Chicken Farming Quotes

Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?

People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.

Once there was a bunny. This bunny had a birthday party. It was the bestest birthday party ever. Because that was the day the bunny got a bazooka. THe bunny loved his bazooka. He blew up all sorts of things on the farm. He blew up the stable of Henrietta the Horse. He blew up the pen of Pugsly the Pig. He blew up the coop of Chuck the Chicken. "I have the bestest bazooka ever," the bunny said. Then the farm friends proceeded to beat him senseless and steal his bazooka. It was the happiest day of his life. The end. Epilogue: Pugsly the Pig, now without a pen, was quite annoyed. When none of the others were looking, he stole the bazooka. He tied a bandana on his head and swore vengeance for what had been done to him. "From this day on," he whispered, raising the bazooka, "I shall be known as Hambo.

Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially.

There won't be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not make for exciting copy.

The snow lay thin and apologetic over the world. That wide grey sweep was the lawn, with the straggling trees of the orchard still dark beyond; the white squares were the roofs of the garage, the old barn, the rabbit hutches, the chicken coops. Further back there were only the flat fields of Dawson's farm, dimly white-striped. All the broad sky was grey, full of more snow that refused to fall. There was no colour anywhere.

He met his day in the shower, washing his hair with shampoo that was guaranteed to have never been put in a bunny's eyes and from which ten percent of the profits went to save the whales. He lathered his face with shaving cream free of chlorofluorocarbons, thereby saving the ozone layer. He breakfasted on fertile eggs laid by sexually satisfied chickens that were allowed to range while listening to Brahms, and muffins made with pesticide-free grain, so no eagle-egg shells were weakened by his thoughtless consumption. He scrambled the eggs in margarine free of tropical oils, thus preserving the rain forest, and he added milk from a cartn made of recycled paper and shipped from a small family farm. By the time he finished his second cup of coffee, which would presumably help to educate the children of a poor peasant farmer named Juan Valdez, Sam was on the verge of congratulating himself for single-handedly preserving the planet just by getting up in the morning.

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.

People have been stabbed over spicy chicken sandwiches. The duck farm industry could benefit from that kind of violence to help increase sales.

What's important about morality in politics is us. We own the chicken farm. We must give our bird-brained, feather-headed politicians morals. Politicians love to think of themselves as "free-range" but they do not have the capacity to hunt or gather morals in the wild. If we fail to supply them with morality, politicians begin to act very scary in the barnyard. These are enormous headless chickens and they have nukes.

For the D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled. They included a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman, a Serbian seducer, and a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming.

I've never had a spicy chicken sandwich worth getting stabbed over. But that's the kind of organic marketing experience I'd like to bring to duck farming.

As far as food is concerned, the great extravagance is not caviar or truffles, but beef, pork and poultry. Some 38 percent of the world's grain crop is now fed to animals, as well as large quantities of soybeans. There are three times as many domestic animals on this planet as there are human beings. The combined weight of the world's 1.28 billion cattle alone exceeds that of the human population. While we look darkly at the number of babies being born in poorer parts of the world, we ignore the over-population of farm animals, to which we ourselves contribute...[t]hat, however, is only part of the damage done by the animals we deliberately breed. The energy intensive factory farming methods of the industrialised nations are responsible for the consumption of huge amounts of fossil fuels. Chemical fertilizers, used to grow the feed crops for cattle in feedlots and pigs and chickens kept indoors in sheds, produce nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas. Then there is the loss of forests. Everywhere, forest-dwellers, both human and non-human, can be pushed out. Since 1960, 25 percent of the forests of Central America have been cleared for cattle. Once cleared, the poor soils will support grazing for a few years; then the graziers must move on. Shrub takes over the abandoned pasture, but the forest does not return. When the forests are cleared so the cattle can graze, billions of tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. Finally, the world's cattle are thought to produce about 20 percent of the methane released into the atmosphere, and methane traps twenty-five times as much heat from the sun as carbon dioxide. Factory farm manure also produces methane because, unlike manured dropped naturally in the fields, it dies not decompose in the presence of oxygen. All of this amounts to a compelling reason...for a plant based diet.

Every time you consume factory-farmed chicken, beef, veal, pork, eggs, or dairy, you are eating antibiotics, pesticides, steroids, and hormones.

I am a battery hen. I live in a cage so small I cannot stretch my wings. I am forced to stand night and day on a sloping wire mesh floor that painfully cuts into my feet. The cage walls tear my feathers, forming blood blisters that never heal. The air is so full of ammonia that my lungs hurt and my eyes burn and I think I am going blind. As soon as I was born, a man grabbed me and sheared off part of my beak with a hot iron, and my little brothers were thrown into trash bags as useless alive. My mind is alert and my body is sensitive and I should have been richly feathered. In nature or even a farmyard I would have had sociable, cleansing dust baths with my flock mates, a need so strong that I perform 'vacuum' dust bathing on the wire floor of my cage. Free, I would have ranged my ancestral jungles and fields with my mates, devouring plants, earthworms, and insects from sunrise to dusk. I would have exercised my body and expressed my nature, and I would have given, and received, pleasure as a whole being. I am only a year old, but I am already a 'spent hen.' Humans, I wish I were dead, and soon I will be dead. Look for pieces of my wounded flesh wherever chicken pies and soups are sold.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life.

you know what the best kind of organic certification would be? make an unannounced visit to a farm and take a good long look at the farmer's bookshelf. Because what you're feeding your emotions and thoughts is what this is really all about. the way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview. You can learn more about that by seeing what is sitting on my bookshelf than having me fill out a whole bunch of forms." Joel Salatin

Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in one's judgments of life.

Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at least one in four birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria. Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right - how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? - but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. (A recent study by Consumer Reports found that chicken and turkey products, many labeled as natural, "ballooned with 10 to 30 percent of their weight as broth, flavoring, or water.

