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By Rick Weiss, Washington Post, January 30.
Video footage being released today shows workers at a California slaughterhouse delivering repeated electric shocks to cows too sick or weak to stand on their own; drivers using forklifts to roll the “downer” cows on the ground in efforts to get them to stand up for inspection; and even a veterinary version of waterboarding in which high-intensity water sprays are shot up animals’ noses — all violations of state and federal laws designed to prevent animal cruelty and to keep unhealthy animals, such as those with mad cow disease, out of the food supply.
The footage was taken by an undercover investigator for an animal welfare group, who wore a customized video camera under his clothes while working at the facility last year. It is evidence that anti-cruelty and food safety rules are inadequate, and that Agriculture Department inspection and enforcement need to be enhanced, said officials with the Humane Society of the United States, which coordinated the project. View the video on the Humane Society website (Warning – Graphic Video)
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Filed under: factory farms
The Board of Weld County Commissioners decided on a split vote Wednesday to continue a hearing until August 2008 that could revoke the dairy’s special permit to operate the dairy with 4,500 cows.
Of central concern to dairy neighbors is a substantial fly problem that they say has inundated their properties and homes. Commissioners are giving the dairy until August to absolve the pest situation.
“I would like this dairy to disappear,” said Wendy Rogers, who owns a farm next to the dairy. “The dairy is too big to manage naturally.”
Filed under: factory farms
The USDA informed Cornucopia today that it had closed its investigation into Dean Foods’ Horizon dairy in Paul, Idaho and another corporate-owned facility in Kennedyville, Maryland. The USDA investigation was in response to a formal legal complaint filed by the Cornucopia Institute in 2006.
“We know from our visit to the Idaho facility that they had no functional pasture meeting legal requirements and were unable to graze their huge dairy herd,” said Mark Kastel, codirector of the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute. Cornucopia’s legal complaint included interviews with the veterinarian and with livestock professionals associated with Horizon’s Maryland dairy indicating that they were not pasturing the animals there, either.
Filed under: factory farms
In the farm belt, a look at the extremes of agricultural production
By Tom Philpott, Grist, Oct. 10.
At first glance, Hardin County, located in the central part of the state an hour north of Des Moines, is just another rural county. It’s blanketed in corn and soy, and houses what’s become the sine qua non of rural Iowa: an ethanol plant. But Hardin isn’t just another rural county: it’s arguably the state’s Confined-Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) capital. The county’s farmers have kept hogs for as long as anyone can remember, but CAFOs didn’t start popping up until the early 1990s.
I drove through the area with three farmers who have been fighting the CAFO explosion. As we moved along country roads, every few miles a set of low-slung buildings would break through the monotony of corn and soy fields. Sometimes there would be two together; sometimes as many as six or eight lined up in two rows. You can’t just walk up to a hog confinement and look inside. CAFO operators are justly terrified that a trespasser could infect the hogs; animals raised this way have little in the way of immune systems. So the lawns in front of most CAFOs display “no trespassing” signs.
Each building, I learned, houses around 2,500 pigs. Often, a kind of big black pond separates the rows. The CAFO industry favors the word “lagoon” to describe these open repositories of feces and urine; I prefer “cesspool.” Newer CAFOs, I learned, can no longer utilize open cesspools. So they plunk the confinement building on top of the cesspool: 2,500 hogs standing over their own several-months’ accumulation of waste.
By Kathie Arnold
What makes a cow organic? The answer has certainly been controversial over the last several years, especially when it comes to grazing cows on pasture. However, I would submit that the National Organic Program regulation, which states that all ruminants must have access to pasture, has been clear right from the start to the vast majority of organic dairy farms and certifiers.
Only a small minority of operators and certifiers took advantage of the absence of a definitively worded regulation to minimize grazing; they also loosely interpreted, if not disregarded, the several citations to pasture requirements in the USDA regulations. This failure to come to the same understanding and application as everyone else seems to stem from a profit motive-to make more organic milk for the marketplace. For example, documents that have recently come to light show that the first operation of Aurora Organic Dairy, in Platteville, Colorado, apparently started out with about 70 acres of pasture for the 5,000 cows they were transitioning. Their self-serving interpretation of the regulation – “all ruminants must have access to pasture” – was that the livestock just needed to have access to pasture at some point in their life.
