Response to Oregon’s IP13 ballot initiative
There are people who wake up and see the world through a realistic lens, who trust scientists and their years of experience, who trust animal welfare experts like the renowned scientist Temple Grandin, and then there are people who wake up every day like Allstate’s Mayhem Commercial Guy and are ready to pounce upon the world like the F1 offspring of a category 7 hurricane and F5 tornado.
The latter are pursuing a ballot initiative filed for the 2022 Oregon general election that, as it’s written, is full of contradictions, open-ended definitions, and to be-frank, a load of never-stepped-foot-on-a-farm declarations.
I’m not a policy maker, and I didn’t go to law school; however, I have dedicated my life, and career, to caring for a dairy herd that resides on a dairy farm that has called Oregon home for more than 100 years.
Tell me how I, as a dairy farmer, can understand this language can’t co-exist, while others apparently cannot:
“Any practice of good animal husbandry is not a violation of this section”
“A person commits the crime of sexual assault of an animal if the person: touches or contacts, or causes an object or another person to touch or contact, the mouth, anus or sex organs of an animal or animal carcass for the purpose of breeding domestic, livestock, and equine animals.”
I have better things to do than to write this blog post, if we’re being honest. But, since we’re here, let’s do this again. The following is from a previous post about what’s happening over in Colorado, but as it happens is applies here, too:
As it’s written, artificial insemination, which is how we breed cows on our farm, will be defined as a “sexual assault.” As an industry, the vast majority of dairy farms choose AI as it levels up to farmer safety, cow safety, better management, and improved herd genetics. These are topics I cover in depth in my daily videos, but let’s look at it from a 30,000 foot view:
Farmer Safety: Most people, even those 3-4 generations removed from the family farm know dairy bulls to be aggressive. Removing them from the farm ensures we’ve taken a significant amount of risk out of the equation. And, not just for the farmer … for the farmer’s family. Even Instagram influencer and hobby homesteader, Madison Vining, knew not to keep a bull calf because of the potential risks.
Cow Safety: AIing is quick, efficient, and adds minimal to zero stress to the cow. Alternatively a bull, and his one ton frame, will add stress and injury potential to the hips and legs of a cow via his breeding technique, which is often a multiple times scenario.
Management: AIing allows us to be efficient with breeding certain bulls with certain cows based on desired characteristics. This means we have the opportunity to utilize as many bulls as necessary to breed our cows without them being on our farm. This allows us to do a few things like knowing the exact days a cow was bred and selecting a bull for a new heifer that will produce a smaller calf.
Genetics: We choose to inseminate our cows to certain bulls based on characteristics like milk production, fat and protein levels in milk, calf size, and how likely they are to get sick. Sure, we could raise bulls on our farm. But we’re not experts in raising bulls. We’re experts in providing excellent care to our dairy cows that provide an excellent product to your grocery store.
I applaud raw, transparent honesty. I welcome questions from all kinds of kinds and I’m thrilled when I have the opportunity to share what’s happening on our farm, and within the agricultural industry, with people who are genuinely interested in learning more about what goes on behind the scenes and how food makes its way to their local grocery stores.
It’s clear the authors of this initiative have ulterior motives. If their goal was to actually “reduce the suffering of animals and improve their quality of life” they’d venture out of their closed-minded lives to learn how we, and I speak on behalf of the vast majority of the agricultural industry, work tirelessly to improve our systems and processes everyday to ensure we’re providing the utmost quality care to our livestock.
