When choosing animals for our farm, we look for the same traits our ancestors prized – good personality, great foraging ability, easy birthing, and good mothering instincts. These are things that are not found in "improved" breeds used by modern agriculture. Modern ag doesn't care if animals can forage because they're raised in big buildings. They don't care if they can easily give birth because they can do cesareans or "pull" babies, and mothering instincts are irrelevant and unknown because they don't allow mothers to raise their own babies. So, modern ag didn't purposely breed out these traits – they simply ignored them because they focused on traits such as feed-to-meat or feed-to-milk conversation ratios, and as a result, lots of bad traits were perpetuated.

I once met an old farmer who said that on his grandparent's farm (so you're talking about people born in the 1800s), you could walk into the pasture and milk a cow standing there in the middle of the grass. If a cow didn't have that kind of personality, she was hamburger. They bred for personality, and they culled animals that didn't have the personality they wanted. Personality is completely irrelevant on a 7,000-head dairy farm. The only thing that matters is production.

Modern agriculture is extremely labor intensive – put animals in buildings, give them food that was produced many miles away, shovel up their manure, and haul it away. They also take away the babies and raise them, instead of having the mothers do it. Although this takes a lot of time and energy, it is possible to raise more animals in a smaller amount of space for less money. Of course, it is not very natural or healthy, so plenty of animals get sick and have to be fed a steady diet of antibiotics and other drugs to stay alive and keep growing fast.

Some might call us old-fashioned, but we do what we do because we're concerned about ethically raising animals and creating a healthy product. By raising animals on pasture, the way they were raised 100 years ago, the animals are healthier and happier, and the end products taste better and are better for you. We're also adding a bit of beauty to the world. Watching goats and sheep graze on pasture or seeing chickens pecking at grass is much more beautiful than staring at another big metal confinement building.

And this system makes so much sense – the animals walk around in the midst of their buffet, eating what they want and fertilizing it so it will grow more for them. It's a perfect system. Who are we to fiddle with a system that's worked since the dawn of time?