Do you use any antibiotics?

I use antibiotics judiciously and rarely. In my experience, attention to basic good animal husbandry makes antibiotics mostly unnecessary. The animals stay healthy. If an animal is sick or has an infected wound, I use antibiotics to treat that problem. That animal is not then sold as meat from my farm. I have used antibiotics a few times in the past twelve years:

• In 2004, A sow sick with a bacterial infection called Erisypelas was given a series of antibiotic shots. She recovered, but then failed to breed. We butchered her for our own use.



• A Black Angus bull tore his foot on the side of the tractor's loader bucket, and the foot became infected. He received two shots of a long-lasting antibiotic, and fully recovered.



• A piglet was stepped on by his mother and had a large flap of skin torn loose from his shoulder. I cleaned the wound and applied an antibiotic ointment. He was cared for in the house at first, then moved to the yard, and eventually rejoined the pig herd as a breeding boar. His name was Ulysses.



• In the flooded spring of 2012, one heifer contracted a case of footrot. She received a single dose of a long-lasting antibiotic called LA200, and made a full recovery. She was a lousy mother, though, and was later shipped to a livestock auction after abandoning her calf.



• We saw more footrot in the fall of 2014, and one cow and one heifer were each given shots of LA200. Both recovered and are still in the herd.
• Footrot also showed up in summer of 2015. One cow had it in two feet simultaneously. Two cows and one heifer calf were treated with antibiotics for footrot in 2015. One heifer calf was treated for pinkeye. Those heifers will join the herd as mother cows and will not be sold for meat.

Is your meat organic?

I am not a certified organic farmer. The main reason for this is that organic feed is far more costly and harder to get than regular feed. I would have to nearly double the price that I charge for my animals in order to cover the cost of organic feed, and that would price the meat out of reach for a lot of my customers.

I prefer to focus my attention on providing good living conditions for the animals, and on buying feed locally. I buy grain from farmers in the area whenever I can. Most of my feed is custom blended by Floodwood Farm & Feed, which also sources grain locally as much as possible. I use a corn-barley-soy blend for pigs and a corn-soy blend for poultry.