People gave you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this was the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. Marika was beckoning from the other side.

Okay.' I can feel the letters vomit off my tongue. O. K. A. Y. I watch the vet insert the syringe into the catheter and inject the second drug. And then the adventures come flooding back: The puppy farm. The gentle untying of the shoelace. THIS! IS! MY! HOME! NOW! Our first night together. Running on the beach. Sadie and Sophie and Sophie Dee. Shared ice-cream cones. Thanksgivings. Tofurky. Car rides. Laughter. Eye rain. Chicken and rice. Paralysis. Surgery. Christmases. Walks. Dog parks. Squirrel chasing. Naps. Snuggling. 'Fishful Thinking.' The adventure at sea. Gentle kisses. Manic kisses. More eye rain. So much eye rain. Red ball. The veterinarian holds a stethoscope up to Lily's chest, listening for her heartbeat. All dogs go to heaven. 'Your mother's name is Witchie-Poo.' I stroke Lily behind her ears the way that used to calm her. 'Look for her.' OH FUCK IT HURTS. I barely whisper. 'She will take care of you.

Who would you rather buy your Duck Soup from, me or some other guy? OK fine, but what if that other guy is SOLD OUT? Then what? What do you mean you'll just go to Popeyes for a Spicy Chicken Sandwich?!

Dave put his head down and ate his eggs. He heard his mother leave the kitchen, humming Old MacDonald all the way down the hall. Standing in the yard now, knuckles aching, he could hear it too. Old MacDonald had a farm. And everything was hunky-dory on it. You farmed and tilled and reaped and sowed and everything was just fucking great. Everyone got along, even the chickens and the cows, and no one needed to talk about anything, because nothing bad ever happened and nobody had any secrets because secrets were for bad people, people who climbed in cars that smelled of apples with strange men and disappeared for four days, only to come back home and find everyone they'd known had disappeared, too, been replaced with smiley-faced look-alikes who'd do just about anything but listen to you.

you see that movie, Chicken Run, where the chickens gang up together and escape from the farm?

Animal agriculture is now dominated by the factory farm- 99.9% of chickens raised for meat, 97% of laying hens, 99% of turkeys, 95% of pigs, and 78% of cattle.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) calculated 24.6 million pounds of antibiotics were fed to chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals, only counting nontherapeutic uses.

Today promised not to be about the ecstasy of life on a farm. Today was the day we were "processing" broilers or, to abandon euphemism, killing chickens.

Shopping is an ecstasy-inducing act, a brief tease that allows us to brush up against the life we desire, that we feel like we deserve.

You know what I think? I think wasted potential is a lot scarier than feeling overwhelmed. There is no monster greater than regret. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Yes, I do too much. It’s what I do.

Between 1950 and 1970, the number of American farms declined by half, the number of people employed in farming declined by half, and the size of the average farm doubled. During that time, the size of the average chicken has doubled.

Don’t know if you noticed,” I say with false lightness, “but it’s raining cows and chickens out there.” Her snort buffets my skin. “Cows and chickens?” “This here is farm country, Libs,” I drawl “Ain’t no cats and dogs filling these skies.

The Popeyes Spicy Chicken Sandwich was so popular that customers stabbed each other to get it, and then seeing that passion, McDonald's created its own Spicy Chicken Sandwich. Here on my duck farm, I fully support McDonald's trying to get their customers to stab each other.

People are eating our oceans to death. No fish is safe. What most people don't realize, however, is that meat-eating also greatly diminishes the oceans, because 40% of the fish taken from the sea is fed to pigs, chickens, cowls, domestic cats, and farm-raised fish. In fact, pigs are eating more fish than sharks, chickens are eating more fish than puffins, and cats are eating more fish than seals. So really, when you eat bacon, you're eating the sea.

The word “slaughter” came to mind, because slaughter is the word for it, for a battle when one side mounts no defense. It’s the word we used on the farm. We slaughtered chickens, we didn’t fight them. A slaughter was the likely outcome of the warriors’ bravery. They died as heroes, their wives as slaves.

Bill Door found a piece of chalk in the farm's old smithy, located a piece of board among the debris, and wrote very carefully for some time. Then he wedged the board in front of the henhouse and pointed Cyril toward it. THIS YOU WILL READ, he said. Cyril peered myopically at the "Cock-A Doodle-Doo" in heavy gothic script. Somewhere in his tiny mad chicken mind a very distinct and chilly understanding formed that he'd better learn to read very, very quickly.

A Tom Sawyerish figure she imagined growing up on some widwestern farm, reading adventure books and butchering chickens, pulling the braids of milkmaids and leaving his hometown to travel the world; a more devout and sober Hemingway, in search of a deeper meaning, but never losing sight of where he came from.

The official line is that, after the war, women couldn't wait to leave the offices and assembly lines and government agencies. But the real story was that the economy couldn't have men coming home without women going home, not unless it wanted a lot of unemployed vets. So the problem became unemployed women. "How you gonna keep us down on the farm after we've seen the world,"' she ad-libs to the old World War I tune. 'Enter the women's magazines, and cookbook publishers, and all these advertising agencies carrying on about the scourge of germs in the toilet bowl, and scuffs on the kitchen floor, and, my favorite, house B.O. Enter chicken hash that takes two and a half hours to prepare. I can just hear them sitting around the conference tables. 'That'll keep the gals out of trouble.

The reality is that if we took the legally sanctioned practices from the animal farming industries and then applied them to other situations, we would think those practices horrendous. For example, if dog owners were cutting off their pets' tails and chopping their teeth out, we would condemn that as being horrific animal abuse. But we do it to pigs and call it high welfare. If someone was killing puppies by thumping their heads against a wall or dislocating their necks, we would call that evil, yet that happens to animals such as piglets and chickens and we call it humane. But the experience is the same for the individual animal, regardless of what species they are.

