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As I mentioned in another thread, I live on a farm. (I hack Ruby and C++ as a day job, the farm is just a hobby). One major reason for doing so is animal welf

• Synaesthesia 10y ago
  I don't see why, for example, chickens couldn't be humanely farmed for not much more expense. If you let them wander about freely in a field, they will voluntarily go back to the coop at night. The current battery system, besides being awful for the animals, is very unhygienic with the chickens cramped together, pooping on each other. Consequently the chickens are given large amounts of antibiotic which encourages superbugs to develop. It's not good for public health, surely!
  • tjic 10y ago
    I'm not defending factory farming of chickens (I actually just adjusted our fencing to double the size of the chicken run), but the answer is: cost. Chickens in modern factory farms are stacked deep. Each has < 1 ft^2, and their cages are stacked vertically perhaps 10 deep, so they get around 0.1 ft^2 of farm land each. We have around 15 chickens in our flock. They share a 144 ft^2 coop and have a little chicken door that gives out onto a 400 ft^2 outdoor run. That's ~550 ft^2 for 15 chickens, or 45 ft^2 per chicken. That's 450 times as much space as a factory farmed chicken gets. That costs money.
    • Synaesthesia 10y ago
      I understand that the space is the big thing, but that is the only additional cost. You may actually save on antibiotics and deaths to illnesses. I think you could maybe have your chickens slightly more dense than the example you mention. For example here in South Africa we have plenty of space, and I see vast warehouses go up.
      • illumin8 10y ago
        Currently, the farmers are not paying for any of the externalities(1) of their operation, including harm to the environment from waste runoff, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and the overall health consequences of eating factory-farmed meat, which are still little understood. This needs to change in order to make humane farming methods more viable, however, it is in direct conflict with the USDA's goals of reducing the price of food for consumers. It's a tough problem to solve, but I've gotten to the point where I don't even know what meat to buy any more. So-called "grass fed beef" can be any beef, since all cows eat grass during at least part of their lives, even factory-farmed cows, and the rules are so lax that there is zero enforcement. This has to change. 1. a side effect or consequence of an industrial or commercial activity that affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost of the goods or services involved, such as the pollination of surrounding crops by bees kept for honey.
      • tjic 10y ago
        Chickens need to be protected from predators, need to be sheltered from the sun, need to be protected from the cold, need to be fed in a way that minimizes waste, need to be watered in the same way, etc. Also, don't underestimate the cost of land. Even if it's just $5,000 per acre, if scheme one packs chickens in at factory farming levels, and scheme two packs them in the way I do (remember: 450 times less densely), then we need an additional 449 acres of land. That's $2,245,000 in land costs. Plus, how do you distribute food and water over those 450 acres? Factory farming may be cruel, but it's not dumb. Farmers are smart micro-optimizers.
      • randomdata 10y ago
        I'm just a grain farmer, but in the highly competitive agriculture world, fortunes are made and lost on seemingly small efficiencies. If the savings on antibiotics and deaths were actually greater than the alternative costs, someone would quickly exploit the gains, and everyone else would eventually be forced into that model to compete. Which is the same reason why you see barns going up everywhere instead.
• deleted 10y ago
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• kbenson 10y ago
  As someone who raises animals for food, how would or wouldn't your behavior change if sufficiently cheap and adequately tasty cultured (i.e. var-grown) meat were available? I ask as someone who eats meat quite regularly, but would prefer not to contribute to the raising of animals for slaughter if I don't have to. I understand that the death of one animal to feed another is part of the natural way our ecosystem functions, but factory farming makes me extremely uneasy. Animals raised in conditions resulting in relatively the same level of comfort or discomfort they might experience in the wild until they are slaughtered is one thing, but being born into an existence that appears to consist of nothing but confusion, fear and pain until death is not something I wish on anything that can feel those.
  • tjic 10y ago
    If my choices were factory farming or vat grown food, I'd choose vat grown in an instant, to minimize suffering. If my choices are vat ground vs home ground...that's complicated. There's a lot to be said for small scale farming. It brings animals into the world and lets them enjoy life, which I see as actively good. We don't have to go remotely near the Repugnant Conclusion Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox and can just note that the pigs seem to enjoy being alive. I also think that it's in man's nature to interact with the natural environment. This is really a book-sized topic, not a news.yc comment one !
    • kbenson 10y ago
      Sure, I understand it's a complex topic, I just figured I would source some info from someone involved in farming at your level. :) I'm for farm raised animals, I think that results in a fairly good life for the animals. I understand there's not a lot of incentive for people to raise certain animals without some sort of pay-off at that end, and that's usually eating them. That makes it somewhat complex.
    • hx87 10y ago
      If vat grown meat contains fat as well as muscle, I'd take in a heartbeat too, but if it's just muscle...I would have to turn it down. Lean meat is tasteless meat, IMHO.
