The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - I Hope You Die: Livestock Farmers on the Threats They Receive

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

This episode, three farmers who slaughter animals reflect on the experience of encountering hate, vitriol and worse from animal rights activists. This episode was produced by Jordan Marr & Philippa Mennell.

Hey everyone, a quick advisory on today's episode. The first five minutes contain some tape that some people might find upsetting and contain some foul language, so maybe give it a second thought if you've got kids around you, in which case you'll be fine after about five minutes through the recording. This is The Ruminant, a podcast about food politics and food security and the cultural and practical aspects of farming. You can find out more at theruminant.ca, email me, editor at theruminant.ca, and you can find me on Twitter, at Ruminant Blog, or search for The Ruminant on Facebook. All right, let's do a show. So my name's Kevin. I operate a mobile slaughter truck in Washington State. I go from farm to farm and make meat out of people's animals.

I got into the business because I thought it was a very humane way to harvest meat. The animal never has to leave the farm, gets dressed, gets on a trailer. getting on a trailer. Every day is a good day to the last second, and that's how it goes. And most, every one of my customers are super happy, and the community is happy. And, yeah, it's a good gig to have. Typically, I service, you know, very small farms, mom and pops, people just raising a few animals of their own. So it's very small-scale, local.

I only drive maybe 75 miles at most. So it's all kept within our community. So most people that see what I'm doing out in the field are super happy and jazzed and interested. But a couple Sunday nights ago, I got an interesting voicemail from someone who wasn't so happy. Hi, Mr. Killer killer fucking meat killer bitch ass i just want to let you know that you're a fucking selfish human for killing animals and you should fucking die instead right have a good fucking night and god fucking will kill you

one day you fucking karma will get you fuck you leave the animals alone and stop letting them die you fucking killer. Hasn't happened very often, but it was a bit jarring for sure and kind of took me back for a second, but then I kind of realized that that's her opinion or their opinion and most people are pretty cool about it, but I know there's people out there that maybe aren't. So was there any aspect of the recording that had you feeling intimidated or worried or nervous? Honestly, not so much.

The area code, the phone number area code is from across the water, and I figured they weren't someone local that was going to pose any real threat or anything. It was more specific, maybe, and I felt like they knew who I was, really, or not just getting my number off Google, then maybe it would be a different perspective. Hey, everyone. It's Jordan. So that recording featured a friend and colleague of mine called Kevin. Kevin, as he mentioned, works out of Washington State, and we decided together that would be the only details we shared about him and his business, just as a form of kind of half anonymity, I guess for obvious reasons. Today we're going to be talking about some of the intimidation and threats that various colleagues of mine have

experienced because of their participation in animal slaughter. And just as a precaution, in case there are any particularly passionate animal welfare activists listening to the show today that might feel inclined to give these colleagues more trouble. I gave each guest the option to be fully anonymous or at least half anonymous, and two of the three have elected to do that just because why invite any more grief? I belong to a social media group of farmers on which Kevin shared the voicemail that you heard a couple of minutes ago. And that kind of served as the motivation to put this episode together. I've been aware of this kind of thing happening to certain colleagues and friends of mine for a few years now. And so once I heard the voicemail, I just thought,

huh, maybe it's time to explore this a little bit on the show. So you've just heard from Kevin, Kevin from Washington. And now you're going to hear from another Kevin. Hello, I'm Kevin Morin. I'm the general manager at McGill University's McDonald Campus Farm. I've been working in agriculture for 10 years right now, various farms across the country. And I had the opportunity to operate my own mixed livestock operation in Kelowna, BC called Kelowna Free Graze Lamb. So Kevin, take me back to the summer of, or maybe spring, spring or summer of 2018 and kind of what led up to this open farm event that you and your business partner had planned

for the community. So this was in 2018. It was the first year of operation of Kelowna Free Graze Lamb. And when we started the operation, we were pretty broke. I didn't have much money. We actually decided to do a crowd funding campaign to buy money for our sheep. And it was a rewards based crowdfunding. So people weren't necessarily just giving money. Like, I mean, a lot of people did, but people would get a reward if they gave a certain amount of money. And the lowest tier was you got invited to an open farm day.

