We’re excited to see the amount of farmers that are using social media outlets to tell their stories about farming. Here’s a great article from the July 12 edition of the Calgary Herald that features once such farmer. We’re now following her on Twitter and hope you will too! – OFAC

Cowgirl blogger; A farmer’s wife tackles social media
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Cathryn Hagel can milk a cow and drive a tractor. She helps brand her family’s cattle and she’s chased a coyote or two.

And just for fun, she and her family bought a team of draught horses last year. Y’know: the great big ones that pull wagons filled with people.

But she’s no country bumpkin. Not at all. She’s part of a small but growing number of farm women reaching out to each other and beyond, with the help of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and blogging.

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Posted by OFAC on July 12th, 2010 :: Filed under Animal care, Beef cattle, Canada, Education and public awareness, Farm life, Horses, Sustainability of the family farm

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Farmers must take the lead on animal welfare – their livelihoods depend on it. We like this article, published recently in the Guelph Mercury newspaper, that discusses this fact and a recent national funding announcement designed to take animal welfare even further in Canada – OFAC

Farmers understand benefits of animal welfare
Guelph Mercury
Owen Roberts
May 10, 2010

Healthy animals are profitable animals. And for farmers, profitability is the bottom line. Farmers who treat their animals poorly can face veterinarian bills, and other costly problems – such as a turned-off, unsupportive public. But right now, for the most part, consumers are on farmers’ side. And farmers aim to keep it that way.

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Posted by OFAC on May 20th, 2010 :: Filed under Animal care, Animal health, Canada, Farm life, Innovation and technology, Media, Research

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Food From Greener Pastures
Beef Producers: Stewards of the land, for now and for the future

Kim Sytsma and her husband Charlie of Eighth Line Farm in Ontario, like many Canadian beef producers, work every day to ensure both the land they manage and the business they built are not only sustained, but improved for future generations of Canadians. “It’s my job to leave the land better than I found it,” says Kim.

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Posted by OFAC on April 21st, 2010 :: Filed under Beef cattle, Canada, Global Warming, Sustainability of the family farm, Uncategorized
Tags :: cattle, earth day, environment, meat eating

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There’s been so many misconceptions in recent years, perpetuated by animal and environmental activist groups, about the effects of livestock on global warming. Those of us who work in agriculture think of farmers as being the original environmental activists. They live on the farms that they manage – often for generations at a time – so it behoves them to leave the land in as good or better shape when they retire from farming as when they received it years earlier. We commend the Washington Times for covering this issue with this recent piece which takes the issue of global warming – and livestock’s effect on that topic – head on. – OFAC

Washington Times
Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Meat, dairy diet not tied to global warming

Jennifer Harper

Forget all that indecorous talk of animal flatulence, cow burps, vegetarianism and global warming. Welcome to Cowgate.

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Posted by OFAC on March 30th, 2010 :: Filed under Activism, Beef cattle, Canada, Dairy cattle, Global Warming, Methane

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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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