An Open Letter to My Alma Mater

Dear Iowa State College of Veterinary Medicine,

 Thank you for the sound education you gave me regarding anatomy, physiology, bacteriology, dermatology, pharmacology, internal medicine, surgery, histopathology and any number of other 'ologies' that I am sure I have forgotten more of than I ever imagined I would learn.  I am, however, most unhappy with the status of education of production animal medicine. The thing that always sparks me off in this regard is typically a comment or article in the quarterly published Gentle Doctor magazine that I receive since I am supposed to be a happy alumna of the college. This month, it was one of the bullet points in the Dean's Letter p.3 (#4 to be exact)
     

 "Establishment of the Swine Medicine Education Center, a collaborative effort that provides unmatched access to a modern production system that includes 90,000 sows and nearly two million pigs and complements our swine, beef and dairy summer programs, and our rejuvenated food animal field services unit." [emphasis is my own] 

You are supposed to be perceived as the "leader in production medicine" also known as "food animal medicine" or to those lay people that may be reading this, "meat".  You are a land grant college in the very middle of the American Heartland, dedicated to the science an innovation involved in feeding the masses, and yet the system is terribly broken and you are all busy trying to fix the system using more of the same technology that broke it in the first place.  

 Stop.  Look around you. 

The world is slowly waking up to the food that they eat and what it is doing to us.  This is clearly evidenced by books like The Omnivore's Dilemma by Pollan and movies such as Food Inc.  You may have not read or watched them yourselves, but you should.  The research being expressed by these people is sound and, what's more important, makes good sense.  You taught me to look at research objectively and I have....theirs is better than yours.  It shouldn't take more antibiotics to grow our meat, it shouldn't take chemicals to sterilize our food, it shouldn't take people dying from food borne illnesses for you to wake up and realize that maybe nature might have a better way. 

Is it because the large pharmaceutical companies won't pump millions into the coffers that you so desperately need to keep going?  Is it because big businesses like Monsanto, Cargill and Pfizer will leave you high and dry if you actually do what is right and study the differences between organically grown, sustainably managed, pasture fed animals and the high stress, GMO corn-eating, pseudo-food animals that are currently being produced by IBP and Tyson?   For shame.

Well, just so we are clear, this is one veterinarian that you trained that will not be contributing to your college unless it is to train the next generation of veterinarians to think for themselves and wake up to what is happening to our animals.  We take an oath at the completion of our vet school education, an oath to protect the welfare of the animals we treat, to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves and yet here we are locking them up in confinement operations that are clearly NOT in their best interest.  I would like to see any one of you live one day in a space confined such that you couldn't all lay down at the same time and there was so much fecal material in the air around you that it was difficult to breathe.  Or maybe you should all be housed over your own excrement for a while and in such a noisy environment that you can't sleep unless you are completely exhausted.  We have all heard what stress does to our own systems and yet we expect our animals - those that will give their lives so that we may eat - to endure such conditions so that our clients can make the most money per unit.  We have lost track of the fact that those units are, in fact, animals.  Veterinarians should be leaders in this area....we know better and yet we are following - following the big Ag money.   Being led along by our noses in the hopes that we, too, might make a bigger piece of the pie at the expense of all those that we are supposed to be minding the welfare of - the animals and, as a result of that, the people that eat them.

Take a stand.  Will it mean money lost? Probably! Will it mean healthier animals and people? Absolutely! And the people that are waking up to this monstrosity will flock to your doors and beg to learn what you can teach them, or beg for the services of the veterinarians that you graduate.  Be the leader again, please, so that I can once again feel pride at calling you my Alma mater rather than cringing when someone points out that, once again, there is a food recall or thousands of eggs that have been contaminated and the only option is to simply throw more antibiotics or more federal regulations at them. 

We need small farmers in Iowa - not corporate giants.  Iowa is a dying state.  Most of these students that you are teaching right now will likely flee these borders like so many rats from a sinking ship. Wonder why there are a dwindling number of food animal veterinarians? I don't. With corporate giants running the show, how many vets do they really need? There are more large production units and more CAFOs in Iowa than in several of the surrounding states, there is more transgenic corn and soybeans grown here than almost anywhere else.  We need to diversify. 



My own role in this has been to conduct some of my own experiments. Once again you taught me to pay attention and keep records and for this, I thank you.  I can honestly say that there is a clear, distinguishable difference between the eggs that are raised in confined "caged batteries of birds" vs those from my flock of free range hens. I also raise a few pigs, a dairy cow and we buy all our beef from a local farmer that raises them on pasture.  The differences in our food quality and thus our health are substantial. And by supporting local farmers I am helping to ensure that small town Iowa actually has a chance to survive.

