Removing Livestock
Sometimes it is necessary to remove your animals from pasture for welfare reasons. AGW’s farm standards account for this reality (see section 7.5). There are two types of exclusion: Emergency and Planned. For an operation to maintain compliance, however, you must be able to justify removal based on one or the other. Let’s define the two types of removal. Emergency removal Emergency removal is defined as something that is far outside of the norm; something that happens less than one…
Eat Play Shove
The very traits that help our birds thrive on pasture can trigger calamity during the winter months. Understanding what is behind these behaviors can help you adapt for winter wellness and bolster health and well-being during the milder months. Eat It is said that top predators live by the principle “eat or be eaten.” For poultry, “eat and don’t get eaten” is probably more accurate. Most poultry are omnivores, persistently combing the range for insects, worms, small rodents and other…
Getting A Handle On The Herd
Depending on the circumstance and the animals, getting cattle to do what you want can be very easy, very difficult or nearly impossible. I grew up working cattle on my family’s ranch, TK Ranch in Alberta, using horses and dogs to help get the job done—a practice we continue to this day. When I was a kid in the 1960s, however, horses were broke, cattle were chased, and dogs and kids tried to help (but mostly just learned to stay…
10 Things You Can Do For The Planet Instead of Giving Up On Animal Agriculture
At A Greener World, we have an annual tradition counting down the top ‘gifts’ we’ve received from Big Ag--and wish we could return. This year’s haul was a greatest hits list from the last decade: unproven, unlabeled genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in our food; increased antibiotic abuse in food animal production; wildly misleading label claims; fake meat, continued soil degradation, extreme weather made worse by climate change--the list goes on. So to close out the decade, instead of restating the…
Regenerative Farming: Our only hope or the next big con?
Before I get shot down, let me start by saying that I believe the collection of practices being described today as ‘regenerative farming’ have huge potential to put the brakes on—and indeed reverse—many of the negative impacts of industrial agriculture. Regenerative farming practices and principles offer solutions to some of the crazy activities that many farmers have been encouraged—or even forced—to partake in. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the widespread adoption of regenerative farming is…