So that was like twofold, one to serve the crowdfunding campaign, but also just as a marketing ploy in our first year of operation. So we organized an open farm day on may 27th i believe in 2018 and we just advertised it over facebook and what happened was that our event got shared through an organized a local organization and that organization was following some local animal activists. So when the local animal activists found out that a lamb farm was doing an open farm day, they just caught on to it really quick. And I kind of want to back up that our operation, we didn't only have a mixed livestock operation, but we also operated a provincially inspected meat processing

facility. And, you know, we're quite proud of that because there are very few facilities around. That was obviously a big point of contention for the vegan group because not only were we raising livestock, but we were slaughtering them on site. Now, as luck would have it, them on site now as luck would have it um that very same day was the vegan fair in colonna so they kind of made an event um like a spun-off event from the vegan fair to come out to our farm and protest our open farm day but it didn't necessarily there was a lot of lead up to that day. So just the whole hate that we had from social media was probably worse than the protest itself. Like, I mean, they just plagiarized a lot of our ads and that became a lot of management. So I was really worried about them protesting us.

So I tried to get in touch with these groups and rationalize with them. And quickly I found that there's no point in doing that because you can't rationalize with someone when they're emotionally attached to an idea. So our best course of resource was just to delete their comments and not answer them. We found that to be the most effective. Anyways, the day of the protests, I think about a dozen of them came out and they just had signs and they were just getting people to honk. I think when people drove by, they were just honking, not knowing what they were honking at because all these signs, but they were getting really excited about it. One thing that was pretty frustrating was they took pictures of ours offline and made posters

of them and showed them back to us. So that was kind of something that got me going. And then actually you were there, Jordan, that day. I was. And you had organized a counter protest. And I think you were protesting down with nuance. Yeah. So when I saw you do that, I had to just go up and see what was going on. And I saw you were counter protesting the protest. And that's when I noticed that they had a sign of my lambs and they were showing it back to me and that kind of hit me the wrong way so I just went up and took the sign out of their hand but as soon as I realized I did that I didn't want it to escalate any further so I just turned around and left which I think was a good point on my side because you don't really want to make

that into any worse of a conflict and then we kept getting hate for about you know six to eight months um after the event from various people in the community which was kind of awkward because Kelowna is not that big of a town so you know the the chef of a given restaurant the vegan restaurant giving you hate uh then you drive that by that restaurant. It was kind of a, kind of funny, but to, uh, to stop the whole thing, it was just ignore them, delete their comments, block them from your page and do not answer. And that was the most effective. Well, Kevin, thanks that I I'm actually quite surprised at your, you've got a good memory. Um, you really have good recall on, on that whole series of events. Let's go.

So that was a great summary. Let's go kind of, I have some follow-up questions. Let's just go through it. So you suggested in your summary that in the end, looking backward, it was the anxiety caused by what they might do and what they were doing online leading up to the event that felt the worst. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at the end of the day i think protesters are just going to protest um and if they're going to do something stupid which is few and far between that's totally unforeseen uh for instance i heard of this uh one story at rocana in in um For instance, I heard of this one story at Rokana in Salmon Arm. So they're in Salmon Arm.

They got they get protested regularly because they're a bit of a bigger operation. But somebody jumped in front of a truck and almost got hit, you know. So that was definitely more more aggressive. But nothing like that happened to us. But but what what was was it was it what they were threatening to do that was causing anxiety for you or was it what you were imagining they might do? Well, I think it was just the bad publicity. Um, but now that I remember, um, no, no publicity is bad publicity. And that was our first year of operating the enterprise. And it was a huge boost in sales for us.

Because I think while I was worried about having a bad rap and people giving us a bad name, a lot of people saw what they were doing and just didn't believe in their message and decided to support us. So the vegans actually kind of worked in our favor. You said that you tried to get in touch and just talk to them leading up to the event. Can you expand on that a bit? Well, for sure. I mean, I've been working in agriculture my whole life, and every system of producing food has consequences.

