Illinois Farm Families Blog

Up until this January, for the past seven years, my family and I were vegetarians. After long, hard thought, discussion and exhaustive research we made the decision to fall off the wagon and get back on the meat. While we agreed on all the pros, my husband and I had different concerns about returning animal protein. The hardest thing for me to reconcile when deciding to readopt an omnivore lifestyle was that my food was once a living being.

So imagine my discomfort when I came face to snout with hundreds of little Wilburs that were being raised at Old Elm Farms.  A big part of why I began our vegetarian mission was because of animal welfare. I saw documentaries and read books and articles touting the inhumane practices associated with today’s modern meat industry. I knew that if I was going to readopt this lifestyle I could not blindly pick up my neatly packaged, ready to cook meats and never consider the chain of events that got it to my grocer’s meat case. I wanted to meet the animals that nourish my family and see the farm operations for myself. 

What surprised (and relieved) me most of all were the farmers themselves. I was spending a lot of time worrying about the poor little piggies in terrible conditions, but I never stopped to think that there are people out there devoting their life’s work to raising these animals.  While is was a bit sad to see all the pink pigs, with curious, playful personalities nudging at the sides of the pens,  it was reassuring to see Steve interact with them and seem to know them as individuals. The pigs I saw were clean, comfortable, alert and active. As social creatures, it was nice to see them together in large, open pens that provided plenty of room and access to food and water. It was clear that while a product, they were treated with care and respect.  Steve talked about how he monitors the facility conditions and makes necessary adjustments. He checks each pen daily and separates any pigs that seem to be struggling or ill. Antibiotics are given as a last resort and pigs are never sent to harvest with antibiotics in their system. His wife talked about being woken in the middle of the night when an alarm goes off indicating that there is a problem at the barn such as temperature or problems with the water supply. Farming is a 24-7, 365 day job. That is the nature of raising living beings and crops.

The bottom line is that whether they truly care about the comfort or mindset of the pigs or not, pork farming is a business, and like most businesses, it’s intent is to provide a product that consumers want to buy. John, Steve and his family want to produce the best quality of meat they can. I’m happy that they have adopted practices that they believe will do this and that just so happen to also be the right, humane things to do.

Five take-aways/surprises:

1.  Raising pigs is a very health consious/clean business. We were wore coveralls and boot covers when we toured the finishing barns. Not so much to protect us-but to protect the pigs from diseases and germs we might bring them! Less disease means less need to treat them with drugs or antibiotics.
2. And while it may seem unnatural or unfair to keep them inside-it’s actually better for them inside. When pigs live outside-they are exposed to the elements, which can alter how they eat and drink. Cold, shivering pigs, need more food. Hot pigs roll around in the mud, that they and their buddies also poop in, along with birds and rodents., which exposes them to diseases, which then have to be treated. Yuck! Indoors, everything is controlled for optimum piggy comfort-from temperature, food and water, ventilation, and best of all-their poop falls through slats in the floor.
3. The overall respect and care for the animals. Even if it’s just to produce a better product, I heard over and over, from the farmers, to the corporate reps, happier, healthier pigs make better meat.
4. That no drugs can be in their systems when sent to harvest. And the incredible amount of tracking and paperwork that is done to be accountable for this. Also that keeping them inside (see my #2) helps prevent the need for antibiotics in the first place!
5. It’s all somewhat green/eco-friendly! Using the manure to fertilize the crops and feeding them bakery crumbs and discards are two ways this process is participating in some serious recycling!

Becky Martinez, Glen Ellyn

When it comes to all things porcine, my knowledge is pretty limited to Miss Piggy, the conniving mustachioed pigs from Angry Birds, Olivia, Charlotte’s Web, that George Clooney kept a pot-bellied one, and the popular tag line, "the other white meat."

And yes, going to college in South Bend, Indiana taught me that a sow’s uterus takes up an entire lab table (we had to dissect both that and piglets), and that driving downwind of a pig farm for a good 20 miles on the way to New Buffalo is probably a good reason to put the top back on the jeep. Beyond that, I had no idea that raising, maintaining and harvesting pork is such a complex (!) process.

I recently joined my fellow Field Moms for a nose around the multigenerational Gould Pig Farm in Maple Park and not only came away with a potential calling as a pig midwife – newborn piglets are very hard to resist - but with some serious knowledge about the current events impacting pork production on a global level.

If you follow foodie news, McDonald’s recently announced its decision to require its pork producers to stop using gestation stalls - pens used for breeding sows that are about the same length and width as their bodies.

Way to be pressured by the European Union there, big wigs.

The EU operates under completely different guidelines than the United States, and once a non-scientific group decided pigs must be able to exercise and investigate their environment, things got kind of hairy for the way farmers run their farms now.

Here’s the thing. Human perception and the way animals are being housed are not mutually exclusive. Just as it’s human nature to think, "Gee, I wouldn’t want to be in a pen where I can’t turn around or hang out with my friends," anthropomorphizing pigs draws a very crooked line in the sand.

