Livestock
4 Reasons Why 'Modern' Agriculture Is Bad For You
Published May 07, 2009 @ 10:35AM PT
The agribusiness and crop chemical companies are enamored of the word "sustainability" these days because, I guess, they think it's a magic word that can wipe the slate clean.
I just don't think anything can be considered sustainable that has such obviously bad effects on our health, and the health of the world around us. Swine flu's all the rage these days, but industrial agriculture didn't start being bad for us just this year.
So here are four of the negative effects of industrial agriculture on the well-being of people and the ecosystems we depend on, things that I don't think we can afford to keep doing in the long-term:
Genital feminization of male humans and animals: This one always gets them where it hurts, but the industrial pesticides used in agriculture are among the class of chemicals that mimics or stimulates estrogenic activity in the body and are linked, or suspected of being linked, to decreased sperm counts and genital abnormalities in male animals up and down the food chain.
Herbicides linked to cancer, neurological disorders: Nanaimo, British Columbia, has recently banned the use of herbicides on residential lawns based on the growing body of evidence that they're linked to a host of cancers, reproductive problems, respiratory illness and neurological effects from learning disorders to full-blown Parkinson's disease. The herbicides used on lawns are often just repackaged versions of the same chemicals, like Roundup, sold in bulk to farmers.
Antibiotics fed to livestock have created antibiotic-resistant bacteria: Called MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, these difficult to treat infections commonly only attack people with compromised immune systems and were once more commonly associated with hospital environments. They don't seem to have developed forms that are very easily transmissible, but they keep showing up in farm environments where low-dose antibiotics are used as growth promoters and infection preventives.
Plants absorb antibiotics from soil amendments: If you use manure from an animal that's been given lots of antibiotics as a plant fertilizer, the plants will incorporate those antibiotics into their tissue. Even people who eat organic food, even people who have a totally vegan diet, can thus get our livestock antibiotics passed on to them in low, irregular doses - just about the worst possible way to take antibiotics. The genes that confer antibiotic resistance in bacteria don't necessarily help them survive any better in the environment at large; which is why penicillin has become useful again, because the resistance genes faded from the active bacterial population after it fell into disuse. Maintaining regular exposure of bacterial populations to antibiotics puts positive selection pressure on antibiotic resistance genes.
And these are just a few of the lowlights of factory farm and livestock production. I could go on.
Sustainability very specifically means something we can afford to keep doing for the forseeable future, but this ... How much more poison can the living things on this planet, including us, take? How much more endocrine system damage, how many more birth defects, can be incurred without risking the most basic means of continuing animal life on Earth? How many more superbug evolutions can we encourage without setting off a global pandemic that our rapid international travel can spread around the entire planet in days?
Any single one of these practices poses serious health threats if continued, in fact, poses serious health threats now. Is becoming steadily sicker and weaker as a population a sustainable proposition? Is our food going to literally kill us, and not just because of the diabetes and heart disease?
Truly sustainable agriculture needs to take into account not only issues such as phosphorus scarcity, but the injury limits on the health reserves of living beings.
Late Snack, Glass of Water
Published May 04, 2009 @ 11:24PM PT
Raiding the internet fridge for your intellectual delectation ...
- McJoan gives the film Blue Gold: World Water Wars, a mixed review, but concludes that it's probably worth watching to get an idea of the scope of the world's water crisis and guide people towards more reasonable choices, like giving up bottled water.
- The Daily Green has a list of 15 foods that you don't have to buy organic in order to avoid the nasty chemicals, and a complementary list of 12 foods that are veritable pesticide sponges.
- Just in case you wanted to start growing your own bread from scratch, Gene Logsdon, who wrote the book on small-scale grain cropping, gives you an overview.
- The Ethicurean alerts us that the USDA is holding its listening sessions on the National Animal ID System and their public comments are open for feedback.
- I do love eggs, but I'm with the folks at CivilEats in hating battery cages for hens.
- Jill Richardson has been writing up a storm at LaVidaLocavore, and while she's got a great primer for those considering raising backyard chickens in the future, she would like you to take action now to help organic dairy farmers.
