Mastodawn

So... pigs! (a thread)

I want to do a full post about them soon, and what we're planning on doing with them, but, some background:

Homesteading is trendy right now, if you didn't know. There are influencers making entire six figure or higher salaries making small-scale farming look cute, and other factors -- like increasing cost of living in cities, the ability to do remote work for some people, disillusionment with "society" or fears of climate collapse -- are pushing a lot of people to try to buy land and get on the bandwagon (or get on the bandwagon in their small suburban lots). It's wonderful that more people are interested in producing their own food and evaluating our reliance on industrial, extractive food systems, but if we're being honest, lots of these people are doing this without a psychological basis for intense physical labor, consistent work ethic (i.e: working around the clock and not quitting or skipping chores because it's cold or they're hard or you're sick or whatever), and appropriate ethics around animals as being sentient living beings deserving of care but who also are a critical part of a whole and who ultimately serve a purpose (usually food production) and instead see animals as accessories, pets, or status or novelty items.

One of the very unfortunate side effects of this is that lots and lots of people are purchasing and then breeding livestock... and then deciding that they can't actually kill them because that would be *awful*, continuing to breed them, and ending up in basically a cycle of overwhelm where without new animals coming in the novelty is worn off to the point where they don't want to do it anymore, so they keep breeding them, but then they're overwhelmed and cannot provide adequate care or afford all of the animals they have.

Livestock "rescues" are popping up left and right, diverting resources to "saving" these animals, all while many rural communities are still impoverished (despite that their tax base is increasing with upper middle class people flooding their housing markets) and without decent food.

There's a solution to this: actually producing food. We could also, then, divert some of this food to urban communities who are also without food.

The vegan debate is enormous (and I cover some of my thoughts in this post: https://rancholibertad.com/on-the-ethics-of-livestock/) but also a little ridiculous. We can pretend all we want that a vegan diet reliant on industrial food systems is actually a diet that *doesn't cause harm*, or that farming without commercial inputs is possible without animals (it isn't) or that somehow wild-sourcing all of our food is feasible in any ecosystem in the US (it isn't -- not at scale, as in, this isn't a meaningful lifestyle change any large percentage of us could make without *any* agriculture, and this isn't a lifestyle that's been lived in a very, very long time regardless of how people wish to categorize Indigenous peoples as "hunter gatherers").

So this is how we're orienting to this issue:

What we have capacity for, we're attempting to procure from these failed homesteads, where they are "calling it" and attempting to dump all of their animals.

The goal is to provide a high-welfare environment, correct any health issues, leverage the animals' instincts to support the land (i.e: pigs love rooting and can help decompact soil and clear rocky areas, turkeys and chickens help with pest control and can consume most cover crops that we plant in garden areas too small for ruminants, etc.) and then to humanely dispatch them when it is time and feed our community (or sometimes our omnivorous or carnivorous allies, like our or community members' dogs, cats, etc. that also support similar land regeneration projects through guarding or other contributions).

#Pigs #Homesteading #RegenerativeAgriculture #CommunitySovereignty #FoodProduction

On the Ethics of Livestock

I have been at once very excited about and dreading this post for a long time, but because of our last post on allyship with chickens, I think that it is necessary to do it now, before going deeper into the philosophies underlying our work here at Rancho de la

Rancho de la Libertad

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Rancho de la Libertad Dec 12

This is an augmentation of our existing approach and the way we're utilizing animal allies in our regenerative efforts, and our work towards community sovereignty, and is not a suitable replacement for sometimes bringing in animal allies from other ethically run regenerative farms.

However, we certainly do not see the solution to an excess population of farm animals to be "house them somewhere, use industrially produced grain to feed them for the rest of their long natural lives, allow them to do no good, euthanize them or wait for them to die a natural death from illness or complications of age, incinerate their bodies when they do die (rather than allowing them to return to the land), and pretend that this is an ethical net positive".

Why are we pretending that a humane death for a single animal that goes on to feed others, as was their original purpose, is somehow *worse* than the clearing of forests, the utilization of pesticides and herbicides, the consumption of fossil fuels for cultivation and harvest equipment and transport, etc etc on and on for decades of a pigs life?

When we make such decisions, we are doing so based on emotions: emotions that come from decades of being socialized to believe that "food" comes in sterile plastic packaging from a grocery store, and not the earth. We are doing so because we have come to believe that looking another living thing in the eye and giving them a death that dignifies and makes meaning of their life, that uses their whole body and a death which is encapsulated in the healing of ecosystems (and other beings) is crueler than purchasing the body of an animal that lived a short, undignified life of pure suffering and fear and is now plastic-wrapped and sitting on a grocery store shelf, or is crueler than consuming a plant-based diet that relied on the clear-cutting of entire forests, the destruction of entire ecosystems, the death of many beings: because we forget that industrial agriculture relies on extraction, slavery and death regardless of whether the end product is a steak or seitan.

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Rancho de la Libertad Dec 16

With all of that being said, we took home some animals that pretty badly needed a change in conditions, and it's been really difficult but really rewarding getting them in better shape.

Pig photo, for tax, though they like me enough now for me to probably get a better one soon. They were on a "mini pig" diet to keep one of them smaller - so that little female is TWO years old. They're growing more now and learning to eat fresh veggies and other goodies instead of just pellets. Big Boy, the big black one, has started playing with the dog (through the fence - I don't think a meeting would be a great idea at this moment). The little girl (who still needs a good name) is so friendly and comes up to me every time I enter their little area. They are not pasturing yet. I'm uncertain we'll train them for electric fencing, they're much older and more stubborn (and more dangerous) than a smaller, younger pig who would more safely be introduced to the idea of electric fencing and being hand-fed treats.

Also the turkeys. Wow, turkeys are so beautiful. These ones came sick, and are steadily improving (quarantine is no joke - disinfecting my boots between their coop and the chickens, just in case, though turkeys are the more sensitive of the two). Two of them were sneezing basically nonstop when we first brought them home, yesterday I heard one sneeze all day while I was outside cleaning and feeding everybody. They're more active (mama really wants to go outside, but they're still in quarantine for two weeks and being coop trained - almost, mama!). The runty baby female is breathing better and roosting with the rest instead of sleeping on the ground. Their beaks are still a little dirty, but there's not much I can do about that quite yet until we build more trust.

#RanchoDeLaLibertad #Farming #RegenerativeAgriculture #Pigs #Turkeys #Animals