Animal welfare is our number-one production value — and 'not being cruel' is the floor, not the ceiling. My honest take on one bad day, benevolent neglect, and why we raise our animals the way we do.
“But do you actually love your animals?” someone asked me the other week. It's the right question — just not in the way most people mean it. So here's the honest answer: what animal welfare really means on our farm, in my own words.
Animal welfare is our number-one production value. It has to be — because everything else we care about feeds off it. The quality of the food, the health of our soil, the health of the people eating our meat: it all flows downstream from how we treat the animal.
The trouble is “high welfare” has been watered down to mean “not obviously cruel.” Not caged. Not kicked. Not starved. Folks, that's the floor, not the ceiling. To me, real welfare is about fit-for-purpose animals in species-appropriate environments, allowed to express their true nature.
So I ask a simple question: how does this animal express its nature in the wild? Then I build the system around the answer.
It's a bird that perches — so why keep it in a cage without a perch? Our hens roost. Our ruminants lounge and graze. And our pigs wallow.
That one gets misunderstood the most. People see a pig in the mud and assume it's filthy — it's the opposite. Pigs can't sweat, so the mud cools them down. They burn in strong sunlight, so it's a mud-mask sunscreen. Pick up fleas or ticks and they lie in the water to drown them. Take the wallow away and you've taken the whole pig's hygiene regime away from them.
“I just wanted a natural animal that had just been outside, allowed to be an animal.”
When people wrestle with the ethics of eating meat, the conversation almost always lands on the final day. I'll gently push back on where the focus goes.
The typical beef animal lives around 550 days. What about directing our focus and action to the 549 days? 549 days of species-appropriate grazing, socialising, and doing exactly what a cow is built to do. The final day matters — but it doesn't weigh more than the 549 that came before it.
We spend our days as the animals' co-labourers, doing our level best to make sure they only ever have one bad day.
There's a romantic idea that a wild death is somehow kinder. It isn't — starvation, disease, or a predator feasting on it while it's still alive. There is no dignity bestowed upon a wild animal by its rivals. But we do bestow dignity upon our animals — and it doesn't stop at slaughter, which is why we use the whole animal, nose to tail. Wasting it would be the real disrespect.
“I don't want my diet to be subsidised by the suffering of animals.”
I'll say something that might surprise you: I reckon I share more in common with a vegan who has thought deeply about this than with an omnivore who's never really considered animal welfare at all. If you've wrestled with this stuff, you're my kind of person.
A mate who cops all my ramblings once summed up how I run our animals as “benevolent neglect.” I kept it.
“I love you, so you better make it.” Not: “I love you, so I'm going to do everything within my power to make it.” I love you — so you better make it.
Give an animal a great, species-appropriate environment, then let it prove it can thrive in it. I'm not in the business of propping up every weak animal so it can limp another generation of weakness into the herd.
There's micro welfare — the triage. Worm this one, treat that one's mastitis, pull a calf. I'm not against any of it; treating a suffering animal is never wrong, and it's still welfare. But there's also macro welfare — the decisions that might mean a bit more pressure in the short term, but that breed the need for intervention out of the herd for good. Mulesing a sheep to prevent flystrike is micro welfare; breeding a sheep that never needs mulesing is macro welfare. My version is often as simple as: cull the mum that needed rescuing this year, and don't breed her back.
It's why we run hardy, indigenous breeds — Nguni cattle, Damara sheep, Fayoumi hens — shaped over centuries by tribal people with no vet and no drug cabinet, where the whole idea was: stay alive, and we'll keep you. The opposite end of that spectrum is the French bulldog, an animal we've bred so badly it can't mate, give birth, or breathe properly on its own. I know which end I want our animals on.
Here's a claim that makes industrial farmers cranky: when an animal lives in the environment it's built for, it doesn't need the drugs. In fact, confinement is what creates the need for them. When cattle or pigs are crowded into buildings, defecating in their own living area, that's the key factor that necessitates the antibiotics. Give an animal fresh ground every day and you won't be reaching for the drug cabinet.
That's exactly why we move our cattle and sheep onto fresh pasture every single day, with the hens following a few days behind. Nobody grazes off yesterday's manure, so nobody swallows yesterday's parasites — and the grass recovers faster for it.
I didn't get into this to eat an animal that was a drug addict. I wanted a clean, natural animal that had just been outside, being an animal.
I'm not a zealot about it, mind you. All our meat is strictly antibiotic-free, but we will not let an animal suffer to protect a marketing claim. My litmus test is dead simple: would I take antibiotics in this situation? If a genuinely sick animal needs treating, we treat it — and then it's sold into commodity markets, never under our label. Both of those matter. And we don't need a lab to tell us when something's off — one of our rules is “your nose knows.” If a shelter or a paddock stinks, we're doing something wrong, so we move them.
Welfare isn't a cost we begrudgingly pay — it's the engine that drives everything else. Get it right and the rest falls into place.
Healthy animals in the right environment build healthy soil — their manure, hooves and grazing are tools, not waste. Healthy soil grows nutrient-dense pasture. Nutrient-dense pasture makes genuinely healing food. As a mate of mine says, it's not the cow, it's the how. And animals aren't bad for the environment — animals are the environment.
That's our whole production philosophy in a sentence: welfare first, and food quality, the land and human health all flow out of it. (If you want the long version, it's laid out in our Five Pillars of Production.)
Our meat comes from animals that lived the way they were built to — moved daily onto fresh pasture, never confined, never on routine drugs, and honoured from the first day to the last.
The best way to know an animal lived well is to see it for yourself — so come and meet them on one of our farm tours sometime.
— Jake
