Chipotle Commercial During Grammys About Messed up Food System Making Waves

By Marion Nestle, Food PoliticsPosted on February 23, 2012

In an op-ed in the New York Times this week, Blake Hurst takes on the Chipotle video that got national attention when played during the Grammy Awards. 

If you have not seen this advertisement for Chipotle Mexican Grill, it is well worth a look. 

Coldplay’s haunting classic “The Scientist” is performed by country music legend Willie Nelson for the soundtrack of the short film entitled “Back to the Start.” The film, by film-maker Johnny Kelly, depicts the life of a farmer as he slowly turns his family farm into an industrial animal factory before seeing the errors of his ways and opting for a more sustainable future. Both the film and the soundtrack were commissioned by Chipotle to emphasize the importance of developing a sustainable food system.

The video has had immediate effects.  Hurst, a former hog farmer who is now president of the Missouri Farm Bureau, notes that “The day after it ran, McDonald’s announced that it would require its pork suppliers to end the use of gestation crates.”  Unfortunately,  as Grist points out, this announcement could just be ”porkwashing” since the company neglected to say by when. 

And then Bon Appétit  Management Company announced a comprehensive animal welfare policy that phases out gestation crates by 2015.

Hurst defends the use of sow gestation crates. 

These crates do restrict pigs’ movements, but farmers use them to control the amount of feed pregnant sows consume. When hogs are grouped in pens together, aggressive sows eat too much and submissive sows too little, and they also get in violent fights at feeding time. The only other ways to prevent these problems are complicated, expensive or dangerous to the pigs.

Really?  I was a member of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.  Our report, Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America, came out in 2008.

During the course of the investigations that led to this report, we visited an industrial hog farm in Kansas where I got a first-hand look at sow gestation crates in (in)action. 

I knew about sow crates, of course, but even so was completely unprepared for the sight of a pregnant sow confined between bars that allowed her only to stand up, lie down, and eat—during the entire 115 days of her pregnancy. 

When we asked why this was necessary, we got this answer: it is easier for the managers. 

• Workers do not have to be trained in animal husbandry.

• Cleaning chores are easier. 

• Feed can be measured.

• The sows cannot fight.

• The sows cannot kill their babies.

Seeing my evident distress, Bill Niman, who was also on the Commission, offered an antidote.  The next day, we drove 100 miles or so and visited Paul Willis’s hog farm.  This is featured in another Chipotle video. 

Willis claims that his relatively free-range sows (confined in fields by electric fences) are nearly as productive.  His animals get to roll in the mud.  They do not fight and do not kill their piglets.

Yes, their meat ends up on the plate no matter how the animals are raised.  But means matter as much as ends. 

Kindness to animals is a  mark of humanity. 

Getting rid of sow crates is a good idea, and the sooner the better.      

'Ag Gag': Why Whistleblower Suppression Laws Are A Bad Idea

Thursday, December 22, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Bruce Friedrich

  

Almost everyone opposes cruelty to animals. In fact, 97% of Americans (according to Gallup) say that animals should be protected from harm, and encouragingly, a poll by Ohio State researchers found that 92 percent want farm animals to be treated well. It’s hard to imagine any topic with more bipartisan support than the humane treatment of animals.  

Last year, meat and egg factory farms pushed these “whistleblower suppression” (aka: “Ag Gag”) bills that criminalize taking photos of factory farms without owner permission in four states (Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, and New York) and it looks like they’ll be coming back in all four of these states, and maybe more. The industry’s guiding philosophy appears to be “what the public doesn’t know won’t hurt us.” So in response to investigations that document abuse, the industry is not trying to stop the abuse; instead, it’s trying to stop the investigations by proposing laws that would make it illegal to investigate factory farms and slaughterhouses.

But if you’ve been paying attention, you know that the will of the American people on humane treatment is not in alignment with reality; the most recent evidence comes courtesy of Mercy for Animals and Brian Ross’ investigative team at ABC News, which exposed a large egg operation that supplied McDonald’s and other big corporations. MFA’s investigators documented dead and decomposing hen carcasses in cages with live hens, workers gratuitously abusing animals in myriad ways, and (of course) the standard abuses of modern poultry farming (e.g., burning off beaks without pain relief and cramming 5 hens into tiny wire cages, where they spend their entire lives).

This was just one more in a long line of investigations by animal protection organizations; every year, we see 3-4 of these investigations, and sadly, every investigation finds new and horrific abuses—abuses that shock the conscience of all kind people.

Responsible industries would meet this stream of horrid undercover investigations with a serious commitment to change their behavior; they would promulgate strong regulations to protect animals and implement “no tolerance” policies for (at least) the sadistic abuse. And they would, as Dr. Temple Grandin has suggested, put video cameras onto their factory farms and into their slaughterhouses to monitor animal treatment. They would hire independent inspectors to review the video and make sure that there was no gratuitous abuse.

Sadly, the industry does not believe that the customer is always right. Instead, the industry’s guiding philosophy appears to be “what the public doesn’t know won’t hurt us.” So in response to investigations that document abuse, the industry is not trying to stop the abuse; instead, it’s trying to stop the investigations by proposing laws that would make it illegal to investigate factory farms and slaughterhouses.

You read that right: Last year, meat and egg factory farms pushed these “whistleblower suppression” (aka: “Ag Gag”) bills that criminalize taking photos of factory farms without owner permission in four states (Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, and New York) and it looks like they’ll be coming back in all four of these states, and maybe more.

Another high-profile investigation makes clear why these bills are counter-productive to the good of the American people: In 2008, the Humane Society of the United States investigated a dairy cow slaughter plant that had passed all of its USDA inspections going back years and in fact had won USDA’s “supplier of the year” award. Their investigation uncovered horrid cruelty to animals and unsafe meat that led to the recall of 143 million pounds of potentially dangerous meat, much of which was destined for our nation’s schools.

If California had one of these whistleblower suppression bills, HSUS’s investigators could have been prosecuted; of course the much more likely scenario is that the investigation would not have happened, and children would have eaten those potentially lethal burgers.

So these whistleblower suppression laws would (if enacted) literally make it a crime to save human beings from dying from contaminated meat, and would also criminalize video investigations that led to employer indictments for worker safety violations, violations of civil rights and sexual harassment laws, and any other potentially illegal activity of a corporation. These are the sorts of investigations that companies and the government should be doing, but if they won’t, the last thing we want to do is criminalize charities for doing them.

At Farm Sanctuary, we provide sanctuary for farm animals who have escaped the factory farming system, and we know these animals as individuals. For the same reason we would never eat cats and dogs, we also would never eat chickens, pigs, or any animals—they are individuals.

However, we also fight for an end to the worst abuses, and that’s where whistleblower protection and the need to legitimately criticize the worst abuses in animal agriculture come in. If your company is so afraid of being “exposed” that you feel the need to criminalize taking pictures of your work, perhaps it’s time to make changes so that you are engaged in work you can be proud of.

What the USDA Doesn't Want You to Know About Antibiotics and Factory Farms

— By Tom Philpott  | Fri Jul. 29, 2011| Mother Jones

Here is a document the USDA doesn't want you to see. It's what the agency calls a "technical review"—nothing more than a USDA-contracted researcher's simple, blunt summary of recent academic findings on the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant infections and their link with factory animal farms. The topic is a serious one. A single antibiotic-resistant pathogen, MRSA—just one of many now circulating among Americans—now claims more lives each year than AIDS.

Back in June, the USDA put the review up on its National Agricultural Library website. Soon after, a Dow Jones story quoted a USDA official who declared it to be based on "reputed, scientific, peer-reviewed, and scholarly journals." She added that the report should not be seen as a "representation of the official position of USDA." That's fair enough—the review was designed to sum up the state of science on antibiotic resistance and factory farms, not the USDA's position on the matter.

But around the same time, the agency added an odd disclaimer to the top of the document: "This review has not been peer reviewed. The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Department of Agriculture." And last Friday, the document (original link) vanished without comment from the agency's website. The only way to see the document now is through the above-linked cached version supplied to me by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

What gives? Why is the USDA suppressing a review that assembles research from "reputed, scientific, peer-reviewed, and scholarly journals"?

To understand the USDA's quashing of a report it had earlier commissioned, published, and praised, you first have to understand a key aspect of industrial-scale meat production. You see, keeping animals alive and growing fast under cramped, unsanitary conditions is tricky business. One of the industry's tried-and-true tactics is low-level, daily doses of antibiotics. The practice helps keep infections down, at least in the short term, and, for reasons no one really understands, it pushes animals to fatten to slaughter weight faster.