Activist groups are very quick to point the finger at what’s wrong in the farming community, and yes, there are always a few bad seeds in the bushel, but animal welfare and animal rights are not mutually interchangeable. And, while transparency is key in how farmers run their operations, activist groups are putting pressure on retailers in saying that consumers want to see an end to gestation stalls.

Gone are the days of open pastures, people. Pigs are not herd animals, and introducing group housing is not a simple process. When left to socialize in groups, pigs develop a hierarchy, meaning that the "mean girls" of the group quickly monopolize food and water sources and become aggressive toward other sows. Pigs do bite and can cause some nasty chewing injuries. Seriously, would you want a 700-pound bully chomping on your vulva or biting off your tail? Yikes! But that’s what pigs do when left to establish their own pecking order.

Stressed pigs also means tough meat, inconsistent individual weights – farmers want to see relatively uniform pigs, not obese or overly thin sows - difficulty in controlling diseases, and more importantly, unhappy pigs.

Think about it. It’s in the farmer’s favor to treat their pigs well. Pig farming is a business, and though there may be a favorite boar or sow here and there, they are not pets. Eventually, we’re going to eat them.

The Gould’s stressed that they treat their sows as individuals, and give them as much TLC necessary to make them feel pampered and happy, which for pigs, translates to biohazard security, quality (not quantity) of space, and five basic freedoms: food, water, protection, and freedom from fear and distress.

In fact, the Gould’s have implemented advanced methods of Pork Quality Assurance (PQA) and Transport Quality Assurance (TQA), which means that voluntary animal welfare audits are the norm at their farm, conducted by third parties who have no connection to them or their clients.

And yes, we did have a chance to zip up some Hazmat suits and actually tour the pig housing. I’ve always been the first to speak up against circuses and puppy mills, and in support of more stringent regulations at those farms that have popped up in the news as being bonafied cruel to their animals, but that was most certainly not the case here.

Though startled when we first trudged in with our plastic shoe covers, and cameras and lighting, the pigs were very inquisitive and relatively clean. I didn’t see any injuries or signs of fights among the pigs, and they spent plenty of time communicating with one another via grunt and oink.

Sure, there was some stinkyness – they are farm animals after all – but remember, they don’t sweat, so that infamous smelly rap mainly comes from poop, which has a lot of ammonia in it. Last I checked, no poop smells that grand, so no big. Better yet, the Gould’s use all of that waste to fertilize their fields, making it an excellent example of reduce, reuse, recycle.

The highlight was witnessing a birth in the farrowing – nursery area - of the barn. The Gould’s work with nature, not against it, and since we had just experienced the insemination of a sow – optimal semen shown to produce lean meat and strong pigs is used, and the process involves charting each sow’s cycle and using a "tease" boar to naturally bring on excitement - it was a pretty nifty progression to see.

Piglets smell wonderful, and are surprisingly fuzzy and loud. Those newborns who have trouble finding their mother’s teats – like any littermates, there are bigger and smaller piglets, and plenty of squabbles over the teats closest to the sow’s head as they have more milk - are assisted by the Gould’s, since the sow’s colostrum and milk naturally boosts her offspring’s immunity and promotes healthy development.

Obviously, the learnathon was vast, but the opportunity to form individual opinions based on the Gould’s experience and Janeen Salak-Johnson’s expertise – the latter is a professor as the University of Illinois – was much greater.

And for all those who know me entirely too well, no, I didn’t bring a piglet home with me. The newborn piglets didn’t fit into my camera bag.

 

Pilar Clark

Field Mom

Additionally, we've learned more about what plants need in order to grow well; exactly what combination of nutrients and at what times help them grow. Some of this has been done through simple selective breeding techniques (breeding the best plants together to get the best hybrids), some by production practices (spacing of rows, tillage methods), some by bigger equipment that gets done faster (bigger planters allow us to plant more acres in a single day, and corn that is planted earlier tends to yield more, as well as GPS allows us to plant straighter and not waste seed), and, yes, some of this improvement comes from "GMOs" (Genetically-Modified Organisms). There has been a lot of bad publicity and concerns about the process of genetically modifying corn, which is a very simple way that genes from other plants are added to the corn. Our family feels that this is such a safe process that we eat products from our corn and feed it to our cows, and we have made a very strong commitment to only do what's best for our cows. All of these practices on our farm allow us to take care of our land, do more with less in this tight economy, and create the best environment for the crops that we grow.

We are well past knee-high right now!  We are always at the mercy of Mother Nature though.  We finally got some much-needed rain on Monday, and although it came with too much wind, our corn fields were not affected. Some of our farmer friends were not as lucky as their corn was damaged by the wind. With any luck, everything will work out for all of us and Mother Nature will give a nice rain as our corn starts to pollinate and make ears in the next few weeks.

Carrie Pollard
Po-Cop Dairy
Rockford, Ill.