My wife is pregnant, and the only over the counter pain medication approved for use in pregnant women is Acetaminophen.
Just because a bunch of idiots are abusing the medications doesn't mean that the rest of us who are not morons should be denied its use. Most of the medications they've listed are prescription drugs that should only be used while under a physicians order. If they need to change the prescribig rules that's fine, but taking the drugs away completely is akin to cutting off your nose to spite your face.
"According to the US National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, scientists have discovered a remarkable similarity between the genetic faults behind both schizophrenia and manic depression in a breakthrough that is expected to open the way to new treatments for two of the most common mental illnesses, affecting millions of people. Previously schizophrenia and depression were assumed to be two separate conditions, but the new research shows for the first time that both have a common genetic basis that leads people to develop one or the other of the two illnesses."
I havn't read the article, so I don't know which one is actually being connected to schizophrenia but I do know that Manic Depression is very different disease from Depression symptomatically.
Manic depressives have mood swings that include a manic phase in which much of their risk assessment skills go away and they engage in reckless and frequently life threatening behavior. These are usually followed by depressive phases that may be similar to that experienced by a Depressive person. Antidepressants have been shown to be counter productive in Manic Depressives because of the unfortunate interaction between the medication and the Manic phase.
Besides, I was under the impression that there has always been a belief that manic depression and schizophrenia were related somehow. At least that's what my mother (who works as a psychiatric nurse) told me.
There were a lot less humans to feed for hundreds of thousands of years, and in fact there were many times that these farms couldn't feed everyone. That's the reason that the US devoted so much research to understanding nutrition and animal/plant production.
Unless you can actually back up that 99.999% claim with a study published by a group that isn't obviously biased, it is simply made up BS, which makes you are a fucking Liar!
You don't understand the first thing about virology or immunology and should refrain from speaking past your knowledge base. Antibiotics are EXPENSIVE and are only used routinely in the swine industry for weanling diets. I've outlined why they are appropriate in weanling diets in other posts and am getting tired of repeating myself so just check these posts to see why you are wrong.
Pig in US herds are the Healthiest pigs that have ever existed in the US outside of research pigs fed in total sterility to investigate the effect of enteral microbiota on digestion and metabolism. In fact, that is a big part of the reason why pigs crash so hard when they do get sick. We try to get pigs to go their whole life without getting sick once. Can you imagine successfully growing a human from birth to say 14 without ever getting sick? The fact that we can often get an entire barn of pigs from weaning to market only having to feed antibiotics in sub-therapeutic doses once and without having to feed therapeutic doses at all is a testament to how well we manage them.
Please, you DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT so please STOP TALKING. Take some classes at your local land grant university, visit a modern swine farm, ask questions of those involved directly in producing your food, and then maybe you'll be qualified to make affirmative statements as to what agriculture is really like.
Ok FUDster, lets take these one at a time, but I want to point out first that.
A. I work in animal agriculture.
B. I have been a member of the Animal Science community for 11 years now, and have been working as an Animal Scientist for 7 of those years. C. I have an Associates, Bachelors, & Masters degree in Animal Science and am a little over a year away from receiving a PhD in the same field. D. All of my graduate work has been focused on the topic of animal nutrition with a focus on increasing the digestibility of animal feed and minimization of animal waste. E. In the course of my research I've done extensive work with swine of all ages, broiler chickens, ducks, turkeys, and a little with laying chickens.
I know what industry is like because I work in it. Unless I'm mistaken, you've most likely never worked on a large operation and have no Fucking Clue what you are actually talking about. You are simply regurgitating talking points originally written by vegetarian/vegan activist groups such as HSUS, PETA, ALF, ELF or the Organic Foods movement which is no more honest about modern agriculture than the rest. Now, as to your individual points:
Your last statement above in particular is just plain wrong. "Large operations" generally means "factory farms [wikipedia.org]," which are indeed less safe, sustainable, and healthy. Animals in these farms are kept in extremely close quarters, enabling the rapid spread of disease, and must be pumped full of antibiotics and sprayed with pesticides to keep them "healthy." Thinking that the meat from those animals is unaffected by such living conditions is willfully ignorant.
Pigs, chickens and most livestock species are Social animals. They Like and enjoy physical contact with each other. Extensive work has been done to determine the exact square footage that a pig needs in a pen in order to not feel cramped, but still not be wasting space. That you haven't read those papers is fine. The Farmer, Extension specialists, and I have, so you don't need to. How about you let us do our job without your armchair quarterbacking.
Your "Rapid Spread of Disease" has more to do with our pigs being the healthiest they've ever been, than being borderline sick all of the time as you imply. Animals that have had little by the way of immune challenges are ill equipped to actually handle a disease challenge when it does happen. That's the whole theory behind vaccinations, controlled immune challenge. Unfortunately, vaccines are expensive to develop and don't usually offer a broad spectrum of protection (one E. coli vaccine will not protect against more than a handful of E. coli strains, and no protection against other bacterial. The alternative is to keep the animals as healthy as possible by keeping then Naive to most pathogens their entire life.
To achieve this goal most swine farms now operate on a rotational strategy referred to as "All in, all out". This consists of moving groups of pigs from one facility to another in groups. All pigs of a given farrowing are weaned together, moved to the nursery together, moved to the growing barns together, moved to the Finishing barns together, and Transported to the Processing plant together. At each step along the way, the recently vacated facilities are power washed and sterilized and then left to dry out for up to 2 weeks in order to kill off any of the bugs in the environment before the new pigs move into the space. This avoids the stress of mixing, the transfer of infections from the former residents to the new residents, and the transfer of diseases from the younger pigs to the older pigs (as could happen in the old style "continuous Flow Barns"). The only age that routinely receives antibiotics on the farm I work for is the weanling barn, and thats because of how stressful weaning is. The stress from weaning is unavoidable, and lowers the pigs natural defenses (plus there is a week or two b
I believe that civilizedINTENSITY beat me to the punch, but I'll answer the rest of the post as well:
You are entitle to the OPPORTUNITY to PURSUE your fortune, but if you cannot hack it for what ever reason, well then tough shit. Companies go out of business all of the time. My father started a carpentry business, he's an excellent finish carpenter, but a horrible business man and ran the company into the ground, taking my mothers A+ credit rating with it. No one cried for us because we'd tried and failed and I fail to see why it should be different for unprofitable farming operations as opposed to unprofitable home remodeling operations.
Where did you get that 94% of farms are small farms number from. I would really like to know. Although it's not about the percentage of farms that are in a given size, but the percentage of the total US meat supply that comes from each farm. If I'm marketed 700,000 hogs annually, I'm not going to really care about the competition provided by a farm that only markets 700 hogs/year. besides, driving the competition out of business in agriculture doesn't reap the same benefits as it does in other industries because when a small operator goes out of business he usually sells to a friend or someone trying to get into the business, thus the level of competition doesn't really change much in the low end of the production scale.