Altogether, the US meat industry uses 29 million pounds of antibiotics every year. To put that number in perspective, consider that we humans in the United States—in all of our prescription fill-ups and hospital stays combined—use just over 7 million pounds per year. Thus the vast bulk of antibiotics consumed in this country, some 80 percent, goes to factory animal farms.

For years, scientists have worried that the industry's reliance on antibiotics was contributing to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. The European Union took action to curtail routine antibiotic use on farms in 2006 (taking Sweden's lead, which had banned the practice 20 years before).

But here in the United States, the regulatory approach has been completely laissez-faire—and the meat industry would like to keep it that way. The industry claims that even though antibiotic-resistant bacteria have been found both in confined animals and supermarket meat, there's simply no evidence that livestock strains are jumping to the human population.

Here is where we get back to that now-you-see-it, now-you-don't USDA research summary, which reads like a heavily footnoted rebuttal to the industry line. Assembled by Vaishali Dharmarha, a research assistant at the University of Maryland, the report summarizes research from 63 academic papers and government studies. Here are few of her findings:

• "Use and misuse of antimicrobial drugs in food animal production and human medicine is the main factor accelerating antimicrobial resistance."

• "[F]ood animals, when exposed to antimicrobial agents, may serve as a significant reservoir of resistant bacteria that can transmit to humans through the food supply."

• "Several studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on antimicrobial-resistant Salmonella showed that [antibiotic resistance] in Salmonella strains was most likely due to the antimicrobial use in food animals, and that most infections caused by resistant strains are acquired from the consumption of contaminated food."

• "Farmers and farm workers may get exposed to resistant bacteria by handling animals, feed, and manure. These exposures are of significant concern to public health, as they can transfer the resistant bacteria to family and community members, particularly through person-to-person contacts."

• "Resistant bacteria can also spread from intensive food animal production area to outside boundaries through contact between food animals and animals in the external environment. Insects, flies, houseflies, rodents, and wild birds play an important role in this mode of transmission. They are particularly attracted to animal wastes and feed sources from where they carry the resistant bacteria to several locations outside the animal production facility."

Naturally, such assertions didn't please the meat industry—and the fact that they were backed up by dozens of peer-reviewed science papers no doubt only sharpened the sting. In the trade paper National Hog Farmer, a National Pork Producers Council official lashed out. Perhaps lacking factual ammunition, the official resorted to an attack on the researchers' credentials:

"We find it very disappointing that a research assistant at a university, who is not an Agricultural Research Service scientist, can develop and post such a review without it going through an agency or peer review process."

Well, the pork producers can rest a bit easier. The researcher, Dharmarha, has been silenced. Not only has her report been erased from the USDA site, but she has been forbidden to talk to media. I reached her by phone Thursday. She told me that she didn't know why the report had been taken down, and that she could make no further comment. She referred me to her superior, Tara Smith of the USDA's National Agriculture Library. Smith has yet to return calls or emails.

But Dharmarha's report remains available, due to the the miracle of Google search's cache and the diligence of the Union of Concerned Scientists' staff, and what it's telling us is disturbing: In addition to mountains of cheap product, the food industry is churning out a major public-health menace. And instead of informing the public about it, the USDA seems intent to keep it on the down-low. Justin Tatham of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has been observing the drama since it started in June, put it to me like this: "As a science-based group, we're concerned about how the USDA is withholding this information from the public."

For me, what's even more disturbing is that government regulators know that serious trouble is brewing from antibiotic abuse on factory farms and seem incapable of acting to stop it.

Dharmarha's heresies are not the first time a government-associated person has bluntly held forth on the topic. In 2009, Josh Sharfstein, then deputy commissioner of the FDA, delivered damning testimony before the US House of Representatives. He opined that routine use of antibiotics on farm animals should be severely restricted—banned outright for non-medical uses like growth promotion and used only "under the supervision of a veterinarian" to treat sicknesses.

But by January of this year, Sharfstein had resigned from his post. The FDA maintains its official stance that antibiotics should be used "judiciously" on factory farms, and it leaves it to the industry to define what that means.

Who Will Feed the People?

Obstacles to Small-Scale Agriculture in the US
By KOLLIBRI terre SONNENBLUME

"In the future, more people will have to grow their own food" has become a truism among pundits and observers who are paying attention to the changing state of western industrial civilization, and of the U.S. in particular. Declining energy resources, ecological degradation, and global financial disolution are a few of the trends that are and will be impacting agriculture-as-we-know-it, and forcing agriculture-as-it-will-be.

That chemical-based farming is a failing experiment has been well-documented elsewhere; numerous books and articles have explored declining soil fertility, chemically-resistant weeds and pests, the tainting and depletion of irrigation water, the shrinking diversity of seeds, the dangers of genetically modified crops, and the plummeting nutritional value of fruit, vegetables, and grains. I will not reiterate these issues here, except through examples that address my points, which concern the future of agriculture.

The "need" for a smaller-scale, non-chemical-based agriculture is clear. So are the attributes that it must have. This agriculture will be regionally-based, because the means for shipping produce around the world will no longer be profitable. This agriculture will be based more on animal power (two-legged and four-legged), because machines will be few, and the fuel for them too expensive or unavailable. This agriculture will focus on soil-building rather than chemicals, because the chemicals are sourced from the same raw materials that make the fuel. This agriculture will break with monocropping over hundreds of acres and instead utilize small parcels intercropped. And, this agriculture will have to involve much more than 2% of the population, even if that population is in decline.

I must mention that, in my opinion, the forces at work in the world today -- energy, ecology, economics -- are of such a large scale and their inertia so powerful that we are being coy when we say we "need" to switch to a smaller-scale, non-chemical agriculture. I suspect that we "will be" making that switch, like it or not, planned or not. No need to rally for the ball that was tossed in the air to come back down. It's on its way, like all things that go up. But the transition -- the beginning of which we are living to see right now -- is a very tricky one, to say the least!

Despite appearances -- which include the mainstreaming of "Organic", and the growth of farmers' markets, CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture), and urban agriculture -- very little fieldwork (pun intended) is happening that meaningfully addresses the emerging challenges of our time. A "100 mile diet" for more than a few "sustainability" geeks is still the stuff of fantasy. The mega-farming system born of the 60's "Green Revolution" is still what puts food on the table of almost everyone in the U.S.

I am a farmer in Oregon's Willamette Valley. This season I have partnered with two other farmers and we are working about seven acres together, trying to grow vegetables, medicinal herbs (not OMMP) and staple crops such as legumes and grains. In the recent past, we were urban farmers in Portland, growing produce for our CSAs in little yards and empty lots while experimenting with staple crops on larger suburban and exurban plots.

Among us, we have over ten years of farming experience, a botany degree, and work in the restoration field, as well as above-average intelligence, impressive resourcefulness and a dawn-to-dusk work ethic rarely seen anymore these days in the U.S. (at least among white people). We are not trying to get $-rich, but we are not idealistic money-haters. Until the seed-and-feed, gas station, and hardware stores take barter, we need the cash. We do not limit ourselves to a single doctrine, such as permaculture. We are unconcerned with the pettiness of politics or the vagaries of the nation's culture. We are simply people who are aware of the emerging food crisis, and want to see what it takes to grow a sustenance-providing amount of food and medicine for ourselves and a few friends and family who threw investment our way.

We are farming on land that was formerly used for grass-seed production, and has been hammered with chemicals and big machines for decades. Over 50% of the cropland in the Willamette Valley is planted in grass-seed, so the lessons we are learning are potentially valuable for future farmers who will be attempting the same in this area. But the issues we are facing -- lack of soil fertility, residual chemical effects, out-of-balance insect populations -- will be found across the nation for anyone trying to farm on land that was conventionally abused.

While in the city, my bicycle-based CSA operation gained much media attention, so I was able to raise enough resources to give urban farming a very serious try. Unlike most urban farmers, I did not have rent or other bills to pay, so was able to devote myself full time. Having thus immersed myself in the practice, theory, and context of agriculture, both urban and rural, for the last several years, the following obstacles to sustainable farming have become obvious to me.

