Wise Farmers: Nicolette Niman

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Waterkeeper Alliance had found that rivers and streams across the US were being polluted by toxic effluent from the huge number of factory pig farms, chiefly in North Carolina and Iowa. Nicolette led Waterkeeper’s campaign to reform the factory pig farm industry, reducing the cruelty and pollution by de-intensifying the animal factories and keeping more pigs outdoors as an integral part of diversified, regenerative farms.

One of the farmers she interviewed about more sustainable and humane ways to raise cattle and pigs was Bill Niman, who was already ranching in Northern California and had founded a network of several hundred farmers and ranchers using high welfare and ecologically sound agricultural methods. Niman had become a guru of a new movement to reconnect consumers with well-raised meats. The Niman Ranch company’s motto is “Raised with Care.” Bill and Nicolette married and now live together on the original California ranch, with their two sons, raising cattle and chickens outdoors, strictly avoiding hormones and sub-therapeutic antibiotics. Niman Ranch markets high welfare meat produced by a network of 600 farms that all follow the exacting standards that allow the meat to be sold the across the US with the Niman Ranch label.

Although she was a vegetarian for over three decades, Nicolette now eats meat and believes that eating meat from cattle raised on pasture and from pigs raised outdoors is beneficial for our health, nourishes soils, and fertilises herbal leys. She disagrees with the film Cowspiracy only because it argues against eating any meat rather than changing your diet to pasture fed meat. She does of course believe that industrially-produced meat is wrong because of the inhumane ways in which it is produced, and because of the shocking over-use of antibiotics in factory farms. So, to explain how eating no meat at all is the wrong solution to factory farming, in 2021 she published her rebuttal, ‘Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat‘.

Niman Ranch products give consumers the chance to eat healthy, humanely produced meat with guaranteed standards under a label that is now recognised across the US. The Niman Ranch rules for pigs are;

No gestation crates – EVER ✔ ✔
No farrowing crates – EVER ✔
Raised outdoors or in deeply bedded pens ✔
No tail docking ✔
No teeth clipping ✔
Low-stress farm environment ✔
Natural bedding required ✔
No Antibiotics – EVER ✔
Vegetarian Feeds ✔

Nicolette says, “When I started eating meat again, I was reconnecting with my whole upbringing, my culture and the foods that I’ve grown up with. I’ve felt physically and emotionally good. It’s been surprising how much joy that has brought me. Our mission is to raise livestock traditionally, humanely, and sustainably to produce the finest tasting meat in the world.”