By knowing exactly which farm the sick animal came from we can know exactly which other animals it came into contact with along its entire life. It prevents us from having to kill a lot of cows that may have come into contact with the sick cow, but ultimately didn't. When the government does a mandatory depopulation and incineration of a herd, they don't buy the animals at market price. The producers involved get some money, but it's not enough to prevent them from having to take a loss on those animals. It can also help to prevent a cow from slipping through the cracks. The only cases of BSE in the US have been as a result of cows that were born and originally raised in Canada. In many cases the ultimate owner had no way of knowing that the cows originally came from Canada and had been exposed to BSE. This kind of mandatory tracking (including tagging of all animals when they enter the country) would have made it a trivial matter to determine if any of their animals were at risk and remove them from the rest of the herd.
We all complained back during the E. coli in the produce scare that it took too long to figure out which produce was tainted and how it happened so that we could remove the tainted food from shelves. This kind of system will do a lot to help with that when it happens again to meat. No matter what our precautions, someone will screw up somewhere and we'll need to do another meat recall and the less time it takes to identify the tainted meat and destroy it, the less people will likely get sick and potentially die.
5 years ago I would have said that the ROI for this system made it untenable (this has been under discussion at least that long), but prices for the technology have dropped to the point where I believe it will not be as onerous as they are claiming.
I fail to see why a small operation should be allowed to opt out of health and safety regulations that everyone else is required to obey. You are apparently one of those (in my option misguided) people that confuse the freshness of locally grown food with being healthier & safer. It's ok, my mother is as well.
I don't know how things are run in Australia, but I've worked at small dairy farms in Massachusetts and Connecticut (Largest farm milked 110 cows at a time and the smallest milked ~25), and I can assure you that all sorts of things slipped by because there was not enough time in the day, or employees, or money to employ extra employees to take care of everything. I'm not knocking those farms, they did the best they could and I think did an adequate job. Even in 25-110 cow operations the larger farms had much more time to devote to managing their animals optimally. I now work at a University in the midwest that milks several hundred cows a day and the management of the animals is top notch despite the facilities being of an older less efficient design than most larger scale operations.
Smaller operators have more to do and less resources with which to do it. That means they are more likely to cut corners out of necessity. A good example is one of the farms I worked for in CT. They milked ~35-40 cows at a time and turned them out to pasture in between milkings, ideal right? This would fit into the idealized picture that we all have of the rural dairy farm. However, 6 out of 7 days each week the cows would be walked to pasture on the other side of a stream that ran through the farm. They would walk into the water and then stop to cool off, defecating almost to a cow (35-40 milking cows and 10-20 dry cows/heifers), directly in the water before moving on across to the far bank and the fresh pasture. You can get away with that on a small farm because regulators aren't looking at the little guys, and if their is a complaint about the fecal coliform counts in the local water supply, they'll focus on the bigger farm just down the road.
Large farms that are incorporated cannot be run like other large corporations. They exist in a market that is frequently unprofitable for everyone, through no fault of their own. Take hogs for example. The recent uproar over the unfortunately named "Swine Flu" has resulted in decreased demand for pork in the US (and probably much of the world). This has led to a decrease in the amount being paid for hogs at the processing plant, to a point where almost no one is making money off of their pigs. They are focusing on trying to lose as little money as possible while waiting for pork prices to rebound into a range that is once again profitable. But remember, if a pig hits market weight you have to send him for processing, you don't have the luxury of holding onto him and waiting because there are more sows farrowing, more piglets weaning, more pigs growing, and more pigs getting ready to enter the finishing barn that aren't going to stop eating and growing just because you want them to. In these situations they have to minimize losses while still preparing for the next profitable period. Short term profiteering of the sort large corporations are famous for is not feasible, because the fallout of that short sighted business plan will be insolvency in the future. Unlike the auto industry, no one comes in to bail out struggling dairy or swine farms. Instead they declare bankruptcy and then sell the land, animals and everything else to their neighbor. Eventually that neighbor that keeps buying the less competitive becomes a large enough farm that a large portion of the US no longer trusts him and wants him to fail in favor of his old neighbors that couldn't compete effectively. How on earth does that make sense.
Free range eggs probably taste better to you for one of 2 reasons. It's either all in your head, or the fact that the free range chickens get to eat a lot more bugs and dead chicken which actually changed the flavor of the eggs. Fre
Ok, where to start. Before addressing individual points. Anyone that uses words like "Poisonous Air" and "Super-incubators for viruses" is spreading FUD. No two ways about it. They have a political agenda, whether they admit it or not, and are obviously biased. The fact that you either were unwilling, unable to see that bias is rather frightening, but not uncommon. Now for your individual points.
Nutritionists can tell you (in fact one is right now) that the feeding of animal byproducts to other animals is routine. Dog food contains meat, as does chicken, and the meat in question is not the top cuts I can assure you. The cattle got BSE from eating rendered sheep byproducts, not other cattle. Sheep have a prion disease know as Scrapie, which in the >200 years that we've known about it has never before jumped from one species to another. In fact, disease transmission by protein, as opposed to bacteria, virus, or fungi was only discovered with the isolation of the prion protein involved in both diseases. This discovery was as almost as revolutionary as germ theory itself. You cannot reasonably expect people to predict that which has never happened before will suddenly happen.
There is no "Flu epidemic" in north america. The flu occasionally affects some herds, but in the 7 years I've been working where I have, we've only seen the flu once. It was not the "Swine Flu" that the media was losing their mind about either, it was H5N4 IIRC. AFAIK, there hasn't been a single case of the so called "Swine Flu" (ie H1N1) in any pigs north of the US, Mexican border. The disease was transmitted out of Mexico by Human-to-human contact. Honestly, how many people do you really believe bring their pigs with them when they travel to Europe, Australia and Asia when leaving Mexico?
Also, if barns were as bad as your obviously biased reference states, then the first farmer to turn on the god damn FAN would seen incredible improvements in health and production and put the rest of the industry out of business nearly over night. Pigs are mammals, just like us. If they cannot breathe or are surrounded by toxins all the time, then they won't grow. They'll end up dying before they get to market, and no one will make any money. Why people such as yourself are willing to believe that animals will somehow grow in conditions that are toxic to them is beyond me. Do you not understand basic fucking biology? If you'd ever have taken a swine management class (as I have) you'd know just how much time is devoted to teach how to calculate the necessary air exchange rates based on season, flooring style, square feet/pig and building style. We had a whole exam on that.
And before you go trotting out the old "Antibiotics" meme, stop right there. The only place I've seen antibiotics fed to pigs on a routine basis is in the weaning barn. weaning is very stressful for pigs, they are moving from a mostly sterile, liquid diet with highly digestible proteins and energy derived primarily from lipids to a diet that is no more sterile than the grass in your back yard, solid, containing a fair amount of indigestible proteins, and with energy derived primarily from carbohydrates. This causes the animal to switch both his internal digestive mechanisms, and deal with a sudden switch in the enteral bacteria colonizing the small and large intestine. All the antibiotics do is knock down the bad bugs long enough for him to make the transition smoothly and then are removed from the diet. Antibiotics are expensive and a small, sub-therapeutic does in the weanling diets will often prevent the need to use much larger therapeutic doses for a much longer period of time if the E. coli gets away from them and causes an outbreak of scours (diarrhea). Prior to the use of antibiotics in weanling diets, losses at this point were much higher than they are now, in fact we've never had higher weaning percentages before.
