On April 22, 2009, about 35 people gathered in the majestic Sage Chapel on Cornell's campus to hear Peter McDonald, of McDonald Farm in Romulus, NY, discuss clean food and restorative agriculture.
McDonald described his first attempt at farming, using conventional techniques like pesticides and fertilizers. It failed.
"I gave up, and then I prayed: my name is McDonald and I'm growing older," he said, adding "E I E I O." A voice in his head told him to grow chickens.
McDonald's land had led a previous farmer to bankruptcy. And when McDonald had the soil tested, he was told that the land had not been farmed -- it had been mined. In other words, the previous farming practices extracted all the nutrients and minerals. "Conventional farmland just holds the plant up," he explained, while people nourish the plants with chemical fertilizers and protect them with pesticides.
McDonald vowed to do things differently. He calls his farming philosophy restorative agriculture, explaining on his website: "If sustainable practices seek to put back what is taken out, then we believe Restorative Agricultural practices are beyond sustainable, as they require putting back twice what you take out. This way, the land is replenished and restored while the farmer makes a living. There is nothing like a multi-species grazing enterprise to help in both fertilizing the soil and stimulating the natural seed bank for a lush pasture."
The result is "clean food" which --to MacDonald-- means "the absence of chemicals, antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, herbicides, insecticides and genetically modified grains as well as animal stress events like ear notching, teeth removal, horn removal, chemical worming and confinement housing." (Note that this definition is a bit different since clean food was mentioned in the NY Times more than a decade ago).
To succeed as a business, he now focuses on the 5 P's : production, processing, packaging, promoting, and finally profit.
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