Big MACC Attack

Free Range Trickiness

A friend sent me a link to an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times today that questions what the author considers the assumption that free range animal agriculture is inherently superior to CAFO meat manufacturing operations. Free Range Trichinosis is the clever title, and it was penned by a history professor at Texas State - San Marcos who conveniently has a book coming out about "how locavores are endangering the future of food."

The gentleman does know how to turn a phrase, and I am sure that the loyal employees of the industrial food companies will buy enough copies (with company money?) to keep it up in the Bestseller Beauty Shows and Amazon Rankings for a goodly while. But the piece in the paper is riddled with logical fallacies, non-sequitors and dirty rhetoric. If I get the time, I'd like to do a little background research that it seems The Times did not (at least not before the piece ran -- there is an addendum on the web now, pointing out that the research which forms the heart of his critique was funded by the National Pork Board). I'm not sure they could have, given the way things are written, and of course Op-Eds are held to a different standard than news, and unless the book is self-published, simply enticing a publisher with a juicy, topical title makes the writer a hot property -- and, in the case of The Times, a small proof of "balance," sort of like the Washington Post printing the vacuous stupidity of Charles Krauthammer.

There is the core conflation of "locavore" and "free range," and later, "slow food." These are hot terms of the moment that are bound to sell books, but while often used near each other in the Googlish sense, the terms are not inherently connected in the real world of food production -- I doubt that "local" veal or fois gras is free range, and so these words are mere straw men the author has set up to bat down.

One example: right in the first paragraph there is a quote from a "purveyor" as to how the benefits of free range are indisputable and then immediately the author notes that this is "another reminder that culinary wisdom is never conventional." Now apparently the professor has been outside the city limits of San Marcos, because he correctly understands that chefs (I assume this is what he means by culinary) haven't always had the best grasp of how food is actually produced.

Twenty five years ago I hosted a vegetable tasting at a prestigious local resort (this was in Vermont, where such things were just getting going...California was years ahead of us) and the executive chef was astounded that we had twelve kinds of carrots to taste.

"When I was in culinary school, there were only three kinds of carrots," he told me.

Intrigued, and having some experience of fifty or so different varieties, I asked him, "Which three?"

"Five pound bags, ten pound bags and twenty five pound bags." We became instant friends and he has gone on to become a staunch advocate of local food.

But our author slyly conflates "purveyor" and "culinary" in this case. Quotations are usually from a specific person, who is identified, so we can assess the credibility of that person (disclosure: my quotation in the first paragraph above is part of the overly long title of the forthcoming book). Some "purveyors" I have know over my thirty years on the production side of the food business buy and sell damaged crates of iceberg from the trunk of a too-old Cadillac, while others not only run top notch operations, but are as familiar with trade press and scientific journals as any professor of history.

Did you notice the subtle diss? I called him a professor of history (which he claims to be) and thus planted the meme that he doesn't necessarily know anything about food -- he might, and I would like to read this "forthcoming" book to see -- and that is another of his unexamined tactics in the piece, which can only help sales of the book: the use of terms for people he purports to disagree with to essentially play off their mind share. A Swift Beef bogosity attack; Colbert X Coulter -- now there is a hybrid (or chimera) that outdoes even Carville X Matalin.

So the second paragraph includes a salting of "data" from the scientific journal; I am definitely going to have to look up the original article, as I used to analyze journal articles for a PhD candidate, and found it is amazingly easy it is to honestly or dishonestly, misunderstand or mis-represent the findings (again, the research was funded by the National Pork Board, which promotes CAFOs).

Next we hear that "just a little time outdoors increases pigs' interaction with rats and other wildlife" (etc., I don't want to violate the Times copyright <G>) but it also involves domesticated cats, and -- OmiGod: moist soil, where he says, "pathogens find an environment conducive to growth." (I find it odd not to mention the 24 / 7 heated barns where animals are jammed cheek to jowl, or the "processing" plants where now-dead meat and parts are held in similarly petri-like conditions. Moist soil...Omigod!) In the next paragraph we learn that this will be especially troubling to "connoisseurs of fine pork...supporters of sustainable meat and slow food advocates" who claim that free range meat tastes better.

The oversights, elisions, conflations and (at the end of the paragraph) mindlesss conclusions of this paragraph are almost too numerous to list...the presentation, is, in the end, flakier than a pie crust. The Union of Concerned Scientists has a good report from last September called "Uncovering CAFOs."