There's no creation without an equal and opposite destruction, bluntly put. So I, you know, that summer in the oak got hired to move beehives in orchards, you know, and what vegan doesn't eat fruit? Well, let me tell you that by moving these beehives through orchards, I killed thousands of bees, you know, and that's just a reality of our food production system. So there's no production system that's harmless, you know, even if you're going to go to like only eat vegetables, you know, and if you're going to do an annual crop until the soil every year, you know, that has an impact on soil microorganisms and the soil organic matter. So these are trying to convey to the vegans. And I was also trying to sympathize with them and to say that, you know, I'm not necessarily a proponent for the conventional meat system either, you know, and my animals are on pasture. them either you know and my animals are on pasture so I don't believe that they're contributing to greenhouse gas emissions because if you take consideration the pasture on top of the livestock I think my belief is that the net emissions you know the pasture ends up acting as a carbon sink so I was trying to just explain these facts um or these points of view to various

people that were getting in touch with me online um i even contacted some by the phone and nobody wanted to hear anything of it like they were just stuck on i have blood on my hands and i'm a horrible person yeah maybe what we offered was convenience because we were close by and also a direct association. You could see the lambs being raised and the slaughterhouse right on site. And that's just looking at your food system right in the eye. And I think that's what we should be doing.

Not necessarily going to the superstore and buying meat that you don't know where it comes from. You don't know how it's produced. And it's, you know, probably on sale because there's an overabundant production. So we're telling a couple stories like this in this episode today, Kevin, and one of them is, you know, focuses on a voicemail that a colleague of ours received that was not fun. It was kind of violent and super rude. And I mean, what do you think about that yourself? You probably know people have been on the receiving end of that. It sounds like in that sense, you didn't experience that anything like violence or anything. But I don't know.

I don't even know where I'm going with this question. I'm just wondering how you react to to when activists take that approach to kind of harass and even become violent towards, you know, people who are who are raising and slaughtering animals. The medium is the message. who are raising and slaughtering animals. The medium is the message. You know, that's kind of what comes to my mind because they're coming to you with anger and kind of like, you know, a sense of derangement. And if you want to evoke any positive change,

you know, you don't do that with a negative attitude. You have to be constructive listening have a sense of dialogue that goes for anything not just the meat production that you know our environment or choosing a better government you know like if if some if a canvasser comes to your door and knocks on the door and you open and they start yelling of a whole bunch of things you're not going to listen to their message so it's not a very effective way to convey change uh and and by that fact you know it reinforces that i may not be necessarily dealing with uh the sharpest group of people so i shouldn't let it get to me at all you know if someone was really bothered by

what I'm doing you know they should at least come to me with a calm disposition and you know want to have a conversation with me as opposed to getting me riled up as well because you know once your testosterone gets going you know there's very little room for uh rational action you know i uh i think you're right and i know from experience because of because of when i was at your open farm day and and charged out and shoved my signs in their faces and we we one thing that didn't really happen was much much much dialogue and the dialogue that did happen didn't really happen was much which much dialogue and the dialogue that did happen didn't happen until we all calmed down and just started talking kevin yeah kevin thanks so much for sharing your story and and just making the time for the for

the podcast i really appreciate it hey my pleasure jordan how did that feel kevin okay oh i just want to say that cliche line you know uh, a long time Lister, first time caller. I'll try and I'll try and slide that in there, Kev. Okay. Did you see the last email I sent you with the questionnaire? Hey, everybody, just a quick interruption to the episode because I want to introduce you to someone. If you listened to the last episode, you'll recall that I mentioned that I have a collaborator right now. A dear old friend has agreed to help me a little bit with the podcast, and I promised to reveal her identity in this episode. And so, Philippa, are you there? Hi, Jordan.

Hi, Philippa. How's it going? Well, how are you? Oh, I'm pretty good. So, Philippa, Philippa Menel, you are the secret collaborator, at least for now, on the Ruminant Podcast. Wow. No more mystery. Why did you agree to do this uh to work on your podcast yeah

i was really excited to to work on this with you um partly because i think you've been doing a great job and i i think there are a lot of really interesting topics that you've been getting into on this podcast. So I think it's a really worthwhile project. And I was excited to be able to take part. Well, I'm sure happy you're taking part, Philippa. And now I just want to sing your praises to everyone. So in a nutshell, Philippa and I go way back, everybody. I met Philippa when I was interning on a veggie farm on Vancouver Island. We then spent two years growing vegetables together.

