No, I am not a vegan and here is why. In my farming practices, I try to follow the guidelines developed by the Savory Institute (https://www.savory.global). Basically, Savory encourages farmers to use livestock to rebuild soil – thus increasing the soils ability to sequester carbon - through a practice of active herd and pasture management.
Say you have 100 acres, you divide that 100 acres into smaller paddocks. You let the herd eat from one just long enough to eat down the grasses – but not completely – and then move them to a new paddock, chickens usually follow behind. This process stimulates growth in the eaten pasture, introduces fertilizer in the form of both cow and chicken manure, and both animals turn the soil as the walk across or scavenge it. It mimics the natural systems of the buffalo whom used to move across the great plain being forced to move by predators. Its no coincidence that as the buffalo herds have been pushed off the grasslands, the grasslands have suffered horribly.
This also means you are going to have animals that must be managed – any given paddock can only sustain so many animals so animals will have to be removed to accommodate births. To me it is a rule of life – something must die in order for something else to live. We’ve lost touch with that very basic symbiosis as we’ve gotten further and further away from our food systems.
Veganism is not healthier. Its been proven time and time again that a vegan diet does not return any significant long term health benefits as a whole. While some extremely diligent individuals might benefit – debatable – as a societal eating standard it would make for far more sick and weak people.
Veganism is monoculture. In order to get the amount of protein our bodies need, we have to supplement. For most vegans that comes in the form of soy. Soy beans are already a commodity crop (one of four) and contribute significantly to monocropping and have been found to produce significant amounts of estrogen in developing boys. I’m going to assume you get the idea behind what a mono crop is. Monocropping in turn severely degrades the soil used to grow it to the point that without heavy chemical fertilizers the land can not sustain it for long. As more and more chemical fertilizers are dumped into the soil they leech further and further into our water systems. This same practice also encourages heavy use of insecticides/fungicides. As a farmer you know not to plant the same crop in the same location year after year as it encourages the natural pests and unhealthy soil microbes of the plants to build up. In monoculture the farmer doesn’t have much of a choice so they dump on the chemicals.
In my opinion veganism is an understandable overreaction to our current, horrific system of agriculture and I fully support the idea of eating less meat and being very deliberate about the meat you eat when you do. Things like CAFOs (consolidated animal feeding operations), monoculture, reliance on chemical inputs and so on needs to end. The answer is not veganism. IMHO the answer is in getting back to our food. In knowing the farmer, in making the choice to spend a little bit more and buy food that was grown/raised with regenerative and sustainable practices and uses as humane as possible slaughtering techniques.