When Brandon Sheard brings his knife across the throat of a sheep, his movements are swift and precise.  The sheep, lying calmly on her side in the pasture on which she has lived her whole life, gently closes her eyes.  Brandon rests his hand on her throat and offers a prayer of gratitude to affirm the sacrifice of her life.

Brandon and his wife Lauren are the proprietors of Farmstead Meatsmith, a small business on Vashon Island, WA, that provides the services of slaughter, butchery, and charcuterie to small farmers in the Puget Sound region, as well as classes in slaughter and butchery.

Operations like Farmstead Meatsmith are unusual in today’s highly concentrated system of industrial animal processing. For example, only four corporations process 84% of the beef raised in the United States. Smithfield Foods alone slaughters 100,000 pigs every day (Brandon slaughters three on a busy day). The effects of this concentration are widespread and result in the mistreatment of the animals, workers, farmers, the land, and the consumers.

While working for a small farm on Vashon three years ago, Brandon had a vision for an alternative approach that could serve the interests of all of the parties involved. Today, the business processes animals in small quantities, on the farms where they are reared, for the farmers’ use. It’s a seldom utilized model that involves traveling around the Puget Sound region with a mobile unit, outfitted to process a range of livestock and poultry.

The implementation of this seemingly simple model is actually deceptively complex, due primarily to the suite of regulations upheld by the state and US  Department of Agriculture (USDA).  In order to sell meat that one has processed, not only does that have to be carried out in certifiable facilities, which are extraordinarily expensive to outfit, but there must be a USDA-trained inspector on site for every slaughter and every animal that you process must be chemically evaluated for dangerous pathogens. (These are regulations primarily geared toward multimillion dollar, high-volume facilities owned and operated by multinational corporations).

In an effort to balance the idealism of their vision and the reality of regulation, Farmstead Meatsmith provides services rather than products. In other words, they do not (and cannot) sell meat. They exclusively slaughter and butcher, and as such there are fewer (though lamentably not nonexistent) regulations. Instead, the model they have found feasible to employ is to travel around the region with a mobile unit, outfitted to process a range of livestock and poultry.

There are significant benefits to the mobility of slaughter services; it alleviates the farmers of the need to truck their animals to larger facilities, gives them more control over how their animals are processed, and allows for virtually immediate delivery of their products. Furthermore, traveling to each farm allows Brandon and Lauren to get to know the farmers for whom they work, and forge relationships, not just invoices. After all, strong communities are integral to shifting our current industrialized agricultural system towards a more localized model.

As one of the few businesses to employ the traveling processing model on their scale, Farmstead Meatsmith is actively reviving knowledge, in the form of traditional slaughter practices. They see it as part of their mission to share this nearly forgotten skill set to any and everyone who has the desire to learn.

That’s why they’re campaigning on Kickstarter to fund a web-based series of instructional butchery and cookery films. Each episode will focus on a traditional process or finished product—from curing (bacon, prosciutto and guanciale) to making blood sausage and head cheese—and will include explicit instructions in addition to history, anecdote and illustration to fully illuminate the rich stories of each process.

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals…. They are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

- Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928

It can be easy to forget that food comes from somewhere. Those of us who eat animals tend to like it that way. For that reason, for most of my life, I’ve done my hunting in the deli case, training my shopping cart on plastic-wrapped livestock at rest in a Styrofoam pasture.

On a few occasions, though, I’ve seen my dinner alive before I’ve eaten it. On a road trip after college, my friend Ian and I snuck behind a poultry warehouse in Ohio, where culled chickens had been smashed against the pavement. We ate our egg sandwiches reluctantly. Another time, a confinement hog farmer in Indiana invited us in for pork chops, while our noses still burned from the stench of manure sloshing in the pit below the animals.

I’ve had good experiences, too––fresh milk drawn under Amish lantern-light, grass-ranging lamb roasted whole at sheepdog trials, the deer we hunted one fall in Iowa. Even when I didn’t like what I saw, there was something cathartic about those moments when I knew what I was eating. Connecting the dots between muscle and meat made me feel, in a way I hadn’t before, honest.

So this spring, when a friend called with an offer to join in a buffalo slaughter, I accepted, and left the house early on an April Saturday to meet him. We drove through urban Portland and the suburbs, just to the edge of the countryside. On the hill ahead of us was a freshly hatched clutch of McMansions, but in the foreground there was pasture––and buffalo. The animals, weighing more than a thousand pounds apiece, grazed placidly, majestically, almost prehistorically. Raised on good pasture, they spend their lives free from confinement, stress or pain, until––one at a time and in comfortable environs––they are harvested.

We clamored onto fence posts in time to see the rancher single out a mature animal and shoot. I felt the ache of witnessing death, then realized I wasn’t alone in my sadness. As the rancher knelt over the buffalo and hoisted it by chains with the bucket of a loader, the rest of the herd drew in close and lowered their heads. The loader lumbered across the field, and the herd lined up in a single-file procession to usher its dead to the pasture’s edge. The sight of animals mourning––in whatever way those silent creatures did––humbled me to my carnivorous core.

So this year I’ve decided to make one resolution, and it’s one I intend to keep for life. Having seen animals like that buffalo live and die with dignity, and having seen and (as a consumer) supported the opposite, I will not eat confinement-raised meat again.

It’s a commitment that I expect will be easy to keep at home: I already do as much shopping as I can at the farmer’s market. There, I get a handshake promise from the animal’s caretaker that the creature I’m eating touched grass, felt the sun, ate a diet free of hormones and additives, and was slaughtered with dignity.

Supermarket shopping is a little harder: chicken labeled “Free Range” may never have been outside, and beef termed “Organic” may have been fed a diet heavy in corn it wasn’t meant to digest. Doing the detective work to find out where my meat, eggs, and milk are coming from will be a challenge, but a fun one. I’ve got a cell phone, and every carton in the store has a toll-free number so I can ask what kind of farm my food is coming from.

Eating out promises to be harder, especially on the road. In college towns and fancy restaurants, food is given extra value when it can be traced to a family farm and advertised as such. But in most places, pork is pork, regardless of how the pig––an animal with clean habits and intelligence on par with a dog––lived and died. I don’t want to be elitist, but I don’t think asking for fundamental respect for the animals I’m eating is pretentious––it seems merely humane. So if I’m in a restaurant that’s making an effort––advertising its “natural” meat and “cage-free” eggs, I’ll have some (and probably order seconds if they’re from an extra good source). If the menu doesn’t advertise where the meat is coming from, I’ll ask. And if quality protein isn’t on offer, I’ll have the oatmeal, and leave a little business card behind:

For good and bad, farmers, slaughterhouses, restaurants, and supermarkets make many of their decisions about animal livelihood based on what the market demands. If we, the consumer market, decide that 2009 is going to be another year of eating whatever’s cheap, abundant and easy, the outlook for the animals caught in our industrial net is sad. There is another option, but we have to decide that compassionate and carnivorous can go together.

The Humane Society has brought a wave of national attention this year to the cause of the fair treatment of farm animals, beginning with the video of a slaughterhouse in Chino, California that displayed for the world the terrible treatment that cows in our food chain are receiving.  Now, The Humane Society is sponsoring Proposition 2, which, if passed with a vote of “yes” tomorrow on California’s ballot, would require pregnant sows and veal calves enough space to turn around and stretch their legs, and would require hens the space to spread their wings.  The ballot initiative has received so much national attention, even bringing the President of The Humane Society, Wayne Pacelle, to Ellen and Oprah’s stages.  Naomi Starkman spoke with Wayne Pacelle to ask him about what will follow Proposition 2′s vote tomorrow.

Civil Eats: You’ve changed the way we view the treatment of farm animals in America. What’s next after Proposition 2?  What are some of the initiatives the Humane Society is working on?

Wayne Pacelle: We hope voters approve Prop 2, and if they do, it will add momentum to our ongoing campaign to urge people to think about their food choices, to stop particularly inhumane treatment of farm animals, and to develop humane and sustainable food policies. We look forward to working with groups and individuals with synergistic concerns, such as environmental groups and the Slow Food movement, to usher in an era with more sensible agricultural policies and practices.

The Humane Society of the United States is also focused on a wide range of other animal protection initiatives, including combating dogfighting and cockfighting, seal killing and the slaughter of other marine mammals, puppy mills and pet overpopulation, abusive hunting and trapping practices, the trade in exotic animals, and much more. We also respond to human-caused and natural disasters for animals and maintain the nation’s largest network of animal care facilities.

CE: Is Yes on Prop 2 a sure thing?  What’s standing in the way of it being a slam dunk?

WP: It is not a slam dunk, but we are making good progress in educating the public about the threats that factory farming poses to animals, the environment, food safety, and small farms. Large factory farming agribusiness companies from throughout the nation are pouring money into the No on 2 campaign and trying to confuse voters. They’ve donated about $9 million and invested that money on television advertisements to tell us that white is black and black is white. They make the ludicrous argument that it’s better for the animals to be confined in tiny cages for their entire lives and also that it promotes food safety to trap them in cages and cluster tens of thousands of animals in windowless buildings. We think the public will see through their charade, but in politics, you cannot take anything for granted. That’s why we have the most powerful grassroots campaign for Prop 2 that California has seen in a long time.

CE: If Prop 2 passes, will the Humane Society or other groups reach out to help factory farms change their infrastructure? To train them to use new techniques?

WP: We are certainly willing to help, but factory farms have plenty of resources to consult in shifting to more humane farming practices. More and more farmers are paying closer attention to animal welfare and environmental concerns. In fact, many egg factory farms are already producing cage-free eggs because of the growing demand for these more humanely produced animal products.

Some industrial farmers may need to learn about animal husbandry anew because they’ve been operating animal factories and actually know very little about caring for the animals.

CE: The undercover video in Chino brought a lot of attention to the treatment of animals and issues of transparency at slaughterhouses. How do you see the “animal protection” movement changing?

WP: The abuses of downer cows at Chino — a slaughter plant that the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the industry held up as a model facility — was a wake-up call to Americans that we cannot trust the meat industry to self-regulate. We need standards and we need enforcement of these standards, for the health of the animals and the safety of our food. I see The HSUS and other animal protection groups devoting more attention to the treatment of farm animals, and that new focus and attention is desperately needed.

Photo: Beth and Ron

The plight of the animals we raise for food in this country rarely enters the forefront of our societal consciousness, but Californians are about to learn a whole lot more about what these animals go through when election season kicks off this fall.

That’s because they’ll cast their ballots this November on Prop 2—the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act—a measure endorsed by Slow Food Nation, the Humane Society of the United States, the Center for Food Safety, and authors such as Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser.

This moderate measure merely seeks to provide certain farm animals with enough room to stand up, lie down, turn around, and extend their limbs. It really is that basic.

Unfortunately, the majority of egg-laying hens, calves raised for veal, and breeding pigs in the United States are confined in tiny cages and crates where they can barely move an inch their whole lives. In effect, Prop 2 will phase out the extreme confinement of these animals.

These three inhumane systems epitomize the abuse that can occur when we take industrialization of our food system to the extreme—abuse that the Slow Food movement has rightly objected to for years.

Perhaps the least well-known of the three systems is the so-called “battery cage” for egg-laying hens. In Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan writes:

“Egg and hog operations are the worst….Broiler chickens…at least don’t spend their eight-week lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who passes her brief span piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single page of this magazine could carpet. Every natural instinct of this animal is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral ‘vices’ that can include cannibalizing her cagemates and rubbing her body against the wire mesh until it is featherless and bleeding. Pain? Suffering? Madness? The operative suspension of disbelief depends on more neutral descriptors, like ‘vices’ and ‘stress.’ Whatever you want to call what’s going on in those cages, the 10 percent or so of hens that can’t bear it and simply die is built into the cost of production.”

This routine cruelty we force upon egg-laying hens and other factory-farmed animals is perhaps the most egregious example of the abrogation of our responsibility to treat animals with a sense of basic decency.

In endorsing Prop 2, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof asks, “The law punishes teenage boys who tie up and abuse a stray cat. So why allow industrialists to run factory farms that keep pigs almost all their lives in tiny pens that are barely bigger than they are?”

Kristof isn’t alone in wondering about this schism we face in terms of our love of dogs and cats and near-total disregard for even the most basic interests of farm animals who are capable of suffering every bit as much as the animals we welcome into families. The fact that we would never force our dogs and cats to live in filthy, cramped cages for their whole lives begs the question of whether we should force farm animals to endure such misery, either.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that nearly 600 California veterinarians, along with the California Veterinary Medical Association (CVMA), are endorsing the “Yes” vote on Prop 2. Dr. Jeff Smith, former president of the CVMA writes in the Modesto Bee, “As a veterinarian, I support Proposition 2 because I can think of no other animals confined to this degree that are deemed humanely housed.”

As to be expected, Prop 2 does indeed have some opponents. On the other side of this initiative is a cast of characters from the factory farming industry with a particularly sordid history of cruelty to animals and consumer fraud. Major financial contributors to the opposition have been caught abusing animals in undercover exposés, paid big bucks to settle criminal animal cruelty charges, and even paid $100,000 to settle allegations of 17 attorneys general—including California’s—that they were misleading the public about animal welfare.

These well-financed opponents are already planning on spending millions of dollars to confuse voters and deceive them about Prop 2. And one thing is for certain: The agribusiness industry doesn’t like to lose, especially in the nation’s top agricultural state. It intends to fight hard, meaning Californians will be hearing quite a lot about the treatment of farm animals in the next three months. Voters will have to sort fact from fiction.

Each one of us can help win a victory for animal welfare, the environment, food safety, and public health by getting involved and supporting the Yes on Prop 2 campaign. The opportunity for so many social movements to join together and fight for a common cause is exciting, and one that will likely yield positive results not only in this election, but for years to come.

Make sure to check out YESonProp2.com – and remember to vote where your mouth is by voting YES! on 2 this November.

Photos by Laurel Fan, Katie@! and Pikaluk

I am a city girl born and bred, with city needs and city habits. My junior year of college, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I took a course called “Religion and Ecology,” in which we read everything from the Jewish laws of kashruth to Buddhist texts; Heidegger’s “Technology;” to “The Monkey-Wrench Gang.” At the end of the course I vowed to spend time on a farm, to look a chicken in the eye as it died, to bear witness to the slaughter of a cow, something that would earn me the right to eat one of these sentient beings.

When I graduated from college I moved back to NYC and hit the pavement running, my farm dreams something quaint and faraway. I became a vegetarian, thinking that if I could not come to terms with animal slaughter, if I could not find the time to go to the farm, then I would refrain, altogether, from eating meat.

But what a terrible vegetarian I was, making exceptions for street food in Mexico and an annual NYC burger. This lasted for five years, on and off, until I gave up, gasping for meat like a drowning woman for water. And hadn’t my vegetarianism been the coward’s choice?, I asked myself. I had found a way out of my vow since it was a helluva lot easier than finding my way to a farm.

So imagine my sense of wonder, when four years after giving up on vegetarianism, and twelve years after graduating from college, I found myself on the farm, present for the slaughter of two sheep. I had traveled to Lopez Island, off the coast of Washington state, in order to visit the community of farmers who make up the Island Grown Farmers Cooperative. This collaborative is in possession of the first ever USDA certified mobile slaughter facility. The reasons for building a mobile unit were particular to their island status: farmers had to go off island to slaughter and then bring the meat back to the island. This wasn’t cost-effective, so most people just brought their meat to the mainland and then sold it there. The ironic result was that the island was having a food access issue; the meat was being raised there but not eaten there.

There is a need for mobile slaughter facilities all over this country because everything is being geared more and more towards the large-scale producers, so that there are very few processing facilities for small farmers, making the market increasingly favorable to large industrial operations and less and less favorable to the little guy. All the little ones are gone, and in their wake are large facilities that are geared for huge numbers of animals. This means you have to travel farther to get to them, sometimes prohibitively so.

Before I headed out to Lopez, I spoke to Holly Freishtat, who was hired early on to do a needs assessment of the island. I asked her what she learned and she said that “the issues this island community is facing, of farmers not having access to local infrastructure, and consumers not having access to the local foods they demand, is no different from what rural and urban communities are facing around the country. I thought they were unique because they were surrounded by water and now I have realized that it is a result of a centralized global food system. We have to build the capacity and infrastructure for our farmers and consumers to have local foods.”

Back to the farm (not the first farm I’ve been on in the past two years at my job, by the way, not by a long shot): I approached with the jitters, and in the first moments I had to suppress tears. But those tears were the tears of a city girl who is so soft-hearted she cannot even train her cats to stay off the kitchen counter. Those were not the tears of a woman who tore into a burger the night before; I would not let them be.

Watching the farmer next to me, I was humbled by her graceful understanding of the cycle of life. She raised these sheep with tenderness, and she watched them die with tenderness. The parts of the animal that are cut away (the head, the hooves, the skin, the innards) are composted on the farm, eventually enriching the very soil that grows next year’s crop of vegetables. To see this is to learn more in 30 minutes than I could have hoped to learn in my semester-long “Religion and Ecology” class.

To see the IGFC mobile slaughter facility in action is to understand what a successful venture this has been – for business, yes – but even more, for the health and well being of the animals. The animals live well in the fields, then enter the barn they’ve known all their lives. They are processed humanely and the work is slow, careful, and meticulously clean. I watched it from inches away, and though it was challenging at first, I watched it open-eyed.

I left the island utterly convinced of mobile facilities’ ability to step in where small/mid-size infrastructure has crumbled away. It works for the farmers, and it works for the residents of the islands. It’s an amazing sensation to drive around the island and see the animals, and then to know—not just because someone told you, but because you’ve seen it with your own eyes—exactly where your food has come from.

Photo courtesy of Horse Drawn Farms