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You already know that the image of a fresh family farm is infinitely more pleasant than that of a factory farm. Obviously, wide-open spaces, a loving family of caretakers, happy animals and fresher produce looks a lot better than cramped spaces, pesticide-sprayed plants, and animals living in poor conditions. But does the way your meat is raised actually affect your health in any way?

Turns out, what’s good for animals is good for us. And there’s plenty of science behind the idea. Here are just three of the reasons why farm-fresh products are better for you and your family’s health.

Omega-3s and Grass-Fed Meat

Much like free-range eggs, grass-fed meats contain much higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids than conventional alternatives. Here’s why.

Cows are evolved to eat grass. They are part of a suborder of mammals called ruminants, which means that they have a specialized second stomach specifically made for digesting grasses. Essentially, when grass enters this stomach, the mammal derives nutrients from it through an internal fermentation process. It then passes into the second stomach, which is more like the one that we non-ruminants have, where it is digested again. This is how large animals like cows can get enough energy from a food as light on calories as grass, and still grow large.

Now, corn is technically a grass, which is why cows are physically able to digest it. However, in nature, cows and their relatives graze primarily on prairie grasses, which are much less calorie-dense. Factory farms give cows corn for two reasons:

1. It is a highly subsidized crop, making it cheap to buy.
2. It fattens up the cows much more than their natural diet would.

When cows eat all this corn, though, they’re eating more omega-6s than omega-3s … much like the majority of modern Americans. Medical research shows that the Western diet now contains a ratio of roughly 20:1 omega-6s to omega-3s, when it should be closer to a 1:1 ratio. This leads to inflammation in the body, which may cause a number of chronic diseases, including heart disease. It is for this reason that many health experts and nutritionists recommend supplementing with omega-3s.

… or, you could just eat a diet rich in vegetables and grass-fed proteins that has that natural ratio built in by default.

Antibiotics

The use of antibiotics has also become a major problem. While we don’t think it’s wrong to use antibiotics when animals are sick, we do have a problem with supplementing with antibiotics on a consistent basis for the wrong reasons.

Due to overcrowding and nutrient-poor diets, animals in factory farms become very likely to get sick. In modern times, it became standard practice to feed animals antibiotics – even when they weren’t sick – in an attempt to bypass common-sense health standards and prevent too many animals from dying.

In 2013, the FDA finally restricted this practice, but the law will be put into effect over a number of years. And also, we prefer to just make the change ourselves. Do you really trust farms that depend on the government to tell them to practice ethical and healthy standards? We certainly don’t.

So what does this mean for your health? A growing body of research has shown that this overuse of antibiotics is leading to resistance in humans. It is becoming more and more difficult to treat illnesses, as bacteria are evolving to survive antibiotic exposure. Pretty scary stuff…

Hormones and Additives

Growth hormones are another big problem in farming. The FDA openly states that as long as a hormone is proven to be effective, it’s perfectly okay to use it. The point of this, of course, is to generate profits. Big farm operations add these growth hormones to their animals’ feed (or implant them under the animals’ skin!), which increases the amount of fat on the animal.

This creates a much fattier meat, which also raises the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of the product. It’s also suspected to increase rates of obesity among consumers.

So, with all these factors tipping the scale, so to speak, what would you rather feed your family? Meat as nature intended it or meat that’s been scaled up to be fattier, worse for your heart health, and bad for the treatment of diseases?

Caring about the environment is absolutely a noble cause, and one that we at Heartland Family Farms take seriously. However, if you follow environmental news at all, you’ll probably have heard that going vegetarian is one of the best ways to save the planet — and that’s a notion we want to help lay to rest.

Let me explain. First of all, let’s take a look at some of the research that has led to the notion that raising livestock is bad for the planet. A lot of this belief comes from a report published by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization titled “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” The report, published in 2006, found that meat production comprised about 18 percent of humans’ carbon footprint — more, even, than the transportation sector.

Dr. Frank Mitloehner of the University of California, Davis, refutes this claim. He points out that while livestock farming’s carbon emissions were monitored from start to end, the transportation sector’s were not. In fact, the UN researchers who published the report agreed with him and asked him to join their task force moving forward.

Now, just because livestock farming and transportation have more equal carbon emission levels than we previously thought doesn’t mean livestock farming isn’t bad, right? Well, not necessarily. You may recall a study that sounded the alarm that vegan diets are actually kind of bad for the environment. While some people eat vegan for strictly moral reasons (and we’re not trying to dissuade anyone from their moral convictions), those whose primary concern is the environment may want to reconsider.