A wild chicken is a dead chicken.

Many people who think nothing of buying factory-farmed ham or chicken from a supermarket are quick to condemn hunting; yet hunting is more defensible than factory farming.

Have you ever had a prophetic dream about my duck farm being as successful in the future as The Spicy Chicken Sandwich? No? Well, try harder! For better results, sleep longer.

Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad.

And the nature of UPF means that the manufacturing process typically cannot allow for concern for the environment or high standards of animal care. It encourages excess consumption of food and necessarily diminishes our knowledge about its origins. If you buy fresh beef or chicken, it will often say on the pack grass-fed’ or ‘corn-fed’. People often want to know which farm it came from. But very few people ask about what the chicken in their prepacked UPF sandwich was fed on, although this is, it turns out, an important question to ask.

[from an entry by her daughter Camille] ...research published fifteen years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine: eggs from chickens that ranged freely on grass have about half the cholesterol of factory-farmed eggs, and it's mostly HDL, the cholesterol that's good for you. They also have more vitamin E, beta-carotene and omega-3 fatty acids than their cooped-up counterparts.

Naomi: ‘And when we die we become an onion, a cabbage, a carrot, or a squash, a vegetable.’ I come downtown from Columbia and agree. She reads the Bible, thinks beautiful thoughts all day. ‘Yesterday I saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the afternoon I climbed up a ladder—he has a cheap cabin in the country, like Monroe, N.Y. the chicken farms in the wood. He was a lonely old man with a white beard. ‘I cooked supper for him. I made him a nice supper—lentil soup, vegetables, bread & butter—miltz—he sat down at the table and ate, he was sad. ‘I told him, Look at all those fightings and killings down there, What’s the matter? Why don’t you put a stop to it? ‘I try, he said—That’s all he could do, he looked tired. He’s a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil soup.

This sort of knockdown or capsize happens surprisingly often to small boats in bad storms. They usually survive, although their crews’ nervous systems are never the same afterward. It has never happened to me. If it ever does, I’ll take the old sailor’s traditional retirement: walk inland carrying an oar until someone says, “What’s that?,” buy a chicken farm on that very spot, and never move.

Merck first distributed the Moraten strain in 1968. Since then, it has been the only measles vaccine used in the United States. Between 1968 and 2006, hundreds of millions of doses have been given. As a result, the number of people infected every year with measles in the United States has decreased from four million to fewer than fifty. Worldwide, the number of people killed by measles every year has decreased from eight million to about five hundred thousand. Measles vaccines save more than seven million lives a year. And the descendants of Kimber Farms’s original flock of chickens, still maintained on the grounds of Merck, are used to make vaccines today.

These haymeadow days were the Arcadian age for marsh dwellers. Man and beast, plant and soil lived on and with each other in mutual toleration, to the mutual benefit of all. The marsh might have kept on producing hay and prairie chickens, deer and muskrat, crane-music and cranberries forever. The new overlords did not understand this. They did not include soil, plants, or birds in their ideas of mutuality. The dividends of such a balanced economy were too modest. They envisaged farms not only around, but in the marsh. An epidemic of ditch-digging and land-booming set in. The marsh was gridironed with drainage canals, speckled with new fields and farmsteads.

It’s a chicken instinct. He’s here for a reason. It’s time to step in, face Deus Brânquia, force Hoffstetler’s experiments to completion. No, not Deus Brânquia. The asset, that’s all it is. Why has he started thinking of it as Deus Brânquia again? He’s got to stop that. The good old Alabama Howdy-do, the heavy-duty Farm-Master 30 cattle prod, is long and straight in his palm, a handrail guiding him from an opiate haze back into the real world.

People gave you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn’t want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, “If this were the Middle Ages, you’d be married and you’d own a farm with about a million chickens on it.

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler's eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their homes, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, the cattle, and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children whoe would be stricken suddently while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example--where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs--the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were not lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.

An old tradition holds that at the Last Judgment, the non-human creatures of the earth will be called by God to "give evidence" against each human being. The idea pops up in books and stories about the Creation, deemed a myth, but a persistent, imposing, even haunting one: We will be judged by the very creatures so dependent on us. So I treat, and will continue to treat, my animals - the dogs, cats, sheep, donkeys, chickens, and cows - with that in mind. They will give evidence. What would I want them to say?

All this talk about organic farming, adverts for free-range chickens and happy pigs… isn’t it more unethical of me to eat a happy pig? Surely it’s better if I eat a pig that’s lived a terrible life than one of those carpe diem pigs with a family and friends? The farmers say happy pigs taste better, so I can only assume that they wait until the pig has just fallen in love, maybe just after it’s had kids, when it’s at its absolute happiest, and then it gets shot in the head and vacuum packed. How ethical is that?

So, when Cole was two and I was four, we moved to Goshen Falls. Lucky us! The whole town is three blocks long. We have a cute little farm with a cute little farmhouse. And even though Mom and Dad are computer programmers — not farmers — we have a backyard full of chickens.

There are distinct health benefits to choosing farm fresh eggs over store bought too. The fresh eggs have as much as a third less of the bad cholesterol than store bought. They are lower in saturated fats and had more vitamin A and E and contained more beta carotene and omega-3 fatty acids.

Yesterday I saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the afternoon I climbed up a ladder—he has a cheap cabin in the country, like Monroe, N.Y. the chicken farms in the wood. He was a lonely old man with a white beard. ‘I cooked supper for him. I made him a nice supper—lentil soup, vegetables, bread & butter—miltz—he sat down at the table and ate, he was sad. ‘I told him, Look at all those fightings and killings down there, What’s the matter? Why don’t you put a stop to it? ‘I try, he said—That’s all he could do, he looked tired. He’s a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil soup.