The USDA has NEVER labeled pigs that eat pigs as safe. The reason is Trichin
There is no large farm in the country that is analogous to Apple Computers, never mind those you list. There are more Large farms in most rural counties than there are large media conglomerates, Computer OS manufacturers, or cell phone companies. Large is relative, and your sense of scale is way off.
There are plenty of diseases that we take radical efforts to control. Hoof and Mouth is a good example. Mandatory sale of all potentially infected animals to the government (at a loss of course), euthanasia, and incineration of the carcasses in the event of an outbreak. Unfortunately, the only vaccine that provides any protection also has a low incidence of actually causing the damn disease itself. This would make it easier to prevent contaminated cows from going un-noticed or from needing to destroy cows that didn't actually come in contacted with the sick ones.
You are completely ignorant of agriculture and should just shut the fuck up. As someone that has worked in agriculture for almost a decade now, I can assure you that you have no idea what you are talking about.
Smaller operations are more likely to cut corners when it comes to environmental and animal health regulations because the regulators don't even bother with them in many cases (I speak from experience). Large operators have all sorts of federal, state, and in many cases county regulations as to animal care and environmental stewardship that they need to satisfy or else they'll be shut down. They supply a higher plane of nutrition, and better health care becuase they can afford to. They can employ people who's whole job is making sure that the animals diet is as well balanced as possible (my current job), and others who's whole job is to make sure that all the animals are as healthy as possible, and yet another person who's entire job is dealing with the paperwork and regulations and making sure they are on the right side of the law. Small operations have one person that is trying to fill multiple positions and logically cannot do all those jobs as well as dedicated specialists.
Smaller is more likely to mean, cut corners, missed signs of illness, poorer plane of nutrition, and greater environmental impact per animal. No one likes to hear it becuase we like the idea of the big red barn in the background and farmer Joe taking care of everything himself, but it is neither profitable or sustainable to produce animals that way.
Left to their own devices, food producers will quite happily sell us sawdust and animal faeces to eat, feed dead cows to other cows, and buy, sell and slaughter sick, dying and dead animals that have been hauled across continents.
Ok, where to start! There are a handful of bad apples in any bushel, and there are those in the animal industry that would willingly take advantage of people for a profit, but that does not make all members of the industry complicit. The vast majority of the livestock producers are honorable, upstanding people that value their animals, the environment, and the health of their customers. However, they are also in a business that does not really pay them what their time and effort is worth. They depend upon the suggestions of Land Grant research institutions and the conclusions of the USDA and FDA when deciding which practices to implement on their farms to try and stay profitable while maintaining the health of their cows. Farmers were told that feeding rendered meat to cattle in small quantities was safe, and saved them money. It even was until the scrapie prion from sheep made the jump to cattle and created BSE. Now that we are aware we all recognized the need to avoid feeding meat to cattle, but the lack of forsight is not the fault of the farmers who had no way of knowing what they were doing was going to be unsafe.
Swine Flu's resistance to medication is the direct result of feeding battery farmed pigs anti-biotics instead of reducing pig density.
AS to "Swine Flu" it has nothing to do with antibiotic use in farms. Antibiotics are used against bacteria. the Flu is a Virus. Consequently, you are full of shit. Do a little research before spouting a bunch of shit on a topic that you are obviously uneducated about. Ars technica did a series of write ups on the disease when it first became pandemic (which they point out sounds scarier than it actually is).
All for a few pennies extra.
Often a few pennies make the difference between losing money on every cow and making money on every cow. We don't pay farmers what their time is worth, which forces them to go large scale in order to remain profitable (on average), unless they want to toss out 100years of technological advances and try to grow for the "organic" market, which is the least "sustainable" way to produce anything.
Since ranchers in the situation you outline have to round up their new calves periodically anyway, they will just tag the animals when they leave the farm. AFAIK, these regulations will not require cattle to be taged the day they are born, but when they are to be transported. If you want to tag all your cows at birth becuase you run an intensive operation that's fine, but if you run more of a range operation where you let them fend for themselves and only round them up a couple of times a year to go to market, then just tag them when they leave. That way if one of them turns up with Hoof and Mouth, they know which animals they've contacted and can warn you that some of your land may be a reservior.
Ok, no one is entitled to an ability to raise cattle for sale to the public profitably. If they can't turn a profit under the new regulations, then they'll have to either supplement their income, as many small farms already do, or they'll fold, as many more have over the years. Their is no inherent value to society in the continued existence of unsafe farms just because they are smaller.
Besides, the point of these tags is not to prevent just BSE, but to minimize the potential spread of all sorts of infection between cattle as well as between cattle and humans. One of the more problematic infections that crops up periodically is Hoof and Mouth, which we have here in the US and can be transfered between cattle, swine, and several other livestock species. It is so dangerous that the only lab in the US allowed to do research into it is an island off the east coast of the US that has no livestock other than those brought there for research, and they will never leave the island (all will be euthanized and incinerated). Any farm with a confirmed case of Hoof and mouth is immediately quaranteened and depopulated with the Government buying all of the animals at well below market value.
Also, large ranchers don't really want this instituted either. No one wants to increase the overhead costs associated with an industry that is periodically unprofitable no matter what they do. However, they do recognize that it is inevitable so they are cooperating in the drafting of the relevent guidelines so that they can keep the regulators from making stupid decisions.
You can keep your tin hat on, and believe that "Big Farms" are trying to kill the little guy, but just be aware that your parinoia doesn't make sense. The little farms are not really competition, what is 10 head compared to 1,000 head really?
I understand what you are trying to say but you are misunderstanding the actual situation. The time and cost/animal to tag will be fairly uniform. Yeah the large operation may be able to buy tags for less/tag but the difference will be relatively minor. Especially since the smaller operations are already paying more for just about all of the input costs per animal.
Their point is only valid if you truely believe that there is some sort of benefit to society in their running a less efficient operation. Large operations have the benefits of scale, but what benefits do we get from the smaller operations? They can get away with avoiding a lot of the environmental and safety regulations that exist because the governement regulates the large operators more aggresively. Contrary to popular opinion, they are not safer, more sustainable, or healthier.
I don't believe that any of these people are greedy or lazy, instead I tend to think of them as being less ambitious or fortunate. They either haven't tried to expand to take advantage of greater economies of scale, or have been unable to. Either way, that doesn't remove the net benefit to society and their industry if this kind of animal tagging becomes routine, which IMO outweigh their desire to avoid compliance. I say this as a member of the agriculture industry, although admitedly not a farmer myself.
You hit the nail on the head with your last sentence.
In all likely hood they are angling for an exemption.
