Livestock
World According to Monsanto, pt 4, rBGH and Bt Crops
Published June 18, 2009 @ 03:37PM PT
This installment of the World According To Monsanto documentary (and a big shout out to Robert Wager, who convinced me that I wasn't taking a nearly hard enough line on biotech) starts out talking about rBGH, recombinant bovine growth hormone.
Understand that this hormone is a mimic of a hormone naturally found in cows' bodies during a certain stage of their development. It's nothing very strange.
Nonetheless, rBGH use in adult milk cows causes painful, continuous udder infections and other health problems. This requires the use of constant, elevated doses of antibiotics, and there still ends up being pus in the resulting milk. The hormone isn't reactive in human bodies; not directly, not until it breaks down, and then it seems to promote reproductive cancers.
It's extremely important to understand that protein and hormone interactions in living bodies are very complex. Introducing a hormone at the wrong developmental stage can prove a disaster. Introducing a normally safe protein or compound at high doses, or to the wrong person, or with the wrong chemical companions, can be a disaster.
This is why controlled, independent safety testing is important when introducing novel compounds to the food system or medical repertoire.
Even though rBGH is ostensibly natural, it isn't normally present in adult cows at these artificial levels, or in food that we've had a chance to try over the long term for safety. This is where the equivalence arguments fall down, because even a cursory understanding of the problems inherent in the safety testing of medicinal and food compounds reveals cases where assumptions of safety were badly misplaced because one compound seemed to be 'just like' some other, normally encountered compound.
Sometimes, problems don't reveal themselves for decades.
With Bt crops, not only are they far more expensive and higher input than traditional crop varieties, but it still requires plenty of pesticides and may cause allergic reactions.
The Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) toxin comes from a bacteria and no amount of garden-variety plant breeding or typical food preparation technique would ever add significant quantities of it to the human diet. Yet Bt crops produce this toxin throughout their tissues, including the edible portions.
Perhaps stories of animals dying after foraging on crop remains, something that rarely happens in the US because of the separation of animal and crop agriculture, are anecdotal and not related. I want a public, independent, well-controlled study to prove it.
Perhaps stories of field workers getting allergic reactions from handling Bt cotton are anecdotal, maybe they were reacting to some crop chemical or other unknown allergen. Prove it. Run proper studies and make the data public.
'It's safe because we said so,' whether the 'we' at this point is the biotech firms or their cowering minions at USDA and the land grant universities, cuts no ice.
There's very little in the history of industrial agriculture that leads me to believe they should get the benefit of the doubt.
Climate Change and African Agriculture
Published June 05, 2009 @ 07:14AM PT
While climate change is sadly acidifying the seas and threatening the US' northeastern coastline, it's also threatening agriculture.
African agriculture is expected to be so hard hit that there are entire regions that may become unsuitable for growing crops because the effective yearly growing season is going to shrink to 90 days or less. These regions will have to convert to livestock agriculture and maize, Africa's favorite crop since it was introduced in the colonial era, will become impossible to cultivate in much of the continent.
Jasmin Melvyn of Reuters reports:
... Climate change could cost the African continent more farmland than the United States uses to plant its eight major field crops combined, according to a study published in the June issue of Environmental Science and Policy.
Farming on up to 1 million square kilometers (247 million acres) of land in Africa could subside by 2050 as climate change makes areas too hot and dry for growing crops, the study said.
The latest U.S. Agriculture Department data puts plantings of the eight major U.S. field crops combined at 246 million acres for the coming year. ...
Bringing livestock to these areas could be, given proper grazing management, a boon to African soils even now. Healthy grasslands are supposed to be grazed and depend on the process for nutrients and cultivation. Deliberate human management of livestock grazing can significantly improve soil health and restore its fertility and could be a counterbalance to global warming (full report here, paid access).
But what do you want to bet that what they'll get is grain-hungry CAFOs, instead of good extension advice about how to get the most out of grazing livestock?
Anyway, it puts a different perspective on the rush by wealthy countries to buy up farm land in Africa that I wrote about yesterday. These issues really are all tied together with our common fates, and as Benjamin Franklin once said, we can all hang together or we will all hang separately.
(Photo credit: International Rice Research Institute on Flickr.)
