Missing Willow Farm

The Animal Welfare Approved program audits and certifies family farms who are raising their animals humanely, outdoors on pasture.  We applied for this certification for our lamb a few months ago and just found out we’ve been approved.  We were visited by an auditor who flew in from Kansas to see our little operation.  There are pretty stringent standards that we were already meeting.  The program requires very detailed record keeping so we moved our animal records from a calendar journal into a spreadsheet for ease of the annual program audit. We were already using a certified humane kill slaughterhouse.  We’ve been told that hardly anybody gets completely certified on their first try and here we are.  As miserable as most animals are treated in commercial facilities, ours have a good hormone-free life.  They have a big pasture, a barn for shelter, huge dogs to protect them, the best care and loads of attention.  And if Purina made sheep treats as well as dog treats, we’d surely have some!