Beekeeping
Published May 04, 2009 @ 10:36PM PT
This past weekend, I attended a workshop on beekeeping. Now, I don't have a yard, nor do I plan to put a beehive in my apartment. I'm sure the bees would be very disappointed that they couldn't find any flowers on my 2 bamboo plants, and I'd be bummed when I got no honey. But I did learn an awful lot. In fact, the workshop opened my eyes that beekeeping is a normal, useful, and even FUN activity.
The first thing the instructor asked was how many of us kept bees. Not too many. OK, how many of us have been stung by bees? Almost all of the class raised their hands, including me. And no, being stung is not fun. While beekeepers use smoke to chill the bees out, accidents happen. The instructor told us about a time he was carrying a beehive to move it from one location to another and he tripped and dropped it. That was NOT fun. He had to put it back together and pick it up and keep walking, even as the bees were stinging him. And you know... that didn't make me want to take up beekeeping.
But the class as a whole made me VERY interested in beekeeping. Bees don't just give you honey, you also get bees' wax, royal jelly, propolis, and (most importantly) pollination. And even bee venom can be good - apparently its a good medication for arthritis. Also, about those beestings, apparently the best thing to do when you get stung is to IMMEDIATELY rub the bee and stinger off you. The bee stinger pumps venom for about 4 seconds after you are stung. If you can get to it quicker than that, then you'll have less venom in you. Also: don't worry about squeezing the stinger and squeezing more venom in you because apparently thats a myth. One experienced beekeeper in the class said that ever since he took the advice to rub the stinger off, now he barely feels any pain.
Another beekeepng note: if a bee gets in your face, its telling you to go away. Don't swat at it, unless you like getting stung. Just turn around, walk four steps back, and you're OK.
The most interesting part of the class was about bee behavior and social structure. It is just mindblowing that such tiny little insects can be so freaking complex! They communicate based on scent and pheromones. One instructor said that they can smell human fear, so if you are scared, the bees are more likely to sting. The smell of fear tells them something must be wrong and that's what gets them going. When you put some smoke into the hive, the queen figures there must be a fire and that all the bees will have to fly away and find a new home. Better eat all the honey first, so you've got a full tummy while you are flying away from the fire! So the bees all gorge themselves on honey and then they are just too out of it to really bother you when you open the hive.
Last, the instructor, who came from Kenya, told us that he dealt with aggressive, "Africanized" bees (in Africa) by opening the hives every single day. When you open the hive daily, the bees learn after a while that you aren't a threat. But here in the U.S. it seems that the "Africanized" aggressive traits don't appear to be that dominant. They said if you get a very aggressive hive, don't worry. Worker bees live about 6 weeks. Replace the queen with a more docile queen bee, and pretty soon she'll start producing docile bees. Within 6 weeks, your problem is gone.
If beekeeping appeals to you, the first two things you should do are 1. Find out if it's legal where you live and 2. Look for a beekeeping club in your area that can help you get started. If I had a yard, I would totally go get me some bees!
(Photo credit: wolfpix on Flickr)
Swine Flu From Factory Farm
Published May 02, 2009 @ 10:33PM PT
Is it from that factory farm, though, the one in Mexico? We may never know precisely, but we do know at the least that its parent strain comes from a factory hog farm in the US:
... H3N2 — the letters denote specific gene variants that code for replication-enhancing enzymes — is the name of a hybrid first identified in North Carolina in 1998, the tail end of a decade which saw the state’s hog production rise from two million to 10 million, even as the number of farms dropped.
... At an environmental level, the conditions which shaped H3N2 and H1N2 evolution, and increased the variants’ chances of taking a human-contagious form, are well understood. High-density animal production facilities came to dominate the U.S. pork industry during the late 20th century, and have been adopted around the world. Inside them, pigs are packed so tightly that they cannot turn, and literally stand in their own waste.
Diseases travel rapidly through such immunologically stressed populations, and travel with the animals as they are shuttled throughout the United States between birth and slaughter. That provides ample opportunity for strains to mingle and recombine. An ever-escalating array of industry-developed vaccines confer short-term protection, but at the expense of provoking flu to evolve in unpredictable ways.