Small operations have all sorts of exceptions to all sorts of regulations. I've outlined some of them in earlier replys to this topic, but it all comes down to ROI for the regulatory agencies. Smaller operations can get away with a larger environmental impact, or lower quality record keeping, or other practices that could make their product potentially (although probably not) more dangerous by some measures, simply because it's too much work to regulate everyone. They want another exception so that they can either have a competetive advantage, or to prevent being squeezed out due to a lack of scale. I don't blame them, I would try if I were in their shoes, but that doesn't make it right to let them have those exceptions.
Besides, people that buy niche market meat already expect to pay more than they would in the grocery store, just build the price of the RFID scanners, tags, and extra time into the price like the large operations will be doing.
Of course, I'm just as much of a hypocrite, because I'm more than willing to take the cost savings on assembly-line food (even though sustainable food definitely does taste a lot better and also is healthier).
You seem to be operating under the same false assumption as a lot of people, that somehow Smaller = Sustainable.
If you look at larger farms, the reason that they are more profitable is because they are using less resources per unit of meat produced. Less feed per # of meat or milk means less fossil fuels used planting, fertilizing, harvesting, transporting, and mixing the feed. In the case of dairy cattle, it means less cows needed to produce the same volume of milk. Large farms are more profitable becuase they are more sustainable. Feed, which makes up >60% of the total cost of production, is expensive and the less of it you use the more money you make (or in many cases the less money you lose depending on the price being paid at the slaughter house).
Large farms are also held to a higher standard of environmental stewardship. All federal, state, and county regulations have lower cut off limits below which they require less or no documentation for. "Small independant ranchers" would fall into this category. They can run their cows down to a field that has a stream or river running through it and let them defecate and urinate in the water to their hearts content while taking a cooling bath in August (I worked on a dairy farm back in CT where the cows spent the hottest days if the year doing exactly that, and even on cooler days they had to walk across the creek to get to most of the pasture). Large farms are require to keep animals a certain distance away from open water sources and ensure that none of the stored manure ends up contaminating local waters because when the water is tested, they will be the first suspect if it has unacceptably high fecal coliform counts.
My guess is what you are confusing for the taste of sustainability, is actually the taste of "Freshness." The "Factory Farm" is much more an example of misdirection than the "Family Farm." Most large farms are owned by a single family, that run the farm with the help of empolyees. They grew in order to get the economies of scale. The idea of "Factory Farms" was created out of the imagination of vegitarian/vegan activism groups such as HSUS, PETA, ALF, etc. becuase people have this built in prejudice against the combination of "Factories" and "Animals" because factories are thought of as being hard, insensitive, and dangerous.
In fact, Large farms are more sustainable on average than small farms due to the economies of scale that come with being a larger operation. Small farms get away with out being regulated because they would be too much work to keep track of. They can pollute to a much greater extent with impunity simply because no one is watching. Large operations OTOH have to file Federal, State, and County paperwork verifying that they are running their business in accordance with envirnomental regulations on all 3 levels.
I agree that this will disproportionately effect small farmers, and that sucks for them. However, these kinds of costs that are proportionately lower on larger farms is the reason that most meat is produced on large farms (not becuase those that run large farms don't care about their animals as far too many idiots believe). Economic forces have cause all animal production industries to move from lots of small farms with only a handful of large operations to mostly large operations with small farms being the exception. As with any industry, if you cannot compete profitably you will be squeezed out.
Since the USDA is also subsidizing corn, soy, wheat, oats, etc. I don't think it matters that you don't eat one class of food subsidized by the USDA. Vegetarians might not like that the animal meat industry is getting handouts from the USDA, but I'm not all that excited about the USDA making Soy cheaper for Tofu manufacturers so it all comes out in the wash.
That would have deserved a "Funny" not an "Insightful".
If it had been modded thus, I wouldn't have had a problem with it, because while I disagree (I love KFC's chicken), humor is is the eye of the beholder and I can understand the joke. Whether the original post was intended to be funny or insightful is indeterminable without the OP defending his post. However, I was not railing against the post but the perception that the post was "Insightful"
Unless you can tell me what they wanted, I can't tell you whether or not it was actually safe. If it wasn't safe, then you should have reported them to the USDA. As long as they are within the guidelines of the USDA's requirements, then I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. However, if you have evidence that they are stepping out side of those requirements and asking retailers to lie about it, then you are doing a disservice to all Americans by not blowing the whistle.
Until you can actually stand up and say what they wanted, and then offer verification I have no reason to believe you over the USDA inspectors.
I went to HS with a girl who's older brother was the first ever case of a genetic disorder.
I can't remember their family name but it was named after her older brother, and she had it too. AFAIK, she and her brother are the only 2 documented cases of the disorder. They both had severe scoliosis, a lot of pain, some immune system disorders, and their abdomens were very short when compaired to the rest of their bodies (due to the scoliosis of the spine I assume). Having a disease named after their family was definitely not any sort of consolation either. She graduated first in her class, so it probably won't interfere with the rest of her life. She'll probably just have to explain about it to everyone she meets, and have some medical complications as she gets older and decides whether or not to have kids.
Sorry it took a while to track down a reference. It's from Elanco (the current manufacturer of Posilac), but the relevant claims were verified by the USDA prior to approving Posliac for use in diary cattle.
The fact that tests have been done where rBST and purified 'normal' BST have been injected into human tissue and proved to be too dissimilar to interact with the receptors for human sotmatotropin seems not to faze anyone for some reason.
I've never heard that before, which is a good reason why that hasn't fazed me. If it's true that it doesn't interact with our bodies, than that resolves my concern. It'll take more than a slashdot post to convince me, but I'll keep an eye out. I'm just cautious around hormones, since my father worked with pharmaceutical hormones a lot, and I learned they can be fairly "general" even when using another species' hormones, but it's ultimately all about the chemistry that I don't know and might mean nothing happens.
Caring about the noise from a local wind farm, and still desiring to utilize the wind for electricity generation are not mutually exclusive view points.
I can agree that we need to make changes in the way we generate electricity, and even agree with you as to the urgency of the matter, but that doesn't mean we can't put a little thought into the execution of those changes. I can want a wind farm, I can even want it in my home town, without needlessly accepting that it'll have to be loud and obnoxious. Maybe there is a better way to lay out the towers so that they don't make as much noise. Maybe there are things that can be done at the perimeter of the farm to disrupt the sound such as plating bushes or small trees (that don't grow large enough to obstruct the all important wind patters that power the towers).
Complaining that towers have negatives along side their obvious positives is not the same thing as not wanting the towers to be installed at all. However, claiming that any complaint about wind farms means you are against their existence at all is incredibly foolish and ignorant, and disregarding legitimate complaints because of your desire to remain ignorant is definitely short sighted.
If it comes down to there being no alternatives that lessen the localized negative impacts of wind farm installation, then I agree that listening to those who are complaining will get us nowhere. But that has yet to be proved. Most modern wind farms are very recent additions to the landscape. I find it hard to believe that we came up with the best possible guidelines for their installation on our first couple of tries. AFAIK, no one even considered the possibility that the noise from the wind farms would cause the neighbors to complain. In large part because wind farms are traditionally built in the middle of nowhere. Now that they are putting wind farms closer to populated area, this concern needs to be address. We don't need to stop all wind farm installation until after we verify that there is nothing we can do about the noise in advance, but we should at least make sure that we are considering the noise problem when in the design phase of wind farm construction.
