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POPSNow you know. It's no fun to think about, but it's better that we know and act upon this knowledge.
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POPSAntibiotic Resistance at Factory Farms More (way more at article website): Kellogg Schwab, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Water and Health, refers to a typical pig farm manure lagoon that he sampled. "There were 10 million E. coli per liter . Ten million. And you have a hundred million liters in some of those pits. So you can have trillions of bacteria present, of which 89 percent are resistant to drugs. That's a massive amount that in a rain event can contaminate the environment." One day, a Bloomberg School colleague down the hall from Silbergeld came back from a weekend on the Eastern Shore complaining about how disgusting she'd found having to drive behind a truck hauling chickens to a processing plant. They found that the air in the car and both surfaces showed increased levels of enterococci after they'd driven behind the chicken trucks. Graham had trapped the flies near poultry farms on the Eastern Shore and found resistant staph and enterococci on them.
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POPSHave You Heard "The Hum"? Various features of modern life have been blamed - gas pipes, power lines, mobile phone masts, wind farms, nuclear waste, even low-frequency submarine communications. The internet is abuzz with rumour and speculation. There are dark mutterings about secret military activity, alien contact and government cover-ups. The hum even featured in an episode of the sci-fi drama "The X-Files". Such conspiracy theories are understandable, but unhelpful, according to Dr David Baguley, who's head of audiology at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. He estimates that in about a third of cases there is some environmental source that can be tracked down and dealt with. "It may be a fridge or an industrial fan or a piece of heavy machinery at a nearby factory that is causing the disturbance and can be switched off," he says. Most of the time, however, there is no external noise that can be recorded or identified. You can hear an amplified recording of the hum, at the source.
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POPSPolitics of the Plate Prices paid to farmers per hundredweight (about 12 gallons) have fallen from nearly $20 a year ago to less than $11 in June. It costs a farmer about $18 to produce a hundredweight of milk. In Vermont that translates to a loss of $100 per cow per month. So far this year, 33 farms have ceased operation in this one tiny state. Meanwhile, the price you and I pay for milk in the grocery store has stayed about the same. Someone is clearly pocketing the difference. Perhaps that explains why profits at Dean Foods—the nation’s largest processor and shipper of dairy products, with more than 50 regional brands—have skyrocketed to more than double the same time last year. We are losing our heritage farms and in the process we are losing a large part of the character of what it means to be a self-sufficient and independent American. Corporate farming and govt subsidies are the biggest causes in this loss and NAFTA and the spread of GMO food products are the driving forces.
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POPSGonzo Gastronomy: How the Food Industry Has Made Bacon a Weapon of Mass Destruction
Rolling Stone paints a grim picture of what goes on inside a hog CAFO: "Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs …" Manufacturing Pandemics Factory farms are a hot spot for new infectious diseases. According to a former chief of the Centers for Disease Control's Special Pathogens Branch, "Intensive agricultural methods often mean that a single, genetically homogeneous species is raised in a limited area, creating a perfect target for emerging diseases, whic
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POPSPETA Wants Obama to Stop Killing Flies, But Won’t Take a Stand on Abortion Continued from article: “You know, really, the only reason we actually sent him the fly swatter, I’m sorry, the fly catcher, was that so many people had contacted us from the media after this happened and asked if we were going to have any response,” Byrnes said. “And so, we really just sent it just as something helpful that he could use if he wanted an alternative to doing it next time.”
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POPSFactory farms get a pass on reporting greenhouse gas emissions
A lot of us question why Americans should care about livestock poop, particularly in the context of greenhouse gas emissions. Animal manure and livestock produce methane and nitrous oxide, which are about 23 and 300 times respectively stronger than carbon dioxide. According to the EPA GHG Inventory, manure is the 5th largest source of methane and the 4th largest source of nitrous oxide in the U.S. It results in more than twice as many emissions as waste incineration and natural gas systems in the U.S. The way in which CAFOs pool their manure is a large part of the problem. When stored in pits and lagoons as is typical on factory farms, the manure breaks down anaerobically, in the absence of oxygen, which exacerbates methane emissions. The EPA has acknowledged that when manures are distributed on pastures as would be typical in a grass-fed animal system, methane production is limited. Thus, there are proven ways to reduce methane emissions in manure management.
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POPSUnited Egg Producers Recruits Kids In Its Sordid Campaign Against Animal Welfare
As outlandish as the cartoon is, it represents what the UEP has been trying to do for years: fight to preserve the status quo in its industry for the sake of the bottom line by deriding egg producers who choose not to use battery cages. A quick bit of background: Most egg-laying hens in the United States are confined in battery cages-barren wire cages so restrictive, the animals can't even spread their wings. Unable to nest, dust bathe, or perch, each bird has less space than a sheet of letter-sized paper on which to live for a year before she's slaughtered. It's hard to imagine a more miserable existence. In cage-free egg farms, while birds typically don't go outside (rendering the above cartoon even more absurd), they're at least able to walk around, lay their eggs in nests, and perch. In addition to cage-free birds typically not having outdoor access, even free-range birds are able to go inside barns when they want.
