By Twilight Greenaway for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
Last August, Zack Smith welcomed a group of farmers, agricultural researchers, and investors to his mid-sized farm just south of the Iowa-Minnesota border for a field day. It was warm out, shorts weather, and around 35 people sat on straw bales listening as the young, fifth-generation farmer—who has gained a devoted audience through Twitter and YouTube and welcomes curious visitors to his farm every year—spoke about a critical turning point in his thinking.
The shift took place nearly three years ago as Smith—who was working off the farm for a fertilizer company at the time—was talking with the Minnesota-based farmer Sheldon Stevermer. “Corn was $2.75, beans were $7.25. We’re small farmers who don’t have a lot of acres. [We were asking ourselves,] ‘Is it worth staying in business?’” Smith recalls. The two were exchanging ideas and Stevermer asked a third farmer, Lance Petersen, what he thought. “He bounced it off Lance and he said, ‘What about putting a pen of sheep in between the rows?’”
Stevermer has an engineering background and he and Smith decided to run with Peterson’s idea. They got to work designing a farming system that involved growing alternating rows of corn and strips of pasture that were wide enough to move a mobile barn through. The plants in those rows also get exposed to more sunlight than a standard canopy of corn or soy, resulting in higher yields per plant. They called the result—a solar-powered barn that separately housed eight sheep in the front, 10 hogs in the middle, and a 125 chickens in a trailing chicken tractor—the ClusterCluck 5,000. They coined the term “stock cropping” for the larger idea to have, as Smith puts it, “plants feeding animals, and animals feeding plants.”
Since then, Smith has dedicated 5 acres on a plot of land Smith rents to trialing the stock-cropper system. And he has worked with Illinois-based Dawn Equipment to design a second, much lighter and more nimble iteration of the barn: The ClusterCluck Nano runs on solar energy and can be moved with a phone app. Now, Smith and Dawn Equipment CEO Joe Bassett are working on a third iteration and actively pursuing outside investment.
The hope, says Smith, isn’t just to build a new type of farm equipment—it’s to help farmers build soil health, cut down on water pollution, and usher in a new approach to farming in the Corn Belt.
Iowa is famously home to more hogs—25 million—than people, and a sizable number of concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. As a result, massive quantities of manure get spread on the same farmland repeatedly, typically during the cold months when there are no roots in the soil to absorb it. That often leads to nutrient pollution in the waterways (and dead zones in places like the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico).
Stock cropping, on the other hand, involves rotating crops with pasture strips so that a smaller numbers of animals leave behind just enough nutrients on the land to help corn grow there the following season—replacing the expensive, leaky fertilizer systems used by most commodity farmers. Meanwhile, the animals themselves live in less confined spaces, eating the plants and insects in the pasture strips. Smith has calculated that if there were 1.4 million ClusterCluck Nanos operating on about 1.9 million acres of forage strips within 15 of Iowa’s 99 counties full time, they could theoretically replace that state’s CAFOs.
“What is progress in ag?” Smith asked the crowd at the field day last August. “If you go down to the Farm Progress show in Boone, [Iowa,] you’re going to see one version of progress, and that’s big, wide, fast farm equipment that’s designed to do more with less people involved,” he said. But Smith, whose somewhat flat speaking affect belies his deep knowledge of agronomy and a stubborn dedication to farming, has other ideas. He points to the fact that even though corn and soy prices have gone back up over the last year, so have the prices of the inputs most commodity farmers rely on, such as synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides.
“It’s the same thing that’s happened three other times in my career. We get a pop and the machine responds, and the pop becomes not very fun anymore. But the concepts we have out here could be very useful as we move ahead into whatever is going to be next. [It’s] not going to be next year or the year after that, but the pattern always comes where [farmers] drain the tank and come back to a break-even proposition.”
Instead of this familiar boom-bust cycle, Smith hopes to see a network of farmers across Iowa, Minnesota, and beyond that can afford to stay on the land while farming at a smaller scale by cutting their input costs radically and selling higher welfare, grass-fed meat into local markets and directly to consumers. And while doing so will require more than just a grassroots effort, these farmers are hoping that their out-of-the-box ideas gain traction with investors who can help them scale up.
