Fieldale's Woes

I'm copying and pasting Harris Blackwood's article from the Gainesville Times because it hits close to home:

Fieldale Farms Corp., the Baldwin-based poultry processor, has announced the layoff of 20 administrative employees and plans to leave 10 other positions vacant.

Tom Hensley, executive vice president of the company said the layoffs were due to rising prices for feed and fuel.

“Our feed cost have increased $2 million a week,” Hensley said. “Our diesel fuel costs have increased $16,000 a day for a six-day week.”

Hensley, who has been in the business for 33 years, said the current situation “is as tough as I’ve seen it.”

The company has cut back production; however, Hensley said no jobs related to production were lost in the cutback. He said the company offered the employees a generous severance and is doing everything it can to help them find new employment.

He said the company has not cut back on the number of chickens being placed with contract farmers, however, the company has delayed placement of chicks by a day to extend the production cycle.

Hensley said other poultry companies are suffering from the two-pronged problem of feed and fuel costs.

Corn prices have skyrocketed in the past year due largely to the demand for corn for ethanol production.

The Fieldale executive said retail chicken prices cannot keep pace with the internal costs of production.

“People are just willing to pay so much for chicken, then, they’ll start eating beans,” Hensley said.

Industrial Vs. Grass-Fed in Three Minutes

Cows eat M&M's?



Thanks Philpott!

Global Food, Global Crisis

Grist reviews Paul Roberts' new book, The End of Food. The passage below, by Tom Philpott, speaks to the historical white elephant sitting among the foodies, locavores and even animal-rights advocates (although, as someone with intimate knowledge of a factory farm, I can hardly argue that there isn't room for a more humane food system):

But Robert's historical frame drives home a key point that his predecessors didn't quite nail down: In many ways, modern food production is an attractive response to centuries of chronic food insecurity. Who wants to spend nearly all of one's income on food, and rely on sugared tea as a key source of calories, as did the 19th-century British working class? Who wants to spend hours a day preparing food as peasant women did, not by choice but for survival? By the dawn of the 20th century, people quite understandably longed for food security and freedom from drudgery. The modern food system -- for all of the new problems it created -- largely met those desires, at least in the United States and Europe. The locavore movement will eventually have to confront them head on.

Philpott also writes that Monsanto is selling its rights to make Posilac, or rGBH...

Posilac had become increasingly marginal to Monsanto's profit growth, which derives mainly from its dominance of the genetically modified corn, soy, and cotton seed markets.

Vanity Fair's terrifying investigation of Monsanto: Harvest of Fear.

Catifsh & Co.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published a fine article on the embattled catfish industry in its August 6 edition (subscription required but follow the link for the picture; and while you're at it, do a google image search for giant catfish). I don't have any comments, except that the best catfish I've ever had was at Taylor Grocery in Taylor, Mississippi. It is interesting that catfish are very much a regional product, farmed primarily in Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama.

Increased feed prices, driven by record-high soybean and corn prices, have stressed the budgets of all U.S livestock farmers--beef, poultry, swine and catfish. But the catfish industry has suffered the most for two reasons, said, Terry Hanson, an agricultural economist at Mississippi State University.

One, feed is a larger share of the variable cost of catfish production, 52 percent in 2007, compared with 35 percent for hogs and 21 percent for cattle, he said.

Second, the U.S. catfish industry must contend with more imports. In 2007, imported catfish accounted for 36 percent of industry sales, compared with just 9 percent for beef, 4 percent for pork and less than 0.00001 percent for poultry products, Hanson said.

"These other industries, while they can't pass on all the higher feed costs, they can pass on some because they have no import that's going to fill the void if people decide not to purchase the higher-priced meat product," Hanson said.

Wow, look at the market dominance of domestic poultry! Here's a good trivia question: Why is it that trout are aggressively advertised as being wild-caught, but catfish as being farm-raised?

