Food and Ag Roundup
Food Sovereignty: The Fine Line Between Right to Farm and Right to Pollute
In Idaho, some are calling right-to-farm legislation right-to-pollute. What's the difference between food sovereignty and a free ride? Also: Frito-Lay gets healthy, a look at land-grant universities and more.By Courtney Lowery Cowgill, 3-31-11
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On the east coast several towns have jumped onto a “food sovereignty” bandwagon, passing ordinances that free farmers from too many regulations. Here in the Rockies, the idea is taking on a different flair in a bill making its way through the Idaho legislature.
According to this story in the Idaho Press-Tribune, the bill would, among other things:
Limit “nuisance” lawsuits against ag operations, protect activities like construction or chemical applications and void local ordinances that call ag activities a nuisance.
While some have dubbed it “right-to-farm” legislation, others say it’s more like “right-to-pollute.”
From Mike Butts’s story in the Press-Tribune: (which, by the way does an very thorough job of covering the bill. Read the whole story.)
The issue hits home for some Idahoans.
Paula and Daryl Weston moved into their Parma home in the mid-1980s. Paula said onion dumping began near the property a few years later, and has since gotten worse. The couple can’t drink or cook with tap water at the home because of the onion flavor, and they fear the value of their property has substantially depreciated, she said.
(Side note: Click here for a cool map from the organization Grown in the City that shows where other food sovereignty measures are being considered—including one in Montana, two in Wyoming and one in Utah.)
GMO
In GMO news this week, Washington Post writer Lyndsey Layton last week nicely laid out what she calls “a battle raging within U.S. agriculture.” The piece explores how with a few recent swift moves, the Obama Administration has gone from a friend of sustainable agriculture to a formidable foe, all because of the GMO issue. The piece is certainly worth a read, but so are the comments, so read all the way down.
In other, way more freaky GMO news, China is genetically altering cows to produce human milk. Seriously.
LAND-GRANT UNIVERSITIES
One of my favorite reads this week is this nice piece on Good magazine about the mandates of land-grant universities. The author, Claire Stanford raises these questions, among others:
Where do the ideas of organic, local, and sustainable agriculture fit into the land-grant system? And, most importantly, in this age of agribusiness, when I walk by the Cargill Building on my way to class, how is big money affecting both the curriculum and research at land-grant institutions?
PESTICIDE LAWSUIT
Farm groups, led by the Farm Bureau, have stepped in on an ongoing lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency that alleges the agency violated the Endangered Species Act by approving certain pesticide use. As Chris Clayton writes for DTN Progressive Farmer:
Farm Bureau stated the Center for Biological Diversity’s massive lawsuit seeks to restrict or even ban the use of pesticides while EPA and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services engage in consultation, on the mere chance that a protected species might be affected. The sweeping scope of the lawsuit and the lack of regulatory framework to complete consultations efficiently threatens to impose additional and unnecessary pesticide use restrictions for years, if not decades.
HEALTHY SCHMEALTHY
Those Lays chips you’ve been avoiding because of the load of MSG they pack? It’s all over—for you and and your hips. (And by “you” I might very well mean “me.")
Frito-Lay announced this week that it is giving some of it’s products a health makeover
and according to this report in the Chicago Tribune, in doing so it joins a slew of other companies doing the same.
But, MSG or not, health advocates are cautioning that it’s still all junk food.
Marion Nestle, writing on her Food Politics blog, called it:
What’s going on here? Processed food makers must be in trouble. “Healthy” and “natural” are the only things selling these days.
But isn’t a “healthy” processed snack food an oxymoron? They can tweak and tweak the contents, but these products will still be heavily processed. ...
And as I keep saying, just because a processed food is a little bit less bad than it used to be, doesn’t necessarily make it a good choice.
SUSTAINABLE AG GETS MORE STUDY SUPPORT
A study out of the University of Georgia (click here for the study) shows that Salmonella has a harder time growing in organic poultry.
Meanwhile two new reports from the UN are urging a “more sustainable approach to agriculture,” according to the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development.
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Courtney Lowery Cowgill is a writer and editor (formerly of these pages) who also runs Prairie Heritage Farm, a small farm in Central Montana. She and her husband grow vegetables, turkeys, ancient and heritage grains and sometimes a little ruckus. As a farmer and writer, she works on and follows food and agriculture issues closely and each week, rounds up the top stories on the web in this arena for New West. Have an ag story you think should be included in next week’s roundup? You can reach Courtney at courtney@newwest.net.
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Comments
People move in, obviously living on trusts, and think they can force all their neighbors to live by thier rules.
So they find something....anything, and start filing lawsuits, complaining, etc.
Why move to Idaho or Montana if you don't like the neighbors?
We do fine without the help.