• alva 10y ago
  Fantastic. I would love to do what you are doing. A long term goal of mine is to have a few acres in the UK, raising animals for meat in my spare time. 1. So I know I can give the animals an peaceful and happy life 2. The quality of well raised meat is many orders of magnitude tastier than the supermarket stuff imo. Could you point me towards any resources that you found helpful when you were starting out? One of my concerns is long term storage of the meat. 3 pigs yield a massive amount of meat, even for a large family. Raising some pigs for beautiful meat, it would seem like a shame to lose some of the quality by freezing 90% of it.
  • tjic 10y ago
    No time to answer this now. Send me an email and I'll respond in detail. Email addr is in my original comment above.
• pillowkusis 10y ago
  you seem concerned with animal welfare, or at least the minimization of suffering; how do you justify willfully killing animals (which undoubtedly creates suffering)?
  • sambobeckingham 10y ago
    Humane killing, I imagine? Stun gun or that bolt hammer thing right to the brain, over in a flash as far as the animal is concerned. Far more pleasant than the natural way - 6 of us chasing it round the prairie chucking spears.
    • Falling3 10y ago
      Just because it's better than "the natural way" doesn't make it humane. How is the idea of humanely killing someone unnecessarily who wants to live not an oxymoron?
  • Guvante 10y ago
    There are ways to kill that minimize suffering. To counter your point, he only raised the animals to eat them, if he could not kill them they would never have existed. Is that superior?
  • douche 10y ago
    If you lead a pig to a trough and feed it something tasty, then bonk it on the head from behind with a sledge hammer, they're dead before they even know it. I hope I get to go out that easy.
    • hx87 10y ago
      Yep, it seems perverse that we force humans to die in ways (e.g. chemotherapy on late-stage cancers, irreversible brain damage) that we would be horrified by if we inflicted them on animals.
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• ldehaan 10y ago
  Super cool! My family and I are also looking to buy a small farm and basically do the same thing, use it to provide good healthy food for our kids and hopefully at some point setup a program for other food conscious programmers and do a hackathon every couple months to improve on farming equipment. Did you get a govt loan for your farm? If so did they require a certain amount of food to be sold or grown?
  • tjic 10y ago
    No, I bootstrapped into a farm by being lucky enough to have bought a small house in Arlington, MA just before it hugely gentrified. I sold a 1,500 square foot house on 0.1 acres of land and traded laterally into a 5,000 square foot house on 56 acres of land. I've worked in tech for 25 years and never hit a good IPO; I guess this is my one big karma win!
  • jasonparallel 10y ago
    I'm not sure if they are still active, but this group was hacking together some cool stuff for the farm: opensourceecology.org
    • jasonparallel 10y ago
      Also check out farmhack.org/tools
• HSO 10y ago
  You've just put a new idea about "the good life" into my head… This sounds positively delightful, to combine tech with rural living. I just might give that a try someday! As someone who has struggled with his diet for ethical reasons for a long time, I have a question though. You say > at the end of the season, when it's time to turn living creatures into meat, doing it yourself ensures that it's done well, and with minimal stress and pain. How does this work? Do you not get cognitive dissonance from killing "your children"? In the abstract, I completely agree with you that 1) eating meat can be done in a good, respectful way and 2) that perhaps the best, most honest way is to do it your way. But I would imagine that once I actually raise a chicken, I could probably not bring myself to kill it with my own hands (let alone eat it). Hell, I'm probably soft enough that even spending just enough time with a chicken to get a sense of its personality would make this impossible for me. Well, maybe if it's a particularly nasty personality, I could kill it but then how could I put such a revolting character in my body? Either way, it seems undoable to me… So how does it actually work, in practice?
  • tjic 10y ago
    Glad you're intrigued! Feel free to reach my by email with any questions! > Do you not get cognitive dissonance from killing "your children"? Well, first, they're not my children. I don't mean that flippantly, and it's a great question to ask, it's just that my answer is: my wife is my wife, my dogs are my dogs (and, yes, family), pigs are livestock...and chickens are sort of walking squawking vegetables. :) I shouldn't joke about chickens tho. The first time I had to dispatch one it put a deep pall over the rest of the day. Taking a life, even of something with a brain the size of a peanut, is a big deal. The first year on the farm my wife gave all of our goats names, played with them, took them on walks, etc. I cautioned her against it...but I also used their names. Slaughter was ... not fun. Still, I did it. A .22 to the brain, and they dropped like sacks of cement. My wife ended up not wanting to eat goat, so I ate a fair bit of goat after that. ...and she learned never to name or play with the livestock. When we started raising pigs, we had learned from our lesson. It also helped that several times pigs escaped from our farm and had to be chased around the block and herded back to the farm, which is a huge amount of work. That put the kibosh on overly warm feelings. Still, pig slaughter again hit me hard. Sure, I gave the pigs freshly picked apples to eat, and even their last minutes of life were better than the best day of a factory farmed pig's life, but killing is killing. The way you slaughter a pig is [ squeamish people, please stop reading ] shoot them in the forehead. This gives them a concussion