tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185877372024-03-13T12:05:46.860-07:00Me and My PlanetWatershed Media's Online JournalUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger46125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-59704488795293931092013-10-11T11:40:00.003-07:002013-10-11T11:40:58.327-07:00Indoctrinating the Youth: National Pork Board Spins Yarns About Modern Meat Production<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A few months ago I stumbled upon a curious attempt at social engineering. A website link led me to a children’s coloring book titled “Producers, Pigs & Pork.” Available both as a downloadable PDF or printed booklet, it invites kids to color in the pictures and “learn more about pigs.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The storytelling takes place on an elementary level. But given the realities of contemporary livestock production, “Producers, Pigs, & Pork” is quite a tale. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We travel with narrator Billy to a 100-year-old farm where we meet fresh-faced veterinarian Dr. Sarah and smiley farmer Jones. Huge feeding silos and windowless barns are outlined for kids to color in. “This is fun!” Billy exclaims. “I’ve never been to a pig farm before.”</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Billy learns that fast growing pigs need lots of corn and soybeans (not forage or food “waste”) to grow to a market weight of 270 pounds. Veterinarians are there to look after animals if they fall ill. And pigs no longer grow up in the mud so they can stay “healthy and happy.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The veterinarian’s prominence in the story is especially curious. She shows up everywhere, as if she’s an employee of farmer Jones. Meanwhile maps and surveys done by the American Veterinary Medicine Association paint a different picture of the involvement of veterinarians on today’s large confinement livestock operations. In fact, the AVMA has documented a desperate lack of veterinarians in states where livestock production has become heavily concentrated: Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and North Carolina. What’s more, a battle is raging right now over the abuse of antibiotics, dosed to animals routinely in feed and water rations—without veterinary consult. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the real world of modern factory farming, the stench from 2,500 pigs jammed into a single hog barn might send Billy running for the door ready to lose his lunch. He might have nightmares after witnessing the crazed repetitive behaviors like bar chewing and pacing that intensive confinement induces in animals who naturally want to spend the day wallowing in mud, rooting for food, and socializing in family groups. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">According to the National Pork Board’s coloring book, “pigs can’t use all the feed they eat, so they produce manure. ... this makes our crops grow better.” But there is no picture for kids to color in of a football field-sized, multi-million gallon manure “lagoon.” There is no mention that a manure holding pond is more like a cess pool, containing hundreds of compounds including antibiotics, hormones, heavy metals, bacteria, and toxic gases. In fact, an operation like farmer Jones’ pig farm can produce as much waste as do the citizens of a small city.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As the story of “Producers, Pigs & Pork” unfolds, the fantasy mounts: doting veterinarians, happy animals, and healthy industrial hog manure. In one final turn of creative nonfiction, pigs turn into roasts, pork chops, ribs and other cuts—without transport or slaughter. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;">This and a number of other coloring books are funded by the Pork Checkoff Program as part of the “Pork4Kids” initiative. The Pork Checkoff Program began with the 1985 Farm Bill and is overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Its $60 million annual budget for communications, research, and marketing is funded by a processing fee on every 100 pounds of domestic and imported pork. Ostensibly the goal is to raise the profile of and demand for “the Other White Meat.” And “Producers, Pigs & Pork” and other propaganda definitely aim at convincing a new generation of the wholesomeness of industrially produced meat.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is essential that our children learn the fundamentals of where their food comes from. But let’s not feed them industry-written myths about food production. Children don’t have to confront the nightmarish scenes behind contemporary meat production to understand that there are better ways to raise animals than inside a bright and shiny factory farm—without substance abuse, excessive crowding, and environmental contamination. That will mean telling a different story. Either the actual truth of what goes on behind the windowless walls of modern factory farms or the story of the independent farmer struggling against all odds (and the USDA) to produce a healthy product that truly honors the animal that become food on our plates.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.wppa.org/FileLibrary/States/WI/ColoringBook.pdf">http://www.wppa.org/FileLibrary/States/WI/ColoringBook.pdf</a></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-12209939748649987562013-06-04T13:47:00.003-07:002013-06-04T13:48:45.391-07:00Message to Congress: Stop Monkeying Around with Conservation Budgets <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-N48LpSxMqEY/Ua5SMzLuEwI/AAAAAAAAALY/brx22MH_jnc/s1600/hanging+CHIMPS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="247" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-N48LpSxMqEY/Ua5SMzLuEwI/AAAAAAAAALY/brx22MH_jnc/s320/hanging+CHIMPS.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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When most Americans think of the agencies in charge of
nature conservation, the Department of the Interior or the
National Park Service likely spring to mind. They don’t think of the Department
of Agriculture, which allocates nearly $4 billion per year to land
conservation in its Farm Bill.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This summer the House and Senate are rewriting the Farm
Bill, which Congress last year kicked down the road. The 10-year price tag will
total nearly a trillion dollars, funding food stamps, agribusiness subsidies,
conservation, and research. Budget cutters are searching for billions of
dollars to slash, and Farm Bill conservation programs, once again, seem
vulnerable. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This is real cause for concern. Established in response to
the overplowing that led to the Dust Bowl, conservation programs are intended
to compensate landowners for vital work that the free market does not value:
soil protection, wetland and grassland preservation, water filtration,
pesticide and fertilizer reduction, carbon sequestration. Safeguarding natural
resources in a time of rising temperatures and more violent weather events are crucial
investments in public health and national security. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Of all agriculturally-related federal spending, conservation
programs can offer the public the biggest return for the taxpayer dollar. They can
expand the availability of organic and pasture-raised foods, help farmers
reduce runoff that harms public waterways, promote soil-enhancing practices
like cover cropping and field rotations, and protect farmland and wildlands for
future generations.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Unfortunately, most members of Congress, including many influential
members of the House and Senate Agricultural Committees, don’t understand the
devastating toll that six decades of Farm Bill subsidized factory farming
methods has taken on the land—or the power of conservation programs to reverse
them.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Adding insult to injury, those conservation programs that do
exist rarely get the money they are promised when Farm Bills are passed.
Legislators make a big deal about how the Farm Bill protects the environment. But
whenever budget appropriators need savings, conservation programs are the first
on the chopping block. There’s a term for this: Changes in Mandatory Program
Spending, or CHIMPS. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Over the last five years, Conservation budgets have been
CHIMPed by more than $3 billion, with nearly $2 billion in cuts between 2011
and 2013 alone. That’s not because there’s no demand for the programs. Three
out of four applications are turned away for lack of funding.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Even common sense on-farm stewardship practices that were
historically required of farm subsidy recipients are disappearing from the Farm
Bill. Take taxpayer funded crop insurance. Over the past five years, subsidized
crop insurance has become farmers’ preferred source of taxpayer assistance. Crop
insurance policies currently come with no land conservation requirements. Because
of this, they are actually causing a massive amount of previously protected
land to be plowed up. Farmers anxious to cash in on record crop prices no
longer have to worry about yields when taxpayer programs guarantee them against
losses. Across the Great Plains, corn and soybeans are being planted on
millions of acres of erodible lands that were previously deemed marginal and formerly
protected through the Conservation Reserve Program. Scientists fear another
Dust Bowl is in the making.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Congress right now has the ability and responsibility to
transform the Conservation Title for the next 10 years,” says Oregon Representative
Earl Blumenauer. In May, Blumenauer introduced HR 1890, the “Balancing Food,
Farms and Environment Act of 2013.” The bill is just one of many intended to strengthen
conservation efforts into the House and Senate Farm Bills, which should come to
floor votes this summer. A Coburn-Durban amendment is aimed at imposing income thresholds
on crop insurance for the largest farmers. HR 1890 would provide more money for
to protect land in permanent easements and reward farmers for carbon
sequestration. Chellie Pingree of Maine introduced an amendment to expand
supports to organic farmers.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In a political landscape hostile to environmental
protection, agricultural lobbies have for decades found ways to pilfer
conservation budgets to help boost crop and livestock production. Over the last
ten years alone, according to the Environmental Working Group, two billion
dollars in the Environmental Quality Incentives Program have been diverted to
pay for the hard costs of establishing waste containment structures for
concentrated animal feeding operations, laying pipe for irrigation in arid
regions, and draining wetlands. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Like the Olympic Games, the renewal of the Farm Bill only
comes around every four to five years. It offers the opportunity for Americans
to invest in the long-term health of farmlands and the countryside. But time
may be running out. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Could this year be a turning point for Farm Bill
conservation reforms, like the 1985 and 1990 Farm Bills, which established
far-reaching efforts to protect grasslands and wetlands across the heartland? <o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-26729109329584344092013-04-14T14:48:00.000-07:002013-04-14T14:50:33.361-07:00The Factory Farms of Lenawee County<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="288" height="192" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&captions=1&hl=en_US&feat=flashalbum&RGB=0x000000&feed=https%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F107723760949159532685%2Falbumid%2F5866133569950056833%3Falt%3Drss%26kind%3Dphoto%26authkey%3DGv1sRgCJ_jjrit8OLh8gE%26hl%3Den_US" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed>
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Eastern, Michigan, March 2013 — Rolling across North
Carolina, Indiana, Illinois, Washington, California, and today, eastern
Michigan, I’ve seen first-hand the impacts of industrial dairy, poultry, and
hog factories on rural communities. I admire the people who fight back against
the invasion of factory farms. I seek them out, trying to see the land from
their eyes. But no matter how many times I experience it, I still find
unpalatable a business model that’s based on marginalizing animal welfare and polluting
your neighbors’ air, land, water and quality of life in the name of profit and
cheap food. </div>
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Lynn and Dean Henning are guiding me on a tour of the CAFOs
of Lenawee County. It’s a cold morning in early spring. The landscape is leached
of color. The ponds are thick with ice. An occasional snowflake flutters from
wooly clouds. </div>
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“When they spray manure in the winter, sometimes you can see
it hanging frozen from the irrigation booms,” says Lynn from the back seat. “We
call them ‘poopsicles.’” </div>
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“What’s it like here when spring arrives?” I ask, imagining
a painterly transformation of the countryside with grass, foliage, blossoms,
songbirds.</div>
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“Springtime smells really bad,” she answers.</div>
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Dean is driving. He is silver haired, in his late fifties.
He has cut back on farm work since suffering a heart attack and a subsequent
quadruple by-pass surgery a few years ago. We travel by “Henning Hwy.,” named after
his grandfather, the first homeowner to bring electricity to the neighborhood. Dean
still farms a few hundred acres of corn and soybeans, manages a few hundred
acres of forestland, and maintains a massive garden that produces a prodigious
quantities of tomatoes, sweet corn, and other heirloom vegetables for family
and friends.</div>
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I already know Lynn Henning as the anti-CAFO warrior with
waves of white hair who won the prestigious 2010 Goldman Environmental Prize. Lynn
and I have met a few times as
fellow conference speakers. She and Dean have been kind enough to let me tag
along on one of their thrice-weekly surveys of creeks and drainages, scouting
for discharges from the dozen or so dairy CAFOs spaced at five-mile intervals
around their area. </div>
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With its vegetable, tree fruit, grain and livestock
production, Michigan boasts the country’s most diverse agricultural output next
to California. But Lenawee County is corn and soybean country. Its fields follow
the rolling contours of the land. Broad fields are interwoven between small
belts of trees and complex drainages that carve through the sloping lands, sometimes
flattening out in low-lying wetlands. This is precisely the challenge of
concentrating livestock in this area: how to keep the waste from running off
fields into the many surface and underground drainage systems that feed creeks,
streams, river arteries and eventually flow into the now mightily polluted Lake
Erie. </div>
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Our first stop is Hartland Farms, a Concentrated Animal Feeding
Operation (CAFO) with 1,000 dairy cows and 2,000 acres of cropland. As Lynn
rattles off the complicated web of partnerships that make up its ownership, it
becomes immediately obvious to me why a CAFO is so aptly referred to as a “factory
farm.” The buildings are sheathed in steel. Cows are nowhere to be seen. They
are housed inside by the hundreds in linear stalls, moving only to lie down or
take their turns at the electronic milking parlor. Waste exits one end of the facility
the way a vertical smokestack might release pollution skyward. Instead of
smoke, the CAFO pipe spews concentrated liquid animal waste—rich in nitrogen, phosphorous,
ammonia and other chemicals and laden with bacteria such as fecal coliform and <i>E. coli</i>. The waste is temporarily stored
in nearby holding lagoons that are bermed into ponds as long as football fields
and deep enough to contain millions of gallons of waste. Waste off-gasses into
the atmosphere that floats across the surrounding community. Waste is spread on
nearby fields or pumped directly into underground irrigation pipes beneath
fields. </div>
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“They plaster it on 8 inches thick and spray right up to the
roadsides,” says Lynn.</div>
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“In liquid form,” adds Dean, “it doesn’t stay on the ground
too long.” </div>
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The image of 100-acre fields smeared with CAFO manure more
than a half a foot deep is nauseating. In fact, I can see the brown green
shadow from a recent ground application glistening between rows of stubble left
from last year’s corn harvest.</div>
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Dean and Lynn make the rounds of potential discharge sites. A
drain can be a simple grass-lined gulley that moves through the low point of a
field. It could be a culvert that spans beneath a road. Eventually the water
moves onto successively larger waterways, like the South Branch of the River
Raisin. </div>
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In order to monitor what is happening to their community, the
Hennings, along with other members of the Environmentally Concerned Citizens of
South Central Michigan, have become citizen scientists. Armed with a variety of
hand-held devices, volunteers can monitor for nutrients, chemicals, bacteria,
antibiotics and biological oxygen demand. Samples are sent to a lab if results
indicate potentially dangerous contaminants. Any alarming findings are
officially reported to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. </div>
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Rural agricultural conflicts like these are not just the
result of too many humans coming up against too few resources. These fights have
been going on for a very long time. Way back in 1610, English landholder William
Aldred claimed that his neighbor, Thomas Benton’s pig sty, was sited too close
to his home. Aldred argued that the livestock operation was violating his
rights as a community member. Upon hearing the case, King Charles I’s court
ruled in Aldred’s favor, deciding that no one has “the right to right to
maintain a structure upon his own land, which, by reason of disgusting smells,
loud or unusual noises, thick smoke, noxious vapors, the jarring of machinery,
or the unwarrantable collection of flies, renders the occupancy of adjoining
property dangerous, intolerable, or even uncomfortable to its tenants." In
other words, it’s against common law to stink up or foul the neighborhood. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Four centuries later, it is still to the courts where
citizens must turn when their air, water, and health are violated by intensive
concentrations of animals.</div>
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We make a stop at what looks like a recently constructed CAFO
facility. There are four white hangar-like barns. Sandwiched between the four barns
is a fancier brick building that must serve as the main office. But something
is amiss. There are no trucks in the lot. There’s no one around at all. The
mailbox is tilted at a funny angle. The place is abandoned. Apparently, the
CAFO went belly up. It’s been taken over by the bank and is for sale. </div>
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Factory farms, I learn, are a relatively new phenomenon in
Lenawee County. The first mega-dairy arrived in 1999 as the Hudson area became
a target of the Vreba-Hoff Dairy Development syndicate. This family, with Dutch
origins, is now legendary across the Midwest for fabricating an elaborate Ponzi
scheme that started over 90 mega-dairies, mainly with investments from European
families they conned into coming to America. Facilities were often never
completed or were simply unprofitable. Environmental violations were routine. Even
as dairies failed, Vreba-Hoff continued to attract more investors, expanding
further into rural communities. Many investors were forced into bankruptcy. Creditors
lost millions. The CAFO conmen took the money and skipped town. </div>
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“Small town drama,” says Lynn.</div>
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Indeed. The more you look behind the curtain, this CAFO model
becomes a serious shell game. Pack as many animals on a particular property as an
agency will authorize with a pollution permit (if the agencies even require one.)
