Tag Archives: industrial agriculture

The Omnivore’s Dilemma QotD

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(from the Big Organic chapter, p157)

Along with the national list of permissible synthetics, “access to pasture,” and, for other organic animals, “access to the outdoors” indicate how the word “organic” has been stretched and twisted to admit the very sort of industrial practices for which it once offered a critique and an alternative. The final standards also demonstrate how, in Gene Kahn’s words, “everything eventually morphs into the way the world is.” And yet the pastoral values and imagery embodied in that word survive in the minds of many people, as the marketers of organic food well understand: Just look at a container of organic milk, with its happy cows and verdant pastures. Thus is a venerable ideal hollowed out, reduced to a sentimental conceit printed on the side of a milk carton: Supermarket Pastoral.

Was going to stop there, but an interesting counterpoint follows:

Get over it, Gene Kahn would say. The important thing, the real value of putting organic on an industrial scale, is the sheer amount of acreage it puts under organic management. Behind every organic TV dinner or chicken or carton of industrial organic milk stands a certain quantity of land that will no longer be doused with chemicals, an undeniable gain for the environment and the public health.

Industrial agriculture is killing our fisheries

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Nitrogen and phosphorus from industrial farming and chicken factories is washing into the Chesapeake Bay and Gulf of Mexico and over-fertilizing algae. The enormous algae blooms take over fish habitats and consume all the oxygen, making hypoxic zones where no aquatic life can survive.

Your Chicken Nuggets Are Killing Your Crab Cakes

The primary source of the chemicals is industrial corn farms in the Midwest, and factory chicken farms in the Mid-Atlantic.

Industrial corn farms over-apply fertilizers to their fields. The crops cannot absorb the entire amount, and rains carry the residual chemical from the corn farms into the Mississippi, which deposits them in the Gulf of Mexico, where they feed the algae bloom.

The chicken factories on the Delmarva Peninsula produce a huge amount of nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich manure, too much of which is washed into the Chesapeake Bay.

I think the title of the linked article sums it up nicely. If you, like me, enjoy Maryland crab cakes or Louisiana shrimp gumbo, stop eating factory-farmed chicken and processed corn-containing products!

 

Defeat for Big Corn?

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News from the NRDC blog: Senate votes overwhelmingly to end corn ethanol subsidies —

  • The amendment will end three decades of subsidies to the corn ethanol industry and save taxpayers several billion dollars.
  • The VEETC (Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit) [cost] taxpayers $6 billion this year alone and [gave] almost nothing in return in domestic ethanol production or industry jobs above and beyond what is already mandated by the Renewable Fuel Standard
  • [The VEETC] comes at the expense of developing the new and cleaner advanced biofuels we need to create jobs, increase our energy security and address global warming.

We wanted to see if Michael Pollan had written anything recently about ethanol subsidies, and read this article from 2006:

http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/the-great-yellow-hope/

  • The way we grow corn in this country consumes tremendous quantities of fossil fuel: Every bushel of corn grown in America has consumed the equivalent of between a third and a half gallon of gasoline.
    • Corn receives more synthetic fertilizer than any other crop, and that fertilizer is made from fossil fuels — mostly natural gas.
    • Corn also receives more pesticide than any other crop, and most of that pesticide is made from petroleum.
    • To plow or disc the cornfields, plant the seed, spray the corn and harvest it takes large amounts of diesel fuel
    • To dry the corn after harvest requires natural gas.
  • Distill[ing] the corn into ethanol, an energy-intensive process that requires still more fossil fuel. Estimates vary, but they range from two-thirds to nine-tenths of a gallon of oil to produce a single gallon of ethanol. (The more generous number does not count all the energy costs of growing the corn.) Some estimates are still more dismal, suggesting it may actually take more than a gallon of fossil fuel to produce a gallon of our putative alternative to fossil fuel.
  • According to the Wall Street Journal, it will cost U.S. taxpayers $120 for every barrel of oil saved by making ethanol.
  • The federal government offers a tax break of 54 cents for every gallon of ethanol produced
  • At the same time, the government protects domestic ethanol producers by imposing a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on imported ethanol
  • Ethanol is just the latest chapter in a long, sorry history of clever and profitable schemes to dispose of surplus corn: there was corn liquor in the 19th century; feedlot meat starting in the 1950’s and, since 1980, high fructose corn syrup.

