The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will soon launch experiments designed to combine the H5N1 virus and human flu viruses and then see how the resulting hybrids affect animals. The goal is to assess the chances that such a "reassortant" virus will emerge and how dangerous it might be.
Swine Flu By Monica @ 6:55 PM
I don't know if you've noticed, but there's been surprisingly little detail on this swine flu. Additionally, local reports are indicating that the death toll from this flu is higher than most media sources are reporting.
We are now learning that this "swine" flu virus is a mixture of four viruses: 1 human, avian, and 2 swine influenza viruses. This amount of recombination has been historically unusual. Scientists claim they have no idea how this happened, yet the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm and Animal Production has already warned of emerging forms of avian-swine-human influenza viruses here in the U.S. due to the way we keep animals. Duh! This outbreak could almost as easily have happened in the United States.
What has not been reported in the mainstream media until now, but which has been known in Mexico for weeks, is that it is believed that this flu is linked to a US-owned Smithfields CAFO pork operation in Mexico. The original reporting on this, from what I can see, was in Grist who picked up on a disease tracking blog called Biosurveillance. The only report I have seen in the mainstream media is, as of the time of this writing, from the Times. I include a large section here because I think it is important. (my emphasis in italics added)
The first known case of swine flu emerged a fortnight earlier than previously thought in a village where residents have long complained about the smell and flies from a nearby pig farm, it emerged last night.
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The boy’s hometown, La Gloria, is also close to a pig farm that raises almost 1 million animals a year. The facility, Granjas Carroll de Mexico, is partly owned by Smithfield Foods, a Virginia-based US company and the world’s largest producer and processor of pork products. Residents of La Gloria have long complained about the clouds of flies that are drawn the so-called “manure lagoons” created by such mega-farms, known in the agriculture business as Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).
It is now known that there was a widespread outbreak of a powerful respiratory disease in the La Gloria area earlier this month, with some of the town’s residents falling ill in February. Health workers soon intervened, sealing off the town and spraying chemicals to kill the flies that were reportedly swarming through people’s homes.
A spokeswoman for Smithfield, Keira Ullrich, said that the company had found no clinical signs or symptoms of the presence of swine influenza in its swine herd or its employees working at its joint ventures anywhere in Mexico. Meanwhile, Mexico’s National Organisation of Pig Production and Producers released its own statement, saying: “We deny completely that the influenza virus affecting Mexico originated in pigs because it has been scientifically demonstrated that this is not possible.”
According reports gathered on the website of James Wilson, a founding member of the Biosurveillance Indication and Warning Analysis Community (BIWAC), about 60 per cent of La Gloria’s 3,000-strong population have sought medical assistance since February.
“Residents claimed that three pediatric cases, all under two years of age, died from the outbreak,” wrote Mr Wilson. “However, officials stated that there was no direct link between the pediatric deaths and the outbreak; they said the three fatal cases were isolated and not related to each other.”
The case of the four-year-old boy was announced yesterday by Mexico’s Health Minister, Jose Angel Cordova, at a press conference that was briefly interrupted by an earthquake. “We are at the most critical moment of the epidemic. The number of cases will keep rising so we have to reinforce preventive measures,” he said, adding that in addition to the 149 deaths another 2,000 had been hospitalised with “grave pneumonia”, although at least half of that number had since made a full recovery.
Mr Cordova went on to say that there have been no new cases detected in La Gloria but epidemiologists want to take a closer look at pigs in Mexico as a potential source of the outbreak.
Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) for pigs are about as grotesque as they can come. Pigs are crammed into giant buildings, kept in stalls so small they can’t even turn around. The pollution from their waste is so noxious that you must wear a gas mask to enter the building. And, of course, the pig’s immune systems are so weakened that you must don a “clean suit” just to walk within 100 feet of them.
Lest you think that's an exaggeration, I recommend this article if you are currently ignorant about what it takes to produce cheap food, particularly pork. It's a highly recommended read about the history of CAFO pork operations, particularly the company in question, Smithfields. I will warn you, it is not for the faint-hearted. Just ignore the free market hullabaloo. These operations are not the product of a free market. Anything but. They are the product of socialism. They started growing in the 1960s when the USDA subsidy program started producing ultra-cheap corn. And if you read between the lines, they were allowed to achieve massive levels of growth by putting small farmers out of business by their owners dictating slaughterhouse contracts. And if you are a small farmer you simply can't build a USDA inspection facility cheaply, so you are at the mercy of those who own them.
