundamental challenge of the
feedlot operator: to make the cattle grow as big and fat as possible,
as quickly as possible. I learned how to alter my cattle's natural
dietary habits. Whereas my father and grandfather raised cattle
almost completely on grass and roughage, I now cut out their grazing
rights and fed them only roughage, grain, and protein concentrates.
Gradually I increased the percentage of grain until they were
90% grain-fed. This made their meat extremely fatty and gave it
the nice white flecks you see in the better cuts of beef in your
grocery stores.
This
diet also, unfortunately, upsets the cow's natural digestive system,
which was designed for grass, not grain. As a consequence, many
of my animals suffered vaginal and rectal prolapses-- organs that
belonged on the inside of the cow fell out. It was too expensive
to call a vet every time this happened, so I spent countless hours
stuffing twenty-five pounds of cow back inside the animal and
then sewing the wound, the whole force of a six-hundred-pound
heifer straining against me. I have been out of cattle farming
for fifteen years now, and I will go back to it the day I wake
up with a burning desire to perform another bovine rectal prolapse
operation.
While
I was expanding my feedlot operation, I would acquire cattle at
auction. I might get a hundred head at a single auction, from
maybe twenty different sources. Unfortunately, with so many animals
from different origins concentrated close together, disease became
my worst enemy. When I shifted from a grazing operation to a feedlot,
the health problems of my herd rose dramatically.
It
was a constant battle: Economics Versus Nature. If you don't catch
a cow during the first few days it's symptomatic, there's about
a fifty percent chance it'll die on you. If even five percent
of your cattle die, there's no way you'll ever make a profit.
Unfortunately, cattle in confinement develop more diseases than
you can vaccinate against. In an enclosed space such as a cattle
pen, even those afflicted cattle that successfully respond to
a vaccination can pass the germ to other cattle in the process
of shedding the disease. So, like most feedlot operators, I learned
to put antibiotics in the cattle's feed. It would have been too
time-consuming to try to target only the sick cattle with the
antibiotic-enhanced feed; it was much easier and more logical
to simply put the antibiotics in the feed of all the cattle. Here
again, like all other feedlot operators, I was outsmarted by Nature,
which endowed the bacteria causing these diseases with the capacity
to mutate and gain immunity to any antibiotic science can develop.
I found myself changing antibiotics in the feed every thirty days
or so, and they were becoming less and less effective.
Sometimes
the drugs I used to inoculate cattle were later determined to
be dangerous to human health and were banned. But the government
always seemed to be sufficiently cooperative with agribusiness
to make sure that the stockpiles of the suspect drug inventoried
by the drug companies were sold before the ban went into effect.
Once the banned drugs were in farmers' hands, they were used until
exhausted.
After
bovine diseases, flies constitute the greatest hazard to feedlot
operations. With every cow in a pen producing twenty-five pounds
of manure in a day, the flies can get so thick that they actually
threaten a cow's ability to breathe. Trying to do something about
the flies persecuting them, cows sometimes kick up so much dust
that they can contract what is called dust pneumonia. But the
great promise of chemical agriculture is that every problem represents
merely another challenge to science, and the scientific fix for
the fly problem was insecticide. Early in the morning, I would
fill up a fly fogger with insecticide and spray great clouds of
it over the whole operation. It would, of course, fall into the
feed and the water of the cattle, as well as on the trees and
the grass and the crops. In addition, I treated the animals for
grubs--the wormlike larvae of certain insects--by covering their
backs with insecticides that were absorbed through the skin in
order to kill the fly eggs. Naturally, I had neither the time
nor the inclination to think about the possibility of this deadly
chemical passing through the hide into the tissues that would
become somebody's dinner; nor did I for a moment consider my own
hide.
To make cattle grow faster, I didn't restrict myself to merely
forcing upon them an unnatural diet of grain. Like most cattle
farmers today, I used growth hormones similar to the steroids
that misguided muscle-builders use at significant risk to their
own health. From the early Sixties to the late Seventies, the
hormone I used most frequently was diethylstilbestrol, or DES.
I used it not only to stimulate growth but also to cause abortions
in pregnant heifers. (After all, the added weight of a fetus would
have been wasted, since it wasn't going to become hamburger.)
During the years that I used the hormone, the debate raged over
whether or not it could be carcinogenic to humans. Finally, in
the late Seventies, the government banned the use of DES, but
since it was so cheap and effective, many feedlot operators bought
up as much product as possible for use after it was no longer
available for sale. I regret to say I was one of them. When my
DES ran out, about two years after the ban went into effect, I
continued to use a whole bunch of new and improved growth hormones.
