“I like vegetarians, I just can’t eat a whole one by myself.”
The other day, on Instagram, my brother Jake, over at Cedar Springs Farm, posted a series of pictures of himself sweeping a sheep. The sheep in question was hanging from his bobcat forks, and bled out. Like myself, Jake will process his meat on farm, whenever possible. There were several sheep sweeping jokes and hashtags accompanying the pictures. All of this sparked the predictable projectile hate from the vegan subset of his followers. “This is disgusting” “You are horrible” “I followed for cute animal pictures, and now this”, etc. Now Jake is very diplomatic, and not one to feed trolls. I, on the other hand, won’t stand for the bullying of hard working farmers who are engaged in regenerative agriculture. Here is a link to the post in question, if you want to see what was said: Jake’s Post
All of this got me thinking about farming, vegans, and ecology. Let me state, from the outset, that I am not prejudiced against vegans. Heck, some of my friends are vegans. I joke, but my little brother is a vegan, with the exception of eating meat that I have raised. Some people find health benefits from adopting a meat and dairy free diet. Some people, also, get very sick from such diets. My issue is not with the validity of a vegan diet. My issue is with the smug condescension and false moral superiority. When viewed in total, the agricultural crisis in America is exacerbated by the type of farming upon which a typical vegan depends, while it is ameliorated by the type of farming Jake, I and many of our cohorts do.
Really, this is a microcosm of the dysfunction of contemporary sociopolitical discourse. The stereotypical vegan has bought into a narrative which reduces ecological concerns to “anthropogenic climate change”. The industrial production of meat has been marked for death, in this world view. People who lash out at holistic food producers as though they are immoral, are as confused as a hedge fund manager at a rainbow gathering. Is industrial meat production damaging to the environment, repulsive, unsafe, and brutal? Yes, yes it is. Does that mean that eating meat is, too? Absolutely not. Here’s the thing, when Nixon’s Agricultural Secretary, that ass Earl Butz, wrecked the family farm (“Get big, or get out!”, he said, and shifted policy to ensure it) the animals were removed from the farm, and moved to concentration camps. Chemical fertilizes replaced manure, and manure was diverted into sewage lagoons. There is an entire book’s worth of bad consequences resulting from this policy shift including, but not limited to, the rise of multi-national agribusiness, oceanic dead zones from fertilizer run-off, soil depletion and sterility, rural poverty, health epidemics from obesity to cancer, and Farm Aid. Just to make it clear what kind of an ass Earl Butz was, here’s another quote: "I'll tell you what the coloreds want. It's three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit." He holds my ire on par with that prick Ansel Keyes. These two have more blood on their hands than the socialists Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, combined, it’s just slower and less obvious how they killed.
So, our militant vegan neighbors conflate the farm processing of meat with the horror movies they have seen from inside factory farms. As is typical of sophist “thinking”, the nuance is lost, and the morality is reduced to killing sheep is evil, and meat is murder! Recently, some of these “warriors for the cause” stole chickens from one of my neighbors during an on-farm processing workshop. They are terrorizing local meat smiths in England. All of this terrorism, bullying, and harassment is directed at small producers who are actually saving the planet, rather than at Tyson, or Hormel.
In truth, Veganism is mass murder. Let us compare our well swept sheep friend with a fist full of organic, fare trade, gluten-free, carrots purchased from a grocery store. The sheep was born on green grass, on a sunny spring day, to a loving mother. He grew up eating warm milk, grass and cottonwood leaves in the fresh air, with all of his sheepish friends. The farmer scratched his ears, and rubbed his chin, and protected him from wolves and the Animal Liberation Army. He was happy and carefree. One day, he reached the peak of his culinary value, and took a trip to freezer camp. He went on to feed people. His life was transformed into a hundred meals. 1 death : 100 meals.
In order to get the carrots to grow, the “organic” farmer plowed his field. By so doing, he killed 487,325,761 microbes per square foot. He also killed 7 miles of mycorrhizal fungi, two mice, one ground nesting bird, a snake, 56 larvae of beneficial predator insects and pollinators, and 128 earthworms. After the carrots were planted, he applied blood and bone meal, as this is the only way an “organic” farmer can get a yield from over tilled soil in the absence of animals on the farm. The blood and bone meal come from the industrial meat industry, of course, and by buying those carrots, the vegan supports that industry where the regenerative small farmer harvesting his sheep does not. That handful of carrots grown in that square foot made one meal. 487,325,949 deaths : 1 meal
So, the obvious question is: where do we draw the moral line, below which living things are food, or alright to kill to make food? Omnivores typically put it somewhere between dogs and pigs, but not all of them. In England, horses are above the line, but in France, they don’t make the cut, if you will. Is the death of millions or billions of nematodes, fungi and bacteria moral to produce a carrot? How about the bird? Is eating a chicken murder, but plowing in half a killdeer and her nest full of eggs OK to plant a carrot? And the worms? Vegans wouldn’t eat them, on moral grounds, but I suppose its fine to senselessly slaughter them and leave them to rot. Much of the fertility of tillage is derived from the decaying bodies of all of these beings, after all.
