High-welfare Pigs in the Welsh mountains

Today I visited a high-welfare pig farm and met Kyle the farmer.  He is based a bit around the mountain from where we are staying.

Kyle's pigs

 I had a tour and saw it was a really nice farm. The animals had lots of space to run, dig, and find roots, there were trees dropping supposedly tasty acorns for the pigs, they do not get ill often so don't require extensive use of strong antibiotics (this might not seem that special but in the pig scene it is), and they have sex lives (again this is a bit of a rarity amongst pigs these days).

How others get lots of pigs in a
small area. Ironically surrounded by
a huge area of their natural habitat

I was told how an industrious farmer could have craftily crammed hundreds of pigs into an area that size. Sure they're sacrificing some of the comforts the pigs enjoy but they certainly would make a lot more money. But who does this matter to? Well, Kyle seems to want his pigs to be happy with their lives and I also would wish for this if I had my own farm. A handy side effect, says Kyle, is it means the pork tastes better, which helps because it could have been that it made no difference what-so-ever and that would have been a harder sell.

The Mission:

The aim is that we create the one really good peer-reviewed answer that gets a point of view across. I wish to focus on the quality of environment pigs get first:

the document as is done so far:

• (In google drive rather than on Follow This Food slightly more editing options at the moment) A peer-reviewed, communal, viewpoint on what makes better and worse environments to satisfy pigs drive to root and play.   

The document linked above aims to describe what would be better and worse environments for pigs. It should say; what kind of environment is really bad, what is better, what is great, and what fantastical conditions might some future farmers aim for?

Kyle's little piglets seemed to dare each other to get close

As well as that topic lots of other really great ones came up to, like looking at antibiotic use, or the health of pig fats (Fats topic) in different animals, etc, which are also waiting to be done.

(Below: A vision of how online communities can earn authority on topics with peer-reviewed, openly discussed,  answers, rather than groups discussing things in private and presenting their views with a distant but  authoritative voice)

Kyle's farm looks to me like it would score highly on this topic discussed above and I'd like him, and others, to be able to measure their farm against this answer too.

We dropped back into Bristol.  Whilst there we visited the city farm. We were planning on posting up a poster to get names in support of a viewpoint on whether pigs mind standing on concrete or not.

I wanted to check whether the answers were alright so I sought the guy in charge of the pigs and talked with him about the poster. He thought the question was a bit too simplistic.

He pointed out that pigs will not have to stand only on concrete in the UK (In a fairly old booklet from 2003 but it won't have changed much) it says 'To enable proper investigation and manipulation activities, all pigs must have permanent access to a sufficient quantity of material such as straw, hay, wood, sawdust, mushroom compost, peat or a mixture of such...'.

Also, he warned that images are capable of making things look worse than they are.  He pointed out in the picture on the right that there was some space for pigs to get off of the concrete and onto the hay.

He said that he would not want to keep pigs without really good rooting space, however.

 So I came back with a different question with which to make a collective viewpoint.  'How would you grade, or categorise, environments on how well they satisfy pig’s behavioural and psychological needs to root and play?', which he agreed was more like it.  With this question, we can show people a way of looking at pig floor that is better and worse for them.  I would like to get comments to improve it on google docs: Here.

The floor they provide at the City Farm will also stand out as being quite a bit better than the lower end flooring.

The answer can lay out a range, or a scale, for pig floor that people can use to decide which farms they are prepared to support.   People can also start imagining what sort of floors would be even better for pigs and would come at the top end of the scale.

Here is a link to a description of how people with views are able to make a difference with community answers

A Conversation On The Future Of Food:
getting people to choose, gladly, to pay more for food.

I discussed some views of the head gardener at this farm whilst thinking how to turn them in to collective answers.

Here is roughly how the conversation went:

Like the last farm, I visited, we also discussed pest control. She had lots of things to say about what you can do to avoid pest outbreaks.  

There is a bit of an answer created here between the two farms, however, it is a pretty complicated topic to tackle. So to begin with I may focus some energy on other more straightforward ones.

At the end of discussing these methods, and the pros and cons of each, she said: “Ours is all just more work because we don't put down pesticides and we have to weed all the time, and we don't work in straight lines with farm machinery”.

I got to thinking about how the amount of work done on farms was an important question to get to look at.  

Me: How much more work really is doing this type of farming?

S:  Well you can plant seeds quicker with a tractor. The weeding by hand does take a lot of time and being, and very small scale makes a difference. It does make it much more work for people.

Me: I still wonder quite how much. It would be nice to quantify it…

S: Its a lot!

Me: Right okay, a lot... Even so, I think workers having a nice lifestyle is an important thing.  

I began thinking how lifestyle could add some desirability to buy the product. I think I would avoid buying products that treated workers below a standard I was happy with because I want to support the world that I agree with. I can appreciate that If I do that I could make better jobs for my friends, and family, and the people I meet around so there would be a noticeable benefit to my own life from doing this.

