Episode 25: The Insanity of IP58 in Oregon

IP58 is proposed legislation that will be on the November 2026 ballot which would, in the words of its proponents, "extend the legal protections that keep our companion animals safe to animals currently on farms, in research labs, and in the wild—which would then protect those animals from slaughter, hunting, fishing, and experimentation."

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Show notes:

https://www.yesonip28.org/

https://orcattle.com/no-on-ip28/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi. I'm Don Tipping and this is an installment of the Agrarian Renaissance podcast. And this will be just a short one, but I felt compelled to address some proposed legislation here in my home state of Oregon, but from what I've read is also being proposed in a number of other states. I think about two dozen other states. A similar proposal was on the ballot last November in Colorado, and thankfully it failed. And because I'm quite often the only farmer that a lot of my friends and acquaintances know, I get asked either in person at the farmer's market or when I'm in town or through social media or an email about things that are sensationalized in social media in particular to be really clickbaity. But there's been one that's been going around, you know, saying proposed legislation will ban hunting and uh raising of animals in Oregon. And it is true. It basically this legislation, IP twenty-eight is the initial name for it. They're still gathering signatures, but they're close and I'm they'll probably have it on the fall ballot. And basically the language says that it would ban the intentional injuring, killing, and insemination on farms, research labs, exhibitions, and in the wild of animals. Uh or as they say, non-human animals. So the people that are initiating this one, uh, if you go to their website, it's called their acronym is PEACE, which stands for the people for the elimination of cruelty exemptions. And one of the some of the language they use in there is they want to ban the sexual assault of animals. So they do create a uh an allowance for the spaying and neutering of animals by veterinarians. But I I'm doing this video outside here with my small flock of sheep. I have 26 sheep. There's one of them right here rubbing against a tree. But the rest you can see behind me, and they're enjoy they got up early to graze and they're now ruminating. They're doing quite well. And so I've had sheep on my farm for now this is year 26, and they're an important part of managing the pastures, the grasslands, but we also use them in the forest edges because they'll clear out uh the underbrush, which makes our land more fire resilient. Uh, because if you didn't know, sheep will gladly eat trees and small shrubs and herbs and even blackberries. Goats definitely will. There are two goats over there somewhere in the mix. They hang together. So you know, from my perspective of being, you know, I didn't grow up on a farm far from it, but I have been doing this lifestyle now for over 30 years. And in my observation of learning how to raise sheep, but I've also raised goats for a bunch of years along with the various types of poultry and pigs, is that if you have a in the instance of sheep, a ram, which we do, he's he's back there somewhere. You can the gray one with the horns, he's a Navajo churro, in case you were curious, which is the first breed that the Spaniards brought over, so a lot of the tribes, including the Navajo Dine, uh, raised them. So if you've seen a Navajo rug, it's most likely the wool of these Navajo churro sheep. But if you have lambs and you let all the males grow up to be full size, and you can see the horns on him, they're significant, they will compete with one another. And I've in my own lived experience, because I because I didn't know what I was doing, this is years ago. I was like, well, it's kind of curious. We were replacing a ram because you have to get new genetics in there periodically. And I'm like, let's introduce the new one to the old one. They started headbutting, and one of them had horns, a horn broke off, and he was spurting blood, and I had to take them down. Um, so I learned you can't do that, you can't have too many males in the population. And the same goes for roosters. Anybody that's raised chickens and had them hatch has learned the hard way. You get too many roosters, they get aggressive. Not only are they crowing, but they'll fight you, they'll actually attack children. Uh, same goes really for anything like Billy Goats, loved a headbutt. You got too many. So, and what we do is we castrate them, and it's really simple. I should have brought the tool with me. It's called an elastrator, and it's a little cringy just to hear that word, especially if you're a man. But it's basically a like set of pliers that has these four um prongs on it. You put a little rubber band over it and then you squeeze it and it opens the rubber band, slip it over the testicles when they're young. They squirm for like a second, and then it's fine. It just is like our belly button, you know, like it uh eventually atrophies and dries up and falls off. We do the same for the tails. I leave the tails on the males and I dock the females in general. You might see some females with tails over there from before I figured out that system. But they're like the method we use for castrating is is painless, you know, largely painless from my observation, because sheep definitely make sound if they're not happy. Uh they don't really make any sound, uh, bloodless, and necessary to manage a flock. It's just part of doing it. And we raise these sheep for manure, grazing, meat, wool. Uh they make more of themselves, they're