MegaHogFarm is not moderation. It might be a business model, but the hog is an omnivore, whose bodily functions mimic to some extent ours. In essence, when you have several thousand hogs on one farm in a confined animal breeding operation, or feeding them out, you do have to understand that however many hogs you have are representing more than one human for every hog, in the waste disposal stream. If a town has to have a certain level of sewage collection and treatment, it would follow that hog farms must have sewage treatment facilities that would serve a small town, or a large one, depending on how many hogs are to be contained on the ground at any one time. Common sense. There are many issues there, including odors, disease and insect vectors, and ground water pollution issues. And one would have to think any large concentration of livestock would have all the same issues, and societal obligations. If that is "a right to farm" issue, there is nothing about that "right" that is a pass on human health and environmental safety. Moderation and attention to details and we don't need mitigation for what should never have been a problem.
That said, we only have to look at Zimbabwe to know what happens when you purposefully shut down large farming operations for a different societal model. In their case, it was to rid the country of European capital, people, and practices. The very real result was that Zimbabwe went from a food exporting country to a country with the most need for food help on the continent. Without fertilizer, water delivery systems for irrigation, and a land redistribution favoring government cronies and government functionaries with arms, the land is mostly now in the most primitive of tribal agricultural practices, which are honored here as being "organic." Organic is a good model to sell higher priced, strictly supervised and grown, low volume food to those who can and want to pay more for better food. The model does not feed the world, however. Factory farming is the only way to feed the world. Better we GMO some sort of population limitations in our food, and as a species, reproduce at a much lower rate. That is a "go nowhere" idea of a nano second life. I understand. But food and population are married and never to be divorced. With your reproductive right comes the right to starve. Limit farming practices and don't limit population growth, and tell me the gain you intend to receive.
I manage a small farm. My job is to use all the tools available to produce the most and best fruit I might. Before the arrival of the Spotted Wing Drosophila fruit fly from Asia, just three years ago at the most, I had worked on an Integrated Pest Management program that was very successful, and I had eliminated all insecticides but one mid winter application to control winter moth or span worm, which is a bloom cluster feeder in spring. Now I have to spray insecticides weekly all during the season we have ripe fruit. There is no market for collapsed, rotting fruit feeding an maggot inside it. You pick a nice berry, pack it and send it to market, and the fly egg inside it hatches and all the while the fruit is in transit, or sitting on the market shelf, the maggot is not only destroying the berry host, but spreading bacteria infected waste to other fruit. Ugly deal. I either spray EPA approved pesticides, or the market eats rotting fruit. You know how that works out. So farmers, through no fault of their own, have world travelers bringing no end to exotic pests to this country where there is no native predator or parasite for that insect or disease, and if you want to eat, we have to spray. If you want flawless products, we have to control the pests.
As far as the onions being dumped, in my neck of the woods cull onions have been winter sheep feed for a long time. I just imagine in the wolf country there is just now no way to run sheep even close to the barn without the danger of mass killings of your sheep. If dogs from the local five acre ranchettes don't get them, then coyotes, cougars, and bobcats will. Add wolves, and "why bother?" becomes the watchword. Nevertheless, sheep eat cull onions and do well on them.
My worry is about Japanese nuclear fallout and my irrigation water. I am not irrigated out of a well. We use a surface water right, and the creek is from several hundred thousands of acres of watershed. I wonder if we will have isotopes, albeit in very minor amounts, in our fruit that was not there in the past. I do know that organic milk, just because the cows are on pasture most of the year, will show radioactive isotopes in higher amounts than cows still feeding on last year's hay and silage, and the confined cow dairies will not have the early exposure organic cows will. And I guess the same will apply to game, feral horses, free range chickens. Not that it will be of any amount that will offer a health risk, but just being there will mean our energy sources in the future are going to be more constrained that we might want.
I think the locavore model is great. Diversity and the ability to use heritage seed, farm away from monoculture, use the waste stream for soil amendments, and all the other benefits have a growing place in the food supply. The only problem is that to feed the world, or even provide a healthy diet to all children and their parents, we must have industrial agriculture. If MegaAg is stupid enough to bully their way through the political process to the detriment of locavore thinking, all that will happen is that they will create conflict, and we will not feed the populace. I use a burn down herbicide called Rely. Only now it has been changed and the new Rely is a little hotter, and as I read the label, it was created to use with GMO Rely Ready crops. You do have to wonder if all the annuals grown for food are now going to have their own pesticide chemistries with crop resistance to the chemical, and the pests theoretically not resistant. Guess what?? We have Roundup Ready seed because Roundup has lost efficacy in some weeds, and that is the basis for using the genes of resistant plants (weeds) to offer Roundup resistance in crop plants. Herbicides losing their "oomph" and not getting the job done is the basis for the GMO crops for pesticide use. Somehow, you wonder where this all ends. We know where it is ending in antibiotics for humans. Most every infection is becoming antibiotic resistant. We are losing our medicines. Maybe that will solve the food issue. We will all die of once easily treatable infections, just like our livestock and our crops.