So ultimately your original post is not relevant to the greater discussion because their concerns are valid and can probably be addressed (whether anything can actually be done about it is still unknown) without slowing the pace of wind farm installation.
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My wife is pregnant, and the only over the counter pain medication approved for use in pregnant women is Acetaminophen.
Just because a bunch of idiots are abusing the medications doesn't mean that the rest of us who are not morons should be denied its use. Most of the medications they've listed are prescription drugs that should only be used while under a physicians order. If they need to change the prescribig rules that's fine, but taking the drugs away completely is akin to cutting off your nose to spite your face.
"According to the US National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, scientists have discovered a remarkable similarity between the genetic faults behind both schizophrenia and manic depression in a breakthrough that is expected to open the way to new treatments for two of the most common mental illnesses, affecting millions of people. Previously schizophrenia and depression were assumed to be two separate conditions, but the new research shows for the first time that both have a common genetic basis that leads people to develop one or the other of the two illnesses."
I havn't read the article, so I don't know which one is actually being connected to schizophrenia but I do know that Manic Depression is very different disease from Depression symptomatically.
Manic depressives have mood swings that include a manic phase in which much of their risk assessment skills go away and they engage in reckless and frequently life threatening behavior. These are usually followed by depressive phases that may be similar to that experienced by a Depressive person. Antidepressants have been shown to be counter productive in Manic Depressives because of the unfortunate interaction between the medication and the Manic phase.
Besides, I was under the impression that there has always been a belief that manic depression and schizophrenia were related somehow. At least that's what my mother (who works as a psychiatric nurse) told me.
There were a lot less humans to feed for hundreds of thousands of years, and in fact there were many times that these farms couldn't feed everyone. That's the reason that the US devoted so much research to understanding nutrition and animal/plant production.
Unless you can actually back up that 99.999% claim with a study published by a group that isn't obviously biased, it is simply made up BS, which makes you are a fucking Liar!
You don't understand the first thing about virology or immunology and should refrain from speaking past your knowledge base. Antibiotics are EXPENSIVE and are only used routinely in the swine industry for weanling diets. I've outlined why they are appropriate in weanling diets in other posts and am getting tired of repeating myself so just check these posts to see why you are wrong.
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Pig in US herds are the Healthiest pigs that have ever existed in the US outside of research pigs fed in total sterility to investigate the effect of enteral microbiota on digestion and metabolism. In fact, that is a big part of the reason why pigs crash so hard when they do get sick. We try to get pigs to go their whole life without getting sick once. Can you imagine successfully growing a human from birth to say 14 without ever getting sick? The fact that we can often get an entire barn of pigs from weaning to market only having to feed antibiotics in sub-therapeutic doses once and without having to feed therapeutic doses at all is a testament to how well we manage them.
Please, you DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT so please STOP TALKING. Take some classes at your local land grant university, visit a modern swine farm, ask questions of those involved directly in producing your food, and then maybe you'll be qualified to make affirmative statements as to what agriculture is really like.
I know what industry is like because I work in it. Unless I'm mistaken, you've most likely never worked on a large operation and have no Fucking Clue what you are actually talking about. You are simply regurgitating talking points originally written by vegetarian/vegan activist groups such as HSUS, PETA, ALF, ELF or the Organic Foods movement which is no more honest about modern agriculture than the rest. Now, as to your individual points:
Your last statement above in particular is just plain wrong. "Large operations" generally means "factory farms [wikipedia.org]," which are indeed less safe, sustainable, and healthy. Animals in these farms are kept in extremely close quarters, enabling the rapid spread of disease, and must be pumped full of antibiotics and sprayed with pesticides to keep them "healthy." Thinking that the meat from those animals is unaffected by such living conditions is willfully ignorant.
Pigs, chickens and most livestock species are Social animals. They Like and enjoy physical contact with each other. Extensive work has been done to determine the exact square footage that a pig needs in a pen in order to not feel cramped, but still not be wasting space. That you haven't read those papers is fine. The Farmer, Extension specialists, and I have, so you don't need to. How about you let us do our job without your armchair quarterbacking.
Your "Rapid Spread of Disease" has more to do with our pigs being the healthiest they've ever been, than being borderline sick all of the time as you imply. Animals that have had little by the way of immune challenges are ill equipped to actually handle a disease challenge when it does happen. That's the whole theory behind vaccinations, controlled immune challenge. Unfortunately, vaccines are expensive to develop and don't usually offer a broad spectrum of protection (one E. coli vaccine will not protect against more than a handful of E. coli strains, and no protection against other bacterial. The alternative is to keep the animals as healthy as possible by keeping then Naive to most pathogens their entire life.
To achieve this goal most swine farms now operate on a rotational strategy referred to as "All in, all out". This consists of moving groups of pigs from one facility to another in groups. All pigs of a given farrowing are weaned together, moved to the nursery together, moved to the growing barns together, moved to the Finishing barns together, and Transported to the Processing plant together. At each step along the way, the recently vacated facilities are power washed and sterilized and then left to dry out for up to 2 weeks in order to kill off any of the bugs in the environment before the new pigs move into the space. This avoids the stress of mixing, the transfer of infections from the former residents to the new residents, and the transfer of diseases from the younger pigs to the older pigs (as could happen in the old style "continuous Flow Barns"). The only age that routinely receives antibiotics on the farm I work for is the weanling barn, and thats because of how stressful weaning is. The stress from weaning is unavoidable, and lowers the pigs natural defenses (plus there is a week or two b
Never said it wasn't. Just pointing out the idiocy of claiming that only the animal protein industries are subsidized by the government.
I believe that civilizedINTENSITY beat me to the punch, but I'll answer the rest of the post as well:
You are entitle to the OPPORTUNITY to PURSUE your fortune, but if you cannot hack it for what ever reason, well then tough shit. Companies go out of business all of the time. My father started a carpentry business, he's an excellent finish carpenter, but a horrible business man and ran the company into the ground, taking my mothers A+ credit rating with it. No one cried for us because we'd tried and failed and I fail to see why it should be different for unprofitable farming operations as opposed to unprofitable home remodeling operations.
Where did you get that 94% of farms are small farms number from. I would really like to know. Although it's not about the percentage of farms that are in a given size, but the percentage of the total US meat supply that comes from each farm. If I'm marketed 700,000 hogs annually, I'm not going to really care about the competition provided by a farm that only markets 700 hogs/year. besides, driving the competition out of business in agriculture doesn't reap the same benefits as it does in other industries because when a small operator goes out of business he usually sells to a friend or someone trying to get into the business, thus the level of competition doesn't really change much in the low end of the production scale.