Convince local governments to build new roads and other infrastructure. Rake in
hundreds of thousands in US Department of Agriculture subsidies to help pay for
waste management costs, and on top of that, take advantage of feed subsidies,
taxpayer supported crop insurance and disaster payments for your croplands. Degrade
the health of the neighborhood with waste emissions and stench, slowly driving homeowners
out, then buy up their devalued properties in the process. </div>
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“They use manure as a weapon,” says Dean.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We are passing through the half-boarded up farming town of
Medina. It’s a victim of what can only be described as economic <i>undevelopment</i>. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Why don’t people fight back?” I ask. </div>
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<br /></div>
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“People are afraid to pick fights,” says Lynn. “It’s like
the town in <i>A Civil Action</i>. People
have lived here forever. Many are convinced that they need this system, that
they’ll earn money renting their land to the CAFOs for field applications.”</div>
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“Even when that waste damages their soil and lowers their
yields,” adds Dean.</div>
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“People will drop a note in the mailbox or take me aside
every once in a while and thank me for speaking out,” says Lynn.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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I think about the twisted and somewhat tragic logic at work:
an unhealthy food production system that people somehow accept as inevitable. A
system where many of the real costs of production—effects on human health,
impacts on shared water resources, basic costs of feed and waste management—are
passed off on local communities and federal taxpayers. I ask Lynn and Dean to
talk about the words and terminology which industry uses to describe these
events I am seeing. </div>
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“They always speak of ‘odor,” says Dean, “never of toxic
pollution.”</div>
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<br /></div>
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“Waste runoff and lagoon overflows after heavy rains is
always ‘storm water,” says Lynn.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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“Waste running into the creeks is a ‘discharge,” says Dean.</div>
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<br /></div>
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“Lagoon waste spread across the farm fields is ‘sediment,”
says Lynn. “But it’s never dry and it’s not sediment. And underground pipes
that drain straight into the creeks are ‘sub-irrigation systems.’” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We stop at an infamous site where a 20-acre wetland was
filled with CAFO waste a few years back. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“The EPA was here to see it,” says Lynn. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I begin to fear that in my zeal to document this tour with
photos I’ve been breathing nasty air. It’s no doubt on my boots and clothes and
perhaps in my respiratory system. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“What if you could buy up one of these defunct CAFOs and
turn it into a demonstration farm for a new kind of pasture-based, healthy agriculture?”
I ask. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“I wish we could,” says Lynn. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Dean describes a farm. “A 640-acre section is a square mile,” he says. “You would want to keep at least 160 acres
in woodland. The rest could be fenced off so that fields could be rotated
between pasture and row crops. At two acres per cow, you could have a
diversified farming operation,” he says. “This model could be very effective on smaller operations.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=18587737" name="_GoBack"></a>”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can almost imagine a new era of integrated agriculture
catching on in Lenawee County. As someone once said, it’s hope that makes us
human. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-77672900709646563322013-04-04T15:53:00.003-07:002013-04-29T15:38:53.261-07:00Bag the "Ag Gag" Bills<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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When might it be punishable to
report a criminal activity? When it takes place inside a poultry warehouse, slaughterhouse,
or on a cattle feedlot. That’s the upshot of a new wave of so-called “ag-gag”
bills passed in state legislatures around the nation, the latest of which, AB
343, was introduced in California last month.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
“Ag gag” laws have been put forth by the meat industry to
criminalize the reporting of animal cruelty by anyone—journalists, activists, or
whistleblowers. They are intended to prohibit the release of videotapes or
photographs that document what happens inside factory farms and meat processing
facilities, often with the threat of jail time. The real goal of these laws is
to “chill” a person’s resolve to make public any illegal behavior such as beating
or torturing captive animals, often using the police to seize their materials.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
Whistle blower intimidation laws incite
the ultimate cynicism about politics. For instance, the California bill is
titled, “Duty to Report Animal Cruelty,” when in fact, its true aim is to
squelch dissemination about the brutality of factory farming. If passed, AB 343
would require would-be whistle blowers to submit any visual evidence to law
enforcement within 48 hours of taking a photograph or video or be subject up to
a $500 fine. It also encourages the submission of any proof to the owner of the
animals. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
This would effectively force reporters
to forfeit their anonymity. A worker might face retaliation from an employer. A
journalist might not have time to adequately pursue a lead. Offending operators
would be alerted that they are under suspicion. Meanwhile, industry maintains the
appearance that it cares about animal welfare.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
Big agricultural lobbies are
desperate to avoid the kind of public relations disaster that befell the Hallmark
Meat Packing Company. In 2008, secret cameras showed downer dairy cows being chained,
dragged, and electrically prodded to slaughter at Hallmark’s facility in Chino,
California. Such illegal practices were exposed by a disillusioned plant worker
and the Humane Society of the United States. The USDA’s Commodity Procurement Branch,
which distributes beef to the National School Lunch Program, was one of Hallmark’s
biggest customers. The ensuing news coverage resulted in the largest recall of
meat products in history and the ultimate closure of the plant.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
Kansas, Montana, and North Dakota already
have laws making it punishable to photograph an agricultural operation without
consent of the owner. Utah, Missouri, and Iowa passed ag gag laws last year. In
Iowa, where recent undercover videos have shown blatant animal abuse at egg and
hog facilities, a first offense can land you in jail for up to a year. A second
offense is considered an aggravated misdemeanor with up to two years jail time.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
What’s happening in California is
part of a nationwide effort. Already this year, whistleblower suppression laws
similar to California’s have been filed in Arkansas, Indiana, Nebraska, New
Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Vermont, and Wyoming. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
The timing of this legislative push
is extremely troubling. The federal government’s budget sequestration could
significantly reduce funding for USDA meat inspectors. The system is already
challenged to keep up with continual changes in production lines that process
animals at ever-increasing speeds. That means even as the government has less resources
for oversight, industry is working to suppress whistle blowing.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
Why is the meat industry on the
defensive? Even perfectly legal practices are often distasteful to the public. In
the face of rising public awareness about genetically modified crops,
contaminated eggs, downer animals, etc., the meat industry has been jolted into
anti-democratic tactics to muzzle its critics.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
Newly elected California
Assemblyman, Jim Patterson (23rd District), introduced AB 343 to the state
legislature with the backing of the California Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
While it might appease the powerful California meat lobby, this law would go
against the will of California’s majority. Most citizens want animals to be
raised more humanely. California’s Proposition 2, the Prevention of Farm Animal
Cruelty Act, passed with 63 percent of the vote. Restrictions on animal cages
are slated to go into effect January 1, 2015. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 130%;">
When government fails to fulfill
its regulatory oversight, citizens—including the news media—often have no
choice but to become their own watchdogs. There is a noble American tradition
of journalism related to food production concerns. At the turn of the 20th
century, Upton Sinclair’s <i>The Jungle</i>
described appalling conditions in Chicago’s slaughterhouse district. Its
publication greatly influenced new laws to regulate food safety and meat
processing. Now is the time to turn the tide against a national assault on
greater transparency and meaningful reform in the food system.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-38631518072557999282013-03-18T12:17:00.000-07:002013-03-19T09:59:08.249-07:00Hermannsdorf: Symbiotic Farming <object height="300" width="400"> <param name="flashvars" value="offsite=true&lang=en-us&page_show_url=%2Fphotos%2Fwatershedmedia%2Fsets%2F72157632952849994%2Fshow%2F&page_show_back_url=%2Fphotos%2Fwatershedmedia%2Fsets%2F72157632952849994%2F&set_id=72157632952849994&jump_to="></param>
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Snow is falling as the plane touches down at Munich airport.
By the time we arrive in Hermannsdorf, an hour’s drive, the forests and rolling
hills of the Upper Bavarian countryside are pillowed in a few inches of white
powder. My wife, Quincey, and I are on a mid-winter European junket. We’ve
tagged along with her father, Doug Tompkins, to visit the farm of Karl-Ludwig
Schweisfurth, one of Germany’s (and the world’s) leaders in the sustainable
food movement. </div>
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We start our tour at the Schweisfurth home, a delightful
cottage decorated with all manner of livestock-inspired artwork. Karl-Ludwig is
a tall, solid-boned, man with a mane of white hair and horn-rimmed spectacles. Now
in his mid-80s, Karl-Ludwig grew the family business, Herta, into one of
Europe’s largest meat processing corporations. He even based its expanding production
lines on Oscar Mayer assembly operations, where his father sent him as a young
man to study American innovation. “I am a butcher,” he says, deprecatingly, acknowledging
the role and trade that life have given him. </div>
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<br /></div>
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After three decades in the meat packing business, however, Schweisfurth
realized that the perpetual need for growth and ever-increasing disassembly
line speeds came at too high a cost. He saw animal welfare, work conditions, health
of the environment, food quality, and personal values plummeting as humans
became further and further disconnected from the basic tasks of food
production. In 1984, at age 54, he sold the business to start over again with
his two sons. His career as a butcher wasn’t at an end. Rather, it became one
skill among a larger set that requires farming, animal husbandry, meat processing,
and retailing. The revamped family business soon included an inn, organic farm,
restaurant, brewery, and bakery. It became a hub for local employment and the purchase
of regionally produced organic grains and other ingredients.</div>
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Around his kitchen table, Karl Ludwig explains his concept
of “symbiotic agriculture.” For more than two decades, he has been
experimenting with raising different species of livestock on the same pastures using
various mobile structures. The pigs protect the chickens from predators. The
chickens eat parasites that might potentially sicken the pigs. The free ranging
animals’ manure returns vital nutrients to the soil as they graze. Hundreds of
acres of fields and livestock pastures at the farm, officially called “Hermannsdorfer
<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">Landwerkstätten,”</span> are planted with various crops that provide
forage for the animals or feed that can be stored for the winter. The farm’s
workers are always striving for the best rotations of pasture crops to prevent
pests from becoming too established, maintain healthy soil, and keep meat flavor
as high as possible. On the kitchen table is a wooden model of a mobile group
housing structure. I take off the wooden roof to inspect. The pigs’ quarters
are downstairs. Poultry enter around the back and roost upstairs. </div>
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Finally it’s time to walk. We find plenty of animals out on
the snowy landscape. Bavarian-styled chicken tractors house birds for both meat
and eggs, active out in the cold winter day. Pigs are kept in permanent barns,
as well as in smaller groups with simple wooden structures out in the fields. The
barns have roomy outside stalls full of straw and covered internal stalls for
feeding and weather protection. Families are raised together for their entire
lives to honor the social hierarchies they develop at birth. Karl Ludwig delights
in explaining the natural conditions in which the animals are raised. Below the
barn, he points to a methane digester, a covered circular tank about the size
of a yurt. There animal waste from the pig barns is processed. It generates electricity from captured methane gas. Compost for the farming
operation is made from the remaining solid waste.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When we enter the slaughter plant, Karl Ludwig describes it
as “the best plant I have ever designed.” It is white tiled, very clean. Chain mesh
gloves and white aprons hang in orderly fashion. The animals are raised right
on the farm and are moved to holding pens close by prior to slaughter. There is
no long distance transportation involved that heightens stress in animals. The
slaughter room and butchering operation are completely separated, he explains,
so that no animal has a sense of imminent death. “I realize that in order to
process animals I must kill them,” he says. “So I want to make both their lives
and their deaths as compassionate as possible.” On a given week, 100 pigs, 20
bulls, and 100 sheep are killed, butchered and begin the curing and processing
stage. </div>
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We tour a curing facility, a hall with a series of brick-lined
rooms where meats are aged. The smell is sweet, sour and pungent. One room is
filled with hanging hams that seem to be the German equivalent of Italian prosciutto
or Spanish Serrano. Another room contains many racks of salamis. The air is
peppery. The rooms have been cleverly designed using the thermal mass of the
hill that the building abuts to provide optimum humidity and temperature
controls with the least amount of energy. </div>
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In a processing kitchen we find large mixing machines for
making sausages. Each stainless steel bowl could easily hold a person. Two
ovens are presently occupied in the smoke curing of pork bellies. We see Karl-Ludwig’s
guidance everywhere. The organizing principle, from start to finish is quality:
for animals, workers, the environment, and eaters. </div>
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<br /></div>
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At last, we sit down to break bread. It is no wonder that the
operation at Hermannsdorf is a popular tourist destination, with its beautiful restaurant
and modern organic grocery. Karl-Ludwig’s family joins us at the table, a wide
open floor plan with high ceilings and exposed wooden rafters, reclaimed from the
former building, which was a mill. In addition to the restaurant they have a micro-brewery
and a bakery. Both use ingredients from the farm and purchase grains, hops, and
malt from regional farmers. We taste a goat cheese appetizer that is light, tangy
and creamy. Spread on chewy dark German bread, it combines perfectly with a stein
of the family Schwinebrau brown ale. This is followed by sautéd fennel and
leeks, a crispy potato pancake, and a roast of veal that is shimmery and pink with
a clean robust flavor. A lager beer, the paler brother of the ale, accompanies
this main course. Karl-Ludwig carves the meat from his seat at the head of the table,
generously passing samples to customers
at the next table. </div>
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At the meal’s end, we present Karl Ludwig with a copy of the
photo book, <i>CAFO: The Tragedy of
Industrial Animal Factories</i>, that Doug Tompkins (Foundation for Deep
Ecology) and I (Watershed Media) co-produced. He looks at the grisly photo on
the front cover. It’s a dark scene inside an industrial hog facility. He points
to me, shakes his head and with sad eyes asks, “You made this book?” I nod my
head yes. “I finally decided to
get out of the industrial meat business when I went inside one of these,” he
says. He begins flipping through the large photographs of animal processing,
waste lagoons, feedlots, and then puts it aside, knowing all too viscerally the
heavy content featured in the book. </div>
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We have landed in one of the epicenters of the global healthy
food movement. It’s a social current that is slowly sweeping the entire planet.
I’ve been lucky enough to visit other places where science, art, land stewardship
and food production combine at such profound levels. I see as this as our
modern renaissance. Hermannsdorf is on the scale of the Prince of Wales’
efforts at the Duchy Home Farm in the English Cottswalds, Doug Tompkins’ pioneering
farmscaping at Laguna Blanca in Argentina, and Wes Jackson’s visionary perennial
polyculture at the Land Institute in Kansas. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Karl Ludwig is convinced that this approach to sustainably produced
meat and grains—“symbiotic agriculture”—is not just a wealthy man’s hobby, not
just a passing fad. It is the future that agriculture must somehow become. His
son calls it “retro innovation,” the combination of land management and
husbandry practices of the pre-petrochemical and pre-animal antibiotic past,
with the understanding of ecological systems and small-scale agricultural
technology of today. This is information rich, systems thinking: finding ways for
the farming to fit the land, and for the land to feed the animals.</div>
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<br /></div>
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A day’s visit is not enough. We need more time to explore. I
have dozens more questions. But we must be on the road to our next destination,
and leave, having tasted, experienced, and fully sensed Hermannsdorf, a lighthouse
to the world of food and farming.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Links:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgLB-a7BI00" target="_blank">Duchy Home Farm in England </a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib-VrM4Qbvc" target="_blank">Doug Tompkins’ pioneering farmscaping at Laguna Blanca inArgentina </a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AlPw0KpUmo" target="_blank">Land Institute in Kansas</a> </div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-78170298410197293072013-03-13T11:25:00.000-07:002013-03-13T11:25:02.205-07:00The Farm Bill is Really A Food Bill
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America’s first Food Stamps were orange or blue. Citizens eligible for government relief
bought a one dollar orange ticket at face value, redeemable for any food item. Accompanying
every orange stamp was a free blue ticket worth 50 cents, that could be used to
buy surplus food items: meat, milk, eggs, or seasonal produce that the
government purchased from farmers. This was the 1930s, and federal nutrition
assistance, along with support to help farmers conserve the soil and earn fair
prices, were essential elements of what we know today as the Farm Bill. Food stamps
were what helped many desperate families put food on the table.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Eighty years on, Food Stamps continue to be one of the ways
America grapples with its hunger problems. Paper coupons have given way to less
stigmatized Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards—monthly monetary allotments
assigned to a debit card. But the numbers are staggering. As a result of the
economic contraction that started in late 2007, nearly 50 million people,
one-third of them children, are now in poverty (up from 31 million in 2000).
The number of U.S. citizens applying for food stamps, now known as the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has nearly tripled since
2001. In the month of October 2012 alone, three years into our economic
“recovery,” nearly 1 in 7 Americans—47.5 million people— participated in the
SNAP program. <o:p></o:p></div>
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These monthly Food Stamp enrollment tallies, however, don’t
demonstrate the magnitude of poverty in the U.S. or the true function of the
program. Critics of big government and social assistance often use the Food Stamp
program as a punching bag for wasteful, excessive and fraudulent entitlements. But
the fact is, a majority of people use Food Stamps as a temporary safety net
between jobs—not as a permanent solution to hunger. Many are working families struggling
to raise themselves out of poverty. USDA estimates that as many as 65 million
Americans received SNAP benefits for at least one month during 2012—1 in 5
Americans.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“People don’t aspire to enroll in the SNAP Program,” says
Stacey Dean, of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. “By far, the SNAP
Program serves people who, because of the stress and hardship of poverty, face
a genuine lack of access to healthy and affordable foods.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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Even in the era of 99-cent value meals, Food Stamps play a
crucial role in providing calories to hungry Americans. As the economic
recovery drags on, and as deficit reduction talks heat up, the annual Food
Stamp budget—which now totals $75 billion per year—will become a prime target
for cost cutters. The values of food assistance must be part of those
deliberations.<o:p></o:p></div>
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1. <u>Food stamps are part of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture’s Farm Bill</u>. While most people associate the Farm Bill with
subsidies for corn and soybean farmers, in fact, its largest line item is the
SNAP program, which accounted for more than 75 cents of every dollar spent by the
Department of Agriculture in 2012.<o:p></o:p></div>
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2. <u>The Food Stamp program mainly serves people in need</u>.
The USDA’s official term for hunger is “food insecurity.” These are people who
regularly skip meals because of a lack of resources. It could be a senior
citizen, with hefty medical bills and fixed income, who must choose between
medicine and food. Or it could be one out of every six American children for
whom Food Stamps along with the School Lunch, Breakfast and Snack programs governed
by the Child Nutrition Act, are an essential bridge between hunger and
starvation. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<u>3. Many food stamp recipients have employment income.</u>
Over 60 percent of participating households earn income that they contribute
toward the family food budget—it’s just not enough to stave off hunger. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<u>4 . No one is buying filet mignon with food stamps.</u> The
maximum monthly allotment—$200 per individual and $668 for a family of four—nets
out to around $2 per meal. Big city mayors, celebrity chefs such as Mario Batali,
and others have taken on the challenge of living on a Thrifty Food plan for a week
at a time. All have complained about temporarily foregoing caffeine, snacks,
and things many Americans take for granted—and feared running out of money. <o:p></o:p></div>
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5. <u>Food stamps function as an economic stimulus</u>.
President Obama’s economic stimulus plan (the American Recovery Reinvestment
Act of 2009) provided tens of billions of additional dollars for food
assistance programs. Studies show that every Food Stamp dollar spent actually
generates at least $1.74 in the broader economy. This is called a “multiplier
effect.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack regularly reminds audiences that
the Food Stamp program helps farmers too. “Producers get somewhere between 15
and 16 cents of every food dollar that’s spent in a grocery store and a
restaurant,” he told the American Farm Bureau Federation in Nashville in
January 2013. “And to the extent that families are empowered during struggling
times to be able to buy adequate groceries for their family, at the end of the
day that also helps American producers.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<u>6. Food stamps have a positive effect on health and
nutrition</u>. According to the Food Research and Action Center, the SNAP
Program lifted nearly 4 million Americans above the poverty level in 2011 by
boosting monthly income. Providing relief from hunger yields positive impacts
on body weight, learning abilities, and reducing the incidence of chronic
diseases—particularly among children.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The recent rise in Food Stamp enrollment offers an important
window into the crisis of poverty and hunger in America. Some might view it as solid
proof of failed economic policy. Instead we should look at as a way to assess
whether and how government is doing
its duty—investing in the health and well-being of all of society for the long
term. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-29755572197008455492013-02-07T12:12:00.001-08:002013-02-07T12:24:52.413-08:00Clueless About Food and Agriculture?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Outside of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move”
campaign to urge kids to exercise more and eat better, this administration
remains largely indifferent to the disaster that is the country’s outdated food
and agriculture policy. USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack recently argued that rural America
has become politically irrelevant—a possible explanation for why the House
refused to even consider a vote on a new Farm Bill last year. Maybe it’s something
else. It could be that the present
Congress and Administration are simply clueless about the severity of our food
and farming crises.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Riding the coattails of the fiscal cliff bargain, the 2008
Farm Bill—three months past its “renew by” date—got a nine-month extension
shortly after New Year’s Day. The
extension could have included funds to preserve programs that help rural
America and rebuild a food and farming system around the challenges of the 21<sup>st</sup>
century. Instead, the policy—concocted in backdoor fashion without any public
input—might as well have been written by lobbyists from the crop insurance,
finance and agrochemical industries.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Farm Bill extension bears little resemblance to the
plan hotly debate and passed by the Senate last summer. While by no means
ideal, that Senate plan would have clipped excessive commodity subsidies and
reduced but still preserved important programs for conservation, organic
agriculture, and rural development. This Farm Bill extension will continue
sending $5 billion in direct payments to landowners whether they farm or not,
whether they experience losses or not. (Both Republicans and Democrats favor
eliminating such subsidies.) </span><span style="color: #262626; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">By extending rather than writing a new five-year Farm
Bill, Congress did, however, manage to avert the dreaded “dairy cliff.” This
would have reverted to a 1949 dairy subsidy program causing milk prices to
spike to about $7 a gallon. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Kicking the Farm Bill down the road means we continue to invest
in a backward agriculture policy. Because nothing was done to reform cotton
subsidies, the US will continue to send $150 million in 2013 to Brazilian
cotton farmers. This is the result of a lingering World Trade Organization
ruling that declared previous US cotton supports trade distorting. Meanwhile,
as Brazilian farmers benefit from the Farm Bill extension, the big losers are
dozens of programs that train the next generation of US farmers and ranchers,
invest in on-farm renewable energy, assist organic growers, expand farmers
markets, and rebuild the infrastructure of a regionally-diversified food
system. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Contrary to what many might think, the US faces a mounting
list of rather alarming food and farming related challenges. Over 15 percent of
the American population—mostly retired, disabled, children or
underemployed—depend on food stamps, the largest budget item in the Farm Bill.
Last year’s severe drought affected two-thirds of all agricultural counties,
impacting crop yields, raising grain prices, and forcing livestock owners to
sell off herds. Unpredictable weather patterns, we are told, are now the norm. “Superweeds”
occupy 60 to 80 million acres of the country’s farmland as a result of a
large-scale shift to genetically engineered, herbicide-resistant crops. Our
research budgets into innovative farming strategies to address such problems are
shrinking rather than expanding.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Farm Bill exists to address problems, like these, that
are not easily solved by the free market. A smarter Farm Bill would offer assistance
to farmers to take care of natural resources, help for those who can’t get
enough to eat, and funding for forward-thinking research to help farmers stay
ahead of environmental challenges. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The good news is that the door is not yet closed on a Farm
Bill. The most recent short-term extension means that a new five-year Farm Bill
could be written and voted on by September. Despite “Farm Bill fatigue” setting
in among many citizens who care about agriculture policy, the time to set the
terms of this debate is now, as Congress struggles with the challenge of fiscal
austerity and the national debt. We still have the opportunity to make the changes
necessary for a healthier, more secure, and conservation-based food system. Representatives
need to repeatedly hear our concerns.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Here are a few ideas that voters should be pestering the
113<sup>th</sup> Congress about:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Full funding for conservation programs to protect topsoil,
clean air, fresh water and safeguard natural habitat; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Reform of the crop subsidy rules to exclude millionaires
from government handouts and limit how much an individual entity can receive;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Changes to crop insurance including limits on federal
funding to insurance companies and strict environmental stipulations for
farming operations that enroll;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Expanded support for sustainable and organic agriculture
through cost-share programs, research, and market development;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Continuation of programs that invest in a new generation
of farmers and ranchers; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Initiatives aimed at increasing the
accessibility and affordability of healthy nutritious foods, particularly among
the young and aging.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Holding our collective breath for change won’t help. The
healthy food movement needs to speak more loudly and preferably in unison on
these issues. Otherwise we’ll get more of the same: food and agriculture policy
that is clueless about the real problems we face in the years ahead.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Follow the Farm Bill discussions at<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><a href="http://www.foodfight2012.org/">Watershed Media</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><a href="http://www.farmpolicy.com/">Farm Policy</a></span></u><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><a href="sustainableagriculture.net:blog">Sustainable
Agriculture Coalition</a> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .3pt; line-height: 130%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><a href="http://www.cfra.org/">Center for Rural Affairs</a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-17545187711832924242012-10-11T14:55:00.001-07:002012-10-11T15:03:19.418-07:00Vote Yes on Prop 37 by Daniel Imhoff and Michael Dimock<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<!--StartFragment-->
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
In America we hold a consumer’s power of choice at the
checkout line nearly as sacred as that of a voter at the ballot box. This
November, California voters will be asked to protect the right of food buyers
to make informed purchases. Vote Yes on Prop 37.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Passing Proposition 37 could change the future of food in
this country. The initiative is rooted in a simple premise: Consumers have the
right to know if their food is produced using genetic engineering, which
manipulates DNA or transfers it from one organism to another. Any plant or animal food product with
genes that have been engineered would be so labeled. This isn’t a radical new
idea. It’s been standard practice in all member countries of the European Union
for years. The latest published research shows that 61 countries have some form
of mandatory labeling for foods containing genetically modified crop
ingredients.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The companies that sell genetically modified seeds and
manufactured foods argue that American consumers don’t need such detailed
labels. They say, “Just trust us.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That is a lot to ask. Product labels are the front line of
consumer protection. Research and development on genetically engineered
products (also known as genetically modified organisms, or GMOs) are largely
done by private-sector, not public-sector, scientists because companies very
aggressively protect their patents. According to the Center for Food Safety, as
of January 2010, Monsanto had filed 136 lawsuits against farmers for alleged
violations of its technology agreement and/or its patents on genetically
engineered seeds. These cases have involved 400 farmers and 53 small-farm
businesses. The level of secrecy and the combative nature of the industry fuels
public distrust.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Unfortunately, consumers cannot look to the federal
government to increase their trust. The Food and Drug Administration does not
require labeling of GMO products.
Many people fear that some government officials in positions that make
policy on genetically engineered products may hold biases born of their
previous jobs with GMO seed companies.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Distrust is amplified by questions over who really benefits
from GMO foods. One beneficiary is the herbicide industry. Corn and soybeans are implanted with
herbicide-resistant genes so that when fields are sprayed, the weeds die and
modified crops survive. Yet, credible studies show unintended consequences.
Some crop yields have leveled off and now farmers face “super weeds” that
require escalating the use of toxic herbicides. Many of the same corporations
that own GMO crop patents are also in the herbicide business.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Another concern is the skyrocketing price of seed for
farmers. According to the USDA’s Economic Research Service, between 1995 and
2011, the average per acre cost of soy and corn seed rose 325% and 259%,
respectively. These are the same years in which GMO soy and corn went from less
than 20% of the total annual crop to more than 80% for corn and 90% for soy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Finally, GMO products on the market offer American consumers
no clear benefits. Not one introduced genetic trait makes a food product
healthier, tastier or longer lasting. With the exception of one research plot
kept far from the center of production, rice farmers in California have refused
to support introduction of GMO rice because their buyers in Japan have banned
its import.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Some critics will no doubt see GMO labeling as another
“nanny state” law and argue that revising labels will add costs. But Proposition 37 simply requires
basic transparency and truthful packaging, and companies have 18 months to
implement it. And it protects the consumers’
right to know in a product category central to health. As we saw in the
multi-billion tobacco case settlement in 1998, companies cannot always be
trusted to put health before profit.
Corporate executives face
the need to maximize shareholder wealth. That need often trumps other concerns.
In light of such history and with the vitriolic battles among scientists still
debating the risks of this relatively new technology, labeling GMO foods allows
shoppers to make informed choices about the level of risk they are willing to
assume.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Proposition 37 supporters are now waging a David versus Goliath
battle. Supporters have raised just over $4 million thus far, much of it from
small natural food companies like Organic Valley, Lundberg Family Farms,
Nature’s Path Foods and Amy’s Kitchen. Opponents of the initiative have raised
$34.5 million, nearly half from Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Agrosciences and Bayer
CropScience, corporations that own most of the GMO seed patents.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Voters may not realize the broader significance of this
battle. With a $2-trillion economy and 38 million residents — nearly 12% of the
U.S. population — the California market is impossible to isolate. In 2008, many
out-of-state agribusinesses financed opposition to the state’s Proposition 2,
which banned cruel livestock confinement techniques such as tiny pens for
laying hens and crates that trap breeding sows for life. Nearly two-thirds of
the state’s voters supported more humane standards, and that law has created a
ripple effect across the nation.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On Nov. 6, California has the chance to reassert a basic
consumer right that has been lost in grocery store aisles: the right to know
exactly what you’re buying. After all, if there are no health or environmental
disadvantages to genetically modified foods, what do their proponents have to
fear in labeling?<br />
<br />
This piece originally appeared in the October 11, 2012 <i>LA Times</i>. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Daniel Imhoff is the author of "<i>Food Fight: The
Citizen's Guide to the Next Food and Farm Bill</i>." Michael R. Dimock is
president of Roots of Change and chairman emeritus of Slow Food USA.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-5206673716158319022012-07-16T12:09:00.000-07:002012-07-16T12:48:11.380-07:00The House Farm Bill is a Not So Funny Joke<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you thought the Senate’s 2012 Farm Bill had its shortcomings,
wait till you see the House Agriculture Committee’s version passed this week.
Most people predicted it would take aim at the SNAP program (food stamps),
continue subsidizing commodity mega-farms, and make a deep reduction in
conservation supports. It does all of this and a whole lot more.<br />
<o:p><br /></o:p><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><o:p> </o:p>$16.5
billion cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program;</li>
<li><span style="font-family: Symbol;"><span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span>no limits on how much a subsidy recipient can
get in a single year;</li>
<li><span style="font-family: Symbol;"><span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span>no basic conservation requirements in return for
crop insurance subsidies;</li>
<li>$6 billion cuts to conservation programs.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The House draft is known as the Federal Agriculture Reform
and Risk Management Act of 2012. But there is little reform to be found within
its commodity programs that will largely shape farming practices, land
stewardship, and public health and well-being over the next five to ten years. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The draft bill’s failure to reform income eligibility rules
means the biggest operations will continue to receive the lion’s share of all subsidies,
which they can use to expand and squeeze out smaller and medium sized farms.