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POPSVilsack defends CAFOs at congressional hearing Yes, we do want to go down that road. CAFOs are being heavily subsidized by USDA and the concentrated pollution and runoff from these factory farms are well documented as causing health hazards. Also, these places are ticking time bombs of drug-resistant bacteria that is being passed on to us the consumer. Bon appetite.
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POPSHog Giant Smithfield Transforms Eastern Europe The Virginia-based pork giant has squashed small-scale hog farming in Romania and Poland, just as it did in the United States in the 1990s. Smithfield says pork prices dropped by about one-fifth, saving consumers about $29 per year. While this is good news for us, farmers are run out of business forced to seek employment elsewhere and the new Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are creating vast open disease ridden cesspools. Unbearable stenches, and wrecked communities. They used high-level cronyism to move through the maze of the Romanian political system. This is a prime example of the poisonous downside of corporate globalization.
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POPSBlame Poverty, Not Pork, for the Swine Flu Rather than supporting economic development in Mexico as means of improving public-health conditions, the greens are content to sit back and exploit the swine flu crisis as another means for advancing their anti-people, anti-business and, yes, anti-environment social and political agenda. Remember, it’s the wealthiest nations that have the cleanest environments. So opposing economic development is essentially a vote for foul air and fetid water.
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POPSSwine-flu, 5 more cases This is a bit worrying given that antibiotic resistance is high in animal diseases, because of the routine use of antibiotics in factory farms. Eat free range !!
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POPSUnsustainable Agriculture Heads for a Collapse While at the same time, the pressure to produce has increased -- India has trebled its chicken consumption. The chickens are raised in factory farms, wasting 3 times the protein and calories. As the rich consume more meat, prices go up and the poor become more malnourished. (The global scenario is repeated within the country).
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POPSThe Truth About Factory Farms " Civil Eats * About * Contact * RSS * * Business and Technology * Eating Culture * Energy Policy * Environment * Food Access * Food Policy * Grow Your Own * Health * In the Kitchen * Life on the Farm * Re-Localize * Take Action « Solar Panels: Just Another Crop? Sweet Sweetback’s Salad with Roasted Beet Vinaigrette » Messy Messages: When the Truth Is Labeled a Smear Campaign * Food Policy April 14th, 2009 By Paul Shapiro A recent Mercy for Animals (MFA) investigation at New England’s largest egg producer revealed a list of cruelties few people would ever want to witness. Dead hens left to rot in cages with live hens. Birds, wildly flapping, kicked like footballs into manure pits. Cages upon cages of birds crammed so tight they can’t even spread their wings. The list of horrors goes on. You’d think this would be the kind of obvious animal abuse few people would hesitate to conde
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POPSWhat Are They Really Afraid Of? Oppressive new rules are being imposed on small-scale producers in the name of food security. The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 contains language would make home food preservation illegal and requires farmers who sell direct to consumers via farmers markets, market gardens, or other community supported agriculture (CSA) endeavors to get permission from a Government inspector The bill also requires consumers who buy from local producers to fill out a form with their name, social security number, and list how they plan to store the produce and when and how they will consume it. If the Government is so set on protecting what they admit is a vulnerable food supply, why are they allowing unrestricted, undocumented flow of illegals across our southern border knowing they will find employment in the agriculture industry? And, why is the Government focused on small family farms? Why would family farmers be of any concern to the Government?
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POPSFlower turns animal waste into fuel continues: Duckweed, they discovered, has an appetite for animal waste, quickly converting it to leafy starch that can then be converted into ethanol. The current source for most U.S. ethanol is industrial-scale corn farming, which requires large amounts of toxic pesticides and dead zone-feeding, fuel-intensive fertilizers. When the costs are added up, corn-based ethanol may prove little cleaner than gasoline. Duckweed could help solve both problems at once. "We did small-scale tests in the laboratory to convert duckweed starch to ethanol using the same technologies as the fuel industry currently uses in corn," said Cheng. "With the same technology, we can easily convert it."
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POPSJapanese Raccons found with Bird Flu What this shows is that the h5n1 virus is present in many different species. It breaks out in a form that is deadly to both animals and people when the host animal is gathered together in large numbers. When chickens, ducks, or geese are factory farmed (thousands raised at same time and housed for egg laying or held for delivery to live markets), the natural system "thinks" the species's population is too large and is exhibitig stress that calls for a "system" response to bring the flock back into balance. The system response to re-create balance is influenza which kills weaker or stressed birds and reestablishes balance. Repeated human intervention causes greater system responses until it may reach pandemic levels.
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POPSWhy What's For Dinner May Be About to Change Obama's 2010 federal budget reflect this, and sets aside a $1 billion annual increase for improving child nutrition in order to meet the President's goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015. Notably, the budget also includes language that -- according to the Administration -- "reflects the President's commitment to supporting independent producers... and investing in the full diversity of agricultural production, including organic farming and local food systems." The budget also increases funding for the National Organic Program, and removes direct payment subsidies for farms that pull in over $500,000 in revenue per year. This reduction in subsidies represents an important shift away from a commodities-based agriculture system where certain crops (namely corn and soy) permeate our food supply and serve as the primary ingredient in everything we eat, from processed snack foods to meat and cheese. As the Administration cuts back on these subsidies and promotes fruits and vegetables
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