At Farm Animal Councils across Canada, we frequently get calls from people driving by farm properties asking questions about the farm animals they see living in the fields. One common theme of questions we receive this time of the year is about animal housing in the winter – specifically, can cattle live outdoors in the winter. This article does a great job of answering that question – OFAC

Chatham Daily News, Friday, January 15

Look for snow on cattle’s backs
Posted By KIM COOPER
Posted 8 hours ago
 
As the winter season is here in Chatham-Kent, let’s look at cattle being left outside during these cold months. For this article, the words cattle, cows, herd, and livestock all mean the same thing. I would like to thank Mike and Joanne Buis of Buis Beef here in Chatham-Kent for their assistance in writing this article.

Like all mammals, cows are warm-blooded and need to maintain a constant core body temperature. Special management and planning is required for cattle to graze outdoors in the winter. For this to be successful, producers select the proper breed of cattle and create the proper conditions for the winter season.

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Posted by OFAC on January 18th, 2010 :: Filed under Animal care, Beef cattle, Canada
Tags :: animal care, beef, Farmers, Winter care

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January 6, 2010 – Happy New Year to the readers of this blog. This article was printed in the Toronto Star over the holiday season and we think this columnist got the issue exactly right. Farm animals aren’t pets and they definitely aren’t 4-legged people. And, with only 1 in every 46 Canadians now actively farming, there is a huge disconnect between farmers and consumers. Enjoy the read – OFAC

The annoying tendency to anthropomorphize animals is likely from our lost connection to rural life

by Connie Woodcock, Out There

Toronto Sun, December 20, 2009

When I was a little girl, I fell in love with a series of books about a pig named Freddy and his barnyard friends on the Bean farm in New York State.

I read every one of the 26 books available in my library over and over. I can remember peering at a New York road map in search of fictional Centerboro, the town supposedly nearest Freddy and his friends.

Written between the 1920s and 1950s, the Freddy books disappeared for a while but they were republished a few years ago and there’s even an association called The Friends of Freddy with its own website. I’ve bought several Freddy reprints and reread them still.

I mention this because much as I loved Freddy, Mrs, Wiggins the cow, Hank the horse with rheumatism in his hind leg, and Charles the henpecked rooster, we all grow up and realize there’s no such thing as a talking animal. At least, most of us do.

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Posted by OFAC on January 6th, 2010 :: Filed under Activism, Canada, Consumers, Education and public awareness, Farm life, Sustainability of the family farm
Tags :: activists, animal care, animal welfare, Canada, Consumers, Farmers, misconceptions, PETA

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Lilian Schaer
Owen Sound Sun Times
October 19 2009

I ‘ve started noticing a bit of a trend in popular media — the bashing of farmers, especially those who grow crops we all depend on.

These horrible people — or so the theme goes — are ruining the environment by producing large volumes of corn and soybeans and they’re making us fat to boot.

There are two sides to every story and the farmer’s is rarely heard or included in the barrage of popular media and consumer criticism about agriculture. So let me debunk a few of these myths.

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Posted by OFAC on October 21st, 2009 :: Filed under Canada, Consumers, Education and public awareness, Media
Tags :: Canada, Consumers, Farmers, food, Media, misconceptions

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Steve Buist, Hamilton Spectator, 2008.06.07

I left the Great Lakes packing plant on May 12 with four boxes of meat piled onto the back seat of my car. Piggy — my pig, the pig I had helped raise and care for — was packed inside those boxes.

Six months of his life, six months of my life, all reduced to four cardboard boxes on my back seat.

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Posted by Admin on July 23rd, 2009 :: Filed under Canada, Consumers, Farm life, Pork
Tags :: Consumers, Farmers, Media, Ontario, pigs, Pork

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Steve Buist, Hamilton Spectator, 2008.05.30

It’s 7 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 21, and it’s one of the coldest mornings of the winter so far. The snow crunches under foot, there’s just a hint of grey light along the eastern horizon and an icy mist rises off the nearby Grand River.

Two gleaming silver tanker trucks from the Wallenstein feed company have already started emptying their loads into the metal silos at Curtiss Littlejohn’s pig farm in the hamlet of Glen Morris.

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Posted by Admin on July 22nd, 2009 :: Filed under Canada, Family vs factory farming, Farm life, Innovation and technology, Pork
Tags :: agriculture, antibiotics, Biosecurity, environment, feed, fuel, hormones, misconceptions, nutrition, Research, technology

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Steve Buist, Hamilton Spectator, 2008.05.28

Six months, 250 pounds. That’s Piggy’s destiny in life.01 At first, he’ll double his weight in a few days, then it will double in a week, then every couple of weeks, then every month. It’s incredible, isn’t it, to think that a barnyard animal is capable of growing so large, so quickly.

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Posted by Admin on July 22nd, 2009 :: Filed under Canada, Education and public awareness, Farm life, Pork
Tags :: animal welfare, artificial insemination, Farmers, meat, Ontario, pigs, Pork, Research

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Steve Buist, Hamilton Spectator, 2008.05.27

It’s 6:30 on a Sunday morning and daylight hasn’t yet cracked the horizon as I head west along Governor’s Road on the far side of Lynden. I drive for miles without passing another car, but almost every barn I pass is already lit.

No one has said it better than John Kenneth Galbraith, the renowned economist and maybe the most famous graduate of the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph.

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Posted by Admin on July 22nd, 2009 :: Filed under Canada, Farm life, Pork
Tags :: Canada, Farmers, pigs, Pork

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Luisa D’Amato, Waterloo Region Record, 02 Aug 2008

It’s Sandi’s turn to be milked.

She stands patiently in the barn, her pale-pink udder bulging between her long legs, as dairy farmer Terry Lebold wipes her teats with antibacterial solution and attaches four suction cups to them.

Within five minutes, about 20 litres of milk has been vacuumed out of her, the white liquid whirling through transparent plastic tubes. Lebold touches her hind flank lightly, disconnects the machine and quickly dips her teats in a reddish iodine solution to prevent infection.

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Posted by Admin on July 22nd, 2009 :: Filed under Canada, Dairy cattle, Farm life, Veal
Tags :: agriculture, Canada, Consumers, dairy cattle, Farmers, food, milk, Ontario

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Luisa D’Amato, Waterloo Region Record, July 12, 2008

The hogs are just a few minutes away from death.

High-pitched screams pierce the warm air at Conestoga Meat Packers, a pork processing plant near Breslau.

Men with plastic paddles push the dusty animals, each as heavy as a football player, toward a covered, metal passageway.

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Posted by Admin on July 22nd, 2009 :: Filed under Canada, Meat/slaughter plants, Pork
Tags :: Farmers, food, meat, pigs, Pork

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Manitoba Co-operator, 2/14/2009

A ranchers’ beef co-operative in Alberta and Saskatchewan has picked up certification from a U.S. group for meeting a long list of social and environmental standards for their product.

Food Alliance Certification Co-operative, based in Portland, Ore., has given Prairie Heritage Producers its certification for “sustainably-produced” beef. Prairie Heritage becomes the first company in Canada to meet Food Alliance standards, the U.S. group said Friday.

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Posted by Admin on July 22nd, 2009 :: Filed under Beef cattle, Canada, Consumers
Tags :: animal care, beef, Canada, environment, Farmers, humane treatment, sustainability, water conservation

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