you can’t run away on harvest day 227eating meat several times each month. Small, irrigated gardens of beans
and leafy greens provided supplementary nutrition, but in this climate it’s
animal products that can offer the prospect of ending malnutrition. Each
goat-owning family makes an agreement with the donor organizations
(Heifer International and the local group ACBIODESA) to give the fi rst
female offspring to another family, thus moving their own status from
“poor” to “benefactor”—a powerfully important distinction in terms of lo-
cal decision- making and further stewardship of the land. For the same
money, a shipment of donated wheat, rice, or corn would only have main-
tained the region’s widespread poverty through another few months, and
deepened its environmental crisis. Between vegetable or animal solutions
to that region’s problems, my vote goes to the goats.
The mountainous part of the United States where I live, though nei-
ther destitute nor desiccated, has its own challenges. The farms here are
small and steep. Using diesel tractors to turn the earth every spring (where
that’s even possible) sends our topsoil downhill into the creeks with every
rain, creating many problems at once. One of the region’s best options for
feeding ourselves and our city neighbors may be pasture- based hoof stock
and poultry. Cattle, goats, sheep, turkeys, and chickens all have their own
efficient ways of turning steep, grass- covered hillsides into food, while
fertilizing the land discreetly with their manure. They do it without drink-
ing a drop of gasoline.
Managed grazing is healthier for most landscapes, in fact, than annual
tilling and planting, and far more fuel- efficient. Grass is a solar- powered,
infinitely renewable resource. As consumers discover the health benefi ts
of grass- based meat, more farmers may stop plowing land and let animals
go to work on it instead. A crucial part of this enterprise involves recover-
ing the heritage cattle, poultry, and other livestock that can fatten on pas-
ture grass. It’s news to most people that chickens, turkeys, and pigs can
eat foliage at all, since we’re used to seeing them captive and fed. Even
cattle are doing less and less grass- eating, since twentieth-century breed-
ing programs gave us animals that tolerate (barely) a grain- based diet for
weight gain during their final eight months in confinement. For decades,
the public has demanded no meat animals but these.
More lately, though, conditions inside CAFOs have been exposed by