Project Animal Farm

Sonia Faruqi

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781605987996
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Sonia Faruqi had an Ivy League degree and a job on Wall Street. But when the banking industry collapsed, she found herself on a small organic dairy farm that would change her life for the better, although it didn't seem that way in the beginning.First, she had to come to grips with cows shocked into place, cannibal chickens, and "free range" turkeys that went nowhere. But there were bright lights as well: happy, frolicking calves on a veal farm, and farmers who cared as much about the animals as their pocketbooks. What started as a two-week volunteer vacation turned into a journey that reached into the darkest recesses of the animal agriculture industry.Surrounded by a colorful cast of characters, Faruqi's quest to discover the truth about modern agribusiness took her around the world. Lively, edgy, and balanced, Project Animal Farm sheds light on the international agribusiness, with the ultimate goal of improving the lives of farm animals here at home. Using her finance background to forecast the future of agriculture, Faruqi discusses the changes we need to make—using our forks and our votes.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

ORGANIC DAIRY COWS

TETHERED, TRAINED BUTTERCUPS

Michael and Irene Miller were baffled to learn that I did not know how to drive a car, let alone a truck or tractor.

“You’re how old?” Irene asked me.

“Twenty-five.”

“So how come you can’t drive?”

“I take the subway.”

Michael and Irene looked dissatisfied with my response. They were also confused to learn that I did not know anything about farms—not even the difference between hay and straw. They claimed that this was like not knowing the difference between bread and bed. Hay was like bread—to eat—and straw was like a bed—to sleep. Would I ever sleep on a slab of bread or eat my bed?

I would not, I assured them, embarrassed.

I was further embarrassed by my appearance. Irene Miller wore not a spot of makeup or jewelry, whereas I was wearing dangling earrings, bright blush, and a colorful top. I looked dressed for a party.

Irene seemed desperately eager to say something. “Everyone around here is white,” she told me in her Dutch accent, staring at my brown skin and black hair. “A few years ago, a black family moved in. Not to our village, but to a nearby one. We never saw them, but we heard a lot about them because everyone stared at them and followed them. No one liked them. They stayed for only a little time. Since then, no other black family—or Jewish or Chinese or Indian, like you—has come to our community. Everyone here is white.”

I did not correct Irene that my background is Pakistani, not Indian. I lived in downtown Toronto only three hours away from the Millers, but I felt like I’d arrived in a foreign country.

For a time, the only sounds at the table were the scrapes of forks and knives against plates. Eventually, Michael informed me, “We have a hundred and thirty dairy cows and calves.”

“I don’t like animals,” Irene rushed to contribute. She took a long, slow sip of wine directly from her wine bottle—her nightly routine, I would soon learn—and then glanced at the speckled, cinnamon Australian Shepherd to the other side of the room. “I didn’t want to get a dog. Michael did, so we have one.”

The dog had been hand-selected by Michael out of a litter of six puppies based on only one criterion: “He was the quietest one.” The canine hush suited Michael because he was himself the quietest of his brood of brothers, growing only more silent over the years, becoming so taciturn that one had to wonder whether he’d taken an oath of silence. He was tall and gaunt, with an angular face lit by overcast, sky-blue eyes and etched with a cloud-white beard.

Like all of his ancestors in the Netherlands, Michael was a dairy farmer, though he’d once thought he might choose a different path. He’d studied tropical agriculture to “save the world.” He never ended up working in the plantations of tropical nations, but he did make it out of the thirty-mile patch of the Netherlands in which his forefathers had passed the last four centuries, and in which Michael predicted that his four brothers and their descendants may pass the next four centuries, anchored there on that spot of land like mountains until eternity.

A few years into their marriage, Michael and Irene Miller^* moved to Canada, to the two-story brick-and-wood house they continued to reside in today. They farmed the conventional way for their first ten years in the country, until Irene—whose hair had then, in winters, roared red like saffron, and in summers melted into the coral color of a setting sun—had an idea that radically altered their circumstances. She noticed that organic, a movement that started sputteringly after World War II as a counter-effort to agricultural industrialization, was climbing in sales, buoyed by consumer interest in health, sustainability, and animal welfare. Spotting a gap between organic demand and supply, she suggested to her husband that they get their dairy farm certified organic.

Certification was expensive, but Irene’s decision was more lucrative than she’d ever imagined. In the twenty-plus years since the Millers had obtained organic certification, the organic sector had lifted off into the sky like a hot-air balloon, its sales reaching $35 billion in the United States in 2013. Today, organic products can be found in three quarters of American and Canadian grocery stores. Surveys show that almost half of Americans actively try to include organic foods in their diet, and two out of five Canadians buy organic products every week.