It's Farmers Who Don't Like CAFOs
Published June 04, 2009 @ 01:57PM PT
With a hat tip to FarmAid on Twitter, this Columbia Daily Tribune article busts the myth that it's mainly urban transplants that complain about confinement operations:
You know all of those claims by proponents of agribusinesses about how “urban move-ins” are filing the lawsuits against concentrated animal feeding operations because they aren’t accustomed to smelling fresh country air?
It is all made up, a total fabrication, stemming from the fertile imaginations of public relations people in the employ of agribusinesses such as Smithfield/Premium Standard Farms, Tyson, Seaboard and MOARK/Land O’ Lakes.
The lawsuits are being filed — and won — by longtime rural residents, most of them farmers[, ...] those who have lived in the area for a long, long time and know the country air isn’t supposed to smell like thousands of hogs or millions of chickens. ...
What a surprise. Corporate employees who lie for a living convincing the public that the only objections to their extremely unsanitary factory farming practices are transplants who don't like farmers.
How unsanitary?
Regular readers will remember that one of the current H1N1 swine flu virus' publicly identified ancestors came from a factory hog farm in North Carolina in 1998, "where it spread and mutated at an alarming rate. Experts warned then that a pocket of the virus would someday evolve to infect humans, perhaps setting off a global pandemic."
Success!
The World Health Organization is moving closer to classing the current H1N1 outbreak as a pandemic, with the virus circulating in all 50 states of the US and 63 other countries.
Meanwhile, Tom Philpott illustrates the likelihood that no links have been found between this current line of virus and a current factory farming operation because no one is looking, even if those pesky Europeans are demanding further investigation of a possible link:
... Meanwhile, no one with authority seems to be investigating obvious possible links with industrial-scale hog farming. As I reported a while back, the only scientists swarming around La Gloria, Mexico—where the flu evidently broke out in the shadow of massive Smithfield hog operations—are from the biotech industry, not the World Health Organization. And they’re training their testtubes on backyard hog farms, not Smithfield’s huge confinement facilities! ...
And if you don't find any evidence that factory farming is, right now, right this minute, responsible for dozens of deaths and thousands of illnesses in an evolving global pandemic, and if every resident of every rural community doesn't regard CAFOs as an absolute evil, all must be well.
All must, indeed, be perfectly safe and hunky dory. Says so on the label.
(Aerial photography of a typical confinement hog farm with attendant lagoons of pig manure courtesy of friendsoffamilyfarmers on Flickr.)
RFID Journal on National Animal ID System
Published June 01, 2009 @ 06:49AM PT
You'd think the founder and editor of the RFID Journal would be thrilled with the idea of mandatory RFID for farm animals. That's a big market. Yet while he supports the idea to some extent, Mark Roberti believes the government is taking the wrong approach. More, he levels what's really the best criticism of the program:
... It's true that the current plan would not enable the government to track the outbreak of a food-borne illness, because there is no tracking of food after it's processed. That is a bigger issue that needs to be tackled—not just with meat producers, but also with fruit and vegetable growers. ...
Rightly or wrongly, I think a lot of people would be willing to put any amount of regulation on the food industry to prevent the next Salmonella or E. coli outbreak. I sympathize.
However, it doesn't mean salvation from food-borne illness. It isn't even close. It's just an expensive mess that will hurt the small farmers who have to tag individual animals instead of entire herds. Do we have the money to waste this year on things that don't work? I think not.
Not like it'd be fine to waste money otherwise, but it seems like an especially bad idea right now.
Children: Not Actually Garbage Disposals
Published May 21, 2009 @ 01:13PM PT
Apparently, it costs too much to give kids healthy food in school.
School lunches are full of excess fat and school nutrition budgets used as a slush fund for commodities producers, especially the beef and dairy industries, which are overrepresented in children's diets by even this unrepentant omnivore's estimate. Emphasis mine:
... But all that cheese adds up. Public schools serve more than 4 billion meals every year -- a number that would make many fast-food chains envious -- and officials say all those lunches are contributing to the growing health crisis among kids. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity rates have doubled in children and tripled in adolescents since 1980, spurring an epidemic of type II diabetes, once considered an adult-onset condition. Obesity has also been associated with heart disease, arthritis, and certain cancers, and researchers have found fatty streaks in the blood vessels of children as young as 10.
"USDA needs to relate the current crisis in kids' health to the meals that are being served, especially to poor kids, because that's the population that's most vulnerable," says Antonia Demas, director of the Food Studies Institute, a child-nutrition group based in upstate New York. Because low-income children often eat both breakfast and lunch at school, "they get at least two-thirds of their calories from school each day, and they're the population really showing an increase in the diet-related diseases."
