We believe that the values food producers hold have a direct impact on the quality of the food they produce. Respect Creation is one of the core beliefs at Ashfount: respect for every living thing on a farm, from the life in the soil to the cattle on the pasture, and for the people who eat what the farm grows.
What does that mean in practice? How does it connect to regenerative farming, and why is it good for business as well as for the land? This page sets out our answer.
A food culture that has stopped respecting living things
Climate change and carbon emissions are well publicized. The threat that modern agricultural practices pose to our health and food security gets far less attention, and a few figures paint a sobering picture.
- The IPCC finds that about a quarter of the Earth's ice-free land area is subject to human-induced degradation, and that soil erosion from agricultural fields is estimated to be 10 to 20 times (no-tillage) to more than 100 times (conventional tillage) higher than the soil formation rate.
- According to the ASPCA, factory farms account for over 95% of livestock farming in the U.S.
- The EPA counted 21,279 facilities in the U.S. classified as CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) in 2024.
- Despite the abundance of food in the U.S., three in four American adults have at least one chronic condition, and over half have two or more, according to the CDC. Many of these conditions are linked to poor eating patterns and low physical activity.
- Monocultures have spread. The FAO notes that since the 1900s, some 75 percent of plant genetic diversity has been lost as farmers worldwide have left their multiple local varieties and landraces for genetically uniform, high-yielding varieties.
The way we have produced food over the last century has hurt our health and the welfare of the animals we farm, and it has exposed the faults of modern agriculture. Why do we degrade our landscapes and soil, and treat animals as commodities rather than as sentient beings?
Part of the answer is that we embraced technological change while neglecting a respectful relationship with nature. Respect means valuing the life of every being on the land, big and small, and recognizing how much we depend on the animals and plants around us.
Rethinking our relationship with nature
Farmers, ecologists and scientists increasingly agree that technical fixes alone will not solve environmental degradation. Lasting change starts with the attitudes we bring to the land.
Respecting creation is more than protecting the planet from pollution or a changing climate. It is a fundamental shift in our ethos: seeing nature not as a backdrop or a resource to be mined, but as a living system we are part of and responsible for. That shift is open to everyone, whatever their beliefs, because it rests on two plain observations: living things have value of their own, and a farm only thrives when the life on it thrives.
For farmers, that responsibility is concrete. The soil, the water, the animals and the wild species on a farm are in their care, and how they treat them decides whether the land is richer or poorer for the next generation. That is why this belief sits so close to our commitment to heal the soil.
Respecting the "pigness of the pig"
Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm is one of the best-known farmers and authors in regenerative agriculture. In his book The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs, he examines industrial farming from the point of view of a farmer who works holistically. His argument speaks to anyone who feels disconnected from their food and how it is produced.
Salatin's central idea is that every animal has a nature of its own. A pig is not a pile of protein to be engineered, but a being with its own instincts and abilities, and good farming starts by honoring them. Understanding animal behavior is not only a route to more sustainable practice. It is a matter of respect.
He argues that our research and farming practices are predicated on growing everything "faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper, without regard to respecting and honoring distinctiveness." His warning is that a culture which views animals as mechanical objects to be reprogrammed and manipulated will, in time, view people the same way.
You do not need to share Salatin's personal convictions to see the point. If we keep treating land and livestock purely as commodities, and keep consuming without limits, we risk seeing one another as commodities too.
Respect for animals means ending needless suffering
Many regenerative farmers have concluded that the way meat is produced at scale causes unjustifiable suffering for large numbers of livestock.
When animals are treated as commodities, their natural behavior is ignored in favor of intensifying production. Most factory-farmed animals are raised in overcrowded conditions that stop them from foraging or nesting, and the stress can lead them to injure one another.
Mutilations are common: beak trimming in chickens, tail docking in pigs. They cause intense pain and prevent natural behavior. Demand for fast-growing animals also brings concentrated feed and selective breeding that put their bodies under intense physiological stress. Even where a pig keeps its tail, a life with no chance to behave like a pig is still a problem.
Will Harris, whose White Oak Pastures is one of the regenerative agriculture case studies in our resources, puts it plainly:
Good animal welfare used to mean you don't intentionally inflict pain and discomfort on the animal. You keep them fed. You keep them safe. You don't hurt them... To us, now, that is no longer sufficient. For me and my family and my employees, good animal welfare means it is incumbent upon us as herdsmen to create an environment in which the animals can express instinctive behavior.
