Activists Attack Modern Ag With Misinformation

Friday, Apr. 23, 2010
The Problem With Factory Farms
By Claire Suddath

If you eat meat, the odds are high that you've enjoyed a meal made from an animal raised on a factory farm (also known as a CAFO). According to the USDA, two percent of U.S. livestock facilities raise an estimated 40 percent of all farm animals. This means that pigs, chickens and cows are concentrated in a small number of very large farms. But even if you're vegetarian, the health and environmental repercussions of these facilities may affect you. In his book Animal Factory, journalist David Kirby explores the problem of factory farms, from untreated animal waste to polluted waterways. Kirby talks to TIME about large-scale industrial farming, the lack of government oversight, and the terrible fate of a North Carolina river.

What exactly is a factory farm?

The industrial model for animal food production first started with the poultry industry. In the 1930s and 40s, large companies got into the farming business. The companies hire farmers to grow the animals for them. The farmers typically don't own the animals, the companies do. It's almost like a sharecropping system. The company tells them exactly how to build the farm, what to grow and what to feed. They manage everything right down to what temperature the barn should be and what day the animals are going to be picked up for slaughter. The farmer can't even eat his or her own animals. People who grow chickens for Purdue in Maryland have to go down to the market and buy Purdue at the store.

We collectively refer to these facilities as factory farms, but that's not an official name. The government designation is CAFO, which stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. Basically it's any farm that has 1,000 "animal units" or more. A beef cow is an animal unit. These animals are kept in pens their entire lives. They're never outside. They never breathe fresh air. They never see the sun.

And the fact that there are thousands of animals packed into one farm is also a problem.

Oh, definitely. There are simply too many animals in too small of a place. In a traditional farm, a sustainable farm, you grow both crops and animals. There is a pasture and you have a certain number of animals per acre. But when you have 2,000 cows per acre instead of two, you have a problem. You can't fit them in a pasture, you fit them in a building. You can't grow enough crops to feed them; you have to ship in their feed. You don't have enough land to absorb their waste. It has nowhere to go. Read More

I would think that true journalists would have a hard time calling this an interview. Usually in an interview, the journalist would ask questions to be answered. In this case, there was an activist that actually made several statements of her own belief and then let the author of the book comment on them. In fact, it’s obvious that the person who posed as a journalist for this article didn’t do any research at all because she didn’t challenge the false claims made by Kirby. His description of a CAFO isn’t right, nor are his statements about how the animals are fed or handled. A journalist would have uncovered that, an activist helps spread the misinformation.

Well-Fed Ag Critics Continue Attacks

Critics of American Agriculture Intensify Efforts

Written by Stewart Truelsen　
Thursday, 08 October 2009 11:04

This has been a good year for the critics of mainstream farming and ranching. Time magazine ran a cover story at the end of August sharply critical of modern farm production methods and the nation’s food supply. It said "food is increasingly bad for us, even dangerous" and blamed obesity on American agriculture.

The president of the American Farm Bureau Federation was once on the cover of Time when that was considered a huge honor. Now, the magazine is a shadow of its former self in readership, editorial content and influence, but the recent story was a slap in the face to farmers and ranchers nevertheless.

The University of Wisconsin chose Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food, to be given to all incoming freshmen this fall and incorporated into more than 60 courses from engineering to art. Pollan is a journalism professor from the University of California at Berkeley. His writing is critical of modern agriculture, food science and technology and the Western diet, including meat products.　　　

Wisconsin Farm Bureau President Bill Bruins, a dairy farmer, called Pollan’s book "a direct attack on the way we farm today." The university claimed it was not endorsing Pollan’s views in choosing the controversial book.　

A woman in the audience told a reporter, "Unfortunately, if we don’t show up and show our side, many of his claims will become truth." She is right about that. Mainstream farming and ranching are under an intensifying attack by critics who believe they can find a gullible audience. Read More

If you don’t think that agriculture is under constant attack in this country, then this article does a nice job of showing the play by play from just the last few weeks. When you reflect back over all of these events, you have to ask yourself what the end goal is. The only logical conclusion that you can come up with is that there is a segment of our society that wants production agriculture eliminated. Of course along with that plan, they also expect food to continue magically appearing in the grocery store. Good luck with that.

More On Walsh

Quittin’ TIME
8/26/2009
By AgWeb

If you’ve been by the magazine stand at your local supermarket or library, you’ll note that one of the nation’s major weekly magazines has as this week’s cover story a blistering attack on conventional agriculture. [And I see fellow AgWeb blogger Matt Bogard has beat me to the punch, but as most fighters know, a 1-2 combination is most effective].

The Aug. 21st issue of Time magazine is entitled “the Real Cost of Cheap Food.” What’s mostly notable about the piece is how predictable and derivative it truly is. There is not a single new fact or assertion in the article that hasn’t long been trotted out by the various anti- activists. You know the ones: Anti-large farms, anti-antibiotic use, anti-carnivores, anti-change. In reading through the article, I kept waiting for something really provocative to appear, but in truth, it read like a college newspaper article. By that I mean that the author didn’t really sift his facts or consider whether the source of them was pushing their own agenda. He just threw them all in the article, because (in ironic comparison to the article itself, which says that too much cheap food leads to obesity) stuffing all those criticisms in one story makes for a very fattening diatribe. Read More

I believe that one of the most frustrating part of all of these negative articles being printed about agriculture is that they are nothing but opinion pieces yet they are trying to portray it as a factual, researched piece. And this isn’t even up for debate because Walsh interviewed several people actually involved in food production and yet chose not to tell both sides of the story. This blatant attempt to NOT tell both sides of the story probably speaks towards Walsh’s integrity as a whole and his respect for journalism.

Walsh Refuses Accurate Info About Beef Production

TIME Publishes Biased View of Beef Industry
An attempt by the NCBA to educate TIME magazine reporter seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
By: Compiled by staff
Published: Aug 24, 2009

The cover story of the Aug. 31 edition of TIME is entitled "The Real Cost of Cheap Food." In the article reporter Bryan Walsh painted modern beef production with an unflattering brush of a wide range of claims. He included common myths of over-reliance on corn and antibiotics, poor farm animal living conditions, and how meat is leading to obesity.

The National Cattlemen's Beef Association was contacted by Walsh last week asking what the cost of raising a 1200 pound steer from birth to slaughter in a conventional production method. NCBA Executive Director of Communications Daren Williams was concerned, knowing that Walsh had written a piece last September that was very biased and slanted against the food industry and beef industry. In that article Walsh accused livestock production of causing global warming and that eating meat increased the risk of heart disease as well as several other blanket statements that could not and are not substantiated by science.

"I had some immediate concerns obviously whether or not Bryan Walsh was interested in writing a fair and balanced piece on modern food production," Williams said. "At that time I put him in touch with and insisted really that he speak with a number of experts and actual producers." Read More

Bryan Walsh’s article in TIME magazine was a ridiculous compilation of nearly every inaccurate stereotype about modern agriculture. The lack of effort to write an article in which both sides were presented and the reader allowed to decide was glaring to say the least. Even with the ability to talk to people in the industry and see for himself how things work, he chose the lazy way out. If farmers and ranchers put as much effort into their work as Walsh did, we’d all be hungry and naked right now.

Time Magazine Insults WWII Vets

Iwo Jima Vets Hot Over Global Warming Pic

Time Magazine is in hot water with some World War II veterans over its April 28 cover illustration, which addresses "How to Win The War On Global Warming."

The magazine takes what is arguably one of the most famous war photographs of all time -- U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi -- and manipulates it to replace the flag and staff with a tree.

A Web site describing Time's story as pushing "more global warming alarmism" talked with retired Lt. John Keith Wells, who it said was the leader of the platoon captured in the Pulitzer prize-winning image by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal.

"That global warming is the biggest joke I’ve ever known," Wells told the Business & Media Institute.
Donald Mates, also identified as an Iwo Jima veteran, told the publication, "It’s an absolute disgrace." "Whoever did it is going to hell. That’s a mortal sin. God forbid he runs into a Marine that was an Iwo Jima survivor," he said. Read More

The idea that you could somehow compare the World War II victory at Iwo Jima with global warming can only be described as a self serving stunt to sell magazines. How completely inappropriate it is to use this image of our American heroes to push an agenda such as global warming.