Xiaoli adds that older police officers tend to view the technology as an annoyance, but since they have to use it, they will resort to a kind of magical thinking about it, convinced that technology can do more than it actually does, or they eschew deeper understanding for lazy, one-click solutions.

Why aren’t more news articles written about duck farms? Is it because the end product doesn’t produce obscene violence? It’s true, people do stab each other over spicy chicken sandwiches, but think of the savagery over my eggs that’ll take place when all that’s left in the grocery store is Beyond Meat.

We drove out of New Paltz heading due north. Squeezed into my tiny hatchback, among our boxes and bags, were my dog, Nico, the hens, and the humming hive of bees, its openings covered over with tape. The dog eyed the hive, the chickens eyed the dog, and if the bees weren't nervous they were the only ones.

was so hot that every now and then a bird fell from the sky, landing with a little thump on the hard-packed dirt. The chickens sat in dusty heaps on the ground, their heads lolled forward, and the last two cows stood together, too hot and tired to move. A listless breeze moved through the farm, plucking at the empty clothesline.

Over the years I have read many, many books about the future, my ‘we’re all doomed’ books, as Connie liked to call them. ‘All the books you read are either about how grim the past was or how gruesome the future will be. It might not be that way, Douglas. Things might turn out all right.’ But these were well-researched, plausible studies, their conclusions highly persuasive, and I could become quite voluble on the subject. Take, for instance, the fate of the middle-class, into which Albie and I were born and to which Connie now belongs, albeit with some protest. In book after book I read that the middle-class are doomed. Globalisation and technology have already cut a swathe through previously secure professions, and 3D printing technology will soon wipe out the last of the manufacturing industries. The internet won’t replace those jobs, and what place for the middle-classes if twelve people can run a giant corporation? I’m no communist firebrand, but even the most rabid free-marketeer would concede that market-forces capitalism, instead of spreading wealth and security throughout the population, has grotesquely magnified the gulf between rich and poor, forcing a global workforce into dangerous, unregulated, insecure low-paid labour while rewarding only a tiny elite of businessmen and technocrats. So-called ‘secure’ professions seem less and less so; first it was the miners and the ship- and steel-workers, soon it will be the bank clerks, the librarians, the teachers, the shop-owners, the supermarket check-out staff. The scientists might survive if it’s the right type of science, but where do all the taxi-drivers in the world go when the taxis drive themselves? How do they feed their children or heat their homes and what happens when frustration turns to anger? Throw in terrorism, the seemingly insoluble problem of religious fundamentalism, the rise of the extreme right-wing, under-employed youth and the under-pensioned elderly, fragile and corrupt banking systems, the inadequacy of the health and care systems to cope with vast numbers of the sick and old, the environmental repercussions of unprecedented factory-farming, the battle for finite resources of food, water, gas and oil, the changing course of the Gulf Stream, destruction of the biosphere and the statistical probability of a global pandemic, and there really is no reason why anyone should sleep soundly ever again. By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, overcrowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to barely be remarked upon. Meanwhile, in literally gilded towers miles above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.

Ivie lowered her coffee cup onto its saucer. “You would do that? I mean, Silas, seriously, these are not your peeps. My dad has tattoos and a Harley. He and my mahmen live in a prefab house out on a farm, and eat their own chickens. We’re talking beer out of a can, a store-bought cake, and hunting dogs running around under the table

Nobody knows exactly where the first chickens were domesticated – India, China, Thailand, Vietnam – somewhere around 10,000 years ago, which is to say at the birth of farming. The wild bird is a red jungle fowl, Gallus gallus (the French made it their national bird because of the similarity to Gaul, and because they still behave like chickens).

In the end they settled down for the night in a far-flung field belonging to a lonely farm, from which they had managed to obtain eggs and bread. “It’s not stealing, is it?” asked Hermione in a troubled voice, as they devoured scrambled eggs on toast. “Not if I left some money under the chicken coop?” Ron rolled his eyes and said, with his cheeks bulging, “’Er-my-nee, ’oo worry ’oo much. ’Elax!

O’er rivers, through woods, With winding and weaves, Their school bus sailed on Through the new-fallen leaves. When out on the road There arose such a clatter, They threw down their windows To see what was the matter. When what with their wondering eyes Should they see, But a miniature farm And eight tiny turkey. And a little old man So lively and rugged, They knew in a moment It was Farmer Mack Nuggett. He was dressed all in denim From his head to his toe, With a pinch of polyester And a dash of Velcro. And then in a twinkling They heard in the straw The prancing and pawing Of each little claw. More rapid than chickens His cockerels they came. He whistled and shouted And called them by name: “Now Ollie, now Stanley, now Larry and Moe, On Wally, on Beaver, on Shemp and Groucho!

But nothing was said about chicken farming anymore. Once, long after it was too late for farming, he might catch her crying and pet her a bit. 'What's the matter, little baby? You got a fever? You want to take the night off?' She might murmur something about candling eggs, but he wouldn't be able to understand what she meant. And after a while she cried on without knowing what she meant either, as a girl cries over a bad dream long after the dream is forgotten. In time the tears dried. She could no longer cry over anything. All the tears had been shed, all the laughs had been had; all the long spent. Leaving nothing to do but to sit stupefied, night after night, under lights made soft beside music with a beat, to rise automatically when someone wearing pants pointed a finger and said 'that one there.

The smart way to be assured of quality organic food is to join a community-sponsored agriculture (CSA) cooperative and buy a share in a local organic farm every year. Every week for an average of twenty-four weeks in the North, and all year round in the South, you share the harvest, which can include fresh vegetables, fruit, and free-range eggs, chicken, and lamb. (See the Resources section for information on CSAs.)