The first of those two paragraphs is about the potential for infection of the animals, not about their taste, but the author seems to think that taste and infection are connected in the same sort of way "tasting" a toke at a rock concert (inevitably, OmiGod!) leads to hepatitis C, or oral herpes. I'm sorry...it was a bad example, but no more far out than the one offered. It just doesn't follow, it is not a valid syllogism, no matter how fancy the verbal footwork; he makes no connection between the infection part of the argument and the taste part, but implies it anyway.

There is a hidden connection behind both paragraphs and does honestly join them that the author does not mention -- and if in the book he even considers this aspect, I think I can safely predict he will have something negative to say about it -- and that is the breed of pig in the study he cites. I should be able to check this when I check the journal article. If it is not identified, the study is flawed, and if it is, I think it is likely to be illustrative.

I am going to speak from my prejudice for a moment (no I have not been doing so up till now!). My kids were raised on a vegetable farm, running wild outside and coming home dirty on a regular basis. They were free range kids. Sure they had the usual ear infections and such, but those were picked up a school, an environment more like a confined animal operation than their home. They are now two healthy, robust adults, and my daughter lives in Africa, but even there, with a little appropriate attention to hygiene, has not gotten seriously ill, though surrounded by pathogens. These days, however, kids -- especially suburban kids -- are raised in a near sterile environment and never have a chance to develop the kinds of antibodies and resistances that our kids did.

With modern domestic animals, the situation is even more extreme, especially with chickens, and with pigs, both of which have been bred for confinement production for generations. And that breeding has occured within sterile environments, with the breeder concentrating -- a breeders must -- on a few traits. I would make a guess (which it will be easy enought to check later, since I know where to look) that weight gain, and litter size are two of those. Disease resistance, foraging ability, taste; those were likely no more important than they were in the case of the cardboard tomato that is harvested green, gassed with ethylene and shipped 2000 miles to sit in a supermarket bin for three weeks before being eaten with a notable lack of relish. Myself, as a vegetable gardener, I confer equal Buddha nature on plants and animals; to see the noble pig -- I raised them, small scale, free range, for local sale, for about ten years -- reduced to a commodity is hurtful.

So there are at least two, maybe three, maybe many more distortions even in this small segment of the article. This post is likely going to be two, three, maybe many time longer than the original article simply because of the layers of ignorance and distortion the article displays. To name a few: the taste the author pooh-pahs is due as much to the breed of pig -- say a Hungarian Mangalitsa -- as it is to the free ranging -- though many of the best tasting pig breeds would not thrive in modern confinement any more than a modern industrial pig would thrive in the "wild" of a pasture; the choice of free range is not only one of taste but of ethics, and of environmental responsibility; I see neither of these mentioned, and so will be interested to read the book and find out about the part of its title refered to by "...and how we can truly eat responsibly." But we'll leave that there, or for our other blog, Hand To Mouth.

That conclusion is foreshadowed at the end of the the piece, and I am losing interest in wasting my time to critique this loosely reasoned and tightly written little screed. One last point that I had highlighted from my first read-through, but will never get to if I am going to have a Friday night; after all I am just a blogger, not a media or dot.org professional. That point is shortly before the conclusion and leads directly to it (at least in the authors twisted universe). "Free range is ultimately an arbitrary point between the wild and the domesticated." Du-uh. All agriculture (and horticulture) is by nature un-natural, as it is a controlled environment (a point he makes while trying to prove the opposite) and it is only a matter of where on the continuum your preferences, premises and practices fall. All points on that sort of space-control continuum are arbitray, as dates and times are arbitrary in the phenological world of seasonal time. And not to seem obscure, a phenological world is what both agriculture and horticulture are all about. Methinks our professor should employ a bit less sophistry, and spend a little more time with the people -- farmers, not factorymen -- he so disdains.

The Ongoing Food Safety Drama - Oh, Really?

In another round of the obvious suddenly becoming visible -- no, not the $165 million in AIG bonuses that were public knowledge last fall but nobody wanted to acknowledge until they came due like death or taxes -- hearings in the House have disclosed cozy relationships between Peanut Corporation of America and the third party inspector they hired to certify plant standards for food manufacturers and the government.

Emails released by the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations detail the relationship, which was apparently worth little more than $1000 annually to the inspection firm, one of the largest in the industry. American Insitute of Baking International even gave them a Certificate of Achievement...though it is not clear what they achieved except to trigger, like a bogus mortgage lender, a rippling loss of much larger proportions: Kellogg, for example, relied on audits by the firm, and ended up eating a $70 million dollar peanut butter sandwich. Here is a link to the Washington Post coverage from this morning.

