This past week, a variety of propositions were up for vote across America. One of curious interest was California's Proposition 2 that would require factory farms to provide enough space for chickens, calves and pregnant pigs to turn, stand and stretch their limbs.

Proposition 2 passed with a 63% vote and takes affect in 2015.

Let's dissect this a bit. Requiring factory farms to provide enough space for animals to turn, stand and stretch means the animals do not have this opportunity now. Allowing factory farms seven years to comply indicates the physical changes needed must be extensive. All this being true, what does it say about current conditions on factory farms?

Wikipedia defines factory farming as the practice of raising farm animals in confinement at high stocking density where a farm operates as a factory.

A factory... not a farm? To see one of the nicer examples of a pig's life on a factory farm, click here. YouTube.com has many other investigarory videos about this topic.  Be warned!  The scenes are graphic, disturbing and should make us think twice about the meat we buy at the grocery store and whether or not we want to feed it to our family.

The day after Proposition 2 passed, one of our mama pigs had her first liter of 12 baby piglets.  There definitely are no modifications needed on our farm!

Our breeder stock consists of eight mama pigs and one daddy pig named Dudley.  This family provides approximately 80 new pigs a year for harvest.

They share our barnyard with a sweet family of pygmy goats, our original "layer" hens and ever-multiplying barn cats.

The barn has a south-facing open side with connecting pastures leading to some wooded acreage.  Our pigs root in the pasture, eat acorns from the big oaks in the woods, bathe and create mud pools from a fixed sprinkler we run in the afternoon and sleep outside under the open side of the barn covering.  Throughout their area are several fresh well-water hook-ups for their drinking convenience.

As Michael Pollan states in his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, when farm animals are free to behave according to their natures, in environments that use species diversity to create bio-synchratic relationships, they neither fight nor suffer from stress-related illness.

As you can see, there is no stress in our barnyard!