Correction appended.

While Stephen Spielberg's latest film, "Lincoln," and Graham Meriwether's "American Meat" both feature compelling storylines and engaging characters, there won't be any screaming headlines about a hot and heavy box office smackdown. And not just because the A-list actors in "Lincoln" and its upwards-of-$65-million budget dwarf the $250,000 Meriwether spent to make his movie about the farmers who raise the meat we put on our tables.

Meriwether is eschewing theaters for a more direct and, he feels, effective way to engage with his audiences.

"We're using a very unconventional distribution model," he said at a recent screening held at Cinema 21 in Northwest Portland. While most filmmakers apply to festivals such as Sundance or the Toronto International Film Festival and look for a distributor to pick up their film, he said his aim was to get "American Meat" directly to farmers. This summer, he premiered the film at a farm in Virginia, at an event for young people interested in becoming farmers. Then in Iowa, Meriwether met the head of the Future Farmers of America, who immediately signed him up to show the film to every FFA chapter in the state. Meriwether is now screening the film at FFA chapters around the country, as well as at select colleges and universities with strong agricultural programs.

Like other current films about the food system, such as "King Corn," "The Future of Food" and "Food, Inc.," "American Meat" addresses the dysfunction that many say lies at the base of the current U.S. agricultural system, which, with its dependence on large agribusiness concerns and its ties to giant chemical companies, has slowly squeezed out small family farms.

Unlike many of those films, however, Meriwether's makes a point of understanding and fully portraying the farmers and their families on both sides of the debate.

Watching 'American Meat'

Because of its unconventional distribution method, the only way to see "American Meat" is to attend a screening listed on the movie's website (there are none in Oregon), or to buy a license for a community screening (also on the website). Priced from $100 to $350 depending on the number of people who will attend, the screening package includes a DVD, publicity materials and guidelines. A theatrical release is scheduled for April in New York City, and individual DVDs will be available for purchase after that.

One hog farmer who raises his animals conventionally is Chuck Wirtz, a lifelong farmer based in West Bend, Iowa. Farming with his two brothers and his son, he operates a large commodity farm, trying at one point to convert part of it to a welfare-compassionate system. The attempt to change his practices failed when a subcontractor for Whole Foods, which had worked with the Wirtz family to set up the welfare-compassionate system, pulled out during the economic crash in 2008. This left him with pigs that couldn't be sold for a profit on the commodity market because it had cost too much to raise them with the welfare-compassionate method.

Wirtz's experience was echoed in the film by chicken farmers who borrowed money to build expensive chicken houses and buy chicks because Pilgrim's Pride, the nation's largest chicken producer, had contracted to buy them. When oil prices rose, Russia and China stopped importing chicken and in 2008 Pilgrim's Pride declared bankruptcy, forcing many chicken farmers out of business or leaving them with thousands of chickens they couldn't sell at a profit.

The film illustrates an alternative model for American agriculture represented by Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms in Virginia. Salatin is a pasture-based farmer featured prominently in Michael Pollan's influential book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and an advocate of what is known as rotational agriculture.

Salatin's method was to repair the health of the land by bringing back the native prairie pasture plants using environmentally friendly farming practices. The cattle then graze the pasture, after which Salatin moves them to another patch (or "paddock"). His chickens are moved into the first pasture and feast on the worms and bugs in the cattle's manure, spreading the manure around with their scratching, and fertilizing the soil.

The chickens follow the cattle into the second paddock and pigs are moved in where the chickens had been. The pigs turn the soil looking for food, and the pasture is fertilized by their manure. By eliminating the use of chemicals and by feeding the animals on grass instead of grain, this method of farming reduces costs and yields more crops and livestock per acre than industrial models, Salatin says.

Meriwether said that after reading Pollan's book, he e-mailed Salatin asking if he could make a film about a year in the life of Polyface Farms. But when he started editing, Meriwether realized he had a problem.

"Joel (Salatin) had continuously talked about conventional meat production and conventional farming," Meriwether said, but he had no footage to show what conventional farming looked like compared with the grass-based method at Polyface.

After attempting to use stock footage of concentrated animal feeding operations shot with hidden cameras, Meriwether said it just didn't feel right to him.

"As a journalist I'd never been to those farms or talked to those farmers, so I made a vow that we weren't going to use a single frame of hidden camera footage," he said. "We spent the next two years going around the country filming with chicken farmers, hog farmers and cattle ranchers."

The project led to an epiphany for Meriwether, a realization that there aren't "good" farmers and "bad" farmers. "It completely changed my perspective," he said. "Every farm is a family farm."

He realized that many times farmers sign contracts with big companies because they feel it's the only way they can keep their farms -- even though, as Chuck Wirtz reveals in the film, they might personally prefer the taste of a grass-raised product to their own industrially raised animals.

Meriwether was able to convince conventional farmers to appear in his film despite their sometimes negative portrayals in other films. He said he looked them in the eye and told them, "I give you my word that I'm not going to disparage you or show you in a negative light."

So when they finally saw the film?

"Everyone has liked it, so I feel like we honored that commitment," he said.

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Kathleen Bauer

is a writer and the author of the

blog.

The article reflects a correction published Nov. 30, 2012.