This, and the spinach, and the jalapenos -- these are the motivations behind the new food safety bill, H-875, that is raising such a ruckus out on the farm and food cultures of the web. That bill would create a new Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services which would -- sort of like the TSA consolidated a lot of different programs under a single adminstrator -- most prominently taking all food oversight functions away from the FDA. Another approach, to simply expand the power of the FDA is embodied in an earlier bill, HR 759.

Look for more on these two different approaches in the coming months.

What's Wrong With The NAIS

There is an excellent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times this morning by small farmer Shannon Hayes of upstate New York which explains precisely how and why the National Animal Idenitifcation System (NAIS) will hurt small farms and benefit industrial agriculture. NAIS, of course was proposed as a way to limit the spread of diseases like Mad Cow, and allow traceability within the global food system.

I'll let you read the original to get the details, but the arugment revolves around two key points.

First is the classic "cost of entry" argument: industrialized farming is already high tech and standardized, and animals are handled en masse, so the addition of a little record keeping is a minimal intrusion. But for small diversified producers it can cost an added 10% or more of sales, and take 10% of the farmer's time. That's just not supportable.

Second is that, as Shannon points out, these controls are unnecessary -- the same way that organic certification is unnecessary -- when food is produced and sold locally. Neighbors can see the farm, and know how the products were raised; if there is a problem it fairly quick and easy to solve. To include these kinds of local, quick feedback systems in a system designed for global production is a classic kind of "category error" and drives the market, and the food system inevitably toward more centralization -- just as we are discovering the weaknesses of that system.

We may need large, nationally distributed food production to feed the cities, but we shouldn't herd  community-based farmers and farming into the slaughter shute in the process. A system like NAIS makes sense for concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and for exporters but not for small farmers. The hearings before the Livestock, Dairy and Poultry Subcommitee of the Agriculture Committee in the House today (10:00 AM Longworth 1300) need to find a way to balance those two realities.

Shannon Hayes is also author of the Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook.

Big Numbers Add Up Both Ways

The inescapable connection between scale and technology, between industrial methods and commodification of food pops up frequently. One example contained in the February 2009 USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) report released this morning shows it in high relief.

The newly formed Egg Safety and Quality Research Unit and Quality and Safety Assessment Research Unit (ESQRU and QSARU -- gotta love those acronyms!) has developed a prototype pressure chamber and camera system that is more accurate than human egg graders (99.4% vs 85.8%). That's all to the good, and helps speed up the egg processing plants, some of which are capable of handling 180,000 eggs an hour.

If that seems astounding to you -- it does to me -- keep in mind that in 2007, more than 90 billion eggs -- that's billion -- were produced in the United States, according to the most recent USDA Census of Agriculture.

I did not call and ask the researchers what this machine is going to cost, but a quick glance at it shows it is not going to be cheap, and so only the largest producers will be able to put it to work. Again, we do need this kind of thing if we are going to keep New York City in eggs (15 million people times 250 eggs, and no close-in farms...you do the math) but we also need research on small scale, local and regional production issues -- including organic and pasture based production -- and that has long been lacking in the USDA research program.

After all, that 250 eggs per year is only slightly better than what a single chicken can do under ideal conditions, with what we already know (egg laying ducks do even better, laying larger eggs, with less cholesterol, but need access to water to thrive, holding down industrial production of duck eggs...) and with some dedicated research we might be able to vastly improve small scale egg production.

Why do this? Well for one thing, it's public money. And yes, the public benefits if there are fewer problems with the industrial food supply: less pathogens, less waste, lower prices...but the economic benefits are going to a relatively small number of large producers and processors who might well be able to fund their own research. And while the specific benefits to tens or hundreds of thousands of small producers might not be as easy to quanitfy it is nonetheless real. Just as 250 eggs per person adds up pretty quickly when you have a lot of people, so does a couple of hundred dollars a year, or an increase of 15 eggs a year per chicken when multiplied time thousands and thousands of small producers.

Unfortunately agricultural research over the years has tended to concentrate on engineering solutions to problems at the expense of cultural problems (on a cash weighted basis) and this has skewed the system toward large (and increasing) scale enterprises, with higher capital needs, and that has affected both the farm population and the communities in which those farms are located.