Me: I think transparency can really make a difference to our own likes and the world we live in because it means that people can channel their money more creatively. There have been attempts to do this already with local money, such as the Bristol or Brixton pound, however, with transparency your money is still as useful as it was before. Transparency allows people to realise if they are channelling money into ruthless multinational corporations and so are giving them more power. It can also help people choose to channel money into small, and medium, scale agriculture. More money there means more things going on there.

How much more worthwhile is to buy a broccoli made with smaller scale agriculture?  So I mean, how much better is supporting a broccoli producer where people have nice jobs interacting with ecosystems if you know that the other option is you buying into people having jobs where they work in unsatisfying, factory line type, jobs and where large companies own the land, don't share the earnings, and treat the ecosystem aggressively with agrochemicals.

S: I think it is worth a lot more but people are not willing to pay more for their food.  I mean the price of food is hugely underpriced.

Me: I agree we do have this question which is ‘why should we pay more for food?’... The challenge is how can we get people to gladly pay a bit more for their food?

..One issue causing cheap food can be the result of government subsidies so there is a top down control over which farms will succeed and which struggle more. So people are getting used to fakely cheap food.

S: Well you can't really get people to pay more for food because the amount of money that people have to spend is already set. For example, the proportion of money people have to pay on rent is massively more than it used to be.

Me: But isn't this some how fake though? Because the rent goes up because people have more income and landlords can ask for more money.  It seems a weird system.  I think economics needs to get back to the ground... literally.  Food is the main thing we need.  In the past you bread has cost something like 70% of your wages.

S: You mean food?

Me: No, literally bread alone… rent was quite a small percent and things to go on your bread made us some of the rest.

So the proportions have gone all off.

I mean, think about the amount you can spend in a pub.  It's not the real cost of the drink.  I did a spread sheet to see budget how much I could spend, adding just a few pub drinks a week sent the budget way out of proportion.

I don't think the economy is so straightforward. I think it is designed to make sure that you are constantly struggling to have money so that you work harder.

But not many people are doing real jobs like farming, like treating ecosystems well and making things abundant.  (i don't know if that is done purposefully to avoid people having too much power; because if you have your own supply of food you wouldn't care so much about the weird system..?)  

And then, people waste their money on all sorts of things.  We were just in a town in Wales and met all these boy racers, and we met the coke heads.  These have loads of money and are channeling it into companies that build weird body parts for their cars, like spoilers that are supposed to apply more downward pressure to the rear wheels but don’t work and that cost hundreds of pounds, or are sending it out to fund cocaine gangsters around the world by buying a ridiculously overpriced drug.

I think it is largely the mindless style of marketing that is causing the strange economy we have.  I think it's people choosing to spend their money irresponsibly, taking no responsibility for where it is going, and marketing encourages people to do that. People also act independently as individual actors concerned about their own personal money flow with out consideration of how it affects each other.

S: it’s hard to get over that...

Me: Well, I think if we can get people to group together and spend their money wisely.  Which is what community answers can help people do by agreeing what is worth buying into, as well as traceability that helps us know who we are buying from.  then, I think with these things, we will reverse this whole weird marketing nonsense.

S: it's a worthy thing to do.

We called ahead to visit a Market garden in the mountains in Wales. Now they are having us stay for a while a feeding us and we are volunteering to help work on a project here, which is building botanical gardens.  

(It an interesting idea It's a ‘world garden’ where different sections have a glamping building from around the world in a circle and adjacent to each traditional structure there are plants that originate in that part of the world.  So you can walk learn about the life forms that have gradually been brought to our shores and grown here.  For instance, potatoes are found in the south America segment as well we tried an entirely unfamiliar sweet yellow berry from the Himalayan slice of the circle that is not yet grown commercially.)

We are also getting a good look at the way the really bountiful market garden, that makes the rest of the site, is managed and seeing some of the smart methods for making it work without these heavy handed agrochemical methods that have become so normal.

A community supported agriculture met the Veg Doctor

These guys run a local veg box scheme and a small organic food and decoration shop.

I arranged to meet during their regular 10:30 coffee break.

I showed them this video explaining how this way of arranging knowledge works.  In response one of them said
J:"So the difference is that the forum groups together which people see things in different ways so you can see the bias.  I suppose even our thoughts are bias.  We are all pro organic. It would be good to compare out views to others."
Me: "yea thats what its about"
J: "Is that really that different from what is there now, we can see the bias of news papers"
Me: " I really think it is.  There is not really a form of media that puts such an emphasis on grouping similar views together and making it easy to compare other views easily.
J: "okay it groups all the different people rather than it be by just one good or bad editor"
Me: Yea.  Furthermore forms of media really do make a big difference to society.  This 60's guy Marshall McLuhan said 'the medium is the message', which meant that the form of media is what makes the difference.  So, centralised media - radio, TV - make people gather in living rooms receiving information, Facebook, Twitter and Google are different and more interactive but they can leave you in your own media bubble hearing only what your peers say.
L: "So this aims to break out of that so you can see other views too."
Me: "That is.  Media really can make a difference to society.  Without the printing press we probably wouldn't have democracy or have dismantled the power the church held on people's minds.

