The Power of Slowing Down

Friends,

The USDA just proposed letting slaughterhouses run at whatever speed they want. 175 birds per minute for poultry. No cap for pork. The official reason: remove outdated “bottlenecks."

I've been thinking about that word all week. Running a living system at unlimited speed isn't efficient. It's dangerous. Those "bottlenecks" they want to remove? That's the calibration. That's the part where someone actually looks at the animal and decides what it needs. Remove that and you don't have farming anymore. You have a factory.

I know this because twenty years of farming have taught me what happens when you try to rush the work. And right now, our thirteen-year-old daughter is reminding me what it looks like when you don't.

Eliza is sitting in a stall right now, reading a book next to a horse nobody else wanted. She just showed up. Read books in his stall. Let him come to her.

My natural instinct would be to try to fix him. She just gave him space to not be broken.

I watched her do this all week and kept thinking about how long it took me to figure out the same thing.

Slowing down has been a lifelong pursuit, honestly, I'm still not great at it.  When we were getting our farm started, I shod horses to make ends meet. Andrea's dad is a farrier who's been running the dirt roads of our little corner of the Ozarks longer than I've been alive. He took me under his wing. We went farm to farm and met all kinds of characters. Those years taught me more about patience than probably any other time in my life.

A horse is a flight animal. When you're trying to nail a shoe onto a hoof, that is not the moment to discover you misread the room. A hurried farrier and a nervous horse are a bad combination. I ended up on the ground more times than I'd like to admit figuring that out. Eventually, I learned to pay attention to my own emotions. To slow down.

That's what this work has asked of me every single day. Not speed. Not scale. Just enough presence to know what the moment needs: how many cattle go in this paddock, when to move the chickens to fresh pasture, when the soil needs rest.

That's the “bottleneck” the USDA and Big Meat want to remove. 

And that's why we're here. Not just to raise animals differently. To plant a flag for a food system that answers to farmers and families instead of shareholders and fight like hell to keep it standing. Submit a public comment to the USDA before April 20th - poultry and pork.

One farmer's voice is easy to ignore. Thousands aren't.

Your farmer,
Cody