Graze Anatomy

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SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS

Humans can't eat grass, an assertion that sounds odd, considering that something like three-quarters of all human nutrition comes from wheat, rice, and corn, all of which are grasses. But what we eat is actually their seeds, the dense package of complex carbohydrates that is the specialty of annual grasses. Perennial grasses, which are more common, devote a larger proportion of their energy to roots, stems, and leaves, and the building block of these is cellulose.

Humans cannot convert cellulose to protein, but cows can, thanks to their highly specialized stomachs-rumens, as in ruminants. "The rumen is the most magical chemical factory in the world," Winter says. "It can turn cellulose into meat." It is a highly specialized bio-digester; if it didn't exist, biotechnologists would be trying to invent it.

The health of the miniature ecosystem inside the rumen parallels the health of the larger ecosystem of the perennial pasture. The health of that larger system sponsors a rich microbial world beneath the soil, where lowly creatures like dung beetles and earthworms grind away at the task of cycling nutrients. Perennial grasses build deep roots that can extend more than 10 feet below the surface. Shallow-rooted annual crops rapidly deplete trace minerals such as calcium, magnesium, and iodine, but the roots of perennials act like elevators, lifting these minerals back into the system and making them available to plants and everything else on up the food chain.

Winter says almost every grain-fed cow has excessive acid in its body, largely because of the lack of calcium and magnesium in its diet. This acidity allows a whole range of parasites and diseases to gain a foothold. A grass diet neutralizes the problem and passes the benefits to humans, who, because of our narrow diets, are also short on these same trace minerals.

Grass-fed beef and milk also bring us the benefits of fat. The modern wave of obesity has made us fatophobes, but nutritional research is telling us we are obese and prone to heart disease not because we eat fat but because we eat the wrong kind of fat. Grain-fed beef is especially high in omega-6 fats and cholesterol. Grass-fed beef and dairy products are lower in both and higher in omega-3 fats and conjugated linoleic acid, which reduce the risk of heart disease and are lacking in our diets.Unlike the industrial feedlot system, which is designed to channel all inputs into a single product-meat protein-grass-fed livestock operations must focus on a series of complex, interlocking ecosystems. By paying attention to these, grass farmers are rewarded with their byproduct: beef or milk. Ideally, health resonates throughout these systems, including the human body.

Economists illuminate this idea with the concept of "externalities"-costs that are invisible to the market. As a former CPA, Churchill knows that being attentive to ecosystem health is a way of bringing externalities into the accounting process. The enterprise has to be profitable, and it is. Churchill and hundreds of farmers like him have found that they can take productive corn and soybean land and convert it to perennial pasture, and in the process make more money than highly subsidized corn and soybean farmers. This flies in the face of the assumptions of agricultural economists worldwide, who have traditionally believed that the highest and best use of the world's most productive lands is row-crop agriculture.

Churchill's balance sheet says otherwise, raising the possibility that entire regions of the globe, including the American heartland, don't need to remain environmental sacrifice zones.

Continued...