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The E. coli Free Market

The E. Coli outbreak is caused by the deregualtion and mass production of food by corporate agriculture’s economies of scale.

By Joel Bleifuss

Since the advent of giant industrial enterprises in the late 19th century, corporate capitalism in the United States has been defined by its use of economies of scale to increase profits—profits further enhanced by the die-off of those businesses unable to compete. Today, vast corporate enterprises—protected by a legal system that defines corporations as persons endowed with the same constitutional… return to article

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    Excellent work Joel.
    As a small farmer on a family farm I watch with horror as municipal waste is “harvested” from the treatment plant in New London, a small city near here. Old farmers told me, years ago, not to spread manure from cows on cow pastures, that the parasites, bacteria and viruses that are being expelled from a species are active on that species. Just the natural stuff in ofal is dangerous enough, put it through an urban sewer system, adding in whatever people dump down the drains, God only knows what you are getting at the far end. Synagro is the company that collects New London’s biosolids (curds?), what they do with it, I haven’t found out yet, but if that is being spread on crop land, I don’t want to eat that food!
    There is a method for dealing with animal waste that offers some promise for preventing water and air fouling and produces energy to boot: Methane Digestion.
    In the process of cooking the manure slurry to shake out the methane, most of the nastiest stuff is destroyed, from what I’ve been able to learn so far, even the antibiotics are broken down. (I can’t confirm this and If you can, please de-bunk) I still wouldn’t put processed horse manure on my horse pastures.
    The other story here is the loss of ag land and farmers. While huge agribiz farms are dominant and bring all kinds of problems with them, try to come up with a plan to feed say, the Northeast, without them. Our growing season is about 18-20 weeks, out of 52, that’s a lot of hungry days. Only 3% of our population is employed at making food for all of US. Small scale. local farming, while often producing top quality produce, is spotty and suffers from uncertainty and inefficiency, big time. It’s tough to compete in the market when your costs are so out of scale compared to the huge combines. The rise of Organic as a brand has helped the small farmers around here as has the “boutique” market, fancy restaurants that show off their locally grown ingredients as a selling point. Farming is a very difficult business in northern states and most of the farms around us have planted their last crop: houses. We couldn’t go back to local farming if we had to, the land is gone.
    So you are faced with either factory farming or depopulating the cold-climate regions, which one is more likely?
    We need to take a clear-eyed look at harm reduction in factory farming, it’s here, it’s not going away, let’s make it healthy.
    Thanks for the digging on this, keep up the good work!

    United States Posted by CitizenV on Nov 25, 2006 at 9:28 AM
    Page 1 of 1 pages

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