entertaining, fuels reduction. It's an important part of our system. We're also a certified organic farm, so having all that manure, we compost that and we use that to fertilize our fields. And so one of the uh the funders for this organization, Peace, the acronym I read earlier, is the uh Karuna Foundation. There's two different Karuna Foundations. One works in Nepal and India, the other is in Colorado, and it's basically a vegan organization and saying like the whole world should be vegan, we shouldn't use animals, we don't want to harm animals, all that kind of stuff. Uh, also PETA, no big surprise there, the people for the ethical treatment of animals. Also, the Direct Action Everywhere organization, the DXE, and it's just a bunch of kind of you know, I'd say suburban middle class kids who grew up to be adults, never had kids, and think they can, and they're probably in a city and they think we're gonna like cause revolution and tear down all the systems they don't like. Um, but what's interesting is looking at the uh Secretary of State records because you can see who contributes to political campaigns or ballot initiatives, and they've raised$135,000 according to what's available online, and$35,000 of that came from a Russian man named Posnar Leonid through a Puerto Rican shell company. There's also other organizations, crypto investors that don't live in the US, from Canada, that also used a Puerto Rican shell company. And I don't know if you know this, you know, Puerto Rico is not a state, it's a territory, but you don't have to pay income tax if you're configured there. So a bunch of this money is coming from out of the state and out of the country, which is crazy. And this I'll I'll preface this with when I was a teenager, I became a vegetarian. Because back then I learned about factory farming and testing on animals, and I was horrified as someone with a conscience. And back then you couldn't buy organic meat or dairy unless you lived out in the country and knew people that raised it. But that you know, part of the organic movement hadn't really uh matured yet. So the only if you didn't want to participate in factory farming, the only options you had were to become vegetarian or vegan and uh or live in the country and make connections with uh actual farmers and ranchers that raise eggs, meat, dairy, uh butter, that that kind of stuff. So, anyhow, so I I have that experience. If I was vegetarian and then I got into small-scale farming and I wanted to grow more of my own food. And I've tried growing soybeans and making tempeh, grains, all kinds of things. And I learned, and this is where there's a great book by Gene Logston, who's written a lot of great books, but this one is called All Flesh is Grass. And he basically talks about how our domesticated animals, many of them that eat grass, horses, cows, uh, pigs eat grass, sheep, goats, rabbits, a whole bunch of them, llamas, donkeys, are amazing. They turn grass, grasslands, which is the best covering for the earth in many places, that can't support forest, uh, and they turn it into meat and milk and hides and leather and all kinds of stuff that are useful. And most of the agricultural land on the planet really shouldn't be tilled up because that process of plowing and tilling, uh, the way you're releasing the fertilize, the fertility of the soil is you're mineralizing the humus, the organic matter through exposure to the sun. And then it becomes mineral, the plants can use it. But you only get to do that for a little while, and then the soil is degraded unless you're very conscious and you're doing cover cropping and making compost and applying rotating crops, having fallow periods, things I do here on my farm. Um, like we see our organic matter increasing over time, even though we're tilling, because we're doing all these soil conservation practices. And even still, I've learned a fallow period is important. What you can't see, well, maybe you can see a corner of it. There's a couple acres above me of land that we used to farm, growing annual crops for seed, that now I put into a mixed clover and grass uh pasture mix, and we're just gonna be grazing on it for a few years to build back soil fertility and just feed our animals. Anyhow, that vegan mindset, and I know what it's like because I used to be that. Uh similarly, like the don't cut down any trees. Well, it's like if you use lumber or heat your home with wood, that's just hypocrisy. So the vegan mindset, and I have friends that are vegan and I get it, they love animals. That's great. I love animals too. And this mindset that wants to, it's a naive mindset and very arrogant oftentimes because they want other people to adopt their belief system that's brand new. And one thing I've realized over the years of trying to grow my own food and getting into raising animals of all different sorts and doing all the butchering myself and doing it in a reverent way, um, is that you know, for one, all agriculture used to be based on animals because that was how we plowed the fields with oxen or horses or mules or donkeys or water buffalo or and that still happens in many parts of the earth. We've moved to a fossil fuel base system. So we're using fossil fuels to do that work, and that really took place in the early 1900s and just ramped up until post-World War II. It's very unusual to see any kind of uh, you know, livestock pulling plows in the U.S. You can see that in other parts of the world. Similarly, the fertility used to come from animal manures and rotating them through the land. And a real ideal farm that doesn't use fossil fuels for farming, probably 70% of the land would be in pasture, hay, and grain to feed livestock. That you then produces the fertility