Farming

We woke up long before the sun did. We drove through darkness and arrived just before 6 am. We packed into the crowded trailer along with close to 15 other “farmers”. The meeting started at exactly 6:01 with introductions and laughter and the happy birthday song and chocolate cupcakes. By 6:07 the fate of Papi, a dairy cow, had been decided. She would be culled, slaughtered, murdered, It would take place this morning. She had only been giving about a pint of milk per day, so little it wasn’t even worth hooking her up to the suctioning, whirring, milking machines one final time. Her life was to be taken before this morning’s 6:30 am milking. She was to be removed from the heard, like her calf had been taken away from her, and shot. I listened for the sound of the gun all morning, but never heard it. I can’t say for sure what happened to Papi this morning, but my intuition tells me that she will be the freshest hamburger meat at distro this Friday.

Our first task of the day was moving chicken tractors. A job that sometimes hurts your heart more than it blisters your hands and makes your back ache. As you yank the heavy and collapsing boxes forward, the weak, sick, and dead chickens become painfully obvious. If you aren’t careful you might run theses chickens right over. Perhaps just a leg, but that’s still enough to evoke a more pained squawk. This morning one chicken that we almost flattened ended up dead. This wasn’t death by chicken tractor, it was at the hands of our mentor Camron. The chicken had a gaping hole in her side, which she was bleeding heavily from. The other chickens took this as their cue to peck at her wound until Cameron came and ended her life.

I have recently become so much more aware of just how brilliant most farmers are. In my experience they have constantly shattered the stereotype of quiet hearted, dull minded, field hands. Being a farmer requires a sharp brain, and the ability to make an array of difficult decisions correctly every single day. Making the right call most of the time is often a combination of a little bit of luck, a lot of experience, and some sheer brilliance. Still, it leaves me breathless that we get to make decisions about the lives of other animals. Today I saw two ends of a wide spectrum of reasons why we take animals’ lives. Mostly, we slaughter animals because their time has come, they have reached our desired size or age, and they can provide us with the end result we have been raising them for, food. Other times we kill them out of compassion, ringing their necks and ripping their heads off in order to set them free from their misery. Sometimes though, we kill them because it is self serving. Four less utters to attend to in the morning, one less cow to heard to pasture each night.

I’m still not totally sure what to make of witnessing these deaths today. I’m hopeful that somehow the different reasons we kill come close to evening each other out and allow us to fall somewhere between exploiter and caretaker.