Good life for the animals, good profit for the farmer
There is a 180-year-old wooden barn on Roger Harley’s farm. But no animals live inside it.
“The only thing we use it for is storage and a kind of collecting yard,” he says. “Our animals live outside, 365 days a year, the way nature intended. They all have shelter outside.”
Harley’s 400-hectare farm, two hours northeast of Toronto near Peterborough, provides a viable alternative to industrial farms — financially and practically. He figures he makes as much per acre as an industrial farmer. But for animals, it provides something the industrial model does not: a good life.
His pigs don’t spend their lives in small, solitary steel cages. They live in families, on acre-large (0.4-hectare) lots, where they can root and wallow in the mud, and raise their young.
“That’s the sound of a contented pig,” says Harley, listening to a sow grunting and chasing after her piglets.
“They don’t have sweat glands, so when they get hot they dig a hole and wallow. Imagine how frustrating it is if all you want to do all day is wallow, and you are stuck on a concrete floor.”
While most industrial farmers pick breeds for weight gain, Harley searched for hardiness. He raises 130 Belted Galloway cattle, 700 Tamworth pigs and 850 Wiltshire Horned sheep, which all can withstand the cold.
He does no mutilations, besides boar castrations performed with anesthetic, and no artificial insemination. His animals make babies the old-fashioned way.
“We don’t put the animals on antibiotics unless they need treatment, but we haven’t needed that for about two years,” says Harley, 56. “We find because they are stressfree, they don’t get sick.”
In factory farms, the young are taken from their mothers soon after birth. Harley leaves them together for months.
His reasoning is both ethical and practical. Left with their mothers, the babies gain weight faster, are healthier and less stressed, he says. “After carrying their young for many months, they deserve to raise them,” says Harley, 56. “Plus, they just do so much better.”
The result: Harley Farms is the only farm certified by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) in Ontario. The farm is an environmental model, too. Harley grows 75 per cent of the animal feed himself, without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Instead, he rotates his fields among different crops and animals over a seven-year cycle. “They each add something back to the soil . . . it’s all part of an ecosystem,” he says.
His sheep and cattle are not fed any corn, the main staple of factory farms. “These are ruminants. They are not meant to be on a grain diet,” he says. “They are grass-eating animals.”
The Harley farm runs on traditional principles, but with modern equipment. The 4,500-gallon (17,000-litre) tanker fills all the pig wallows and water troughs with hydraulic levers. When Harley needs to know about an animal, he checks its radio tag, which records everything from birth date to field changes, pairings with mates and any medication given.
“Any basic movement in animal or change in its situation, we record,” he says. “It’s like a bar code.” His latest big purchase was a $160,000 Merlo telehandler, which operates as both a tractor and an industrial loader.
So, if large pastoral farms are financially viable as well as humane, why aren’t there more of them?
“If you are a factory farmer,” says Sonia Faruqi, “you don’t need to know anything about animals. You just need to know how to operate a switchboard.”