At the Other End of the Spectrum

While the rest of the world presses ahead with the kind of agricultural methods that you would presumably need to feed people cheaply and to, well, produce a $1.29 McDouble, some people have a different vision and you can see it in this beautifully-shot film Good Things Await.  Danish farmer Niels Stokholm runs his farm on "biodynamic principles" which is to say that his farm produces its output with no outside inputs.  All the fodder consists of hay produced on the premises.  The cheese comes from the milk of the resident Danish Red Cattle, an endangered heirloom species.  He makes extensive use of composts and even stranger practices, such as packing cow horns with manure, burying the horns to undergo a fermentation process and, at the process's conclusion, digging out the transformed manure and stirring it into hot water to create some sort of super-fertilizing soup.  

There's a metaphysical aspect to is as well, as there was in biodynamics at its founding.  He speaks of sun and star energy transmogrifying into the reds and greens of the various plants on the farm.  He muses on the mystical properties of yarrow root and dandelions.  He slaughters his cattle on site, believing the hot blood that seeps into the soil after slaughter preserves the integrity of the herd's  collective spirit.  You don't have to be sold on his claim that these methods are just as productive as modern methods to appreciate his approach; certainly I'm not and the film makes it pretty clear that the farm is non self-sustaining from the sale of meat and produce but rather subsists pretty heavily on donations to a foundation around which the farm is economically organized.  But this is a man living out his dream, pointing out alternative approaches to agriculture that he is trying to demonstrate by living them out.

Ironically, his nemesis throughout the film is not Monsanto or any other predatory corporation, but rather the Danish authorities that instill a fairly rigid view of what organic farming practices need to be.  Stokholm, for instance, believes that dehorning cattle is cruel and makes for less healthy cattle.  He points to how air circulates through the horn and into the bloodstream, carrying clues from the fine particulate matter in the inhaled air as to the contents of the food that the cow's stomach needs to digest.  If the cow doesn't have this early-warning system, the digestive process will be less efficient.  But leaving horns on the cattle requires occasional use of tie stalls for when they need to be fed in doors and would otherwise use their horns to fight over feed.  And so this farmer, who is providing the most idyllic life you could ever imagine for his cattle (based on what we see onscreen anyhow) is cited for animal cruelty by the by-the-book bureaucratic regulators on alarmingly frequent "random inspections".  And so it goes.  This is almost a documentary analogue to the recent film Still Mine where James Cromwell's character fights for the right to use time-honored building methods in the construction of a cottage for his dementia-stricken wife, but almost loses everything for not strictly observing somewhat arbitrary and inflexible building codes.

If you love David and Goliath tales, are fascinated by farming, or like drooling over artisanal foods, check this out.  I don't have Netflix so I can't say with certainty that it's on there, but it appears to be.