And Philippa comes from a family of farmers. And in fact, something fun about Philippa Menel is that on her parents' farm is where the famous ambrosia apple originated. So you can thank Philippa and her parents and that farm for the existence of the ambrosia apple in your lives, if it's been in your lives. Anyway, Philippa, I consider you a lot smarter than me. And I'm really excited for the insight and perspective that you're going to bring to the show. Wow. I'm so excited to be working on it with you. And I'm really, really grateful for the opportunity to do this with you. Well, for so many reasons, too, because we haven't worked together now in a long time. So this has been a fun chance to get to... To get the band back together? Yeah.

To get the band back together. Yeah yeah at least some of the band right philippa yeah with with the good and the bad uh i'm reminded of all of the fun of what that means jordan but no it's been great and also because i'm a big fan of podcasts in general and i think yours is a pretty great one but it's something I've always been curious about so this is so fun it's such a big learning curve for me to get to see behind the curtain a little bit yeah well um I'm super excited to work with you Philippa and just so everyone understands for now um until you feel ready you'll be mostly behind that curtain just helping on the production side of the ruminant and helping generate ideas and helping me put out a better episode.

But we're not going back into the shadows. That's right. But at some point, if you feel comfortable, then then listeners will probably hear you on actually like conducting some of the interviews and just different, different parts around, around the show. So I can't wait for that, Philippa. And I can guarantee all of you listening that you're going to enjoy that whenever it happens. Me too. Great. Okay, Philippa, I think we're done. I think we don't have to do this introduction anymore. I think it's over. Do you have anything else you want to say?

No, I'm relieved. This was fun. Thanks, Jordan. Bye, Philippa. Bye. Hey, my name's Tracy. I own a mixed livestock farm in the South Kiribati region of British Columbia. We currently raise laying hens, meat chickens, Thanksgiving turkeys, and Faro to Finnish heritage pigs. We also have a small herd of Icelandic sheep that we'll be doing lamb and fiber from. I think that's about it. about it. Tracy, thanks so much for joining me on the ruminant podcast. No problem. So Tracy, I thought I'd start by asking you, uh, if you heard the voicemail that I will be sharing at the top of this episode, the one, I believe you and I are on the same kind of social media group where one of our colleagues recently shared this voicemail with kind of a, I would call it a threatening voice, anonymous voicemail towards this colleague of ours who slaughters meat with a mobile abattoir.

Did you catch that message? I did. I did. And what was your, like, I'm curious, you know, I grow plants, but you raise animals and i'm really curious to know what your reaction was to it i was really upset to hear that somebody would take the time to um call somebody and leave such an angry and misconceived voicemail on someone's message. So I'm wondering, Tracy, if you could, you know, tell us a little bit about the animal husbandry you and your partner do on your farm. Maybe start us off there.

Just give us a sense of like, not just what animals that you raise, but what you do with them and how you do it yeah so from the start we didn't grow up wanting to be farmers um we kind of fell into it after we got um 50 laying hens um we just had the desire to produce our own food and maybe share some with some friends and um it kind of spiraled into more of a desire for me to know exactly where the meat that I was consuming was coming from. I then started researching and learning more about that. And I am actually a veterinary technologist. I worked in the vet field for many years. Um, so

I always aspired to just provide my animals the best that I could, um, with treating them ethically. Like I talked to them and I, they're more than just that they're going to end up on a dinner plate to me. And it's anything that happens on the farm, they're my priority. It's like they eat first. If something happens that one of them's ill, I take care of that. It's it becomes right to the priority, top of the priority list. It's all about them for us, whatever makes them happy, and we want to make sure that they're happy. For instance, with my pigs, we have them for seven to eight months, and they have one bad day.

But that seven to eight months is what I feel matters, and we believe that our animals should have natural instincts and be able to exhibit what would be natural to them. Like pigs should be rooting in the soil, chickens eating bugs, worms, and enjoying the sunlight.

