The Turkeys are Here!

This is day 5 and the turkeys are still officially cute. People here on the farm were saying that the turkeys would turn ugly after the third day, but I have been checking daily, and they are still not ugly.

About 100 tiny turkey poults were donated to the Farm by a large turkey factory. They arrived when they were one day old - cute, fuzzy little peepers. They are kept in a special coop with temperature controlled lighting to keep them warm as they are extremely fragile. These turkeys have been commercially bred to be exactly the same, and as a result they are so genetically similar that they are very susceptible to all kinds of illnesses. I am also told that they are unbelievably dumb - bred not even to be able to reproduce on their own! So, although they are not a heritage heirloom variety of naturally bred turkey, they will be raised humanely: without antibiotics or hormones and allowed to roam freely.

Back when I was a single gal living in the city, one of my roommates came home with another bizarre tale of daily life in New York City. She had seen a group of people protesting inhumane treatment of poultry outside of a KFC in Greenwich Village. She was baffled at the sight and wondered how people could have such misplaced passion. Who cares about chickens when there is terrible suffering of human beings all over the world!

Recently during our morning devotional time we were asked to step outside and find something to look at and practice some meditation. I had arrived to the devotion time late and was more focused on eating toast than I was at trying to meditate. Thankfully, Samson from Ghana was in a contemplative frame of mind and said something that really resonated with me. He was looking out over the farm and the creation story from the Bible came to his mind. He noted that the Earth and all of creation was made before man and that nature had an established working order to it apart from man. In the end, man was created to fit into that natural order. He went on to observe that because of the corrupt human heart, man has tried to make creation work according to his own order.

So, maybe cruelty towards poultry is not that big of a deal compared to all the insanity that is going on in the world, but at the heart of the industrial food model is the abuse of the natural order for profit. Birds are living creatures and were never meant to be pumped full of hormones and drugs, bred to have unnaturally gargantuan breasts, and left packed in cages, unable to walk around. As man continues to use nature for the accumulation of wealth instead of respecting the limitations of the natural order, we, and future generations reap the effects of the depletion of our natural resources, global warming, disease and destruction. I'm reminded of the scene in "An Inconvenient Truth" where Al Gore shows a picture of a scale with the Earth on one side and bars of gold on the other.... Hmm.... Which one should we choose?

Here is a Wendell Berry quote from a book I am reading:

"I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. The food he grows will be fresher, more nutritious, less contaminated by poisons and preservatives and dyes than what he can buy at the store. He is reducing the trash problem; a garden is not a disposable container, and it will digest and reuse its own wastes. If he enjoys working in his garden, then he is less dependent on an automobile or a merchant for his pleasure. He is involving himself directly in the work of feeding people."