Disconnects From Food and Factory Farming

I believe that as a society, we have become completely disconnected from our food.  There is this cute little pic, taken from what appears to be a newspaper clipping.  We all point and laugh, we hope that it's a wind-up - no one can really be that daft can they? - but deep down, there's a part of me that is concerned it's all too real.  Someone really believes this to be true.  I also have a song running through my head at the moment, especially the line "Peaches come from a can, they were put there by a man".

There are a lot of ways that I see this disconnect - especially regarding meat.  I saw someone ranting on about how ridiculous it was that a leg of lamb now cost $35 and that put it totally out of her price range.  I don't think she realised that it was the wrong season for fresh lamb and we'd had a very hard winter the year before.

Now let's just stop and focus on that little bit for a moment.  A hard winter means lamb at Christmas four to six months later is expensive.  Lambs are usually born late Winter to early Spring.  Down here in the South Island of New Zealand, we can get sudden unexpected blizzards any time from June to late September.  We did a couple of years ago, I was stuck inside for four days and completely grateful that I didn't have any livestock at that point.

In my little area, sheep-farming is predominant.  I was talking to the manager of our local large sheep estate and during that blizzard a couple of years ago, they lost more than a thousand lambs.  They were born during the blizzard (sheep tend to do this, I think it's a survival trait).  Lambs going from over 30 degrees Celsius in the womb to minus zero air temperature go into shock and die.  Their little bodies don't have the resources yet to keep themselves warm, and they're wet with amniotic fluids which cools their bodies more quickly and sometimes freezes before they've dried.  Their mothers are generally covered in a layer of snow on the ends of their wool and they can't completely envelop the lamb anyway.  The lamb's body temperature drops too fast and it kills them.  A day or two after birth, the lambs are better able to cope with a sudden drop in temperatures.

This station generally runs about 10,000 head of sheep.  I'm not sure what percentage of that is ewes in lamb.  I do know that most ewes have twins and sometimes triplets.  Because it's sheep, there is an expected rate of mortality.  It was explained to me as "Sheep just die sometimes, for no real reason at all.  It sometimes seems as though they go looking for new dumb ways to die.  The trick is to try to keep them alive for long enough to make a few quid off them."

Even if that thousand was 5% of their lambs for that year, that's still a considerable amount.  I suspect though it's more like 20 - 30%.  Now they have an amount of income they expect from the works in return for all the lambs they sell them.  There is nothing greedy about this (as some have suggested), they get paid once a year and they have certain costs that need to be covered to continue running.  Things like wages, vets, shearers, all the trappings to keep the animals well and healthy, and more expensively, contained in their correct paddocks and poachers kept out.

How would you cope with a 5% pay cut?  What about 20- 30%?  Most people I know live week to week.  5% for an entire year would cripple them.  So the works pay more for the lambs.  The scarcity pushes the prices up.  This isn't a new thing either.  I know for that year, the works was paying 30% more per lamb to keep their farmers going so that there would be lamb next year and possibly hogget in a few months.  When the works pays 30% more, they charge more for the meat that goes to the supermarket.  They have operating costs like staff wages etc to cover too. 

And that's how a hard winter increases the price of your leg of lamb at Christmas.  I also know that several farmers were disheartened by the way it dropped back down to a more normal rate the following year.

Now let's just take that a wee step further.  I've seen a lot of stuff this year regarding factory farming animals.  I've seen pictures of sows in farrowing crates with captions about how she spends her entire life stuck like this.  Tragically, this creates two problems for those supporting the factory farming issues.

Firstly, a farrowing crate is used purely for farrowing.  The sow has her litter of piglets (this is what farrowing means) and is in this crate for 1-3 weeks (it varies) until the piglets are big enough and strong enough to get out from under their mother and she has less ability to eat them.

I saw a number of things when my sow had her first litter of piglets.  An adult pig getting up from lying down is not a pretty or graceful event.  They roll around until they can get their feet under them to get up.  80 - 150kg of clumsy animal rolling around.  I saw two newborn piglets crushed when Mum rolled on them trying to get up to show me how clever she'd been. 

A local pig farmer told me that eating piglets is more common with gilts having their first litter.  She's a little confused about what has just happened, as many new mothers are, then something that smells like food crawls over her face.

Before this farmer began using farrowing crates, he had a very hard time staying in business and keeping staff.  There is nothing that drives staff morale down more than getting up after a small storm in the night to find out that many of the sows had panicked and there's at least a 50% mortality rate in the piglets just from the storm.  I mentioned a 5% loss in sheep farmers - here 25% is normal and expected but it can be over 50%.  When you have to go and pick up several thousand dead piglets in a morning, it's a truly awful way to start your day.

Now, a gestation crate or sow stall is different.  This isn't used for farrowing.  This is used to keep a sow caged until she farrows.  This is the crate or stall that she may spend most of her life in.  This is awful and cruel and I support the fact that they have been banned in NZ.  What was that?  Oh yes, they've already been banned (2010 I believe) to be completely phased out by the end of next year.