You see, a lot of it comes down to landmass. As Dr. Frank Mitloehner points out, American livestock farming technologies have majorly increased efficiency. This means that it takes one cow in America the same amount of time it would take 20 cows in India to produce the same amount of milk. And 20 cows take up a lot more farmland (and generate a lot more methane) than one.

With our planet nearing a population of 9 billion people and deforestation already a tremendous problem, we can’t afford to clear more way for farmland. Increasing efficiency, therefore, becomes paramount to sustainability — and a vegan diet is actually not very sustainable at all.

“When applied to an entire global population, the vegan diet wastes available land that could otherwise feed more people,” QZ explains.

Finally, as you may recall if you’ve read Michael Pollan’s book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” meat is much more calorie-dense than vegetables. One family could easily survive off of meat from one pasture-raised cow for an entire winter. Try to feed the family on veggies, though, which are much less calorie-dense and therefore required in much higher masses, and you’ll use up a lot more energy.

So, eating meat that’s been reared efficiently may technically be more sustainable than a vegan diet. But what about animal welfare?

If you question factory farms’ ability to efficiently raise livestock while treating animals humanely, we don’t blame you.

Here in the US, many of us have grown accustomed to pale yellow egg yolks. If we saw the egg yolks from chickens raised abroad, we’d probably wonder what the heck was wrong with our eggs.

It may surprise you to know that the natural color of wild poultry eggs is actually a deep orange color, not quite as bright as the outer peel of a particularly ripe orange. Of course, there’s plenty of room for variance in nature – sometimes you might encounter a bright yellow yolk or one that has a paler hue. But in nature, you’d never find the millions of similarly colored pale yellow egg yolks that you see in conventional supermarkets around the US.

Why the difference? It all has to do with hen’s diets. If a hen consumes high levels of xanthophylls (a plant pigment), her eggs will have a more orange-toned color. Hens that lay pale yellow yolks tend to live on diets of wheat and barley, while colorless diets – such as those high in cornmeal – tend to produce even lighter hues.

This seemingly small difference actually makes a big difference in terms of nutritional value as well as taste. The more varied a hen’s diet is (that is, the more often she’s allowed to roam and eat whatever she pleases), the more nutritious her eggs will be. As a result, eggs from conventionally raised hens tend to be not only more flavorless, but also lower in nutrient content.

And that’s not all. Hens who are fed diets high in corn, soy and wheat eat a higher ratio of omega-6 fatty acids to omega-3s. This is because omega-3s are more bountiful in seeds, insects and grasses other than corn. As a result, eggs from pasture-raised hens are higher in heart-healthy omega-3s – something we Americans could definitely use in our diets. In fact, according to Healthline, pasture-raised hens produce eggs that are significantly higher in not only omega-3s, but also vitamins A and E. They contain much lower cholesterol levels, too, as a result of the difference in fatty acid chains.

So, what does all of this mean for you? If you enjoy your eggs in the morning, it’d be highly beneficial for your own health to seek out eggs from pasture-raised, free-range, ethically treated animals. We’re not just talking about chicken eggs, either – all of these rules apply to eggs from ducks, geese and all other poultry.

Buying local is an investment not only in your local economy, but also in the practices and ideals of the area in which you’re shopping. You get to know who your goods and services are coming from and get to support the local economy. In our case, you even get to know exactly where your food comes from.

When you buy local, you’re making a choice to encourage local vendors and to fuel their businesses. This has economic benefits from the bottom up, and cuts out middlemen so that more of your consumer dollars actually end up in the vendor’s pocket, and therefore in the local economy.

The Benefits

So why is this such a good thing? Well, it means that your dollars very literally travel shorter distances and spread out less to areas that don’t actually affect you and yours.

For instance, let’s say you eat at a locally-owned restaurant that locally sources its meat and produce. You’re investing money in a local business, which will then turn around and reinvest that money into other local goods and services. Each person or company that makes a decision to invest in their local economy is spreading the benefit to local schools, interests, betterment projects, and families. As the local movement grows, so does the locale.

