Owning a business is hard. There are a ton of balls in the air and it pretty much always feels like if you drop even one ball, it will be the end of your business. Most businesses simply can't do it all and we rely on employees to get the job done.
Last night I interviewed a potential new employee. He seems like a nice person. And I hope that he will be a good fit on our farm. But I don't know that he will be a good fit. We will train him and keep an eye on him and do everything we can to set him up for success. But in the end we have to have faith in another human to do the right thing, when we go to our son's school event, a family birthday dinner or just work late in the field. We have to trust who we hire even when we are not there watching.
You see, when we hire someone, we aren't just trusting them with a cash register or inventory. We are trusting that whoever we hire will do the right thing by our cows. Living breathing animals that have been entrusted to our care. We are trusting whoever we hire will not only live up to our expectations as their employer, but also to your expectations of our farm because you are our customer.
Cows aren't always compliant. You can't reason with them. You can't explain the plan to them and have them understand you. They can be incredibly frustrating to work with at times. Cows can cause people to lose their patience and sometimes the person losing their patience is the person you hired. The person you have to trust will make the right choice when things don't go their way.
Yesterday an undercover video came out from an animal rights activist group. It was filmed in part at a Fair Oaks Farms. The video shows inexcusable treatment of animals by employees of the farm. In response to the video Mike McCloskey, founder of Fair Oaks Farms, released a statement that you can read on their Facebook page. In the statement he takes ultimate responsibility for what happened and explains that the employees in the video had been fired long before the video was released because other employees spoke up after witnessing abuse. The culture on the farm is such that employees spoke up when they saw bad actions and that says a lot.
The McCloskey family has to put their trust in a lot more employees than we do on our farm because their work load is bigger than ours. But at the end of the day, both of our families have to put our trust in others. When something happens to break that trust, video camera or not, that is the ultimate betrayal.
Last night I hired a new employee. I will train him, I will have him sign an agreement to care for our ladies with respect, I will supervise him. At some point I will leave him on his own to do some work and I will put my trust in him because I have to, to get the job done. I will put my trust in him because I believe that although evil exists, most humans are good. That is the best I can do.
Sophie B
So true! I commend the family for eliminating the workers as soon as they became aware of the situation. After reading the comments on the Facebook post – which I should not have dove into before bed – I see many people were upset there aren’t cameras in the barn to watch the employees.. that this has to be happening all the time. Does every office, cubicle, classroom, stockroom, train car have a camera? No, and that’s because we should be good-faithed and trust our employees to do the right thing.
Thanks for the calm and insightful post.
dmaudal
The McCloskey family chose the inhumane practices of keeping calves in solitary confinement in HOT BOXES that reach Sahara Desert temperature and with HUMIDITY on top of that. To see how that feels, get in your car, park in full sun, crack the window a few inches and see how long you would last! That's insanely inhumane practice! The investment of thousands of HOT BOXES gets approval from the TOP...the McCloskeys!
dairycarrie
I think it might be a good idea for you to read a little about what a calf hutch is and why they are used. I just published this post that should explain it a little better than I can here.
https://dairycarrie.mystagingwebsite.com/2019/06/10/what-are-calf-hutches/
Jason
No thanks, I don’t own a car. I feel they are TERRIBLE for the environment and can’t understand why with the negative effects of global warming being what they are, you would be so inconsiderate and terrible a human being to declare that you require your OWN oversized, carbon monoxide death machine and that we should all go out and join you in purchasing one for ourselves just so you could prove a point about some cows.
Debra Kollar
Hi Carrie,
And what about the lie that they do NOT send calves for veal? This may have been a few employees but nothing was addressed about that lie? Can you answer this? I commend the family for speaking up and now installing a video system which should have been a given with a 30,000 cow operation. However, how could a manager or someone not pick up on the calves who were dying? Each one is accounted for, right? Isn’t there a cause of death listed or are they just piled on the truck like the undercover person said and not accounted for? Perhaps there is a reason a huge factory-like operation for live animals (30,000) isn’t the best. Quality is overtaken by quantity.