1) Not Enough Farmers

Less than 2% of the U.S. population is directly involved in farming. Two hundred years ago, it was over 90%, and as recently as the 30's it was still 40%. Increased mechanization and cheap fuel were the paired enablers of this historic shift to giant farms manned by a handful of people. The so-called "Green Revolution" of the 60's, with its "better living through chemistry" was the hammer that nailed shut the coffin on small-scale farming, which has been dying a drawn-out death in the decades since. Despite a small uptick in the number of small farms over the last decade -- due largely to the Organic trend -- most agriculture is still huge and corporate-run. The population of the U.S. and much of the world is utterly dependent on this system for sustenance, and will remain so while any transition takes place.

This 2% will have to grow, but how? Who wants to give up a working week of five 8-hour days for one that is seven 12-16 hour days? Who wants to give up a regular check for financial uncertainty and perhaps impoverishment? Who wants to give up their city socializing and entertainments (both increasingly electronic)? Or maybe their electricity and hot running water? Not most people I have met, whether the proposition is to farm in the country or in the city.

Many Portlanders I met were inspired by the urban farming beginning to take place in the city, and some dreamed of Havana. As portrayed in the film, "The Power of Community", a radical rearrangement of agriculture took place in Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union and the attendant loss in resources. Non-chemical farming became the only viable option, and the practice of urban farming grew dramatically. The makers of the film claimed that Havana was now growing over 50% of the produce it consumed within its own city limits. Impressive and inspiring, on the face of it.

But Portland is and was not Havana. A few dozen people starting CSAs and selling to restaurants does not a food revolution make, and besides, Cuba's very different style of government was likely the major steering and empowering force in that shift. Most Portlanders would probably not appreciate the contrast in ownership models, etc., used on that island, were they to be imposed to them and their neighborhoods (which is not to denigrate Cuba or its response in any way).

Portland is a hypey town, and the press that urban farming got made it look much more impressive than it was. I know this from reading the articles about myself and my own operation, all of which but one had glaring errors that presented things not quite like they were. One result of the press coverage was that people made the assumption that "OK good, somebody's taking care of that," and went on with their days.

But no, nobody's taking care of that yet, really. Urban farming has still not attracted enough practitioners to be taken seriously.

2) Lack of Equipment for Small Scale Farming

Suppose you want to plant an acre each of wheat, soup beans, and millet. How does one plant, cultivate, harvest, and process crops on this scale? Wheat can yield over two tons per acre, beans and millet half a ton each. You can't efficiently seed plots of these size by hand. Or weed them, or harvest them, or thresh and winnow them. Not without a lot of people, that is, and the days are over when the whole village would drop what they were doing and turn out to bring in the harvests from the fields.

The vast majority of machinery available on the market today in the U.S. is geared toward the hundreds, or thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of acres. It's too big to move around in such a small area.

The equipment needed for small acreage farming is no longer manufactured in the U.S., and hasn't been on a mass scale since the 70's. Most of the old stuff is sitting in rusty heaps at the edges of fields or has been repurposed as "yard art". Earlier this season, we watched helplessly as scrappers hauled away an old combine they had found in the blackberry brambles on the property we are farming. Being lessees, we were unable even to buy enough time to see if it was repairable, but we saw pieces go by that could have been used on their own for seed-cleaning at our scale.

Equipment for small acreage farming is still manufactured and sold in other parts of the world, including Europe, China, and India. The technology has continued to develop in these places, with new innovations improving on tried-and-true designs. We farmers have drooled over the beautiful machines that Ferrari is making. But the cost of purchasing and shipping this equipment to the States is a prohibitive factor for our operation.

The Amish and a few hobbyists have been keeping alive draft animal practices, but these folks are also few and far between. Animal husbandry is not a skill learned overnight, and, as with vegetables, some heirloom breeds that are good for field work have been lost or are dwindling.

In the city, the situation is easier, because the plots are usually small enough to be polished off with a walk-behind rototiller. Here, too, there are serious quality issues, and the best machines are made overseas, many of them in Italy. Regardless of how good the equipment is, some knowledge of small-engine repair will really help the farmer, especially to avoid costly by-the-hour fix-it shops, who might or might not do the job right.

Additionally, for farmers rural and urban, parts could eventually become an issue. If the economic fabric frays to the point where shipping becomes expensive, then the next skill the farmer will have to take up -- or better yet, find in someone else who wants to barter for food -- is metal fabrication, including welding. If you don't feel like picking up a pitchfork, consider enrolling in a VoTech.

3) Lack of Knowledge about Small-Scale Farming

The knowledge of how to grow on a smaller scale is also disappearing. The average age of an Oregon farmer is 67. If he (usually) even remembers how things were done before, who knows if he is capable of changing, or if there are enough of him around who are willing or able to teach younger people. The big equipment he uses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and isn't paid off yet. What else is he supposed to do? Federal agricultural subsidies aren't going to Grandpa Grass Farmer; they're going to ConAgra, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland.

We have the pleasure of knowing the farmer in our area, Harry McCormick of Sunbow Farm, who founded the Willamette Valley Grain and Bean Project. Harry has been farming near Corvallis since 1972, and has a wealth of knowledge and experience about growing horticultural and field crops. He started the Grain and Bean Project a few years back to try to help farmers get out of the grass-seed business and start growing food. Thanks to his efforts, thousands of acres are in transition, but that's not as impressive as it sounds. Harry himself describes this work -- the work of cultivating staple crops on a small-scale basis -- as "fringe".

Old USDA publications from the early 20th Century (and earlier) will become more useful again, as they describe in detail many practical, reliable techniques that don't involve 40+ foot wide combines.

4) Lack of Financial Resources

Will there be a Marshall Plan for small-scale agriculture in the U.S.? Not from a president who appointed someone from Monsanto to the USDA. How about from the cities, counties or states? Nope. They're going broke and cutting essential services already. The private sector? There's no money in it. The non-profits with their grants? Only if you fit their ideological stripe and promise to play by their rules. Ralph Nader's bizarre vision of the super rich saving us is only slightly less far-fetched than the idea that the Galactic Federation will be raising us to the next level of consciousness in December 2012.

Though I had no difficulty selling shares to my produce CSA in Portland (and could in fact have kept a long waiting list), I have not had similar success with raising funds for our current project. I don't know why, for sure. Possible reasons: Staple crops and herbal medicines, delivered once at the end of the season, doesn't offer the same gratification as twice-weekly produce. Or, grains and beans lack the trendiness of urban farming, which in Portland has reached the status of sexy (for which I will gladly accept some credit!). Or, having moved to the country, I am now out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Or, I was just too outspoken for some people's standards, and their self-obsession led them to take personally what I meant culturally. Who knows?

The bottom line is that there ain't much of one. In our case, the only way we were able to invest as much as we have (a low five-figure amount), is because one of us had an inheritance from a recently deceased mother to draw on. Which is not exactly what most people would wish for, or that many can even look to as a possibility. Going into this year's season we had seeds, tools, books, and other hard-good resources (altogether worth another low five-figure amount) only because we had invested in those things so well during the urban farming years. We were not starting from scratch. In these ways, we had a financial and material advantage that other people can't count on.

Not that these resources have been adequate to the task; they haven't. We estimate that our project could only be truly effective if we had a low six-figure sum for a three year period. Who is going to hand that out, to tens of thousands of farmers across the nation?

5) Lack of Market

One farmer in the Grain and Bean project is sitting on 17,000 lbs. of garbanzo beans because he could not find a buyer willing to pay a reasonable price. While the big boys are continuing to be subsidized -- not just by the USDA, but by the U.S. military holding control of various regions and their resources -- the non-chemical farmer coming up in this country is unable to compete on price.

One year in the city, I calculated that my hourly wage was something like 5 cents. Even in a so-called "Foodie Town" like Portland, it was challenging to find a market for my produce. Most consumers, including restaurant owners, are still shopping for produce with a list in their hand, rather than learning from the farmer about what can and can't be grown in their region. On the first hot day of Summer, which happens sometime in late June in the mild Northwest, everyone wants tomatoes, watermelon, and corn. Nevermind that those crops are still 2-3 months away at that time of year (if they ripen at all).

The farmers bring some of this on themselves, by choosing to cater to perceived customer desires, rather than by concentrating on what grows best and presenting a balanced, nutritious diet to the customer, and educating them about it. For example, the Pacific Northwest is the best place in the U.S. to grow parsnips: the roots can winter in the ground and don't need to be dug up and stored, and, the sweet flavor comes out only after a couple-three freezes, but the ground doesn't get cold enough to kill them. For this second reason, California parsnips never taste as good. The temps just don't go down enough. Here is a delicious -- almost sugary when roasted -- vegetable to get you through the winter, along with carrots and turnips also from the ground through the cold months, and very few Oregon farmers are growing them.