But Irene—whose hair was now the aged, flaxen yellow of scorched sand—was no longer glad about the success of her organic plan. She was sad, beset by pangs of regret and resentment.

As soon as he finished dinner, Michael stood up and, without a word, strode out the back door of the house. Irene, who was still chewing the (non-organic) lettuce salad and ham-and-bean chili she’d prepared for dinner, leaned closer to me. “It’s my fault,” she whispered, her face defeated. “It’s all my fault. I wish I hadn’t had the idea for organic. I want to get out of dairy farming, but now we’re stuck with the farm. It’s harder to sell an organic farm than a regular farm.”

“Why do you want to get out of dairy farming?” I asked, surprised and uncomfortable at the personal nature of the confession.

“Because I hate it. I am completely sick of it. We’ve had it for thirty years. Michael promised me he would sell the farm, or give it to our daughter Annie, before we became fifty-one. Then, when we became fifty-one, he promised me he would sell the farm before we became fifty-three. Then, when we became fifty-three, he said fifty-five. Then he said fifty-seven. But he will become fifty-seven next week, and he told me to give him two more years to sell the farm. But I can’t wait two more years. I’m thinking of leaving without him. I hate this dairy farm.”

Irene and I cleaned up after dinner without a further word; then I retired to my room upstairs. The room was rusty, dusty, and musty, furnished with an ancient television and stereo, two bookcases colonized by long-legged spiders, and a bed of worn, unwashed blankets. The season was winter, but the room was unheated, offering little insulation from the wind whistling outside. I’d been thinking it at dinner, but as I tossed and turned in bed, I felt certain that coming here was a mistake.

I’d rarely seen cows up close before, and so I visited the cowshed eagerly on my first morning with the Millers.

Sixty-five cows lived in the shed. Most of them were collages of black splashed with white. They were giants, weighing 1,300 pounds on average, and standing nearly six feet tall, their hooves, elevated at the back, creating the effect of high-heeled shoes. Their pink udders looked like bulbous balloons, veined with weight. Even their eyelashes were large, arching an inch around dark eyes.

As I entered, the cows stood up one by one, like saluting soldiers. When I extended a hand to them, some treated it like wilted hay, taking a whiff then turning away. A few perceived it as dewy grass, giving it a swift sniff and lick. Others regarded it as a cumbersome fly and shook it off. Many viewed it as an encroaching weapon. They leapt to their feet in a great flurry of flesh and attempted to vault back. But they couldn’t: they were shackled to stalls by neck chains. I could still have touched the cows, or punched them, or poked their eyes, and their chains would have arrested them instead of me.

Each cow lived as cramped in her stall as a big foot in a small shoe. She spent her hours engaging in one of four activities. She would eat, her mouth rotating in a slow, circular motion as she chewed through the pile of corn and hay dumped daily before her. She would drink, from a soup-sized blue bowl that, when touched with her mouth, filled automatically with water from a labyrinth of overhead pipes. She would nuzzle—passing her head through from underneath the bar separating her from her neighbor—and she would lick her neighbor or else rest her head on her neighbor’s neck. Finally, she would groom—rather, try to groom.

Though every cow’s hindquarters were caked with a crusty layer of excrement, she was helpless to clean them. Her neck chain held her in place. In addition, just behind her back hooves lay a “manure gutter,” a low channel that lined the rear of her stall, and into which she feared falling. If that weren’t enough to quell all movement, directly above her shoulders dangled a device that Michael Miller called a “shit trainer.”

A shit trainer is a zigzag-edged metal rod that punishes the cow underneath with a jolt of electricity whenever she does not position herself precisely at the stall-gutter boundary as she defecates. Trainers are painful and restrict movement severely, causing stress and nervousness in cows, for which reason they are banned in Sweden and parts of Germany.

Defecation was tedious for the Miller dairy cows. A cow would drag her back legs out of her muck in the manure gutter and would heave herself up until she was standing. She would then raise her tail and lift her shoulders, but zing!—her shoulders would brush the trainer. She would comply with the trainer’s electric warning that, in her present position, her excrement would fall into her stall, and she would carefully step back a hoof-width. Her hind hooves now perching precariously at the very edge of her stall, she would defecate, fearing the whole time that she would lose her footing and fall.

None of this was what I’d expected of an organic farm. The Miller website was merry, with its colorful pictures of cartoon cows, but the cowshed was melancholy, with its two rows of feces-smudged cows in gray stalls facing gray walls. The neck tether, the cow trainer, and the manure gutter together trapped the cows, subduing them from ahead, from above, from behind. Cows could not even turn their heads around fully. They were numbered, ordered milk machines.