But somehow, a 50% piglet mortality is kinder and less cruel than a sow in farrowing crate for a couple of weeks?  I challenge that assertion in anyone who wants to make it.  What kind of twisted, sick individual can honestly accept this as truth?  How is half your piglets dead better than 1-3 weeks in a farrowing crate?  Most sows walk happily into them and lie down.  They don't have to work for their feed, they get to rest after the birth of anything up to 25 piglets and they are warm and sheltered.

I've spoken to people who believe that if a sow has plenty of room to move, in a lovely spacious shed then she won't roll on her piglets or harm them in any way.  These are again people who have no ideas of the reality.  Unlike many mammals, a sow must lie down to feed her piglets.  When the piglets have fed, they pile on top of Mum (you see this in cats too) and as close to Mum as they can get for the warmth and comfort.  It really doesn't matter how much space the sow and piglets have - they'll all be together in one small part of that space.

The second part of the issue with referring to farrowing crates as sow stalls or even as similar to sow stalls is that when you use the wrong words in your protests you are ranting about things that don't actually happen. What this does is show your ignorance which makes you someone to ignore.  It doesn't matter how well-intentioned you are or even if you're protesting something that genuinely needs to be stopped, if you're waxing lyrical over an issue like this and the words you're using aren't what you really mean, you seem to be clearly poorly educated in your issue and not worth giving air time to. 

There was a video doing the rounds of some activists breaking into a pig farm at night.  They made much of how startled and nervous the piglets were.  They showed all the rats running around.  They spoke of how awful it was to see 20 piglets cramped into such a small space.

Please tell me how someone breaking into your home and shining lights attached to video cameras in your face in the middle of the night would leave you calm and unruffled?  Please explain to me how that should be even less if it happened to your children?  Remembering that these were piglets of only a few months old.

I have heard from a fairly reliable source that the rats were released by the activists.  Truth?  I don't know.  The presence of rats however, only shows that there is adequate feed and ventilation available.  It is harder to control rats in a free-range environment and if you want to consider something a little scary, I used to buy a brand of pig pellets that the rats and mice left alone.  I didn't have to put it in tightly lidded bins or anything.  You have to wonder what could possibly be in this feed that the vermin wouldn't touch it?  If you leave poison around (even in bait stations) you run the risk of potentially poisoning your pigs.  If not from direct contact with the poison, from when they eat dead rats - and they will.  Traps are difficult with rats and can only catch one at a time.  Lots of cats and dogs is a better option, but will never keep the vermin population down to zero.

20 piglets is one litter.  This is one family of siblings, all together nice and cozy.  A sleeping room in a preschool could potentially look similar too.  Miss Eight's preschool had little cot spaces like cubby holes up the wall in the nursery.  Three layers of what were effectively baby sleeping cages.  It was a clever way to make the most of the space they had, but when I say it like that, it sounds rather terrible doesn't it?

Don't forget, as many people seem to, that the perfect end result for organisations like SAFE and PETA is that we all become vegan.  Because killing our own kind is so much better and far more ethical.  I cannot be vegetarian.  My body is built in such a way that I don't absorb iron from non-meat sources.  I quickly become very sick and anaemic, even when I'm making sure to have a healthy and balanced vegetarian diet - yes I know there is more to it than just not eating meat.

Our bodies are designed to be omnivores.  This is in our very physiology.  From the type of teeth we have and the way they are structured to our digestive system.  Having political views to make that "not for you" is one thing and that is fine.  Having a body type that remains healthy on this type of diet is another thing, and that is also fine. Telling the rest of the world that they should live unnaturally and make themselves ill for your politics or beliefs is arrogant.  Anyone who is truly sucked in to that is a prime example of Darwinism in action.

Now when there are people who are still objecting to the prices of food, who seem to treat increases in the prices of food as something completely unfair and rude that has been done to them and seem to believe they have a right to cheap food what is to be done?

"I'll eat free-range pork and eggs when they come down in price" they say.  Or "These free-range farmers are just cashing in on a fad, they're just being greedy."  But at the same time they're often the people complaining about factory farming practices.

You can't have it both ways.  Free-ranging costs more for a number of reasons. 

I do believe that free ranging is better.  I like the taste of the meat more than the factory farmed stuff.  If I can't afford to buy it (or couldn't before I moved to our block) then I would go without.

However, as long as there are people with the attitude that food should be cheap (and how dare these farmers actually be able to afford to live and pay their staff more than minimum wage?) then there will always be factory farming in one form or another.  I am not saying it's right.  I'm saying that the protests are aimed at the wrong part of the process.  This is a supply and demand thing and a disconnect from what goes into growing an animal from paddock to plate and keeping it healthy enough to become food.

If you truly want to stop factory farming, become more involved in where your food comes from.  Get your education from more balanced sources.  Visit the farms, as I have, talk to the farmers or more importantly, listen to them.  See that money is just as tight for them as it is for you.  If you want to stop it, create demand for the free-range.  Stop buying the other stuff.  Actually live by your proclaimed ideals.  Be aware that a lot of the propoganda you hear is inflated, dramatised and made to cause an emotional reaction and that there may not be as much truth in what you see than it seems on the surface.