Cows were born to roam and graze. Chickens were born to scratch and peck. Hogs were born to root and wallow... If you have a cow on a feedlot, a hog in a gestation crate, a chicken in a battery cage, they're safe, they're reasonably comfortable, but they can't express instinctive behavior.
It's like putting your child in a closet and saying, "This is great. I keep the temperature at 72 degrees. I leave the light on. He'll never break his leg playing football." That may seem like great child-rearing, except it's not.
Safety and comfort are the minimum. Respect asks more: a life in which the animal can be what it is.
From scarcity to abundance
Salatin argues that industrial farming rests on a scarcity mindset. Monocultures and concentrated animal feeding operations make it fragile: disease spreads easily, and degraded soil with little biodiversity needs ever more chemicals to force a yield.
The alternative is a farm built on resilience, with healthier soil and animals free to express their natural behavior. That means considering each animal and each crop for its nature and putting its strengths to work.
Pigs are a good example. A pig can plow with its nose and has a talent for moving material around. At Polyface, pigs help build compost alongside the cattle. In winter, the cows are fed hay on a bedding of wood chips and straw, and corn is worked into the bedding layer. Once the cows move out, the pigs move in, root through the bedding for the fermented corn and turn the material from anaerobic to aerobic compost as they go.
The job suits the pig, it is work the animals enjoy, and it serves the farm. The pig stops being a commodity and becomes a co-laborer, a fellow worker in the needs of the farm rather than a unit of protein.
Respect leads to healthier food and viable farms
Respecting creation is a moral position, but it is also a way of farming that pays off for farmers, their communities and the wider world.
Salatin points to a basic pattern in nature: perennials build soil, while annuals use up accumulated fertility in a seasonal flush of production. Taking grazing animals off the land, plowing up perennials indefinitely and substituting chemicals works against that pattern. Many farms that manage holistically find they get better and more varied yields as biodiversity in the soil recovers, and using fewer harmful chemicals protects the soil, the health of the people working the land and the farm's budget.
Salatin told Indiana Public Media that his family's farm has not used chemical fertilizer since 1961. Instead, Polyface runs chickens after the cows for parasite and grub control, and the eggs become a profitable by-product of that system. Letting pigs turn the compost saves the cost of heavy turning machines, and doing without pesticides spares the farm the license, the fees and the classes that come with them.
The same respect shows up on the plate. With most meat in the U.S. coming from intensively farmed animals, the way we eat is doing our health few favors. Intensively farmed animals often carry lower levels of beneficial omega-3 and a less favorable ratio of omega-3 to omega-6, and crowded conditions can increase bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella. Routine antibiotic use in industrial farming is driving the rise of resistant superbugs, raising the risk of a post-antibiotic age in which treatable diseases become deadly again.
Animals that are treated with respect and allowed to express their natural behavior are usually healthier and need far fewer medical interventions. Food raised in step with nature can also be measurably more nutritious. A 2007 Mother Earth News study tested the nutritional content of Polyface Farm eggs and compared them with the USDA standard nutritional profile for eggs:
- Vitamin E: 0.97 mg (USDA) against 7.37 mg (Polyface Farm)
- Vitamin A: 487 IU against 763 IU
- Omega-3 fatty acids: 0.033 g against 0.71 g
- Cholesterol: 423 mg against 292 mg
To deny a hen the chance to range on pasture is to deny the person who eats her egg a full nutritional package.
Respecting creation is good business
Many regenerative farmers point out that farming has lost its appeal for younger people, who do not want to carry debt to agrochemical companies or use practices they are ethically uneasy with. Farming that respects creation gives them another path and greater freedom over the business.
Regenerative practices are gaining ground as their results become better understood, and more people accept that the industrial model cannot go on indefinitely. That is good news for anyone building a food business that has to serve both its bottom line and the land.
At Ashfount, we believe the way forward for any venture in the food space is respect for creation and a willingness to act as a steward of the land and animals in its care. It is a question we ask of the farms, ranches and food businesses we work with, and the story we help them tell through our consulting and media work. Businesses built on that respect can flourish, ethically and financially.