Farm Tour
A couple weekends ago, the boyfriend and I made the drive out of our city to visit Harborside Farms. We like to buy grass-fed, free-range meat and animal products, but the problem is that food labels are very deceiving and you can never really know what you’re eating.
I met Clint at the premiere of Fresh, The Movie in October. He and his wife Pamela own Harborside Farms as a small family farm. They encourage consumers to check out their farm before buying any of their products, so the boyfriend and I were only too happy to go out and visit them. The boyfriend has worked on farms before, but I’d never really been to a farm (at least, not since I was a little kid), so I was incredibly excited.
Harborside Farms is everything you could want from a farm. The family is lovely, the chickens run around freely, the pigs and piglets play in a small forest, and the cattle have large fields to wander through. They’re moved regularly so as to always have fresh grass to eat.
The farm even processes all of their meat on-site! This significantly reduces stress for the animals. We got to take a look inside the butcher shop and freezer. It was so nice to be able to see it all. Because Clint and Pamela make deliveries to Winnipeg every couple weeks, we can place our orders and get fresh meat delivered right to us. I feel uncomfortable buying regular meat from a grocery store, these days, because of the likelihood that it is factory farmed. Once you start looking into factory farming and learning more about the vast differences between factory farming and farms like Harborside Farms, you can’t really go back.
I mean, would you rather have an animal cooped up all his life…
…or would you rather have an animal live a good, happy life?
Photo taken from the Harborside Farms website.
I’m really looking forward to buying meat from Harborside Farms – it’s important to know exactly where your food is coming from and how it is treated so that the environment stays healthy, the economy stays healthy, the animals stay healthy, and you stay healthy.
Do you know where your meat and animal products come from? Have you visited a farm? Are you concerned about where your food has been and what it has gone through before it reaches your plate?
If you want to learn more about factory farming and small farms, check out Fresh, the Movie, or read the book The Compassionate Carnivore. You can also read my article, Knowing where your food comes from is well worth the research, in the most recent issue of The Uniter.
Ooh nice they even process their own meat! Sometimes we go out to the farms but it’s far and we don’t have a big freezer. I’m hoping when we move we will be closer to some places like this!
That was one of the best parts about it! Most farms don’t process their own meat, so it was really cool to see that everything is done right there.
Great post, Sagan!
Harborside Farms looks like an excellent place to buy your meat. They have the same philosophy as we do – natural is always better!
Agreed!
I do buy organic meat, eggs and dairy, at the local supermarket or at Whole Foods. I figure if it has the USDA label, then It’s fairly safe.
This is really the only way you can know for sure what you are getting is good. Good for you Sagan!
That’s fantastic! I need to look into ethical eggs and cheese when I move.
Where do you get your eggs and cheese from now? Anywhere in particular?
Ahhh Sagan! You know I love this stuff. So excited that you visited a farm, how fun! I have a freezer load of beef from the farm we visted last spring, the author of The Compassionate Carnivore, Catherine Friend! Besides that, we buy local and grass-fed meat and eggs whenever possible/available. Most of our dairy comes from a semi-local company that works only with small and sustainable family farms.
Its not cheap, I won’t lie. But the more people who can support this way and do…the more the prices might go down…
I wrote this blog post with you in mind 🙂 Seriously, I can’t tell you how big of an impact that book has had on me and the boyfriend – we talk about it regularly.
I love that you live this life.
I do a pretty good job with being conscious with my food choices, but far from perfect. With seafood being the only non vegan things I eat it avoids much of what you discuss. I wish we were a kinder species. With our inability to consider limiting our population it is impossible for the majority of people to eat organic, free range, kindly killed food. There will never be enough of it. Unfortunately our distorted food supply is probably a result of the need for more and more food, and more food drives population growth, not the other way around as most people think. Unfortunately knowing things and changing things are like losing weight, no?
It IS quite a dilemma. Must just do the best we can!