The Farmer’s Dog Meals: Fall Week #8 – 12/17/25

Farmer’s Dog Meals

It’s the last newsletter of the year. And well, I know I should wax poetic about my gratitude for a great season and all the wonderful support of our members. (Cause I DO feel that!) I should… but I’m not gonna. Instead I’m gonna give you one of those Farmer Cassie rants that many of you love so well. 

I recently ordered a Christmas gift for a family member, and inside the packaging was some of those corporate coupons for 15% off this or that. I usually routinely pitch these, but the word farmer caught my eye. It was a coupon for a product called the Farmer’s Dog. The coupon informed me that one can now buy custom-prepared human food on order for a dog. 

The existence of this company has been gnawing at me for days. 

I just can’t. 

First of all, I am hard-pressed to think of a farmer who would actually spend their money to feed a dog in this way.

My farm dogs are working animals. They get fed kibble. They also receive uneaten human food in their food bowls, because why on earth would I waste the very food I worked so hard to grow, harvest, and cook. The dogs also catch mice and other small rodents on their daily rounds.  Maggie especially is a whiz mouse hunter and loves to gross out the crew by eating them right in the fields alongside us as we harvest. Crunch. Crunch. Compost from the pile is also a favorite of the dogs – Pepper loves rock hard frozen sweet potatoes this time of year. He sometimes eats so many of these that he poops in the house at night… unbelievable amounts of poop full of chunks of sweet potatoes. (He is currently being crated now  at night until the sweet potatoes are no longer easy to grab on top of the compost!). 

Bottom line, there is nothing special about what my dogs eat that can’t be replicated in any home with kibble and table scraps. The only thing my farm dogs ingest that other dogs might not so much are rodents and a BUNCH of things they shouldn’t eat…. namely partially rotted food and water from muddy puddles. Is this what the Farmer’s Dog corporation is trying to replicate?

Second of all, purchasing corporately marketed, packaged, and shipped human food at human food prices for one’s dog seems like the 
epitome of a broken food system to me. Are we not capable of cooking our own human meals and then sharing those healthy human meals with our dogs if we want to supplement their diet? Do dogs need things prepared by professionals?

And then of course, the bigger question for me is, should we be spending our wealth on human grade food for dogs when actual humans struggle to put food on the table?

Case in point, I was at a meeting with the pantry director of Badger Prairie Needs Network today. She told me that sometimes when a dog passes away, people will donate their unused Farmer’s Dog customized meals to the pantry. She has to explain to pantry clients that they can’t legally take it, unless it’s for their pet, even though it’s human grade and packed with vegetables. That just seems wildly backwards to me. Have we really created a system where those with wealth donate food intended for a dog to humans? And a system where humans in need are prohibited from eating human food because it’s marketed for dogs? What? 

I could go on and on about how messed up this is in my opinion. If I was a stand-up comic, for sure I’d make my tight-five based on the existence of this product. It’s simultaneously so sad and darkly hilarious to me. 

I will save you from more ranting.  Instead, I want to thank you. Thank you for participating in an economic choice that tries to be an antidote to a broken farm system. Thank you for purchasing locally grown, organic vegetables. And if you have been so kind to donate, thank you for helping make this food available for free to those who are struggling financially by supporting Crossroads’ Purpose Grown Project.(Don’t know about it and want to learn more?)

Together we can’t fix a broken food system, but we can certainly try to create a model of a different way of doing things where we make sure to treat humans we don’t know at least as well as the dogs we know and adore. 

Thank you!
Farmer Cassie