#37
01 / 07/ 2022

Cattle Man

For the past few years I have not been a meat eater. My partner Cecilia and I made the decision to go vegan after binge watching a bunch of Earthing Ed videos and after noticing animals had souls. Then we went to Paris, and I ended up eating whatever I wanted, because DUH! I had the most wonderfully prepared roasted veal. Baby cow. Pretty much as hardcore predator-carnivore as you can go in polite society. Now, I am pretty much vegetarian, the exceptions being big events such as my friend Emmen's recent wedding party where delicious Nihari was served. How could I resist?

All this is to say, I had no idea what was going on with consumer beef prices until recently. The prices of meat has risen, on average, 12% across the board. I have heard that this is because of a system that is rigged to suit meat packers. The “Big Four”—Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef—purchase and process 85 percent of beef in the United States.

While prices for beef are higher for consumers, the price American ranchers can get for cattle are low. The rancher in this interview lays out why that may be. One of the most striking reasons is related to competitive global trade, which is compounded by marketing loop holes. Such as the allowing of meat packers to label meat as "Made in America" even if the cattle is raised in other countries, as long as it is packed in the USA.

With all this in mind, I set out to make some photos for my project documenting small farms in Washtenaw County…

Meet John Cox, the farmer behind Baseline Beef.

Woah, John its sorta cold out…

Nice, as my father would say, that is a “great coat.”

After making these photos, I called up John and asked him to tell me about his life. The following has been edited for length and clarity. I hope to return to the farm soon to record a proper podcast with John. As you will see he is a well of knowledge and a really beautiful soul.

How did you get into farming?

Well, I didn't grow up doing any farming. I became an engineer and worked for General Motors on powertrain type stuff, then a few other places. I wasn't bad at it or anything. It just got to be where, you get good at it and you think, okay, this is interesting but all I am doing all day is sitting in front of a computer. At the last place I worked there was a long window. I found myself looking out of it and staring down another long winter working from eight to five, and never seeing the sunlight. So I decided I wanted to do something a little more natural.

I had an environmental bent for a long time. I was even a vegetarian for a while after reading about the horrors of industrial animal agriculture. Eventually, I dug deeper into farming and realized, of course there's different ways of doing things. 

I interned at a farm called Tillers International, near Kalamazoo and lived there for about a year. They teach homesteading type classes, blacksmithing, timber framing, even broom making. Their farming related stuff is focused on draft animals. They have a program teaching farmers in other countries how to use them to improve their crop yields.

After the internship I went to Mozambique for three months, and after that was finished I interned at a farm in Iowa that was a broad scale permaculture operation. They had a bunch of pasture planted for hay and it was being cut and sold at a loss. So me and another guy decided we needed to get some ruminants to eat all this extra forage. So I got some sheep. But then I was egged on to get some cattle and ended up getting a herd of British Ancient White Park. 

I probably would have stayed in Iowa and kept going there but things began to just fall apart. The guy that was in charge was sort of, uh, crazy. He didn't have a good relationship with the people that he was leasing the land from and in the long run, there wasn't enough money coming in so I had to find somewhere to bring my herd.

I grazed the cows around on a neighbor's field for the whole summer and that was a little bit of a stressful experience. There weren't very good fences. I had to haul the water over to 'em, 800 gallons, every other day.

I knew I had to move out of there before winter came so I was looking all around for anybody that I knew just to lease some pasture or rent a space temporarily. Anyway, it worked out really well. Bill and Kathy, the owners here at Baseline, were looking for somebody else to farm at the same time I was looking for somewhere to farm and so I brought my original herd from Iowa over in one semi truck and have been here since 2016.

Wow, it is interesting that you were vegetarian and then became a beef farmer, were you thinking about regenerative land management?

Well, yeah there's definitely a way to improve the land through the use of grazing animals. Some land would degrade entirely without grazing animals. Think of an arid area, since we killed all the buffalo and most other native herbivores have been extinct by humans, it doesn't regenerate itself. In many places this created a desert where you wouldn't have necessarily had a desert, if you would've had animals cycling the vegetation. So at this point, some of these environments would suffer greatly without any kind of management.

Tell me about the way you raise your cows. What are the benefits of doing it the way you do compared to say a feedlot?

The basic idea is I am growing the forage for my animals and they are out on the pasture, harvesting themselves by grazing. In the growing season, I'm out there moving the fence multiple times per day, every day.  Maybe you don't need to be that intense to still see a benefit and keep your animals healthy but I see a positive relationship between growing healthy forage and growing healthy animals.