Even if you grow something people want, making a profit is still a challenge. Restaurant owners want to pay a wholesale price that compares well with Cash-and-Carry, and farmers' market customers are often looking for a bargain, too. Farmers' Markets can be expensive to attend for the starting-out farmer, what with the costs of a tent, table, bags, a legal scale, etc., and with market policies such as mandatory liability insurance. Most Farmers' Markets would more accurately be called Farmers'-Market-Manager-and-Their-Non-Profit-Board Markets, as they have become highly regulated structures, making demands of farmers in the interest of creating their own personal vision of a market that matches their effete tastes. Gone are the days when you could just drive a truck up and sell produce out of the back, with no cost except gasoline and a tarp.

6) The Wasteland Left Behind by Conventional Farming

Much of the farmland in the United States is a wreck and not ready to eat out of. Here in the Willamette Valley, over 50% of cultivated acres are in grass-seed. Another sizeable percentage is in Christmas trees, for which very poisonous chemicals are used, including Atrazine, a ground water contaminant. Nurseries of ornamental plants account for another chunk. Only 5% of the Valley is in food production. That's a lot of poisoned, not-ready-to-farm land.

We are seeing first-hand the issues in making a grass-seed-to-food transition, and the picture is sobering. The first thing we discovered is that you can't simply till the grass under and plant. The list of crops that can grow unaided in our particular toxic circumstance doesn't go much beyond jerusalem artichokes, chicory and horehound. Soon after arriving, we transplanted healthy perennial medicinals into the ground and watched as they turned red immediately. Some grew out of it, some did not. They have all been stunted and in some cases misshapen.

These were the kinds of plants that are said to thrive in poor soils, and which we had never amended before. Tough old birds reduced to clipped weaklings. Sad to see.

Without the money to amend all the soil, we took to carefully dressing each spot or row where we would be seeding or transplanting. This has worked somewhat well, but is not a farming-technique that I would recommend. The result has been a field that is still predominantly infertile, with little "pots" of short-term fertility plugged into it. An act that's difficult to follow the second season, and not at all a long-term solution.

We were able to get a list of the chemicals used by the grass-seed farmers. Broad-leaf herbicides, 10-10-10 fertilizer, fungicides, and growth regulators were their main tools, with Round-Up at the end of the five to seven year planting cycles. A toxic brew, to be sure, but not nearly as intense as what people will find at sites where other crops were farmed.

The effects of these chemicals are persistent, even when the chemicals themselves are (allegedly) not. Fungicides take out the mycorrhyzal bacteria so important for healthy root growth, and must be re-introduced. When artificial nitrogen is used, the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil stop fixing, and must be restarted. When broad-leaf herbicides are used, the diversity of plant life becomes constricted to those tenacious weeds that can survive the pounding, and their vigor in the absence of chemicals can quickly overcome the organic farmer's new crop.

Cover-cropping and other methods could eventually fix these hurting lands, but they take years. So, when people realize that they can't wait any longer to switch to small-scale, non-chemical farming, will it be too late? If it's going to take empty shelves in stores to make more farmers, then the future will bring starvation.

Interestingly, we found that the soil in the city was much cleaner and more productive than any of the country land we have worked (five different locations). The image in city minds of a pristine countryside is false. Many agricultural chemicals are flat illegal to use in urban areas. Nope, the country has become a toxic wasteland, and people have another thing coming if they think we'll just be able to fan out into the fields around the cities and start growing our own food when the machine breaks down.

7) Extreme Weather

The apparently more common instances of extreme climate events such as droughts and flooding are leading to crop losses around the world and in the United States. I will take no stand here as to whether these events are caused by human industrial activity, HAARP and weather modification, or are merely another trend like the "Little Ice Age" or "Medieval Warming" of the past. But as a farmer who closely observes the local weather, and who keeps up-to-date about other farmers' weather, it is clear to me that we definitely are in a period of increasing climatic instability as relative to immediately preceding decades.

Hundreds of hours of work and many months of growing can be wiped out by an early frost, a record heat-wave, or an unseasonable rain. You can't eat your insurance policy, even if you have one. This year, in our location, we experienced precipitation high above average in March, April and May, preventing tilling and hence the planting of spring grains. Then, in June, we got rain twice, the second time only a sprinkle. In July, we had one two-day rain event. Last year, the rains didn't stop until early July, also preventing tilling. Then the October rains started in September. Going back season-by-season, each year of the last six has been marked by different extremes of wet, dry, hot and cold, all considered atypical. So, abnormal is the new normal, which makes it very difficult to plan, if not plant.

Historically, agriculture has been marked by famine on a regular basis. That the U.S. has not experienced widespread crop-failure since the Dust Bowl is an historical abberration. With the floods in the Midwest and the droughts in Texas and the Southwest, perhaps we are witnessing the end of that lucky streak currently. In any case, the drama of weather will play itself out region-by-region, farm-by-farm, farmer-by-farmer, and does not seem likely to be easily predictable.

8) The Social Challenges

Sometimes when I'm out there in the field doing repetitive and arduous by hand because there's no other way to do it (sometimes because that's just how it's done and always has been done), I find myself wondering, "How do people think we are going to switch from conventional to 'sustainable' agriculture?" The on-the-ground facts paint a picture of mind-boggling challenges, tangled (by nature) logistics, steep learning curves, tremendous labor, and radical lifestyle change for which no one seems ready.

The people of the U.S. are, by and large, the pampered children of Empire, unaware and uninterested in their own priveledge, taking their war-won comforts as an entitlement and their narcissism as a birthright. For much of the rest of the world, the view is different: the globe is a plantation, its people slaves, and the U.S. is the master's house on the hill. The flabby inhabitants of that mansion don't want to go out into the fields for fear of getting their hands dirty. Or chop their own wood, or carry their own water, or so on.

Why does this matter? Because although we are all individuals, we are all -- whether we like it or not -- "in this together". U.G. Krishnamurti put it in terms of the cells in the body; each cell is its own individual entity, but each cell is dependent for its survival on all the cells immediately surrounding it, each of which is dependent on the cells around them, etc. There is no going-it alone. "Rugged individualism" has always been a myth.

When it comes to my own current dedication to farming, I have personally experienced what I can only describe as some kind of instinct with a species-centered focus, to work on our collective survival. I do not consider myself better or worse than anyone else for choosing this work. There is not for me a political, philosophical, or sentimental motivation. I offer no vision and have no hope. And I do not believe that I will survive trying times just because I am trying. I say all this to dissuade you from your own delusions of hope, if you have any.

Wishing, praying, or (a la Portland) "manifesting through intention" do not grow crops. Neither does hard work on a piece of land if that land is poisoned, or you lack the equipment or resources, or if the weather knocks you for a loop. Those are the circumstances that all the farmers, old and new, will be facing. Agriculture has always been a crapshoot, and it looks to me like the odds against are rising.

Factory Farms Produce 100 Times More Waste Than All People In the US Combined and It's Killing Our Drinking Water

"Factory farms are dangerous to the environment; they are ticking time bombs of manure just waiting to be spilled into public waters." 

By Jill Richardson, AlterNet
Posted on May 25, 2011

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently delivered a major victory to factory farms. Under a 2008 EPA rule, any confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) "designed, constructed, operated, and maintained in a manner such that the CAFO will discharge" animal waste must apply for a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit under the Clean Water Act. The livestock industry ridiculed the notion that a farm must apply for a permit to discharge manure whether it intended to discharge it or not. And while, when phrased that way, it might sound ridiculous to you too, the details of the case betray a different story.

David Kirby, author of Animal Factory, The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment, tells story after story in his book of factory farms discharging waste irresponsibly -- sometimes on purpose, and sometimes not. As Karen Hudson, whose story is told in the book, says, "Factory farms are dangerous to the environment; they are ticking time bombs of manure just waiting to be spilled into public waters."

The simple fact is that factory farms produce over 100 times more waste than all American humans produce combined. In the past, a pastured cow might disperse waste over an acre or more; how can farmers responsibly deal with the waste of 1,000, 5,000, or even 10,000 or more animals when they are crammed in tightly together? And, unfortunately for the farmers, they are often working under contract for major meat or dairy conglomerates who own the animals and leave the farmer with a tiny profit margin (or none at all) -- plus all of the liability, dead animals and manure. Therefore, in addition to simply disposing of manure responsibly, they also need to dispose of it cheaply if they are to stay in business.