This all reminds us of a t-shirt we saw recently: http://www.goodjoe.com/Store/Product.aspx?id=66. It’s not clear from the creator’s description if she is making a statement about the large quantity of corn products found in the composition of the average American body…

 

 

Royal factory farming

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All the fuss about the royal wedding made us wonder about factory farming in the UK. How does it compare to factory farming here in the US?

The big difference seems to be with the level of awareness of consumers in the UK, which in turn influences the behavior of agribusinesses and legislators. British consumers in general are more advanced in their views on factory farming than their American counterparts. This description from World Society for the Protection of Animals explains the mindset of many British consumers:

The UK has broadly high welfare standards in the UK, as well as strong consumer awareness regarding eggs and meat. As a nation of animal lovers, free range eggs are an everyday item and shoppers by and large try to buy ethical and high welfare meat products.
However, milk and dairy products are less well understood and our dairy industry as we know it is under threat to intensify production.

In response to the dairy industry threat, British charities and nonprofits are fighting the applications of mega-dairies seeking to set up shop in the country, because, as we know, factory dairy farms are bad for the environment, bad for the animals, and bad for consumers. Currently, the WSPA says, the average dairy farm in Britain is home to only 113 cows, with very few farms housing more than 200 cows; compare that to the US where some mega-dairies pack over 15,000 cows into cramped indoor quarters.

Other ways Europe is ahead of the US in farm animal treatment: the UK has an Animal Welfare Minister and government-created Farm Animal Welfare Council to enforce farm animal treatment standards; the EU outlawed battery cages (effective next year), pig tail docking, veal crates, and pig gestation cages (effective in 2013); and the EU banned the administration of growth hormones, growth-enhancing drugs, and human antibiotics to food animals. The concept of animal sentience is much more accepted in Europe: that animals are intelligent and feel emotions.

It seems that, like the hats they wear to fancy events, British consumers and legislators are quite sophisticated regarding animal welfare. Even if we Americans don’t want to adopt their headwear fashions, we should at least strive to emulate their outlook towards livestock.

Can industrial agriculture feed the world?

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A recent article on alternet.org (What Would the World Look Like If We Relied on Industrial Agriculture to Feed Everyone?) explores what the world might look like if industrial agriculture is chosen as the worldwide solution to feeding the hungry. Popular belief holds that industrial agriculture is the only viable solution for keeping people fed as the global population explodes; but that doesn’t take into account the significant drawbacks, including contribution to global warming, soil nutrient depletion, water over-consumption, and the loss of small family farms.

An example is cited: Punjab, India, which saw a big increase in wheat production in the 1970s from the use of industrial agriculture:

But according to a 2007 report put out by the Punjab State Council for Science & Technology, “Over-intensification of agriculture over the years has led to water depletion, reduced soil fertility and micronutrient deficiency, non-judicious use of farm chemicals and problems of pesticide residue, reduced genetic diversity, soil erosion, atmospheric and water pollution and overall degradation of the rather fragile agro ecosystem of the state.”

Indian farmers who fell into debt while trying to compete with the industrial agriculture companies sometimes saw suicide as the only way out: “Since 1997, over 200,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide.”

Conversely, local farms practicing sustainable agriculture would be kinder to the environment and a boon to their communities. This sums up the argument nicely:

Agroecology is not a return to some traditional past, it is the cutting edge of farming. It mimics nature in the field, and uses resource-saving techniques that can be of greatest benefit to cash-strapped farmers and to women, for whom access to credit is most difficult, and who cannot afford to run high levels of debt.”

The bold is ours–what an important concept! That and other points raised here were covered in a talk we recently attended by Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms. Stay tuned for a post about that!