Me: Perhaps we can look to find something we can comment on from you guys... We need to ask ourselves a question on a certain topic.  Hopefully the answer we give can help differentiate better and worse ways of producing food

We discussed how coffee can be wasteful of water for a bit... this could have worked if we knew more about the different methods and which ones did waste water so we could avoid buying them.  Also some other issues to do with coffee were discussed, as we continued to sip our lovely aromatic drinks believing it cant be really that bad...

We moved on to something closer to home, pest control.

Me: So from your point of view what general different approaches to pest control are there?" (link)

After a bit of discussing what is different about the different approaches they came up with this:

"By not looking after the soil properly you have weaker plants which can suffer more from pest attack and remain needy for artificial inputs and increase the need for pesticides. This type of approach will just feed the top few inches (Do fertilisers really just feed the top few inches?).

Our approach is to see our soil as a living entity, and by using system to feed and nurture the soil we can then produce strong, healthy crops. So pesticide use is reduced."

Me:  As this answer gets worked on and created by more of a community it can really make a louder voice to help explain what distinguishes different types of food.  Organic is great however it can need more explaining and I feel it should be explained by everyone and anyone rather than few editors. 'Organic' also needs more explaining more because it can seem to some people like it means 'Premium'.

L: "There are some organic farms who do things really well but they are also those who try to get away with as much as they can and do just enough to get the certification"
Me: "Sure, I think that by laying out lots of well explained answers on what is better and worse, that could be in scales (or grades), would mean that producers can show how good they are in lots of ways rather than with a simple organic / non-organic distinction.

We left it at that.  With the 'Vegdoctor' signed up and lots to say.  Hopefully their views can find their place in a good working knowledge framework and spread far and wide.

A butchers in a small Welsh town

In a small Welsh town in the welsh hills,  I arranged to visit the local butcher to demonstrate this type of forum.

















I explained it is about collecting views on key questions and showed him the map (below) with a large range of interconnecting topics to be questioned:

There are questions, I explained, such as 'do cows mind standing on concrete?'
Butcher: "Oh no they won't like that.  You wouldn't leave them on concrete.  That is something my uncle would never do."
Me:  "This sort of thing is happening though its called a Zero Grazed system and there is a push to have even more of these types of farms.
If people keep choosing to buy this kind of meat and dairy without knowing where it's coming from or understanding the issues there will continue to be high demand for it.  Especially with us leaving the EU, it is likely that this is the way lots of farms could go.

We agreed that people could do with a way of finding this information more easily.

Me: So if you could answer that would be one helpful questions.
Butcher: I cant really say for sure if they don't like standing on concrete
Me: Sure for each question ideally we want people who would really know what they are talking about, perhaps be able to tell anecdotes or give evidence, and set themselves up as an authority on it.  Perhaps there is something you can be surer of.

I showed him a butchers page we have done for Blackmore vale

We looked at the common questions found under each of the drop-down menus to see which he felt like answering.

He was drawn to 'Why or why not buy locally?'.  In below this question there are a couple of points of view to add too and he added his comment in agreement with a view on buying locally.

He put: 'I agree with this as a small business that is based around a small community. Money is harder to come by in our area, and any money circulated in the area also creates jobs for people locally such as friends and family.'



With lots of people adding views like this and merging them into peer reviewed communal answers.  He was happy with this.  We hope lots of people can really get to see this point of view on how if you buy locally, or from afar, it will affect what your local area is like and how just because it is the cheapest it doesn't always mean it is the best for you in the long run.

Traveling Around and Forming Collective Viewpoints

Here is my first post blogging our journey visiting differently thinking producers out there.  With a mission to get people to start grouping together their shared viewpoints, or show where they differ, into a new type of forum.

It aims to get views on important things, in particular, the different ways of making foods; which do people think are right and wrong, or better and worse.  As well as getting a real close look at some key points that people understand but lots of people may not easily believe, such as how much 'normal' food production is damaging so many things that are so important to us (soil, antibiotics, bees, climate, our health, etc)

We hope to show some great ways of looking at the world as well as articulate, and expose, some really crazy viewpoints too, many of which are mainstream stances on things.

We have already visited some great ethical and forward thinking places such as Tydden Teg in Snowdonia, Tinkers Bubble, Chagford, and Biochar, among others.

I have just decided it would be good to log this journey towards creating this new form of media and hope you will enjoy hearing about it.