‘Escaping the Dead-end, No-win Ag Treadmill’
During the first Stock Cropper field day three summers ago, Smith started by pointing to the land next to his home farm and naming all the farming families that had sold or lost their land. The land hand been consolidated into a few larger farm operations, he told his audience, and as a result, his community had changed. Like in many rural areas, there were fewer schools, fewer neighbors to farm alongside, and it now requires a much longer drive to get to the grocery store or hardware store.
Even with an automated barn, he says, the stock-cropper system still requires farmers who are more hands-on than most other modern commodity farming, a fact that, if it were widely adopted, would result in a reversal of the population loss so many rural counties have seen.
“The whole idea of this system is that it will require a lot more farmers,” said Smith during a phone call last fall. “Because even though the barns are going to move themselves, somebody still needs to chore them, somebody still needs to do the daily husbandry. And you don’t have to try to farm half the state of Iowa to make a reasonable living.”
Ricardo Salvador, the senior scientist and director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (and a Civil Eats advisory board member), had Smith as a student when he taught at Iowa State University in the ‘90s. He has attended two of Smith’s field days and sees the work as potentially transformative.
“He wants to escape the dead-end, no-win treadmill [agricultural] situation where all that you can do is choose from a very narrow range of options, which always make the farmer the person who takes the ultimate risk, earns the least, and is dependent on government [subsidies] in order to make ends meet,” says Salvador. By selling the highest-value final product—the meat itself rather than just the grain to feed the animals—Salvador adds, he’s found a way to do something that has “become out of reach for farmers that decades ago bought into the idea of specialization.”
The hope, says Smith, is to create a system that’s more resilient in the face of climate change because it relies on fewer inputs.
Eventually, he says, “we could probably cut nitrogen use by 75 percent compared to a conventional corn acre. And I think we could completely eliminate the [added] phosphorus and potassium and use the animals to cycle it back into the soil.”
He is also looking at other crops that might make good animal feed, like barley and field peas, which would diversify the operation further. “The whole idea is that we want to increase the amount of biodiversity in the field within this system and build resiliency that way.”
Dawn Equipment’s Bassett got on board with stock cropping and started collaborating with Smith several years ago. Bassett had been making small-scale farm equipment targeted specifically at those cutting down on tillage and planting cover crops after he took stock of the nitrogen problems—and resulting regulations—in the Chesapeake Bay and the Des Moines Waterworks lawsuit.
“At that time, [it looked like] the government was going make farmers start doing something to preserve water quality and topsoil, “ he said. “I thought, ‘Surely, there’s going to be a groundswell of momentum that sort of gets farmers to change their practices.’” And while didn’t happen right away, he says that part of the business has grown in recent years.
Bassett sees much of the recent wave of ag technology as furthering, rather than solving, the most pressing problems with commodity agriculture—and he wants to do something different, even if it can mean a slower ramp-up to profitability.
“Agriculture is very high-tech now, but it’s not actually any different,” he says. “We have high-tech tractors and combines, but what they’re doing is exactly the same. Now [farmers are getting] robot tractors to plow the fields, so they’ll just plow even more.”
Bassett is personally motivated by the climate crisis and believes having animals on the landscape are key to sequestering carbon in the soil. “A stock-cropper system of intercropping, where you are rotationally grazing in between rows of cash crops, will probably be the most regenerative farming system possible. And it will produce the highest yield per unit of fertilizer of any system.”
Dawn Equipment is working on more prototypes, and the company’s ability to manufacture its first round of commercially available ClusterCluck barns will depend on the level of investment Bassett and Smith are able to attract. Together they have bootstrapped the project so far, and they are hoping to attract venture capital to keep scaling up the project. But Smith isn’t interested in the typical model.
“A lot of people just want you to come in and do this and then flip it in three years and sell it to Cargill. I’m not interested in that. We need to find the right investor that is bought into the merits of what we’re trying to build and is going to give us the rope and the leeway to get there,” he says.
