An op-ed piece by Philip Ackermen-Leist, a professor at Green Mountain College.
Ackerman-Leist: Bill and Lou are a parable for saving our broken food system
by Opinion | October 30, 2012 | VTDigger
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| Greg Martin learned to raise his own meat by taking the sustainable farming class at Green Mountain College. |
Our society has become increasingly divorced from agriculture, and our assumptions about food and farming are too often based more on emotion or business interests than those of real, on-farm experiences and community decision-making about the food we raise and eat.
The scenario unfolding at Green Mountain College in Vermont is a perfect example of how the narrow, self interests of a few are being used to trump the difficult decisions made by a community connected to, and engaged with, its food and farm system.
By now, you may well have heard the story of Bill and Lou, the team of oxen at Green Mountain College who, after much open discussion within our campus community, will soon be sent to slaughter.
What may not be so evident in the debate now swirling around the periphery of our small Vermont campus is that this decision is another step in our college’s longstanding effort to foster a community-based food system.
However, given the pressures exerted from outside interest groups that know neither the facts nor the animals nearly as well as our students do, it is beginning, to feel more like an issue of food sovereignty.
Green Mountain College is a thoughtful and diverse community charting its own course in an industrialized food system that typically relegates choosing to a grocery store grab-bag experience.
Bill and Lou came to the college a decade ago as our first team of oxen. They were male calves on a local dairy, facing the same fate that most male calves on dairies face these days — an early death. Farm managers and students trained Bill and Lou and have used them for a variety of farm tasks. As Bill and Lou have gotten older, we have been preparing for a transition to a new team, a decision expedited this past summer when Lou injured his leg after stepping in a woodchuck hole. However, we decided not to finalize the necessary decision during the summer, when most of our student body was absent. Rather, we waited until the students returned to help us reflect upon the fate of our livestock, as has been our tradition for more than a decade when we first began rebuilding our college farm and food system.
In 2000, my Sustainable Farming Systems class proposed rebuilding the farm that the college had abandoned 50 years prior. To my surprise, the vegetarians in the class insisted that livestock be incorporated into the farm. They wanted a working farm, not a petting zoo or an animal sanctuary.
These vegetarians wisely observed that the college had a responsibility to provide students with the opportunity to take ownership of their decisions to eat meat and to come face to face with those realities. Furthermore, they believed that contrasting livestock farming practices and the “mystery meat” streaming through the dining hall freight doors might help expose the ills and injustices of industrialized livestock farming.
Bill and Lou have names, faces, and a connection to our community, and others are now telling us how to make decisions for our community and foodshed. Isn’t this the kind of food system we’re trying to avoid — allowing for those with the biggest voice, the most money, or partial facts to make decisions for entire communities to which they have no connection?
Since that time, faculty, students, and administrators from all disciplines and dietary perspectives have gathered to make decisions about the fate of livestock on the college farm: cattle, swine, poultry and sheep. Sometimes, the dialogue has been heated, but on most occasions, the discussions have been tempered and frank, with give and take from all sides.
Such discourse is in sharp contrast with the voluminous, and misplaced, reaction that we have received from outside our community regarding the fate of Bill and Lou. Clearly, this Internet buzz being generated by outsiders is designed to be loud enough to drown out our own community’s difficult decision. That leads to the greatest contradiction: Bill and Lou have names, faces, and a connection to our community, and others are now telling us how to make decisions for our community and foodshed. Isn’t this the kind of food system we’re trying to avoid — allowing for those with the biggest voice, the most money, or partial facts to make decisions for entire communities to which they have no connection?
For anyone who cares about farm animals, caution is warranted in precluding the slaughter and consumption of livestock due to the depth and longevity of the human-animal relationship. If the extensiveness of that relationship is the rationale for not slaughtering an animal, then the logical conclusion is that relationships with any animals used for food should not be fostered. Run with that argument far enough, and you end up smack-dab in the middle of a “concentrated animal feeding operation,” otherwise known as a CAFO.
As a grass-based livestock farmer myself, with 50 head of rare breed cattle, I covet a deep relationship with my animals, and I think that the abolition of livestock farming is unlikely to happen. However, the transformation of livestock farming has to happen, and it will not happen through polarizing polemic. It might happen when communities take ownership of their food systems and responsibility for their own decisions. What better place for it to occur now than at a community-minded liberal arts college, where the pragmatism of the farmer meets the kaleidoscopic prisms of the liberal arts?
If we have any hope of transitioning away from industrialized factory farming and reinvigorating democracy in our food system, it depends more upon rich community dialogue than single-minded activism.
Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Philip Ackermen-Leist, a professor at Green Mountain College and author of the forthcoming book, “Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to Create Local, Sustainable, and Secure Food Systems” (Chelsea Green).
I keep getting e-mails from Green Mountain College students, alumni, and professors asking why I keep calling their farm a cruel place. Well, here is one reason:
Maxx Hockenberry , Greg Martin
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| Maxx Hockenberry, a freshman at Green Mountain College |
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Defending the GMC Decision »« Mobile Emotional LobotomizersSlaughter 101: Green Mountain College» October 27th, 2012 17 CommentsI keep getting e-mails from Green Mountain College students, alumni, and professors asking why I keep calling their farm a cruel place. Well, here is one reason:
Those words were good to hear, as I’m down on public speaking (for me–not very good at it) and have been feeling guilty about making myself so scarce at veg fests and the like. Thank you!
j
utterly indifferent to the animal’s experience. Instead of an openly cruel pigeon hunt, this behavior is supported and rewarded under the guise of education.
Last night, I attended
a lecture at Hunter College on “Chickens.” The two speakers, Joseph Barber, Ph.D. and
Mark Hauber Ph.D., editor and contributing author of “The Chicken: A Natural History” spoke about the complex mental and emotional lives of chickens. People were interested in who these animals are.
Again, I ask why students and staff at Green Mountain College are not required to learn about the inner lives of the animals they are raising and slaughtering? Why is all this research being ignored?
What exactly is being taught there?
and New Yorkers are not
The latter has reached a new low, so that even an NRA-supportive cattle ranching magazine is disgusted by the unsportsmanlike conduct: http://www.cattlenetwork.com/cattle-news/Commentary-Fuel-for-the-fire-174594051.html?ref=051
It’s too bad; I’ll bet they have some smart teachers and kids there, but GMC risks being remembered as uncaring “locavore Nazis.” It would seem like someone from GMC would step in and put a stop to it just on publicity grounds.
jm
James
I have interacted with some via Facebook. Most comments show little respect for bill and Lou. The general gist was these animals are for them to use, and when they can’t be used anymore they will be killed to make hamburger.
Sustainability was never intended to be a “reason” to kill a living creature. Period. They have created their own agenda, and are falsely classifying it under sustainability.
They have gone after VINE as a reason for all this up roar. How naive /stupid are they if the head line, “college turns mascots into hamburger and will feed to students” will not cause a stir?
These animals have served the school for 10 years. They can still be embassidors for sustainability in retirement. What country do we live in where we reward hard work with death. It sure is not the American thing to do. These oxen have held a job longer than any of the students, and maybe teachers.
Let’s put an end to these types of ethics! Tell politicians that you don’t want your tax dollars to go to a gmc.
What are they teaching there? Why hasn’t Vermont’s animal cruelty organization been investigating there? The pictures (and proof) are plastered all over facebook.
I agree with Marie, it’s time to make a financial impact.
Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns.
http://www.upc-online.org