Buying Non-Local

Let’s look at the other side — buying from larger retailers that do not source locally. Yes, those businesses likely employ locals and pay some local taxes like all vendors do, but that’s pretty much where their direct contributions usually stop. They ship their goods long distances, they are generally owned by a larger company that doesn’t have your particular area’s best interests or culture at heart, and they make decisions for the good of their entire company, not necessarily for the area that their store is in. Are they bad or evil? No! They’re just not… local.

Less Overhead

Now for the detail that many people overlook: packaging, shipping, and preservation of food. When local farmers bring meat or produce to sell locally, whether they sell it in stores or at farmers’ markets, they don’t have to spend as much on fuel, employee wages, and preservation of the food via things like refrigerated trucking. This means less overhead cost to bring the food to sell, and more direct repayment of the producer’s efforts. Additionally, lower overhead costs often mean that local vendors can keep product prices down, which saves you money, too!

Transparency & Practices

Local vendors are also much more able to make their own beliefs and practices a part of their sales and service process, so the buyer is much more likely to be equipped with accurate knowledge about their purchases and consumables. Whether they sell sustainably produced food, natural products, or locally-made crafts, they’re doing something that matters to them personally, and that will translate into their products and your experience with them. When buying locally, you’re buying from someone you know or are at least acquainted with, which is a big deal — transparency and familiarity generally result in better quality products, because families who grow and sell locally have more to lose in terms of reputation, and they personally care more about the individuals who buy their products than a big retailer will.

Some things can’t be purchased from local vendors; that’s just a fact of life.

When’s the last time you looked at a menu and read that something was “sustainably sourced,” “organically grown,” or “farm-to-table”? If you’re like most of us, it probably wasn’t too long ago. In fact, these buzzwords of the food industry have been trending for years. Why? Because restaurants and manufacturers know that customers want to trust the food they’re putting into their bodies.

But it’s more than just these fancy buzzwords that are trending within the food, restaurant, and agriculture industry – it’s transparency and trust in general. Consider the McDonald’s advertisements that aimed to prove the ingredients they use in their food are natural and whole. Or Chipotle’s years-long campaign touting the fact that it’s a GMO-free company – these and other marketing efforts are all about building customer trust and loyalty by being transparent.

According to Sullivan, Higdon & Sink’s white paper, “Evolving Trust in the Food Industry,” these efforts are absolutely the right way to get to consumers. A whopping 65 percent of those researched say that knowing how their food is produced is somewhat or very important. And, of course it is! Would you want your family eating something unnatural or potentially harmful?

But let’s take a step back – putting “sustainably sourced” on your menu or developing an advertisement about your fresh and natural ingredients isn’t as transparent as it gets. Not even close.

At Heartland Fresh Family Farm, we like to think of transparency as part of our currency – it’s not something we try to sell to you. It’s simply built into what we do. And it’s not just that we practice grass-based sustainable agriculture, although that’s, of course, an important part of our process.

What really creates that sense of transparency is that we’re here for you when you’re ready to ask questions and dig a little deeper. That’s the beauty of buying from your local farmer – transparency isn’t even discussed, it’s just ingrained. It’s there when you purchase your fruits and veggies from the person who actually grew them. It’s there when you decide to give your local farmer a call to ask about what goes into the meat he sells. It’s there when you develop a real relationship with him or her based on trust and rapport you could never have developed with a supermarket chain or fast food restaurant.

Why worry about what’s really in your food? Why make decisions about the health of your family based on propaganda or advertising? Will you ever REALLY believe them?

Sources & Resources

Evolving Trust in Food Industry

Consumer Perceptions of Food Industry Transparency

Transparency: “Just Ask”

We recently shared some articles on social media that underlie a real concern for many Americans: After decades of nutrition advice from so-called professionals, no one has any idea what is healthy and what isn’t. Is meat bad for you? Should you consume vegetable oils? What the heck is the difference between saturated fats and unsaturated fats? And beyond that, what are the good sources of both saturated and unsaturated fats? The list goes on and on, to the point that nobody’s really sure what to eat anymore.

We aren’t nutritionists ourselves, but we’re actually okay with that. You know why? Because “nutritionism” (we’ll describe what that is in a moment) has consistently been wrong, and we like to live by one manifesto only: Eat real food.

What is Nutritionism?

Many of you may be familiar with the food and science writer Michael Pollan, a journalism professor and food writer who has covered a number of the problems with nutrition and food science over the course of his career.

