”I don’t believe in arable farming, it takes out the
fertility of the soil. We only have fifty years supply of phosphorus left from
Morocco”, says Ado Bloemendal, who has worked ten years as an advisor for
intensive grassland management in the Netherlands. The cycles of nutrients are
disrupted by plowing and tilling the land but in permanent grasslands the cycles
be closed, and very little nutrients will be lost.
Under the brand of Pure Graze, 50 farmers are now working
with the intensive production of grass-fed chicken, pork and cattle as well as
dairy cows. Fifteen of the farmers are also marketing under the common brand.
Some of the farms are organically managed and no farmer use pesticides or
chemical fertilizer. There is very little use of antibiotics and if they after
all other options are exhausted have to treat an animal, the meat will not be
sold under the brand.
For cows, the grazing is very intensive, they just stay a
few hours in the same place, this is mirroring the movement of herds in the
wild. Through intensive grazing the quality of the grass and the productivity
are very high. In addition, it regenerates the grassland. “Grassland” is
perhaps not the right term. ”The invention of chemical fertilizers and the
dominance of English ryegrass are linked”, says Ado. This is because English ryegrass and the
other grasses are favoured by nitrogen fertilizers and therefore outcompetes
other plants; the perfect lawns are terrible mono-cultures. But it is better
for both the cows and nature to have a much bigger variation of plants. Pure
Graze supplies a few different seed mixes, for cows they have a mix with eight
clover varieties, six grasses and eight herbs including caraway, parsley,
chicory, pimpernel, dandelion, yarrow. Ado calls
it his salad buffet, perhaps borrowing from Joel Salatin on the other side of
the Atlantic.
The productivity of the system is very high. Dairy cows in
this system produce up to 20,000 kg of milk per hectare of land. Almost all the
food comes from the grasslands, mostly as direct grazing, but some of the grass
is cut for silage for winter feed. Diary cows normally get 2 kg of beet fiber
is added to the diet for energy and fiber. As cows get almost no supplemental
feeding and they are moved around in the pasture, there is very little risk of
the pasture being overmanured. To get
the right perspective of this amazing productivity: 20,000 kg of milk has 700
kg protein, 800 kg fat and 12 million calories. This equals the energy
(calories) for some 14-15 people, protein for some 40 people and fat for 30
people in one year. You could still feed more people with a bumper crop of ten
or eleven tons of wheat from the same area but only with massive investments in
fertilizers and pesticides.
[i]
Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2014, Meat
Atlas.
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