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MacRaven Dave Haxton's Weblog Musings, Reflections, Rants and Comments from a Hoosier Heathen husband, father, grandfather, farmer and software engineer. There's really only one of me ...
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home :: Agriculture Tue, 22 Jul 2008A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss 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. (link) [New York Times]Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:00 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link Sat, 19 Jul 2008Pigeons: The Next Step in Local Eating (No, Really) 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. (link) [Wired: Top Stories]Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:45 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link Food fears linger even as tomato scare ends
"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. (link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:38 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link Fri, 18 Jul 2008As Price of Corn Rises, Catfish Farms Dry Up 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. (link) [New York Times]Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:59 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link Tue, 24 Jun 2008Load Up the Pantry 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. Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:54 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link Sun, 22 Jun 2008Record corn prices mean more expensive meat, dairy 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. (link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]Sun, 22 Jun 2008 20:35 /Agriculture | 3 writebacks | permanent link Thu, 19 Jun 2008South Korean president: No older US beef 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. (link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:04 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link Tue, 10 Jun 2008EU orders horsemeat and chips in equine passport scheme
The European Union will kick off a single passport and chip system next year - but only for horses and donkeys. Well, for now anyway. (link) [The Register]Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:00 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link Thu, 22 May 2008AP: Foot-and-mouth plan used flawed study 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. (link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories] Thu, 22 May 2008 06:10 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link Tue, 20 May 2008Superefficient Frankencrops Could Put a Real Dent in Greenhouse Gas Emissions 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. If we keeping shooting from the hip and refusing to think about the long term, we're going to solve the greenhouse gas problem by writing ourselves and ou progeny right out of the equation. Keeping 6 billion people fed boosts global warming more than all the world's cars, trucks, trains, ships, and planes put together. Agriculture accounts for almost 14 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, according to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. One response is to eat fewer of the two- and four-legged greenhouse gas factories known as animals. Before you send back that T-bone, though, call in the bioengineers. (link) [Wired: Top Stories]Tue, 20 May 2008 06:35 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link Farm moms may help children beat allergies Well duh! There are very few allergies among farm kids as opposed to the general population. But I would like to suggest that maybe the answer isn't a vaccine - it's more farms and more farm kids, or at least a better urban lifestyle that doesn't try to prevent all exposure to all allergens for everybody. Mothers exposed to farms, particularly to barns and farm milk, while pregnant confer protection from allergies on their newborns, according to a group of German researchers, who will present their findings at the American Thoracic Society's 2008 International Conference in Toronto on Wednesday, May 21 (link) [EurekAlert!]Tue, 20 May 2008 06:04 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link Fri, 16 May 2008Center for Rural Affairs urges farm bill veto This is about the clearest explanation yet of how and why farm subsidies kill family farms. LYONS, Neb. - Today, the Center for Rural Affairs announced its opposition to passage of the farm bill conference report and encouraged President Bush to veto the bill if it passes. (link) [The Prairie Star]Fri, 16 May 2008 06:39 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link Tue, 29 Apr 2008Restaurant inspections -- public perceptions vs. reality If people find out how little good these bureaucratic hassles really do, perhaps they'll want to eliminate them. Right? C'mon - they'll make them more bureaucratic, tougher and more intrusive - then they'll do some good! I wonder how long this cycle must continue before we finally grow brains? Foodborne diseases cause an estimated 76 million illnesses in the US each year with about half associated with restaurant meals (more than 70 billion meals). Therefore, preventing restaurant-associated foodborne disease is an important task of public health departments. According to an article in the June 2008 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the public is generally unaware of the frequency of restaurant inspections and the consequences of poor inspection results. (link) [EurekAlert!]Tue, 29 Apr 2008 06:23 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link Mon, 28 Apr 2008Islam on the table Ya know, I find the Islamic (and Jewish) restriction on pork silly. But what's instructive about this article is how it details the implementation of a government policy, in this case a religious one, without actual reference to that policy's objectives. They're not banning pork, they're intentionally regulating it out of existence. We're seeing more of the same here in the US - although the policy objective isn't religious, it's commercial. New laws may spell Turkish pork industry's demise (link) [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]Mon, 28 Apr 2008 06:21 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link Sat, 26 Apr 2008Poisoned Dream Could be subtitled "The Joys of Chemical Farming" ... India's Green Revolution brings bitter harvest (link) [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:13 /Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link |
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