This piece, written by Shannon, originally appeared as a story at SapBushFarmStore.com. 

“Do you vaccinate your animals?”

The call comes in as I’m getting ready for bed early last week.  “We vaccinate the sheep,” I tell the caller.  “They get a C, D & T vaccine, for Clostridium Perfigens type C & D, and Tetanus.”

She stammers a little on the other end.  She doesn’t know what to do with this information. 

“I understand lots of people are concerned about all types of vaccines,” I push forward.  “I was slow to vaccinate my own kids, even.  But if a disease is a real threat, and we will not be able to alleviate the animal’s suffering if they contract it, then we will vaccinate.”

The truth is, we actually vaccinate very little.  The cattle and chickens don’t require vaccines.  Because we artificially inseminate and farrow out our pastured pigs here on the farm, and because we minimize visitation, the herd is pretty closed to the outside world.  They aren’t exposed to risk.  Since we stopped buying in feeder pigs and started breeding our own, we haven’t needed to vaccinate pigs for years.  The sheep do require the one vaccine they get.  The first symptom of Clostridium Perfigens is enterotoxemia.  It progresses so swiftly, the animal can die before any problem is even detected.  And tetanus is brutal.  This is truly a case where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

But I don’t think this is the information this potential customer is looking for.  I don’t think this is the conversation she is expecting.  

“Am I giving you the information you need?  Perhaps you have a specific vaccine that’s worrying you?”

“The COVID vaccine!”  She blurts.  “They’re putting it in everything.  They’re injecting mRNA into the entire food supply!”

Ummmm…..no, they’re not.  We’re not.

I admire her vulnerability, her willingness to speak to a worry that, to me, is nearly comical.   “That’s not a thing,” I try to explain.  “The animals aren’t at risk for that, and no farm I know would willingly incur expense and hassle to administer anything that wasn’t addressing an imminent risk to the animals.  And we’re not legally required to administer any vaccines.  Each farm makes it’s own risk assessment.”

This is the second time in two weeks when we’ve fielded this concern from new customers. Where is it coming from?

It doesn’t take me long to find out. 

Apparently, about a year ago, according to the Associated Press,  a claim began circulating through social media that farmers either would be, or currently are, injecting livestock with mRNA vaccines.   “Social media posts in recent days have falsely asserted that farmers are required to vaccinate livestock with such vaccines and baselessly suggested that unsuspecting humans will therefore consume the immunizations,” writes Angelo Fichera for the AP.  He quotes an Instagram video:

“‘I just recently read that farmers and ranchers are being told that they must inject their livestock with the mRNA vaccine,’ a man in an Instagram video claims. ‘What temperature do I need to cook my cow in order to get rid of the mRNA death jab vaccine thing?’”

This issue has been raging on for an entire year, and I’ve managed to be blissfully unaware of it.  It is only just catching up to us. Sap Bush Hollow Farm’s social media got hacked at the start of 2022, and we took the opportunity to springboard off it.  We never looked back.  

And while the customer who is calling believes that the issue of greatest concern is whether or not I’m giving the Covid vaccine to my animals, I am more concerned about her social media use, and how it impacts me, a farmer who needs to get off the phone and get to bed, who’s left defending our animal husbandry practices against misinformation.

“We all have a choice now between two profound forces,” writes Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus, “fragmentation, or flow”(Hari, p.62). Hari argues that each day, whether we maintain focus on our lives and creative work, or suffer from the fragmented distraction of social media, can be boiled down to the work of two psychologists, B.F. Skinner, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Skinner, who rose to fame in the 1950s and found his way into psychology textbooks across the nation for teaching pigeons to play ping pong, brought us the idea of operant conditioning, where, through the use of reinforcement, humans and animals can be taught how to act in the world through a system of rewards.  According to an article in Smithsonian Magazine, Skinner used this method to teach pigeons to play ping pong and complete other nonsensical actions.  It’s how we train dogs to sit by offering treats, or how Skinner trained rats to pull levers.  Skinner argued that this is how humans learned, as well — that “Children are rewarded, through their parents’ verbal encouragement and affection, for making a sound that resembles a certain word until they can actually say that word” (Koren, 2013). 

Hari brings this forward in time to the social media platforms — If people get rewarded with hearts and likes and comments on their posts, they keep doing it over and over and over again.  According to Hari, “You and your sense of focus are simply the sum total of all the reinforcements you have experienced in your life”(53).  In essence, we’ve been re-programmed by social media to dwell there, on a quest for arbitrary meaningless currency, such as likes, shares, hearts, comments and follows. 

And so, following this logic, coupled with the algorithms of social media that give precedence to those posts that will distract us as much as possible from our everyday life  —those posts that generate the most likes, hearts, shares, comments and follows (usually the most outlandish and controversial stuff…or selfies), we’re conditioned to scroll and scroll and scroll.  And as we do, we’re shown those things that keep our eyes locked on our screens for the longest periods of time -very often those things that enrage, or shock…

…Like baseless claims that farmers are pumping the food supply with mRNA vaccines. 