By knowing exactly which farm the sick animal came from we can know exactly which other animals it came into contact with along its entire life. It prevents us from having to kill a lot of cows that may have come into contact with the sick cow, but ultimately didn't. When the government does a mandatory depopulation and incineration of a herd, they don't buy the animals at market price. The producers involved get some money, but it's not enough to prevent them from having to take a loss on those animals. It can also help to prevent a cow from slipping through the cracks. The only cases of BSE in the US have been as a result of cows that were born and originally raised in Canada. In many cases the ultimate owner had no way of knowing that the cows originally came from Canada and had been exposed to BSE. This kind of mandatory tracking (including tagging of all animals when they enter the country) would have made it a trivial matter to determine if any of their animals were at risk and remove them from the rest of the herd.
We all complained back during the E. coli in the produce scare that it took too long to figure out which produce was tainted and how it happened so that we could remove the tainted food from shelves. This kind of system will do a lot to help with that when it happens again to meat. No matter what our precautions, someone will screw up somewhere and we'll need to do another meat recall and the less time it takes to identify the tainted meat and destroy it, the less people will likely get sick and potentially die.
5 years ago I would have said that the ROI for this system made it untenable (this has been under discussion at least that long), but prices for the technology have dropped to the point where I believe it will not be as onerous as they are claiming.
I fail to see why a small operation should be allowed to opt out of health and safety regulations that everyone else is required to obey. You are apparently one of those (in my option misguided) people that confuse the freshness of locally grown food with being healthier & safer. It's ok, my mother is as well.
I don't know how things are run in Australia, but I've worked at small dairy farms in Massachusetts and Connecticut (Largest farm milked 110 cows at a time and the smallest milked ~25), and I can assure you that all sorts of things slipped by because there was not enough time in the day, or employees, or money to employ extra employees to take care of everything. I'm not knocking those farms, they did the best they could and I think did an adequate job. Even in 25-110 cow operations the larger farms had much more time to devote to managing their animals optimally. I now work at a University in the midwest that milks several hundred cows a day and the management of the animals is top notch despite the facilities being of an older less efficient design than most larger scale operations.
Smaller operators have more to do and less resources with which to do it. That means they are more likely to cut corners out of necessity. A good example is one of the farms I worked for in CT. They milked ~35-40 cows at a time and turned them out to pasture in between milkings, ideal right? This would fit into the idealized picture that we all have of the rural dairy farm. However, 6 out of 7 days each week the cows would be walked to pasture on the other side of a stream that ran through the farm. They would walk into the water and then stop to cool off, defecating almost to a cow (35-40 milking cows and 10-20 dry cows/heifers), directly in the water before moving on across to the far bank and the fresh pasture. You can get away with that on a small farm because regulators aren't looking at the little guys, and if their is a complaint about the fecal coliform counts in the local water supply, they'll focus on the bigger farm just down the road.
Large farms that are incorporated cannot be run like other large corporations. They exist in a market that is frequently unprofitable for everyone, through no fault of their own. Take hogs for example. The recent uproar over the unfortunately named "Swine Flu" has resulted in decreased demand for pork in the US (and probably much of the world). This has led to a decrease in the amount being paid for hogs at the processing plant, to a point where almost no one is making money off of their pigs. They are focusing on trying to lose as little money as possible while waiting for pork prices to rebound into a range that is once again profitable. But remember, if a pig hits market weight you have to send him for processing, you don't have the luxury of holding onto him and waiting because there are more sows farrowing, more piglets weaning, more pigs growing, and more pigs getting ready to enter the finishing barn that aren't going to stop eating and growing just because you want them to. In these situations they have to minimize losses while still preparing for the next profitable period. Short term profiteering of the sort large corporations are famous for is not feasible, because the fallout of that short sighted business plan will be insolvency in the future. Unlike the auto industry, no one comes in to bail out struggling dairy or swine farms. Instead they declare bankruptcy and then sell the land, animals and everything else to their neighbor. Eventually that neighbor that keeps buying the less competitive becomes a large enough farm that a large portion of the US no longer trusts him and wants him to fail in favor of his old neighbors that couldn't compete effectively. How on earth does that make sense.
Free range eggs probably taste better to you for one of 2 reasons. It's either all in your head, or the fact that the free range chickens get to eat a lot more bugs and dead chicken which actually changed the flavor of the eggs. Fre
Ok, where to start. Before addressing individual points. Anyone that uses words like "Poisonous Air" and "Super-incubators for viruses" is spreading FUD. No two ways about it. They have a political agenda, whether they admit it or not, and are obviously biased. The fact that you either were unwilling, unable to see that bias is rather frightening, but not uncommon. Now for your individual points.
Nutritionists can tell you (in fact one is right now) that the feeding of animal byproducts to other animals is routine. Dog food contains meat, as does chicken, and the meat in question is not the top cuts I can assure you. The cattle got BSE from eating rendered sheep byproducts, not other cattle. Sheep have a prion disease know as Scrapie, which in the >200 years that we've known about it has never before jumped from one species to another. In fact, disease transmission by protein, as opposed to bacteria, virus, or fungi was only discovered with the isolation of the prion protein involved in both diseases. This discovery was as almost as revolutionary as germ theory itself. You cannot reasonably expect people to predict that which has never happened before will suddenly happen.
There is no "Flu epidemic" in north america. The flu occasionally affects some herds, but in the 7 years I've been working where I have, we've only seen the flu once. It was not the "Swine Flu" that the media was losing their mind about either, it was H5N4 IIRC. AFAIK, there hasn't been a single case of the so called "Swine Flu" (ie H1N1) in any pigs north of the US, Mexican border. The disease was transmitted out of Mexico by Human-to-human contact. Honestly, how many people do you really believe bring their pigs with them when they travel to Europe, Australia and Asia when leaving Mexico?
Also, if barns were as bad as your obviously biased reference states, then the first farmer to turn on the god damn FAN would seen incredible improvements in health and production and put the rest of the industry out of business nearly over night. Pigs are mammals, just like us. If they cannot breathe or are surrounded by toxins all the time, then they won't grow. They'll end up dying before they get to market, and no one will make any money. Why people such as yourself are willing to believe that animals will somehow grow in conditions that are toxic to them is beyond me. Do you not understand basic fucking biology? If you'd ever have taken a swine management class (as I have) you'd know just how much time is devoted to teach how to calculate the necessary air exchange rates based on season, flooring style, square feet/pig and building style. We had a whole exam on that.
And before you go trotting out the old "Antibiotics" meme, stop right there. The only place I've seen antibiotics fed to pigs on a routine basis is in the weaning barn. weaning is very stressful for pigs, they are moving from a mostly sterile, liquid diet with highly digestible proteins and energy derived primarily from lipids to a diet that is no more sterile than the grass in your back yard, solid, containing a fair amount of indigestible proteins, and with energy derived primarily from carbohydrates. This causes the animal to switch both his internal digestive mechanisms, and deal with a sudden switch in the enteral bacteria colonizing the small and large intestine. All the antibiotics do is knock down the bad bugs long enough for him to make the transition smoothly and then are removed from the diet. Antibiotics are expensive and a small, sub-therapeutic does in the weanling diets will often prevent the need to use much larger therapeutic doses for a much longer period of time if the E. coli gets away from them and causes an outbreak of scours (diarrhea). Prior to the use of antibiotics in weanling diets, losses at this point were much higher than they are now, in fact we've never had higher weaning percentages before.
