


Jim Stansbury
Sep 19, 2023
Netherlands
Categories:
Agriculture, Sustainability,
A Dutch farmer, known as the “pig whisperer”, is demonstrating a better way to raise and market pigs in the Netherlands. Dr. Kees Scheepens believes that large factory farming that consumes limited land and treats pigs and other animals inhumanely, is wrong and not our future.
What’s the right way? A retired veterinarian, he has been raising pigs for ten years with traditional family farming and his creative improvements. “Factory farming of pigs in the Netherlands is a dead end,” he says. “We now know that a pig is not a thing: it is a sentient being with a high level of intelligence, comparable with humans.”
“The last three to four generations have started using fertilizers, pesticides and going from big, bigger to biggest,” he says. “That was the societal trend in agriculture, but I think we have to become smartest. He wants to bring animal farming back to a more humane level, and this includes how a pig pees.
Why is peeing important for sustainable farming? To encourage pigs to urinate separately, he has created a reward system: a machine delivering lemon sour candies when their urine goes through a special floor membrane in an outside “toilet” area. “When I reward them for correct urinating, there will not be the contact between a nitrogen compound found in urine and an enzyme in the manure: that creates ammonia, and that’s one of the main factors in the [excess] nitrogen discussions [taking place] in the Netherlands.”
No one wants to live near a pig farm, and Dr. Scheepens is now raising pigs in barns where they can laze, eat, root, and wallow as nature intended, without impacts on neighbors. He also offers the idea of paying a family farmer an income to support raising half the pigs on the same land.
This story is an interesting example of redefining our relationships with food animals. The industrialization of food production and processing has disconnected people from this understanding. This article highlights a story with a triple bottom line win (economic, environmental, social success). Teaching our children, perhaps in school programs and projects, to raise food and emphasizing solutions that are a triple bottom line success may help us build a more sustainable future for food production. 4-H programs in the U.S. may be a good model to consider. There are valuable, intangible benefits too to be had. Children learn or deepen existing personal values by raising food animals, such as compassion, responsibility, decency, fulfillment with personal achievement, and humility; all values that serve anyone well throughout their life.
Originally published October 19, 2021.
Source:
Source:

Catalog #:
0721.108.01.101921