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I don't know what to think about this trend - part of me wants to yell "Yippee! They're finally getting it!", but another part of me thinks the folks who do this are missing the point entirely, and simply substituting one set of middlemen in the food chain for another.

A new breed of business serves city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty.

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:00 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link

Yum! Fresh squab! They really are delicious ... but I gotta wonder who gets to put the RFID tag on them and report their every roost.

With global demand for meat threatening to topple the food system, it's time we put Pollan on steroids and remembered: pigeons are fowl.

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:45 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link

Ya gotta love this quote from the article:

"We live in an age of technology where you can bar-code a banana," said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. "We've got to work this through with the industry and come up with something that's reasonable. The more confidence consumers have, the more goods they will purchase."

So, apparently, it's not just livestock that's destined for "complete traceability" - it's every food item. You can be, however, that Dole and Chiquita will probably get an exemption from barcoding every banana - they'll get to mark each container or shipment, since they do "too many" fruits, just like Tyson and IBP will be exempted from RFID tagging every pig or chicken because there's too many ... only the "little people" will have to mark everything, and it'll put us out of business.

And won't that make the big agribusinesses sad ... losing their local competition just when it's starting to pick up and take off.

How is it that people cannot see it: proposals like this are designed by big business, for big business and they benefit big business. Regulation does little or nothing to protect the public from real or imagined dangers, but it does a whole lot to restrict access to markets and lock out new and smaller players from the game.

Capitalism, my ass! This is state socialism a la the Soviets and Cubans, and the cracks are beginning to show in the system, just like they did (and are) in those two failed economies.

AP - The tomato scare may be over, but it has taken a toll — it's cost the industry an estimated $100 million and left millions of people with a new wariness about the safety of everyday foods.

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:38 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link

It ain't just catfish farmers that are feeling the pinch - a fifty pound bag of chicken feed that I paid $8 for this time last year now goes for $13.29.

Unable to cope with the soaring cost of feed, catfish farmers across the South are draining their ponds and wondering what comes next.

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:59 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link

When the Journal speaks, who listens? We'll see. For the record, our freezer is full, as is our larder.

I don't want to alarm anybody, but maybe it's time for Americans to start stockpiling food.

(link) [Wall Street Journal]

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:54 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link

If you don't have a chest freezer, get one now. Meat is gonna be mighty scarce this time next year.

AP - Raging Midwest floodwaters that swallowed crops and sent corn and soybean prices soaring are about to give consumers more grief at the grocery store.

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 20:35 /Agriculture | 3 writebacks | permanent link

Ostensibly, this is to prevent BSE, because symptoms of the disease don't usually appear until the animal is at least three years old. So the logic seems to be, if we eat a diseased cow that shows symptoms, we'll get the disease, but if we eat that same cow before symptoms are apparent we won't.

Huh?

Mad cow disease has nothing to do with the age of the bovine, and everything to do with it's feed regimen. And it's been pretty much established that even if the critter's brain is dripping with BSE, you probably won't get it by eating a sirloin steak cut from it's butt. Brain sandwich = bad, rump roast = good.

I can certainly understand South Koreans concern over this - I'm not a fan of feedlot beef at all: it can be slaughtered in a completely bas-ackward fashion, leading to contamination of even that tasty rump roast with nerve infected nerve tissue. But on the other hand ...

I wish they could understand our concerns about the loss of our electronics industry. There were over 25,000 electronics manufacturing jobs in Indianapolis alone when I got out of the military in 1975 - today there are probably less than 200. A good number of those jobs ended up in South Korea. And that dislocation was every bit as traumatic to our economy as a case of BSE would be to South Korea.

Free trade doesn't describe the current situation. These days, it seems to mean "You can export anything you want to us, but you can restrict our exports to you any way you want as well." In other words, you get to sell us cheap cameras, stereos, TV's and computers, despite our fears of job loss and economic chaos, but we can't sell you cheap beef because you're supposedly afraid you might get sick.

And that's another bovine byproduct: bullshit.

Free trade needs to become fair trade: you don't want our beef? Fine. We don't want your cars. Tit for tat, tariff for tariff. See how long the protests over "mad cows" continues on Korean unemployment lines.

AP - South Korean President Lee Myung-bak pledged to keep U.S. beef out of South Korea unless Washington agrees to ban meat from older cattle, seeking Thursday to defuse a political crisis sparked by health concerns that has derailed his plan to boost U.S. ties and reinvigorate the economy.

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:04 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link

It seems as though the folks in the EU are a leg up on us in implementing total animal tracking. And look what they're starting with: equines. Whose aficionados here have been a driving force in keeping keeping NAIS at bay. So far. Interesting.

The European Union will kick off a single passport and chip system next year - but only for horses and donkeys. Well, for now anyway.

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:00 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link

Maybe somebody in the government is growing a brain, after all. I'm just surprised that Indiana isn't in the running for a final spot - it'd be just the sort of stupidity I'd expect from "My Man Mitch" in an election year.

AP - The Bush administration relied on a flawed study to conclude that research on a highly infectious animal disease could safely be moved from an isolated island laboratory to sites on the mainland near livestock, congressional investigators concluded in findings obtained by The Associated Press.

Thu, 22 May 2008 06:10 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link

Mark my words: we're watching here another ethanol fiasco in the making. Properly fed and raised livestock produce less greenhouse gases than intensive grain agriculture, and mucking about in the nitrogen chain is a sure fire way to initiate a bio-disaster of historic proportions.