In Karen's story, the CAFO in question perhaps did not intend to discharge manure. The farmer, if given the choice, may not have decided to apply for a permit. In February 2001, heavy rains coupled with melting snow and ice raised the levels of the nearby megadairy's manure lagoon to just inches below the rim. Panicking, the farmer, David Inskeep, decided not to hire tankers to haul away his cows' waste, as investigators had ordered him to do. Instead he ran hoses from the lagoon to a nearby ravine over a mile away and pumped two million gallons of "a foamy, brown-yellow stew" into it. The 10-foot-high berm that dammed the ravine gave way, and the result was "the worst livestock spill in Illinois history."

The permits in question in the recently decided case would require farmers like Inskeep to make a plan for how to handle animal waste, and to follow that plan or face penalties. A version of this law has been in place for decades, but the details of the law have changed several times in the last few years. The major question of the case is: Can a CAFO be held liable for failing to apply for a permit?

Under a 1976 rule, all large CAFOs (those with more than 1,000 cattle or equivalent amounts of other species) and some medium-sized CAFOs were required to have permits to discharge waste. If a CAFO discharged waste without a permit, it faced civil or criminal penalties. The only permissible, unregulated pollution was "agricultural stormwater discharges," when a storm carried animal waste into navigable rivers.

This changed in 2003, when a new rule required all CAFOs to apply for permits or to ask the EPA for a "no potential to discharge" determination to become exempt from needing a permit. Additionally, the 2003 rule required all CAFOs to design and implement a "Nutrient Management Plan" (i.e. a plan to responsibly deal with animal waste). So long as the farmer followed his or her Nutrient Management Plan, any pollution of waterways was to be included in the "agricultural stormwater discharges" exemption.

After some legal wrangling, both by industrial farming interests and by environmental groups, the rules were changed again in 2008. The 2008 rule only requires CAFOs to apply for a permit if they are "designed, constructed, operated, and maintained in a manner such that the CAFO will discharge." Unless a CAFO can prove it does not meet that criteria (and thus does not need a permit), a discharge of manure would result in penalties both for the discharge itself and for failure to have a permit.

The recent court decision ruled that the EPA has no right to require CAFOs to apply for permits unless they actually discharge waste. Once a CAFO discharges waste, however, the court decided that the EPA can then require it to apply for a permit.

The industrial farming groups -- the National Pork Producers Council, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Oklahoma Pork Council, United Egg Producers, the North Carolina Pork Council, the National Chicken Council, the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association, Dairy Business Association Inc., and the National Milk Producers Federation -- also challenged the EPA's right to force CAFOs to design and implement Nutrient Management Plans and to penalize them if the plans are not followed and waste is discharged into waterways. On this issue, the court sided with the EPA.

What is the impact of this decision? Could it perhaps have no impact at all, as the CAFOs exempted from applying for permits are those that are not polluting? Sadly, this is likely not the case. By forcing CAFOs to apply for a permit, the EPA was forcing them to create a plan to manage the large amounts of waste their animals would inevitably generate. Without planning ahead for responsibly disposing of manure, how many CAFOs will wait until the last minute, like Inskeep, and then dump millions of gallons of manure into the environment? Even though the EPA will still be able to penalize them once they do, the damage to the environment will already be done.

These are not hypothetical scenarios. Just ask Rick Dove, an ex-Marine who serves as a Riverkeeper on his beloved Neuse River in North Carolina. After retiring from the Marines, he lived his dream of becoming a small-scale commercial fisherman on the river briefly -- until enormous hog operations moved in, each producing as much waste as a town of 20,000 people, and their waste killed the fish.

Dove has seen hog farmers oversaturating their "sprayfields" -- cropland intended to absorb the unfathomable amount of manure generated by the hogs -- resulting in contamination of local waterways, but he has also seen the farmers illegally dumping the manure directly into the rivers. And then he's seen the Neuse turn red, green, yellow, orange, and black with various types of algae blooms that precede fish kills that kill millions or even a billion fish at a time.

In addition to irresponsible spraying or dumping of manure, there are the many lagoon spills that occur. In these cases, farmers likely have no intention of dumping manure into the environment, but it happens all the same. Kirby says that when writing his book, "there were so many lagoon spills that my editor had me take some out." And because such spills are accidents, farmers won't necessarily apply for permits ahead of time, since they don't intend to discharge manure.

The losers in this story are not just "tree-hugging" environmentalists or even fishermen. In far too many cases, the losers are drinkers of water -- which is all of us.

Local and Organic Food and Farming

The Real Gold Standard
By WILL ALLEN, KATE DUESTERBERG and RONNIE CUMMINS

More and more consumers and corporations are touting the benefits of “local” foods, often described as “sustainable,” “healthy,” or “natural.” According to the trade publication, Sustainable Food News, local as a marketing claim has grown by 15 percent from 2009 to 2010, and it’s likely that number will increase in the coming year.1 Even supermarket giant and junk food purveyor Wal-Mart, with total sales in 2009 of $405 billion, has jumped on the bandwagon. It has pledged to reduce food miles and increase its purchase of “local” fruits and vegetables to include 9% of its produce by 2015. 2

Those who espouse local food are now called “locavores.” But, beyond the greenwashing and co-opting of the term by Wal-Mart, the supermarket chains, and factory farms and feedlots, what does “local” food and farming really mean? What is the impact of non-organic local food and farming on public health, nutrition, soil, water, marine life, biodiversity, and climate?

Jessica Prentice coined the term locavore for World Environment Day in 2005 to promote local eating, and local consumption in general. Her goal was to challenge people to obtain as much food as possible from within a one hundred mile radius. Her success was more than she imagined. In 2007 the New Oxford American Dictionary selected “locavore” as its word of the year. Local had arrived!

Then, the highly respected author Barbara Kingsolver published Animal Vegetable, Miracle emphasizing the value of eating locally, and the concept spread like wildfire. 3 While the eat local/buy local concept is increasingly popular, looking beyond the label or the marketing claims, it is obvious that “local” is a rather fuzzy concept, lacking in most cases a concrete definition or a set of principles and guidelines.

By contrast, the organic system of food production has legal definitions, a handbook of rules, permitted and prohibited substances, acceptable practices, an inspection process, and labels to guide the consumers. Local has none of these guidelines, rules, inspections or protections. It has the cachet of popularity without any guarantee of safety or sustainability.

Some chemical farmers, and even poultry, egg, pork, dairy, or beef operators feeding their animals genetically modified (GMO) grains, claim that local is better than organic, because it stimulates the local economy and reduces the distance (food miles) that food travels between the farm or feedlot and your table. But does so-called local farming, utilizing toxic pesticides, GMO seeds and feed, chemical fertilizers, and animal drugs mean that the food is safe and sustainable? Obviously not. We believe that there shouldn’t have to be a choice between local and safe organic; but rather that consumers should look for food that is not only local or regionally produced, but food that is also organic and therefore safe and sustainable. Local and chemical, or local using GMO seeds and feed, is nothing more than greenwashing. Organic and local is the new gold standard!

The locavore phenomenon brings up several important concerns including: food miles, chemically grown food, greenhouse gas emissions, factory farming, genetically engineered animal feed, and the value of organic labeling. All of these crucial issues relate to the central question: what should be in your market basket?

Does Local Mean Safe?

Despite the increasing popularity of the eat-local movement, many people do not understand that “local” does not necessarily mean that food is organic or even safe. Chemically grown foods produced locally may be cheaper than organic and may aid the local economy. But they pollute the ground water, kill the soil food web, and decrease the soil’s ability to sequester climate-destabilizing greenhouse gasses, broadcast pesticides into the air, poison farmworkers, and incrementally poison consumers with toxic residues on their foods. “Local” pesticides, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and chemical fertilizers are just as poisonous as those used in California, Mexico, Chile, or China.