The USDA has NEVER labeled pigs that eat pigs as safe. The reason is Trichin
There is no large farm in the country that is analogous to Apple Computers, never mind those you list. There are more Large farms in most rural counties than there are large media conglomerates, Computer OS manufacturers, or cell phone companies. Large is relative, and your sense of scale is way off.
this protects against more than just BSE.
There are plenty of diseases that we take radical efforts to control. Hoof and Mouth is a good example. Mandatory sale of all potentially infected animals to the government (at a loss of course), euthanasia, and incineration of the carcasses in the event of an outbreak. Unfortunately, the only vaccine that provides any protection also has a low incidence of actually causing the damn disease itself. This would make it easier to prevent contaminated cows from going un-noticed or from needing to destroy cows that didn't actually come in contacted with the sick ones.
You are completely ignorant of agriculture and should just shut the fuck up. As someone that has worked in agriculture for almost a decade now, I can assure you that you have no idea what you are talking about.
Smaller operations are more likely to cut corners when it comes to environmental and animal health regulations because the regulators don't even bother with them in many cases (I speak from experience). Large operators have all sorts of federal, state, and in many cases county regulations as to animal care and environmental stewardship that they need to satisfy or else they'll be shut down. They supply a higher plane of nutrition, and better health care becuase they can afford to. They can employ people who's whole job is making sure that the animals diet is as well balanced as possible (my current job), and others who's whole job is to make sure that all the animals are as healthy as possible, and yet another person who's entire job is dealing with the paperwork and regulations and making sure they are on the right side of the law. Small operations have one person that is trying to fill multiple positions and logically cannot do all those jobs as well as dedicated specialists.
Smaller is more likely to mean, cut corners, missed signs of illness, poorer plane of nutrition, and greater environmental impact per animal. No one likes to hear it becuase we like the idea of the big red barn in the background and farmer Joe taking care of everything himself, but it is neither profitable or sustainable to produce animals that way.
Left to their own devices, food producers will quite happily sell us sawdust and animal faeces to eat, feed dead cows to other cows, and buy, sell and slaughter sick, dying and dead animals that have been hauled across continents.
Ok, where to start! There are a handful of bad apples in any bushel, and there are those in the animal industry that would willingly take advantage of people for a profit, but that does not make all members of the industry complicit. The vast majority of the livestock producers are honorable, upstanding people that value their animals, the environment, and the health of their customers. However, they are also in a business that does not really pay them what their time and effort is worth. They depend upon the suggestions of Land Grant research institutions and the conclusions of the USDA and FDA when deciding which practices to implement on their farms to try and stay profitable while maintaining the health of their cows. Farmers were told that feeding rendered meat to cattle in small quantities was safe, and saved them money. It even was until the scrapie prion from sheep made the jump to cattle and created BSE. Now that we are aware we all recognized the need to avoid feeding meat to cattle, but the lack of forsight is not the fault of the farmers who had no way of knowing what they were doing was going to be unsafe.
Swine Flu's resistance to medication is the direct result of feeding battery farmed pigs anti-biotics instead of reducing pig density.
AS to "Swine Flu" it has nothing to do with antibiotic use in farms. Antibiotics are used against bacteria. the Flu is a Virus. Consequently, you are full of shit. Do a little research before spouting a bunch of shit on a topic that you are obviously uneducated about. Ars technica did a series of write ups on the disease when it first became pandemic (which they point out sounds scarier than it actually is).
All for a few pennies extra.
Often a few pennies make the difference between losing money on every cow and making money on every cow. We don't pay farmers what their time is worth, which forces them to go large scale in order to remain profitable (on average), unless they want to toss out 100years of technological advances and try to grow for the "organic" market, which is the least "sustainable" way to produce anything.
Since ranchers in the situation you outline have to round up their new calves periodically anyway, they will just tag the animals when they leave the farm. AFAIK, these regulations will not require cattle to be taged the day they are born, but when they are to be transported. If you want to tag all your cows at birth becuase you run an intensive operation that's fine, but if you run more of a range operation where you let them fend for themselves and only round them up a couple of times a year to go to market, then just tag them when they leave. That way if one of them turns up with Hoof and Mouth, they know which animals they've contacted and can warn you that some of your land may be a reservior.
Ok, no one is entitled to an ability to raise cattle for sale to the public profitably. If they can't turn a profit under the new regulations, then they'll have to either supplement their income, as many small farms already do, or they'll fold, as many more have over the years. Their is no inherent value to society in the continued existence of unsafe farms just because they are smaller.
Besides, the point of these tags is not to prevent just BSE, but to minimize the potential spread of all sorts of infection between cattle as well as between cattle and humans. One of the more problematic infections that crops up periodically is Hoof and Mouth, which we have here in the US and can be transfered between cattle, swine, and several other livestock species. It is so dangerous that the only lab in the US allowed to do research into it is an island off the east coast of the US that has no livestock other than those brought there for research, and they will never leave the island (all will be euthanized and incinerated). Any farm with a confirmed case of Hoof and mouth is immediately quaranteened and depopulated with the Government buying all of the animals at well below market value.
Also, large ranchers don't really want this instituted either. No one wants to increase the overhead costs associated with an industry that is periodically unprofitable no matter what they do. However, they do recognize that it is inevitable so they are cooperating in the drafting of the relevent guidelines so that they can keep the regulators from making stupid decisions.
You can keep your tin hat on, and believe that "Big Farms" are trying to kill the little guy, but just be aware that your parinoia doesn't make sense. The little farms are not really competition, what is 10 head compared to 1,000 head really?
I understand what you are trying to say but you are misunderstanding the actual situation. The time and cost/animal to tag will be fairly uniform. Yeah the large operation may be able to buy tags for less/tag but the difference will be relatively minor. Especially since the smaller operations are already paying more for just about all of the input costs per animal.
Their point is only valid if you truely believe that there is some sort of benefit to society in their running a less efficient operation. Large operations have the benefits of scale, but what benefits do we get from the smaller operations? They can get away with avoiding a lot of the environmental and safety regulations that exist because the governement regulates the large operators more aggresively. Contrary to popular opinion, they are not safer, more sustainable, or healthier.
I don't believe that any of these people are greedy or lazy, instead I tend to think of them as being less ambitious or fortunate. They either haven't tried to expand to take advantage of greater economies of scale, or have been unable to. Either way, that doesn't remove the net benefit to society and their industry if this kind of animal tagging becomes routine, which IMO outweigh their desire to avoid compliance. I say this as a member of the agriculture industry, although admitedly not a farmer myself.
In all likely hood they are angling for an exemption.
Small operations have all sorts of exceptions to all sorts of regulations. I've outlined some of them in earlier replys to this topic, but it all comes down to ROI for the regulatory agencies. Smaller operations can get away with a larger environmental impact, or lower quality record keeping, or other practices that could make their product potentially (although probably not) more dangerous by some measures, simply because it's too much work to regulate everyone. They want another exception so that they can either have a competetive advantage, or to prevent being squeezed out due to a lack of scale. I don't blame them, I would try if I were in their shoes, but that doesn't make it right to let them have those exceptions.
Besides, people that buy niche market meat already expect to pay more than they would in the grocery store, just build the price of the RFID scanners, tags, and extra time into the price like the large operations will be doing.
Of course, I'm just as much of a hypocrite, because I'm more than willing to take the cost savings on assembly-line food (even though sustainable food definitely does taste a lot better and also is healthier).
You seem to be operating under the same false assumption as a lot of people, that somehow Smaller = Sustainable.
If you look at larger farms, the reason that they are more profitable is because they are using less resources per unit of meat produced. Less feed per # of meat or milk means less fossil fuels used planting, fertilizing, harvesting, transporting, and mixing the feed. In the case of dairy cattle, it means less cows needed to produce the same volume of milk. Large farms are more profitable becuase they are more sustainable. Feed, which makes up >60% of the total cost of production, is expensive and the less of it you use the more money you make (or in many cases the less money you lose depending on the price being paid at the slaughter house).
Large farms are also held to a higher standard of environmental stewardship. All federal, state, and county regulations have lower cut off limits below which they require less or no documentation for. "Small independant ranchers" would fall into this category. They can run their cows down to a field that has a stream or river running through it and let them defecate and urinate in the water to their hearts content while taking a cooling bath in August (I worked on a dairy farm back in CT where the cows spent the hottest days if the year doing exactly that, and even on cooler days they had to walk across the creek to get to most of the pasture). Large farms are require to keep animals a certain distance away from open water sources and ensure that none of the stored manure ends up contaminating local waters because when the water is tested, they will be the first suspect if it has unacceptably high fecal coliform counts.
My guess is what you are confusing for the taste of sustainability, is actually the taste of "Freshness." The "Factory Farm" is much more an example of misdirection than the "Family Farm." Most large farms are owned by a single family, that run the farm with the help of empolyees. They grew in order to get the economies of scale. The idea of "Factory Farms" was created out of the imagination of vegitarian/vegan activism groups such as HSUS, PETA, ALF, etc. becuase people have this built in prejudice against the combination of "Factories" and "Animals" because factories are thought of as being hard, insensitive, and dangerous.
In fact, Large farms are more sustainable on average than small farms due to the economies of scale that come with being a larger operation. Small farms get away with out being regulated because they would be too much work to keep track of. They can pollute to a much greater extent with impunity simply because no one is watching. Large operations OTOH have to file Federal, State, and County paperwork verifying that they are running their business in accordance with envirnomental regulations on all 3 levels.
I agree that this will disproportionately effect small farmers, and that sucks for them. However, these kinds of costs that are proportionately lower on larger farms is the reason that most meat is produced on large farms (not becuase those that run large farms don't care about their animals as far too many idiots believe). Economic forces have cause all animal production industries to move from lots of small farms with only a handful of large operations to mostly large operations with small farms being the exception. As with any industry, if you cannot compete profitably you will be squeezed out.
Since the USDA is also subsidizing corn, soy, wheat, oats, etc. I don't think it matters that you don't eat one class of food subsidized by the USDA. Vegetarians might not like that the animal meat industry is getting handouts from the USDA, but I'm not all that excited about the USDA making Soy cheaper for Tofu manufacturers so it all comes out in the wash.
That would have deserved a "Funny" not an "Insightful".
If it had been modded thus, I wouldn't have had a problem with it, because while I disagree (I love KFC's chicken), humor is is the eye of the beholder and I can understand the joke. Whether the original post was intended to be funny or insightful is indeterminable without the OP defending his post. However, I was not railing against the post but the perception that the post was "Insightful"
Unless you can tell me what they wanted, I can't tell you whether or not it was actually safe. If it wasn't safe, then you should have reported them to the USDA. As long as they are within the guidelines of the USDA's requirements, then I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. However, if you have evidence that they are stepping out side of those requirements and asking retailers to lie about it, then you are doing a disservice to all Americans by not blowing the whistle.
Until you can actually stand up and say what they wanted, and then offer verification I have no reason to believe you over the USDA inspectors.
I went to HS with a girl who's older brother was the first ever case of a genetic disorder.
I can't remember their family name but it was named after her older brother, and she had it too. AFAIK, she and her brother are the only 2 documented cases of the disorder. They both had severe scoliosis, a lot of pain, some immune system disorders, and their abdomens were very short when compaired to the rest of their bodies (due to the scoliosis of the spine I assume). Having a disease named after their family was definitely not any sort of consolation either. She graduated first in her class, so it probably won't interfere with the rest of her life. She'll probably just have to explain about it to everyone she meets, and have some medical complications as she gets older and decides whether or not to have kids.
The fact that tests have been done where rBST and purified 'normal' BST have been injected into human tissue and proved to be too dissimilar to interact with the receptors for human sotmatotropin seems not to faze anyone for some reason.
I've never heard that before, which is a good reason why that hasn't fazed me. If it's true that it doesn't interact with our bodies, than that resolves my concern. It'll take more than a slashdot post to convince me, but I'll keep an eye out. I'm just cautious around hormones, since my father worked with pharmaceutical hormones a lot, and I learned they can be fairly "general" even when using another species' hormones, but it's ultimately all about the chemistry that I don't know and might mean nothing happens.
http://www.elancodairy.com/faqs/fda_safety.html
Caring about the noise from a local wind farm, and still desiring to utilize the wind for electricity generation are not mutually exclusive view points.
I can agree that we need to make changes in the way we generate electricity, and even agree with you as to the urgency of the matter, but that doesn't mean we can't put a little thought into the execution of those changes. I can want a wind farm, I can even want it in my home town, without needlessly accepting that it'll have to be loud and obnoxious. Maybe there is a better way to lay out the towers so that they don't make as much noise. Maybe there are things that can be done at the perimeter of the farm to disrupt the sound such as plating bushes or small trees (that don't grow large enough to obstruct the all important wind patters that power the towers).
Complaining that towers have negatives along side their obvious positives is not the same thing as not wanting the towers to be installed at all. However, claiming that any complaint about wind farms means you are against their existence at all is incredibly foolish and ignorant, and disregarding legitimate complaints because of your desire to remain ignorant is definitely short sighted.
If it comes down to there being no alternatives that lessen the localized negative impacts of wind farm installation, then I agree that listening to those who are complaining will get us nowhere. But that has yet to be proved. Most modern wind farms are very recent additions to the landscape. I find it hard to believe that we came up with the best possible guidelines for their installation on our first couple of tries. AFAIK, no one even considered the possibility that the noise from the wind farms would cause the neighbors to complain. In large part because wind farms are traditionally built in the middle of nowhere. Now that they are putting wind farms closer to populated area, this concern needs to be address. We don't need to stop all wind farm installation until after we verify that there is nothing we can do about the noise in advance, but we should at least make sure that we are considering the noise problem when in the design phase of wind farm construction.
So ultimately your original post is not relevant to the greater discussion because their concerns are valid and can probably be addressed (whether anything can actually be done about it is still unknown) without slowing the pace of wind farm installation.