Ecocrit

"Of course, readers have always been willing to pull on their mental boots and journey to places in books they would never think of visiting in the flesh. Millions have read Walden and Life on the Mississippi, yet how many have built a hut in the woods or rafted down the river? What is new about contemporary readers is not their preference for indoor life, but how far indoors they are able to retreat and how long they are able to stay there. The boxes that shut us off from nature have become more perfect, more powerful, from all-electric mansions in the suburbs to glass towers in the city, from space shuttles to shopping malls. Today, the typical adult reader leaves a humming house in the morning, drives an air-conditioned car to a sealed office, works eight hours under fluorescent lights, stops on the way home at night to buy dyed vegetables and frozen meat wrapped in plastic, enters the house through a garage and locks the door. Except for lawns, which are fertilized and purified to an eerie shade of green, and a smoky sky, and a potted plant or two, everything this reader sees all day had been made by human beings. Only the body itself stubbornly upholds the claims of biology, and even this biological datum our reader treats with chemicals designed to improve or delay the workings of nature."

From "Speaking a Word for Nature," Scott Russell Sanders. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. UGA Press, 1996.

Also, upcoming from UGA Press: What Is a City? Rethinking the Urban After Hurricane Katrina edited by Phil Steinberg and Rob Shields ($19.95), a collection of essays by 12 planners, architects, policy-makers, and geographers.

Snapshots

Jennifer Campbell, from Tiger, Georgia:

“My husband thinks we're going to have another Depression. But the people these days don't know how to get along. What are they going to do without their TVs and cell phones? It's going to be ugly.”

Interviewed at Zack's Too gas station in Hoschton, Georgia.

Feed & Seed

In May I went to Maddox Feed & Seed in Jefferson, Georgia to interview the proprietors about how rising fuel costs, the price of corn, and the ongoing drought were affecting business. I spent two hours inside, gathered my quotes, and wrote an article for the newspaper. However, I could have grabbed a chair and stayed there all week. A feed-and-seed and farm supply store is a goldmine of decent people and good talk. Everybody who walks in has a story that'll make your hackles stand up and is ready to tell it. Unfortunately, I wonder how much longer places like Maddox will survive in North Georgia. Maddox itself is in a precarious position on the south end of Jefferson, as that part of the county is rapidly suburbanizing and pushing out its farmers.

The following is an assortment of quotations from the owner and her son, Caleb. Each is speaking to the worst case scenario of rising fuel and feed prices and an intensifying drought:

• “There's people been giving away horses.”
• “Drought, [no] hay, fuel, corn—what's going to happen next year?”
• “Despite what people think, we're not making a dollar a bag on a bag of corn.”
• “You can't find any hogs right now.”
• “Fertilizer is up 30-40 percent.”
• “The fertilizer companies have decided they're going to make money because the farmers [with corn] are going to make money.”
• “There's a lot of fields that were planted last year that are idle this year.”
• “The only end that's really making any money is the fuel end of stuff.”

Know Your Milk

What is rBGH?

I'm swiping this definition entirely from Ben & Jerry's, which produced a small pamphlet explaining its thoughts on a “synthetic, chemically-intensive, factory-produced food supply.” I love that they call out Monsanto and can't wait for the oncoming transnat war, as imagined by Kim Stanley Robinson, that will end capitalism, democracy, and civilization as we know it. Right now I'm hoping it's a no-holds-barred bout between Exxon-Mobil in one corner and an alliance of ConAgra and Archer Daniels Midland in the other.

Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone is a genetically engineered copy of a naturally occurring hormone produced by cows. The naturally occurring hormone regulates the amount of milk a cow can produce; the genetically engineered copy of the hormone is used specifically to boost those amounts.

rBGH is manufactured by Monsanto Company, which sells the drug to dairy farmers under the name POSILAC (though it's more commonly referred to as BGH, rBGH, BST or rBST); farmers inject rBGH/POSILAC into cows for the purpose of increasing the cows' milk production.