Frequently, local chemical farmers claim that they only use “less toxic” pesticides or herbicides such as Monsanto’s Roundup. Unfortunately, “less toxic” is a dangerously relative term! Roundup is a powerful weed-killer, and is now sprayed so heavily on the nation’s 150 million acres of genetically engineered crops that it is poisoning our water supplies, killing the soil, and creating superweeds that can only be killed with super-toxic herbicides such as 2,4 D, arsenic and paraquat. Farmers in the U.S. have used everything from arsenic, lead, cyanide, fluorine, DDT, and nerve poisons since the 1860s, and they still use massive amounts. More than 80% of all the pesticides currently used in vegetable, fruit, and flower production are nerve poisons that were used on insects and also on concentration camp victims during the first and second World Wars.

Organophosphate pesticides or nerve poisons have been linked to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children. Organophosphate nerve poisons were found in the urine and saliva of Seattle preschool children who were eating conventional (chemical) and local food from off the shelf. When the kids stopped eating chemical food and ate organic food the organophosphates disappeared from their saliva and urine. When the children returned to the chemical diet, the nerve poisons showed up in their urine and saliva again.4 Nerve poisons, whether they are used on foods that are locally, nationally, or internationally produced and distributed are dangerous hazards, especially for growing children and at-risk populations. They need to be driven off the market, as soon as possible.

Does “Pesticide Free” Mean Safe or Sustainable?

Often, growers at farmers markets will say, “ I don’t use pesticides, I only use chemical fertilizers.” Sadly, what many people do not realize is that chemical fertilizers are extremely hazardous. A high percentage of these fertilizers seep into our wells and municipal drinking water, or else run off into our streams, rivers, and finally end up in the ocean. Two-thirds of the nation’s drinking water is contaminated with hazardous levels of nitrogen fertilizer. Non-organic farmers and feedlot operators are literally poisoning us and our children with the collateral damage of chemical fertilizers. High nitrogen and phosphorous levels in rivers and oceans kill fish and other marine wildlife. When this enormous amount of excess nitrogen enters the ocean it causes dead zones and oceanic acidification.

Some “pesticide free” growers will argue that since they only use chemical fertilizers, their produce is cleaner. Their food may not have high pesticide residues. But, remind them that cleaner isn’t clean! And inform your local chemical farmer that their toxic fertilizer is polluting our drinking water, trashing the oceans, killing the soil’s ability to sequester greenhouse gases, destabilizing the nitrogen cycle of plants, and emitting billions of pounds of deadly greenhouse gasses every year. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is perhaps the most potent greenhouse gas emitter in the U.S. To produce each pound of fertilizer, 6.6 pounds of nitrous oxide (N2O) are emitted. Nitrous oxide accounts for a full ten percent of all climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases.

Nitrous oxide is extremely hazardous. It depletes the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere (thereby increasing skin cancer for humans). It increases ozone pollution levels at the ground level (fueling the current epidemic of asthma and respiratory diseases.) Poisonous nitrate fertilizers leaching into our rural wells and municipal drinking water supplies (where it combines into a super-toxic brew with pesticides) are a biological time bomb, a major cause of cancer, infertility, hormone disruption, and birth defects.

Perhaps most deadly of all, nitrate fertilizer kills our living soils and soil microorganisms, decreasing their ability to sequester (through plant photosynthesis) excess greenhouse gasses in the soil. Even after a century of industrial farmers dumping hundreds of billions of pounds of chemical fertilizers on farmlands, our living soils still contain two to three times as much carbon as the atmosphere, with the practical capacity to clean and safely sequester a considerable amount of greenhouse gases over the next 40 years. In other words, our living soils can save us—but only if we stop the widespread use of nitrate fertilizers, GMO crops, and pesticides and replace these deadly chemicals and mutant organisms with organic compost, compost tea, and cover crops, augmented by the biological power and fertility generated by organic, carefully planned, high-density rotational grazing of animals.

The energy-intensive manufacturing of nitrate fertilizers requires the use of massive amounts of natural gas, a resource in short supply, that will increasingly be needed to take us through the transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy. We can no longer afford to waste natural gas in order to uphold the profits of Cargill, Monsanto the devil, and Food Inc. We can no longer afford to have chemical-intensive food and farming greenwashed as “local.”

U.S. non-organic farmers used an average of 24 billion, 661 million pounds of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer per year from 1998 to 2007. That means that more than one hundred sixty-two billion, seven hundred sixty-two million pounds of nitrous oxide (N2O) are released each year in the process of manufacturing that fertilizer. 5 Also released is the CO2 from transporting the fertilizer. Since 70% of synthetic nitrogen is imported, the transportation cost is increasingly higher each year. Beyond production and transportation emissions, enormous quantities of N2O get released when the 24.66 billion pounds of synthetic nitrogen is applied to farmland every year. Nitrous oxide is 310 times more damaging as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Every year, U.S. farmers use enough synthetic nitrogen to fill more than 12,330, railroad boxcars with a capacity of 200,000 pounds each.

Consequently, farmers and supermarkets that tout their products as local and pesticide-free, while still using synthetic fertilizers, are engaged in greenwashing. Non-organic farms poisoning the environment with chemical fertilizers are a far cry from safe or environmentally friendly, even though they promote themselves as pesticide-free and local.

“Local” Factory Farms and CAFOs: Destroying Public Health and Climate Stability

According to Wal-Mart and Food Inc.’s definition of local (anything produced within a 400-mile radius), meat, dairy, and eggs, reared on a diet of GMO grains, slaughterhouse waste, and antibiotics, qualify as “local.” According to the USDA, the majority of the nation’s non-organic meat, dairy and eggs are now produced on massive factory farms, euphemistically called Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). 6 CAFOs are typically overcrowded, filthy, disease ridden, and inhumane, not only for the hapless animals imprisoned inside their walls, but also for the typically non-union, exploited, immigrant workers who toil in these hellish facilities. According to the EPA, the legal definition of a CAFO is a farm or a feedlot where large numbers of animals are confined and reared, beef – 1000 head; dairy – 700 head; swine – 2500 pigs weighing more than 55 lbs; poultry – 125,000 broilers or 82,000 laying hens or pullets.

Unfortunately meat, dairy, or eggs coming from CAFOs in North America are not required by law to be labeled as such. Greenwashing CAFO products as “natural” or “local” is a major source of profits for Wal-Mart, Cargill, Conagra, Perdue, Land O’ Lakes, Kraft, McDonald’s, KFC, Monsanto and chemica/GMOl farmers and ranchers. Organic consumers, farmers, and retailers need to educate the public about the hazards and inhumanity of factory farms and CAFOs. These animal factories, where GMO feed and drugs are force-fed to most of the nation's livestock and poultry, are not only poisoning consumers, but are also generating massive amounts of climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases, especially methane, which is 72 times more destructive per ton than CO2. Methane (CH4) pollution is responsible for approximately 14% of human-induced global warming.

Where does methane pollution come from? Methane pollution mainly comes from factory farms and the overproduction of non-organic meat, dairy, and eggs, from throwing hundreds of millions of tons of rotting food, paper, and lawn wastes into landfills (instead of composting them for use on farms, ranches, and gardens), and the destruction of wetlands for shrimp and fish farms, industrial agriculture, chemical-intensive rice farming, and urban development or sprawl.

How do we get rid of excess, climate-destabilizing methane? By purchasing organic foods, especially those produced by family farmers and ranchers in our regions, and by increasing consumer awareness that it is unhealthy and inhumane to purchase factory farm foods. It is becoming increasingly clear that buying or consuming meat, dairy, or eggs that come from a factory farm or CAFO is an ethical abomination and a climate crime. While calling for a boycott of factory-farmed products we must deliver the positive message that the organic, humane, healthy, food producing small farms and ranches of North America are actually greenhouse gas sequestration centers, arguably our most important allies in cooling off the planet.

Millions of consumers are still "in the dark" about how "conventional" foods--especially the cheaper brands of animal products, processed, fast, and fake foods--are produced. We must educate the public about the need to fight for Truth-in-Labeling so that CAFO products, derived in great measure from Monsanto’s GMO crops, are no longer greenwashed as “local” or “natural.”

Food Miles and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Food miles are the average miles that food travels from the farm to the consumer. Since more than 80% of the U.S. grocery purchases are now processed foods, a huge percentage of the carbon or fossil fuel footprint of industrial agriculture comes from transporting factory farm crops or animals to the processing plant or slaughterhouse and then transporting these processed foods from the processing plant to the dinner table via the supermarket. By reducing the processed foods in our diet we can greatly reduce the food miles or carbon footprint for which our households are responsible, since the shorter the distance food travels, the lower the greenhouse gas emissions.

