Aaron Hartman, MD describes learning holistic health lessons from running his family farm: prioritizing healthy grass, clean water, and species-appropriate diets (kelp supplements for cows; free-ranging omnivorous diets for chickens) produces better animal products and led him to apply the same principles to human healing—listening to the body and spending time in nature rather than treating people as machines.
Chapters
My family farm became my classroom for healing. When we first got our cows, I realized I needed to take care of my cows because they were kind of expensive, and if a cow dies, it's a lot of money. So I started to find out, how do you have a healthy cow? Well, first you have to have healthy grass. We started supplementing with kelp. We got them clean water, and all of a sudden, I learned about how these basic things help the cow make good meat, good dairy, good cheese, and ultimately affect our health. Same thing for chickens. You want your chickens running around eating bugs, grass. Chickens are omnivores, which means they eat some plants and some animals. Once you give them what they're naturally made to eat, you respect the callus of a cow, and the chicken is of a chicken. All of a sudden, they have healthy food. And I realized the same thing with humans. Once you respect your humanity and what it takes for you to be a real person, your body will heal. In our world, act as if we're robots. We're machines. We're not. We're humans. And so how do you get back on the healing? Listen to your body. Get in nature, and your body will start to heal.