Speakers Share Their Visions at Sustainable Ag Meeting

2/20/2007

Agweek (Grand Forks, ND)

By Mikkel Pates

Feb. 20--ABERDEEN, S.D. -- The topics of "good" and "bad" livestock development were keynote topics at the Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture Society's 28th annual winter conference Feb. 9 and 10 in Aberdeen, S.D.

Some 450 people attended the meeting, with prophet like speakers touting the organic-sustainable way, while slamming the "bad" concentrated animal feeding operations.

John Ikerd, a Missouri professor emeritus from the University of Missouri-Columbia, described the "bad" of CAFOs. The "good" involves organic production and the soil-balancing that goes with it.

That was described by Dr. Paul Detloff, a veterinarian from Arcadia, Wis., and a consultant for Organic Valley, a fast-expanding organic food production co-op.

Ikerd, 67, says he's known as a radical outsider -- destructive and disruptive -- because he preaches against CAFOs and what he calls their secondary economic and social community, as well as public health.

It didn't start out that way, he says. Ikerd grew up on a small dairy farm in southwest Missouri and obtained all of his degrees from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He became a specialist in forecasting cattle and hog prices.

He went to Oklahoma and North Carolina. He eventually headed the department of Extension Agricultural Economics at the University of Georgia during the farm financial crisis in the mid-1980s.

"I began to realize that what I'd been teaching was more a part of the problem than part of the solution," Ikerd says.

Ikerd started questioning the system and says he soon found himself on the outside of faculty selection and advisory committees that would advance his career.

He started thinking of the "specialization, standardization system" of agriculture -- the industrial system -- as a "resource-using" system that uses up the fossil energy or human capital.

"It doesn't quote 'waste' resources, investing for the benefit of some future generation," he says.

In 1988, Ikerd moved back to the University of Missouri, where he brought in close to $500,000 to support sustainable agriculture programs.

"As long as I was bringing in my own money, including half of my salary, I could do what I wanted to," he says.

In the mid-1990s, he created new waves when he gave a bad review of a University of Missouri economic study that promoted CAFOs as rural development.

Business records for hog farms in Missouri showed the same number of hogs in a CAFO could support three times more people on smaller farms that also were dependent on hogs, Ikerd wrote at the time.

"You'd have thought I'd committed blasphemy," Ikerd recalls. The powers at the university "wanted to destroy my paper and shut me up." Even though he didn't have tenure, he had academic freedom, Ikerd says.

From Aberdeen, Ikerd was scheduled to travel to North Dakota, where he planned to warn people "not allow your health to be threatened" by CAFOs, he says, but adds that this can't simply be a "guise for wanting to keep CAFOs out."

"Virtually every scientific study that has been done over the past 40 years has documented the detrimental effect (of) CAFOs on rural communities. The only positive effects at all are the aggregate economic effects, without any consideration to economic equity," he says. CAFOs concentrate benefits to "a few, but at the expense of the others."

He says 20 counties in Missouri have passed health ordinances restricting the location and operation of CAFOs. Rural communities have a "right to decide when their health is at risk," he says, and adds that as long as they can document the health risk, they "can pass ordinances that are more stringent than the state health ordinances." Supporters of CAFOs want to keep the issue in zoning and the "nuisance area" of law and not into the public health area.

North Dakota farm groups, including the North Dakota Farm Bureau, have been working to ease the way for livestock development by creating a statewide standard for animal zoning, enforced by the state health department, that can't be made more stringent on a township-by-township basis. Livestock development has lagged in the state, compared with surrounding states, despite an abundance of relatively inexpensive feed.

Ikerd says CAFOs should be avoided.

"People say, 'Either get big or get out.' I say either get small or get out. We can produce as much or more meat with the sustainable operations -- organic, biodynamic, grass-based -- as we're producing out on the feedlots. It just takes more people.

What's wrong with having more farmers? What's wrong with having more people out in rural communities working on the farms?" He says the farmer's share of the food dollar is so small that the consumer costs would only increase about 1 percent.

For the past five years, Detloff has been a consulting veterinarian for Organic Valley Family of Farm, a LaFarge, Wis.-based organic food marketing cooperative that started with seven farmers in 1988. The company had $330 million in 2006 and expects sales of $480 million in 2007.

About 80 percent is in dairy products.

Today, the co-op has 680 farms supplying milk and big ambitions. Another 140 farms will be added in 2007, and another 400 are in transition. It has 31 "pools" for obtaining milk from Maine to Texas to North Carolina. Organic Valley owns only one plant and co-packs with 74 other plants, all of which are certified organic.

A native of Grand Meadow, Minn., near Rochester, Detloff went to the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, where he earned a veterinary degree.

Detloff initially headed a five- person "corporate clinic practice" and then returned to solo practice in 1982.

"I had some clients that went organic and started working with their soils and started balancing them and started cleaning them up by not putting any chemicals or salt-based fertilizers or herbicides," Detloff says.

The newly organic dairymen were selling to Organic Valley, which was started only 85 miles away.

As he saw the organic herds "flip" to better health, he lost some of his veterinary income. Detloff himself became disenchanted with conventional farming techniques and started to go to Midwest bio ag classes to learn agronomy principles.

"Anything that ends with a '-cide' kills cells is impeding biological activity. In the soil you have bacteria, viruses, fungi, nematodes, amoebas, algae and earthworms," Detloff says. "They're all integral in keeping soil balanced and tilt in the soil. Your '-cide' type of farming destroys microbiology." Detloff established "Dr.

Paul's Lab," which supplies organic-approved medicines for cattle.

Today, Detloff works for Organic Valley, teaching farmers about putting cat ions in the proper ratio and proper acidity.

Dairymen need to grow "full-stemmed, highly mineralized, high 'brix' plant to feed the rumen," he says.

"The rumen is made for grasses, not seeds -- corn silage, your grains. You can feed a little bit, but if you feed too much, your pH of your rumen drops, and it's called acidosis. And you get a buildup of hydrogen in every cell of the body." That interferes with the immune system, reproduction and longevity of the cow, Detloff says.

Organic Valley established its own rules for organic practices before USDA set up its National Organic Program.

Later, a 15-member National Organic Standards Board was set up to advise the NOP. The final list for standards was set up in October 2002. Independent certifying agencies will certify farms according to rules established by the NOP.

But Organic Valley goes beyond the national standards by not allowing the use of oxytocin to treat milk-ejection problems. The co-op also is leading the way toward a shift toward keeping cows on true pasture, instead of the dry lot dairies that had been allowed under organic standards.

Detloff talks about nine "tools" provided by Mother Nature, including aloe vera and other botanicals.

"We make tinctures, which are extracts of plants, where we draw molecules into alcohol or an apple cider vinegar.

These tinctures are full of energy. There are tinctures for antibiotics, tinctures that replace hormones. What they find so exciting is we can replace all of the drugs that are commonly being used from Mother Nature's warehouse."