A lot of farmers will sell off their calves to feedlots around eight months old separating them from their mothers. I keep my herd together that's usually at least two years and typically a good part of the second year. So that's a very different life for the cow than if I would sell them as calves to a feedlot where from an animal welfare perspective, it's not so great. They are with strangers, in the hot sun, their pen is full of manure, there's a lot of flies. Co-mingling all these cattle and putting 'em in a stressful situation creates a lot of health issues in the cows. The biggest cost in feedlot is treating stick animals. That's why typically antibiotics are fed in the feed. It is a sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics, which is encourages antibiotic resistance and you have a higher amount of antibiotic in the final product than you would, if  just spot treated 'em or whatever. In my case, I haven't had to give any antibiotics. They stay pretty healthy. I suppose illness could happen, but in general it's not common in this type of system. 

Another issue at feedlots is waste management. You concentrate all the nutrients and then it becomes pollution. You also see a lot of byproduct feeds like, soybean hulls, soybean meal, dried distillers grain, basically anything cheap that has food value. So that ties into the environmental situation, where grain is subsidized encouraging a monoculture and you have huge grain fields which causes the loss of biodiversity, of course, but also issues with, runoff, erosion. For example, the dead zone in the Mississippi Delta, caused by all the nutrients that were applied in Iowa and other states washing down. You wouldn't necessarily have that at all if you had pasture instead of a crop field.

So I think with one thing in general is you can list all of the bad things that the conventional system does, but there are so many externalities that it's hard to even quantify. When I say I am raising ecological beef, I'm trying to say that we're not externalizing all of that. We are trying to mimic a natural ecosystem versus creating some type of mechanized system.

It’s obvious you love what you do, you were smiling the whole time I was watching you feed the cows. They were all so curious and sweet and looked happy to be eating together. What is hard about what you do?

Taking animals to the butcher is definitely hard. You raise a life for years and then you end it. I think it used to be harder to take 'em in for slaughter than it is now and that's partly economical, it is not a decision. You have to have something to sell if you're ever gonna have enough money to buy what you need just to keep the rest of them alive. The world doesn't care, whether you'd like to keep your animals or not, or if they have real nice lives. The world wants money. So yeah. You've gotta figure out how to get it one way or another. You've gotta decide when it's time. As grazing manager, you have to be the predator. You have to decide who stays and who goes to keep the herd in balance and keep it going.

That's actually a good thing to point out is that in nature, these animals would obviously be preyed upon. It makes me think about how as humans we've destroyed balance in so many ways. I don't know how we move forward but I think it's got something to do with people like you and returning to locally produced food.

It is arguably less efficient to do things on a smaller scale, like I do. I wouldn't say that this operation is inefficient, but it is in a lot of ways. When I take any animals to the butcher, it's usually two or three at a time. Well, if things were more organized and we had better equipment, I could haul six at a time and that's less trips for the same purpose. At the same time, then you start scaling up like in the dairy world and you have 1500 cows in one barn, then you've gotta figure out what to do with all their manure. 

When the, the pandemic broke out and bigger meat packing plants were closing there was huge strain on all the small butcher shops that I used and nobody could get in. If we had a system where there was more distributed skill and ability it would've been more resilient. You wouldn't have had a supply problem everywhere at the same time.

That is the key to a better country right there. Distributed talent and skill and distributed manufacturing. I mean, that solves so many problems in this country. We've carved out rural areas labeled them as dumb-asses and concentrated in the cities. That's a recipe for collapse. I think people are gonna wake up, you know, they're gonna have to at some point… I'm reading your face, you seem not to be convinced?

I don't know. Well, part of it is when I first got into farming, I was really into permaculture. I thought, this makes so much sense. Everybody is gonna be eating natural and doing all this natural stuff and composting their poop! That's the way to go. The world has to change. We have solutions to many of our problems, but I don't know if the world is gonna figure it out. Maybe I'm getting jaded about it, but it's kind of harder to maintain those ideals. When I sell beef at the farmer's market, and a lot of people don't seem to care that I'm selling grass fed beef or not. They're just at the market and they see some beef and they're like, ah, I'll buy some beef, I'll buy some steaks. They've never really thought about the environmental impact of it.

But then I think, ultimately, things take a long time to really get going. I had worked at Argus Farm Stop which is solely stocked with local produce, for 5 years almost as soon as I moved back to Michigan. It's changed a lot, at first it was slow, eventually, people came and now it is busier than ever.

What I know about people is that we're creatures of habit. Once we're in a comfortable habit, it takes a lot to break out.

For sure. And of course the consumer has a lot of options. There's a lot of players in the marketplace and with beef. You can go to the grocery store and buy something labeled as "100% Grass Fed American Beef" which can actually mean a lot of different things. They may not be inclined to talk to some scruffy guy at the farmer's market. They may not even go to the farmer's market…

Well I bet that will change once they read this! Haha. Thanks so much John, what is up for the rest of the day?

Of course, thanks for coming out. I'm going to go feed my cows.

Want to support John and his herd?

Buy Baseline Beef at Argus Farm Stop, The A2 Food Co-Op or directly from the
Cattleman himself.

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