What’s really strange is that memory works the same way: by area-restricted search. If I ask you to list all the animals you can think of, you are likely to begin with the category of “pets” and list cats, dogs, goldfish, parakeets. Once you run out of items in that category, you’ll move on (like the pigeon who can find no more crumbs) to another category: farm animals such as cows, chickens, pigs, goats, and horses.

In Xi Jinping's China, it's uncomfortable for two strangers to go too deep into the subject of politics. There are no clear cut consequences for discussing politics. After all, this is preceisely how the system of censorship works, with a shadowy unease that looms over public conversations. Censorship is not made explicit, you just censor yourself. No one knows the consequences of critique, but no one wants to find out.

My favorite chick was the tawny-colored Buff Orpington. She promised to one day be a bodacious plus-sized model of a chicken, wearing fluffy pantaloons under full feathery skirts and with as charming a personality as her appearance suggested. Predictably named Buffy, she didn’t mind being handled and rather seemed to enjoy the company, clucking softly with a closed beak as I picked her up and stroked her silky feathers.

I suppose the truth is simply that it was possible for benefits like these to accrue only to a Negro lucky enough to remain in the poor but relatively benign atmosphere of Virginia. For here in this worn-out country with its decrepit little farms there was still an ebb and flow of human sympathy—no matter how strained and imperfect—between slave and master, even an understanding (if sometimes prickly) intimacy; and in this climate a black man had not yet become the cipher he would become in the steaming fastnesses of the far South but could get off in the woods by himself or with a friend, scratch his balls and relax and roast a stolen chicken over an open fire and brood upon women and the joys of the belly or the possibility of getting hold of a jug of brandy, or pleasure himself with thoughts of any of the countless tolerable features of human existence.

I find literature in the silence after the baby stops crying, which is unlike any other silence. It is as if the world returns after annihilation and astounds anew with its robins and spaghetti and cut grass. In that moment of abrupt calm there is no good or bad or should or shouldn’t, just gratefulness to recognize once again the distant drone of a lawn mower, the tittering gossip of the chickens as they take a wide berth around the dog.

Have a seat in a liberal restaurant, and you’re assaulted with all sorts of rules and information. No substitutions. Everything organic. They’ll tell you the name of the farm the lettuce comes from, the variety of tomato in the salad, and probably even the name of the hardworking chicken who donated the eggs. But they won’t ask you how you want your steak. They won’t ask you anything, actually. At liberal restaurants, they tell you what you’re going to have.

It’s all supposed to be so innocent, upwardly mobile snob, designer shades, beret, so desperate to show he’s got good taste, except he’s also dyslexic so he gets ‘good taste’ mixed up with ‘taste good,’ but it’s worse than that! Far, far worse! Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won’t be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Suprmarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it. . . .” “Saunch, wow, that’s. . .” “It’s been on my mind. And another thing. Why is there Chicken of the Sea, but no Tuna of the Farm?” “Um. . .” Doc actually beginning to think about this. “And don’t forget,” Sauncho went on to remind him darkly, “that Charles Manson and the Vietcong are also named Charlie.

All this talk about organic farming, adverts for free-range chickens and happy pigs...isn't it more unethical of me to eat a happy pig? Surely it's better if I eat a pig that's lived a terrible life than one of those carpe diem pigs with a family and friends? The farmers say happy pigs taste better, so I can only assume that they wait until the pig has just fallen in love, maybe just after it's had kids, when it's at its absolute happiest, and then it gets shot in the head and vacuum packed. How ethical is that?

Sprout looked through the wide-open door, focusing on the world outside. It had been a while since she’d had an appetite. She had no desire to lay another egg. Her heart emptied of feeling every time the farmer’s wife took her eggs. The pride she felt when she laid one was replaced by sadness. She was exhausted after a full year of this. She couldn’t so much as touch her own eggs, not even with the tip of her foot. And she didn’t know what happened to them after the farmer’s wife carried them in her basket out of the coop.

She too looked like a regular lady, living in the world- didn't seem particularly with it or excitable or stellar. But that chicken, bathed in thyme and butter- I hadn't ever tasted a chicken that had such a savory warmth to it, a taste I could only suitably identify as the taste of chicken. Somehow, in her hands, food felt recognized. Spinach became spinach- with a good farm's care, salt, the heat and her attention, it seemed to relax into its leafy, broad self. Garlic seized upon its lively nature. Tomatoes tasted as substantive as beef.

We’ve created mass production at low prices, a system that operates under duress. There are stressed-out pigs who can’t mate, who bite one another’s tails because they’re so confined, or who are so heavy their legs can no longer support their bodies; turkeys who can’t reproduce naturally; chickens who have to be debeaked because they peck at each other in densely packed cages; roosters bred for growth who’ve become so aggressive that they injure or kill their mates; and cows who eat other cows as part of their feed and go mad. All of this is presided over by stressed-out farmers, many of whom have come to accept the industry’s bigger-is-better mantra, though it’s clearly unsustainable for them and the earth. In the process they have become almost as trapped as the animals they “farm.” Farmers, industry, and consumers have created a treadmill that runs ever more rapidly, fueled by all kinds of suffering animals—including us. It’s a system that only takes and doesn’t give back; it extracts and doesn’t replenish, until the creatures and the earth that sustain its existence have nothing more to give.

I needed to talk to Vargina, to straighten this out, but felt suddenly faint, headed for the deli across the street. Just standing in the vicinity of comfort food was comfort. The schizophrenic glee with which you cold load your plastic shell with spinach salad, pork fried rice, turkey with cranberry, chicken with pesto, curried yams, clams casino, breadsticks, and yogurt, pay for it by the pound, this farm feed for human animals in black chinos and pleated chinos, animals whose enclosure included the entire island of Manhattan, this sensation I treasured deeply.

