Authors: Maureen Ogle
The Coleman family’s strategy for survival unfolded against a backdrop of renewed enthusiasm for organic agriculture, which had first gained substantive support in the United States back in the 1930s. During that decade, prolonged drought and soil exhaustion spawned spectacular dust storms; massive clouds of dust spun from topsoil rolled across the plains states, carrying their gritty rain as far as the East Coast. The devastation prompted some in the agricultural establishment to urge farmers to return to more “organic” approaches to working the land. But support for this alternative to factory farming waned under pressure of wartime demand for food, and in the 1950s, alternative agriculture and the establishment parted company thanks to what plant breeder Richard Harwood described as a McCarthyist “mood of intolerance”
among the nation’s scientists. He remembered that decade as one when human and scientific “arrogance” spawned an “intellectual wasteland.” “I was . . . the most arrogant bastard that you want to run across,” he said later. He and his colleagues assumed that science would “dominate the universe. And we proceeded as if [it] would,” thanks in part, he admitted, to their belief that supplies of “very cheap energy” would never run dry. (Harwood eventually concluded that his arrogance was misplaced. In the 1970s, he began conducting research on sustainable agriculture and by the late 1990s occupied an endowed university chair in the subject.)
But in the wake
of the environmental alarms and food famine of the 1960s and 1970s, many Americans questioned the wisdom of an agricultural model that relied more on petroleum products than on nature. At what point, some asked, did the environmental costs of antibiotics, commercial fertilizers, and pesticides outweigh the need for cheap food? If agriculture itself was toxic, would global demand for food eventually lay waste to the planet? Questions like these multiplied, especially after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) targeted agriculture in general and livestock operations in particular as major sources of water pollution.
Among those who questioned the status quo was Ken Monfort, and in 1971, he instructed his feedlot employees to isolate a thousand yearlings from the rest of the herd and feed them rations free of antibiotics and DES. In addition, the animals went to slaughter minus the chemical dip used to destroy parasites that otherwise burrowed into their flesh. Monfort sold his E-Colo-Beef to health food stores on the West Coast at a price about 40 percent higher than that of his conventional meat. (The brand name is not as unfortunate as it now sounds to our ears:
E. coli
bacteria had not yet achieved celebrity status.) The project didn’t last long. The cattle needed 10 to 15 percent longer than conventional stock to reach market weight, which meant that Monfort spent 10 percent more on feed. Once slaughtered, the carcasses yielded less meat because three-quarters of the livers were diseased and parasite-infected flesh had to be cut away. “When you start trimming
away $2 a pound meat to get rid of grubs it starts getting expensive,” admitted a Monfort executive. (A company vice president later described the short-lived project as “a colossal blunder
. . . that [would not] happen again.”)
But Monfort’s failure did not alter his view that Americans needed to rethink their appetite for meat. “Food is a scarce item,”
he argued. “It will be scarcer.” He openly supported “small planet” advocates who urged Americans to feed the world by eating less meat. The idea gained credence in part because of the food famine, but also because of the work of Frances Moore Lappé, a California social worker. Her 1971 book
Diet for a Small Planet
popularized the idea that meat production was both inefficient and wasteful because farmers planted millions of acres to raise food for livestock rather than humans and polluted air and water in the process. Ken Monfort agreed. “It’s obvious
humans should come first,” he said, and livestock “last on the list” of those getting grain. He argued that cattle producers could conserve grain by keeping herds on grass until they were at least two years old instead of sending them to feedlots at twelve or fourteen months. In 1976 he predicted that beef consumption would drop by 15 to 20 percent as Americans cut back on meat in order to provide food for hungry nations. (As we’ve seen, he was right about the decline, but wrong about the reason.)
Other pockets of support for alternative agriculture flourished here and there. In 1971, alt-farmers in New England organized the National Organic Farmers Association (later the Northeast Organic Farming Association), and an organic farming group in Maine had five hundred members by the mid-seventies. Stewart Brand’s
Whole Earth Catalog
, first published in 1968, provided fringe farmers with information and inspired the creation of dozens of “alternative technology centers” in North America, many of which included a gardening or farming component and more than a few of which were attached to universities and colleges. The agricultural outliers proved to be a mixed bag. When reporters for the
New York Times
went looking for alternative farmers in the 1970s and early 1980s, they found college professors, an anthropologist, a scientist, and a former official of the Federal Trade Commission, hardly the long-haired dope smokers of the stereotype. At the center of
this early national nexus stood J. I. Rodale (born Jerome Irving Cohen) and his son Robert of Pennsylvania. For decades, the Rodales had published magazines and books devoted to organic gardening and farming but otherwise worked in relative isolation, scorned by most (the “Don Quixote
of the compost heap,” wrote one reporter in 1966). During the sixties and seventies, however, their reputations and profits soared as a new generation of farmers embraced hoe and compost.