And while the barns were developed for corn and soy operations, Bassett hopes to see them reach orchardists and vineyard owners interested in grazing animals as a way to build the soil between their rows in other parts of the country.
A Processing Bottleneck
While Smith hasn’t had a problem finding a market for the meat he’s produced so far with the stock-cropper system, the lack of meat processing infrastructure for small scale producers is a well-known challenge.
Keaton Krueger, another Iowan who is farming with his wife on 80 acres purchased from her family, while working full time in the field of precision agriculture (most recently for WinField United), has been following Zack’s progress and says he’s very impressed with what he and Bassett have done in the last three years. The focus on soil health aligns with his approach and, on paper, the system promises the kind of steady income that would allow him to gradually transition to full-time farming.
“Right now, farming is like a second job, but it would be great someday if a system like the stock cropper could allow us to make a living farming without having to become a giant consolidated grain-farming entity. I think there are a lot of people like he and I, who are still in agriculture professionally, that probably could access a few hundred acres of land and would be happy to go home and work hard on that land to make a living.” But working at that scale isn’t possible within the current system, he adds.
And yet Krueger hasn’t committed to buying a barn because he says the meat processing infrastructure isn’t there yet. The Kruegers raise hogs for themselves and their family members, and he says, “We have to schedule a year in advance for just a few hogs a year.”
But he’s optimistic that more demand could help pave the way for more processing. “I think that will probably be an area that gets solved either through the stock-cropper vision or through somebody that’s supporting the vision,” says Krueger.
Krueger, Smith, and Salvador all point to Jason Mauck’s work as an inspiring example. The Muncie, Indiana-based, self-described “maverick grower” farms row crops in strips to collect optimum sunlight like Smith and raises hogs that he sells himself through Munsee Meats, the meat processing plant that has been in his family since the 1950s—with the recent addition of automated self-serve meat lockers.
“[Mauck] is trying to retain as much of the food dollar as possible, which means that he’s in charge of production, processing, and distribution,” says Salvador. “He’s got this small USDA-certified meatpacking plant. But then his sales are through what are essentially these high-tech vending machines. And he controls the whole thing.”
At the field day in September, Mauck bought a ClusterCluck Nano and brought it home to Indiana, where he has been sharing photos of it in action.
And when Smith envisions networks of producers working together to build a supply chain using stock cropping, he thinks the region around Mauck’s processing business is probably the most logical place to start.
“It’s going to take regional hubs outside urban areas, and then farms positioned around those hubs rather than, for instance, growing pork here in Winnebago County, Iowa, and shipping it to Sioux Falls to be killed, and then shipping it to Washington, D.C., after that. We’ve got to do a better job of nesting the production around where the people are.” He also sees pasture-based systems as inherently easier to locate next to cities—because, unlike CAFOs, urban dwellers “can actually come out and see and participate in it, and it’s 100 percent transparent; the farmer has nothing to hide.”
The USDA is also in the middle of rolling out a sizable grant program that is intended to support small-scale meat processing infrastructure—as part of the Biden administration’s response to consolidation in the meat industry—but it’s not clear whether those grants will work in tandem with efforts like Smith’s.
Swimming Against the Tide
It is far from easy to envision and follow through on building an alternative to commodity agriculture, in part because the companies behind it wield so much power in the Corn Belt.
The depopulation of rural areas—and the sheer number of miles it has put between people—hasn’t helped. But social media has done a lot to help outliers like Smith and Mauck build networks that have bolstered them in the face of the status quo. “Maybe 10 percent of farmers are open to these ideas,” says Smith “That’s the community space that we’re aiming for and trying to build a coalition around right now.”
At the end of the day, Smith is clear-eyed about the fact that what he’s doing may struggle to gain traction because it threatens the powers that be in the commodity agriculture industry.
“You’re not going to see John Deere, Corteva, or Bayer supporting something like this. I come from that world,” he told his field day audience. “I was a Pioneer seed rep and chemical dealer.” Enabling farmers to work in a closed-loop way that harnesses the power of nature isn’t good for those companies’ bottom lines, he added.
