Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Attacking Food Production

Farm law underwrites nauseous, large-scale pollution
By Larry Beahan
Updated: 01/05/09 6:26 AM

The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing a well-deserved tax on the greenhouse gas methane, produced by New York State’s 146,600 dairy cows. Industrial farm lobbyists seem to have gotten to Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N. Y., because he calls such control “absurd.” The senator has stepped into something that smells.

We all favored “Right to Farm Laws.” Then corporations invented Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, known as CAFOs. These polluting profit machines flew in under the radar. Now they produce 80 percent of our milk and meat. We have 14 of them in Erie County. Wyoming County has the highest concentration of them in the state.

In 2003, 1,000 small New York farms closed, unable to compete with expensive, federally subsidized CAFOs. These factory farms can feed 7,500 cows jammed into tiny lots. The manure drains into lagoons to evaporate into the air and seep into the water. Read More

The pure hatred for modern livestock facilities is quite apparent from the Sierra Club. It’s the same old song and dance though that Sierra Club normally puts out. They tell people how unbearable the smell is, how the environmental damage will be worse than dumping nuclear waste on the ground, etc. I have been around much, much bigger operations than the ones mentioned here and have never run into these smells that I always read about. The fact of the matter is that there is no sound science ever utilized by groups like these. The UN study has been debunked several times. This article only uses the Sierra Club’s only weapon, and that is emotion.

No comments: