Story by: Jessica Scott-Reid.
Jessica is a Canadian writer, animal advocate and plant-based food expert. Her work appears regularly in media across Canada and the US.
In the search for solutions to our broken food system and looming climate chaos, a revolution — or perhaps a devolution — has begun. In attempts to counteract noted harms resulting from industrialized agriculture, on the land, to the air, animals and people, some farmers are now looking backwards, to traditional methods of food production. Regenerative, organic, and veganic farming each hope to be the answer to the question of how to grow food while also rebuilding soil and trapping carbon. But the debate continues regarding what role domestic animals should play within these systems.
While both organic and regenerative farming can include breeding, farming and killing animals for food and other products, veganic farming does not generally include the use of domesticated animals or their products in any way.
Or, are there grey areas?
Within each system there appears to be a magical space where domesticated animals are incorporated into food production, but only of their own accord: no exploitation, no slaughter. It’s what one might call the sanctuary farming method, and it may just offer the most progressive solution yet.
One such place, is Sho Farm and Sanctuary in western Vermont, where a flock of 107 rescued ducks call the 1,300-acre regenerative farm, home. Growing fruit -- mainly sea berries -- nuts, perennial vegetables, and most recently hemp, farmer Melissa Hoffman describes the ducks as “farm partners,” and “completely here as themselves.” Hoffman says that while the ducks are dependent on her and her partner for supplemented food and safety, “we don’t ask anything of them.” Instead, she says, just by existing they provide positive benefits to the farm. “When it’s warm enough outside, they go out and forage in the orchard. They love to eat flies, they love to eat slugs, and snails,” providing natural pest control. They also aerate the soil by plunging their bills into the land in search of insects. And they fertilize by leaving their droppings. Hoffman also composts the manured hay from the ducks’ barn, attracting worms and “creating the most amazing compost for humic acid, and humus in the soil,” she says, which she calls “invaluable.”
Sho Farm is also committed to aiding in the restoration of wild ecosystems and wild habits, adds Hoffman, through agroforestry and perennial agriculture, and what she calls “wildlife integrated food systems.”
Some of the residents of Sho Farm and Sanctuary. Photo: Shawn Smith.
On the other side of the country, in the California Bay area, Sweet Farm is growing and selling over 45 different varieties of edible produce, while caring for 125 rescued animals, including pigs, cows, chickens and one lama. “They are all rescues, they are all ambassadors for their species, and they are not here to produce manure for us, they just do,” says co-founder Nate Salpeter. He says the alternative to utilizing the manure would be to ship it off, which he calls careless, and “would extend our carbon footprint.” Instead, he says, it is used in compost, spread onto pastures, flower fields and cover crops.
Salpeter explains though, that at Sweet Farm they are more focused on building soil health through other practices, such crop rotation, low and no-till approaches, and cover cropping. “We put a lot of emphasis in ensuring our practices are not depleting the soil, but instead are working with what’s in it, and also helping to continue building up things like carbon content and mycorrhiza and rhizobium in the soil.”
Sweet Farm does not incorporate active grazing of their animals on the land where food is grown. Salpeter says though, they may one day swap the areas where the animals are kept, with where food is grown, perhaps to help replenish the soil if necessary, or “let’s say there’s a lot of amazing leftover volunteer root vegetables that the pigs can go out and root around, eat them, help clear the field, so that way we can go in with a clean slate.”
Salpeter considers Sweet Farm to be veganic, “because it’s central to the tenant that it’s not exploitation, and it’s harmonious with them.”
Fresh produce at Sweet Farm. Photo: InkPoetry.
In Canada, one former-cattle ranch is now in its fifth year as a sanctuary and organic vegetable farm. Tim Fors, a volunteer and board member at Farmhouse Garden Animal Home in Ontario, tells of how the farm owner, after caring for a particularly weak calf, decided he just could not continue sending animals off to slaughter anymore. Today, the herd of 29 cattle are home to stay, and the farm is instead producing and selling a wide variety of certified organic plant crops, with help from the animals’ composted manure. “It’s not harming the cows in any way,” says Fors, “and it has to be removed anyway.”
Canadian animal activist and scholar, Darren Chang, says the incorporation of domestic animals into regenerative food production is an ongoing debate, but, “the advantage of having domesticated animals around, for example in a farm sanctuary that is also a plant food farm, would model a type of food production system where animals are respected as members of a community while also growing food sustainably,” he says. “Veganic farming or an animal sanctuary farm don't have to be mutually exclusive. We must focus on the bigger picture and our goals. These alternative food production models help to demonstrate that the killing and exploitation of animals are unnecessary, and that we can actually coexist with domesticated farmed animals as members of a shared multispecies community, striving to live in just and harmonious relationships.”
Hoffman at Sho Farm agrees. “Sometimes you’ll have a veganic farm and then sometimes you’ll have a sanctuary, but rarely do you have both in one place,” she says. “If sanctuaries could partner with growers, you have a synergy that is invaluable for properly managing the nutrient flows and the compost that come out of the sanctuary, and that can take care of any pathogens that are present. And that can be used to grow food not only for the animals, but also for humans.”
Hoffman describes animals rescued from industrialized agriculture as “refugees” of a “potentially dying industry,” and “symptoms of an industry we are aspiring to replace.”
While this model is not going to replace most livestock operations anytime soon, it is a vision of a more sustainable future if we're prepared to think differently about our relationship to the land and to the animals we currently farm for food.