... It may well prove impossible to pinpoint exactly where [the new swine flu] first emerged or became infectious to people. But most of its genes are almost certainly part of a North American industrial virus lineage long expected to produce pandemic variants like this one. ...
Read the whole thing, the article goes on to describe the reason the flu has been mutating so fast in recent years, chief being the flu vaccines they give the animals to stop the spread of a sickness that's mainly a problem because of how they're raised.
Biological principles are more complicated than the ones that govern the manufacture of screwdrivers, cars and lampshades. They are, however, reasonably well understood.
Do predictably stupid things, you will get predictably bad results.
And I understand if people want to point out that hunger kills and hurts a lot more people than this outbreak has done. I won't argue that. It's just that the entire food system is broken, and part of that breakage is the mass, monocrop cultivation of grains and legumes solely for the sake of maintaining these animals in extremely unhealthy conditions. That's just stupid.
People need a larger variety of food, these animals need forage, and no animals are healthier when they're packed into tiny crates and forced to stand in their own waste.
The Meat of the Problem
Published May 01, 2009 @ 10:29PM PT
I've got a somewhat sick analogy but I'm going to share it anyway. Five months and eleven days ago, my brother died. He was 23, and we don't know why he died. We do know that he was obese, and we found out after he died that he was eating a LOT of fast food. (He had told us he didn't, and that he was on a diet, but there aren't a lot of secrets when you're dead and his bank statements showed an awful lot of charges at every fast food drive-thru in town.)
We think Adam died the Thursday before Thanksgiving. We aren't really sure. Because Adam, my brother, frequently went through periods where he refused to answer his phone, nobody thought it was weird that we didn't hear from him for a few days. It took about four days before my mom got worried enough that no one had heard from him, and that's when we discovered he was dead. When I went home for the funeral, Mom said she was disappointed that we weren't able to donate Adam's organs because it took us so many days to discover his body. Adam was a strong believer in organ donation.
I thought - but did not speak - about my friend who recently donated a kidney. She's a vegan and eats a very healthy diet. The doctors were ECSTATIC about her healthy, vegan kidney. Well, if doctors would be ecstatic about my friend's vegan kidney, I have a hunch that even if we found my brother sooner, nobody would've been very interested in his organs. What kind of shape would they have been in after he'd abused them so badly for so many years? The idea that you are what you eat is no joke.
Why do I bring this up? Well, if we are what we eat, then so are the animals we use for meat - cows, pigs, chickens, lambs, fish, etc. So here's the analogy: Just like you'd probably prefer a healthy organ donor like my vegan friend instead of someone who eats crap, wouldn't it make sense that you should also prefer the meat, milk, and eggs from animals that ate healthy diets to those that didn't?
This might be a no-brainer to everyone on this site. After all, we're all here because we already "get it." But soooo many people do not. Like this New York Times article. I am not a nutritionist and I do not want to give out dietary advice that I am not qualified to give. But I think that it makes little sense to paint with a broad brush like the NYT article does about meat. All beef is not equal. All pork, chicken, fish, etc, is not equal. The conventional wisdom that red meat is bad for you and should be eaten in moderation or not at all makes a LOT of sense if we're talking about factory farmed red meat. But what about grass fed, pasture-raised beef, pork, or lamb? I find it hard to believe that pasture raised beef has the same "heart attack on a plate" nutritional profile as factory farmed beef. I have read some research showing that grass fed beef and the milk of grass fed cows has more of certain beneficial nutrients compared to (factory farmed) grain-fed cows. What I haven't seen are studies comparing the health of humans who eat grass-fed beef with humans who ate factory farmed, grain-fed beef.
Why is this so important? Well, I think that most people understand that humans have eaten animal products throughout our history. Although some of us (myself included) choose to be vegetarians, the vast majority of people see meat, dairy, and eggs as normal, natural foods. What I think most people do NOT know is that the product they are getting now when they eat animal products is not the same product our ancestors at. Simply put, our ancestors didn't factory farm. Yet we factory farm, produce crap-quality meat, dairy, and eggs, and then we eat them. And we have epidemic rates of diet-related illness. Until a larger percentage of Americans make these connections, I think it is going to be hard to achieve the changes we really need.