No set of numbers can tell the whole story, but when it comes to the annual slaughter of farmed animals, the numbers have such an oppressive weight that they can easily overwhelm the stories behind them: 69 billion chickens, 1.5 billion pigs, 656 million turkeys, 574 million sheep, 479 million goats and 302 million cows. In total, 72.5 billion farmed animals were killed for human consumption in 2018. Ten times the global human population, slaughtered every year. Nor does this number include the ducks, rabbits, horses, geese, kangaroos, bison and other land animals killed so that we can eat their meat, And what about the fishes?

I recently had dinner with George. We did not eat fish. Instead we ate at a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant. I had lemon-grass chicken with chile, and George had stir-fried vegetables. Both meals were excellent, and both consisted of foods originating far from Spokane. Although we didn’t ask the cook where the chicken and other foodstuffs came from, it isn’t difficult to construct an entirely plausible scenario. Here it is: the chicken was raised on a factory farm in Arkansas. The factory is owned by Tyson Foods, which supplies one-quarter of this nation’s chickens and sends them as far away as Japan, The chicken was fed corn from Nebraska and grain from Kansas. One of seventeen million chickens processed by Tyson that week, this bird was frozen and put onto a truck made by PACCAR. The truck was made from plastics manufactured in Texas, steel milled in Japan from ore mined in Australia and chromium from South Africa, and aluminum processed in the United States from bauxite mined in Jamaica. The parts were assembled in Mexico. As this truck, with its cargo of frozen chickens, made its way toward Spokane, it burned fuel refined in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Washington from oil originating beneath Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Mexico, Texas, and Alaska. All this, and I have chickens outside my door.

Other evidence suggests that the 1918 virus might have mutated within pigs (which are uniquely susceptible to both human and bird viruses) or even in human populations for a time before reaching the deadly virtuosity of its final version. We cannot be sure. What we can be sure of is that there is scientific consensus that new viruses, which move between farmed animals and humans, will be a major global health threat into the foreseeable future. The concern is not only bird flu or swine flu or whatever-comes-next, but the entire class of “zoonotic” (animal-to-human or vice versa) pathogens — especially viruses that move between humans, chickens, turkeys, and pigs.

A farmer, as one of his farmer correspondents once wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey, is “a dispenser of the ‘Mysteries of God.’” The mothering instinct of animals, for example, is a mystery that husbandry must use and trust mostly without understanding. The husband, unlike the “manager” or the would-be objective scientist, belongs inherently to the complexity and the mystery that is to be husbanded, and so the husbanding mind is both careful and humble. Husbandry originates precautionary sayings like “Don’t put all your eggs into one basket” and “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” It does not boast of technological feats that will “feed the world.” Husbandry,

Had things turned out differently, had she not married George, this might be where Ida Mae would be living: on a Chickasaw County farm with chickens and pole beans in walking distance from where she grew up. She would never have lived in Chicago, might never have seen it. She wouldn’t have been able to vote all those years or work in a big city hospital, to ride the elevated train and taste Polish sausage and be surrounded by family and friends most everywhere she went because most everyone she knew moved north like she did. Her children—James, Eleanor, Velma—not to mention the grandchildren, might not have existed or would surely have been different from what they were if they had. It’s almost incomprehensible now.

Anna rushed onward, past another row of homes, and found her way to the farm where they kept their chicken coop. She opened the netting to collect a fresh batch of eggs. "Morning, Erik, Elin, and Elise," she greeted the hens. "I've got to move quick today. Freya is coming!" She gathered at least a dozen eggs, closed up the coop, and carefully carried the bucket and the tea back to the house. An older man was pulling a cart with flowers down the street. "Morning, Anna!" "Morning, Erling!" Anna called. "Gorgeous blooms today. Do you have my favorite?" Erling produced two stems of golden crocuses. The yellow flowers were as bright as the sun. Anna inhaled their sweet aroma. "Thank you! Come by later for some fresh bread. First batch should be out of the oven midmorning." "Thank you, Anna! I will!" he said, and Anna hurried along, trying not to crack the eggs or stop again. She had a habit of stopping to talk. A lot.

There is no part of this country where one cannot find a source of fresh, organic meat and produce. I’m not talking about Whole Foods, I’m referring to farmers’ markets and local butchers and fishermen and -women. If you can’t find a source for fresh produce and eggs and/or chicken, bacon, and/or dairy products, by Christ, become the source! What more noble pursuit than supplying your community with breakfast foods?! If you want to read more about this notion, by actual smart and informed writers, pick up some Michael Pollan and some Wendell Berry. I have no intention of ever ceasing to enjoy red meat. However, I firmly believe that we can choose how and where our meat is raised, and I’m all for a grass-fed, happy steer finding its way to my grill long before a factory-farmed, filthy, corn-fed lab creation. It’s up to us to choose farm-to-table fare as much as possible until it becomes our society’s norm once again.

After I’d come to understand evolution and know a little about history and farming, I saw that the thick white animals I laughed at for following each other around and getting caught in bushes were the product of generations of farmers as much as generations of sheep; we made them, we moulded them from the wild, smart survivors that were their ancestors so that they would become docile, frightened, stupid, tasty wool-producers. We didn’t want them to be smart, and to some extent their aggression and their intelligence went together. Of course, the rams are brighter, but even they are demeaned by the idiotic females they have to associate with and inseminate. The same principle applies to chickens and cows and almost anything we’ve been able to get our greedy, hungry hands on for long enough. It occasionally occurs to me that something the same might have happened to women but, attractive though the theory might be, I suspect I’m wrong.