... Given the industry's clout, USDA officials are careful to include agribusiness representatives in almost every discussion about the school lunch program. In the mid-1990s, a group of health advocates met with the USDA a to ask that schools be allowed to serve soy products like veggie burgers. According to one participant, a department official asked them, "Have you spoken with the Cattlemen about this? Until the Cattlemen go for this, we aren't going to be able to move on it." Soy alternatives were eventually allowed, but only after the beef industry group was consulted. ...
And as we discovered last year when video footage of slaughterhouse practices was revealed, downer cows have been making it into the school lunch meat supply. Children aren't only eating too much meat, it isn't the good stuff.
Jill Richardson, writing at LaVidaLocavore, suggests an alternative: make school lunches wholesome and appetizing, like they do in Italy, France and Japan,countries where they don't treat kids like garbage disposals for food only the starving would volunteer to eat.
(Photo credit: Marshall Astor on Flickr. That picture might look appetizing, unless it was a good composite of your every single breakfast and lunch, as opposed to the occasional 'I'm going to hell for this' treat.)
Late Supper: Fend For Yourself Night
Published May 16, 2009 @ 07:32PM PT
Raiding the internet fridge for your intellectual delectation ...
- Over at LaVidaLocavore, Jill Richardson shares a food issues sampler platter and catches Time magazine cheering for a pointless National Animal ID System.
- At The Jew and the Carrot, Cecily Marbach Oberstein writes about living in a mixed-diet household and Miri Levitas writes about storing seasonal foods for the sake of both sustainability and variety.
- In both the UK and US, Bonnie Powell of the Ethicurean points out that community gardens have more applicants than space, and also links to a Slate article that says the backyard chicken phenomenon is more a reporting trend than an actual trend. Or maybe, urban chicken fans are just really, really good at public relations ;)
- Head over to Civil Eats to get the details on tomorrow night's sustainable agriculture chat from 8-10 pm, a response to people who think local food is part of the problem and screening dates for "The Garden."
(Photo credit: by petit hiboux on Flickr.)
H1N1 Swine Flu Update - Yes, It's In The Meat
Published May 12, 2009 @ 09:08PM PT
First, contrary to initial pronouncements by Smithfield and government authorities, you can get swine flu from the meat of sick animals, and the claims that the US herd is free of the flu is based on an abscence of evidence.
No one is independently checking the US hog herd for H1N1. If you think these meat packers would self-report to the public any swine flu they did find, you weren't paying attention to the peanut contamination scandal.
Really doing something about the disease factories known as industrial farms would involve going up against an incredibly powerful lobby, one that's pushing a National Animal ID System that will make small scale animal production methods too expensive to compete.
It's actually an insult to chicken sh*t to properly describe the cowardice of most of Congress when it comes to standing up to people who throw a lot of money around.
So nothing is likely to be done to prevent future outbreaks, though if we are unlucky, this one could still turn into a pandemic:
... What should we be watching for this summer? Influenza is a seasonal disease. Summer in the Earth's northern Hemisphere is winter in its southern hemisphere and vice versa. In the United States, we are moving into summer. But below the equator, they are moving into winter. I would keep a very careful watch on the southern hemisphere. Its the making of the perfect storm: new Swine flu in circulation and winter conditions promoting its circulation. ...
Health experts worry that this flu could hit a third of the population as we move into the southern hemisphere flu season, with its full effects not likely to be apparent until it's flu season in the northern hemisphere this fall and winter. Quarantine at this point is a pipe dream, just as it always was, especially as the first case has been confirmed in China. Sealing our southern border or avoiding travel to Mexico is of no practical use, as I've written before, unless satisfying xenophobia appeals to you.
So there's nothing for this but trying to take care of your personal health, avoiding contact with sick people, and encouraging sick people to stay home from work or school.
At present, the best means of avoiding a number of diseases, including the flu, remains scrubbing your hands with soap in warm water for at least 15 seconds after touching public surfaces, shaking hands, handling waste, using the restroom, and always before eating - so say the health experts quoted in the Wall Street Journal. Which, as I just told Chris, totally vindicates my OCD tendencies.
If that's an alien mindset to you, maybe try watching a few episodes of Monk ;) You don't have to develop a fear of elevators or anything, but a little extra germophobia will go a long way towards protecting everyone's health from industrial agriculture's little Frankenstein flu.