Part of the locavore ethic is to get people to eat from their own food shed, to save energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and stimulate the local economy. But, real “local” is also about stimulating a return to in-home food preparation, an appreciation for taste, and the joy in cooking—and eating. As folks begin to appreciate the taste of locally grown fresh organic foods, their dependence on processed foods from afar usually dwindles.

The 20% of the U.S. diet that is not processed food includes fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy products, farm raised meats, eggs, whole grains, cold pressed oils, raw honey, syrup, natural sugars, etc. Though only 20% of the total food budget, the sales of non-processed food are huge! Unfortunately, production of non-processed foods is largely regional with production concentrated on the southern half of both coasts and the southwest. So, even a majority of the fresh foods come from afar. This requires lots of trucking and refrigeration to get the food to local markets the across the country.

“Fresh food miles” indeed contribute to the high CO2 emissions from the U.S. food system, but these whole foods are certainly not the major greenhouse gas contributor in our food system. That dubious honor belongs to factory-farmed meat, eggs, and milk, which generate 30 to 50% of all of the U.S. greenhouse gasses, more than industry and fossil fuels combined. 7

Fortunately, locally and nationally, farmers have worked out strategies of how to grow fresh foods in the middle of the winter with better technology and a minimum of heat, even in extremely cold places like Maine, Vermont, Minnesota, and Montana. Consequently, farmers and consumers are growing and storing food throughout the year so that they are not responsible for so many food miles on their tables.

Our thesis is that a majority of our food miles could be chopped off if we prepare more of our food from local ingredients. But, that begs another question. What kind of local ingredients?

Chemical and Local versus Organic and Local

Some growers and brokers argue that local, chemically grown is better than fresh organic, because so much that is organic travels long distances from the two coasts. If they are talking about comparing supermarket fresh organic with fresh chemically grown local, we should still choose supermarket organic, because, whether they are used locally or nationally, pesticides and fertilizers are more dangerous and deadly to your health and the health of the environment than chemically-free organic foods transported from outside your local region.

Chemical farmers are not inspected or reprimanded by the federal or state governments as to their use or abuse of pesticides or fertilizers unless there is an accident, whether they are local farmers or factory farmers from California, Florida, or China. The only way the abusers are caught is when there is a fish kill, a labor poisoning, a recall after multiple poisonings, or some other notable injury as a result of a spill, overuse, or carelessness.

By contrast, organic growers are inspected every year and can be inspected at any time the certifying agency or the federal government (USDA) deems it appropriate. These are the rules in California, Vermont, Chile, and all countries that grow and market certified organic products. Because organic farms are inspected (at least once a year), and their soil and water checked for toxins, consumers can be secure that the organic products are the safest on the market. Consumers can be confident that organic food does not contain poisonous pesticide residues, did not poison farmworkers, and was not grown with a fertilizer that trashed the soil, the water, the atmosphere, and the oceans.

Organic farming is a set of techniques and strategies that encourage the life to come back into the soil and into our food. Chemical fertilizers kill soil life and inhibit the accumulation of organic matter (plant residues in the soil). Chemical food has less life force because chemicals kill soil microorganisms and earthworms. Organic matter is critical to organic farmers because nutrients cling to organic matter, so the plant roots can efficiently find and mine nutrients and water at those spots.

Organic farmers add nutrients such as lime, rock phosphate, potash, and sulfur in an effort to get the soil balanced so that the maximum amount of all nutrients and water are available to foraging plant roots. This soil-balancing act is a constant process. On light and sandy soils, organic matter must be replaced every year by growing a fertilizer crop and by adding small amounts of compost, which has billions of soil microorganisms. These critters go to work breaking down the organic matter and making it available to plant roots while constantly adding to the fertility by defecating the digested organic matter (and they work 24-7, not 9 to 5).

To control pests, organic farmers rotate their crops, so that pests do not build up from continuous monocropping. Instead of toxic pesticides, organic growers use beneficial insects as predators and parasites on pests. They use bacterial sprays for certain worms and beetles. They spray clay on their apples and other fruits. They use insect traps and lures. And, they use trap crops that the insects like better than the main crop. They use disease resistant crops that are immune or less prone to disease. And, they monitor their fields often so that they can spot problems early.

The Gold Standard: Local and Organic

Local organic food and farming are the gold standard. Organic farmers gladly adhere to a set of regulations, use non-toxic products, and accept the need to be scrutinized by an independent third party inspector. Why? Because, regulation of food safety is essential to guaranteeing consumers that the farmer has their health and well being at the center of his or her business plan. The organic regulatory process is neither easy nor happily anticipated by the farmer. But it is necessary! It is our covenant with our customers.

There are no regulations governing “local” chemically grown or GMO-derived food. Anything goes! Nobody is inspecting the farm! Nobody is watching the store! As customer, you must also be the regulator of non-organic food. Instead of depending on a regulator, you as customer should ask the “local” growers what they used as a fertilizer source, how they controlled pests and diseases, and what chemicals they used to stimulate yield.

When the local chemical grower tells you that local is better than organic, tell them that they should switch to organic so that you can trust their food to be safe, clean, inspected, and environmentally friendly. Local food is not the gold standard, and may not even be safe. Local-organic is the gold standard.

Citations:


1. Sustainable Food News, November 12, 2010.


2. Hightower, Jim, Other Words, Dec. 8, 2010, “Meet Your New Neighborhood Food Market”


3. Kingsolver, Barbara, et. al 2007 Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.Harper-Collins, May 2007.


4. Curl, Cynthia L., Fenske, Richard A., Elgethun, Kai. 2010 Organophosphorus Pesticide Exposure of Urban and Suburban Preschool Children with Organic and Conventional Diets. Department of Environmental Health, School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.


5. Fertilizer Use Statistics, 1998-2007 . National Agricultural Statistical Service, United States Department of Agriculture.


6. “Factory Farm Nation,” Food and Water Watch, 2010,


7. Goodland, Robert and Anhang, Jeffery, 2009 Livestock and Climate Change. World Watch Magazine. November 1.

Factory Farms Make You Sick, Let Us Count the Ways

24 Corporate Crime Reporter 33
WASHINGTON, D.C., AUGUST 27, 2010
By RUSSELL MOKHIBER

Factory farms makes you sick.

Let us count the ways.

Just last week, more than half a billion eggs recalled.

Why?

Salmonella poisoning.

More than 1,300 people sick.

Just last week, a recall of more than 380,000 pounds of deli meat products distributed nationwide to Wal-Mart stores.

Why?

Possible contamination with the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes.

The bacteria can cause listeriosis – a rare but potentially deadly disease.

Move over Animal Farm.

Here comes "Animal Factory."

And the animal factories are dominating the agricultural landscape.

Making us sick and poisoning the environment.

The Obama administration, which ran on a platform to confront factory farming, has done little to confront the problem.

“They don’t have the stomach to take on the factory farms,” David Kirby, author of the book Animal Factory (St. Martin’s Press, 2010), told Corporate Crime Reporter last week. “They are gun shy. I’m disappointed.”

While the Justice Department and the Department of Agriculture are holding hearings on concentration in agribusiness, Kirby see the exercise as a glorified listening tour.

He doesn’t anticipate federal intervention to prevent a disaster.

But he says what needs to be done is clear – move from factory farms to family farms.

How?

Ban non-therapeutic antibiotic use in animals.

Bust up the processing cartels.

“There are so few processing plants now and they are so centralized and big they want to process only factory farm animals,” Kirby says.

Cut the billions in subsidies to agribusiness.

“And by the way, why aren’t the tea partiers out there screaming about the billions of dollars we give away every year to these massive farms?” Kirby asks.

“And then take some of those subsidies and give them to small independent farmers who can really use it to compete.”

He says that the Obama administration ran on a platform to do some of these things.

But it refuses to take on big agribusiness.

Kirby says it will take a disaster to change the system.

“You can pass all the laws you want, organize all the boycotts,” Kirby said. “But ultimately when you cram thousands of animals into a single confined space without access to fresh air, outdoor sunlight, pasture, natural animal behaviors – you are asking for problems in the form of diseases that attack people.”

“Mother nature will have the last word. Mad cow disease was a warning. Swine flu was a warning. MRSA was a warning. The egg recall was a warning.”

“But we haven’t hit the big one yet.”

“Things are changing. Consumers are waking up.”

“I understand that there are lines around the block at farmers markets where eggs sell out by noon.”