The Herb Farm reminded Marguerite of the farms in France; it was like a farm in a child's picture book. There was a white wooden fence that penned in sheep and goats, a chicken coop where a dozen warm eggs cost a dollar, a red barn for the two bay horses, and a greenhouse. Half of the greenhouse did what greenhouses do, while the other half had been fashioned into very primitive retail space. The vegetables were sold from wooden crates, all of them grown organically, before such a process even had a name- corn, tomatoes, lettuces, seventeen kinds of herbs, squash, zucchini, carrots with the bushy tops left on, spring onions, radishes, cucumbers, peppers, strawberries for two short weeks in June, pumpkins after the fifteenth of September. There was chèvre made on the premises from the milk of the goats; there was fresh butter. And when Marguerite showed up for the first time in the summer of 1975 there was a ten-year-old boy who had been given the undignified job of cutting zinnias, snapdragons, and bachelor buttons and gathering them into attractive-looking bunches.

What Dr. Price's work teaches us is that the absolute fundamental requirement of healthy diets cannot be found in pasta, nor vegetable juices, nor oat bran, nor olive oil, but only in certain types of animal fats. These fats come from animals who consume green, growing organisms (such as grass and plankton), or who consume other animals that have consumed green, growing organisms (such as insects). What is tragic is the difficulty in finding such foods today. Most of our dairy cows spend their entire lives in confinement and never see green grass; chickens are kept in pens and fed mostly grains; pigs are raised in factories and never see sunlight; even fish are now raised in fish farms and given inappropriate feed, like soy pellets. Even worse, most people avoid these foods today because medical spokesmen claim they cause cancer, heart disease or weight gain, even though a number of highly qualified scientists have admirably refuted these charges. Suffice it to say that the patient who is afraid of consuming foods containing animal fats and cholesterol will make no headway in his efforts to improve his diet as these foods are absolutely vital for good health.

When you see that you're making other things feel good, it gives you a good feeling, too. The feeling inside sort of just happens, and you can't say this did it or that did it. It's the many little things. It doesn't seem that taking sweat-soaked harnesses off tired, hot horses would be something that would make you notice. Opening a barn door for the sheep standing out in a cold rain, or throwing a few grains of corn to the chickens are small things, but these little things begin to add up in you, and you can begin to understand that you're important. You may not be real important like people who do great things that you read about in the newspaper, but you begin to feel that you're important to all the life around you. Nobody else knows or cares too much about what you do, but if you get a good feeling inside about what you do, then it doesn't matter if nobody else knows. I do think about myself a lot when I'm alone way back on the place bringing in the cows or sitting on a mowing machine all day. But when I start thinking about how our animals and crops and fields and woods and gardens sort of all fit together, I then get that good feeling inside and don't worry much about what will happen to me.

Marlboro Man was out of town, on a trip to the southern part of the state, looking at farm ground, the night I began conceiving of the best way to arrange the reception menu. I was splayed on my bed in sweats, staring at the ceiling, when suddenly I gave birth to The Idea: one area of the country club would be filled with gold bamboo chairs, architecturally arranged orchids and roses, and antique lace table linens. Violins would serenade the guests as they feasted on cold tenderloin and sipped champagne. Martha Stewart would be present in spirit and declare, “This is my daughter, whom I love. In her I am well pleased.” Martha’s third cousin Mabel would prefer the ballroom on the other end of the club, however, which would be the scene of an authentic chuck wagon spread: barbecue, biscuits and gravy, fried chicken, Coors Light. Blue-checkered tablecloths would adorn the picnic tables, a country band would play “All My Exes Live in Texas,” and wildflowers would fill pewter jugs throughout the room. I smiled, imagining the fun. In one fell swoop, our two worlds--Marlboro Man’s country and my country club--would collide, combine, and unite in a huge, harmonious feast, one that would officially usher in my permanent departure from city life, cappuccino, and size 6 clothes.

Whatand why were never questions for me. How was the only question. When I look back now, I realize that I never thought about what I wanted to become in life. I only thought about how I wanted to live my life. And I knew that the “how” could only be determined within me and by me. There was a big boom in poultry farming at the time. I wanted to make some money to finance my desire for unrestrained, purposeless travel. So I got into it. My father said, “What am I going to tell people? That my son is rearing chickens?” But I built my poultry farm and I built it single-handedly, from scratch. The business took off. The profits started rolling in. I devoted four hours every morning to the business. The rest of the day was spent reading and writing poetry, swimming in the well, meditating, daydreaming on a huge banyan tree. Success made me adventurous. My father was always lamenting that everyone else’s sons had become engineers, industrialists, joined the civil service, or gone to America. And everywhere everyone I met—my friends, relatives, my old school and college teachers—said, “Oh, we thought you’d make something of your life, but you are just wasting it.” I took on the challenge. In partnership with a civil engineer friend, I entered the construction business. In five years, we became a major construction company, among the leading private

The sex trade is also flourishing under the patriarchal objectification of women, paid for by men who are willing and able to own or rent a girl (or sometimes a woman) for sex. Those who are exploited are comparatively powerless, and cannot refuse sexual advances or deny the wishes of those who pay (someone else) for their services. In these situations and many others, men own and control the bodies of women as they own and control the bodies of sows and cows and hens. Sexual exploitation of human females for the benefit of males is mirrored in contemporary animal industries. Men who control animal industries exploit females for their reproductive abilities as if nonhuman animals were objects devoid of will and sensation. Sows are treated as if they were bacon factories and cows are treated as if they were milk machines. Sows, cows, hens, turkeys, and horses are artificially inseminated to bring profits to the men who control their bodies and their lives. Women in the sex trade are similar to factory farmed females . . . . Even comparatively privileged women in relatively fortunate marriages can readily be likened to sows and cows. . . . The reproductive abilities of women and other female animals are controlled and exploited by those in power (usually men) and both are devalued as they age and wear out—when they no longer reproduce. Cows, hens, and women are routinely treated as if they were objects to be manipulated in order to satisfy the desires of powerful men, without regard to female's wishes or feelings.