I realize that I will very likely not be high on the list to win any of the prestigious awards distributed to the "good soldiers" of the veterinary profession, but it is my honest belief that if you don't periodically stir the pot, all the scum rises to the top. I feel it is my obligation, as outlined by the oath, to continue the improvement of my professional knowledge and competence and so I put this challenge to you as directly as possible.....Lead, don't cave into big agriculture corporations that threaten to undermine this profession and ruin the trust that the populace has previously had in the veterinary community.  Lead, find a better way, a more humane way, a more sustainable way to raise the food that we need to live on.  Lead, so that others will actually want to follow. 

Black Gold

This was my breakthrough into organic farming.  While living in the city we had built a compost bin and then moved it with us when we came.  It was the starting point for us - from the dirt on up.  I have started and restarted this post about ten times now....not sure exactly why since it is quite possibly the best and most useful thing on the farm and one thing that I am constantly amazed by. But for whatever reason writing about it in any sort of understandable way is hard.  Most likely because it is entirely too simple.

Scraps of anything green and growing or dead and brown
Water
Air

Time

It's that simple. 

This is the recipe for dirt that Mother Earth has known for eons and we have since tried to make a science out of with no great success.  We make it entirely too complex.  You can spend a fortune buying organic compost at any garden store, or you can make it for free using all of the stuff that you throw out every day - the coffee grounds, the potato peelings, the apple cores, the old wilted flowers, the weeds that are the bane of every gardener's existence.  Just about everything that goes down the garbage disposal could be put to a better use as compost. 

Over the decades, since chemical farming came into vogue, scientists tried to figure out what the key ingredients were that plants needed to grow.  They came up with phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium as the three things that plants need to thrive and have since marketed it every possible way.  Nitrogen is the stuff that you see farmers carting around in the spring and spraying all over their fields and a mix of the three chemicals is what you will find in any bag of lawn fertilizer.  The thing they didn't realize is that even though they are supplying the three main ingredients, they are leaving out the micro ingredients that plants also need to survive. Micro nutrients are those small amounts of nutrients that plants (and animals) utilize to put the main nutrients to their best use.  We have slowly been depleting the soil of the micro nutrients for about 60 years now. 

It is similar to saying that all people really need to survive is fat, protein and carbohydrates without any thought at all to vitamins and minerals.  Without these micro nutrients none of the main nutrients get absorbed and utilized properly.  If you want an interesting and eye-opening breakdown of what I mean by all of this, Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food is a good place to start or even just typing in the words - "whole food supplements" in any search bar is likely to get you some interesting reads.  We humans try to break everything down to it lowest form, we look for the exact chemical that is responsible for preventing scurvy or rickets, for instance, and once found (Vitamin C and Vitamin D) we take those chemicals in excess to help ward off these terrible diseases without really understanding how they work or what other smaller chemicals might be there to help the system along.   It is like putting only gasoline into a car without any understanding of what oil and antifreeze are there to do.  Whole foods - like a whole orange- has many chemicals in it and many chemical interactions that take place that we have absolutely no understanding of that make it the perfect packet of Vitamin C known and yet we take out the Vitamin C to put into tablets and throw the rest of the orange away.

The same thing has happened to our dirt over time.  We kept the Potassium, Nitrogen and Phosphorus and threw the rest of the beneficial stuff out with the trash.....literally.

Composting is perhaps one of the easiest things to do and one of the most beneficial.  It is the crux of sustainable farming - we pull nutrients, in the form of plants, out of the soil....we need to put nutrients back into the soil.  What better way to do this than to use the used up plants themselves?

Any, and I mean any vegetation or things that were previously vegetation are fair game for a compost pile.  The only rule that I stick to is that you can't put anything meat based in the pile - no meat scraps and no droppings from animals that have been eating meat.  The main reason behind this is that it sometimes takes on a bit of a foul odor and it can definitely start to attract the local vermin to the area.

You need to have a pile of some size to get the whole thing going.  3 square feet is generally considered to be about the right size.  You can hold it all together with a ring of woven wire, or a fancy compost bin....or you can just pile it up in a heap of at least 3 square feet and let it go.

Wet it down until it is about as wet as a well wrung out sponge.  In the early spring, or when it is dry in the middle of summer, I will add about 5 gallons to the pile periodically during a dry spell to keep it going.

Turn the pile every three weeks or so to allow air to mix with the pile and voila!  Dirt!

There are a few things that I have learned to do over the course of several years of producing the best black dirt imaginable. 