More important, however, advocates of alternative farming elbowed their way back into the scientific and academic mainstream, most notably at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where Barry Commoner established the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems. Commoner, a scientist who picked up the environmental standard after Rachel Carson’s death in 1964, urged Americans to regard agriculture as part of a larger whole, although for quite different reasons from those John Davis elaborated when he’d developed the concept of agribusiness. An “ecosystem,”
Commoner said, “cannot be divided into manageable parts,” and agriculture was but a piece of a “larger, over-all system of life which occupies a thin layer on the surface of the earth—the biosphere.” Commoner warned that Americans courted disaster because they ignored the damage inflicted by industrial agriculture’s “massive intervention into nature.”
Commoner’s uncommon viewpoint and his scientific credentials attracted others who questioned the tenets of mainstream science and agriculture. Among them was physicist William Lockeretz. During the sixties, he, like many of his colleagues, was dismayed by the role that the scientific establishment played in the Vietnam War and by extension his attachment to that establishment. In 1971, he took a job at Commoner’s center to investigate the science of alternative agriculture. Lockeretz shied away from the mysticism espoused by some alternative enthusiasts; indeed, he avoided using the word
organic
because of its hippie connotation. “As far as our methods
and our ideology we are very solidly within mainstream academic research,” he said. “The only thing that is unconventional is the particular system that we are studying.”
Lockeretz’s wariness was justified. At the time, and regardless of their credentials, supporters of alternative agriculture faced not just scorn but outright hostility. Some of it was perhaps warranted: many advocates linked alt-agriculture to mysticism, and others painted farming as a pastoral utopia. Farmers, wrote one essayist, must be allowed to seek “voluntary simplicity”
and “must derive happiness and humane satisfaction from a life” free of the “consumerism, leisure, and delirious pursuit of novelty that characterizes [
sic
] our society.” Why farmers alone should do so was not clear, and that perspective ignored the history of American agriculture, which was a tale of farm families demanding access to “consumerism” and a standard of living on par with that of urban Americans. Still, at a moment when global food shortages captured headlines, it’s not surprising that many in the agricultural establishment scoffed at the idea of returning to old-fashioned techniques of crop and livestock production. Chief among them was Earl Butz, who shouldered the role of head cheerleader for conventional agriculture and made no effort to conceal his disdain for those who rejected it. That was obvious when he and Wendell Berry butted heads during a 1978 debate. Berry, a Kentucky college professor who owned a small farm where he cultivated his land using horses rather than machinery (“I like horses,”
he explained; using them allowed him to remain independent of “the oil companies”), had emerged as the poet laureate, as it were, of alternative agriculture. In 1977, he published
The Unsettling of America
, a critique of, among other things, Butz’s view of agriculture. Berry believed that “independent”
farmers embodied the “traditional values” necessary to a good society: “thrift, stewardship, private property, [and] political liberties.” But those values had been eroded by ones rooted in the “urban industrial” worldview. Butz dismissed Berry and his ilk as muddle-headed idealists, able to spin agricultural fantasies only because “modern, scientific,
technological agriculture” had freed them from the drudgery of producing their own food. Agriculture was not a romantic retreat for poets and professors but a “machine”
designed to make food and fiber. “We can go back
to organic agriculture in this country if we must,” said Butz, but “someone must decide which 50 million of our people will starve!”
Faced with such derision, it’s unlikely that alt-agriculturalists would have made much progress moving into the mainstream on their own. But they benefited from the support of three other groups. First were environmentalists, at the time the most well organized and well funded of the public interest advocate-activists. Emboldened by the EPA’s linkage of agriculture and pollution, eco-warriors argued that factory farming relied too heavily on nonrenewable resources; that too many farms had been carved from fragile, unsuitable terrain; and that livestock confinement systems, pesticides, fertilizers, and the like were poisoning land, air, and water. Nor were these head-in-the-cloud dreamers. They were well trained in Naderist watchdog/attack-dog tactics, including litigation, which had become an effective tool for negotiating social change; the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, for example, mounted court challenges to the use of hormones in livestock production. They also knew how to work the halls of Congress, where rule one was: Compromise and negotiate or go home.