Life, on Earth, is born of death. This planet is not a “safe space”. If you want to live, something else must die. The root of a dead plant feeds the fungi which dies and provides nourishment to the worm who dies to provide nourishment to the plant which dies to feed the vegan. When the sheep eats the grass, it does not die. It gets healthier, provided the sheep moves to new pasture before it takes a second bite. That is what the farmer is for, to move the sheep. The pasture is not plowed, so the soil is alive (sequestering carbon, not eroding), and fertilized by the sheep’s manure. The ecology in a rotationally grazed, perennially planted agro-forest system, such as the one on Cedar Springs Farm, is vibrant and teaming with life. The carrot farm is largely dead, and the soil would be hard pressed to support weeds, if the farmer quit feeding it dead chickens.
Even if we accept the twisted and manipulated argument about atmospheric carbon, permaculture and holistic animal management beat tilled agriculture for carbon sequestration, by far. Top soil is mostly carbon. Vegetable row crop soil is low in organic (carbon) matter, and has less every time it is tilled. Joel Salitin, for example, has to keep raising his fence posts, so the cows don’t step over his fences, because his rotational grazing builds soil that fast. Grazing animals turn grass into food without harming the soil structure and biology. In fact, they are required for the soil to thrive. It is better for the Earth, the soil, and the people to get their food from grazing animals than any other source. There is less death, by far, and a positive effect the ecology, rather than the soil strip mining that is (even “organic”) row crop farming.
On my farm, I use grazing animals to produce compost, which I use to top dress un-tilled permanent raised beds, in my garden. No soil biology was harmed in the production of this carrot. Every six months, or so, one of those grazing animals takes a trip to freezer camp. One death, hundreds of meals, minimal trauma (when processed on farm). The animal has been loved, respected, and nurtured. I do everything possible to use every bit of that animal to its highest purpose. The organs become pate. The hide is salted for future tanning (so some dim wit can throw paint on it, someday). The bones are cooked down for stock. The intestines are either cleaned for sausage casings or fed to the chickens. Anything that is not usable in another way is composted, and returned to the soil. The larger system is geared to grow into one that produces mountains of food with almost no involvement from me, except for moving animals and harvesting perennial and self re-seeding crops.
If I were to grade the morality of a farmer like Jake vs. some vegan who shops at an elitist grocery store, Jake gets and A+, and the tofu-for-brains gets a D. What is worse than spitting curses at someone on the grounds of morality? Doing that while being wrong. There’s little wrong with being a vegan, but that activist vegan cult is a menace and a mass-murdering danger to society! The way they eat requires tearing the flesh of mother earth with claws of death. The way we eat means sometimes a lamb dies, but the earth is better for it having been there. I’d rather wear fur than be a sanctimonious, virtue-signaling, hypocrite.
Do we joke around while we slaughter and butcher? You bet we do. It is gruesome work. Anything we can do to stay light and laughing during being covered with blood and guts, we will do. If you have never been to a government approved processing facility, you have no idea how disturbing it is. There is so much death hanging in a place like that. There certainly isn’t laughter and joy. When we elevate an animal on the farm, it is a celebration. The sacrifice of the animal’s life means continued life for us. Every gesture from sweeping sheep to rinsing filth from intestines is done with respect and gratitude. The gallows humor takes nothing away from that. In fact, it turns a hard day into a delight, and that is as it should be.
As I have mentioned before, if you eat meat, you should experience slaughter and butcher, at least once. After that, you will respect those who are able to do this work regularly. If you do not eat meat, try to source your vegetables from no-till farms, or grow your own, without tilling. If you produce none of your own food, for God’s sake shut the hell up. Just as women are really the only one’s with a valid voice in the abortion debate, farmers are the only one’s with a valid voice with regard to if and how animals enter the food system. If you believe that you eating meat is immoral, don’t eat meat. If you believe that me eating the meat I raise and process is immoral, you’re a brainwashed idiot. Remember that regressive, fundamentalist ideologies are always at the root of genocide. We may look like “red-neck hill-billies” to you, but in truth we are doing the hard work to actually fix our planet while others simply change their Facebook avatar and march around in pink pussy hats.
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