and drops them, but does not kill them. You then roll the pig on its side or back and stick a 12+" knife into its chest until it scrapes the spine, then you pivot the knife to slice the aorta and other arteries. The pig is still technically alive at this point, although it is insensate. Because of my ethics re animals, if I'm going to take a life, I want to use every last bit of the animal. This meant capturing the gallons of blood in a five gallon bucket. This is the most visceral thing ( no pun intended ) that I have ever done. I don't want to oversell it and say that it's "spiritual", but there is absolutely no escaping the reality of exactly that you're doing and what's going on. The act of sliding a 12" knife deep into a living, breathing thing is irrevocable, undeniable, and challenging. Eventually even the neurological echoes stop and the animal is still. At that point the animal is 100% gone, and you can tell. It still *looks Photo (again, not for the sqeamish): https://goo.gl/photos/No2xyddwDMGfLn6f6 https://goo.gl/photos/No2xyddwDMGfLn6f6 At this point you have to slice slots in the pigs rear angles, hook a gambrel through, and then lift it (tail up, head down). You then skin in, disembowel it, and skin it. I had a dissociative event the first time I did this. I was elbows deep in a creature that was about 4 minutes from having been completely alive, and it was still 98.6 degrees (or whatever pigs runs at), and it was in that uncanny valley between "alive" and "foot". I was quite lucid, and eloquent, as I spoke to people around me, but I felt like I was doing something that was in an entirely different realm. I realize that lots of people here probably hunt and killed deer when they were 10, or whatever, but this was the first large animal (larger than a goat) that I had ever killed. Hunters often say things like "I respect the animal and feel a deep kinship with it and blah blah blah" and that's easy to hear and not really appreciate, but killing and processing a large animal really is a transformational event, and one that I'm glad I've had. There is no denying exactly what you're doing, and - to me, at least - this created or strengthened my commitment to (a) raise animals as ethically as I possibly can, (b) use every bit of them without waste. I think that killing and eating animals is fundamental to who we are (and I don't mean "we've evolved incisors"; I mean "the rituals and process are encoded in our minds". The hand shapes the tool and the tool shapes the hand). If anything, this belief that humans have a deep connection with raising animals makes my revulsion against factory farming even stronger. Just as dog fighting isn't merely horrific in its own right, but extra horrific because it is a perversion of something good, factory farming takes something good and inherently human and replaces it with something cruel and inhumane. I see that as a perversion. I hope this answered your question; I seem to have rambled a fair bit.
• angryredblock 10y ago
  Do you generally work 'normal' (9-5) hours? Do you have help on the farm or are you the primary caretaker? I'd not have thought of farming as low-time-commitment enough to be a hobby.
  • tjic 10y ago
    We have a 1,000 ft^2 greenhouse, a 3,000 ft^2 corn field, and a 3,000 ft^2 pumpkin patch. We do not have 10 or 50 or 5000 acres of crops. Basically, large gardens, not real farming. That said, we ALSO delegate some chores to farm hands. I installed fencing the first year, then realized how stupid this was given comparative advantage. Now I code, code, code, and then get some extra work and code some more, and let farm hands do other work.
• sctbpwn 10y ago
  Zuck?
• macandcheese 10y ago
  Curious what your thoughts on Joel Salatin + Polyface farms are? I've read a small handful of his books and found them enlightening - if a bit preachy. From the perspective of never really farming for profit and only volunteering / taking urban farm courses in college, his writing seems prophetical to me. Any thoughts?
  • tjic 10y ago
    I've read one or two of his books. I'm tentatively a fan. I need to dig in deeper.
• jessaustin 10y ago
  That second photo has me wondering... do you use the table saw for butchering? I only ever use hand tools (with the exception of the electric grinder), but I was under the impression that big meat saws are band saws rather than table saws... it seems it would make a huge mess!
  • tjic 10y ago
    Oh, no! Im just doing it NEAR the tablesaw. I do it all by hand with knives.
• tluyben2 10y ago
  We started out making our own farm for animals (pigs + chickens) but we figured we actually liked the little buggers (what you describe as watching them grow etc, for me, especially with pigs, makes them the same level as dogs and the hypocritical west is as the hypocritical west does which I couldn't really stomach) and went vegetarian anyway. Don't miss meat at all (don't actually like it anymore), but that's not the point; the life is good if you like that kind (nature, fresh air, quiet usually if you have a small farm) of thing with or without eating meat. We have fresh eggs from our chickens and fresh fruit and veg without pesticides and water from our own well. We started growing hops (& more apples) for the brewery and it is really nice. It isn't for everyone but if you like it then there is no reason not to if you are a programmer (which I am). You don't have to go full in with a complete farm, just growing / rearing your food partly is a nice feeling. It also is, at least here in the EU, much cheaper if you don't go full in (and you wouldn't have to if you don't have to make money); everyone wants to live in cities (I feel left out as I hate them :), so the country is empty and land is cheap. As are houses (depending on the location). In a lot of countries you would not even need a house per se; just a container or caravan would suffice (if only I had known this when I was young).
  • tjic 10y ago
    Sounds great! We also grow hops and apples.