My own reasons for abandoning social media after that initial hack were varied —- I hated social media’s intrusion into my life — the sense of obligation to shove a camera several times each day at everything we do here at Sap Bush Hollow – whether it’s laminating croissants, cooking a grass-fed steak, sitting down for a meal, feeding the pastured pigs or….vaccinating the sheep.  I hated the sense of inadequacy that I experienced through my obligatory scrolling — no matter what success I enjoyed on the farm that day, another farmer was doing something better, smarter, faster, pithier, cleaner, and with more followers and a better looking haircut.  But beyond that, I wanted to recapture in my life what Hari argues is the antidote to the fragmentation of social media:  flow. That’s where Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work comes into play.

Csikszentmihalyi found Skinner’s worldview pretty depressing and limited.  There had to be more depth to the experience of life here on Earth.  So he began studying creativity, and expanded that work to examine anyone who was capable of experiencing deep enjoyment and involvement with life.  He coined the term flow, “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.”  Hari points out that the creative people Csikszentmihalyi investigated didn’t seem to live by Skinner’s rules.  The point of an activity was the experience — Not the completion, the reward, the likes, the follows, the shares, the hearts.

Hari argues social media, with it’s distractions, is robbing more and more of our flow experiences.  I felt he was right.  After leaving all the platforms, I felt my anxiety levels abate, my concentration increase, my interests expand.  

Admittedly, while that change has made my life more rich, it has not made it any easier.

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been sorely missing social media this week.  

Mom is unwell.  She is a but a wisp of her former powerful self.  Her voice is thinner, her clothes hang off her.  We take her to neurologists, to cardiologists.  She submits to test after test with grace in the face of fear.  On Friday, I take the day off to accompany her and Dad for yet another test.  We are told we need to commit five hours to the procedure.  We go to the waiting room and I sit and look around me, everyone else here for the same test.

And I see so much scrolling.  Around the room, patients palm their devices, thumbs flicking up and down on the screens as they let their social media feeds draw them away from the here and now, where none of us wants to be.

I look over at Mom and Dad.  She reads a novel.  Dad studies a newly released book on grass-based farming.  I have Ula’s algebra text out on my lap, where I’m trying to understand the properties of logarithms (Ok…yes.  I self-sooth with math.  Is that not a thing?). 

I think all three of us would like a social media feed right now.  Something distracting.  Engaging. A selfie in a bikini.  A baby eating birthday cake.   Maybe even a post warning about farmer’s injecting mRNA vaccines into livestock.  Something like that would be so delicious in this moment — It would enrage us, distract us.

And that would be so nice because…

Life is so painful.  

I get it.  I understand why that woman, and others like her, was letting herself get hoodwinked by false claims on her social media feed.  Because the excitement and drama there pulls us away from the troubles here.  Only it doesn’t.  It distracts us, but it does not lessen our troubles, ease our minds, nor lighten our burdens. 

And while I know that, it doesn’t make this moment in this place, facing what we’re facing, any easier (although, truthfully, manipulating logarithms does seem to slow my racing pulse).

In the end, the nurses conclude Mom has too many complicating factors at this point to even administer the test, and they send us home.  We move slowly to the car, sad and frustrated and scared.  And I’m wondering at the inevitably of everything, and where and when any relief will come.

Then Saturday morning rolls around.  It doesn’t matter what is happening in our personal lives.  Saturday is Sap Bush Cafe Day.  And we dial in the espresso machine and begin cooking breakfasts for guests, and Mom and Dad’s Saturday morning coffee klatch arrives.  There, they swap stories about the news and dogs and the various types of misinformation that can be found on the internet.  As it all unfolds, the muscles in my stomach release their knots and make room for full belly laughter.  Mom and Dad smile deeply from their hearts.  They eat well, Mom’s cheeks glow, and I recognize the medicinal power of the day.  It is not social media, but social-izing that we needed to bring ourselves back to center. 

It’s as if the flow of life serves as it’s own antidote.   I am reminded that, just as I am not the product of some social media feed, nor does the pain and sadness of real life necessitate endless suffering.  With friends, family, creative loves and meaningful work, I can recover from the daily blows, pick myself up and keep going….And once again, I’ll be ready to handle that next phone call asking if I’m giving my chickens the Covid vaccine. 

Sources:

Fichera, Angelo, AP Fact Check: No, farmers aren’t required to vaccinate livestock with mRNA Vaccines, Associated Press, April 13, 2023: https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-mrna-vaccine-livestock-mandate-covid-564035224253

Hari, Johann, 2022: Stolen Focus.  Crown Publishing, New York.

Koren, Marina, Smithsonian Magazine: B.F. Skinner: The Man Who Taught Pigeons to Play Ping-Pong and Rats to Pull Levers, March 20, 2013: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bf-skinner-the-man-who-taught-pigeons-to-play-ping-pong-and-rats-to-pull-levers-5363946/

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 2008: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Perennial. New York. 

 

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