The cows are never allowed out to pasture, right? What about the confining conditions for a 30,000 cow operation? So I would like your opinion about the proposed lie on the veal arguement and especially, from him. Here’s the thing. If they do take them to veal and have stated clearly they don’t, how can we believe what he says? Why didn’t he mention this in his speech since it was clearly a huge point in the video? What is your take on that? I am not trying to create controversary, just merely stating a valid point that wasn’t addressed. This isn’t your issue. But a valid one to address. In my opinion, I would rather have meat and dairy be more expensive, even if I have to eat less of it, with the assurance that the animals (whether dairy cows, chickens, pigs) have quality of life before they are killed humanely or continually used for dairy. Personally, I think it’s crazy to run an animal operation to that scope and scale. With factory goods like tennis shoes, fine. But with live animals (30,000) no wonder something came up. Again, nothing against you. But these are the questions that came up for me. Why do you think he didn’t talk about the vel acdusation? Thank you
dairycarrie
He did address it but not in the initial video.
This is from a news channel-
"Fair Oaks Farms founder Mike McCloskey says he was unaware calves were being sold to the veal industry, citing a lack of communication between the general manager in charge of livestock sales and himself.
“It was not our practice in the past ... and (I) apologize for the unintended false claim made previously," McCloskey said in a statement to The Times. "Our bull calves will no longer go to veal."
Fair Oaks Farms accounted for less than 4% of all calves purchased by Midwest Veal, a veal farm located in North Manchester, Indiana, according to a statement from Midwest Veal."
As far as dead calves go... just like in humans babies, not all calves were meant for this world. Fatal birth defects, illness and stillbirths happen in cows and humans. There's a lot of calves and even a small percent of dead calves ends up looking like a lot of calves with big populations.
Cara
This whole comment sounds like manure. You own the business, see the over heard, have the meetings. I like how y’all think it’s okay or excusable because you “didn’t know”. You didn’t know about the abuse or the veal or apparently any of the things happening on your farm.
dairycarrie
You realize I have nothing to do with Fair Oaks Farm right? I'm just a dairy farmer who is talking about the difficulties of being a business owner and manager when it comes to trusting others with our animals.
Jay Clark
Sorry to reply to something from so long ago but I just stumbled across this and some of these comments.. uhg.
The folks at Fair Oaks seem like decent people trying to do what’s best. They just have to rely on a LOT of others to also have that vision.
Many of the – attack, attack, attack, comments are coming from people similar to those that made the video.
Step 1- *Always* go after those that are at least trying. The reason being, they can’t cause as much trouble for the large corporations that don’t try and don’t care. Those corps just tell them to f-off and no one expects otherwise, so they don’t make good targets.
Step 2- once they “smell blood in the water” they’re like crocs. If they feel resistance, they just clamp down harder. We all do things we wish that we could’ve made better choices but some of us accept actions and hope they don’t happen too often. While some reclaim a sense of righteousness by exploiting & attacking the wrongs of others. “They’re wrongs make me a better person”, if you will.
You seem like a good person too, Carrie and thanks for the info.
L Grove
I had just started drinking Fairlife protein drink & loved it.Tho’t I’d found the ultimate protein drin, high protein good taste is important to me,a gastric bypass patient.
However, since the abuse article came out, it sickens me to even think about drinking it. I am no longer going to buy it.
dairycarrie
The video came out two years ago and the farm does not supply the milk in Fairlife products.
Wes P
Dairycarrie, thank you for this insightful article. I had no idea any of this had happened as I just started drinking Fairlife last year and I’m not a big social media person. I have a couple of questions…
In your opinion, do you think that Fair Oaks had too many logs on the fire? It seems to me that they got too big for the owner to be able to ensure the operation was running as he designed it, much less take a hand in the welfare of the animals.
Second, shouldn’t there have been a paper trail for each animal from cradle to grave? I find it hard to believe that someone at management level, or in the accounting dept I assume they have given their size, should’ve known that animals were disappearing and/or being sold to veal processing farms. (Admittingly, I don’t know enough about veal to understand why that’s a problem.) I spent ten years in the petroleum industry, and things done in the field sometimes go unnoticed for awhile, but any issue can usually be traced back to the person at fault by those that know what to look for.
Lastly, do you believe him? I ask you because you obviously have first-hand knowledge of the industry, and you would know what could go unnoticed and what couldn’t. I want to continue drinking Fairlife because I love it, but I won’t support blatant cruelty to animals. That being said, I’m not blind to the fact that an operation of his size (or any size for that matter) has to do things that aren’t always in the best interest of the animal, but this level of abuse is, I pray, out of the ordinary.
Gerry
I believe this video of animal abuse was a total setup, and someone was trying to put this farm out of business. Working on a farm is low pay hard job and persons that do this job do so because they love animals. To me this was a totally a staged video to put these folks out of business, as what has been going on in all our food industry. I believe all the action against these animals was done on purpose so this video could be made.