“Changing the arrangement of the use of plants and animals in this way, it is a significant threat [to the existing industry],” he added later on the phone. Not only does the stock-cropper system require much less synthetic fertilizers, but “it’s going to take us less seed. We’re getting more yield per seed, and that flies in the face of everything I’ve done up to this point. . . . It’s a potential threat to significantly reduce the things that we’re told we have to farm with in order to survive.”
“A lot of farmers just wouldn’t dare try this, because the fear of looking strange,” says Salvador, who adds, “the people who will pooh-pooh it or make it sound like it’s strange are the industry and the folks who want to be comfortable just farming corn and soybeans, and getting checks from the government when they can’t make ends meet.”
“But,” he adds, “I see a slow-brewing, quiet revolution out there.”
Twilight Greenaway wrote this article for Civil Eats.
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By Twilight Greenaway for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Minnesota News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
When you approach the poultry paddocks at Salvatierra Farms outside Northfield, Minnesota, you might not notice how many chickens are hiding among the tall grasses and young hazelnut trees at first. And that's by design.
On a warm afternoon in June, 1,500 7-week-old hens had come out to mill around-lured by feed and water stations-but many were hard to find.
"There's an eagle that comes around here," says Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, the farmer and visionary behind the operation. "It has flown over a few times, and it just keeps going." Soon, he adds, the trees and other perennials will be tall enough to provide cover for the birds, but the grass will suffice in the meantime.
Salvatierra, which was a conventional corn and soy operation until Haslett-Marroquin bought it three years ago, is in the midst of a wholesale transformation. He has planted more than 8,000 hazelnut trees there, created a water catchment pond, begun managing the forest that frames it on two sides, and leveled the land where he plans to build a home for his family.
This summer, he also raised the first flocks of chickens there. As it comes into maturity, Salvatierra stands to become a central hub around which a growing network of farmers, scientists, nonprofits, and funders will rotate-all in the name of regenerative poultry farming.
Regenerative is a complex term with many interpretations. Haslett-Marroquin's approach combines what he learned growing up in Guatemala-where chickens thrive in multi-story jungles-with a deep understanding of the Midwest's native ecosystems. Unlike the pasture-based model of poultry production which typically uses mobile barns and is sometimes also referred to as "regenerative," it involves raising the birds in one spot, alongside trees and other perennial crops as a way to build soil that is rich with organic matter and carbon, capture and store water, and make the land on which it takes place more resilient in the face of the climate crisis.
At the core of the effort in Minnesota is Tree-Range Farms, the company Haslett-Marroquin co-founded, and a growing network that includes more than 40 farms in the region. The Regenerative Agriculture Alliance (RAA), the nonprofit he founded and now sits on the board of, also plays a key, ongoing role in developing the infrastructure behind the network and has plans to scale it up to extend across the upper portion of the corn belt.
But the grand vision doesn't end there. There are also farms using Haslett-Marroquin's approach in Guatemala, Mexico, and in several Native American communities, including the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. And if its advocates have their way, the core practices and the philosophy behind it could be replicated in many parts of the world in the years to come.
And at a time when Americans eat more than 160 million servings of chicken every day and industrial poultry farming is known for polluting ground water, air, and waterways, as well as causing health issues for people who live nearby, it could be a welcome change.
How the Model Works
Like the chickens hiding in the grass, the sophistication of Haslett-Marroquin's regenerative poultry system may be hard to spot for the untrained eye.
For years, he collaborated on research and development on his first farm, Finca Marisol, and on a nearby farm called Organic Compound in Faribault, Minnesota, to establish a production standard with very specific parameters.
Each poultry flock or "unit" includes 1,500 chickens, a barn, and 1.5 acres of land divided into two fenced in areas, or paddocks. The birds spend every day outside-where they eat a combination of dry grain, sprouted grain, bugs, and plants-in one paddock, and when the plants there have been sufficiently grazed down, they're moved to a second one. Farms typically start with one unit, but they can also opt to start with half a unit if land is scarce.