to fertilize the other cash crops. Nowadays, most farms, all of the farm is cash crops. They import all the fertility, usually in the source of um, you know, some kind of extracted petroleum product in hydrous ammonia or urea, which is basically oil, or let's say that an organic farm, they're using some kind of uh factory farm byproduct like chicken manure or composted manure or fish meal, uh fish emulsion, that kind of thing. I remember years ago talking to a man who was a certifier for California Certified Organic Farms, C C O F, and they're the main certifier in California. They certify farms outside of that state too. Anyhow, he was certifying a fish emulsion plant down in Baja, and I guess at that time there were five of these plants, and they would have two boats with a big quarter mile-wide net, and they do sonar or however to target schools of junk fish, you know, tiny minnows, that kind of stuff. And it's not fish byproducts, they're literally mining the ocean for fish for organic farming, and that's why I think it's so important that real regenerative agriculture, and I'm just gonna make a blanket statement and if I'll link my video about regenerative agriculture, includes animals. You can't do it otherwise. Maybe in you know, unique exceptions and urban environments or something, but they're probably importing all their fertility, whereas these guys, they make more of themselves. Look at how happy these animals are here. I'm here chilling, my dogs are sleeping in the shade over there, and they make more of themselves. They turn grass that grows from sunlight abundantly here for part of the year into their bodies and manure and carbon dioxide that they're breathing on the plants. And the beautiful thing about raising sheep is that they're born in the spring, they live on their mama's milk for until they're ready to graze, and by about that time the grass is growing. And then here there's a grazing window, and it basically mirrors the solar calendar. You know, the starting, let's say, February 1st, the days are getting longer and longer until summer solstice, and then tapering off, and then that tapering off time, August, September is the ideal time to slaughter lambs for meat. And lamb is really good. If you haven't had it, a lot of the world's really into it. Go to North Africa or a lot of Africa or Morocco or all around the Mediterranean, it's all about it. Turkey, lamb kebabs, good stuff. Um, and sheepskins are cool. And just back to this vegan mindset is so naive because I don't want this to happen, but really it's a NIMBY issue. And I'll let that truck go by. It's my neighbor. And if you don't know that acronym, it's not in my backyard. And basically, it's this mindset that I want my life, I don't want to experience the suffering of animals. So I'm either going to be vegan or vegetarian, or I'm gonna buy all my food at Whole Foods or Erwan or one of these kind of places, and then I don't have to witness the suffering of animals. Um, you know, are they buy organic thinking that all those animals are treated well? And unfortunately, that's not the case. Not all farms are like this super small family farm thing. There are big factory organic farms as well. That's a whole other issue. Maybe we'll explore it at a later time. But this NIMBY mindset wants to externalize all that stuff rather than acknowledge that it's part of it. Like if I let all my ram lambs grow up and have horns and just like live out their days, it's gonna be a mess. And this IP28, here's the insanity of it, is they say that all farms and ranches that raise livestock for meat need to wait till the animal dies of natural causes. That's just insanity. For one, that meat would be no good. It wouldn't be profitable for the farmer at all to live. I mean, sheep can live to be like 12. And then you're like, at that point you want to kill them just out of mercy because they like screw up their legs or they have problems. Uh, I've seen it firsthand. It's just you can't let nature run its course. All of agriculture, all of civilization is intervening and collaborating with and participating in nature. And this mindset that I think is an urban mindset of people that you know went to universities and grew up totally divorced from the realities of life. And it's it's just insane. This won't pass here in Oregon I had recently joined the board of a statewide organization called Friends of Family Farmers, and I was talking with the executive director yesterday if they were going to devote any resources to it. And they're like, we don't need to, because the Cattlemen's Association, the Oregon Farm Bureau, and uh the Oregon Sportsman Association have each put forth large sums of money to just torpedo this thing. So what a waste of money, though. You got all these vegans that raised all this money that could have been doing something productive to initiate this ridiculous, ludicrous legislation. And then these organizations that I don't necessarily agree that with everything that the Oregon Farm Bureau does or the Cataman Association, I don't raise cows, so it's not really my place to participate in that. But then they have to spend money on those things, raise money from people that are, you know, well-intended or the sportsmen's. They say they want to ban hunting of deer. It's like where I live, everybody, you know, in the fall were like, hey, you get your deer. It's just like part of the management of these habitats. And I see it. It's just a it's this crazy, nimby, dissociative divorce from reality, divorce from nature uh scenario that this, you know, the I think that the vegan mindset, I'll just zero in on that because the organizations that are supporting this all purport to be that. Uh you know, that