Without basic conservation requirements in place, operators have the economic
incentive to plow up even the most marginal grounds because the government
“safety net” will ensure they turn a profit. The likely and unwelcome result will be the loss of
critical habitat and soil protection, and a reversal of conservation gains made
over the past three decades.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Instead, this bill’s reforms are designed to roll back
regulations and policies that protect the public, small farmers, and rural
residents from potential harms of industrial agribusiness. If passed as
written, a series of riders and provisions in the House Farm Bill would: </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
• gut rules that protect water
quality and wildlife from agricultural pesticides;</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
• exempt GMO crops from proper
environmental reviews and federal oversight;</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
• block states from establishing
their own standards around food production and food safety; </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
• eliminate fair competition and
contract reforms for livestock producers passed in the 2008 Farm Bill.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The only silver lining is that the House leadership has yet
to set a time frame for this disastrous draft bill to be debated by its full
membership. Amendments can and are being written to bring the bill back in line
with the needs of the country. Now is the time to reach out to your
representatives and urge them to defy this agribusiness biased contract on America.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is anyone’s guess as to how this Farm Bill cycle will
move ahead. Will a one-year extension of the 2008 Farm Bill be passed until a
bill can be agreed upon later? Will the Senate and House Agriculture committees
go straight to the conference process to avoid a messy debate and vote on the
floor of the House? Will automatic cuts to the USDA budget be assessed in 2012
through the sequestration process agreed to earlier this year (which prohibits
decreases in SNAP and Conservation Reserve Program funding)? These are just a
few potential scenarios. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As concerned citizens the best thing we can do is to stay in
touch with groups that are working for change on this issue, be prepared to
make calls and in person meetings with your representatives, and bring your
vote to the table.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Resources:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="feed://feeds.feedburner.com/SustainableAgricultureCoalition">National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition</a> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.ewg.org/agmag/2012/07/crop-insurance-bad-for-taxpayers-bad-for-the-environment/">Environmental Working Group</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-49176998851703993102012-04-10T10:25:00.008-07:002012-04-10T10:58:10.736-07:00PINK SLIME by Becky Weed<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:drawinggridhorizontalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:drawinggridverticalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:dontautofitconstrainedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><b><span style=" ;color:black;">I am a farmer/I am a citizen, and this is what ‘we’ are being told:</span></b> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We must raise or at least finish our animals in cages and feedlots because it is ‘more efficient’.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">Even our animals that start on pasture must end in feedlots, because they ‘finish more quickly’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We must feed heavy grain diets to ruminants evolved to live on grass, inducing low-grade illness and the practice of feeding subtherapeutic antibiotics ---<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>because that ‘enhances growth rates’.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We cannot quit subtherapeutic feeding of antibiotics because it would be too expensive.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We must implant growth hormones to make our animals grow faster because that is most ‘profitable’.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We can extend the output of such feedlots by scavenging the meaty bits admixed with pathogen-prone fatty exteriors, and disinfecting the resultant ‘pink slime’ with ammonia gas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We must serve this augmented ‘hamburger’ to our populace, unlabeled, because it ‘adds value’.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We must spray chemicals on our fruits, vegetable, grains, and into our soils, because it is ‘cleaner’.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><span style=" ;color:black;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><span style=" ;color:black;">We must work, or hire others to work, in conditions that affluent Americans shun for themselves or their children.</span> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We must burn up the carbon in our once-organic-rich soils in order to maximize production with ‘modern’ farming. We must displace food production with ethanol production because it ‘conserves’ carbon-based fuels.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We must purchase crop insurance via government programs rather than building our own crop insurance by building our soils and our crop diversity.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We must grow crops with diminished nutrients because modern, high-yielding Wonder Bread varieties are ‘best’.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We must feed the food derived from such management to our children.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We must plant only a few crops for fuel and livestock feed on such a vast portion of our continent that we disrupt the natural migrations of birds, mammals, pollinators, and water, because it is more ‘efficient’.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We must kill even our most iconic and remnant species, such as buffalo, because their vestigial grasslands interfere with our ‘system’.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><span style=" ;color:black;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><span style=" ;color:black;">We must degrade our waterways, air and soil with the effluent of modern agriculture, because it is most ‘efficient’.</span> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We must purchase and plant the output of centralized biotechnology companies, because that is more ‘efficient’ than following a farmer’s curiosity, drive and wherewithal to breed seed suited to our local landscapes and cultures.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We should be grateful for the plentiful food thus produced, even if we observe increasing obesity diabetes, and malnutrition even among the ‘well-fed’.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We must be grateful for this ‘cheap’ food.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><span style=" ;color:black;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><span style=" ;color:black;">We must endorse these mandates of modern agriculture, while asserting that we are salt of the earth, and that we deserve to maintain our ‘</span><span style=" ;color:black;">way of life’ even as our food system degrades everyone else’s</span> </span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoBodyText"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">If we choose to reject these mandates of ‘modern’ agriculture and farm differently, eat differently, vote differently, then we are quaint, callous, elitist and irrelevant.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><span style=" ;color:black;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><span style=" ;color:black;">We must feed the world, now seven billion, soon nine, then twelve, then what?</span> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">I am a farmer/ I am a citizen, and ‘we’ are telling us:<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">We are indeed grateful for the abundance, ingenuity and hard work that has brought us all much good food and good fortune, and it is time we take stock. How many compromises equal ‘modern’?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">It is not our job to fill the Petri dish to bursting point. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">The earth is our matrix and regulator. Neither trade associations, nor insurance companies, nor governments, nor universities, nor corporations, nor stock markets, nor our neighbors will superceed its natural systems’ ultimate grasp.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">Perhaps some of us <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">are </i>too different to fit the rhythm of modern agriculture---too small, too poor, too new, too foreign, too female, too contrary, too dry, too wet, too close to the land?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">Perhaps it is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">our</i> job to lead the colony to pause, to feed our hearts and our brains, not just our bellies and our banks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">Efficient?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Cheap?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Robust? Equitable?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Durable?</span></b></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoBodyText2"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">Farmers, of all people, could be the most qualified to recognize and explain that the current practices and trajectories take us to a place we cannot afford, and that we can scarcely want. That is, if we would speak our minds. </span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></i></p><p class="MsoBodyText2"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">Pink slime is only the most recent manifestation, at the output end, of a more deep-seated, long-brewing slurry at the heart of American agriculture. This critique of the half-century-old corn-soybean-feedlot-dominated regime of American agriculture is not an attack on farmers, but is rather a plea to farmers, to awaken to our own complicity in, and our own power to change, the very system that we have allowed to compromise our values, our status, our land, and our futures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Pervasive propaganda notwithstanding, it does not have to be this way, because it cannot continue to be this way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; "><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="font-weight: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span></i></span></p><p class="MsoBodyText2"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; "><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="font-weight: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:100%;">Have we entered Alice’s rabbit hole, where governors defend pink-slime manufacture for its job creation, even as the numbers of farmers, ranchers and cows continue to dwindle; where Farm Bureau policies perpetuate the dominance of a continental corn desert, even as their roadside posters invoke bucolic red barns and ranchers with calves-in-their-arms; where Monsanto patents life forms and prosecutes farmers, even as it bankrolls a $30 million dollar PR campaign to resurrect agriculture’s sullied reputation?</span></span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;font-size:100%;"><i><br /></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;font-size:100%;"><i>We have watched and sometimes profited in recent decades as the complex maze of subsidies, lobbies, markets, revolving doors and ignorance have rendered our legislative, executive and judicial branches impotent to find a path out. Consumers are trying to peer down the rabbit hole; scientists are tweaking the dials and reporting some news, but farmers, especially farmers, can and must blast open the portals and reclaim.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; "><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; ">Becky Weed is co-owner of Thirteen Mile Farm in southwest Montana. Thirteen Mile runs a small wool mill and is currently revising its long-term sheep operation, collaborating with a young farmer to add vegetables to its lamb and wool marketing. Weed has worked on her own place and with others to raise livestock while coexisting with native carnivores. <a href="http://www.lambandwool.com/">www.lambandwool.com/</a></span></p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-53193976834099419472012-04-03T11:59:00.001-07:002012-04-03T12:03:55.769-07:00Four Ways the Farm Bill Makes Me Crazy<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; "><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">The Farm Bill is a 700-page hodgepodge of laws, regulations, guidelines and payouts covering all manner of U.S. agriculture, conservation and nutrition programs. And by the end of September, Congress is supposed to re-authorize this mess, or some variant of it, for another five-plus years.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">A rational, coherent blueprint for a healthy national food supply might be too much to ask. But after years of studying the Farm Bill, I'd be thrilled to see a dent made in four of its most glaring conflicts of purpose.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; "><strong style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">1. Don't subsidize what you don't want people to eat.</strong></p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">In broad strokes, the Farm Bill generally has three primary thrusts: 1. Nutrition spending like SNAP (formerly called food stamps), emergency food assistance, and school feeding programs; 2. Subsidies for commodity crops and income support for farmers; 3. Land, soil and ecosystem conservation. These first two are like trains on separate tracks running in completely different directions. (Come to think of it, so are the second and third. They will be addressed below.)</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">In early 2011, the USDA replaced its Food Pyramid with My Plate, a simple graphic representation of the food groups recommended. My Plate's message is clear: A healthy plate should be at least half full of fruits and vegetables and another 30 percent should comprise whole grains. The last 20 percent of the plate is reserved for proteins. A serving of low-fat milk or yogurt rounds off the serving recommendations.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">If there were a matching USDA Subsidy Plate, however, its message would be: Fill your plate with meat and processed foods. Nearly two-thirds of the corn, over half of the soybeans, a great deal of the cottonseed and cottonseed meal, and even some of the wheat produced in the U.S. are fed to livestock. The remainder of the corn and soybeans are either processed into biofuel or industrial food ingredients. And these are the crops the Farm Bill primarily subsidizes. Fruits, vegetables and nuts--the very items the USDA wants us to eat most of--are known as "specialty crops" and currently receive only a small fraction of farm subsidies despite their high nutritional values. Well over 60 percent of commodity subsidies flow to crops fed to animals.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">It's the industrial beef, hog, chicken and dairy operations that win out; subsidies mean they get cheap feed. According to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, the meat, egg and dairy sectors were the beneficiaries of the majority of the $246 billion in subsidies given to U.S. food producers between 1996 and 2009.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; "><strong style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">2. Don't pay polluters.</strong></p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">Massive dairies, hog and poultry factories and other livestock feedlots house thousands (often tens or even hundreds of thousands) of animals. Some produce as much waste as the sewage system of a small city. The difference is that animal feeding operations don't install municipal waste treatment plants to clean up their messes.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">And yet this type of food production has been supported for a decade by a Farm Bill program called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. EQIP, as it's called, must spend 60 percent of its budget on livestock producers, many of whom are the worst, environmentally speaking. And what are they spending that money on? Manure lagoons and waste trafficking.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">EQIP started as a conservation program, meant to help small livestock producers keep animal waste out of creeks and waterways. But now, thanks to lobbying, the massive animal farms can be reimbursed for up to 75 percent (capped at $300,000 per owner) of their costs for animal waste storage and hauling and compliance with laws like the Clean Water Act. Should we have to pay livestock operators to comply with basic laws? Should our tax dollars build the infrastructure for massive meat, egg, and dairy factories?</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">Meanwhile, EQIP funds to organic farming projects are capped at $20,000 a year per operator.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; "><strong style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">3. Don't subsidize overplanting.</strong></p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">Nothing in the Farm Bill--nothing--continues to be more counterproductive than the complete disconnect between commodity crop subsidies and conservation programs. On the one hand, subsidies encourage farmers to plant in every inch of soil, crop insurance programs eliminate farmers' economic risks, and disaster bailouts encourage plowing even on marginal lands in areas prone to flooding and drought. On the other hand, the U.S. Department of Agriculture directs less than 7 percent of its overall spending toward conservation, much of that to right past wrongs and to clean up problems stemming from over-farming.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">Consider, for example, that even as 1.7 million acres were enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program in South Dakota between 1985 and 1995, more than 700,000 acres of grassland were converted to crops--primarily corn and soybeans (already in excess supply). This absurd process only accelerated during the last Farm Bill, as even grasslands used for hay and pasture were transformed into corn fields. Such a dichotomy makes Farm Bill conservation programs seem more like a distraction than a coordinated national stewardship strategy.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">In the case of the Wetlands Reserve Program--arguably the Farm Bill's most successful conservation effort to date--only wetlands previously impacted by agricultural development are eligible for funding; you can't use the money to save pristine ecosystems (unless they're attached to land damaged by farming or ranching).</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; "><strong style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">4. Don't farm corn for fuel.</strong></p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">The drums are finally beating against ethanol subsidies and tax breaks that suck up $7 billion per year in tax dollars. It's about time. For years Congress has mandated that gas be blended with ethanol to push our fuel supply further. And yet, we're practically spinning our wheels backwards. It takes about two-thirds of a gallon of petroleum products to sow, fertilize, irrigate, harvest and process a gallon of corn ethanol. That's minimally cutting our dependence on foreign oil.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">In fact, in 2010 a full 36 percent of the U.S. corn crop was turned into ethanol. That only displaced about 8 percent of what we put in our gas tanks. Americans could save that much gas with a 1.1 mpg increase in the fuel efficiency of our cars and trucks. Here's a kicker: Ethanol-laced gas actually lowers fuel efficiency by 3 to 4 percent.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; ">America faces numerous and complex food- and farming-related challenges in the years to come: curbing the obesity epidemic, halting the loss of habitat, stopping disease outbreaks like e. coli, bringing up the next generation of farmers and ranchers, and many more. The Farm Bill is our chance to right things that are wrong with the food system. Even small amounts of well-directed funding can do a great deal for a beginning farmer education program, habitat restoration effort, or local food project. It would help if the Farm Bill could stop fighting itself. And maybe then it can start to align along one sensible strategy: Create economically and environmentally healthy farms to grow healthy and affordable food.</p><div><br /></div></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-77890721134102222152011-05-09T16:21:00.000-07:002011-05-11T10:28:26.168-07:00We Can’t Afford to Look Away<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Copious column inches have been devoted recently to secrecy laws that are being proposed and voted upon in state legislatures to protect Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) from unflattering media attention. “Whistle blower” laws in Iowa, Minnesota, and Florida would make it a felony offense to gain employment for the purpose of producing videos documenting the realities of food animal production. The </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/opinion/27wed3.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">New York Times editorial board</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> had this to say in late April:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.25in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">“Exposing the workings of the livestock industry has been an undercover activity since Upton Sinclair’s day. Nearly every major improvement in the welfare of agricultural animals, as well as some notable improvements in food safety, has come about because someone exposed the conditions in which they live and die.” </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Just this winter nutcases in Montana introduced a law that would allow representatives to carry concealed weapons in state capitol buildings. Do we find it surprising that states would also want to protect the sociopathic behavior behind closed doors of animal factories?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">The CAFO industry and its evil twin, big agriculture, have been mucking with free speech, freedom of information, and basic democratic rights for over a decade. Oprah Winfrey was dragged through a prolonged and expensive lawsuit in the late 1990s for saying she had changed her mind about eating hamburgers after learning about industry feeding practices. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">When sifting through 6,000 images for possible publication in </span><a href="http://www.cafothebook.org/"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories</span></i></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">, we learned that Montana, North Dakota, and Kansas had already passed laws making it illegal to photograph a food animal production operation without consent of the owner. Thirteen states had passed “veggie libel laws” making it a criminal offense to critique a food production operation. Needless to say, the 450 photographs and 30 essays that made the final cut were carefully vetted.