CLEAN WATER

One of our chefs called yesterday asking for information regarding how our farm protects its water from chemical contamination.  Any informed person today knows that most farmers dump millions of tons of chemicals on their land.  In fact, it often seeps into groundwater and drifts through the air, making even non-using farmers susceptible to detectable levels.

            As I went through some of our protections here at Polyface, it struck me just how blessed we are not only in location but also in proactive development.  First, we’re not in heavy cropping country.  This doesn’t look like Indiana and Iowa, Toto.  In fact, not a single monocrop field adjoins our home acreage.  A couple do on some of our leased property, but they are extremely few.  Crops like corn and soybeans account for the lion’s share of chemical use; very little is used on pastures and virtually none is used on forests.

            Here at what we call Polyface Central, much of our border is state land owned by the Virginia Natural Resources Department.  That’s not good land stewardship, but at least they don’t spray chemicals.  We call it organic by neglect. 

            Because our land is primarily in an area of pastures and forests, the overall chemical use per acre is extremely low.  That means aquifer contamination is also extremely low.  Rain doesn’t percolate through chemical-laden crop ground on its way to the aquifer; it percolates through leaf litter and grass, both of which act as cleansers.

            Perhaps the biggest water purity security we have, though, is that our livestock drink water from our permaculture style high ponds we’ve built over the years.  This gravity-fed water flows in a pipe and into a chicken, pig, or cow trough.  Because we abut Little North Mountain, our farm literally owns its watershed. 

            We know exactly what’s above the terrain of our ponds.  On some of the rental farms we also use pond water but if we don’t control the entire watershed, we control most of it.  Although perhaps the most vulnerable one is located a couple hundred yards downhill from a public road, which gets applications of snow removal concoctions, the wetland drainage grows copious amounts of vegetation, which help purify the water.  The pond has cattails, salamanders, frogs and other critters that indicate clean water.

            More and more people today want protection from the unknown.  Few unknowns are more invisible to the naked eye and more insidious than chemicals in water.  Nothing purifies water like vegetation and high organic matter soil because all that carbon detoxifies like a carbon filter.  Pasture-based livestock and constant movement facilitates soil carbon capture and therefore is perhaps the most efficacious water purifier available.

            I’m extremely thankful that Mom and Dad settled on this place in 1961 rather than somewhere more vulnerable to toxicities.  Fortunately, the neighbor who built factory chicken houses in the early 1970s went out of business 20 years later and those houses no longer exist.  Dodged that bullet.

            As important as water is to health and metabolism, I wonder sometimes how much of our product terroir is due to water and not the pasture.

            How do you insure safe water for your livestock?