More Crayons

Why I Choose to Farm Meat on a Dying Planet.

It may surprise you to know I was a vegetarian for nearly a decade before I started raising meat. I changed my thinking about how I ate after spending time with sustainable farmers, their land, and their ethos.

It didn’t happen fast. I pushed back against it for a long time because I was very comfortable in my identity as a vegetarian. But I found more colors and when you find more colors; ideas change.

Let’s talk about crayons:

Remember when you were a little kid and there were those jumbo eight packs of crayons? They were easy to hold and very distinct. There was no question which was red or blue or orange. You could point to that red crayon and any child could reach out and grasp it.

That’s what it feels like talking to most animal rights folks when they find out I raise pork, chicken, and lamb. They have their jumbo eight-pack and every basic color is an unwavering belief.

For example, let’s say the jumbo red crayon stands for “Killing Animals is Wrong.” It holds hands with: “Humanity-Has-Progressed-Past-Eating-Meat Blue. And “It’s-Destroying-The-Planet-Orange.” And so on.

There’s not a lot of nuance because nuance is where beliefs go to die (or at least begin to compost). I know because I didn’t eat meat for nine years. I brought Tofurkey to Thanksgiving and still have PETA shirts from college in my dresser drawer.

But when I started playing with the dream of becoming a full-time farmer things started to change. I started slowly adding meat back into my diet and it wasn’t because of my love of farming; it was because of my love of animals, nature, and the people who raise them alongside it.

Once I learned what the sustainable farming movement was trying to accomplish, I started seeing things differently, seeing things I couldn’t before. Now I was experiencing, first hand, the alternatives to those horrific factory farms. I was standing on their land, touching their livestock, sharing meals and conversations at their kitchen tables.

I had lumped all meat, from every source, as bad. Bad for the animals, for the climate, and my health. I was basing it on documentaries and websites. I was citing infographics about how much water and corn is pumped into one factory-farmed steer. I ate and acted as if all meat was raised in the same horrible place the same horrible way.

It’s insane to lump 32 acres of waving prairie with a trout-filled stream, raising 20 calves a year, to an industrial meat-packing plant. The most ardent activist has to admit the lives of those cows is better than the lives of those on literal conveyor belts. And once you can admit that much, once you see our farms and the animals we tend, you get another shade of red in your crayon box.

Now there’s red and maroon in your pack. Both look like blood, sure, but to call them the same color is categorically false. You can see the difference with your own eyes.

I collected all these other shades of red. It was no longer as simple as “killing an animal is wrong” not when you’ve spent time on farms where you see people studying everything from soil composition to native grasses. Not when you’ve helped a cattleman who hasn’t been on vacation in 30 years pull a calf from a dying cow at 3AM. Not when you’ve had lunch at houses with bottle-fed lambs in the kitchen, with their income going to better barns, with their entire lives revolving around the care and work of these animals you think they are hurting.

These are the farms building new topsoil through rotational grazing. These are the fields free of poison pesticides and petroleum-based fertilizers. These are the farms managing the delicate dance of wildlife and natural habitats with enlightened practices.

It is so rare that human intervention can make anything in nature better, but here they were. Returning dead dusty acres of Monsanto corn and soy beans into grasslands. Inviting native species of birds and insects back home. Healing their small corner of the planet and doing it by raising animals for food.

So I added ruby, rust, wine, and scarlet crayons to my understanding of red. The concept was no longer simple. I could see that these farm animals were not born to die at the hands of throat-slitting hicks. They were born to be part of a cycle we all take part in. That we can’t avoid with any amount of rhetoric; which is that we must consume life to live. And there are ways to do it that heal and change the world for the better, and they may involve blood on your hands.

Gibson helping move piglets from one paddock in the woods to another

When I was boycotting meat I was just doing what made me feel better about myself, not what was better for animals or the planet. And when you’re holding this pile of assorted crayons and someone is screaming at you holding up that single red jumbo—you realize they aren’t interested in nuance. No true believer is.

At this point in my life with the colors I currently have, I feel the best thing any one of us can do for animals the environment is to stay close to home, in every aspect. Eat food raised near you (within a hundred miles if you can), travel less, and focus on your local communities, craftsfolk, and small businesses. I do not see the logic in buying Boca Burgers made by the Kraft Corporation shipped on diesel trucks across half a continent as more environmentally-sound than eating the cow your neighbor butchered in his backyard.

Because this modern lifestyle of having everything you want anytime you want it - is killing us. It’s the absolute destruction of the natural world and waste of our depleting resources. I can’t tell you how much I want to scream and try to explain I gave up everything they do for fun because I wanted a better life for the 5 pigs I raised. In so many ways I did just that.

Make no mistake, this is the life I want. But it wasn’t the life I wanted, or could even conceive of, when I was melting that jumbo red crayon in my clenched fist. And while I am FAR from a perfect person, and love a bag of Cheetos with the gusto of a starving peasant - I am trying to live a small life for a big reason. Which to me means putting my time, money, and recreation into my community. And that includes eating the foods people have eaten where I reside since before living memory.