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Many reactions to the images that finally appeared in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">CAFO</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> follow similar lines: “it’s so heavy,” “I can’t get past the beginning,” of “I’d just rather not know.” A classroom of Bradford University political science students described the photographic content as “very intense.” Please consider this. Of the sixty-plus photographers that contributed images to the book, the largest by number came from photo agencies: the Associated Press, Corbis, Reuters, Alamy, and others. These photographers had permission to enter slaughterhouses, feedlots, and hog factories. Do you think they were shown the most down and dirty or the best of the best?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Facing the importation of the U.S. mega-dairy model into the United Kingdom, the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) sent a </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8q_EAbotAw"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">video</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> team to America’s largest milk producing state, California, to see what they might be up against. The WSPA researchers were appalled at how easy it was to document blatant and abysmal animal welfare conditions. Should they be classified as “agro-terrorists” as the new anti-whistle blower laws proposed by industry suggests? Or should they be thanked for showing us a situation so desperately in need of improvement? After a prolonged campaign, the UK mega dairy withdrew its pollution permit—at least for the time being.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Meanwhile, in January of 2011, the Idaho legislature voted 61-7 to keep the public from knowing how dairy waste is handled. One wonders how legislators—charged with protecting the public good—can possibly pass a measure that prohibits its voters from being informed about something as potentially toxic as fecal floods of CAFO manure that can penetrate their drinking wells and groundwater.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">These are Orwellian times. Many local governments have lost the ability to decide on whether or not to allow a CAFO in their communities. Those decisions are now made instead by state departments of agriculture, which are largely ruled by industry. Legislators turn their backs on freedom of speech and freedom of information to protect shit spewing polluters. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Citizens can’t afford to look away from the realities of basic economic production systems, whether we are talking about food, energy, shelter or anything else. What you don’t know can at least make you an accomplice in something you might not agree with, such as the abuse of other living creatures or ecosystems for the sake of a cheap meal. More than that, the democratic rights that we hold dear are ultimately at stake. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Is protecting the Fast Food Nation worth that price?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">See also:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><a href="http://www.just-food.com/analysis/collaborative-approach-sets-uk-apart-on-animal-welfare_id115248.aspx">"Collaborative Approach Sets UK Apart on Animal Welfare"</a></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-50815357824695037772011-05-02T12:14:00.000-07:002011-05-02T12:34:19.183-07:00A West Coast Healthy Food Uprising<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal">The West Coast is a place where, on a rainy winter night, hundreds of people turn out to discuss food policy. People understand the connection between healthy food and community health. They see local and regional food as an engine to revitalize economies. Still I am often asked what audience members can do to affect change in the food system. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">To my mind, individual action takes place in radiating circles, starting with the personal and moving out to the local, regional, state, national and global. I am increasingly drawn to the personal and local, where influence and outcomes are most powerful and tangible. Raise your own fruits, vegetables, or chickens and you know exactly what goes into the entire process. Work on a campaign to protect open space or build a school garden and you can have personal contact and investment. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Things are not so clear or accessible at the national level. The Farm Bill, driver of federal food policy, is so complex that it is hard to know where to begin. Absent campaign finance reform, you are swimming with the sharks: grain monopolies, corn growers, farm bureaus, livestock associations, sugar lobbies, ethanol processers that pour billions of dollars into the political process. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">We can’t let this intimidate us from righting a broken food system. By pulling back to the regional level, it might be possible to form an alliance of concerned eaters with political power at the national level. In January 2011, the <a href="http://seattlefarmbillprinciples.org/seattle-principles/">City of Seattle approved a Farm Bill platform</a>. Given the growing awareness of the importance of food and farm policy on the West Coast, it is reasonable to expect that city councils in Olympia, Portland, Eugene, Ashland, Ukiah, Santa Rosa, San Francisco, Los Angeles and all the way down to San Diego may carefully consider and eventually sign on to a similar document. Its main tenets share a lot in common with a Farm Bill platform drafted by Roots of Change in Los Angeles in November 2010:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">• a health centered food system;</p> <p class="MsoNormal">• sustainable agriculture practices;</p> <p class="MsoNormal">• community and regional prosperity and resilience;</p> <p class="MsoNormal">• equitable access to healthy food;</p> <p class="MsoNormal">• social justice and equity; </p> <p class="MsoNormal">• systems approach to policy making.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">While the Farm Bill is the Big Kahuna in the food and agriculture system, there are other forceful unifying levers. In 2008 California passed Proposition 2, an animal welfare initiative that will ban three forms of egregious confinement systems: cages for laying hens; confinement stalls for pregnant sows; and veal crates for male dairy calves. Proposition 2 can’t be dismissed as a purely California phenomenon. It passed with 63 percent of the vote. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/weekinreview/15marsh.html?_r=1">Seven states</a> have now banned certain animal confinement systems, and the Humane Society of the United States has introduced similar initiatives in two more key states: Washington and Oregon.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In addition to unified Farm Bill platforms, imagine the entire West Coast agreeing on advanced animal welfare standards. Most citizens believe that food animals deserve humane treatment while they are alive, yet there are no laws at the national level to protect livestock during their production cycles. Intervention is still possible at the state level. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Health practitioners are also joining the food policy reform movement, concerned about the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other nutritionally related ailments ravaging adults and children in their communities. They are following the lead of innovative programs like the <a href="http://rootsofchange.org/content/activities-2/california-farmers%E2%80%99-market-consortium">California Farmers’ Market Consortium</a> that links the food stamp program (SNAP) with regional growers of fruits and vegetables in 60 farmers markets, from Santa Rosa to San Diego. In key markets, SNAP recipients can receive up to double the value of their purchases of fruits and vegetables—money that goes right into the hands of farmers. They can also watch demonstrations on how to cook and eat more healthfully. Doctors are collecting data on the medical benefits of such programs to analyze their effectiveness. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Coastal livestock producers and consumers interested in high quality, pasture-raised animal food products are united around a common concern: a lack of slaughter facilities within reasonable driving distances from production centers. In years past, each large town had some sort of slaughter facility. But decades of massive consolidation have devastated local processing capabilities. Small-scale slaughter facilities are one of the crucial missing links in local food system capabilities. In California, for example, only a handful remain. Just as Farm Bill dollars once built the giant monoculture farming infrastructures and Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operation industry that dominate today’s food system, it can do the same for the modern pastured livestock movement. Assistance can come in the form of value added producer grants, loans, important research, regulations tailored to small-scale facilities—to complement necessary private investment. Reformers could ask for 10 new West Coast processing facilities, for example, in the upcoming Farm Bill as a pilot project.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In a relatively short amount of time Washington, Oregon, and California could become a regional force in the national dialog leading up to the next Farm Bill. If we citizens don’t impact policy at the national level, there are plenty of agribusinesses and food manufacturers already working to set the rules and spend taxpayer money for us. As the old adage says, we reap what we sow. The West Coast can set its own table. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-82645459505015883742011-04-22T10:23:00.000-07:002011-04-22T10:25:38.714-07:00What Industry Doesn't Want You to Know About Animal Factories<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;line-height:22.0pt;mso-pagination: none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: -webkit-xxx-large;"> <!--StartFragment--> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;line-height:22.0pt;mso-pagination: none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia">See no evil, hear no evil, eat no evil. This seems to be the operating principle behind a slew of recent legal initiatives aimed at sheltering animal factory agriculture operations from public view.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;line-height:22.0pt;mso-pagination: none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia">State legislatures in Iowa, Minnesota and <a href="http://floridaindependent.com/23574/jim-norman-bill-would-make-farm-photography-a-first-degree-felony-animal-rights-groups-outraged"><span style="color:#00B7B8;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none">Florida</span></a> are now considering bills that would make it a criminal offense to gain employment for the purposes of videotaping what goes on the behind warehouse walls of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs. In March, the <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/human-interest/animals/08001000.topic"><span style="color:#00B7B8;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none">Iowa House of Representatives</span></a> passed such an anti- “whistle blower” measure, co-written by the Iowa Poultry Association, which is now before the State Senate.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;line-height:22.0pt;mso-pagination: none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia">Pre-emptive legal strikes by the CAFO industry to put a chilling effect on anyone considering tarnishing its public image are hardly surprising. Industrial animal food producers are reeling from a series of shocking undercover videos that expose the abuse and suffering on the disassembly lines of slaughterhouses and inside warehouses crammed with hogs, laying hens, and meat birds. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/01/chicks-being-ground-up-al_n_273652.html"><span style="color:#00B7B8;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none">Such</span></a> imagery is hard to shake from your subconscious. (Just this week a video was released of a sick calf getting <a href="http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/04/shocking-video-dairy-calves-bludgeoned.php"><span style="color:#00B7B8;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none">killed with a pickaxe</span></a>.) Opinion polls consistently show that Americans are increasingly concerned about animal welfare and health standards, and often willing to pay more for them.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;line-height:22.0pt;mso-pagination: none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia">While the industry would like us to believe that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, we are barely six months removed from last summer’s recall of 500 million eggs due to salmonella contamination from just two CAFO operations in Iowa. In response, people flocked to farmers markets, specialty retailers, and other venues to purchase free-range, organic, and cage-free alternatives.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;line-height:22.0pt;mso-pagination: none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia">In fact, industrial animal agriculture has already made bold assaults against First Amendment rights. In three states—Kansas, Montana, and North Dakota—it is illegal to photograph a factory farm without permission of the owner. Thirteen states have passed agricultural disparagement laws—a.k.a. veggie libel laws—that restrict what can be said about perishable food products. None of these laws have been challenged in federal court. The Texas Cattlemen’s Association, however, engaged Oprah Winfrey in a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/18/us/gain-for-winfrey-in-suit-by-beef-producers-in-texas.html?scp=3&sq=oprah%20beef%20lawsuit&st=cse"><span style="color:#00B7B8;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none">prolonged legal battle</span></a> in the late 1990s for claiming on television that she had been “stopped cold from eating another burger” after learning about cattle feeding procedures from reformed rancher Howard Lyman. The popular talk show host had both sufficient resources and determination to fight and ultimately won the decision.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;line-height:22.0pt;mso-pagination: none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia">Numerous states have passed Common Farming Exemptions, which essentially allow the industry to determine animal cruelty statutes by defining them as standard practices. Does this sound like the fox guarding the henhouse? While the welfare of our pets is legally protected, there are no federal laws that presently govern the raising of food animals. Food animals are protected during transport (very hard to enforce) and during slaughter (though this doesn’t include the 9 billion chickens raised in the United States each year.)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;line-height:22.0pt;mso-pagination: none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia">The real question citizens and our elected representatives should be asking is, what do the animal factories have to hide, and do we really want to be part of such a clandestine food system? Is a cheap bacon cheeseburger or bucket of chicken worth the loss of democratic freedoms? We are talking about food production, after all, not missile defense.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;line-height:22.0pt;mso-pagination: none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia">Dr. Temple Grandin, animal behavior specialist at Colorado State University and long-time consultant to the livestock industry, argues in her most recent book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Animals-Make-Us-Human-Creating/dp/0151014892"><i><span style="color:#00B7B8;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none">Animals Make Us Human</span></i></a>, for greater transparency. Animal food producing operations, she suggests, should be able to pass a random inspection test, where a non-expert can visit and intuit how well animals are being treated. The best facilities, in her opinion, have video cameras streaming at all times, allowing for constant monitoring. Dr. Grandin is far from a radical animal welfare activist, and remains one of the most respected people in the world on such matters.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;line-height:22.0pt;mso-pagination: none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia">Animal agriculture impacts the planet in powerful ways. Tens of billions of food animals consume vast amounts of feed, generate massive volumes of waste, and make cheap fat and cholesterol laden meat, eggs, and dairy products the centerpiece rather than a vital component of every meal.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;line-height:22.0pt;mso-pagination: none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia">Proponents have been arguing for years that industrial food production is necessary to feed the word’s ever-increasing population. Essentially we are being told that the CAFO industry is too big to fail. Research increasingly shows that modern sustainable agriculture operations can be equally or more productive than conventional ones: without federal subsidies, environmental impacts, and dubious health implications—or infringements upon constitutionally protected freedom of speech.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;line-height:22.0pt;mso-pagination: none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia">Organic and sustainable agriculture practitioners have spent the last thirty years with an open source approach to information about farming techniques. For the most part, what they have learned the hard way about chemical-free, soil enhancing agriculture is out in the open for anyone to learn. Certified organic and biodynamic producers are required to pay fees to third-parties to audit their practices.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;line-height:22.0pt;mso-pagination: none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia">Recent moves to pre-empt the public from learning about the sometimes unspeakable conditions of modern intensive livestock operations are just the tip of the iceberg. Local communities are being stripped of their powers to determine zoning and land use concerning agricultural operations. Why aren’t local citizens permitted the right to decide whether a CAFO can be sited in their community in states like Illinois and Iowa?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;line-height:22.0pt;mso-pagination: none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia">There is a lot more information that the consuming public might find useful about industrial animal food production: the quantity of antibiotics used during a given production cycle; the exact contents of feed rations; the quantities, content and dates of air and water emissions from a CAFO; the amount of federal subsidies that support a particular operation. All are concerns with real public consequences.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;line-height:22.0pt;mso-pagination: none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia">We all have to eat. But we also have a right to know. Food should not come at the expense of animal welfare, the health of someone else’s community, or perhaps most importantly, our democratic freedoms.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> <p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-21745136568148571112011-04-07T10:47:00.001-07:002011-04-11T09:34:22.287-07:00The Land of Stinkin’: When a Mega Dairy Takes Over<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal">Imagine a series of pits that, if combined, would cover an area 40 acres in size carved 20 feet deep. Laid out as a perfect square, each side is 1,320 feet long, enough to hold 16 football fields. Now imagine it full of millions of gallons of festering manure from over 5,000 dairy cows plunked down into rural Jo Daviess County in northern Illinois. Imagine also, that these cesspools would be excavated from a porous Karst geological formation, with the propensity to percolate directly into the groundwater, along with a cocktail of nitrates,phosphorous, hydrogen sulfide, bacteria, and other substances like antibiotic drugs. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">If your state’s Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t bother fulfilling its obligations to permit such potential pollution hazards under the Clean Water Act, you have little choice but to start your own citizen activist organization. For three years, the HOMES group (<a href="http://www.stopthemegadairy.org/">Helping Others Maintain Environmental Standards</a>) has been emptying their pockets for attorneys fees, organizing rallies, documenting abuses, and constructing a legal case against a California mega-dairy that wants to—as they see it—invade their community, an agricultural region with many legacy farms spanning multiple generations.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The challenge before the HOMES group is made all the more difficult because Illinois communities have lost the ability to refuse such a siting of an industrial animal factory operation in their area for concerns of protecting their own public health. “Local control” over such decisions, in Illinois as in many other states, has been relegated to the state level. In fact, just this week a HOMES' group appeal was denied by the Illinois Supreme Court, affirming that the state's Department of Agriculture has the ultimate say in CAFO siting decisions, and stripping citizens' rights to sue for improper implementation or enforcement of regulations. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I participated in a community discussion about CAFOs sponsored by the HOMES group last week. It was an opportunity to listen to talks from long-time activists Dr. Kendall Thu of Northern Illinois University (contributor of a great essay to my <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><a href="http://www.cafothebook.org/">CAFO<span style="font-style:normal"> book</span></a></i>) and <a href="http://web.missouri.edu/~ikerdj/papers/Idaho%20CAFOs%20--%20Local%20Control.htm">Dr. John Ikerd</a>, retired agricultural economist at the University of Missouri, whose work greatly informed the book’s pieces on the community impacts of industrial animal factory agriculture. I also had a good chance to meet other committed anti-CAFO activists, such as grain farmer Karen Hudson and public interest attorney Danielle Diamond, both with the <a href="http://www.sraproject.org/">Socially Responsible Agriculture Project</a>.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">This leg of the CAFO outreach campaign started about an hour west of Chicago, driving west and south through the Land of Lincoln, known by the anti-CAFO activists as the Land of Stinkin’. There are over <a href="http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/factsheet/factory-farm-map/">3,200 CAFOs in the state</a>, primarily hog and dairy operations. To pump a steady stream of feed into these protein factories, Illinois produces a staggering amount of corn. We drove for hours and hours at the 65 mph speed limit, passing field after monoculture field of corn, fields right up to the highway, right up to farm houses, right next to mutated suburban developments with barely a forest or hedgerow or clump of trees in sight. As they say, planted “fencerow to fencerow.” In this day of soaring commodity prices, soaring demand for animal feed and ethanol, it seems the only way an Illinois farmer would maintain any habitat at all is if the government (aka taxpayers) pay them for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The mega-dairy that the HOMES citizen activist group is fighting against is owned by A. J. Bos, a corporate agribusiness from California. It has already established one of the country’s largest dairies in northeastern Oregon, Threemile Canyon, which I have visited and am told is now the third largest emitter of airborne ammonia in the nation—no small achievement if true. One of the departing acts of public service of the Bush administration was to remove Environmental Protection Agency restrictions on reporting of air emissions including ammonia, an airborne pollutant and health hazard that can literally travel for miles from a livestock operation. The CAFO industry has been given a get out of jail free card when it comes to Clean Air Act violations.