Around the world and back Author’s travels reveal the best and worst of farming practices
To research her book, Project Animal Farm, Sonia Faruqi visited 60 farms in eight countries, starting here in Ontario. She shielded the identities of most farmers, particularly the local ones. Here are 10 striking examples from her book:
1. Organic dairy farm, Ontario
Faruqi expected the organic farm to treat its 130 Holstein dairy cows well. Instead, she found them shackled by neck chains in stalls, with electric “s--- trainers” poised to jolt them each time they shifted away from the manure gutter. The calves were isolated in small hutches for three lonely months.
2. Conventional pig farm, Ontario
Faruqi describes the farm as a dark dungeon, with the sows screaming from inside their small, steel crates. She watched in horror as the farmer stabbed them with needles of penicillin to induce weight gain and described the babies being castrated without anesthesia.
3. Conventional turkey farm, Ontario
Faruqi visits a farm with 6,000 turkeys. As babies, they are declawed, de-beaked and de-snooded. What’s most alarming, though, is their rate of weight gain. They are genetically bred to gain almost half a pound (200 grams) a day — so much that they suffer heart attacks. Male turkeys can no longer mount females without harming them, so farmers artificially inseminate.
4. Veal farm, Ontario
Faruqi expected the red veal farm to be as disturbing as the pig farm. Instead, she found the baby male dairy cows living with daylight, straw beds and comfortable socialization for all but the first seven weeks of their lives. Red veal cows are fed corn, while “white veal” cows are fed formula, and usually housed in crates for their lives. Most veal in Canada is red.
5. Dairy farm, Vermont
Faruqi discovers a new trend in the U.S.: bedding cow stalls with dried manure. Half the adults have had their tails removed, so they can’t swish away flies. Their calves are covered in sores from ringworm — a fungus best healed with sunlight they never see.
6. Chicken farm, Merida, Mexico
Faruqi visits a factory with 30,000 chickens, whose excrement is sold as cow feed — a practice banned in Canada. If humans grew at the same rate as these chickens, she writes, we would weigh more than 600 pounds in eight weeks. The cause is not growth hormones, but “Frankensteinian genetics.”
7. Dairy and egg farm, Cayo District, Belize
This small Mennonite family farm is Faruqi’s favourite. She calls it “humane, environmental, beautiful and eye-opening. It was exactly what I’d been seeking all over the world.”
The female farmers know all 30 cows by name and pet their 50 hens. However, the operation’s small scale makes it an impractical replacement for industrial farming, Faruqi says.
8. Chicken farm, Bali, Indonesia
Chicken farming is changing in Indonesia, from small backyard farms to industrial ones, Faruqi finds. The farm she visits is a good example — 600 chickens in a barn. Unlike Canadian farms, they are afforded sunlight with mesh walls. The barns therefore do not reek of ammonia.
9. Chicken farm, Malacca, Malaysia
In Malaysia, Faruqi visits a factory that produces 160,000 chickens a month for KFC. The warehouses are bathed in blue light, believed to accelerate weight gain. The Cobb chickens have been bred to have such large breasts that they lie “breast-down, like an elephant seal.” The new trend is to house them in cages.
10. Egg farm, Malacca, Malaysia
This is the largest industrial farm Faruqi visited — 65,000 egg-laying hens in one factory, stacked in five levels of metal cages, each jammed with seven birds. The ammonia was so bad, “my nose started dripping like a broken pipe,” she writes. One in seven hens dies here, many from Newcastle disease — a virus brought on by stress.