Photo credit: tercerojista on Flickr.com
Outsourcing Disease, Destruction
Published May 01, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
As linked to previously, wealthy countries whose own farmland is losing productivity are buying farmland in poor nations where the population may be illiterate and unaware of its rights when their governments approve selling their land out from under them.
Some of the countries have insisted that they'll hire locals, though industrial agriculture often explicitly employs fewer people, substituting fossil fuels and machinery for human labor. Some of them have promised to sell part of the crop locally, hopefully their will be jobs available for now-landless subsistence households that pay enough for them to buy a sufficiency of food.
Would it help if they promised to mitigate ecological damage? If industrial farming could really do that, countries practicing it probably wouldn't be so worried about losing farmland at home. I mean, it seems like it'd be less hassle to just take care of what you've got?
Would it help if they promised to be less polluting? Well, industrial agriculture needs a lot of chemicals in order to manage that prized workforce reduction. Biotech crops are notorious for having been most frequently engineered to tolerate pesticides, and for mainly being successful and a tremendous sales tool for chemicals like glyphosate, aka Roundup.
Do poor nations need their populations to have increased risks of birth defects during spraying season? I would submit that no one needs that.
Would it help if they promised to follow the highest standards of sanitary livestock practice? Well, look what a mess industrial livestock farming has made wherever it's been allowed. Let's take, say, hog farming.
The picture up at the top of this post is, obviously, of a family of pigs running around in a grass-covered pasture. To the immediate left is a picture of pigs in a confinement barn.
Which one of those lifestyles looks more sanitary for the pigs?
As it happens, the obvious answer is the correct one..
Factory farms are known breeding grounds for pathogens that regularly violate US environmental standards. So they've moved South, to countries where regulations are less stringent. Some bloggers are calling this the NAFTA flu, because NAFTA has a lot more to do with the spread of this farming method and its diseases than any pigs, as Robert Wallace writes at Farming Pathogens:
... There is, then, another reason why the ’swine flu’ tag fails. It detracts from an obvious point: pigs have very little to do with how influenza emerges. They didn’t organize themselves into cities of thousands of immuno-compromised pigs. They didn’t artificially select out the genetic variation that could have helped reduce the transmission rates at which the most virulent influenza strains spread. They weren’t organized into livestock ghettos alongside thousands of industrial poultry. They don’t ship themselves thousands of miles by truck, train or air. Pigs do not naturally fly.
The onus must be placed on the decisions we humans made to organize them this way. And when we say ‘we’, let’s be clear, we’re talking how agribusinesses have organized pigs and poultry.
Although considerable attention is being paid to the role of a particular company in the emergence of the new influenza, and rightfully so, we might better focus on the deregulation that allowed such porcinopolises to grow to the point that whole human communities are pushed off the land pigs now occupy. ...
As Wallace goes on to note, it was reported in Science that swine flus of the H1N1 variants got a jumpstart in their evolution in 1998, mixing with human flus in the hog barns of North Carolina. Ever since, they've been mutating like crazy, incorporating new strains and regularly tossing off new variants.
Should Smithfield's Granjas Carroll subsidiary not be directly to blame, this flu got its start in the livestock production model they've profited from and spread.
But ... this mess sounds like a good idea to keep exporting to even more countries. International officials think it'll be a win-win. Right, right.
And someday, pigs will fly.
(Photo credit: Grongar on Flickr and the Wikipedia Commons, via Answer.com's factory farming information page.)
Vilsack Promises to Boost Biotech Crops
Published May 01, 2009 @ 05:50AM PT
Sad, but ultimately unsurprising. There was a Monsanto rep on the selection committee:
... Just back from the G8 summit in Italy, Vilsack pledged today to bring a “more comprehensive and integrated” approach to promoting ag biotech overseas. ...
Chances are, he means livestock, too.