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">This large-scale industrial assault is set against the backdrop of the unraveling meltdown of the Fukishima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan and I can’t help thinking of the out of control scale of our industrial operations. The CAFO industry is essentially telling us they’re too big to fail, we need their massive confinement systems if we want a cheap and abundant food supply. The costs of polluting a community’s groundwater, eroding their living standards, degrading their air quality and filling the countryside with the odors of thousands of cows producing more manure than milk on a daily basis and never touching a blade of grass are simply the price of cheap dairy products. What they don’t say is that the jobs a CAFO actually brings in to an area will most likely be very few and low paying. It will also spell the end for numerous small and mid-size independent producers in the region. And in time, once a community is opened up to the animal factory industry, it begins a downward economic spiral with few other development options. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">As the HOMES group fights with every breath to prevent becoming an ecological sacrifice zone, it appears that the owners of California-based A. J. Bos have no intentions of living anywhere near the operation. State and federal regulators have made the expansion of such filthy businesses possible. It is humbling to witness such a tragic abandonment of civic defense.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Glimmers of hope remain. Although construction of the mega-dairy is well underway, the barns remain incomplete and no animals are confined yet. Last October, a bright purple leachate of rotting silage, applied onto fields of the A. J. Bos land, contaminated a tributary to the Apple River. As a result, the US EPA is now questioning whether this CAFO can possibly be a “zero discharge facility” as the corporation has alleged. (That's essentially the way the system works. A CAFO promises they are not going to discharge, and the government believes them.) Meanwhile, a second citizens’ activist group, Illinois Citizens for Clean Air and Water, is successfully petitioning the US EPA to withdraw the Illinois EPA’s Clean Water Act permitting authority because of their failure to properly regulate existing CAFOs. The pressure is now on the Illinois EPA to step up their regulatory oversight or risk US EPA taking over administration of the Clean Water Act in the state.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In northern Illinois, and across the country, everyday citizens are doing the work of the state and federal government to prevent a complete fouling of their communities by industrial animal factories. This is hardly the time to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, a pursuit senators and representatives from both sides of the aisle are currently attempting. In many states, the Clean Water Act remains one of the only tools that offers citizens any kind of legal recourse and environmental protection from installations such as shit spewing absentee landowner corporate mega-dairies. In an age of increasing voluntary corporate compliance, community self-preservation hangs by barely a thread. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-90632481680597160332011-03-22T11:38:00.000-07:002011-03-24T15:01:10.193-07:00The Tour de Stench<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal">Packed cozily inside a pickup, six of us are heading down a two-lane country highway through a Western Kentucky landscape blanketed in snow. We’re on what our tour organizer, Aloma Dew, calls a “Tour de Stench,” exploring one of the United States’ increasing number of animal factory hotspots. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">At one point, our driver, Gene Nettles, centers the truck in the road, tires evenly straddling the broken yellow line. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>“I’m in Tennessee and you’re in Kentucky,” he says to me, with a chuckle. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Industrial poultry houses have long occupied this lightly populated rural area, supplying the region’s two massive processing plants with a steady stream of factory farmed meat birds. This rise of poultry CAFOs here has been intentional — It's not called Kentucky Fried Chicken for nothing. Among the rolling hills are vast fields of federally subsidized corn and soybeans. These are the primary feed ingredients for fattening broiler chickens, now crammed as many as 80,000 inside the newest windowless, temperature-controlled warehouses. The stubble from last fall’s corn and soybean harvests is still visible under the recent snowfall, pricking up in geometric patterns. On the bare branches of the few remaining woodlots that edge the fields, bird nests are everywhere. Hawks stare down from perches, scanning the ground for prey. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Spurred on by a nearby Tennessee hog corporation, Fulton County, western Kentucky is also becoming a magnet for industrial pork production. The Tennessee-based Tosh Farms corporation is what is known in industry terms as an “integrator.” They contract with Kentucky growers to raise hogs to their exact specifications. In essence, it’s more like a boarding arrangement. Growers construct houses at no small cost — $200,000 each I am told — then cram them full of animals that the integrator actually owns. The contractors are paid a fee for successfully raising pigs to slaughter weight. The downer animals — dead, dying, diseased, and disabled — and the vast amounts of waste the animals generate over their short lifetimes become the grower’s responsibility.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">My companions tell me that integrator Jimmy Tosh was attracted to this area because of Kentucky’s comparatively lax enforcement of water quality regulations and favorable tax laws. Somehow, despite the massive amounts of waste emitted from such intensive concentrations of animals, new CAFOs are being issued zero discharge permits. The only possible explanation for how such daily volumes of urine and feces could possibly disappear without environmental or community impact is “magic.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">But to my co-travelers, these CAFOs and their associated problems are anything but magical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It is more typical that whenever and wherever a high concentration of CAFOs appears among rural populations, conflict and community strife also enter the picture — pitting neighbor against neighbor, at times family member against family member. This is also the case at hand. Scrunched in the front seat with me is Max Wilson, a conventional grain farmer whose 900-acre conventional corn and soybean farm is surrounded by three hog CAFOs, all within less than two miles of his home. His neatly cropped hair starting to gray, Wilson is tall and slender and looks more like a school board president than what one might regard as an environmental crusader. In fact Wilson <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal"><u>is</u></i> a local school board member. But he is also one of a dozen neighbors involved in a lawsuit against Tosh Farms. The impacts have accumulated over time —oppressive odors, declining property values, CAFOs sited closer and closer to residences. He and his neighbors felt they had no choice but to take legal action.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Soon we are face to face, and nostril to stench as it were, with one of the hog CAFOs at issue. Two long white windowless buildings, huge circular fans on their side walls, are sunk down in the snowy landscape. These are finishing barns, where young hogs are sent to eat until they reach slaughter weight — approximately 260 pounds. I am told that hog barn operators in these parts often file applications for pollution discharge permits by declaring just a few animals shy of the official EPA designation of a CAFO, which would be 2,500 for hogs over 55 pounds. (This strategy of cramming animals just under the minimum for EPA designation as a CAFO is being adopted in other areas as well.)</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">These barns also represent a return to an old style of hog CAFO known as a “deep pit,” referring to the 8 foot deep by 100 foot by 200 foot manure catchment directly beneath the building. It’s designed to hold a million gallons of urine and feces. Rather than first pumping it into an adjacent lagoon, the hogs live on top of their own waste. Gases such as ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and other VOCs (volatile organic compounds) are vaporized or blown into the air with fans. The remaining waste is pumped out of the deep pit and plowed into the ground, sprayed onto fields, or distributed by the truckload in shiny stainless 6,000-gallon tankers — often at night. Other fans are used to suck the air out of the CAFO and replace it with outside air. Toxic fumes from beneath the barns could otherwise overwhelm the animals. (There are reports of animals dying just this way due to extended power outages.) </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I am about 75 yards downwind from the nearest building and the odor is sour, ammoniated, and nauseating. It fills the truck cab in the few seconds it takes for me to open and close the door to take pictures. Max says he can smell it more than two miles away when the wind blows in the direction of his farm. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In addition to the two hog barns there’s a dead box, a concrete rectangle about the size of a 40-foot ocean shipping container. That’s where the mortalities go to be composted or picked apart by the scavengers. Dead boxes are standard on most of the hog CAFOs I have seen.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">This area of rolling hills and wintry farm fields and remnant woodlots seems like it would be quite stunning in the spring time. One can imagine a thoroughly different kind of agriculture. Pastures could be restored to complement the feed grains, with livestock moving about these farms, rather than a complete separation of animals from the outside world and their farmers. Tree plantings could protect the soil and yield food on the hills and on highly erodible lands. One could envision more farmers too, a new generation of people participating in a more diversified agriculture and food system.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Given the recent economic realities of agriculture, where more and more power has been transferred to integrated processors and distributors, it is somewhat understandable that landowners have taken the gamble on these expensive operations. For many, owning a CAFO may mean the difference between survival and foreclosure. Often the payback on such investments can take a decade, however, and the return per animal can be marginal. Then there’s the issue of quality of life. If neighbors are complaining, one has to wonder what it’s like to actually live on one of these operations.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Faster than we know it, our tour de stench is over. I am left thinking, as I so often am, that it really matters whose side you are on in these seemingly intractable battles. I am on the side of the farmers and the animals and healthy farm communities, even if our food ultimately costs a bit more. No amount of cheap protein is worth tearing away the fabric of rural culture by stinking up the countryside and raising animals as if they were assembly line objects. Somehow we must find a way forward. We don’t need this kind of agriculture to feed the world as is so often claimed to justify the concentration of filth and misery these systems embody. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I believe the collective wisdom and desire for change is out there among us. </p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-69892475001283952372011-03-07T10:27:00.000-08:002011-03-07T10:34:58.358-08:00Honoring The Food Animals On Your Plate<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">From the</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> cream in our Monday morning coffee to the roast chicken at Sunday night dinner, we accrue an incalculable debt to food animals. We depend on them for nourishment. We gather festively around the cooking of a turkey or ham during holidays. Yet many people do not realize that most of the animals that grace our tables are the victims of harsh suffering long before slaughter.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Consider the modern turkey. It is far removed from the wild, native bird that the pilgrims roasted for those original Thanksgiving gatherings. Today’s conventional turkey, the Broad Breasted White, is an entirely industrial creature. It is bred to grow freakishly quickly and raised on grain inside massive buildings. Most male turkeys, or Toms, become so breast heavy, they can barely stand up – and certainly can’t reproduce. Artificial insemination is the only way this man-made species survives. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Such mass-production meat factories – called “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs – exist for most of the animal food products Americans buy: cows, pigs and chickens. At least 90 percent of food animals in the U.S. are raised this way, and other countries are rapidly adopting the CAFO model as well. These enterprises are a perverse inversion of our idea of family farms with pigs rolling in the mud, cows grazing in pastures, roosters crowing from fence posts, and farmers interacting with the animals. At CAFOs, vast numbers of animals—100,000 cows on a feedlot, 30,000 chickens in a broiler shed, 1,000 hogs in a windowless warehouse—are confined in pens or cages, often kept alive with regular doses of antibiotics</span></span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">. </span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">As CAFOs take over the food system, it is clear that there is already plenty of animal protein in our diets. Americans now eat an average of 33 pounds of cheese each year, for example, largely because of the flood of cheap milk coming from dairy CAFOs. This is three times the per capita consumption of the 1970s. Cheese is the largest source of saturated fats in our diets, which tend to raise cholesterol levels and are linked to heart disease. Dairy products, meat, poultry, and eggs don’t have to be nearly so cheap or abundant – and yet we are raising 10 billion food animals in the United States every year. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The high costs of factory-farmed foods are being paid for by the animals, rural communities, taxpayers, and the environment. Large-scale animal operations generate the sewage output comparable to a small metropolis. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">T</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">he waste oozing from these highly concentrated production systems fouls the air, land, and water. Sadly, if you purchase animal products from fast food restaurants, supermarkets, big box stores</span></span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">,</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> or other mainstream outlets</span></span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">,</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> there is a strong chance that you are eating at the expense of someone else’s community well-being.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">You don’t have to become a vegan or vegetarian to opt out of this system that might best be described as “organized irresponsibility.” (Those are certainly viable options, however.) Some of the country’s best small farmers are demonstrating that traditional methods of livestock production are practical and economically viable. They are raising locally adapted breeds of livestock</span></span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">on pastures where the animals eat a more natural diet, grow more slowly, and naturally socialize. These animals are also raised without routine doses of antibiotics and growth hormones, essential tools in industrial CAFO production. Third-party certification organizations such as Animal Welfare Approved have established standards combined with regular audits to encourage such humane production practices. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Still, labels can be confusing, and some like “natural” and “healthy” are misleading. The best way to know where your food comes from and how it was produced is to know your farmer.</span></span><span class="MsoCommentReference"><span style="display:none;mso-hide: all"> Still</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The other way to reduce the role of CAFOs is to scale back the amount of meat we consume. Many individuals are simply orienting their meals around more grains and vegetables with smaller portions of higher quality, sustainably sourced meats, dairy, and eggs. Another groundswell is the Meatless Monday campaign, which has already been embraced by chefs, restaurants, food services, k-12 schools, and college campuses. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Attending to the conditions under which your food is raised is a profound way of giving thanks to the animals that nourish you daily. It can also lead to some of the most satisfying meals you’ve ever shared or tasted.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Resources:</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><i><a href="http://www.cafothebook.org/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories</span></a></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Grass Pastured Meats</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><a href="http://www.eatwild.com/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">www.eatwild.com</span></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><a href="http://www.americangrassfed.org/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">www.americangrassfed.org</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><a href="http://http://www.jhsph.edu/clf/programs/eating/proj_meatless.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Meatless Mondays</span></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Helvetica;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">This piece was originally published on <i>Huffington Post</i>. </span></span></p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-89161534351197690072011-02-03T13:53:00.000-08:002011-02-03T13:55:09.286-08:00Confessions of a Reluctant Wonk<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal">First, a confession. I am a reluctant wonk. Despite writing rather extensively about food and agriculture policy, acronyms are not what motivate me in the morning. After about a half an hour of studying something as dense as the Farm Bill, I need a diversion, a few minutes of deep breathing outside with my feet on the ground, or some quality time with Fanny, my Australian shepherd. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I do believe that agriculture is indeed a public good. Food and farm policy are not a necessary evil but a real privilege and opportunity for a country and its people. It is wise to invest in conservation, clean water, soil protection, and habitat enhancement for our collective good. The natural world, well attended, cannot keep pace with the growth demands of the industrial economy and Wall Street. Unfortunately, our rural lands, farm animals, and agriculture workers are being driven by efficiency, industrial concentration, and profit taking. Rather than investing in tangible returns and long-term security, agriculture policy is pushing us toward the brink of collapse on many fronts.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">For those who care about healthy food, the Farm Bill is something we all need to digest—even in small helpings. The information is out there, accessible and more organized than ever before, even if the situation is not so rosy. (Check out <a href="http://www.farmpolicy.com/">www.farmpolicy.com</a> everyday for a week to get started.)</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The Farm Bill is a massive legislation that is revisited every five to seven years. The next renewal is scheduled for 2012 but it could likely drag on into 2013 or beyond. For the last few decades the Farm Bill has been dominated by two primary political forces: a nutrition and hunger bloc that fights for food stamps (now known as SNAP) and other assistance; and the commodity agriculture lobby (corn, cotton, wheat, rice, soybeans, dairy, sugar producers, and concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs). This is your basic <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">quid pro quo</i>. Urban legislators get food assistance for the 40 million Americans facing hunger on a regular basis. Farm country legislators bring home the bacon to huge agribusinesses that are now raking in record profits. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">My least favorite of these commodity players hijacking taxpayer dollars are the CAFOs. Not only are their factory animal farms morally reprehensible, they are fouling the air, water and land in the communities where they have taken over and are feasting at the public trough in the process. Their economic model is based upon a steady supply of Farm Bill subsidized feeds—corn and soybeans—that has saved them billions of dollars over the last decade. (This is well documented in a report by <a href="http://ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/wp/07-04LivingHighOnHog.pdf">Timothy Wise and Elanor Starmer</a> from Tufts University). In 2002, the CAFO industry began raiding precious Farm Bill conservation dollars to pay for nasty manure lagoons and waste management infrastructure. A single CAFO investor can qualify for $450,000 in Environmental Quality Incentive Program dollars to pay for his or her own pollution compliance. (Read Martha Noble’s essay in <a href="http://www.watershedmedia.org/cafoReader_overview.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The CAFO Reader</i></a> for a more detailed summary.) </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">One would think that once the CAFOs and other commodity producers get their 10 billion to 20 billion dollars each year from the taxpayers, their lobbyists would be content to let the rest of the players fight over the scraps: a few billion here for conservation, a few million here for rebuilding local food capacity, a few million for those organic farmers who pay high certification costs just to prove they are doing the right thing. But agribusiness is not content. They are fighting for every last cent of Farm Bill dollars and doing all they can to paint the burgeoning good food movement as fringe and meaningless.