Honestly, this whole story angers me beyond belief. We don't need more regulations, and this swine flu epidemic is just what will justify more food safety regulations and a massive new government agency created by HR 875, more controls over our food. Yes, this pork factory may be responsible for this. But can you imagine a town in the United States where 60% of the population experiences respiratory distress and some sort of legal action isn't pursued? There have been plenty of lawsuits already over CAFOs in the United States. What appears clear in this article is that the local authorities didn't care. As in many countries that are less free (like China), corruption of the local officials is rampant.
Here is what we need to do. We need to abolish grain subsidies and the EQIP program that help CAFOs to be profitable. We need to abolish USDA meat inspection requirements dating back to Teddy Roosevelt that put small farmers out of business. On-farm, hygienic slaughter is not an issue. We need to put to rest programs like NAIS that are exorbitantly costly to the small farmer and have nothing to do with food safety. Foreign countries need accountable local governments free of corruption. And if it can be proved that Smithfields helped to create this global pandemic, which will likely kill thousands if not more, they should be sued out the ying yang. We already know that CAFOs, whether beef or pork, have created antibiotic and acid- resistant strains of E. coli and MRSA. Now possibly this new swine flu. None of these are just some minor nuisance, they are deadly. And these developments are completely predictable to anyone having taken Evolution 101. The animals are packed in at way too high a density (seriously, 50,000 hogs per square mile?) to ever regulate these factories into cleanliness.
Frankly -- and unfortunately -- I'm even skeptical that lawsuits will help them to clean up their act:
Smithfield is not just a virtuosic polluter; it is also a theatrical one. Its lagoons are historically prone to failure. In North Carolina alone they have spilled, in a span of four years, 2 million gallons of shit into the Cape Fear River, 1.5 million gallons into its Persimmon Branch, one million gallons into the Trent River and 200,000 gallons into Turkey Creek. In Virginia, Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of the Clean Water Act -- the third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the act by the EPA. It amounted to .035 percent of Smithfield's annual sales.
So most importantly, we all need to search out and face the reality of where our food comes from and adjust our purchases accordingly. People who are having their water supplies polluted by this waste are having their rights violated, and it doesn't appear that EPA regulations or lawsuits are really working to do anything about it. (It might help on a legal level if waterways were owned, which is where most of the problems have occurred.) Most Americans are far too ignorant of these matters.
The Feasibility of a Pastured Animal Production Model By Monica @ 3:35 PM
I was linked by a friend to a great article in Mother Earth News entitled The Amazing Benefits of Grass-Fed Meat. I think the article focuses too much on climate change, but the other benefits described in the article with regard to animal health, human health, soil erosion, and landscapes are still huge. I highly recommend it. It also highlights the soil fertility issues I've wanted to raise for some time. And to think we would have been decades ahead on rotational grazing techniques by now without grain subsidies.
I've been busy with so many other tasks and my blogging here has been very light. I promise that I'll blog on HR 875, rBGH and its supposed mitigation of climate change -- and the feasibility of a grass-fed model from a production perspective. A commenter on Dr. Eades' blog says he wants a more authoritative analysis on this last point, not just layman comments. I'm currently collecting peer-reviewed literature on the issue of productivity in pastured, organic models vs. grain-fed models.
In the meantime, here are some simple facts presented by Michael Pollan, who discusses the productivity of Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in Virginia. This is an organic animal farm using rotational grazing. Other farms such as Nature's Harmony Farm also use this technique now. I'll grant that this farm exists in a rich, moist temperature zone. However, the results are still impressive and as the Mother Earth News article above points out, there is a lot of marginal grassland in the United States that is not used for grazing. (This includes land pulled out of production under 10 year contracts through the USDA's idiotic CRP program.)
Let the video load and move forward to 10:50 where the interesting stuff starts, then finish it to the end. Quite inspiring.
In other words, 1/2 cow, 1 pig, 3000 eggs, 200 broiler chickens, 10 turkeys, and 10 rabbits per acre. The bird production per acre might be a bit higher than ideal per this commenter's suggestion. Nevertheless, can we conclude from the facts of this example that organic=starvation, as Earl Butz, former Secretary of Agriculture under presidents Nixon and Ford, said? I think not.
The Price of Grass-Fed vs. Grain-Fed Beef By Monica @ 1:52 PM
A few months ago I was involved in an internet discussion about the affordability (or rather, the perceived non-affordability) of grass-fed beef. This led me to investigate the costs of grass-fed beef in a bit more detail.
Let's compare the costs of current grain-finished beef with mostly grass-fed beef. I'll use two fairly comparable products: Costco beef and local beef from Colorado's Best Beef Company (CBB).
I say "mostly grass-fed" because the product I'm using for comparison isn't grass-finished. At CBB, the cattle are fed grains for probably the last couple of weeks of their lives. However, there's a vast difference between this beef and the feedlot beef in stores. There are no additional inputs from antibiotics or steroids. The cattle are raised on pasture, which doesn't create a waste and animal health problem as it does in feedlot practices where literally tens of thousands of animals are packed per square mile (correction: I had written "acre". I think we can all see it's physically impossible to get that many animals per acre unless we're stacking them high). From a human health perspective, the omega fatty acid ratio and conjugated linoleic acid content resulting from a short grain-finishing time may render this beef as somewhat less ideal than grass-finished beef. It's still corn-finished beef. However, the finishing time is drastically reduced under a mostly grass-fed model. This beef is much higher quality and tastes spectacular.
But how much does it cost?
The grass-fed beef from CBB is approximately $5.61 per pound, but this doesn't tell you very much because it doesn't allow for a direct comparison of cuts. If it's all ground beef then obviously that's twice as expensive as grocery store feedlot beef!! So, I went through the list of cuts and poundage that are received in a bulk order of 1/2 beef from Colorado's Best Beef Company. Then, I went to Costco and listed the prices per pound for all of these different cuts: T bones, ribeyes, sirloin, round roast, top round, bottom round, chuck, flank, prime rib, sirloin tip, heel of round, arm roast, rump roast, brisket, stew meat, short ribs, soup bones, and ground beef. Where Costco didn't have these cuts, I used local grocery store prices/lb.
What I discovered is that if you buy the same poundage of the same cuts at Costco, you will pay 71% of the cost of the local, grass-fed beef. At Costco you'd pay $922.30. Buying the same poundage and cuts 1/2 beef in bulk from CBB you would pay $1303.70. (If you'd like to see the calculations, feel free to email me.)
Is it worth it? It depends on your individual value hierarchy. Most of the cuts at Costco are USDA graded as Choice. Costco Choice ribeye is $6.89/lb while Costco Prime ribeye is $8.89/lb. Most of the cuts at Costco aren't available as Prime cuts, so I couldn't make that comparison. I would imagine most of the cuts from CBB are Prime, therefore making CBB affordable when you fairly compare quality.
It's up to the individual to decide whether the environmental, animal welfare, taste, health benefits, and convenience of buying in bulk are worth the extra cost. It certainly helps to have a big freezer and some cash up front. For us this is worth it, partly because we do not eat out that often due to living in a remote area. Furthermore, I have discovered in the past year that with a little bit more effort I can make a far more delicious dish than I can get in most restaurants when I have access to quality ingredients.
Those of us on the meat production side of agriculture have been thrown a curve ball over the last year by the federally mandated production of ethanol. The historic corn price discovery, dictated by supply and demand, has been replaced by a highly subsidized ethanol industry whose appetite for corn and ability to bid the price up has resulted in record high corn (and rest of the feed commodities) prices. These prices are only to be replaced with higher record prices every time the government opens its mouth.
Here, though, I have to point something out. Historic corn prices are not driven solely by supply and demand. This is a mixed economy where prices are also driven by subsidies and USDA economists. I have to point out that even with the ethanol boondoggle, corn prices are still probably lower than they would be due to the existence of government programs that are designed to drive down the price of corn. Yes, I think this is the case even with federally-mandated and subsidized ethanol production. This is not only because the price of corn is directly lowered due to subsidies but because the subsidies encourage overproduction which further lowers the price. I'm not sure anyone can really make a decent stab at what the price of corn would be in a free market. It's an incredibly complex situation since corn has been artificially cheapened since the mid-1900s.