In his book “In Defense of Food,” Pollan describes the concept of nutritionism. Essentially, nutritionism — which is the prevailing paradigm for looking at nutrition in our society — is the belief that food is the sum of its parts. When a person believing in nutritionism looks at, say, kale, they don’t actually think about kale…they think about fiber, vitamin K, vitamin C, vitamin A, manganese and copper. Likewise, when they look at red meat, they think about not only protein and iron, but also saturated fat and cholesterol.

But as Pollan argues (and as we believe), food is not the sum of its parts. There’s something about the way all the elements of food, nutritional and otherwise, work together that’s both intangible and unbelievably important. It’s why eating a healthy salad full of vegetables will always be superior to eating a Fiber One bar.

The Dangers of Nutritionism

When we reduce food to the sum of its parts, ignoring how it works synergistically in a way that allows it to flourish as a living organism, we lose some very important things along the way.

Firstly, adhering to a nutritionism philosophy is essentially adhering to nutrition ideologies. And as we know about ideological thinking, that means that some nutrients are going to be seen as good while others are going to be seen as bad. Cue the “fats are bad for you/gluten is bad for you/buy tons of probiotics/eliminate carbs” music.

Additionally, if we preach nutritionism, we essentially tell people that the context of their food doesn’t matter. Eating a “healthy” processed protein bar and shake on the go is suddenly as good for them as enjoying a homemade meal with their family. This is a problem, because study after study shows that regardless of how many calories or specific nutrients people consume, food culture plays a much bigger role in health outcomes.

“…the experience of these other cultures suggests that, paradoxically, regarding food as being about things other than bodily health – like pleasure, say, or sociality or identity—makes people no less healthy; indeed, there’s some reason to believe it may make them more healthy,” writes Pollan.

Lately in Iowa, there’s been a lot of conversation around clean water. The discussion is largely about whether lawmakers can fix the problem – and if so, how. The issue is complicated and multi-faceted. However, as farmers, we know that part of the solution is that we need to be careful about what we put into the soil. Part of that problem? Pesticides.

While pesticides may not be the only pollutant in our water, there have been a multitude of studies showing that the chemicals do, in fact, affect the health of both the ecosystem and the humans who live in the surrounding area. And their influence on the ecosystem makes sense: Because they kill insects, they throw off the natural food chain, which causes an imbalance in everything from the health of the local predators to the abundance of certain plants.

According to Modern Farmer, this problem has seriously influenced the decline of the population of monarch butterflies in Mexico and the U.S. The beautiful insects feed on certain plants that farmers have killed with pesticides for years. In turn, the butterfly population has decreased significantly.

In fact, the butterfly issue is so great that the USDA is dedicating $4 million in funding to improve the butterflies’ habitats on farms.

The lesson here is that pesticides really do make a difference, whether you’re worried about the population of a pretty butterfly species or the cleanliness of the water you drink.

At Heartland, we don’t like to use pesticides, herbicides, or other unnatural chemicals on what we grow – we think food is simply better when you know exactly what’s in it, and water is too.

They say ignorance is bliss, but many people are starting to disagree – especially when it comes to what they’re eating. A recent study from Technomic found that people are increasingly becoming more concerned with what exactly is in their food (a trend we at Heartland are completely on board with). Consumers are starting to pay attention to things like food additives, and more and more, they’re expecting restaurants to be completely transparent about what goes into the food they produce.

Here’s what Sara Monnette, Technomic’s director of consumer insights and innovation, has to say about it: “Menu transparency is imperative and can help drive sales of healthy options,” Monnette said in a release. “Telling an ingredient’s story – whether it’s farm-raised, local or GMO-free, for instance, can directly impact consumer decisions about what to order and where to dine.”

Now, given the recent popularity of food-industry buzzwords like “organic” and “non-GMO,” it’s hardly surprising that people are becoming a bit more conscious of what goes into their bodies. But organic, farm-raised, sustainable food is what we at the farm have been producing for years. It’s what we’ve always eaten, it’s what our children eat, and it’s what we love to serve you folks. It’s what we know.

So, as if you needed another reason to buy food locally, here it is: Buying that meat or produce from your local farmer benefits both of you, but it also allows you to know exactly what’s in your food. The turkey, beef, or veggies you buy from us are completely natural, with no additives.

So give us a call at 319-838-2047, email us with all of your questions, or just drop by the farm one day, and we’ll tell you all about what we do to produce the best food possible!