US Organic is cruel and inhumane to livestock. This statement will shock many and be denied by others. US standards for organic production of livestock are cruel and inhumane. They are a travesty of what organic should be.
In an ideal world, buying organic would mean the products you purchase were produced in a fair manner, provide a decent living for the farmer, and improve the fertility and long-term sustainability of the land. There should be no bad environmental effects caused by the farm’s management practices, and it should be a thriving, long-term producer for generations to come.
What Does Organic Really Mean?
Most people think that organic means no sprays, no chemicals, and no treatments for the problems that beset agriculture. However, organic does, in fact, allow the use of many chemicals. Some of them are actually more toxic and more lethal than their non-organic counterparts. The difference is that organic treatments are natural and not synthetic. All of agriculture defines the time between when a treatment can be given and when it is safe for humans. Organic pesticides can have longer withdrawal times for both handling and harvest than their non-organic counterparts.
Domestic animals should be free to express natural behaviors. They should also be protected from disease, parasites, predators, and illness. They should eat natural foods appropriate for their species, and they should be sheltered for their well-being. All of these requirements should be adjustable to reflect the vast differences in farms, soils, breeds, and species. They should reflect the diversity that is the birthright of many thousands of years of agriculture.
In many ways, organic vegetable and fruit growers are actually working toward this goal. However, US standards for livestock are woefully lacking in common sense and good animal husbandry practices.
Under US organic rules, no slaughter livestock can be given any sort of paraciticide. At all. On the surface, this sounds reasonable – after all, with proper management, there should be no parasites in your stock, right?
Wrong!
How Can We Prevent Parasites?
While there is much in livestock management that can be done to minimize common parasite infestations, there is no way to completely prevent them without medicine. All livestock is eventually slaughter stock, and a responsible farmer will make certain that animals are healthy and free of medications before they go to the slaughter yard. Parasite infestations cause significant harm not just to the individual animal, but also the herd. Even healthy animals that do not die can fail to thrive, resulting in lower-quality wool, meat, and milk, plus unnecessary discomfort, shortened lifespans, and higher mortality in young. Increased costs to raise replacements are a hidden, but significant, cost in a flock that is heavily parasitized.
Parasites in Sheep
Parasites in sheep can be broadly classified into several main groups: internal parasites, external parasites, and hybrid parasites.
Internal parasites mostly consist of worms. Roundworms and tapeworms infest the intestine, while flukes affect the liver, lungworms affect the bronchial passages, and meningeal worms affect the nervous system.
External parasites include ticks, which carry several viral diseases, plus sheep keds and lice in several varieties.
Hybrid parasites cause both internal and external damage. The bot fly lays eggs in the sheep’s nose, and after they hatch, the grubs eat the blood from the nasal passages. They can cause internal damage if they make their way into the stomach. Some bot flies can infect humans and other animals. Warble flies are another hybrid-type parasite.
Techniques to Reduce Parasites
Even besides medication, there are many techniques the farmer can use to reduce infestation in their stock. Proper grazing management, combined with large rest pastures, a hard freeze cycle, and the help of other agricultural species can help break the life cycles of parasites. If the land can be grazed by both cattle and sheep, a farmer can use the cattle to sweep the pasture of primary sheep parasites, and vice versa. The animals are still affected, but it will reduce the losses caused by parasites and lower the overall parasite burden of the flock.
FAMANCHA is a widely-used system that helps detect individuals infested with barber pole worm. While it’s a system for just one species and one parasite, it’s effective in areas with heavy barber pole worm burdens. Even then, knowing which animals are infested is useless unless something is done to kill the parasites.
Breeding sheep that are resistant to parasites can and does work, at least for the farm where they are bred. However, significant research in Australia and New Zealand indicates that animals bred to be resistant to parasites in one location may not carry that resistance to other areas. While it can be helpful in reducing individual farmers’ reliance on dewormers, it’s not an end-all solution.
All of these techniques can, and should, be used by all sustainable farmers to mitigate problems caused by parasites. However, nothing in a farmer’s arsenal can do anything about the parasites carried by wild animals.