In relation to grass feeding, I've encountered a lot of speculation online that either 1) a grass-fed model can't feed the world or that 2) it's not affordable. I'll address the first issue in a later post. As to the second issue, let's consider a commodity where subsidies are pretty much absent:lamb. All lamb is pasture-raised, whether it's in Australia, New Zealand, Chile, or the US. This means the market isn't skewed by feed costs. And what do you find? If you go to different stores you will find that all of these products are pretty competitive in price, despite the foreign products having additional transportation costs.
I'd like to end by pointing out that New Zealand's farm economy is almost purely free-market -- unlike the intensely socialized farming system that exists in the United States. There are practically no farm subsidies in New Zealand, and the farm products arequite competitive even on an international basis. The cost of milk production in New Zealand is among the lowest in the world, too. All the cows in New Zealand are grass-fed. And they don't use rBGH to boost milk production, either. New Zealand cows do not see an ounce of grain, except the seed heads they might find on a farm field. How can farmers possibly afford to grass feed? Isn't grass feeding supposed to be expensive?
What's my point? The grass-fed animal production model works -- when it doesn't have to unfairly complete with subsidized grains, EQIP subsidized waste disposal, and "vertical integration" of the beef industry due to USDA inspection mandates that make it all but impossible for small producers to slaughter meat affordably. All three of these drive up costs for independent producers operating on a largely grass-fed model.
Grain-finished beef is never going to disappear because most Americans like the taste. However, it does not need to be as inhumane and polluting (i.e. violating of property rights) as it is. Nor does it need to be providing as low quality meat as it is providing. Unleash the free market, and we will see the success of grass-fed beef here in the United States. It's already been shown in New Zealand.
NAIS Meeting with Ag. Secretary Tom Vilsack By Monica @ 9:45 AM
Walter Jeffries of NoNAIS has a recent report of his testimony about The National Animal Identification System (NAIS) in front of Tom Vilsack, our new head at the USDA. I agree with the vast majority of what Jeffries wrote in this piece, with the exception that democracy is somehow about individual rights -- it's not. Democracy is tyranny of the majority.
In any case, I recommend reading Jeffries' report in its entirety.
ROCHESTER, Pa. -- On the first Friday of Lent, an elderly female parishioner of St. Cecilia Catholic Church began unwrapping pies at the church. That's when the trouble started.
A state inspector, there for an annual checkup on the church's kitchen, spied the desserts. After it was determined that the pies were home-baked, the inspector decreed they couldn't be sold.
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The problem is the pies are illegal in Pennsylvania. Under the state's food-safety code, facilities that provide food at four or more events in a year require at least a temporary eating and drinking license, and food has to be prepared in a state-inspected kitchen. Many churches have six fish fries a year, on Fridays during Lent. St. Cecilia's has always complied with having its kitchen licensed, so food made there is fine to serve. But homemade goods don't make the cut.
Go read the whole thing.
If these pies are so dangerous, why is it legal to give them away?
The sad thing is that this story is not exceptional. There are health codes like this across the country and they are partly responsible for the decline in farmer's markets. It is impossible to sell a loaf of bread -- or any other homemade product -- at some farmer's markets due to health codes. Getting away with it is dependent on the grace of the regulators and whether they are willing to turn a blind eye.
This is all beyond absurd. These pernicious regulations must be repealed.
Unfortunately, this news is not new. Monsanto, the makers of POSILAC (rBGH or rBST) have been pursued labeling bans and restrictions state by state for nearly a decade now. When a dairy labeled their milk as rBGH-free, Monsanto sued them. When Monsanto was not successful with lawsuits, it attempted to enact labeling bans directly by going to state secretaries of agriculture. When that didn't work, Monsanto tried to get labeling restriction bills passed in state legislatures. Unfortunately, their last attempt in Kansas has worked. It is reprehensible.
Monsanto no longer owns POSILAC -- Eli Lilly does. The people who own and use this hormone will do and say anything to sell it. Last year a peer-reviewed paper was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) -- a very high impact journal -- in which scientists associated with Monsanto actually alleged that use of this hormone could help stop global warming. I'm not kidding.
A review of that PNAS paper will be one of my next blog topics.