• The water is really important.  It may sound crazy to water your compost bin, but it definitely speeds up the breakdown process.  
•  A metal stake through the center of the pile will let you know if it is getting hot enough.  When a compost pile really gets going, the internal temperatures will be around 150 degrees and even weed seeds will get cooked beyond the pont where they will germinate.  My method, using the metal stake, is rather primitive but it works well.  I know that when I pull out the stake and it is too hot to touch, the pile is cooking. 
•  If your pile isn't taking off and getting hot - add dirt!  You will read that you need to go to the garden store and pick up bone meal or compost starter, blah, blah, blah.  Everything you need to get it going is already in the ground - all the enzymes, all the beneficial bugs, everything - just add a few shovelfuls to the mix and it will help to get it going.
• You don't need to mix it into the soil - this is what worms are for and they are good at it!  They will make short work of incorporating any compost that you put around flowers or vegetables into the soil.
• You know when it is done and ready to be used when you can no longer identify any of the stuff that you threw into it.  If you can identify a few things, simply take those out and throw them back on the pile for a little more time.

Over the winter, I let it sit and by spring the bottom stuff of the compost bin is gorgeous and ready to be spread around the flowers.  Then I add in leaves left over from the fall, grass clippings, vegetable scraps from the kitchen, coffee grounds and filters, egg shells and any weeds that have made an appearance in the garden.  Mix it all up and add water.  By the time the potatoes are peeking up in early spring I have another batch of the black gold to be spread around them.  And so it goes all summer long - using left overs to make more soil to make more vegetables which leads to more left overs.  Whole food nutrition for the garden- and not one chemical needed.

Ham and Eggs

What goes really great with eggs? Yeah, you guessed it. We figured that since we had officially launched into having animals on the farm that we would try for a well rounded farm and bring on a few pigs.

I love pigs. Grew up with them for the most part (and, no, that is not a veiled reference to living with my brother). We always had a few on the farm for 4-H purposes for my brother and eventually for me when I got old enough. We even had a sow named Gus, that had a litter of piglets one year. The runt, Porkie, lived in our basement for about 3 weeks drinking milk from a baby bottle attached to the end of a hockey stick......hmmm, maybe that is where the idea of Lambie in the basement came from.....

There are very few farm stories from when I was a kid that didn't somehow involve a pig in one way or another. Leaping Leland, Gus, Dr. Jekyll, Brutus....all pigs of legend on our farm. Our pigs always had a great time of it. They were never confined. We had a wonderful English type piggery at our farm in Minnesota - they could come inside the hog house at any time, or be outside in the cement walled enclosure if they wanted. And, if they were very good pigs, we would set up a low electric fence and run them out onto dirt and then I would overflow the horse tank and let the water trickle down to the hog wallow where they would happily lounge for the entire day like crocodiles in a swamp with only their eyes and noses above the mud.

People that don't know pigs always assume that they are very dirty animals when actually, the exact opposite is true. Pigs are, by nature, very clean animals and highly intelligent. Of the farm animals, the pig ranks the highest in GPA. If they are given half a chance, and a little room, they keep their enclosures clean.

The very worst thing that modern farming practices have done is to confine these wonderful animals. If this entire blog does nothing more than convince just one person to consider where their meat comes from and consider that their "meat" at one point had a life that should have been worth living, then it will have been entirely worth all the writing.

As a veterinarian, we are required to learn about some production animal medicine. We have to have the basics down for approximately nine species - cats, dogs, pigs, chickens, cows, horses, goats, sheep, turkeys....and, as you can see, most of those species are production animals. So we learn about the antibiotics that get put into feed to help them grow quicker or protect them from disease since they are raised in such large quantities in such close quarters. What people don't understand....not even veterinarians in many cases, is that this is not the way these animals developed. They didn't develop to live in tiny confinement units with hundreds, if not thousands of others. If you take them out of that horrible artificial environment and put them in a more natural setting, guess what?..... they don't need any of the food additives or antibiotics to survive. The salmonella and pathogenic E. coli strains disappear.

I have seen confinements, been in them as well and I can tell you with all honesty that I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy much less an animal that lives and breathes to rut in the dirt. It is sad to see a pig in a confinement. They are stressed from the first day there and they are denied every essence of what being a pig really means.

CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) this is what they are typically called in the business. In the business of agriculture, an animal is reduced simply to an end product from the moment of its birth. It is only seen as a "unit of production" as in "how many units of production can we fit into that new building". We have become so focused on producing as many units as possible in the smallest space possible, that we have completely forgotten that these so called units are beings with a similar physiology to our own.

What is sadder still.....most non-farming people have no understanding of the conditions that these poor animals suffer in before they are butchered and served up to us in a grocery store under so much plastic wrap. Movies like Food Inc have definitely helped to open peoples' eyes and journalists like Michael Pollan have also helped with books such as An Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, but what helps the most?....drive around and look at where these animals are living! If you live anywhere in the Midwest I can almost guarantee that you can find some close by. It is depressing, disheartening and simply wrong on so many levels and the apathy that we have for these animals.....even more wrong.