If you read the label information on POSILAC, you'll see th manufacturer indicates that injections of the drug may cause a wide variety of serious healthy problems in cows. Some studies report a 79% increase in mastitis (infection of the udder) resulting in greater need for antibiotics, reduced pregnancy rates, cystic ovaries and uterine disorders, digestive disorders and lacerations, enlargements and calluses of the knee. As to milk's nutritional content, some studies have shown that the use of rBGH increases the time during which cows give milk with decreased protein.

The use of rBGH to treat dairy cows is prohibited in Canada and the European Union.

For Ben & Jerry's, rBGH solves “a problem that never existed.” Besides the health of the cows, their biggest concern is that the FDA “does not require that food products be labeled when they contain milk from treated cows” because that agency sees no qualitative difference, at least for the health of consumers, between normal milk and synthetic rBGH milk. And since there are also no “uniform state labeling standards,” shoppers often purchase and drink milk from rBGH-treated cows without knowing it.

Ben & Jerry's duly notes that the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (www.vpirg.org) helped compile this information. I owe Claire thanks for passing it along.

Stepping Away from Food: The Nature of the Beast

Continuing from the previous post, perhaps I'm being overly sensitive to the often cadaverous finger-pointing of the newspaper trade in general. To each his own, and it's probably unacceptable to expect conscience and creativity from something that never promised either in the very first place. But, on the other side, “baby accidentally suffers burns in hot bath”—come on? We all open and close our eyes to the overly mundane and inane of our meager circumferences; giving ready voice to it only adds to a chattering chaotic world that's already threatening to slip through our collective grip.

There's too much data. The world is too cold and objective. I don't need computer read-outs of social entropy. I'm looking for a human voice.

The Times-Picayune has concluded an eight-part feature on one local homicide. Is it a harbinger of a different kind of reporting? I'm not sure. The behind-the-scenes account seems to borrow something from cable television. But it's damn interesting, and the reader is actually allowed to see and feel for the players: the detectives, the family, and the victim.

You're Never Going To Believe This: Gardens

The Washington Post published an article in the August 3 edition about the rise in the number of vegetable gardens nationwide. Honestly, there's nothing really new here, and I think I've seen the same article, at some point in the past several months, on the Web sites of every major news publication in the U.S. The angle has usually been the same: Rising fuel and food costs are leading to more locally-grown and home-grown tomatoes. I'm not necessarily complaining—Lord knows, it's heartening to see stories about community food efforts pop up on the Times-Picayune and Journal-Constitution. But at this point, as a pure news item, it seems like a fall-back and another space filler.

You know as someone who advocates a sacramental vision, like that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, I'm just nutty about the dreadful modern worship of numbers. However, I did find one passage in the article, and its horrible statistics, particularly interesting:

In New York City, more than 3 million residents, 38 percent of the population, had difficulty affording food last year, according to a recent report by the Food Bank for New York City -- up 13 percentage points from 2003. Food costs rose 15 percent during that period. The number of people using soup kitchens and food pantries hit 1.3 million last year, up 24 percent from 2004. LINK

Did I read that right? People are starving. Hopefully, there's something here that envisages organic, locally-grown food as a public right, and not simply a boutique, status-sensitive icon, like an iPhone. You could even ditch the organic part and just increase the number of urban gardens. Beyond the philosophical and theological arguments about the experience of being close to food, there's simply no drawback in a ubiquity of food. Inundate the world with vegetables from California, Florida, Chile, and around the block. I find no sin in a rotted cucumber if everyone's belly is full.

It's such a fine line, haranguing against the wrong kind of food while people go hungry. Social justice and the long-term health of inner-city residents consuming food products high in artificial hormones, antibiotics, trans fats, etc. has to be secondary to immediate needs. Yet there's no revolution without shocking the system.

Which leads me to another article. Los Angeles is trying to zone out fast-food restaurants in the same way as liquor stores in order to protect the health of its citizens. William Saletan of Slate gives his opinion here.