For related articles and information, please visit OCA’s CAFO’s vs. Free Range page.


If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. – J. R. R. Tolkien  

On June 20th, Allan Savory gave the keynote presentation at Slow Meat, Slow Food’s first-ever symposium celebrating artisanal meat
production. Not all meat production is created equal and the vast majority of meat consumed in most of the developed world comes from confined animal feeding operations (CAFO). There is so much evidence of the degradation and environmental toll that CAFOs take. We must increase public awareness as well as improve access to locally produced grass-fed meats from ranchers managing holistically, mimicking nature to utilize livestock as a tool to enhance the land on which we all depend.

In CAFOs, manure and urine from livestock leads to over-nutrification to the point that the land can’t handle the extreme amounts of animal excrement and it reaches toxic levels. However, when the livestock are on open rangeland and native pastures there is a symbiosis that can be built between the soil biota, the animal’s gut bacteria, and the health of the human consumer. Grasslands cannot function without biological decay. In areas that have year round precipitation and humidity, insects and soil microbes do this work often unassisted by any megafauna. However in areas that experience seasonal dryness, nature employs ruminants (grazing animals with a rumen that ferments grass before digesting it) to accomplish this biological decay. This allows the older blades of grass to be removed and create an opportunity for the grass plants to do more photosynthesis and pull more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and put it into the soil as organic matter that increases fertility and water holding capacity. Holistic Planned Grazing is facilitating this all over the globe.          

However, there are a lot of barriers for ranchers and farmers in getting their products to market. The system is designed to cater to mega-scale operations. This makes nearly every process in the distribution chain difficult for small family ranchers to maximize the value of their product. These challenges include everything from a shortage of legal slaughter facilities and available cold-storage, limited distribution options to population centers, meeting the quantity and uniformity needs of restaurants/retailers, staffing farmers markets, creating legal value-added products that are more convenient for customers, etc. How can we still have efficiency and profitability in the meat industry while celebrating quality, care, and family-scale operations? Slow Food invited 100 hand-chosen delegates from around North America to start collectively addressing some of these problems.