In those days, I never met a chemical I didn't like.
Most
Americans don't have any idea how well the Department of Agriculture
protects the grower at the expense of the consumer. When a chemical
is banned from use, a farmer or livestock operator who has the
chemical in stock has a choice: either to lose money by disposing
of the product, or to use it and take the risk of getting caught
breaking the law. How severe is that risk? Well, if you use a
banned product in your cattle feed, you have to face the prospect
that the government is going to inspect one out of every 250,000
carcasses. They will test this carcass not for all banned substances,
but just for a small fraction of them. And even if they detect
some residue of a banned substance, and even if they're able to
trace the carcass to the ranch that produced it, the guilty rancher
is likely at most to receive a stern letter with a strongly worded
warning. I never met a rancher who suffered in any way from breaking
any regulation meant to protect the safety of our meat. The whole
procedure is, in short, a charade.
I
didn't lose too much sleep over breaking the rules. I had bigger
worries.
Even
though I had increased crop yields dramatically, even though I
could now grow a heifer to 1,100 pounds in just 15 months instead
of the 30 months it used to take, even though I had bought or
leased many of my neighbors farms and increased my acreage fortyfold,
it was getting harder and harder to make ends meet. The chemicals
themselves were expensive, and every year I had to use more chemical
fertilizer and more antibiotics to get the same result as the
year before. And the cattle continued to get sick and sometimes
die in spite of my best efforts.
I
was working 18-hour days, and feeling less and less secure financially.
I had dug myself into a chemical pit so deep I didn't have time
to do anything except keep digging. Only my wife, Willow Jeane,
would occasionally comment to me: "Are you sure we're going in
the right direction?" She would note that the trees were starting
to die, and that in spite of the herbicides, the weed problem
seemed to be getting worse. And she wasn't at all pleased the
day I came in with so much herbicide on my clothing that my mere
presence killed off the houseplants.
I
used to have lunch once a week in Great Falls with a group of
about 15 Montana feedlot operators. We figured that by sharing
our experiences we could help each other find the right technological
solution for every problem we encountered. We didn't question
the underlying theology of our revolution: a magic chemical bullet
would cure any problem we ran into. We stuck by that theology
in spite of the mounting evidence that every bullet caused more
problems.
Of
those 15 feedlot operators who were in business 15 years ago,
I believe just one may still be in business today.
Our
challenge had been to defeat Nature. And we found that we could
do it. But only by destroying the land, and with it, ourselves.
As
long as I've known Willow Jeane, I've seen terror in her eyes
only once. It was on a snowy winter's night in 1979. I was lying
in a hospital bed, facing an emergency operation for a tumor that
had been found that same day on my spine. Willow Jeane's first
husband had died of cancer when he was 28, and the prospect of
widowhood once more was a bit much even for her. I was damned
sure I was going to survive, but my trusted friend and surgeon,
Alex, had told that if the tumor was inside the cord, there was
less than one chance in a million I'd walk again. As long as I
could move my feet, the operation could wait until morning, which
was the earliest he could get there because of the blizzard.
I
stayed up all night, moving my feet and thinking. I was thinking
about what counted and what didn't.
Having
10,000 acres and 7,000 head of cattle didn't count. Having 30
trucks and 20 tractors and seven combines didn't count. Having
a $5 million-a-year agribusiness didn't count.
My family counted, and the land counted.
For
some reason, I kept thinking about the soil--the magnetic feel
of cool, dark, loamy, worm-laden soil in my hands. I'd grown up
with my hands in that soil, and I'd always liked the feeling so
much, I rarely troubled to wash them. I thought about how rich
the soil had looked when I was a kid. It didn't look like that
anymore. Now it crumbled in my hands. It was thin as sand. There
were no more worms in it. After all the tons of herbicides and
pesticides and chemical fertilizer I'd poured into it, the soil
looked more like asbestos. The trees on and around the farm were
dying. The birds were gone. The farm was no longer a living, breathing
thing; it was an increasingly precarious chemical equation. I
made up my mind then and there that no matter what the outcome
of my operation, I'd dedicate the rest of my life to restoring
the land to what it had been when I'd had the good fortune to
be born to it.