Listen, if you live somewhere warm enough where you can eat beans out of your garden all year, you are very lucky. Eat beans every meal. But here in upstate New York we have a growing season of under a hundred days. We have mountains and rocky hillsides and many of us have land unsuitable for anything beyond the grass and trees that grow there.

This farm, for example, is stuck on the side of a mountain with rocks, ridges and inclines that would easily topple a tractor. To make it profitable for vegetables it would require cutting down the forest for more acreage and additional sunlight, destroying the habitat of wildlife, building greenhouses and heating them… It’s an ordeal that destroys the song already in progress.

No, my land is good for wildlife, sheep, pigs, and dairy animals that can be raised on what they graze on all summer and then fed over winter on stored sunlight (aka hay) and that plant-based energy converts into meat that creates a local diet that makes sense here.

That is what Northeastern farmers have done and still do. What has changed is the methodology. Now sustainable meat-based farms are healing landscapes destroyed by commercial vegetable farming. They are farming like a hundred years ago, only with better tools and less impact on the land.

Land turned into a desert because of industrial corn and soy slowly heals when the soil is sparked back to life again by letting animals graze. What was raped dust returns to living fields. Livestock root and fertilize the earth, they die and compost into it. We forget, all the time, that nothing is more carnivorous than plants. That they live off the nutrients in the soil from blood and bone and a star so far away we call it a friend.

I am tired of people with these childish tools accusing me of murder and cruelty because they chose to pretend their diet doesn’t include the thousands of animals’ deaths they can’t see. The uncountable wildlife that lost their home to grow the salad in the bag in the produce aisle. The songbirds and pollinators killed by pesticides. Lives ripped to literal pieces because a fawn slept in the corn the same day a combine was roaring through. The people that died so far from home for the oil that runs those diesel trucks full of Impossible Burgers…

And for what? So you save $2.29 a pound on ground chuck?

And I am well aware that not everyone can or should move to the county and build a chicken coop. Not everyone is meant to farm and not everyone should. But we can all do more to allow room for new ideas.

And I am not a fool or a saint. I also use the supermarket. I also eat take out. I also contribute to the industrial food complex, especially when money is tight or my freezer is empty. But I’m not talking about perfection here. I am talking about the sum of your life’s decisions adding up to a better world. And I don’t think we get to that better world with eight giant crayons, with belief instead of compromise.

Cattle raised down the road from me living the best life!

I will never see Paris. Hell, I’ll probably never even have my own washing machine. But I get to wake up on this farm every day and dedicate it to the animals I share my life with. My dogs and cats are roommates and family. My horses, hawks, and draft animals - coworkers and friends. My pigs, sheep, and chickens - the life that sustains my own. And all that is because I now have this 64 pack of crayons with a sharpener in the back, and every shade I can handle from those original notions I was handed as knee-jerk vegan is different and better. And I aim to add more. I think that’s all life is. Adding more color.

So, what I ask is this: give people the benefit of the doubt. It’s not our job to understand everything, but it is our job to not assume the worst of those who make different choices.

I’ll end with this. I gave up every other kind of life I could be living to do this. I work very hard. I do not travel. I do not vacation. I do not drive farther than 20 miles from my home 98% of the year. And I do it because I would rather be part of the solution than the noise. I would rather hand someone bacon raised here than the Smithfield Plant. I would rather know I gave an animal a noble life and fast death I was responsible for instead of pretending I wasn’t for the thousand unseen behind a bag of baby carrots. I would rather be home then racing peers in the endless hustle of needing to prove your kitchen counters are nice enough or passport full enough.

I feel I am truly improving the lives of animals and the planet by living a small life eating out of my backyard on the side of a mountain. I encourage more of you to support small farmers like me doing the same. You don’t have to pull a Barbara Kingsolver. You can choose to replace half of the chicken you eat with birds from your local free-range poultry farm. Choose to replace one meal a year! It’s a change in practice, in dollars, in how that animal lived. How you live.

And if all you see is that red stain on my hands, I plead with you, to consider the complication and beauty of another choice. There are so many hues to decision. So many ways people try to make this a better world. Stop arguing with the sustainable meat farmers, we’re on your side. All of us who care so passionately about how we eat are on the same side. I can’t tell you how much we agree about a better future for both the animals and people here. It’s my whole life.

See past the comfortable limitations of what you believe and try to open yourself up to what you don’t yet understand. Grab a pitchfork, not to storm our walls but to help muck our barns. Together we can grow vegetables and grains and meat and share in one giant feast, side by side. A table full of a thousand colors from the garden and gate. The meat is optional, it always is, but it still deserves a place at the table. Every life does.

Let’s bring my 64-pack to shame.

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I first heard the metaphor about crayons from a John Mayer interview over 20 years ago. He was asked about connecting with people and responded with how some folks only have the ability to see in limited colors when so many shades exist. He used the same jumbo 8 pack vs 64 pack metaphor and it always stuck with me. Giving credit where credit is due, though he was talking about how “some bitches are talking about purple and I’m talking about magenta” and I’m talking about rotational grazing. Feel free to contact him about this essay if you feel I am ripping his rizz.

Also, this is an opinion from a pig farmer you read for free on the internet, not a congressional order. So before you send that angry email about meat being murder, just don’t. I have work to do.