So that's kind of always been our priority, what we want to provide for them. And we always feel that in turn, what they provide to us, it we just feel better about that. So it's kind of that give and take, I guess, relationship, you could say that we're giving them a great life, and they're sacrificing themselves for us, I guess, you could say. and they're sacrificing themselves for us, I guess you could say. Tracy, what about, I would love to know your experience with this sort of thing.

I don't know going into this conversation, if you've ever had the kind of threatening, you know, email or voicemail that we've talked about, but like, have you experienced vitriol from people who don't agree with you being involved with raising animals for slaughter? I have. I've had a few different instances that have happened. The biggest instance that I had was last summer, one of the farmer's markets that I attend. It was a new market for me.

It was my first season. We'd come in to take over for another farm that was attend. It was a new market for me. It was my first season. We'd come in to take over for another farm that was leaving. And they shared that I was coming and they shared on social media. It was on Instagram. It was a photo of me and one of my breeding sows who was pregnant at the time when I took the photo. And it was a gorgeous photo. Pig looked like she was smiling. Like, it was just a happy moment. And I then proceeded to be attacked on Instagram

all weekend by animal rights activists using such words that, like, I was going to slit my pig's throat, that I probably, I probably took that photo and slit her throat right afterwards, that I was a murderer, that the only type of protein people should be eating is legumes and like chickpeas, vegetable proteins. And it just kept going on the whole weekend. So it was upsetting because that's not how I view things. And, you know, I take as much care of things as I can, but it was a bit of a shock. And I, the farmer's market, I talked to them about it afterwards. And unfortunately,

like they don't share about me on social media anymore because of that instance. So, you know, new people to the market who eat meat and might like my meat don't really always know I'm there. So that was a difficult part to go through. And that's, I dealt with that a couple of years ago. I was featured in an article for the Vancouver Sun. And some people started commenting. It was about the lack of abattoir services in the province. And a lot of people were commenting about, yeah, me killing the chickens. And probably the photo was taken.

And I then, you know, murdered all my birds or whatever they would say. So those those are the the main instances I've had. Although so it sounds like, though, it's actually I mean, it's impacted you on a couple of levels. Like I want to ask you about just your visceral or emotional reaction in a sec. visceral or emotional reaction in a sec. But really, I just mean, in a practical sense, it sounds like you, at least in some cases, have chosen to kept a lower profile than you otherwise would have, because to have a higher profile publicly invites a pile on. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm, I can be very introverted, I take people's words to heart. So even though I don't agree with what they're saying, what they're saying can impact me because I'm an emotional person. So, and I don't, I try not to let it bother me, but I chose with that farmer's market because it is a higher plant-based market that I chose. I didn't want to be featured anymore just because it was the easy route and I didn't want my business impacted and I didn't want

negative stuff being said about my farm like that. So, well, especially when you, I would imagine you kind of just become on the outside of that conversation. Like suddenly some momentum takes off online and a bunch of people are saying terrible things about you and your business where, where all you can really do is watch it happen. I don't know. I can really relate to how I really believe if that happened to me, I'd have, I don't know, I might go as far as I'd have trouble sleeping, at least while it was going on. I mean, I don't it doesn't seem much different from many other examples of online vitriol that that targets someone.

And and I don't know, I think there'd be a lot of people that would would really struggle with that emotionally as it's happening. Yeah. And I just, to be honest, I find that this is just another form of bullying. Like, and I just feel like there's no place for it in the world. Like, people want to eat meat. They want to eat something ethically sourced. That's fine.

If you want to eat plant-based, that's fine too. Like it's, we're allowed that choice and we're so lucky to live in a country, um, you know, in a first world country that we have those choices, um, to make. When you have experienced the more negative stuff, another additional frustration must be to farm with certain ideals in mind mind whether it's stewardship or animal welfare is is to take something that's already hard to do profitably and and make it harder you know and that just must make it especially frustrating when um you're trying really hard to, you know, to give the animals a good life while they're alive and sentient, and then to, you know, be on the receiving end of, um,

that kind of negativity. Yep. Um, I think an irony about this Tracy that I was thinking about is like, so I, you know, commercially I grow plants. Um, but my, you know, my time, my experience with farming, I've dabbled in animal husbandry. And, um, one observation I made, observation I made, uh, I don't know, a long time ago is, is that like, I think you to do animal husbandry well to, to raise animals, despite the fact that in many cases they're being slaughtered at the end, like you really have to love animals. And it's one reason I don't raise animals. I like animals. All right. But I don't, I'm not an animal person. I don't love animals. And I, I just, my own observation that it's, it's really seems almost like a requirement. Um, if, if you're going to spend your life raising them and hopefully raising them in a way that, that takes their, their needs and their welfare into consideration. Do you agree with that? Do you agree with that? I 100% agree with that.

