By Jerica Cadman

If you happen to live in a city, you may never have seen this kind of bird before.

They are rather remarkable and very unmistakable.

Meet the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher.

His tail is almost twice the length of his body, and when he flies, his tail can open up, just like a pair of scissors!

Flycatchers love our warm Texas summers and live along the edges of large grass fields, where they feed on grasshoppers, dragonflies, and other flying insects. They can be found in surrounding states, too, and in fact, the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher is Oklahoma’s state bird, and a picture of him can be found on their commemorative quarter coin. Check in your pocket to see if you have your very own engraving of a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher!

So what does a Flycatcher have to do with our farm?

Well, someone recently asked me about how to help their children understand why we eat meat.

That is a great question!

(And no, it’s not because we eat Flycatchers haha.)

Before Farmer Matt and I decided to become farmers, we learned a few really important things. First we learned that God created this earth, and He is infinitely wise. That means He understands everything.

Can you make a real car that can drive and hold people?

Do you know how engines and brakes and wheels and suspension work? Cars are really complicated machines, and it would take a really long time to learn how to make one.

Can you make a car that is perfect and never breaks down?

Only God could do that. But of course He didn’t make any perfect cars. He made something much bigger and more amazing than that. He made the whole universe!

Everything God made was very good—He even said so when He finished creating everything. But when sin entered the world through Adam, it caused many problems in the world. Thankfully God has provided the perfect solution through His Son, Jesus!

Still, the universe and all its contents work together in amazing ways. When you study the universe and science, you begin to see how wonderfully everything is designed. This is one reason our family loves science. The world is like a puzzle, and every piece fits perfectly.

For example, if we didn’t have birds like Flycatchers, farms might get too many grasshoppers and dragonflies. The grasshoppers would eat up too many of the crops, and the dragonflies would eat up too many of the wasps, which help us because they pollinate flowers and eat spiders. The flowers wouldn’t make as many seeds, and the spiders would become much more numerous and cause problems of their own.

Instead we have these beautiful and unique birds called Flycatchers. Everything is in balance.

Likewise, God gave humans permission (actually, instructions!) to eat meat. When you begin to study the food chain, you can understand that we need animals to make manure, which feeds plants. But if nothing ate those animals, they would become too numerous and would begin to throw things out of balance. In addition, humans need animal foods to be really healthy. People who do not eat any animal foods have to take special pills to get all the vitamins and minerals they need or they would become very sick. This is not a very natural way to eat.

Animals spend all day outside, eating plants and soaking up sunshine. They eat for many hours every day, and their bodies are very good at making nutrients that ours cannot. It’s what most animals spend most of their time doing. Cows will eat as much as 180 pounds of grass in a day. That’s 15% percent of their body weight. They turn grass into nutrients like Omega-3 fatty acids, Vitamin E, Vitamin A, and Vitamin K, which help human bodies have healthy hearts, eyes, skin, brains, organs, and immune systems. Those are all really important, aren’t they?

Humans only spend about 90 minutes per day eating. An adult will eat about 3 or 4 pounds of food per day. That’s only 2% of a 180-lb person’s body weight. We need the food we consume to be very nutritious because we eat so little compared to animals. We also live a lot longer than most animals, so we need to take care of our bodies so they will still work well when they get old. We need to make every bite count.

Because cows eat so much, some people think humans shouldn’t raise cows for food. They think they are not efficient, and that humans should eat plants instead of giving the plants to cows first. There are two problems with this thinking: The first problem is that all plants need manure to grow.  Where would they get the manure if there weren’t any cows?

The second problem is that grass is much easier and more efficient to grow than crops. But humans cannot eat grass at all. We do not have the special stomachs that cows have that can get nutrients from grass. Yet there is much more grass-land than crop-land in the world. Grass can grow in really harsh climates and on rough terrain like hills, where other crops cannot grow. Grass can survive for long periods without rain, and helps prevent erosion during storms. And all grass needs is sunshine and manure to grow. Grass is an amazing plant, and cows can turn grass into really nutritious meat.

Scientists have found that by teaching farmers about the way cows graze, cows can be used to restore land that had turned to desert due to poor management. The cows trample and eat the dead grass so it can rot and become soil again, instead of drying out and becoming like standing firewood and feeding wildfires. In turn, the healthy growing grass feeds the cows, which have babies. Humans can eat the extra cows that grow up so that there are not too many cows, and so that the humans will have really nutritious food from cows that have been gathering sunshine all day.

It’s a pretty amazing system. We are still learning about it. It will take us our whole lives to learn about it, and we still won’t know everything. But God already knows everything about it because He designed it. Isn’t that amazing?

Thanks for reading our Sticker Story of the month. See you next time!

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Sticker Story Archive

Missed a story or want to revisit a favorite? Here is our list of previous Sticker Stories

• June 2019 – “Scratch” the Farm Cat
• July 2019 – Berkshire Pig
• August 2019 – Turkey Poult