"Everything that is part of the standard was tried and tested, from breeds to how long you feed them, to the right kind of welfare aspect to consider in the coop construction," says Diane Christofore, the current executive director of the RAA, which brought in the funding for the research and development behind the standard. The organization recently launched an online course to train farmers in the practices and philosophy behind the standard; it is also making a number of scholarships available and will release a version in Spanish soon.
In addition to trees, farmers are encouraged to plant other perennials such as grasses, elderberry bushes, and comfrey. And if they grow corn and soybeans on the property, they are invited to diversify their rotations by adding oats for soil health. In eight to 12 weeks, farmers can take the birds to the small-scale processing plant that the RAA runs in Northern Iowa.
If they opt to sell them under the Tree-Range label, storage, distribution, and marketing are all taken care of, as the birds make their way to consumers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region. Soon, Tree-Range plans to expand its reach to add retailers in Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago.
The hope is to provide a relatively easy point of entry for beginning farmers looking for a way to start earning capital quickly. With their short lifecycle and relevance across many cultures, chickens allow farmers to get onboard and join the network-or the "ecosystem," as RAA refers to it-while renting land and/or working other jobs. Once the barn has been built-or adapted from an existing structure-the required labor is concentrated in the mornings and evenings, making it a relatively easy lift for new farmers.
"We're creating this for the people that don't have access to the [resources to engage in large-scale agriculture], but you're also working with people who are still engaged in conventional ag, watching this, and asking, 'How could I transition?'" says Christofore.
Many of the farms raising birds for Tree-Range are run by immigrants, such as Callejas Farm, where Jose and Erica Callejas, formerly from El Salvador, raise multiple flocks of chickens each year with their daughters. Or Carrillo Brother Farms, where Jesus and Aldo Carrillo-who immigrated from Mexico-raise one flock a year alongside a wide array of fruit and vegetables.
Feed the People Farm Cooperative is another interesting example. There, Cliff Martin has been raising two flocks a year on land that his dad owns as part of a collective with three other young farmers, including Helen Forsythe and Bec Ersek (who also works at the RAA's business administrator).
They see the farm as part of a larger collective movement and the money they earn from the flocks goes toward maintaining the land, holding trainings and events for other young community organizers in the region. They're also working on adding a composting processing site, neighbor approval pending. "We simply wouldn't be doing this if it weren't for the RAA's infrastructure and support," Forsythe said during a recent farm visit.
Haslett-Marroquin says there are more interested farmers than the RAA has the bandwidth to support at this point, so he's confident that the network will continue to grow.
For one, he says, the modular approach to adding flocks to farms makes it relatively simple to replicate. After years of prototyping the system at Finca Marisol, he says everything fell into place very quickly at Salvatierra Farms, where he is starting with three units and plans to add three more in the coming year.
"There was no guesswork," he says. "This thing happened as if I had done it a million times. And we could take 1,000 acres, 10,000 acres, or 1 million acres, and we'd know exactly what to do. That's the difference between farm-level thinking and system-level thinking. And at the end, it's that large scale that makes it truly regenerative, not the farm itself."
Feed conversion ratio-or the relationship between the feed that goes into the animals and the final product-is a common metric for measuring financial success and environmental impact in meat production. But the RAA's definition of regenerative turns that equation on its end.
The chickens in that system eat more grain than chickens raised solely in a barn because they move around much more. But the farms have an overall smaller footprint, because the added chicken manure boosts the productivity of the hazelnuts and other companion crops, without synthetic fertilizer. On 1.5 acres, mature hazelnut trees will produce around 800 to 1,200 pounds of nuts.
"Once you add up the output of meat, the output of hazelnuts, the large-scale sequestration of carbon," Haslett-Marroquin says, "you can't even compare it to a confinement model. It's not apples to apples."
At the core, his approach to food production is one that places productivity within a larger context of a balanced living system. It's about "stewarding the transformation of energy from non-edible forms to edible ones," and it's a process that isn't new, but on the contrary, quite old.