I certainly doubt we will ever go back to a widely decentralized agriculture (especially in commodity grains) but if we are going to have a two tier system -- large production units to mass produce food for urban areas, and a smaller, more regional agriculture to produce fresh and artisan crops -- then we need to fund both of those. Otherwise the only farms left soon will be the factory farms, and farmers will end up wearing lab coats and just operating computers instead of actually growing food.

Here is a link to the full online magazine article on the USDA-ARS website.

A Fifty Year Farm Plan

Yesterday's New York Times carried an Op-Ed piece jointly written by Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, two of our better long term thinkers on how to create (or re-create) a sustainable food system, triggered by concerns about the new Farm Bill.

Wes Jackson, of course, has spent decades at The Land Institute in Kansas working to develop perennial grain crops with high enough yields to replace annuals -- all for the purpose of reining in the disastrous rate of soil erosion in the midwestern USA.

Wendell Berry, the author of The Unsettling of America and many other books of essays on farming and culture, could well be the patron saint of this site, as that book was my first guide to what I was really doing when I became a vegetable farmer in the early 1980's.

The piece hits the four big points that every one talks about but that never seem to make it onto the table when policy is actually set:

• soil loss and degradation

• toxic pollution

• petroleum dependency, and

• the destruction of rural communties.

And yes, they do mention the positive impact of good soil management: increased carbon sequestration, which fights global warming. They also note the long held intellectual fallacy that all inputs are substitutable and that the fungibility of money will somehow feed the planet (an idea even more ludicrous than its proponents' claim that organic agriculture could never feed the world, I might add). Berry created the concept of "The Great Economy" and knows what he is talking about here.

For anyone who wants a quick primer on the interconnectedness of these issues and how any plan to address any of them will have to address all of them -- in a sustained fashion -- this short piece is a must-read.

Ethanolics Anonymous

If you are a grain farmer in the US, it's hard not to like the push for Ethanol as an alternative fuel. After all it has been a tough few years with thin to negative margins, and constant talk about doing away with the subsidies that function as profits in the Humpty-Dumpty economics of conventional agriculture. Now the price of corn is skyrocketing, and farmers' wallets fattening. Of course if you are a livestock farmer (or feedlot owner) you don't like the corn ethanol push because it raises ther cost of your main production input. But that is only part of the picture.

Myself, I think the price of grain ought to be higher (and subsidies lower) to remove some of the distortions from the market, and to remove the ad-hoc subsidy of non-farm (by that I mean CAFO) meat production. But I don't think straining our food producing acreage even further to grow more corn so we can continue to drive too inefficient vehicles too frequently, for too little reason is the way to do it. If we must make ethanol, let's do it right, with more appropriate, cellulosic crops.

An editorial in today's New York Times, "Honesty About Ethanol," [link] reminds those who might have forgotten that production economics is only one part of the food and fuel production puzzle. Climate change triggered by greenhouse gass emissions -- especially after the recent election -- is going to have to be a part of the analysis. Superficial analysis in support the 2007 Energy Bill looked at ethanol as essentially carbon neutral in that carbon released when burned was matched by the carbon sequestered when it was growing. This, of course, ignored conversion efficiency or the energy balance of ethanol production (itself a matter of persistent debate), but even more troubling are the indirect effects of altering the market economics for corn by stimulating a huge new demand.

Domestically, it means that farmers are taking land out of conservation programs and putting it into corn production. That land was functioning as a carbon sink (as well as wildlife habitat), and when it is plowed up much of that carbon is released. Internationally, it means that Third World Farmers, clear more land (think climate critical rainforest) to make up for the loss of now too expensive imported corn. Fact is there are plenty of waste materials -- called so because they currently go to waste, I guess! -- and some perennial grasses that offer a much better alternative than re-directiing food crops to fuel production. (We deal with this carbon / fuel / food question in more detail in our blog Sinks or Swim.)

Food and fuel; we've been binging too long. What we need is a 12 Step Program for our energy addiction; corn ethanol is just the hair of the dog.

Speaking Truth To Power, NOT

A Chinese blogger's entry on her country's melamine tainted baby milk powder scandal was reprinted in the Washington Post this morning, and should be read by everyone with a stake in reforming the industrial food system.

It is a soul searching piece that reaches behind the immediate, shocking reality of how industrialization and globalization of the food supply can lead to huge, widespread problems that the older, more regionalized system contained inherently -- due to scale, rather than any basic superiority or goodness.

