...or at least the farmer who raises your meat!
A friend of mine, who recently returned to eating meat after 8 years of being a vegetarian, says to me on a daily basis, "I don't want to meet my meat." I think this is her way of saying that she doesn't agree with me raising pastured pork for our consumption. The only thing I can think of when she says this to me is; "Why wouldn't you?"I'm not advocating going out and meeting the chicken, who, two months later will be your dinner. But meet your local meat farmers, visit their farms, and if you can't do that, google the company or farm name on your meat to check out their methods and business practices. If it were me, and I was a new omnivore, I'd want to make sure that my meat was raised humanely, in a way that allowed the animal to have a good life, and in a way that is good for our earth.
Factory farming needs to become a thing of the past. It is annihilating the earth and horrible for the animals and the people who handle these animals and operations. Animals are meant to roam, forage, peck, root, and nibble on grass, leaves, plants, and roots. Pasturing our animals gives us a more human livestock system, a healthier human diet, huge energy savings, elimination of feedlots, and a reduction in greenhouse gases.
Watching Fast Food Nation years ago, left me upset and bewildered. The treatment of the animals coming off a feedlot, where they have lived their life in confinement atop a pile of their own poo being served a commodity, grain-only diet, is stressful and harmful to both the animal and the employees of the slaughterhouse. These workers are asked to process hundreds of animals daily in poor working conditions for hours on end. This diet along with the stress that the animals endures, results in a poor quality of meat that can be harmful to your health. There are a variety of environmental conditions which can cause stress in animals, including extremes in temperature, humidity, light, sound, and confinement as well as excitement, fatigue, pain, hunger, thirst. Stress before slaughter can cause undesirable effects on the end quality of meat such as pale, soft, exudative meat or dark, firm, dry meat.
At our farm, we handle our piglets daily. We want to keep them docile and friendly. Nobody wants to be pushed around by six 150lb pigs. We practice managed rotational grazing for all our animals. We move our poultry to new pasture daily, also providing them with plenty of fresh water and organic feed. Our children know that these animals will soon be sent to market, for which we give thanks to these beings and treat them with respect and kindness while they are with us. I'd prefer to set up on-site processing to eliminate the stress, for the animals, associated with being put in a trailer and hauled off to an unknown place, even if it is just for a day. However, we are not set up to do that yet, and instead, we have chosen with care, a processing facility that implements humane systems. Livestock holding pens that have been professionally designed by Dr. Temple Grandin, the world's foremost authority in the humane handling of animals, and moving of the animals from the holding pens to the processing plant is through a series of one-way gates along a calming, circuitous path that never retraces steps. This is the most humane method possible and substantially reduces and even eliminates the release of stress hormones to provide a better tasting end product. We don't take one step in the whole process lightly!
