Relish

Editor's Note: This is the third of three articles on today's farm and today's farmer. Parts one and two were published in Relish here and here.

As we wrote before, our initial conversation with Justin Leszcz and Sam Ashlock from YellowTree Farm branched out into multiple directions with opportunities for field research. While we embraced Blood & Sand and dumpster diving, we were wary of visiting the monthly animal swap meet in Waterloo, IL.

Why? Because we prefer animals to most people, and hearing how animals are mistreated pushes us a little bit further toward misanthropy. When Leszcz described once seeing a deer for sale at the swap, we naively wondered why, imagining that they make good pets. Leszcz explained, matter-of-factly, that people keep them in cages to harvest their urine for hunters. Our visceral response was to decline the trip, but intellectually we decided that refusing to see what’s out there is akin to people saying they don’t want to know where their meat comes from. So, we set a date.

The morning began early—a full moon still high in the sky—with an ominous harbinger: we hit a rabbit crossing Kingshighway on the way to meet Leszcz. A short 45 minutes later, we arrived at the fairgrounds as the sun was rising. Leszcz, who’s somewhat of a regular, remarked that the parking lot seemed particularly full. Since animals are expensive to feed over the winter, when a person can no longer rely on crops, farmers try to unload them during the fall, he explained.

Searching for a goat, Leszcz guided us through the crowds, stopping to examine various tools and canaries that caught his eye. One of the first farmers we saw had three striking turkeys, caged, with feathers so glossy they looked varnished. While it’s hard for many to see any animal “in wire,” there are few alternatives to showcasing one’s livestock and poultry at such an event; accepting the cages, then, seems half the battle toward the dispassion necessary for browsing the animals.

We had already been prepped on how to differentiate between “good” and “bad” farmers (by animal-to-cage ratios and smell, mostly), and as the man talked about how friendly his turkeys were, we could glean from both the way he affectionately spoke of them and the clean, relatively spacious conditions (at left) they were kept in that he was one of the “good” ones.

Moving from stand to stand, we saw mostly fowl—chickens, geese, ducks, quail, and pigeons—many rabbits, and the occasional goat, with the smaller kids kept in crates and the adults secured in pens or tied to trailers. A woman walked past, carrying ducks, upright, one under each armpit, as if she were holding trophies. Clucking chickens, honking geese, and laughing children added to the general cacophony of negotiating deals. An acrid scent (think vinegar, to the 100^th power) wafting through the chilly, early-autumn breeze signaled a male goat’s nearby presence, according to Leszcz, who knows the smell all too well.

As our guide stopped to chat up a farmer regarding her Brobdingnagian sweet potatoes, we found ourselves in front of a man with 5-week-old piglets. He picked one up to show some children, who had gathered around the pen, and cradled it to his chest. Idylls reminiscent of Charlotte’s Web quickly evaporated, though, when he said he wouldn’t feed the piglets enough to keep them smaller than their parents. Lucky for us—and the pigs—Leszcz didn’t see them, or otherwise he may have bought them for slaughter. We joke (sort of) but are guilty, like many, of believing that it’s somehow sadder when a “cute” animal dies. In truth, of course, we acknowledge that all animals deserve to live and die well, a belief that brought us to YellowTree Farm in the first place, looking for answers to complex questions about humane slaughter.

Leszcz, who’s generally affable, has no trouble calling out people on how they’re treating animals at the meet. Once, for example, he saw a man putting a goat in his car trunk and tried to intervene by educating him on proper transportation methods. The man responded along the lines of “I’m killing it anyway when I get home so why bother.” It’s easy to shake one’s head at such behavior, perhaps attributing the man’s actions to “cultural” differences, but as a whole, if we criticize that man, we must turn the same critical eye towards ourselves, given how many factory farms and slaughterhouses operate. The difference is in transparency and sheer numbers.

We saw plenty of “bad” farmers as well. Ducks crammed into a white, plastic crate left us feeling sick and helpless, and we weren’t at all prepared for the puppies. A litter of Great Pyrenees pups offered a model of how to treat animals: kept in a large pen on the ground, they had straw underfoot and a large bowl of kibble from which several, sprawled out like frogs, were calmly eating. Farther along, however, sat a small cage balanced atop another cage of guinea fowl, wherein two shaking terrier pups looked miserable, as they tried to gain traction on the wire. At this point, we unwisely forgot Leszcz’s warning to shoot pictures only from afar, and ultimately had to leave because he sensed that people were growing angry with our intrusiveness.

The incongruous sight of two hot air balloons floating low in the gleaming morning sky helped buoy our spirits a bit as we returned home. Leszcz’s sole purchase that morning was some onion bulbs. Since he planned on slaughtering a goat later in the day if he had found the right one, we inwardly cheered that they were all too big for his purposes (left). Then again, maybe a quick and humane slaughter would have been the best fate for one of those goats. We had much to contemplate, and a dead rabbit—at our own hands—was enough killing for one day.