The rural activists fighting corporate farming also supported alternative agriculture, in part for a practical reason: there were so few farmers and rural residents that those working to improve their plight could gain influence only by forging alliances with other advocacy groups. But the goals of the anticorporate crusaders dovetailed with those of alternative agriculturalists. As the cofounder of a rural advocacy organization put it, struggling small farmers needed “practical alternatives”
to factory farming. By the mid-1970s, his group, the Center for Rural Affairs (CRA), one of the earliest and longest-standing rural interest groups, was sponsoring research into “appropriate farm technology
and organic methods” with the goal of helping farmers wean themselves from expensive, energy-inefficient inputs. This was no hippie-feel-good, Garden-of-Eden project. CRA’s leaders grabbed science-based information as fast as the staff at Commoner’s laboratories generated it.
Scholars and university faculty, especially rural sociologists, most of whom worked at land grant institutions, also supported and enriched the alternative agriculture ethos. Like so many scholarly fields, sociology was transformed by the activist idealism of the 1960s and 1970s and by the Hightower critique of land grant research agendas. As important, by that time, many sociologists had concluded that the Green Revolution—the global project to transplant modern agriculture to impoverished countries—was harming rather than helping communities, farmers, and the environment; they communicated their findings and their dismay in scholarly journals and at conferences. All of it inspired sociologists to ponder the negative social and economic consequences of industrial agriculture. Although Americans prided themselves on feeding the world, these academic critics argued that everyone paid a high price for that accomplishment, whether as family farmers run off the land, rural main streets lined with empty shops, or environmental damage. Like alt-agriculturalists and environmentalists, many sociologists framed their work around a holistic perspective: farmer and field could not be isolated from the “natural” environment or from communities near, dependent on, and catering to agriculture.
Numbers and diversity gave the nascent alt-agriculture alliance the clout needed to gain traction with the establishment. They pressured the EPA to maintain its scrutiny of agriculture as a source of pollution, and the 1976 farm bill contained legislation aimed at creating more markets for small farmers: “farm-to-consumer” projects, or as they’re called now, farmers’ markets. In 1979, the USDA sponsored a study of organic agriculture in the United States and Europe. “Energy shortages,
food safety, and environmental concerns have all contributed to the demand for more comprehensive information on organic farming technology,” wrote Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland. The final report “strongly”
recommended that the USDA support research and education that would “address the needs and problems of organic farmers.” The 1981 farm bill authorized “multidisciplinary organic farming research projects” aimed at implementing the report’s ideas and recommendations. Garth Youngberg, a political scientist who chaired the organic study team, was hired by the USDA to coordinate those programs.
It’s not clear how much Mel Coleman knew about these activities in the early eighties, but this much we do know: he already boasted a healthy environmental perspective because experience had taught him and his family to avoid using chemicals and drugs on their ranch. Back in the 1930s, a mining company had dumped residue into a creek near Coleman land, killing the water’s fish, an event that stayed in Mel’s memory for the rest of his life. “It will permanently warp you
to have to deal with something like that,” he said. In the late 1940s, the family had dusted cattle with the insecticide DDT. The experience left a bad taste in Mel’s mouth and bad air in his lungs: the chemical would soak his coat so thoroughly that he had trouble breathing, even out in the open air of the Colorado range. As for that farmers’ darling of the 1950s, DES, he wanted none of it. The first time he encountered cattle dosed with the hormone, the animals’ strange behavior “made [his] . . . lip curl.”
He was equally skeptical about antibiotics, which the family used briefly in the 1960s to protect calves from pneumonia. But in the mid-1970s during an outbreak of “scours,” a form of dysentery, Coleman and his veterinarian dosed calves with antibiotics to no avail. Fifteen percent of the animals died. “I believed
that the harmful bacteria had developed a resistance to antibiotics, and that scared me,” he said. “Right there, we stopped using [them].” Make no mistake: in 1979, Coleman wasn’t running a 100 percent “natural” operation. He inoculated newborns and fed his cattle hay grown with manufactured fertilizers as well as protein supplements that contained synthetic materials.