Parasites with Wild Hosts
The meningeal worm is commonly carried by deer. Sheep are a dead-end host when infected because, unlike deer, they can die from the infestation. Nose bots are a serious problem in some areas because they are the larval form a fly. The farmer can do little to control the adults. We have personally lost sheep to nose bot infestations. Liver flukes are another parasite carried by deer and elk.
There is very little that farm management can do to curtail external parasites. Shearing at the proper time and providing clean bedding is about all we can do to prevent lide, keds, and ticks. Fortunately, such infestations tend to be rather rare. In our own flock, in the last eight years, we’ve only had to treat an external parasite infestation twice. In modern agriculture, sheep dips have been replaced by much smaller doses of targeted insecticides. Most are based on pyrethrins, a natural insecticide synthesized from chrysanthemum plants. Most pyrethrins today are synthetic, if only because the dosage is easier to predict and control.
Given that all domestic stock will become infested with parasites, it is critical that organic standards provide a safe and effective way to deal with these pests. When management is not effective, or when there is nothing management can do, we need to step in with medication. Sadly, there is no safe and effective parasiticide that is also USDA-organic approved. While many have been tried, under rigorous real-world testing, all of the organic-friendly solutions have failed. Even the best potential remedies cannot touch flying pests and flukes.
What Next?
This is a significant problem that is well-recognized by the organic standards in other countries. Under the international IFOAM standards, or the EU standards, proper control of parasites is deemed an animal welfare issue and is mandated by those standards. Treatment using approved parasiticides is allowed when a defined need is documented. Under the direction of a licensed veterinarian, when at least double the slaughter withdrawal time is adhered to, these treatments are allowed by the organic regulating bodies in their countries. Additional regulations concerning the prevention of any environmental contamination are also required.
This is an excellent common-sense approach, and it has resulted in the widespread adoption of organic standards by many diversified farms that would not otherwise consider doing so.
In US organic standards, when an apple farmer is facing a parasite problem like codling moths, there are safe, effective, accepted ways to eradicate the problem. Initially, dormant oils are sprayed on the trees to reduce the hatching rate of the overwintered eggs. Later, pheromone lures are used as mating disruptors, preventing the moths from finding mates. When the inevitable infestation does occur, there are several safe, effective chemical sprays that can kill the codling moth grubs. Similar options exist for many other vegetable and fruit crops.
The livestock producer, however, is denied any way to safely and effectively treat his or her animals.
How Things Used to Be
In the past, there were few, if any, safe and effective parasiticides. This resulted in the usage of unsafe options. Straight nicotine was one. They resulted in the needless deaths of many animals. Some medieval records indicate that it was not uncommon to lose up to 50% of the sheep in a flock per year to the worms they contracted. Such a waste of animals should be abhorrent to anyone who cares for animals. Even the best US organic farms seem to accept a loss of 10-15% of their stock as “normal.” A well-managed non-organic flock standard is less than 5%, and that’s including stillbirths and accidents.
The second big issue is vaccinations. The US standard says vaccinations are allowed in one section, but in another, nothing can be given that is not on the approved substances list. This has led to differences in how certifying agencies interpret the rules. In some locales, any vaccination to prevent disease is allowed; others will allow vaccines, but only in some cases; still others say that none are allowed.
This is cruel and confusing. In our area, there are many sheep diseases that stay in the soil. They can stay dormant there for decades, and they’re carried by wild animals. Before we vaccinated, we would lose lambs to these diseases. They are horrible clostridial infections, and once the animal gets sick, there is usually no possibility of recovery. Their deaths are prolonged and painful. To deny the farmer the option of preventing these diseases is to condemn their animals to unnecessary and cruel deaths.
Our Stance
It is for these reasons that I consider the current US organic standards to be cruel and inhumane. We will not become certified organic until these standards reflect the high level of care we demand for our sheep.
If we were in Wales or Europe, or Australia or New Zealand, we could, in fact, be easily qualified as organic. Their standards do recognize the critical animal welfare issues that parasites and preventable diseases represent, and they’ve provided a way to treat them effectively. Now, our next big step is to demand similar allowances here.