Danielle and Ken liked to call them “cattle beasts.”

Blond, blue-eyed, eighteen-year-old Danielle was a minimum-wage worker at the Miller milk plant. She was a high school graduate, but a grudging one, for all she’d ever learned in classrooms was “School is so boring.” In retrospect, Danielle wished she’d spent her formative years wielding her gun instead of her pen. “My funnest thing to do is take my gun and shoot pigeons,” she told me cheerfully.

Ken was a good-looking, green-eyed, brown-haired, twenty-nine-year-old father of two boys. He regretted his high school years even more than Danielle did. “The piece of paper you get when you graduate doesn’t help you make money or anything,” he said. Money was also Ken’s complaint against his current job, for the wage he now earned was less than the eighteen dollars per hour he’d earned as a night janitor at his previous place of employment, Campbell Soup Company.

As a volunteer at the Miller farm, I assisted Ken and Danielle whenever they requested, attired, like them, in a black shirt, hairnet, and green gloves. Guided by their congenial tutelage, I stamped containers with expiration dates, placed them in cardboard boxes, and taped and stacked the boxes. I’d never done such repetitive, mindless work before, and I much preferred spending time in the cowshed. So did Annie Miller, who became my favorite person at the farm.

Thirty-one-year-old Annie was the only one of Michael and Irene’s four children to work at the family dairy. She had a soft voice and whole-hearted smile, and was a mother to two children. Their names were tattooed onto one of her sinewy biceps, the other bicep reserved for a sprawling tree before a sizzling sunset in a turquoise sky. Annie’s affection for animals set her apart from her parents and from most in her community.

Annie, for instance, named all the cows. “Every cow has her own personality,” she told me, “but I’d say that most of them are gentle and friendly. They form friendships just like we do. Socializing is very important to them. I don’t like the idea of identifying them just by their ear tag numbers, so when they’re born, I write down names for all of them in my book, next to their numbers. No one knows their names except for me.”

Miller milk plant workers Ken and Danielle, in contrast, viewed cows as just numbers. Both came from beef-cattle farming families, and neither had ever known anyone except Annie to name their cows. “Unless maybe,” mused Danielle jokingly, “farmers call their cattle beasts Buttercup-one, Buttercup-two, Buttercup-three, until a hundred, just to say they name them!”

Danielle and Ken both believed that their “cattle beasts” did not recognize them. “If they’re too stupid to recognize each other,” Danielle reasoned, “how can they recognize people?”

Annie, in contrast, was confident that cows recognize one another, and also people. “I’ve noticed that when cows line up in stalls, they prefer lining up next to certain other cows. That shows they recognize each other and make friends—they like being next to their friends. Also, I’m not usually the one to milk them, but when I do milk them, I can tell they’re surprised. That shows they recognize people.”

I agreed with Annie. With every afternoon that I visited the cowshed, fewer cows stared at me, more of them started to ignore me. The rapid alteration in their reaction indicated that they recognized me as the same dawdling individual strolling among them every day.

To my delight, calves recognized me, too.

The seven youngest calves at the Miller farm had pink noses, inky eyes, and dappled designs of night skies suffused with white clouds.

Each calf was restricted to an individual five-by-six-foot enclosure called a hutch. The walls of the hutches were marked with long, dark, lightning-like streaks of excrement. The straw on their floors was stained by manure from the yellow of a banana to the brown of a potato peel. The knees and hooves of calves—and, in a few cases, even their bellies and necks and faces—were smudged and spotted with sticky dabs of feces. The calves looked dirty and unhappy.

The hutches stood in a row outside the cowshed. The first time I stopped by, all seven calves continued to lie idly in their lairs. As I walked to and fro in front of them, they stared at me warily, like I was trespassing on their terrain. Eventually, 307, an ebony-faced calf with a white triangle blazoned across her forehead, rose and stepped out into the small outdoor area at the front of her hutch. Her knees knobby, her eyes steady, she inched toward me tremulously. She sniffed my hand—then licked it. Surprised, I returned my hand to my pocket. Undeterred, she licked my pocket.

The other calves remained timid and placid that first day, but they became bold and brazen over the next days. They started calling out to me like flea market vendors, sauntering and sashaying to persuade their one visitor to arrive, or to return, or to stay. My favorite calf was 310 because she was the youngest and prettiest, her hair pattern that of a snow field sprinkled with pebbles, her eyelashes white around the left eye and black around the right. Even timid little 310 would step...