As the word is used in the mainstream, “farming” tends to imply “animal farming,” so a low[1]key opposition between vegans and “farmers” comes as no surprise. Animal farmers correctly understand that a vegan world would eliminate their current form of livelihood, and some vegans opposed to their activity boost that antagonism with rhetoric such as “fharmers.” But over the past decade a new relationship has been growing, one in which vegans are organizing to help animal farmers move from their current nonvegan practice into a form of farming that involves no animals. By 2020, several organizations had emerged doing extensive work around the system-changing project of farm transition.
Transfarmation
Mercy For Animals (MFA) got directly involved in the process. MFA coined the term “transfarmation” and launched a successful program to enlist farmers willing to transition away from animal use. “From our perspective,” noted Tyler Whitley, who runs MFA’s Transfarmation project, “farmers are essential, and we’re fortunate enough to work with farmers who got into it because they want to grow food for people.”
Whitley specified that many farmers are motivated by this simple notion but find themselves increasingly trapped in a zero[1]sum game in which big corporations are calling all the shots and feeding people takes a back seat. That’s one reason why a growing number of animal farmers are leaving that industry for one that can be seen very literally as more sustainable. MFA’s program helps them set up a different kind of system by building projects and infrastructure around the basic transition process and sharing farmers’ step-by-step progress.
Rowdy Girl
Renee King-Sonnen and Rowdy Girl, the calf who inspired an animal sanctuary.
“The whole farm transition started with my big mouth,” Renee King-Sonnen, founder of Rowdy Girl Sanctuary, remarked laughingly in a Zoom interview. Around ten years ago, while running a cattle ranch with her husband, Tommy Sonnen, King-Sonnen named one calf Rowdy Girl in defiance of Sonnen’s rule never to name the cattle, as the calf’s headstrong personality stood out from the others. “I didn’t know at the time that I was going vegan,” she said, “but Rowdy Girl did. Rowdy Girl herself was my vegan advocate. She was the one who helped me see what we were doing.”
Seeing things from a new perspective, King[1]Sonnen decided she couldn’t keep raising animals and taking them “up the road” to the slaughterhouse. “I told Tommy one day, ‘You take those calves up the road one more time I’ll follow you. I’ll go to that sale barn. I’ll buy ‘em all back and bring ‘em back home; I’ll do it with your credit card.’”
Although it took a while, finally “Tommy came over onto this side,” she says happily of their new life running Rowdy Girl Sanctuary.
This post is excerpted from an article in the Fall 2024 edition of American Vegan magazine (subscribe here).