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Last year, Senators Mc Cain (R-AZ), Chambliss (R-GA) and Roberts (R-KS) publicly attacked Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and a small program named Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>KYF 2 (in Wonk speak) was spending approximately $65 million to rebuild local food systems around the country, including developing new markets in urban areas for rural farmers hoping to expand their businesses. In highly divisive language, the Senators claimed that this money was benefitting organic hobby farmers supplying urban elites at farmers markets, rather than “Production Agriculture.” This is the term for heavily subsidized monoculture commodity farmers that largely grow crops we don’t directly eat. Just to give some perspective on that $65 million Know Your Farmer program budget, Brazilian cotton farmers received $165 million last year from our government in retaliation for past U.S. cotton subsidies deemed illegal by the World Trade Organization. The Senators wrote no nasty letters to the Secretary about those payouts to farmers in another country as far as I know. Then again, there are a lot of cotton farmers in Arizona and Georgia. <span style="color:red;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Last week the rules were finalized on another 2008 Farm Bill program called the Farm and Ranchland Protection Program (FRPP). One would hope this money would go to protect beautiful farmlands in areas threatened by sprawl and development. But in keeping with their strategy of fighting for every last cent of the Farm Bill pie, agribusiness lobbyists were able to make a CAFO manure lagoon (a cesspool of waste) eligible for protection<span style="color:red;"> </span>under Farm and Ranchland Protection Program easements. Maybe there is something I don’t quite understand — such as even small operations have such holding facilities — but somehow this doesn’t seem what the program was intended to preserve. (Read the <a href="http://sustainableagriculture.net/blog/frpp-final-rule/?utm_source=roundup&utm_medium=email">National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition’s report</a> here.) </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">As you can see, foodies, foodists, healthy food activists, and concerned citizens have no choice but to begin to understand the detailed maze of farm policy. Our challenge is to move from acting individually to developing collective clout. It’s the only way voting with our forks might begin to change the enormous power corporate agribusiness wields over our food system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-69591978374647141752010-12-10T08:33:00.000-08:002010-12-10T08:52:30.687-08:00The Totally Outsourced Life<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>It used to be that we made things in this country: you know, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">stuff</i>, all kinds of things from heavy machinery to automobiles, clothing, furniture and electronics. My family ran a small woodworking and printing business in a mixed industrial and agricultural county in south central Pennsylvania. That factory was eventually shuttered, but for most of my formidable years we employed over 100 skilled workers, many who ran small farms in their off time and during the weekends. Gradually we Americans learned to “outsource,” a fancy term meaning that the owners of businesses and corporations maximize profits by moving operations wherever labor is cheapest and environmental laws are nearly nonexistent. This left us with the job of financing, designing, distributing, marketing, and importing the now outsourced goods — sending much of the money that used to remain in our own communities offshore.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The unmaking of the America that used to make things was a gradual wearing away. Early industrialization centered in the northeast. Then it crept slowly across the south, like a great blight, leaving a rust belt in its wake. (Before we outsourced overseas, we had a lot of practice outsourcing in our own country.) It is almost impossible for me to return to my childhood home anymore without feelings of deep despair. Economic development has all but stagnated. The woods and farms have long been carved up for golf courses and mutant housing developments (many unoccupied) that serve as a tax haven for commuters to Baltimore (an hour drive to the south). Nearly all manufacturing eventually moved offshore: first to Japan then Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Indonesia, India, China, Viet Nam, moving like a domino effect to wherever people are willing to work for less than the last outsourcing mecca. What wasn’t outsourced to Asia ended up in Central America, especially to the maquiladoras along the U.S.-Mexico border once NAFTA passed. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The American financial system found a new way to grow the economy: credit. If everyone lived on credit, we could keep buying all the stuff that had been outsourced and was now piling high in malls and box stores, which had in turn outsourced most of the traditional local retailers as well. Once the credit ran out in America, the countries that were making the goods began extending the credit. We know all too well the outcome of that story when the bills finally came due. The banks were too big to fail. But millions of people lost their homes and without any manufacturing sector to speak of, or money to pay for stuff, the economy ground to a halt.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Global swings of money and economic power are not new to history or the international economy. In the nineteenth century, when a country’s worth and economy were actually based upon real assets like how much gold bullion and silver were in the government coffers, western trading nations became more than a bit rattled when vast stores of their wealth were being shipped off to Asia to meet rising demand for things like pepper, tea, silk, and other goods. The English retaliated by smuggling opium into China. This was done against the direct wishes of the emperor who cautioned his people against what a narcotic addiction would do to their cultural fabric. But like, credit and cheap disposable things that make life convenient, opium is a powerful addiction. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In a shameful effort to regain their vanishing wealth, the English bought opium from India and transported it into China only in return for gold. This way they cracked the nearly impenetrable fortress of the Imperial Chinese economy. Ultimately, it signaled the beginning of modernization, decade after decade of internal wars and revolution, and the end of dynasty rule in China.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Today, we Americans are faced with our own self-imposed addiction — we are strung out on the consumption of disposable products that fuel our convenience-driven lifestyles. Imagine that one of the biggest export items from California, among the world's ten most powerful economies, is recycled cardboard, from the boxes used to import all the cheap outsourced products. We are credit junkies, living by turning our houses and mortgages into ATM machines, and doing all in our powers to keep the faucet of cheap outsourced products flowing. Unlike imperial China, our economic leaders do not caution us to be more disciplined. Instead we are asked to grow the economy once more by consuming — keeping that addiction satisfied — rather than building an infrastructure to make things for ourselves. Consumption detached from production is an opiate, something that may satiate us from purchase to purchase, but keeps us from dealing with the real enemy at the gate. The totally outsourced life, in which purpose and the making of basic necessities has tragically gone missing.</p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-80994244593578358222010-11-19T11:11:00.000-08:002010-11-19T14:11:05.839-08:00Giving Thanks: Honoring Your Food Animals Over the Holidays<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7ldzspLyB0o/TOb1Sm3qapI/AAAAAAAAABo/5hBVsNrp6XM/s1600/turkeys%2Bfor%2Bblog.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 134px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7ldzspLyB0o/TOb1Sm3qapI/AAAAAAAAABo/5hBVsNrp6XM/s200/turkeys%2Bfor%2Bblog.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5541386091546438290" /></a><br /><!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--StartFragment--> </p><p class="MsoNormal">The end of year holidays are times when families gather around their tables, sharing meals and company, often organized around the cooking of a turkey, ham, or roast. During the three-month feasting period between Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl, we whip cream to dollop on pumpkin pies, sip egg nog, share breakfasts of eggs, bacon, sausage, cream cheese and lox. What many people may not realize, is that the many animals that we depend on for holiday meals and snacking, can be the victims of harsh suffering and tremendous environmental degradation. It doesn’t have to be this way.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Consider the Thanksgiving turkey. The bird that the pilgrims sat down to enjoy on those original Thanksgiving gatherings was wild and native to the continent. Today’s conventional turkey is an industrial creature, the Broad Breasted White, bred to grow at a freakishly fast pace, raised on grain inside massive barns where their quality of life is severely compromised. In fact, male turkeys, or Toms, now grow so big so fast and are so breast heavy, most can barely stand up. Natural reproduction is out of the question. The industrial turkey is a totally manmade construction, dependent on artificial insemination. Often times to add flavor to these industrial birds, the meat is injected with vegetable oils, saline solutions, or animal proteins.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">A similar factory-like scenario applies to most of the animal food products Americans buy around the holidays: cows, pigs, and chickens. An increasing majority of animals in the U.S. and other countries are raised in factory farms or CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations.) These enterprises are not the family farms of past times, with pigs rolling in the mud, cows grazing in pastures, and roosters crowing from fence posts. CAFOs are industrial-scale facilities where vast numbers of animals are confined, kept on life support with antibiotic medicines, and generate an output of sewage or waste comparable to a small metropolis.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The good news is that alternatives to this tragic animal factory scenario are out there and you don’t have to be a vegetarian to participate. (Though that certainly is an option.) Farmers around the country are increasingly turning toward better methods of livestock production. They are raising rare heritage breeds of turkeys on pastures where the birds grow more slowly and eat a more natural diet and are part of a local food economy. Many producers now raise animals without antibiotics and growth hormones, essential tools in industrial CAFO production. A number of organizations have standards for organic production and animal welfare. Many cooks are featuring a lot more grains and vegetables with perhaps smaller portions of higher quality, sustainably sourced meats, dairy, and eggs.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Knowing your farmer and understanding the conditions under which your food was grown is a profound way of giving thanks that also includes the raising of the animals that do so much to enrich our holiday celebrations. It could also lead to some of the most satisfying meals you’ve ever shared.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">A few resources:</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:windowtext;"><a href="http://www.cafothebook.org/">The CAFO Book Project Website</a></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:windowtext;"><a href="http://www.eatwild.com/">Eat Wild</a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.heritagefoodsusa.com">Heritage Foods USA</a></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:-webkit-xxx-large;"><br /></span></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> <p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-87073280534877797552010-11-18T10:54:00.001-08:002010-11-22T15:36:20.680-08:00Down on the Factory Farm: The Lower Yakima Valley<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7ldzspLyB0o/TOV3Qz_f7gI/AAAAAAAAABg/pFgkvk1IFnA/s1600/DSCN0818.JPG"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7ldzspLyB0o/TOV3Qz_f7gI/AAAAAAAAABg/pFgkvk1IFnA/s200/DSCN0818.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5540966047267417602" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7ldzspLyB0o/TOV23d6MB9I/AAAAAAAAABY/YhvMEgUilJI/s1600/DSCN0772.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7ldzspLyB0o/TOV23d6MB9I/AAAAAAAAABY/YhvMEgUilJI/s200/DSCN0772.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5540965611842832338" /></a><br /><!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;mso-bidi-font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12.0pt;">With a slate gray sky threatening rain on an early November day, I drive up to the Lower Yakima Valley to meet anti-factory farm activist Helen Reddout. She is the founder of Community Association for Restoration of the Environment (CARE), a group that has battled industrial dairies in southeastern Washington State for over 15 years.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;mso-bidi-font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12.0pt;">An older woman of smallish stature, Reddout doesn’t look like your typical public defender (if there even is such a thing). She is in fact a farmer and still runs the cherry business she started with her husband many decades ago.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;mso-bidi-font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12.0pt;">But it only takes 5 minutes for me to realize that Reddout has done a lot of homework and is not afraid of confrontation. In the mid-1990s, she explains, as we pile in the car to start our tour, an influx of mega-scale dairies, primarily from southern California, tragically transformed a valley with a diversity of small family farms into a toxic nightmare. At first she thought the agencies would deal with the perpetrators and the sewage that immediately began to overwhelm her rural community. One day she realized that they weren’t going to take action and began to fight back.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;mso-bidi-font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12.0pt;">The remnants of that former patchwork of diversified agriculture are still visible in the Lower Yakima. Feathery fields of asparagus now golden and red, the heavy bushes tilting towards winter dormancy. Orchard blocks of cherry, apple and pear trees. Stubble and angled stalks from fields of feed corn now harvested. Increasingly what we see dominating the farm economy here, however, are huge operations with very large concentrations of black and white Holstein dairy cows.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;mso-bidi-font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12.0pt;">The cows are not out grazing in the green rolling pastures. Some operations have shiny aluminum siding, cement floors, and stall systems that stretch on for hundreds of yards like municipal airport hangers. At others, the cows are confined in open corrals on vast manure and muck lots, spending the day walking and standing in their own waste. Adjacent to all these pens and enclosures are manure cesspools of all kinds. There are concrete holding tanks, unlined lakes brimming with sewage, massive pits carved into the earth waiting to be filled. There are more than 200,000 cows on the 70-plus CAFOs in a 19-mile corridor in the area, estimates Reddout. But she encourages me to call around to the local agencies, because she says even they don’t know how many cows are actually in the valley anymore.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;mso-bidi-font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12.0pt;">At approximately 125 pounds of waste per cow per day, you begin to get the brutal picture of what it’s like to have your community taken over by industrial dairies. It seems as if you combined all the liquid waste from the dairies we drive by, it could easily fill a stadium. Manure is being sprayed on surrounding fields through large central pivot irrigation booms and smaller manure cannons, pumped from one holding area to another. As the storm touches down, the shit smeared fields begin to glisten in the rain. The waste enters my senses through a variety of pathways: burning nose, throbbing temples, nauseous stomach. One can easily imagine manure ponds overflowing, fields saturated, and waste literally running into ditches and along roadsides. No wonder property values have plummeted and real estate sales have stalled out. Many residents couldn’t move even if they want to. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;mso-bidi-font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12.0pt;">The entire system seems to be predicated on organized negligence. There is clearly both too much waste and too much milk. Reddout tells us that with the national glut of milk, much of the output here will be exported or dehydrated or made into cheese. Meanwhile the kids in the local schools are at risk of their water supply being contaminated by e.coli or nitrates. Most of the small dairy farmers have been driven out by the big corporate dairies who concentrate more animals on their lots for ever-diminishing returns on bulk milk prices. Starlings and magpies flock around these operations, becoming unwitting transmitters of mold and bacteria around the community. Then there is the issue of replacement calves. In order to continue lactating, milk cows must be impregnated every year. Half of the calves will be male and have little economic value. At the end of our tour we pass a hovel of plywood containment huts where male calves are tethered for veal production. Through small cutouts in the wood, you can see the eyes of a few animals staring out.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;mso-bidi-font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12.0pt;">In 2002, CARE was awarded a $1 million decision against a local dairy operator for violations of the Clean Water Act. Half the money went to the Western Environmental Law Center in Eugene, Oregon, the legal defenders who took on the case; the remainder went to an organization that conducted an extensive study of well and groundwater quality throughout the entire valley. Meanwhile the fight goes on and the industry searches for ways to expand the number of cows in the valley.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;mso-bidi-font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12.0pt;">The latest scam involves raising millions of dollars in public funds to install industrial digesters on top of the waste pits that capture methane gas for energy conversion. It’s a concept sold to the public as a green energy solution, even if the millions of taxpayer dollars invested may never be recouped, and nitrates may still pollute the environment, and the industrialization of the dairy cow will continue.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;mso-bidi-font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12.0pt;">Before I head back to the safety of my own community, I ask Helen Reddout what she wants. Without hesitation, she tells me she wants the dairy CAFOs to leave her community for good and for family farming to return to the Lower Yakima. The routine use of antibiotics whether animals need them or not, she argues, should be stopped, as it leads to the proliferation of antibiotic-resistant pathogens that threaten human and animal health. She wants the federal subsidies that provide cheap grain to CAFO operators and other taxpayer supports eliminated. And she wants to see any remaining dairies to follow the lead of her neighbor Allen Vourtman, who grazes 350 cows on pastures next to her home, and takes the welfare of his cows, and their impacts on the health of the local environment very seriously.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <span style="font-family:Helvetica;mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi- mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-USfont-family:Helvetica;font-size:12.0pt;">From what I've seen, Helen Reddout doesn’t seem to be asking too much.</span><!--EndFragment--><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Helvetica, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:-webkit-xxx-large;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Helvetica, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">For a great article on the dairy industry and the USDA from Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Moss, read </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07fat.html?emc=eta1"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">this piece</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> in the Nov. 6, 2010, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">New York Times</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">.</span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-31538137757095666442010-09-09T14:56:00.000-07:002010-09-10T10:33:07.048-07:00Egg Recall Reveals Scrambled Priorities<span style="font-style:italic;">Contamination is just part of what's wrong at massive animal factories </span><br /><br />The recall of a half billion eggs from two Iowa agribusinesses, Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms, because of salmonella contamination is still dominating the news. Earlier last month the news was the withdrawal of a million pounds of E. coli tainted hamburger. That was followed by nearly 400,000 pounds of deli meats infected with listeria. Who knows exactly where the next outbreak will pop up, but it seems certain to come again from the world of industrial animal food products.<div><br />Americans have a seemingly insatiable appetite for meat, poultry, dairy and eggs, even as food safety issues increasingly become headline news. What many people are coming to realize, however, is that the majority of these farm animals are no longer raised on the pastures and barnyards of family farms but inside CAFOs: concentrated animal feeding operations. The farming of animals in these crowded, often filthy, factory-like facilities raises a host of health, environmental and ethical concerns. Salmonella is just the tip of the iceberg.<br /><br />The concept behind the CAFOs is simple: Cram as many animals into the smallest possible space for maximum growth at the least expense. Laying hens and hogs seem to suffer the harshest fate under this system. A conventional laying hen lives out her days in a wire confinement pen called a battery cage. Confined in the cage with a number of other cell mates, she is normally allotted an area little smaller than a cubic foot to live out her short productive life, never experiencing the outdoors, scratching the dirt, naturally socializing or enjoying any privacy to nest. As soon as her productivity declines in a year or two, she is removed from the cage and slaughtered for processing (for pot pies or soups), asphyxiated (because her meat is not worth the expense of processing) or sometimes buried alive and composted. Charles Dickens would have a hard time conjuring a grimmer scenario.<br /><br />The CAFO industry, some farmers and even the U.S. Department of Agriculture insist that factory-farm systems that house thousands of battery cages in a single building are necessary and even better for the birds and for food safety. It's certainly true that all food production systems -- small, medium, and large; organic, pasture-based and industrial; local, national and international -- are prone to risks of contamination. But with tens or hundreds of thousands of animals in close confinement, when something goes wrong inside a CAFO, it can spread far and fast. Contamination can quickly sweep through the integrated production networks of feed and hatcheries, through an animal population and out into the food system. Iowa is a perfect example: Those half a billion recalled eggs came from just two so-called "farms" with 7.5 million hens between them.<br /><br />Industry is quick to counter-attack that shifting to cage-free, pasture-raised or organic egg laying operations will mean higher check-out prices. Economic conditions being what they are, any talk of rising food prices creates anxiety. Yet that hasn't stopped large numbers of U.S. consumers from flocking to small producers to buy eggs -- even at a premium -- in the wake of this recall.<br /><br />Fortunately, millions of people are waking up to the consequences of a food system dominated by massive corporations: the loss of regional food production capabilities in the face of impending fuel shortages; tax-funded subsidies that prop up feed grains; antibiotics given to animals that pass into the broader environment; obscene volumes of waste in concentrated areas; a legacy of abysmal treatment to the animals we depend upon for sustenance. For the sake of our health, our environment and our economy, should we let this continue?