Canadian pastoral
So a Wall Street banker walks into a barn . . . It’s no joke — that’s the journey Sonia Faruqi took when she left her finance career to explore farming practices around the world, writing a book about her experiences. She found horrific animal abuse, even on so-called organic farms. And she discovered a better way, close to home
Sonia Faruqi arrives at Harley Farms dressed for a business party: teal cocktail dress, black and white designer purse and black open-toed sandals that reveal her sparkle-painted toenails.
She navigates a giant mud puddle, daintily carrying a purple gift bag with chocolates she brought for the farmer.
“I knew you’d be taking photos,” she says, explaining her attire. But her outfit is not that different from the one she wore on her first farm visit 41⁄ years ago.
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“I had no idea what I was getting myself into,” she writes in her just-released book, Project Animal Farm: An Accidental Journey Into the Secret World of Farming and the Truth About Our Food.
Faruqi was a cab-riding, hyper-urban investment bank analyst on Wall Street. At 24, she lost her job in the market crash and moved to Toronto to be closer to her family, who were immigrating to Canada. (Faruqi’s parents are of Pakistani descent, but they raised her in the United Arab Emirates.)
She thought a rural vacation might rejuvenate her, and contacted a dozen Ontario farms. The single one that agreed was an organic dairy, three hours away by bus. Faruqi didn’t drive.
She was expecting a scene from the milk carton: antique brick house up on a green hill, surrounded by happily grazing Holsteins.
Instead, she found cows chained by the neck to stalls, standing sentinel beneath a menacing electric prod, which would jolt them any time they moved their rears away from the manure gutter. (Organic cows must have access to pasture120 days ayear in Canada. The rest of the time, they are often chained to make milking easier for the farmer. This practice is banned in the United States, Faruqi says.)
Her curiosity was piqued. If this was an organic farm, where animals are supposedly treated more humanely, what would a conventional one look like?
Through her hosts, she met an egg and turkey farmer who grudgingly let her into his hen warehouse, and later allowed her to stay with his family for a week.
Faruqi was already vegetarian. But what she saw that week would be enough to turn even the most avowed meat-lover into a vegan. Thirteen thousand bald-spotted, de-beaked hens crammed four or five to microwave-sized cages. One dimly lit, windowless factory housing 40,000 broiler chickens that have been genetically bred to balloon from 40 grams (one-tenth of a pound) to more than three kilograms (close to seven pounds) in just 50 days. A farmer kicking her injured turkey rather than treating it.
The chapter recounting her tour of a nearby pig farm is so gruesome, it took me three tries to read it. Faruqi describes females screaming in their small steel cages, while being jabbed with needles of penicillin to induce weight gain. “The life of a present-day sow is a cycle of protracted misery,” she writes.
Faruqi portrays herself often as a damsel in distress, dependent on the sympathy of strangers to drive her places, or to grant her unplanned interviews. (She shows up unannounced to the reception of a large Malaysian poultry company’s corporate office and waits there until the owner takes pity on her.) But in truth, she’s iron-willed, obsessively organized and brave.
She even talked her way onto the floor of a slaughter plant for the day, posing as an aspiring employee.
“There was one side of me that was repulsed,” she says, “and the other side really wanted to find solutions. The other side won out.”
Over two years, Faruqi’s search for solutions took her as far as a Mennonite farm in Belize and chicken barns in Bali. But in the end, she found them close to home — at a 400-hectare farm just outside Peterborough, where animals live “as nature intended,” outdoors, eating grass, digging wallows and having babies the old-fashioned way, not with purchased semen and a catheter. It is basically what she envisioned, four and a half years ago, when she arrived at that dairy farm. She calls it large pastoral farming. “It’s not just the human treatment of animals; it’s also sustainable and can continue, year after year. Factory farms are harmful to the land. They are the biggest polluters of rivers and streams in the U.S.,” she says.
An unexpected solution she offers involves
gender. Women do the bulk of grocery shopping and cooking, yet are a rare species not just on farms, but on the boards of large agricultural companies. For instance, the largest chicken producer in the United States, Tyson Foods, had just one woman on its 15-member executive team as of 2014. Faruqi calls this the “grass ceiling.”
“Studies show women are more empathetic and concerned about animal treatment,” she says. “They are also more likely to look for organic, healthy food and be concerned about food safety. There’s a rationale on both the production and consumption side.”
She won’t be one following that clarion call personally. The real accident of her journey was discovering her talent for writing. Faruqi’s style is clear and direct, and her analysis good.
“Writing is the best tool for action,” she says, after crouching down in her cocktail dress to gingerly pet the ear of an enormous, hairy pig.