Circle M Farm

Several days after the artificial insemination adventure, I was filing the receipt from our swine semen supplier and noticed that the box and its fragile contents had cost us $79.00.

The slip broke our costs down into $7 for each tube of semen, 42 cents for each “Goldenpig,” which must have been the yellow-foam-tipped straw, and over $65 for shipping and handling. If Piggy Lou has another eight piglets in three months, three weeks and three days, as she is scheduled to, each will have cost us about $10. That’s good news, and she’ll likely raise more than eight this time.

But contemplating the numbers somehow made me feel sad about our first brush with conventional modern farming, where there is typically so little value on the animals themselves and so much more assigned to the various technologies employed to make working with them easier. This is the case in almost every aspect of conventional animal husbandry in America, and I think its why the factory farming system breeds mistreatment. The living beings are the least valuable figures in the equation (and I think I can safely say that includes the farmers themselves).

For instance, in a large-scale hog operation, most of the financial outlay goes toward building concrete indoor confinement facilities for the pigs and concrete subterranean sludge storage for their manure. To survive in such artificial and unhealthy conditions, piglets must have their teeth and tails cut off (in such close quarters they’ll start biting each others’ tails and keep on chewing) and then be medicated through their food for the rest of their lives. Sows, meanwhile, are forced to gestate, multiple times a year, in small “crates” where there isn’t even room to turn around. They give birth standing up, chained to metal rails so they can’t step, sit or lay on babies born into the cramped concrete bunkers.

A similarly uncomfortable fate awaits beef cattle, as chronicled in Michael Pollan’s excellent “natural history of four meals” in America, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” As it does chickens. And lambs. Choose a meat that you can purchase in a typical grocery store, and the story will be the same if you research it on the web or in one of the many current best-sellers on our food supply.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s blockbuster non-fiction crossover, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” she (and her husband and daughter) very elegantly uncover the same sort of de-valuing in vegetable farming. In the conventional produce equation, living plants are worth pennies, while the lions’ share of investment goes into petroleum products – gas for tractors, tillers, sprayers and harvesters; gas to truck vegetables an average of 1500 miles before they’re consumed; oil to make pesticides, herbicides and synthetic fertilizers; oil to make packaging.

“We’re consuming about 400 gallons of oil a year per citizen – about 17% of our nation’s energy use – for agriculture, a close second to our vehicular use,” writes Kingsolver’s husband, Steven Hopp. “More than a quarter of all farming energy goes into synthetic fertilizers.” One could argue that this skewed investment in conventional vegetable farming has led to mistreatment of the plants and the land, too.

As ultra-small-scale homesteaders – we own 20 acres, 10 of which is in un-fenced reversion to brush and grass, a couple are in woods, six are in permanent rotational pasture and under an acre is in bio-intensive vegetable production – we tend to have very little investment in infrastructure or equipment beyond fences and gates. The priority here is care of the animals, care of the land, care of the plants. They are our most valuable investment, by necessity. It simply wouldn’t make sense for us to invest in tractors and chutes and concrete bunkers at our size. We milk the goats by hand because we only milk a few. We pick the corn by hand because one pass with a combine would squash our entire garden. We weed with tiny hand-hoes because our crops are planted closely to conserve space and water.

Of course, we’ve done a lot of reading and researching, and we have a developing philosophy of why we believe such methods are healthy for the planet. But the truth is that many of our investment and methodological decisions are made for us by the scale of our farm. Unfortunately, growing food on a scale this small is rather inefficient and rather more expensive than conventional methods. That makes our meat and produce, like that of other small growers, a sight more pricey than we, or our customers, can pick up in the grocery store.

But we believe that our children and our customers and we ourselves deserve well-cared-for foods. Friends, when you can, buy local, buy small, buy loved.