<br /><br />Change is in the air. Most countries in Europe and a number of U.S. states have taken measures to ban the most restrictive technologies used in CAFOs, such as the battery cages.<br /><br />But we need not wait on federal or state regulations. We have a say in the kind of world we want, and it is expressed in the food choices we make every day. It's in our power to participate in a healthier food system, one egg at a time, one farmers market at a time, one meal at a time. It starts with simply understanding and honoring where our food comes from. At that point, the foods produced in CAFOs become a lot less appetizing and ultimately, unpalatable.<br /><div><br /></div><div><i>This article previously appeared in the <a href="http://zesterdaily.com/zester-soapbox-articles/645-egg-recall-factory-farms">Zester Daily</a>.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Further Reading on <a href="http://www.worldpoultry.net/background/salmonella-thrives-in-cage-housing-7481.html">WorldPoultry.net</a>, a poultry industry publication. </div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-22561876743060698032010-07-08T14:11:00.000-07:002010-07-08T15:47:33.933-07:00"Know Your Farmer" Program targets small-scale, rural meat producers for assistance<span style="font-style: italic;">This Blog post was written by <span style="font-weight: bold;">Emmett Hopkins</span>, a Northern California vegetable farmer (<a href="http://www.foggyriverfarm.org/">Foggy River Farm</a>) and Watershed Media research assistant.</span><br /><br />Critics have accused the USDA's new "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food" program of siphoning money from rural farming areas to prop up "urban locavore markets." As a farmer, I feel the opposite is true. The program is specifically looking for ways to create more agricultural opportunities in rural areas by removing barriers to small-scale farming.<br /><br />As described in a previous Watershed Media blog post, a trio of Republican senators, including John McCain, recently wrote a <a href="http://www.agri-pulse.com/uploaded/KnowYourFarmers.pdf">letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack</a> complaining that the program is "aimed at small, hobbyist and organic producers whose customers generally consist of affluent patrons at urban farmers markets.” The subtext of this statement is this: the "Know Your Farmer" program is supporting small-scale meat and vegetable farmers who sell directly to consumers instead of big agribusiness farmers that grow commodity crops like corn, soy, and factory-farmed animal products. And in this the senators are right; "Know Your Farmer" is trying to make it easier for small-scale, rural farmers to survive.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Small-scale Meat Producers & Mobile Slaughter Units</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_tYj44tA8sMg/TDZTsf5EVkI/AAAAAAAAAAM/Hk8WAVscxSw/s1600/WM+Blog+Photo+--+Right+Front+Side.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_tYj44tA8sMg/TDZTsf5EVkI/AAAAAAAAAAM/Hk8WAVscxSw/s320/WM+Blog+Photo+--+Right+Front+Side.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5491668819565106754" border="0" /></a>Funded under "Know Your Farmer," the USDA has recently rolled out a series of tools to promote small-scale meat processing in rural areas. At a time when the vast majority of the meat industry is controlled by <a href="http://www.grist.org/article/food-wall-street-bets-on-jbs-takeover-of-pork-giant-smithfield/">three or four multinational corporations</a>, local processing facilities are sorely needed. In many regions, animals farmers would currently have to trek their livestock across state borders to find the nearest state or federally approved processing facility. A <a href="http://www.fsis.usda.gov/PDF/KYF_maps-050410_FOR_RELEASE.pdf">study funded through "Know Your Farmer"</a> shows all the geographic gaps between the country's meat producers and the facilities that can legally process their chickens, steers, and hogs. The study's charts show hundreds of counties with no nearby options.<br /><br />To help close these gaps, the USDA is promoting mobile slaughter units--essentially butchers on wheels, able to travel from farm to farm to process meat where it wouldn't otherwise be possible. There are currently only nine such roaming facilities in operation in the U.S. (4 in Washington State and one in Alaska, California, New Mexico, New York and Texas). A group of farmers in San Juan County, Washington organized the first of these mobile less than ten years ago. The 36 foot truck and trailer <a href="http://www.mobileslaughter.com/">unit</a> began accepting animals for processing in 2002. It can process 10 beef, 24 hogs, or 40 sheep per day with two butchers.<br /><br />According to Neil Gaffney, press officer for the Food Safety and Inspection Service, "mobile processing facilities are viewed by the USDA as one mechanism that helps support the goals and objectives of 'Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food.'" To help spur more development of mobile slaughter units, the USDA has taken the following steps (as detailed by Gaffney):<br /><br /><ul><li>FSIS launched a toll free help desk last December for small meat and poultry processors, which will support USDA's "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food" initiative by helping small processors to reduce the time and expense of dealing with agency requirements.</li><li>FSIS held outreach webinars this past January on mobile slaughter units, and produced a video to help prospective producers with the requirements on setting up a mobile slaughter facility.</li><li>In May, as part of the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative, the Agency announced the availability of the FSIS compliance guide for mobile slaughter units (available at www.fsis.usda.gov/Significant_Guidance/index.asp), a document that can help small processors and establishments who own or manage mobile slaughter units meet food safety regulatory requirements.The document is not a regulatory requirement.</li><li>FSIS also released a preliminary study as part of that initiative in May revealing existing gaps in the regional food systems regarding the availability of slaughter facilities to small meat and poultry producers. The data in the study creates a county-by-county view of the United States, indicating the concentration of small farms raising cattle, hogs and pigs, and chicken, and also noting the location of nearby state slaughter facilities and small and very small federal slaughter establishments. (See "Slaughter Availability to Small Livestock and Poultry Producers – Maps" at:http://www.fsis.usda.gov/PDF/KYF_maps-050410_FOR_RELEASE.pdf.)</li><li>On June 24th, the Agency hosted a red meat mobile slaughter unit information session at the Washington County Agricultural Center in Boonsboro, Maryland, to educate farmers, ranchers and processors on how to set up mobile slaughter units, receive the federal grant of inspection and meet USDA food safety requirements. </li></ul><br />The hope is that, over time, these efforts will help build the infrastructure needed to support small-scale, regional meat producers.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />But why is it important to help small-scale farmers in the first place? </span><br /><br />In today's agricultural arena, small-scale, family farms are routinely being squeezed out by corporate operations. In several years' time, we may be hard pressed to find more than a hand full of small, independent growers. According to a recent <a href="http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5468">Worldwatch report</a>, only four companies control 60 percent of terminal grain facilities. Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and Zen Noh control 81 percent of U.S. corn exports and 65 percent of soybean exports. And <a href="http://www.grist.org/article/food-wall-street-bets-on-jbs-takeover-of-pork-giant-smithfield/">three companies</a>--JBS, Cargill, and Tyson together dictate over 75 percent of the U.S. beef market and four companies more than 65 percent of the U.S. pork market. Chicken and turkey are not far behind. In almost every agricultural sector--from meat production and processing to fresh fruits and vegetable farming--the little guy is becoming an endangered species.<br /><br />The USDA is wise to identify this trend as a potential long-term problem and take steps to stop the bleeding. Agricultural consolidation poses major risks to both our food safety (outbreaks are hard to track in the factory-farming model) and our food security (if we delegate all our agricultural resources to a few companies, we're more likely to lose them.) Corporate consolidation also threatens to dismantle the rural communities that have formed the bedrock of the nation for centuries. As agriculture becomes more and more large-scale and mechanized, farmers find themselves out of work and farming communities have to shutter their doors. To combat this, Neil Gaffney says, "the initiative is working to break down barriers that keep local food systems from thriving, and create new opportunities for farmers, ranchers, consumers and America’s rural communities."<br /><br /><br />For information about all the mobile slaughter units around the country: <a href="http://www.extension.or/page/Mobile_slaughter%2Fprocessing_units_currently_in_operation">http://www.extension.or/page/Mobile_slaughter%2Fprocessing_units_currently_in_operation</a><br /><br />For photos and video of mobile slaughter units:<br /><a href="http://www.mobileslaughter.com/photos.htm">http://www.mobileslaughter.com/photos.htm</a><br /><br />Slow Food USA article on Mobile Slaughter Facilities and Food Safety:<br /><a href="http://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/slow_food/blog_post/mobile_slaughter_facilities/">http://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/slow_food/blog_post/mobile_slaughter_facilities/</a><br /><br />Deputy Secretary of USDA, Kathleen Merrigan, on Mobile Slaughter Units:<br /><a href="http://brownfieldagnews.com/2010/01/25/merrigan-says-mobile-slaughter-units-have-a-role/">http://brownfieldagnews.com/2010/01/25/merrigan-says-mobile-slaughter-units-have-a-role/</a>Emmetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04541180672285545489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-82442848185026003872010-06-25T14:12:00.000-07:002010-06-25T14:26:31.590-07:00The Myth of Containment<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 18px; font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:12px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-style: italic; line-height: 21px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: normal; font-family:'Trebuchet MS';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The blog post was written by Watershed Media board member Diana Donlon.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: normal;font-size:13px;"><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">In the mid-1980s when I was studying history in college, “containment” - as in stopping the spread of communism - was a ubiquitous topic. The threat of communism has long-since waned, but the theme of containment has resurfaced albeit in a different, but tragically visceral guise. The ongoing calamity in the Gulf is quite literally a failure of containment. BP gambled with a risky technology. The government was sloppy in its due diligence. And both otherwise powerful entities have proved to be virtually powerless to stop the hell they’ve unleashed. Late last month Bob Herbert of the New York Times likened “the oil gushing furiously from the bowels of earth” to “a warning from Hades.”</span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">There are instructive parallels between the uncontained oil catastrophe and genetically engineered technology. Like the oil companies, the bio-technology companies pushing genetic engineering (GE) are gambling with the fundamental integrity of our ecosystems. Bio-tech gambling, however, is taking place at the molecular level largely out of public view and mostly without our knowledge or consent.</span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">On April 27, 2010 the Supreme Court heard its first ever case addressing genetic engineering --</span><a href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/09-475.pdf"><span style="font: 16.0px Helvetica; color:#851214;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms. Monsanto was appealing a Federal court decision that USDA failed to abide by environmental protection laws when it approved “Roundup Ready Alfalfa” for commercial sale. </span><a href="http://www.roundupreadyalfalfa.com/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Roundup Ready Alfalfa</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> (RRA) has been genetically altered to be resistant to glyphosate the active ingredient in Monsanto’s flagship Roundup herbicide. The justices’ </span><a href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/09-475.pdf"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">decision on the case</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> was announced on Monday (June 21). In a 7- to-1 decision, with Justice John Paul Stevens dissenting, the Supreme Court ruled that the lower court judge had gone too far in imposing a national ban on RRA. Both sides immediately started claiming victory. But, before we consider the implications of the high court’s decision, let’s back up a moment and ask why we should care about a seemingly obscure legal case in the first place?</span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Hay is the third largest crop grown in the United States. And, in this country the primary hay crop is alfalfa. Most alfalfa is fed to dairy cows. Dairy cows produce dairy products including milk.</span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">In 2007 the Federal court held that the USDA had failed to abide by environmental protection laws when it approved RRA for commercial sale. Citing its potential to contaminate organic and conventional crops, the court halted any further planting and sale of Monsanto’s RRA. The Federal court granted an injunction banning all plantings of the GE alfalfa until USDA fully complied with environmental laws and rigorously assessed the crops’ impacts. Monsanto already controls corn and soy, the two largest crops, and would like to add alfalfa to its impressive roster. Unsatisfied with Federal court ruling the company took the case to the Supreme Court.</span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">During the oral argument on April 27, Justice Scalia stated that, “This isn’t the contamination of the New York City water supply. It really isn’t.” With all due respect to Justice Scalia, it isn’t, but he was close. It could be the potential, irreversible, genetic contamination of the food supply.</span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Some question how a Roundup Ready Alfalfa plant could contaminate a conventional or an organic plant. The answer is pollination. Alfalfa is an open-pollinated crop. Bees, wind, and other pollinators can carry pollen at a distance of several miles from the genetically engineered Roundup Ready plants and cross-pollinate the non-Roundup Ready Alfalfa plants. Pollination has the potential to wreak havoc by spreading patented, foreign DNA that is proprietary to Monsanto. And, like BP and its infamous Deepwater Horizon well, the Monsanto Corporation and the government will be utterly powerless to contain the damage it unleashes on the commons.</span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">In Greek mythology Zeus was angry with Man because, with the help of Prometheus, Man had stolen fire from the gods. Zeus planned his revenge on the mortals by giving Pandora a box or a jar. He told her that the box contained ‘special gifts’ but that she must never, under any circumstances, open it. One day Pandora’s curiosity got the best of her and she lifted the lid slightly. Out flew disease, despair, hunger, poverty, war, sickness, death, old age, greed and violence. Frightened by what she saw, Pandora tried desperately to close the vessel but, her efforts were in vain and only hope remained. Like a big, bad oil slick, the evils oozed all over the earth and have plagued us ever since.</span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">At first glance it looks like Monsanto has won, but the decision isn’t so black and white. The Supreme Court did not make a decision on the safety of RRA and left the lower court ban in place. In sum, the ban on planting Roundup Ready Alfalfa still stands. The lid is still on the jar. If we have learned to stop gambling with too-big-to-fail technologies that once unleashed cannot be contained, we will keep it firmly in place.</span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333"></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 21.0px; font: 13.0px Trebuchet MS; color: #333333"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Diana Donlon is a philanthropic consultant to foundations in the Bay Area. Her area of specialty is the food system.</span></i></p><p></p> </span></div></span></span></span>Emmetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04541180672285545489noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18587737.post-73456637679569188262010-06-08T11:06:00.000-07:002010-06-08T11:19:37.495-07:00Republican Senators Take Aim at Small Farmers, Urban Consumers, and LocavoresIn late April, a trio of Republican senators––John McCain (AZ), Saxby Chambliss (GA), and Pat Roberts (KS)––wrote an angry letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, debunking a recent USDA program called <a href="http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/knowyourfarmer?navid=KNOWYOURFARMER">“Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food.”</a> This initiative distributes grant money and loans with the goal of strengthening local food chains and linking consumers with farmers.<br /><br />The Senators accuse <a href="http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/!ut/p/c4/04_SB8K8xLLM9MSSzPy8xBz9CP0os_gAC9-wMJ8QY0MDpxBDA09nXw9DFxcXQ-cAA_2CbEdFAEUOjoE!/?contentidonly=true&contentid=bios_merrigan.xml">USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan</a> of diverting urgently needed funds from rural communities in favor of: 1) “specialty crops” (the government’s term for fruits, nuts, and vegetables, of which the USDA recommends each of us eat at least five servings a day); and 2) small growers and organic farmers (who the Senators stereotype as hobby producers “whose customers generally consist of affluent patrons at urban farmers markets.”)<br /><br />They conclude that<br /><br />“American families and rural farmers are hurting in today’s economy, and it’s unclear to us how propping up the urban locavore markets addresses their needs. Given our nation’s crippling budgetary crisis, we also believe the federal government cannot afford to spend precious rural development funds on feel-good measures which are completely detached from the realities of production agriculture.”<br /><br />The not so subtle subtext of this letter is that to be a “real” farmer, you must be engaged in “production agriculture.” One can only assume this means corn, cotton, wheat, rice, and soybean production—the five primary commodity crops grown across hundreds of millions of acres in factory fields, propped up by the lion’s share of $15-plus billion in yearly USDA farm bill payments. In their view, the small producers benefitting from the Know Your Farmer program are not just do-gooders raising organic heirlooms for elite urbanites. They’re sucking away subsidies that should be going to the nation’s real farmers. Never mind that there are now more than 5,000 farmers markets across the country; or that an average of 10 million Americans shop at one on any given Saturday during the harvest season; or that farming organically is extremely hard and valuable work.<br /><br />Here’s the bottom line. The Know Your Farmer program has spent a reported $65 million total so far with plans to invest another up to another $1 billion in loans from the stimulus program. This is peanuts compared with the $60-plus billion in USDA commodity subsidies that production growers presently receive over a five-year period.<br /><br />Since Senator Chambliss is the ranking minority member of the Agriculture Committee, he and his fellow scribes must be aware that the U.S. is now considering paying Brazilian cotton growers $147.3 million this year because of former production agriculture subsidies that were in violation of World Trade Organization rules. You read that right––Brazilian farmers. The <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703961104575226290221967322.html">Wall Street Journal</a> recently decried this as madness.<br /><br />Such divisive political framing sets clear distinctions for how we talk about farmers, food, and our agriculture and nutrition policy. It might also backfire by fueling the fires of public opinion that have been rallying around healthy food production and raging against USDA subsidy programs. It is obvious to an increasing number of citizens and legislators that these programs:<br /><br />1) divert billions of dollars to commodity agribusinesses whether they have actually suffered losses or not, whether they grow crops or not, with few funding caps, and few social or environmental mandates that would provide a public benefit to taxpayers in return;<br /><br />2) support industrial crops that are more suited for animal feed, processed foods, and biofuels rather than a healthy, diverse diet;<br /><br />3) flood the market with cheap, processed ingredients that contribute to a growing crisis of obesity and other diet-related epidemics.<br /><br />Are these the feel-good measures McCain, Chambliss, and Roberts want us to get excited about?<br /><br />Instead, they single out a long-overdue and modest attempt to repair links in broken local food chains and educate the public about the importance of knowing your farmer and where your food comes from. Revitalizing local food production can impact the every day lives of citizens––Food Stamp recipients, for example, who can use their Electronic Benefits Transfer cards to buy organic produce at farmers markets; or public school kids that enjoy fruits and vegetables grown by productive farmers in their areas; or small livestock producers that can now process their pasture raised meats with the aid of mobile slaughtering units.<br /><br />Why don’t the Senators want us to know our farmers or care about where our food comes from? Maybe it’s because they are clinging to the decades-old “Get Big or Get Out” story line that defines how the majority of the country’s food is presently produced. This is the tragic story of 50 years of USDA policies that swept millions of family farmers from the American landscape and gave agribusiness the unimaginable powers they wield today over our entire food system.<br /><br />Knowing your farmer and knowing your food will become the primary story of the next fifty years of food production. It is the story of saving local agriculture and local farmers before they disappear altogether. In saving regional food production, we become healthier, more engaged, more secure citizens. With quite a bit of leadership, and a comparatively miniscule budget, Vilsack and Merrigan are actually trying to restore relationships and rewrite the stories of decentralized modern farming.<br /><br />If Senators McCain, Chambliss, and Roberts cared about the health and vitality of rural communities they might be better served to embrace the inevitable rediversification of the food supply. It certainly deserves its fair share—and then some.<br /><br />Other Links:<br /><br /><a href="http://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&yr=2009&progcode=total&page=conc">Environmental Working Group Farm Subsidy Database</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/knowyourfarmer?navid=KNOWYOURFARMER">USDA Know Your Farmer Know Your Food Program</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.farmpolicy.com/?p=2334">Farm Policy.com Report</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0