HR 875 By Monica @ 7:47 AM
I've been remiss in blogging about HR 875, the so-called "Food Safety Modernization Act". This bill does not take a long time to read, but the language in it is extremely vague. It proposes the erection of an enormous new federal agency called the Food Safety Administration. What appears clear under the bill is that any "food establishment" where food is passed from producer to consumer could be highly regulated. This is all a serious worry, I think. I plan to summarize HR 875 in the coming week or so, but in the meantime, you may wish to read these two articles on the matter: Kansas Cattlemen on HR 875
Why is food purchased from local farms often so damn expensive? I recently ran across two interesting essays on the topic via the blog Food Renegade, both focused on livestock.
First, in Unfair Fare, part-time New York farmer Bob Comis argues that the problem stems from a failure on the part of many small farmers to take advantage of economies of scale. Instead, these farmers tend to rely on the willingness of some not-so-bright folks to pay exorbitant prices for locally-produced food. Undoubtedly, many consumers do need to be smarter shoppers.
Second, in Why Local Food Is More Expensive, farmer Joel Salatin argues that the high prices are largely the product of massive government controls. These controls are not merely ill-suited to the workings of the small farm; they also entail fixed costs that burden small farms far more than large farms.
Whether you will ever buy food direct from a farm or not, I heartily suggest reading this second article. The inanity, burden, and expense of these government controls on farmers is worth glimpsing in its concrete details. It's not a pretty picture.
Notably, while these two explanations for high prices of locally-produced food differ, they are not mutually exclusive. However, in the long run, the government controls over farms are clearly far more significant than the poor judgment of some farmers and consumers. The market can and will weed out inefficient farms via competition over time. In contrast, government controls can only be remedied by a massive cultural and political u-turn toward free market agriculture. Given the general confusion about and hostility to free markets today -- and given that large farms often support such controls as a means of suppressing their competition -- that u-turn will be no easy task.
Unfortunately, NOT an April Fool's Joke By Guy Adamson @ 2:47 PM
I'm always wary after April 1 of falling for a leftover April Fool's news story online. I'm sad to say this article, from the UK's Daily Express mentioned by UK nutrition author Barry Groves in his blog is NOT an April Fool's Day story.
SQUADRONS of “Food Police” are to start knocking on doors to lecture families on how to feed themselves properly.
One wonders how long before a U.S. "Food Czar" enacts just such a program here.
Local Farmers Corralled in Sting Operation By Guy Adamson @ 8:22 AM
SPRINGFIELD (FNS), April 1 -- The kids say they were only doing their part, but authorities say the nation’s food supply is a little bit safer now thanks to the work of these school-age members of the volunteer service group AgriCorps.
Six local farmers were cited for noncompliance with the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) thanks to help from area 4-H Club and FFA members, now part of the U.S. government’s AgriCorps food safety volunteer group.
“We really couldn’t have carried out this animal safety sting operation without the help of our youngest volunteers,” said Skip Butts, Sr. Executive Regional Troop Leader of the AgriCorps Volunteers.
According to authorities, the school-age AgriCorps volunteers asked the farmers to bring their best dairy calves and heifers to the county fairgrounds for a 4-H dairy judging competition. But the competition was just a ruse to see if the farmers were following NAIS protocol—they weren’t.
NAIS regulations require all farm animals to be tagged with an identification chip and any movement tracked in the national food safety database. None of the six farmers who showed up were in compliance and all were issued citations. In lieu of a court appearance, all six volunteered to join the AgriCorps Volunteer-Abroad program. None of the four men and two women cited were available for comment since they immediately left for the new AgriCorps farm training facility at Riker’s Island in New York, according several relatives, who asked not to be named.
“The best part is, we get to keep the animals!” said a delighted Lisa Smith, age 10, who begged her neighbor to bring his animals to the contest. “I’m glad they volunteered to go help people in other countries who don’t know how to grow food.”
The local Dairymen Corps, Inc., a public/private partnership organization, will operate the six farms until the local farmers return from overseas volunteer duty, said Butts. He added that additional supply of soy milk from the National Food Reserves will be allocated for the area to make up for any drop in cow’s milk production as a result of the transition.
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April Fools! Yes, this is a fictional story…for now.
