Have you ever asked your kids to explain where food comes from? They’ll laugh and say loudly, “From the store!” That’s one of those perfectly simple answers that makes talking with kids fun and entertaining. But can adults provide a much better answer? Many people don’t understand how animals are raised for food. Either they lack information or they simply aren’t interested. By keeping the details of its production processes a secret, the food industry has become a multi-billion-dollar sector. We like to know what we grow, how we grow it, and what we eat, and we love sharing this knowledge with our customers. This is one of the main reasons why “NEGANTIgardi” was founded, and why we are building a better food system.

Over the past century, the food system has changed dramatically and has reached a point where its nutritional value is unacceptable. Food is supposed to sustain us, enrich us with nutrients and vitamins, and be our source of energy. Instead, food makes us sick, harms the environment, and nature, creates inhumane conditions for animals, and, frankly, produces low-quality livestock and poultry meat that simply doesn’t taste good.

These are bold statements, and it’s understandable that there’s a lot of confusion about how meat ends up on grocery store shelves every day. We fully understand that people are busy with their daily lives, want to get everything done as quickly as possible, and want to feed their families at the best possible price. But we want to help. And we believe we can do so in a way that’s better not only for you, but also for animals, farmers, and the environment.

For example, let’s talk about beef sold in supermarkets. These animals are raised on farms that use artificial insemination to increase the number of calves born and boost profits. Calves are separated from their mothers too early, when they should still be nursing, and are then fed hormones to artificially stimulate growth. Farmers who raise such cattle are under intense pressure from large corporations to focus solely on profits, regardless of anything else, which leads to conditions such as those found in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). The animals are transported by heavy trucks and trains to these CAFO facilities, where they are crammed by the hundreds and thousands into small spaces and fed cheap feed. The feed consists of chicken feathers and byproducts from other animals. The animals are kept in very small spaces with no room to walk around, let alone graze. And then they are loaded back onto heavy trucks and trains and sent to slaughterhouses, where they are processed every day along with thousands of other animals.

The situation is no better for pigs and chickens. CAFO pigs live for only eight months before they are slaughtered. They never see the outside world, nor do they breathe fresh air. Chickens are born in massive factories, then sent to a chicken coop where tens of thousands of birds live under constant artificial light for 45 days, and then, before slaughter, are crammed into cages. Never moving, never breathing fresh air, never seeing the blue sky. The chickens are fattened so intensively that, before they are slaughtered, most of them can no longer walk.

That’s the meat they send to supermarkets. It’s pale. It’s tasteless. It’s cheap!

The top priority at every stage of the food supply chain is profit. Not nutritional value, not quality, not taste, and certainly not customer satisfaction.

So, what’s the alternative? We, the “NEGANTIgardi”!

We have treated our cattle with respect, allowing them to graze on natural pastures and slaughtering them at a nearby organic slaughterhouse. Transportation causes stress in animals, and meat from stressed animals does not taste good. Therefore, we do everything in our power to minimize stress for the animals.

The tastiest meat comes from animals that eat the kind of feed they have historically consumed for centuries. This also applies to breastfeeding, as a mother’s milk provides calves with a large portion of the nutrition they need to stay healthy. Healthy animals do not need antibiotics or growth hormones, unlike animals raised on CAFOs.

High-quality meat also comes from animals that are allowed to graze freely. That is precisely why we ensure at least 0.5 ha of pasture per head of cattle on our farm. This ensures that each animal has enough forage to eat. We can rotate our grain fields in a much more sustainable way by using livestock to naturally fertilize the fields. As a result, not only do they produce higher-quality beef, but their fields will also yield better crops (and continue to do so for decades to come).