Small Family Farms and Old Fashioned Values

Something I hear over and over again lately is that many people, like me, are opposed to factory farming. The public is far more aware today than in previous years about the cruelty involved in the intensive confinement of thousands of animals. There is also growing concern about the environmental damage of large scale animal agriculture.

Unfortunately many people think that these problems can be avoided by buying animal products at farmer’s markets, thus supporting smaller, local farmers.

The Washington Post unwittingly dispelled that myth on October 26 when they did a front page story on the effort to bring around Mennonite farmers to more environmentally friendly ways to handle animal waste. The message came through loud and clear with the photograph that accompanied the story: emaciated cows with protruding ribs stood in a dank feedlot, standing in their own waste without a blade of grass in sight.

The Mennonites are much like the Amish, a religious community that eschews certain trappings of modern life. But make no mistake; they are still as dedicated as any factory farmer to wringing the last dime from their animals with the least amount invested.

The focus of the article was the damage from Mennonite farms to local streams and creeks from animal waste run off. The article touted the success of working with some farmers to create systems to hold the waste in pools rather than let it run into the streams. Though it’s certainly better not to kill off every living thing in our local streams, I was troubled that the article ignored an important fact. The issue of animal waste disposal is becoming a crisis essentially everywhere we have animal agriculture. Storing the waste in pools on the farm is good for the streams, but still bad for the environment over all. Further there is just more animal waste than the environment can absorb. The only long-term solution to this issue is to stop raising so many animals for people to eat.

This article is timely because several members of my own family have hopped onto the trend of heading out to an Amish market (a one and half hour drive each way, at least) to buy “more humane” and “more natural” meat, cheese, and butter and egg-laden desserts for the holidays. I will certainly be showing them this article. We like to think back on our agrarian past as a utopia. The Mennonites and the Amish, because they wear old fashioned clothing and forgo many modern conveniences, bring to mind a happy myth of the family farm. But this article clearly shows it was always a myth. Even when horses plowed our fields and women wore bonnets while milking cows, animal cruelty has always been part of animal agriculture, and always will be.

The only way to avoid this cruelty and environmental devastation is to stop paying people to raise and kill animals for you. Whether you’re paying the grocer down the street or driving to the farmer’s market, when you buy eggs, milk, cheese, meat, or any animal product you are paying someone else to wring the maximum profit from animals even if that means under-feeding them, confining them, crowding, allowing them to develop disease, mutilating their bodies, or beating them if they don’t cooperate. The money you pay for these products ensures that more of these animals will be bred into this life. The money you pay rewards someone for polluting ground and water that other people and animals depend on.

If you want to go to the farmer’s market buy local organic produce, vegetables, lettuce, herbs. The answer to our ethical and environmental concerns about animal agriculture are not to be found in “smaller farms,” “local farms,” or “old fashioned farms” any more than they can be found in industrialized farms. The answer is to stop eating animals and animal products and eat a vegan diet instead.