Christopher McPherson raises Animal Welfare Approved beef cattle in Siler City, North Carolina. Mac Farm cattle are raised with the highest animal welfare standards in the United States, using sustainable agriculture methods on his independent family farm. Animal Welfare Approved farmers raise their animals outdoors on pasture or range their entire lives. All approved practices can be found on the AWA website, making it one of the most transparent certifications available.

When she was 10, while most children are asking their parents for allowance money and believe that eggs come from the grocery store, Shelby Grebenc was soliciting her grandmother for a loan of $1000 to start her own pasture-raised egg business. Shelby and her parents live on four acres in Broomfield, Colorado, 20 miles outside of Denver. She began caring for laying hens when she was just 6-years old. “Dad was trying to teach me to be an adult,” she says, so he gave her chores—watering, feeding, and letting out the family’s small flock of chickens. In the summer, she loved it. When it was 20oF during Colorado’s winters, she hated it, but that didn’t keep her from learning everything involved in raising hens on pasture and starting her own business selling eggs to help expand the family’s income when her mother, Nancy, who has multiple sclerosis, was in a nursing home.

In the 1940s, Jim Chandler’s parents purchased the land where he grew up and learned to farm with his family. While the Chandlers always had some cattle, the farm mostly produced row crops like cotton and soy beans. Now, the farm’s main feature is its Black Angus beef cattle that produce what Jim calls “as pure beef as you can actually get.”

Many years after swearing off the farm life when she left the family farm for college, and following a career as a nurse, Joyce Keibler and her husband Gary chose to spend their “retirement” as sheep farmers. In 2005 they bought Hemmer Hill Farm outside of Louisville, Kentucky’s Northeast End and began raising Saint Croix sheep. While Joyce’s family had experience with both beef cattle and wool sheep, she preferred the smaller size of sheep. After attending a free class at the University of Kentucky which introduced her to different sheep breeds, she decided on the Saint Croix, a small meat breed with hair rather than wool, known for its resistance to the parasite problems that often plague other breeds.

When Linda Perez returned home in 1994 after living in Africa for many years, she found the landscape of South Texas surprisingly similar to that of Zambia, where she had been an educator and public health worker. While her family, based in the San Antonio area, are not farmers, she had always wanted a ranch and while in Africa, taught high school level agricultural science to African children. Also surprising was the way that her health background helped her be a better rancher; she better understood the welfare benefits of later mating and weaning, which has helped her to raise healthy, well-tempered animals.

Darrell Phelps has been raising Texas Longhorn cattle since 1994, but it was his business partner, Julian Perkins, who saw the marketability of the breed in the sustainable food market. Darrell, who is married to a Texan, began raising Longhorns in North Carolina for their lean, healthy meat and because they are easy keepers. The partners are also adding Angus beef cattle to their ranches to appeal to customers who may not be familiar with the Longhorn variety.

Have we just witnessed Big Ag’s first legislative strike against labeling of genetically modified foods in one of Big Ag’s home states?

North Carolina Rep. Glen Bradley, an advocate for consumer rights introduced a bill earlier this year to require labeling of genetically modified foods. House Bill 446 sought to require “labeling of food and milk products sold in this state that are or that contain genetically modified food and or milk and milk products from animals that have received recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH).” First introduced on March 23, 2011 it was passed the very next day to the Agriculture Committee where it promptly withered and died. A representative from the office of House Bill 446 co-sponsor Rep. Bill Faison told us that it was highly unlikely to be revived this year.

If I were a cynical person, I would speculate that we have Big Ag to thank for this bill’s death. Why? Because industrial agricultural companies are the only entities that profit from our ignorance of what is in our food.

The breed of goats that Debbie and Aaron Dermid raise, while hard to find in the United States, are a New Zealand meat goat well-adapted to the heat and humidity of North Carolina. The Dermids returned to their home state after Aaron left his career as a state trooper in Florida and received a degree in horticulture. After a lot of research, they decided to raise Kiko goat on their 13 acres in the foothills of the northern part of the state for their very low incidence of parasite problems, slow-growing hooves and maternal instinct. Kiko mothers immediately clean their young and care for them attentively, leading to very low mortality rates. In addition, they have a remarkable ability to conserve water in hot environs.

One of the things I love most about my job as program director at Animal Welfare Approved is that I get to meet people who are literally changing the world from the ground up. Ron Finley is the perfect example, except that he’s not the typical farmer or rancher whom I usually meet. He grows fruit and vegetables on an urban community garden: a 10ft by 150ft strip of land between the sidewalk and the curb in front of his house in Crenshaw, south central Los Angeles.

I bumped into Finley at the recent Good Food Festival in Santa Monica, CA. We got talking and he told me about his recent successful fight with city bureaucrats over his community garden and the grassroots initiative he’s set up to help urban communities to grow healthy, organic food for themselves. From the outset I liked the man, and we were clearly fighting the same fight, just on very different fronts. His story was as inspirational as anything I had seen or heard before.