When I was first called as a General Authority, we lived on a very small plot of ground in Utah Valley that we called our farm. We had a cow and a horse and chickens and lots of children. One Saturday, I was to drive to the airport for a flight to a stake conference in California. But the cow was expecting a calf and in trouble. The calf was born, but the cow could not get up. We called the veterinarian, who soon came. He said the cow had swallowed a wire and would not live through the day. I copied the telephone number of the animal by-products company so my wife could call them to come and get the cow as soon as she died. Before I left, we had our family prayer. Our little boy said our prayer. After he had asked Heavenly Father to “bless Daddy in his travels and bless us all,” he then started an earnest plea. He said, “Heavenly Father, please bless Bossy cow so that she will get to be all right.” In California, I told of the incident and said, “He must learn that we do not get everything we pray for just that easily.” There was a lesson to be learned, but it was I who learned it, not my son. When I returned Sunday night, Bossy had “got to be all right.” This process is not reserved for the prophets alone. The gift of the Holy Ghost operates equally with men, women, and even little children. It is within this wondrous gift and power that the spiritual remedy to any problem can be found. “And now, he imparteth his word by angels unto men, yea, not only men but women also. Now this is not all; little children do have words given unto them many times, which confound the wise and the learned” (Alma 32:23).

propose that we consider our farmers on a spectrum, let’s say, of agrarianism. On one end of the spectrum we have farmers like James, interested in producing the finest foodstuffs that they can, given the soil, the climate, the water, the budget, and their talent. They observe how efficacious or not their efforts are proving, and they adapt accordingly. Variety is one of the keys to this technique, eschewing the corporate monocultures for a revolving set of plants and animals, again, to mimic what was already happening on the land before we showed up with our earth-shaving machinery. It’s tough as hell, and in many cases impossible, to farm this way and earn enough profit to keep your bills paid and your family fed, but these farmers do exist. On the other end of the spectrum is full-speed-ahead robo-farming, in which the farmer is following the instructions of the corporation to produce not food but commodities in such a way that the corporation sits poised to make the maximum financial profit. Now, this is the part that has always fascinated me about us as a population: This kind of farmer is doing all they can to make their factory quota for the company, of grain, or meat, or what have you, despite their soil, climate, water, budget, or talent. It only stands to reason that this methodology is the very definition of unsustainable. Clearly, this is an oversimplification of an issue that requires as much of my refrain (nuance!) as any other human endeavor, but the broad strokes are hard to refute. The first farmer is doing their best to work with nature. The second farmer is doing their best despite nature. In order for the second farmer to prosper, they must defeat nature. A great example of this is the factory farming of beef/pork/chicken/eggs/turkey/salmon/etc. The manufacturers of these products have done everything they can to take the process out of nature entirely and hide it in a shed, where every step of the production has been engineered to make a profit; to excel at quantity. I know you’re a little bit ahead of me here, but I’ll go ahead and ask the obvious question: What of quality? If you’re willing to degrade these many lives with impunity—the lives of the animals themselves, the workers “growing” them, the neighbors having to suffer the voluminous poisons being pumped into the ecosystem/watershed, and the humans consuming your products—then what are you about? Can that even be considered farming? Again, I’m asking this of us. Of you and me, because what I have just described is the way a lot of our food is produced right now, in the system that we all support with our dollars. How did we get here, in both the US and the UK? How can we change our national stance toward agriculture to accommodate more middle-size farmers and less factory farms? How would Aldo Leopold feel about it?

ancient Spartans wеrе skilled agriculturalists. Тhеу tended tо farms thаt thеу usеd tо produce thеіr оwn livestock, dairy, produce аnd grains. А Spartan warrior ate а diet thаt mаіnlу consisted оf whоlе grain barley, whоlе grain wheat, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, legumes, fish, quail eggs, chicken eggs, olive oil аnd meat. Sugar wаs unknown tо thе Greeks, sо thе Spartans nеvеr ate it.

If Anybody Has Married, Left town, Had a fire, Sold a farm, Been arrested, Been your guest, Left you a fortune, Elected new officers, Met with an accident, Organized a new club, Swiped your chickens, That’s News Phone us

I present... the courtyard!" The curtain slid away to reveal a wall of glass. Several production workers slid the transparent panels along the tracks until the entire room opened up onto a massive outdoor kitchen. The contestants filed outside, stunned by the extravagance. It doubled the size of their workspace. Stovetops and grills were set into brick counters. Refrigerators were tucked safely under a canvas canopy. And best of all- most thrilling of all- was a lush, vibrant perennial border that surrounded the entire kitchen, filled with edible plants, herbs, and flowers. Bright orange nasturtiums nodded in the afternoon sunshine, tender peas twined about a chicken wire fence. Bees hovered over patches of fuzzy thyme. Sophia laughed out loud. This was utterly delightful. "Your dream come true, Miss Garden Fairy?" The Scot's thick arms crossed his chest. He looked utterly disinterested. "There are fully-stocked pantries inside, as well. But the outdoor facility takes advantage of our beautiful Vermont landscape. Edibles in the garden." Mr. Smith pointed to glass-fronted coolers. "Local cheeses and other dairy products." He sauntered over to the canopied area and the cameras followed him. Baskets of fresh produce lined the tables. "We locally farmed proteins, fruits, and vegetables. Honey. Maple syrup. Anything and everything you can imagine." He took a perfectly ripe strawberry from one of the boxes and popped it into his mouth.

century ago, the typical Iowa farm raised more than a dozen different plant and animal species: cattle, chickens, corn, hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, cherries, wheat, plums, grapes, and pears. Now it raises only two: corn and soybeans.

He is a big fan of children being raised by their mothers at home. “Nurseries are similar to poultry farms into which chicks are crammed after they are hatched,” he says, and meanders down a small detour about how the meat of wild birds is tastier than the meat of factory chickens to prove his point.