Think back a year or so. Then it was American pet deaths ...now it is Chinese infants. What to do?

What Cui recounts is an anecdote, related by a country cousin, about a deeper corruption, what she sees as a moral failing of her countrymen that is a sort of perverse playout of the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) principle -- though NIMBY is by its nature, rather, a hypocritical anti-principle.

It involved tainted rice (I'll let you read the post yourself, here) which farmers in the cousin's region knew was poisoned, but sent off to market anyway, knowing it would end up far away and untraceable. This ability, this "freedom" to dump waste at a distance (NIMBY) is something that is only possible when the scale of production (of anything, but here, in this case, and especially, food) puts the scope of the production process "over the horizon," out of sight, out of mind in the same way that toxic trash from the American lifestyle is "exported" to the developing world.

Organic and Fair Trade certification systems (as well as previous government standards) were developed in response to this problem; the question of whether or not they are up to the task depends, I guess, on your assessment of essential human nature. No system can cure human moral weakness, and it is on the socialization, the institutionalization of moral weakness that Cui writes so movingly.

Industrialization, Scale and Chinese Food Scandals

An excellent article in the New York Times today gives a lot of the background on the Chinese baby milk powder scandal, and both its background, and how it was allowed to fester in the background while the government was focused on the Olympics. There is also a good discussion of the sweetheart relationship between large producers and the goverment, and how a one party state reduces the ability of a system to root out its own problems and heal them.

This is something I first became aware of in 1990, when I was sent by Organic Gardening magazine to write an article on the state of sustainable agriculture in recently "liberated" Central Europe. While each of the Soviet bloc countries had a unique agricultural situation based largely on how early and how completely its agricultural production had been socialized, one thing was the same for all: industrialization. Industrialism was more important than socialism in predicting how quickly each country would be able to recover and vibrant agricultural system...

Tiny Cars, Fuzzy Thinking

In an Op-Ed column in today's Washington Post, Anne Applebaum raises the important relationships between technology, equity and quality of life in our developing world. (Tiny Car, Tough Questions, Page A13)  She focuses on the developing world, using the introduction of the Tata Nano as an example of the double edge that making a middle class live accessible to a much larger population on earth will have. Comments posted on the WaPo site indicate that a fair number of people sense her conflation of ability to pay some sort of righteousness - when they are actually unrelated to the logical question at hand.

This is primarily a food, farming and technology blog so I want to point out how her general misunderstanding of the sociology of technology bleeds over into our world here in the food and farming biz because has apparently bit the biotech booster message big time and isn't even aware of it. Here's how:

 

Bt, Beta Carotene and the Big MACCs

Commodification and the Destruction of Efficacy

     On the one hand American agriculture can be seen as a huge success: the number of Americans required to till our fields has dropped from more than 60% to less than 2%, and only six percent of the farmers produce 56% of the crops; corn yields increased 333% over sixty years, to a point where agricultural products make up 10% of all exports. Whole industries have arisen to supply materiel to the farmer: in 1992 for example, 1.1 billion pounds of pesticidal chemicals (worth a solid eight billion dollars to GNP) and over four billion pounds of fertilizer (and this is only the active ingredient weights).1
     But there have been costs, too: falling water tables on a continental scale; chemical contamination of drinking water; eutrophication of lakes and streams; damaging outflows of both topsoil and nutrients into coastal estuaries. And these are just the environmental costs; there are social and economic costs as well, related to the eventual cleanup of pollution, the high energy input of modern, conventional agriculture, and the urban and suburbanization that result from the migration of farm populations into other employment sectors.      All this has been created by viewing agriculture strictly through an economic lens, though it is essentially a natural process. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists,

Industrial agriculture views the farm as a factory with 'inputs' (such as pesticides, feed, fertilizer and fuel) and 'outputs' (corn, chickens and so forth). The goal is to increase yield (such as bushels per acre) and decrease costs of production, usually by exploiting economies of scale.2

     This view of agriculture as a system of inputs and outputs has led, according to critics like Richard Lewontin of Harvard, to a situation where farmers are receiving a steadily declining portion of the 18% of the United States economy that flows from their farms and fields.3 Other factors are mechanization and the resultant plant and animal monocultures. Monoculture, at its current level, means growing literally thousands of contiguous acres of the same plant, which is an incredible biological incentive to the explosion of pest and disease populations. Both of these incentivize an increase in farm size, and a decrease in the number of crop varieties grown within the monoculture itself.4