At
the crack of dawn, I was wheeled into surgery. I awoke in the
intensive care unit, propped up on my side. The first thing I
did was to look down at my feet. With effort, I was able to slide
down the bed so that they could reach the metal bars at the end.
I felt the metal. It was cold to the touch. It was the most euphoric
sensation I've ever known in my life.
When
Alex came to check on me, he explained that, after cutting the
bone off the outside of my spinal column, he had discovered the
tumor not only inside the cord but also extended beneath it. His
only option was to pick a nerve, cut the nerve, and hope the tumor
was attached to it like a fish on a line. Alex picked one, cut
it, and I escaped paralysis with a one-in-a-million operation.
I
kept my promise to the land. I organized a group of chemically
disillusioned fellow farmers to develop environmentally sound
ways to control weeds--our biggest problem--and we came up with
plenty of solutions. That work drew me into politics, and I found
myself running for Congress on a platform of clean air, clean
water and clean food. I might well have won if the bank hadn't
unexpectedly foreclosed on my farm in the middle of a very public
campaign. I sold our land to Hutterites, whose way of life seemed
compatible with organic farming methods. Then I went to Washington
after all, as a lobbyist for the National Farmers Union, and,
among other things, worked to help pass the National Organic Standards
Act of 1990. President Bush signed the bill into law that year.
Eight years later, the standards still have not been agreed upon,
and the law has yet to be put into effect.
After
my tumor operation, I had started studying everything I could
get hold of about the relationship between livestock, farming
and the environment. One summer day in Washington in 1990, I was
sitting with my feet up on my desk, looking out at the Potomac.
I started thinking about all the issues, personal and political,
that were concerning me. I was feeling a growing sense of cynicism
about my work, and about the chances to effect change through
legislation. I knew that most of the bureaucratic subsidies I
was fighting for went to the raising of feed crops, not human
food. I'd read a whole host of depressing statistics about the
loss of rain forests throughout the world, and I knew that a large
part of that rain forest loss came about in order to clear land
for cattle grazing. I'd read, too, that livestock outnumber humans
on the planet by five to one. I'd learned that about 50% of our
water usage in this country is dedicated to livestock production,
and that our natural aquifers were being depleted at an alarming
rate. I'd learned that we were losing topsoil at a rate of one
inch every sixteen years, and that much of that loss of topsoil
was related to cattle grazing and to the chemically intensive
methods that factory farmers were using (and that I had once used).
I'd seen rivers polluted from the waste of cattle and pigs and
chickens, and seen birds disappear from the skies over fields
sprayed with herbicides that were meant to facilitate the growth
of crops used to feed those animals. I'd put many thousands of
head of cattle into confinement and seen how they suffered from
unnatural conditions. I knew that while a billion people went
to sleep hungry, the overfed part of the world was busy feeding
sixteen pounds of grain to cattle in order to make one pound of
beef. I'd seen countless friends suffer from heart disease. I'd
seen the cancer rate in America increase dramatically. My own
health was hardly exemplary: I weighed 350 pounds, my cholesterol
topped 300, my blood pressure was off the charts, and I was getting
nosebleeds.
Suddenly
the circle came together for me. We were, as a civilization, making
one big mistake. This mistake was killing us as individuals just
as it was destroying our land and our forests and our rivers.
We were eating animals, and it wasn't working. If those animals
had set out to take their revenge on us, they couldn't have done
a better job.
And
I became, right then and there, something I never dreamed I'd
become: a vegetarian.
Within
a year of eating no meat, my health problems all started to go
away. Not only did I feel better physically, but I felt better
knowing that there was one answer to many of the different ills
afflicting both ourselves and our environment.
Everything
revolves around the fork.
We
must ask ourselves as a culture whether we want to embrace the
change that must come or resist it. I would love to see organic
farming replace chemical agriculture. I would love to know that
I've wandered into my nation's heartland by the sweet smell of
grain and not the forbidding smell of excrement. I can no longer
fathom what there is to be afraid of except the status quo.
While
writing my book I returned to Montana. At the largest commercial
supermarket in Great Falls, I could hardly believe my eyes. Soy
milk and rice milk on the shelves. Soy hot dogs, veggie burgers,
tofu, seitan. It's not hard anymore to be a vegetarian in America.
If it can be done in Great Falls, it can be done anywhere."
From
"MAD COWBOY" by Howard F. Lyman with Glen Merzer. COPYRIGHT
©1998 by Howard Lyman and Glen Merzer. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted
by permission of Scribner, An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