“Demand for sustainably grown eggs right now is huge. That will make companies sit up and take notice.”

“Things are changing. But for a massive shift away from factory farming, it will probably take some new super-virus combining the killer bird flu and some killer swine flu.”

“And that could happen. These chicken farms in Iowa are just down the road from the hog farms.”

“And birds and rodents and insects are moving in and out of these places.”

That disaster would force public action. But what about preventable public action by the Obama administration.

“It won’t be enough to have a serious impact on the structure of the factory farms,” Kirby says. “We are awash in apathy in this country.”

US egg recall above half-a-billion and growing

By Agence France-Presse | Monday, August 23rd, 2010

A massive recall of eggs possibly tainted with salmonella bacteria is now at more than half-a-billion and could grow, the top US food safety official said Monday.

"It is the largest egg recall that we've had in recent history," Margaret Hamburg, head of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), told NBC television.

"We may see some additional recalls over the next couple days, even weeks, as we better understand the network of distribution of these eggs contaminated," she said.

Hamburg added that US officials were "continuing to investigate aggressively to determine the exact source of the contamination as we move forward with the recall."

There are no known salmonella deaths due to the eggs, but health officials said the outbreak has sickened hundreds of people across the United States.

The recalls affect two chicken egg processors -- Hillandale Farms and Wright County Eggs, both in the midwestern state of Iowa -- and cover at least 14 US states, from California to Arkansas.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has warned that the outbreak could actually be larger than reported, because most people who get sick from salmonella do not seek medical treatment.

The FDA said infected rodents many have spread the salmonella to the eggs.

Responding to complaints that the recalls were ordered just last week even though people began getting sick in May, Hamburg said it takes time for any food safety probe to get up and running.

"You have to start an investigation. First you see the rise in the number of cases of salmonella above the normal background. Then you start to identify the cases and do the investigation of where they might have been exposed," she said.

"This salmonella is the most common kind so it makes it a little bit harder to track down the source," Hamburg added.

"We've tried to move swiftly to identify the source and take the action necessary to protect the consumer."

Health experts say salmonella is spread most often by the consumption of food contaminated by animal fecal matter.

The microbe usually flourishes within the intestinal tracts of fowl and mammals.

An estimated 400,000 people are infected with food-borne salmonella each year in the United States, according to the CDC.

Recent years have seen various massive food recalls in the United States -- from salmonella-tainted peanut butter to pistachios to frozen spinach, and milk -- amid criticism that America's food regulation regime is under-staffed and overtaxed.

"We need additional resources. We need additional authority. We need greater ability to trace back products to their source so that we can identify how the contamination occurred and what products are at risk," Hamburg told NBC.

"We need better abilities and authorities to put in place these preventive controls and hold companies accountable, and we need to be able to more routinely review records and work with companies to make sure that the food supply is safe."

Massive Egg Recall

vidlink

The Problem with Factory Farms

The Problem with Factory Farms
By CLAIRE SUDDATH Friday, Apr. 23, 2010

If you eat meat, the odds are high that you've enjoyed a meal made from an animal raised on a factory farm (also known as a CAFO). According to the USDA, 2% of U.S. livestock facilities raise an estimated 40% of all farm animals. This means that pigs, chickens and cows are concentrated in a small number of very large farms. But even if you're a vegetarian, the health and environmental repercussions of these facilities may affect you. In his book Animal Factory, journalist David Kirby explores the problems of factory farms, from untreated animal waste to polluted waterways. Kirby talks to TIME about large-scale industrial farming, the lack of government oversight and the terrible fate of a North Carolina river.

What exactly is a factory farm?

The industrial model for animal food production first started with the poultry industry. In the 1930s and '40s, large companies got into the farming business. The companies hire farmers to grow the animals for them. The farmers typically don't own the animals — the companies do. It's almost like a sharecropping system. The company tells them exactly how to build the farm, what to grow and what to feed. They manage everything right down to what temperature the barn should be and what day the animals are going to be picked up for slaughter. The farmer can't even eat his or her own animals. People who grow chickens for Perdue in Maryland have to go down to the market and buy Perdue at the store.

We collectively refer to these facilities as factory farms, but that's not an official name. The government designation is CAFO, which stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation.

Basically, it's any farm that has 1,000 animal units or more. A beef cow is an animal unit. These animals are kept in pens their entire lives. They're never outside. They never breathe fresh air. They never see the sun.

What are the health and environmental hazards of CAFOs?

For one, you're often no longer feeding animals what they're genetically designed to eat. CAFO cows eat a diet of milled grains, corn and soybeans, when they are supposed to eat grass. The food isn't natural because they very often put growth hormones and antibiotics in it. That becomes a problem when you put that manure on the ground.

And the fact that there are thousands of animals packed into one farm is also a problem.

Oh, definitely. There are simply too many animals in too small of a place. In a traditional farm, a sustainable farm, you grow both crops and animals. There is a pasture, and you have a certain number of animals per acre. But when you have 2,000 cows per acre instead of two, you have a problem. You can't fit them in a pasture — you fit them in a building. You can't grow enough crops to feed them — you have to ship in their feed. You don't have enough land to absorb their waste. It has nowhere to go.

So what happens to it?

The manure is liquefied. It gets flushed out into an open lagoon, where it is stored until farmers can use it on what few crops they do grow. There's just so much of it, though. I've seen it sprayed into waterways and creeks. These lagoons filled with waste have been known to seep, leak, rupture and overtop. This stuff is untreated, by the way. We would never allow big, open cesspools of untreated human waste to just sit out on the ground near people's homes and schools. And yet because it's agriculture, the rules are different.
You write at length about North Carolina's Neuse River. What happened there?

Hundreds of massive pig farms came into North Carolina in the 1990s. In Animal Factory, I tell the story of Rick Dove, a former Marine who retired and bought a fishing boat. One day he noticed the fish were dying in really weird ways. First there were the algae blooms. Algae creates oxygen during the day through photosynthesis and expels carbon dioxide at night. When that happens, there's literally no oxygen in the water. Everything comes crawling up to the shore in the shallowest part of the river, trying to pump water through their gills. By the morning, they're all dead. Everything — shrimp, crab, little fish called menhaden, eels, bass. People call it a "fish jubilee," 'cause they can just wade into the river and pick up free food.

Soon after this started happening, Rick Dove noticed the menhaden fish were developing round red circles on their flanks. They'd go into what was called a "death spiral." They just start swimming into little circles and just die. Nobody knew what was causing this. Pretty soon after that, the fishermen, including Rick and his son, noticed they were getting round red sores on their skin in the parts that touched the water. Then they'd get very disoriented. Fishermen would forget where they lived or where they'd docked their boats. Rick started to do some research. One day he read in a science magazine about pfiesteria, this very odd plankton that emits toxins that stun a fish so it can suck the fish's blood. That's what the lesions were. But the toxin also gets in the air, and that's why fishermen were getting disoriented.

Rick wanted to know the source of this problem, so he went up in an airplane. That's how I open Animal Factory, with him looking down at these massive pig farms. Sometimes you can even see the waste runoff going directly going into the water. Other times they're out there spraying night and day because nobody is watching them. You can't see this from the road. There are very few inspectors, and they're not going to go out there and monitor everyone.

People probably assume this kind of stuff is regulated, but it's not. Or at least not enough. What should the government be doing?

A lot of the laws are on the state and county level, so it depends on the political will and political culture of the individual state. That doesn't mean Democrat or Republican. That means agriculture state vs. a state with not a lot of agriculture. What kind of laws have agriculture-friendly states passed? Some states say that if a company spills its manure, it doesn't have to pay to clean it up. The taxpayers pay. If you try to pass pollution standards, the industry complains that they're already too heavily regulated. They claim that if you force them to reduce how much they pollute, they're not going to be able to operate. They're essentially saying they can only make money by polluting and breaking the law. That should be unacceptable to everybody.

You spent three years reporting this story. What stands out?
One time I visited a pig farm, a regular farm — not a factory farm — in Illinois. Right across the street was a hog CAFO. The owner didn't live there, of course. There's no farm house on a factory farm, just business offices. At night, all the workers would leave, and all I'd hear as I was trying to fall asleep was the sound of the pigs fighting each other, biting each other, squealing, screeching all night long. It was like nothing I've ever heard before in my life, and it just didn't stop. It sounded like kids being tortured over there. I'll never forget that sound. It was very sad.


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1983981,00.html#ixzz0m6XWvDkj