"We are unleashing the original Indigenous intellect that makes us so powerful as human beings. It is the one thing that all capitalistic, extractive, destructive systems hate. That's why they will go and massacre Indigenous communities at mass scale, because they know that that intellect is so powerful that it can overcome the extractive system. And it can, in the end, save the planet," he says, adding, "If you restore the people to the land, you can't exploit them."
The Science
Haslett-Marroquin is confident that the system he has developed works, but he knows that Western scientific research is key to scaling it up.
Beth Fisher, a soil scientists and assistant professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, is part of a team of scientists in Minnesota that started measuring the health of the soil, water, and the emissions released from farms in 2021.
Fisher says she was approached by Haslett-Marroquin, who asked her to gather evidence to add validation to what he had long observed and understood intuitively about the way regenerative practices work on the ground. She was interested in the approach, but it was the visit to Finca Marisol, the first farm where birds and trees had been raised side by side for almost a dozen years, that sealed the deal.
"The soil structure is beautiful-you pull up a scoop and how it holds together on its own, is held together by the ooey gooey stuff that organic critters put into the soil," she says. "Water infiltrates beautifully. It has a wonderful collection of organic matter."
Since then, she and the undergraduate students she works with have been gathering samples of soil on a handful of farms in the network, as well as conventional corn and soy farms that neighbor them.
"At Finca Marisol, the comparison farm is considered reduced-till better practice. And it's night and day; the [water] infiltration is way slower on the reduced till practice, the carbon storage is way less, and that farmer has been doing it for decades, really trying to do better in his practice. And the effect on his soil is negligible," she says.
"At The Organic Compound, where they've raising chickens using regenerative practices for six years, they're already in better shape than the neighboring conventional farm," adds Fisher, who is hoping to start publishing some preliminary data soon.
"We'll be disseminating the results, both in the academic peer-reviewed literature, but also, I think it's so important for it to find its way into the context where farmers can hear about it."
Carrie Jennings, who is research and policy director at the nonprofit Freshwater, and an adjunct professor and researcher at the University of Minnesota, is another scientist engaged in the research. She points to the fact that the Cannon River, which runs through Minnesota and down to the Mississippi River, is one of the bodies of water that is most polluted by agriculture chemicals in the nation.
And she has seen strong initial evidence that regenerative poultry system is sending water down into the aquifers below, rather than adding to that pollution. This is rare in Minnesota and other the parts of the corn belt, where the water on millions of acres drain directly to waterways due to the ceramic pipes, or drainage tiles, that were installed below farmland over the last century. The roots of the trees and other perennial plants on the farms in the RAA network, however, often break up and clog the tiles, preventing runoff and sending the water into the aquifer below.
Jennings is closely tracking the funds Minnesota is directing toward regenerative practices. "We want to make sure they're funding the right practices; we don't want them throwing away tax money on things that aren't going to improve water, soil, and climate," she says.
Jennings also wants to provide hard evidence for farmers looking to change their practices. "Farmers notice that their lives and waters are degrading over generations, and even within a generation. They're not exactly happy about it, either. They know that they're spending more than they should on chemicals. So, if someone like Regi[naldo], who is innovative and experimental entrepreneurial, can show that this works then it's more likely to be adopted."
She also points to the fact that General Mills has been funding the research for the first two years, as evidence of the potentially influential nature of Haslett-Marroquin's approach. "They need to make sure [crops] can continue to be grown in this rapidly changing world. It's important to the companies and the consumers of those products," she adds.
In addition to the research, General Mills is also funding the RAA's farmer training and the establishment of its demonstration farm. "We have been inspired by the RAA's thought leadership and continue to learn from the deep and holistic way they approach regenerative agriculture," said a company representative in a statement to Civil Eats.
RAA collaborated with Oatly, General Mills, and number of other nonprofit and research entities in the region, on a $5 million climate-smart commodities grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) aimed at "support[ing] poultry producers who follow diversified, regenerative, climate-smart grain production methods incorporating small grains such as oats, no-till, and cover crops, integrated agroforestry practices."
