Farming Animals without Suffering

Now to questions that are exercising my mind at present.

If animals and ecosystems go hand in hand, if animals can help us grow crops and manage the land, then how do we keep animals without causing suffering? If we can keep them, then is it also possible to keep animals for food such as milk and eggs without suffering?

I must profess to have no answers.

These questions just prompt further questions.

Is domestication itself a form of suffering?

What about sex? Animals have a drive to reproduce. It is that drive that both provides the production opportunity and often begs the management action.

Is it realistic to expect to eat anything without causing suffering? Cropping is well know to involve serious collateral animal suffering.

What about those uninvited animals - the scourge of any crop farmer?

What about those uninvited animals - the joy of any nature lover?

When does an animal cease to be an animal? When it is a mollusc, or an insect? Or is it all those things that science classifies Animalia? Where is the sentient line?

Don't plants have feelings too? And bacteria and fungi?

Perhaps I should be a Jain?

Where does the 'middle way' sit in all of this?

Too much to tackle in one go. Perhaps I will try dealing with them one at a time.

Animal or Vegetable

So why animals at all?

I have often read that we should all switch to farming plant crops for direct human consumption. We could feed many more people with a lower environmental cost.

That statement does not consider some relationships that are demonstrated on our farm.

The first is that all land is not the same. The land I work with runs from a small river to a ridge of substantial hills. Near the river the soil and moisture are such that I can reliably grow many types of crops. I don't have to travel far uphill before the soil is not suitable for cultivation or cropping. However, these areas are suited to perennial pastures or trees. By the time I am half way to the top of the hills the slope and soils restrict sustainable land use to trees and seasonal grazing. In fact the majority of the land I work with is only suitable for animals and trees (and generally not crop bearing trees).

The second is that plants and animals go together. As a trained ecologist I tend to see ecosystems not agricultural production systems. Herbivores and herbs are synergistic, as are fruit and fruigivores,  detritus and detritivores, meat and carnivores. That does not presuppose that humans need to eat animals, simply that trying to remove animals from ecosystems is likely to have a range of unwelcome and perhaps unanticipated ramifications.

The third is that animals play a management role. The land we farm is in transition (more of that in a later post). In the meantime, we have a large amount of grass that, left unchecked, would constitute a serious fire hazard. This is something that is dangerous and against the law. Some of the grass may be dealt with by controlled burning or mowing. Both these strategies have their limits. Another management function of animals is biomass and nutrient cycling. Our organic permaculture farming strategy is dependent on recycled plants (cattle, goat and poultry manure) for fertility and soil carbon.

The final relationship is that the land we farm exists in a social fabric - of markets, technologies, industries and cultural proclivities. We live in an area where everyone farms cattle and no-one farms much else. There is a cattle market, saleyards, abattoir, transport providers, farm work contractors, product distributors and suppliers, even a yearly calendar of cattle related events. By contrast we grow a small garlic crop every year. There is no local established marketing, sales or distribution systems for garlic. We have to be grower, processor, marketer, sales and delivery. We faced the same challenge with our goat dairy. There are significant inefficiencies (cost/unit production) in swimming against the tide.

I will not use any of these relationships as a justification for continuing to farm animals for slaughter. However, each does present a very real challenge.

The question is not - 'Should we farm animals or plants?' I suspect I cannot do one sustainably without the other. The question is - 'How do we influence the ecosystems we manage without precipitating suffering?'

Farming Animals for Slaughter

Today we are tagging and emasculating calves.

Strange for a buddhist farmer. A pragmatic decision.

The moment when I realised that I wanted to stop farming animals commercially is still very clear in my memory.

We farm. Part of our farm is raising cattle for slaughter. Even when we ran the dairy the ultimate fate of our goats was slaughter. The ultimate fate of almost any animal in a production setting (meat, milk, eggs, wool) is slaughter. It is simple accounting. Farm animals are only productive during the prime of their life - when they are growing and reproducing. After that they become a cost with no income. They are either sold to slaughter, or they are simply killed. They do not retire to live out their days.

In some circumstances they do not even get a short life. Our dairy operation systematically killed almost all of our male kids at birth. We did raise the males for meat for a couple of years but there was no real commercial market. At sale we earned less than 20% of what it cost us to raise them.

So why did I want to stop? One of the key aspects of 'appropriate livelihood', which is one of the key steps in the Eightfold Path, is to refrain from raising animals for slaughter. 'Appropriate livelihood' was certainly an important consideration.

However, it was much more than that. I came to farming partly to address my disquiet with the way western agriculture was separating people from their food. As a result people are increasingly isolated from the inevitable ethical decisions that are made in the food production process. I did not like a lot of the decisions that were being made on my behalf.

Farming was a way of facing those decisions head on. If I was going to eat meat (and even then I was largely vegetarian) then I was going to take responsibility for raising, killing and butchering that meat. It would be done in a way that I thought appropriate. That connection could be shared with everyone who ate our meat.

I spent 12 years confronting my philosophy of ethical meat production with the reality of breeding, raising, killing and butchering animals. In the end I knew that the animals had no desire to be killed, and that the killing was causing a deep undercurrent of suffering in me.

Buddhist philosophy met lived experience. It was really a non-decision.

I wanted to stop, but how to extricate myself from this dilemma - a farm predicated on raising meat; a farmer no longer interested in perpetuating the personal suffering caused by doing so; a family with a heavy investment of time, effort, money and emotion in that farm.

The farm is in transition - more of that some other day. That is the pragmatic part. That is why I am still emasculating and tagging. But I will not kill another animal so that I can eat meat. Soon no animal on our farm will face that fate. No person will be asked to take on that suffering on my behalf.

What's this all about

This is about trying to make sense of an anxiety.

As Stephen Batchelor (www.stephenbatchelor.org) observes (to paraphrase): Death is a certainty, its timing is unknown, the afterlife a hypothesis - so what should I do now?

For now I manage a farm - I even have the privilege to 'own' a good proportion of what I am trying to manage.

When I came to the farm I had goals. About sustainability, about reconnecting people with where their food came from, about being innovative, progressive and influential. They were goals aimed at making this world a better place, my community a better community, and my family a better family. They were also goals that played to my ego.

When I came to the farm I also had questions. About what it was to lead a fulfilled life, a right life. About how I should conduct my relationship with the world.

Obviously these goals and questions were interconnected. Obviously I had to find some reference point for what was 'better' and what was 'right'.

Between 2001 and 2009 we ran a family dairy and cheese business. My parents, my wife and our children. We succeeded in so many ways (achieved the goals we had set ourselves). But I failed in one, the critical one. I was so busy working on and in the business that my relationships with the world, my community and my family had become distorted. The energy derived from my desire to be successful, and my fears of failing was causing all sorts of suffering. My ego had not taken over, but it had become an anchor.

Then we had another baby - and he helped us to make a change.

I had already read stoic philosophy and a number of westernised treatments of Buddhism. They had become my standards for 'better' and 'right'. They were also the seeds for change - the baby was the precipitating factor.

Since then I have been asking the question - what should I do now? My anxiety is driven by my inability to adequately answer that question.

For four years the farm has been in transition - with no definite goals, only insubstantial aspirations based on a slowly shifting philosophical foundation.

This blog will be an ongoing attempt to answer the question - what should I do now? How should I live in a world where I am not in control - a world of impermanence and interdependence. A world where I have responsibilities that I will not abandon. A world where our existential suffering can be transcended, but where so much of what I am inclined to do, what I have been taught to do and what I am encouraged to do, seems only to add to suffering.

It will focus on farming because that is my primary interaction with the wider world.