It depresses me, as a veterinarian, to see animals treated this way. I stand very much opposed to the American Veterinary Medical Association's stance on antibiotic use in animals not to mention the entire idea of a CAFO in and of itself. For a group of people whose lives and careers are devoted to the care and well being of animals, we are a sad lot when it comes to production animals. I typically get the response, "well, they are just food animals" to which I say, any animal that will be forced to give up its life for me deserves to be treated better than they are.

I can sense my production animal vet friends sharpening their knives to come after me. Questions such as, "Well, how would you suggest we raise enough animals for this country then?"

Easy! Small family farms. The way that it was done a generation ago, before Americans became fat and slow and idiotic. Joel Salatin, owner and operator of Polyface Farms in Virginia has been farming with a conscience and sustainably for years. We all bemoan the loss of the "family farm" and hate to see corporate farms take over. Why do they take over? Because we buy their cheap, confinement raised, unsustainable meat, that's why. If we were to STOP buying it, the confinements would disappear.

If I can say nothing else about this issue, it is this......PAY ATTENTION! Notice where your food comes from, how it was raised. If you cannot account for its well being, then you shouldn't be eating it. We are what we eat and likewise, we are what our food eats as well. If our food is raised up to its elbows in shit....it is very likely that we will soon be up to our own elbows in shit (metaphorically, if not literally).

Alright, enough soap boxing for a while.....back to the pigs. One of my clients happened to have pigs that she raised. Farmers that actually farrow pigs are starting to become fewer and farther between (another type of corporate takeover, I'm sorry to say) but I lucked out with her because she had just had a litter of piglets one day when she came in for some other animal related service. We struck a bargain.....2 piglets at weaning for a bag of cat food.

I received 28 pounds of piglet and she went home with 17 pounds of cat food. Who said bargaining wasn't alive and well.

Two tiny little pigs in our new "piggery" section of the shed. They looked so small and lost the first few days. There were times when it appeared that they had disappeared entirely because they would be buried under the straw beneath the heat lamp, but pigs are very food motivated animals and within a few days they recognized us as the prime "food givers".

The reason that pigs are one of the main "meat" animals is that they are about 99% muscle. This was quickly realized as they grew incredibly fast and could move 60 pounds of cement block around with just their snout. We had to catch and treat the smaller of the two pigs once with a shot of antibiotics, but catching him and holding him up long enough to give the shot was a full workout of its own.

We had toyed with the idea of naming them or not. I was one to suggest that maybe we shouldn't name them, as then it becomes exponentially harder to eventually eat them, as discovered by the "Bob noodle soup" incident. So, we decided to name them based solely on marks....we had "Patch" and "Bongo" .....how exactly we came to Bongo is a bit of a mystery, but it involved a thesaurus and an alternate meaning for the word "stripe" I believe.

Pigs love to play. They chase each other, they have running "dashes" and will often make a "woffing" noise that sounds a little like a dog bark when they are having a good time. They are mischievous and humorous and very friendly. I made friends quickly with Patch and Bongo because I almost always had old produce from the garden that I would cart over for them to have. That, and I would share my beer with them.

Pigs will eat just about everything. They are omnivores just like us, but they are much less particular about what they eat. Left overs were a main staple of their diet at our farm. We would save all the scrap produce that we peeled off carrots or potatoes, left over onions, squash seeds, old beans, etc and take them out to the pigs at the end of the day. They would come running for any treats that we would bring. Old windfall apples, peach pits, corn cobs, watermelon rinds, rotting squash and cucumbers, pulled up grass weeds.....any vegetarian produce that we could come up with they loved. We had a strict rule though....no meat, although there was one instance of them catching a chicken on their own and making quite a feast of it. Eggs and milk however were allowed.....so they weren't vegan pigs. They also had an incredible sweet tooth and loved the chocolate chips and marshmallows that sometimes found their way out to them.

Our Patch and Bongo went from 14 pounds each at the start to well over 260 pounds within 6 months. And then it was time to go to market. The week before they left however, they received a special treat every day and split a beer between the two of them the night before.

Thankfully, we live in a small town where there is a small butcher. These, too, are becoming harder to find as the USDA grows in strength and tries to further limit what people can and cannot eat.....apparently it is fine to eat unwholesome, CAFO meat, but healthy happy meat....not so much. But I digress.

Was it difficult to watch Patch and Bongo go off to market? Yes! The shed was a sad and quiet place suddenly, but they had been reaching an age and size that they were clearly uncomfortable and the place had to be vacated so that we could clean it out and get it ready for winter and then, in turn, next year's piglets. The meat from those two pigs filled a chest freezer for us and fed our family of 7 as well as two other families throughout the winter. I cannot express to you how wonderful is bacon that has been raised on marshmallows, beer and fresh air. So, as sad as it was, we gave those two pigs the happiest life we could, we loved them well and cherished their bodies that helped to feed us. They were well treated and well thought of their entire lives and even after.....I would be happy if as much could be said for me when I die.