Do you use any antibiotics?

I use antibiotics very 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. I have used antibiotics three times in the past five years:

• A sow sick with a bacterial infection called Erisypelas was given a series of antibiotic shots. She recovered, but then failed to breed.



• My 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 is Ulysses.

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, and I buy a blended feed from the Farmers Co-op feed store in Wright, MN.