my answer to all of the "in the wild" comments is that cows are imported. left to their own devices, they would never have migrated here and would never have been bred into the weight-gaining machines they have been turned into by "modern" agriculture. so, by "left to their own devices," i don't simply mean opening the stalls of farms and leaving them alone. i mean what would have happened without any human interference. as for pigs, they seem to be be thriving in the wild, much to the chagrin of people who have to deal with them (see, for instance, "hogs gone wild" on discovery).
i do appreciate the fact that you took such good care of the animals. from everything i've seen and read about how most of the animals being fed to the public today are treated, what you did is no longer typical and hasn't been for quite some time. all of the new ag-gag bills being proposed are just further evidence (albeit circumstantial) that the agriculture industry has much to hide.
yes, we do live in an interconnected world, but by the logic of your last paragraph, we're all war profiteers too since the resources secured by such wars (mainly oil) are essential to pretty much everything. i do take issue with the idea that all the people who provided all those essential functions you list would not have been able to do it without eating meat. there are lots of vegetarians and vegans performing each of those functions just as well as their meat-eating counterparts.