I spent Sunday in the hayfield. I don't like doing that. Sundays are generally reserved for church and family time. However, when the hay is ready to bale, you gotta go. I rolled around 100 bales with relatively no issues, so that's good. During the haymaking process, I got a visit from the family. They needed a picture of Atticus with a roll of hay. He's currently working on a Fourth-grade poster project, a mammal poster for science class. I'll admit, I smiled inside when he told me he wanted to do his project on cows. It's convenient too. We have been able to get all of the needed pictures without leaving the farm. We needed pictures of cows, habitat, food (see above), predators, and tracks. I love his creativity. For the predator picture, he had a cool idea. "Dad, for the predator picture we could just put a mirror." Yes, of course, cattle have natural predators that fit the proper definition so we mentioned those. In his mind Humans eat more beef than any wild animal, so we are their predators. We could have included a picture of a human eating a steak, but a mirror makes the message more personal for those reading the poster.
That message needs to be more personal for everyone. I have never run from the fact that animals have to grow and die for us to be able to eat meat. The grocery store and traditional meat providers would like for you to forget that. They don't want you to associate the product with the animal from which it came. They are perfectly happy for you to associate the product with the plastic packaging it came in. Even better, associate it with the pastoral farm scene on the front of the plastic packaging. Just don't ask any questions about the aminals themselves.
At our farm, and many other farms like ours around the country, the particular production methods are what we talk about the most. Why is that? It's because our customers have a deep, visceral, spiritual connection with the food they eat. When you value and respect the life that had to be laid down for you to enjoy a steak, you want that life to have been respected for its entirety. Words like grass-fed, free-range, and pasture-raised are buzzwords to some people. To others, they are phrases that describe the production methods they desire. Knowing that those methods are honored by farmers you know allows us to be aligned toward a common goal, respect. Ultimately, that alignment allows us to feel better when we look in the mirror on the mammal poster.