they're going to be compassionate, we don't want to see any life suffer. And it's like, well, suffering happens. And when I was studying biodynamic agriculture, one of the ways it was phrased uh in the literature that you know was over so back to this idea that uh you know Rudolf Seiner talked about that the role of the steward is to recognize the gift that the domesticated animals have made and treat them with respect, dignity, compassion, and try and make their life as good as possible. Nothing lives forever. And if you've ever witnessed an elderly animal suffering, it is uh really jerks on your heartstrings, whether it's a cat or a dog or a sheep or a cow. And so good stewardship of animals involves culling before you have problems. And I'll share a little story of my own was one time I had a you, I believe her name was uh you know Bertha or Greta. We used to give them like old woman names. And this was when I was newer at having sheep, and this animal was about 10 years old, and I was like, oh, we'll let her have lambs one more time. And she wound up having triplets and really suffering. Long labor. Normally the lambs are born, they drop to the ground, the mama's licking them, eats of the placenta, and the baby's nursing within a half hour. It just happens. And the ones that it don't that they don't lamb well, uh it really is on my uh responsibility to call them before that happens. So anyhow, this one animal that was older, had triplets, two of them, well, one was still born, one was born alive, and then one was stuck, and it was a whole thing. And I should have just had put her down right then, but she suffered for hours and hours as we're trying to pull this thing out, pull this animal out that's dead, but she would die if we didn't. And so you have to recognize these things, and that's it. This kind of leads into my next part, and this is a bit of a closing, is we did a butchering workshop a number of years uh months ago in November or so, and uh we called it demystifying death. And I had two friends here co-teaching with me. One is a hide tanner, really good at tanning hides, and another is a Chinese acupuncture doctor. So we did an anatomy lesson, and then we also ate organ meats and stuff as part of the workshop. And as I'm getting ready to do the first slaughter with a knife, uh this one young woman, we had about 20, 25 people there, asked, like, well, aren't you gonna burn some sage and pray for the animal or something like this? And I was like, Lady, I've been praying for this animal for 25 years. The whole the flock, the whole thing, raised my kids in close connection to watching lambs be born and the miracle of birth, and laughing at their silliness and their sweetness, and little lambs bouncing around or young ram lambs headbutting each other, all these silly things, and it's all one big prayer. And that's one thing that I think city people, suburban people don't understand about those of us that are producers that grow all the food that you eat, unless you're a gardener or homesteader and you're growing a portion of your own food. They love it. Why else would you do all this work to be paid like a peasant? Because no farmers getting rich off it. It's because we love the lifestyle, so we do it with. Reverence, reciprocity, respect, and doing our best to preserve the dignity of the animals. And um, you know, I hadn't really thought about it in that way. It's not like you can just like pray some magic words and then all of a sudden the animal doesn't suffer. You just like know what you're doing, you know, to avoid suffering. And if you don't, go learn from some older person. And and it just showed me the the naivete, the level of uh, and that's why this woman was there at the workshop trying to learn and you know and confront her own fears. I don't mean to throw her under the bus, but when I see things like this, you know, banning the injuring, killing, insemination on farms, uh and even wild animals, I'm just like, people, go go find something better to do with your time. It's ridiculous, it's absolutely ridiculous, and quite honestly, an insult to those of us that are doing our best to provide nutritious food for our communities. So that's what I have to share today. I know the whole topic of animal welfare is a bit contentious, but it's being put here in our face, and I want to point to something when I have all these people asking me, what do you think about this? I heard this on Instagram that they're gonna ban all this. So that's why I took the time to do this today. If you like this, maybe consider sharing it with a friend or relative. Um, I'm doing this whole podcast thing not to make money, we know I don't make any money doing it, I spend money doing it because it's my time. But I do feel it's important for people to hear from actual farmers and ranchers reality. Because even the nonprofit organizations that are advocating for small farms, they're not farmers, and I'll tell you that because I'm on the board of one, and there is another woman who's a producer on the board. Uh, but so often we have decisions being made in Washington, DC, or here in Oregon and Salem by people that are just totally uh divorced from the realities of which they want to uh regulate or legislate. So I encourage those people to go find real jobs and uh spend their time constructively. So hopefully you appreciate that. Uh feel free to like, share, follow this. There will be an audio version in the comments down below, and hope these guys take a lunch soon because they're making a racket over there. Unlike my sheep. So we'll end it with just a little sheep chilling, grazing. Look at those guys, they're so cute. And here's goats, they don't have wool, so they're in the sun.