livestock
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A great WSJ video on the mad economics of cow farming
This wonderful little video by Wall Street Journal Multimedia originally came out in July, but the newspaper embedded it today in an article on feed prices. It contains two highly interesting bits of information. 1) With corn prices hovering at historically high levels, industrial-scale meat producers are turning to junk food as a feed supplement […]
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Ironically, a lost battle against a hog factory planted the seeds for a sustainable farm
In "Dispatches From the Fields," Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America's agro-industrial landscape.
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One Step at a Time Gardens is a model of agricultural sustainability. Over 50 varieties of vegetables grow in rotation on six acres of fine Iowa topsoil that receive no synthetic chemicals. Compost, cover crops, and chicken manure feed the soil. Pests and weeds are kept at bay through the use of physical barriers, biological products, and cultivation. The crew is made up of members from the community and a couple of non-local folks, such as myself. The farm provides produce to supply a local food system.
Yet when the wind blows from the northwest over One Step at a Time Gardens just east of the town of Kanawha, Iowa, visions of agricultural sustainability quickly fade as the sweet stench of pig manure from the local Confined Animal Feeding Operation or hog confinement, as they say around here, envelops the farm. The Kanawha CAFO consists of five buildings that can each house up to 2,500 hogs. Behind the buildings lies the lagoon, the source of the stench, where all of the manure and waste (dead hogs) are dumped.
Factory hog farming now dominates certain counties in Iowa, the nation's number-one hog-producing state. But it wasn't always so. The practice didn't really take off until the mid-1990s, when state law governing CAFOs changed. The Kanawha CAFO played a significant role in that change -- and Jan Libbey and Tim Landgraf, who now run One Step at a Time Gardens but then worked as a county naturalist and a metallurgical engineer, respectively, battled the Kanawha CAFO from the start. The fight against the CAFO is what inspired them to start their farm in the first place.
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From New Jersey, bad news for factory farms
Thomas Hobbes famously described life in a “state of nature” as “nasty, brutish, and short.” The U.S. meat industry appears to have taken Hobbes’ statement as a prescription for proper animal husbandry. Every year, millions of farm animals are slaughtered without ever knowing anything besides life in a grim, crowded cage. Many are subjected to […]
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California’s Prop 2 could end the worst farm-animal abuses and set a national precedent
When Californians go to the polls in November they can set a precedent for the rest of the country by ending the worst animal and environmental abuses and simultaneously increasing the safety of our national food supply.
It's an election year and we all know what that means -- big money, big events, and big promises. As the rest of the country listens endlessly to the political propaganda of the last few desperate months before November, California voters are being fed an entirely different mouthful of issues -- the living conditions of the billions of farm animals slaughtered in this country every year. This weekend the Humane Society of the United States will hold a series of cross-country parties to mark the celebration of their historical ballot initiative in California: the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act or Proposition 2.
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Conservation land in flood zone opened to grazing
Livestock grazing will be allowed on thousands of acres of Midwest land that had been set aside for conservation, Department of Agriculture Secretary Ed Schaeffer announced this week. Under the federal Conservation Reserve Program, landowners are paid to let their acreage just chill out and be wildlife habitat. But after the region’s recent spate of […]