Snow is falling as the plane touches down at Munich airport.
By the time we arrive in Hermannsdorf, an hour’s drive, the forests and rolling
hills of the Upper Bavarian countryside are pillowed in a few inches of white
powder. My wife, Quincey, and I are on a mid-winter European junket. We’ve
tagged along with her father, Doug Tompkins, to visit the farm of Karl-Ludwig
Schweisfurth, one of Germany’s (and the world’s) leaders in the sustainable
food movement.
We start our tour at the Schweisfurth home, a delightful
cottage decorated with all manner of livestock-inspired artwork. Karl-Ludwig is
a tall, solid-boned, man with a mane of white hair and horn-rimmed spectacles. Now
in his mid-80s, Karl-Ludwig grew the family business, Herta, into one of
Europe’s largest meat processing corporations. He even based its expanding production
lines on Oscar Mayer assembly operations, where his father sent him as a young
man to study American innovation. “I am a butcher,” he says, deprecatingly, acknowledging
the role and trade that life have given him.
After three decades in the meat packing business, however, Schweisfurth
realized that the perpetual need for growth and ever-increasing disassembly
line speeds came at too high a cost. He saw animal welfare, work conditions, health
of the environment, food quality, and personal values plummeting as humans
became further and further disconnected from the basic tasks of food
production. In 1984, at age 54, he sold the business to start over again with
his two sons. His career as a butcher wasn’t at an end. Rather, it became one
skill among a larger set that requires farming, animal husbandry, meat processing,
and retailing. The revamped family business soon included an inn, organic farm,
restaurant, brewery, and bakery. It became a hub for local employment and the purchase
of regionally produced organic grains and other ingredients.
Around his kitchen table, Karl Ludwig explains his concept
of “symbiotic agriculture.” For more than two decades, he has been
experimenting with raising different species of livestock on the same pastures using
various mobile structures. The pigs protect the chickens from predators. The
chickens eat parasites that might potentially sicken the pigs. The free ranging
animals’ manure returns vital nutrients to the soil as they graze. Hundreds of
acres of fields and livestock pastures at the farm, officially called “Hermannsdorfer
Landwerkstätten,” are planted with various crops that provide
forage for the animals or feed that can be stored for the winter. The farm’s
workers are always striving for the best rotations of pasture crops to prevent
pests from becoming too established, maintain healthy soil, and keep meat flavor
as high as possible. On the kitchen table is a wooden model of a mobile group
housing structure. I take off the wooden roof to inspect. The pigs’ quarters
are downstairs. Poultry enter around the back and roost upstairs.
Finally it’s time to walk. We find plenty of animals out on
the snowy landscape. Bavarian-styled chicken tractors house birds for both meat
and eggs, active out in the cold winter day. Pigs are kept in permanent barns,
as well as in smaller groups with simple wooden structures out in the fields. The
barns have roomy outside stalls full of straw and covered internal stalls for
feeding and weather protection. Families are raised together for their entire
lives to honor the social hierarchies they develop at birth. Karl Ludwig delights
in explaining the natural conditions in which the animals are raised. Below the
barn, he points to a methane digester, a covered circular tank about the size
of a yurt. There animal waste from the pig barns is processed. It generates electricity from captured methane gas. Compost for the farming
operation is made from the remaining solid waste.
When we enter the slaughter plant, Karl Ludwig describes it
as “the best plant I have ever designed.” It is white tiled, very clean. Chain mesh
gloves and white aprons hang in orderly fashion. The animals are raised right
on the farm and are moved to holding pens close by prior to slaughter. There is
no long distance transportation involved that heightens stress in animals. The
slaughter room and butchering operation are completely separated, he explains,
so that no animal has a sense of imminent death. “I realize that in order to
process animals I must kill them,” he says. “So I want to make both their lives
and their deaths as compassionate as possible.” On a given week, 100 pigs, 20
bulls, and 100 sheep are killed, butchered and begin the curing and processing
stage.
We tour a curing facility, a hall with a series of brick-lined
rooms where meats are aged. The smell is sweet, sour and pungent. One room is
filled with hanging hams that seem to be the German equivalent of Italian prosciutto
or Spanish Serrano. Another room contains many racks of salamis. The air is
peppery. The rooms have been cleverly designed using the thermal mass of the
hill that the building abuts to provide optimum humidity and temperature
controls with the least amount of energy.
In a processing kitchen we find large mixing machines for
making sausages. Each stainless steel bowl could easily hold a person. Two
ovens are presently occupied in the smoke curing of pork bellies. We see Karl-Ludwig’s
guidance everywhere. The organizing principle, from start to finish is quality:
for animals, workers, the environment, and eaters.
At last, we sit down to break bread. It is no wonder that the
operation at Hermannsdorf is a popular tourist destination, with its beautiful restaurant
and modern organic grocery. Karl-Ludwig’s family joins us at the table, a wide
open floor plan with high ceilings and exposed wooden rafters, reclaimed from the
former building, which was a mill. In addition to the restaurant they have a micro-brewery
and a bakery. Both use ingredients from the farm and purchase grains, hops, and
malt from regional farmers. We taste a goat cheese appetizer that is light, tangy
and creamy. Spread on chewy dark German bread, it combines perfectly with a stein
of the family Schwinebrau brown ale. This is followed by sautéd fennel and
leeks, a crispy potato pancake, and a roast of veal that is shimmery and pink with
a clean robust flavor. A lager beer, the paler brother of the ale, accompanies
this main course. Karl-Ludwig carves the meat from his seat at the head of the table,
generously passing samples to customers
at the next table.
At the meal’s end, we present Karl Ludwig with a copy of the
photo book, CAFO: The Tragedy of
Industrial Animal Factories, that Doug Tompkins (Foundation for Deep
Ecology) and I (Watershed Media) co-produced. He looks at the grisly photo on
the front cover. It’s a dark scene inside an industrial hog facility. He points
to me, shakes his head and with sad eyes asks, “You made this book?” I nod my
head yes. “I finally decided to
get out of the industrial meat business when I went inside one of these,” he
says. He begins flipping through the large photographs of animal processing,
waste lagoons, feedlots, and then puts it aside, knowing all too viscerally the
heavy content featured in the book.
We have landed in one of the epicenters of the global healthy
food movement. It’s a social current that is slowly sweeping the entire planet.
I’ve been lucky enough to visit other places where science, art, land stewardship
and food production combine at such profound levels. I see as this as our
modern renaissance. Hermannsdorf is on the scale of the Prince of Wales’
efforts at the Duchy Home Farm in the English Cottswalds, Doug Tompkins’ pioneering
farmscaping at Laguna Blanca in Argentina, and Wes Jackson’s visionary perennial
polyculture at the Land Institute in Kansas.
Karl Ludwig is convinced that this approach to sustainably produced
meat and grains—“symbiotic agriculture”—is not just a wealthy man’s hobby, not
just a passing fad. It is the future that agriculture must somehow become. His
son calls it “retro innovation,” the combination of land management and
husbandry practices of the pre-petrochemical and pre-animal antibiotic past,
with the understanding of ecological systems and small-scale agricultural
technology of today. This is information rich, systems thinking: finding ways for
the farming to fit the land, and for the land to feed the animals.
A day’s visit is not enough. We need more time to explore. I
have dozens more questions. But we must be on the road to our next destination,
and leave, having tasted, experienced, and fully sensed Hermannsdorf, a lighthouse
to the world of food and farming.
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