"It's an opportunity now to start to produce grains within [the regenerative] system, because 70 percent of the cost to farm business is feed," says Christofore.
Rethinking Processing and Growing the Network
Lack of accessible meat processing is a common barrier to entry for small-scale poultry producers. So, in prototyping a regional network of producers, the RAA-whose express goal is to make regenerative poultry production the norm-has invested in its own processing facility as a separate LLC.
A relatively small building in Northern Iowa-just over an hour south of Northfield-the facility was acquired in late 2021. That first year, the small staff processed 1,000 chickens. In 2022, it processed 50,000, and manager Arnulfo Perrera says he hopes to reach 80,000 to 90,000 birds this year.
After attending agricultural school in Honduras, Perrera came to the U.S. to work as a manager for Smithfield Foods, the nation's largest pork producer. "That was not really like my calling-raising hogs in barns in the conventional systems," he says of the experience.
A decade later, with a long-awaited green card, Perrera was able to leave Smithfield to take a role managing the RAA processing plant in 2022. Since leaving what he calls "the dark side," he has staffed it up 14 people, despite its isolated rural location and the challenge of competing with larger companies in the region that can offer higher pay.
But, ultimately, Perrera hopes to help create a new model, in an industry where ever-faster line speeds, crowded facilities, underage workers, and resistance to protecting workers' health have become the norm. "I believe strongly that if the food is going to be sustainable and regenerative, it needs to be that way throughout [the food chain]. On the farm side, as well as the processing," he says.
For Jose Morales, who has been at the plant since the RAA took ownership, the difference is palpable. The facility he worked at previously slaughtered 13,000 chickens every day of the year; 2,000 workers arrived in three shifts and worked 24 hours a day. He felt like one small cog in an enormous machine.
At the RAA facility, Morales says, he has had a say in shaping the workday and he's helped train other employees. "We came up with a plan. Each person will be doing each job for two, maybe two and a half hours. So, you're not doing the same thing all day." It's less repetitive motion, which is less difficult on everyone's bodies, and all the workers at the plant are trained to work in all the roles. "It's harder in the beginning, but then it's better. When somebody's calls in sick, or they don't have a babysitter, we have somebody to call."
Nonprofit meat processing plants are very rare, but Christifore, Haslett-Marroquin, and the rest of the team see the fact that they don't have shareholders to appease as key to their approach.
The goal is to enable the proliferation and growth of the network of farms, and provide better jobs than many meat processing facilities. "If you're doing it with integrity, there is not a lot of money to be made at that level of the supply chain," says Christofore.
In stepping down from leading the RAA, Hasslet-Morroquin hopes the network moves toward a collective model of leadership based on a Mayan diagram that looks more like a circle than a pyramid. The idea is to create a strong system wherein everybody leads and follows at the same time, a reciprocal form of relationship-based accountability. "And if you do that, you unleash the energy of the people, and it is unbelievable. That's why we call this an intellectual insurgency."
Christofore echoes that idea. "We expect a certain level of participation, from those who want to commit to the ecosystem. And that's when you start to care about things; it's when you start to have ownership. It comes with a lot of responsibility and does require risk. But what comes with it is an opportunity to be a part of a culture and a community that's growing."
Hasslet-Morroquin has his sights set on reaching 250 farms on 50,000 acres in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. From there, he can see the network expanding to five or six other regions around the U.S. until it reaches 500 million chickens. That type of growth sounds enormous, but it would still only be 5 percent of the total chicken raised in the U.S. And at that point, he says, a truly regenerative system would have some real leverage.
"At that point, we'll look at the industry-the USDA, investors, markets, everybody, and say, 'OK, folks, why should we only do 5 percent of the total poultry system this way when we can do 100 percent?'" says the visionary farmer. "I may not get there myself, but somebody else could get us there. It doesn't matter how long it takes. We don't plan for the next year to two; this is about the seven generations in front of us."
Twilight Greenaway wrote this article for Civil Eats.
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