Sentient Media visit Sweet Farm: a farm sanctuary in California to find out how and why they help animals rescued from factory farms and other situations.
Journalist Jessica Scott-Reid reports for Sentient Media:
Nate Salpeter, co-founder of Sweet Farm in the San Francisco Bay Area describes his farm sanctuary’s 125 rescued animals—including pigs, cows, chickens, and one lama—as “ambassadors for their species.”
He says that while the animals are not there to produce manure for the farm, “they just do,” and if it wasn’t used, it would have to be sent elsewhere, “which would be careless,” he says. Shipping manure off the farm would increase the operation’s carbon footprint. Instead, the manure is used to help maintain pastures and to grow flowers and important cover crops.
The animals at Sweet Farm do not actively graze the land where foods are grown, but Salpeter says one day they may swap where the animals are kept, with where food is grown to help replenish the soil, but only if necessary. Or, he says, “let’s say there’s a lot of amazing leftover volunteer root vegetables that the pigs can go out and root around, eat them, help clear the field, so that way we can go in with a clean slate.”
Salpeter says that the risk of disease spread within a sanctuary farm system is reduced for a variety of reasons, but “first and foremost is the focus on being good stewards to both the animals and the land.”
Adequate space on pastures and in barns, he says, “combined with individualized care, as opposed to blanket treatments with powerful antibiotics and antivirals, together reduce transmission vectors and resistance building opportunities.”
Read more about Sweet Farm here: https://sentientmedia.org/video-how-sweet-farm-helps-animals-rescued-from-factory-farms/
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I spent 10 years in North Carolina watching the hog industry destroy people's lives in it's Coastal Plain communities, from low paying production work to spraying manure on fields that blew back on homes in the area and contaminated drinking water. We gained very little traction in the state legislature because many members have close ties to the hog industry. 🤯 People need to address this issue because lawmakers won't.