You have to love a pig for them to push you around. No, I totally think that I couldn't imagine if I didn't love animals that I would want to be that, that sort of passion for their lives and, um, making sure that they're healthy and getting their needs. Um, there has to instances where, you know, the pile on is happening and you're feeling crappy because of it. What do you, how do you try and mitigate those feelings? Or like, you know, how do you try and feel better or just deal with it as it's happening? What's your strategy? your strategy um I reached out to another farm friend of mine and um he's who it had happened to as well and you just try and I try and talk myself out of feeling like letting those words get me down obviously it still does but I found that um talking to people really helped me with it and it's been an adjustment for me to kind of take a step back and just think like this is this person's issue they have a bigger issue something else is going on they're taking it out on Um, so I try and coach myself that way that it's not me. It's, it's them and put the blame, kind of the blame back on them for whatever is going on in their lives and why they feel this way or whatever. Um, so yeah, I just try and do that. And the biggest

part with like when it was happening on Instagram, it's just all of a sudden you get all these messages. Um, and then you're working as quick as you can to try and delete them and block the person. And it's, um, very repetitive when it like happening and then it, and then it slows down. So once once it slowed down I think it bothered me for a couple more days and then yeah it I just now kind of laugh about it well I'm glad you can laugh about it Tracy and I really appreciate that you came on the show to talk about it thanks so much oh you're welcome. All right, everyone. So that's the end of that segment.

I hope you enjoyed those insights into a part of raising animals that can be a bit heavy, a bit negative, a bit of a drag. Thank you to Kevin and Kevin and Tracy for sharing their stories. Tracy, for sharing their stories. And to all of my colleagues raising animals, I'm sorry that you have to put up with stuff like that. If you have to put up with stuff like that, to those of you who are very passionate animal rights activists, I think the dialogue is important. I think there's lots of room for dialogue, but I don't think, I don't think the yelling and the hatred and the vitriol is productive as as Kevin was saying in my conversation with him Kevin from Quebec that is all right cue some transition music so a ruminant episode in 2022 will be satisfied with one segment, but we'll always strive for more than that.

For segment two of this episode, it's another edition of the Farmer Questionnaire. Who are you and where do you farm? I am Rebecca Neen and I farm in unceded stolen Sequetmook territory in Sorrento on Shuswap Lake in the southern interior of British Columbia. The farm is Left Fields, and we also run Crenogue Ales. Crenogue Ales is Canada's first certified organic on-farm microbrewery, so we are making beer. And on the farm, we're growing hops for the brewery specifically. We also sell hop rhizomes. And we have a very mixed farm from vegetable gardens and orchards and small fruit and berries to a small flock of sheep.

We occasionally keep wiener pigs and we have chickens for meat and eggs. At this point, apart from the hops and the sheep, the rest of the farm is really focused on feeding our family and our extended community rather than being a commercial farm. So the commercial part is the hops. Why do you farm? Well, I tried not farming for a while. And it just wasn't enough. Name a farming mentor and something they taught you. Patrick Steiner of Stellar Seeds farmed with us for eight years

and just taught me a ton about growing seed and working with people on a farm. The whole process was a giant learning experience for both of us. But his seed practice actually is now informing a lot of what I'm doing on the farm. I have another mentor as well, Keith Bolter, who has taught me a ton about loving livestock. I knew how to work with sheep, but he really taught me to love our livestock in a different way. What tool or practice do you use regularly that you'd have a hard time giving up? I think I've got three. Paper mulch. So that's rolls of very heavy duty paper that we use around

all of our perennial crops. And also actually a lot of our annuals as well anything that's sort of singly planted it is used for keeping moisture in the soil and as a weed barrier it's fantastic because it breaks down over winter at least it does here where we get a lot of snow and if not you can compost it and it allows a lot of air through. So the soil underneath actually is in really, really good condition. It is so much better than any of the plastic mulches. The Korean Homi Digger, the short-handled version. I just use it for everything. And swearing.

