By PETER SCHUTT
Dec. 22, 2014
I recently read Edward O Wilson’s newest book “A Window on Eternity”. It’s a short chronicle of his time in a national park in Mozambique that an American has taken on as a personal mission to rehabilitate. The park’s large animals were massacred over two decades in the late 20th century during a civil war, in order to feed the fighters. Wilson went to the area to help figure out what effects the extermination of the antelope, etc., had on the overall ecosystem.

The main impact, he says, is that because the tens of thousands of grazing animals were no longer around to poop all over the park, now there were any dung beetles or other insects that feed on the poop; moreover, the birds, reptiles and small mammals that feed off the insects also vanished or went into steep decline. That much is pretty easy to understand.

What is much more challenging to contemplate is the likelihood of more adverse effects – impacts on organisms that we can’t see, either because they are much below the soil surface or because they are too small for the naked eye to see. (As an aside, but of critical importance, is Wilson’s estimation that modern man has identified only about 20% of the millions of species of plants and animals on or in the earth. There’s a lot out there about which we have no idea!)

And so we come to Winchester Farm. And chicken shit. And cow patties.

We have considered converting our farm to be certified organic by the USDA. Our practices actually are right in line with the USDA’s regs, except when it comes to nitrogen we apply to our corn crop. Corn, even non-GMO heritage seed, requires a good bit of nitrogen in the soil – generally more than can be added thru cover crops and cow manure. So we use commercially manufactured, high quality chemical nitrogen.

The best “organic” source of nitrogen is chicken litter, which is chicken manure mixed with bedding. We would need about 60 tons of litter for the 60 acres of corn we grow for our livestock each year. And we can’t produce that amount from the chickens we have on the farm, so we’d have to buy chicken litter from conventional chicken growers.

Now we get to the problem – large commercial chicken operations start their chicks from their first week drinking water that has antibiotics added to it. They get these antibiotics every day. Also, commercial chicken growers add arsenic to their feed to control parasites and enhance weight gain. According to the USDA, most of this arsenic passes right thru the bird and into their poop.

The USDA allows chicken litter to be applied to soil in certified organic farming operations. So the arsenic and antibiotics to into the soil, along with the nitrogen. They delegate responsibility for monitoring arsenic levels to each state. I don’t think any monitoring is done on the level of antibiotics in chicken litter.

At Winchester Farm we have invested 10 years in allowing the soil to heal. We know this because we watch what happens in and on top of the soil. As the soil heals, we now see dung beetles and other organisms consume cow patties within 24 hours; here today gone tomorrow, poop going back into the soil.

We now have nightcrawlers teeming in pastures where they had been extinguished by conventional farming practices. We have field larks and bobwhite quail reappearing after 10 years of absence. And we don’t know what else is happening in the soil that we can’t see. But we have to expect that, as long as we work with nature and keep unnatural elements out of the soil as best we can, the outcomes can only be for the best.
So for now, we’ll pass on the USDA organic certification. At least until we can figure out a healthy way to become certified.