What's one of your favorite breeds or cultivars? everything and swearing. What's one of your favorite breeds or cultivars? For breeds, I would say California variegated mutant sheep, not just because they have mutant in their name, but because they're absolutely beautiful and good tempered, nice size, beautiful fleece and nice lambs. And in cultivars, I'm going to go with Puntaloo's tomato, which is a Basque variety that Brian and I were given

on a trip to Spain many years ago when we got a chance to visit with some of the Basque original people who've been fighting to maintain their sovereignty for many, many years. And this is one of their heritage varieties. It's a huge, heart-shaped, very meaty, but very smooth-fleshed tomato. Main crop, massive vine.

What's the best decision you ever made on your farm? Being certified organic. How do you think your farm will look differently in 10 years? Well, a beaver just moved into our farm. So I don't really know, but my guess is it's going to be wetter. I think our riparian area will enlarge itself. How do you maintain balance in your life? Yoga.

What's one skill set or knowledge set that you lack in your farming that you wish you had or that has vexed or befuddled you? Oh, welding. I never learned to weld because in high school, I walked into the class on welding with a bunch of 13-year-old guys with big hair, because that was what was in then, running around with oxyacetylene torches and no safety equipment, and I just turned around and left. And I never learned to weld, and I wish to hell I had. What's your most challenging pest, weed, or predator and how do you manage it? Ugh, thistles and burdock. See the aforementioned swearing. I'd have to say in some cases not very

well and in other cases reasonably well. Burdock, we mostly spike the plants and try to get the root out below three inches below the ground, below the soil surface, because as a tap-rooted weed, that's the best way to get rid of them. But the amount of seed that's in the soil is horrendous. And thistles are just a huge problem anywhere that we've cultivated or anywhere that where the pastures have been overgrazed. So mowing really seems to be the only thing that we can do on those. But it's a constant struggle. We don't have a good answer. Do you ever doubt your decision to be a farmer or your specific focus as a farmer?

Well, I don't know if I doubt the decision to be a farmer, but I can't, I mean, I can't at this point really imagine doing anything else. But I would like to have more time in my life to work with the fiber that our animals create. I would like to have more time for art. And I find that in the growing season, I just don't have the capacity. And I guess it's not the doubting of the decision to be a farmer. It's just trying to understand how to age as a farmer and not, you know, become so damaged I can't actually function at anything anymore. So it's a process, I guess.

What's your worst habit on the farm? Oh, not putting everything away at the end of the day. Leaving crap out. Who is someone you'd be most interested to interview about their life and or work? Keith Bolter. He is an organic farmer who is in our area. He's doing beef and grain and has been an organic farmer for his entire life, coming out of large-scale grain production on the prairies where he actually grew up farming with horses.

I think he has a fascinating history. His approach to land and to farming is an approach that's really based in love and respect and really living with the land. And I just think he's amazing. And I think he's had a fascinating life. I'd love to actually have a proper interview with him. Today I learned I don't need you all right that's it for this episode everyone I hope you enjoyed it and if all goes well

I'll be talking to you again in two weeks I'll keep the outro short today so that you can not be listening to me and be mostly listening to my wife Vanessa singing the ruminant outro song talk to you soon we're no closer we never have laundry we'll own nothing to this world of thieves live life like it was meant to be I don't fret honey I've got a plan to make our final escape All we'll need is each other a hundred dollars

And maybe a roll of duct tape And we'll run right outside of the city's reaches We'll live off chestnuts, spring water and peaches We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves And live life like it was meant to be Because why would we live in a place that don't want us? A place that is trying to bleed us dry We could be happy with life in the country

With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands. I've been doing a lot of thinking, some real soul searching, and here's my final resolve. I don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong so we'll run right out into the wilds and braces we'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees and live life like it was meant to be live life like it was meant to be I'm sorry.