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The Conventional Food System is Fragile

Posted in Food for Thought

Many people think that growing food the conventional way is the only way to feed the world. After all, that’s what they’ve been told for years. Conventional farming practices have created a system that is fragile because it relies on many outside factors to continue functioning. The failure of any one of these could lead to higher food prices or worse, the failure of millions of acres of crops or widespread death of livestock.  

Reliance on Drugs, Pesticides, and Herbicides

When an industrial farm crams thousands of animals into a building, they create an ideal environment for pathogens. The same goes for cropland. When you have thousands of the same plant in a relatively small area, pests that target that plant have a virtually unlimited supply of food.

In confinement animal feeding operations (CAFOs) this requires the use of antibiotics. The overuse of antibiotics has led to antibiotic resistant bacteria. Herbicide resistant weeds are showing up in croplands. Nature abhors a monoculture and is fighting back against these unnatural farming practices. Nowhere in nature will you find only one species of plant or animal. Nature thrives on diversity.

The question is, what happens when we run out of effective antibiotics? At our current trajectory, it’s not a matter of if, but when. Most confinement operations feed antibiotics on a continuous basis. Some of these antibiotics are not even necessary. Some operations feed antibiotics to speed growth. Others to prevent disease. All the while, bacteria are reproducing and mutating.

According to the CDC, overuse and misuse of antibiotics leads to bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics.[4] Once that happens, this bacteria quickly become the dominant bacteria since there is no other competition. It’s unclear how many drug resistant diseases were developed in factory farms. Some undoubtedly came from us. After all, livestock farms are not the only ones abusing antibiotics.

In 2013, the CDC published a report outlining the to 18 drug-resistant threats. Among them were: Clostridium difficile which causes 250,000 infections each year and 15,000 deaths. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) causes over 80,000 infections each year and over 11,000 deaths. Streptococcus pneumoniae is the leading cause of bacterial pneumonia and meningitis in the United States with 1.2 million infections and 7,000 deaths.

The Electricity Cannot Go Out

This is mostly a problem for industrial animal operations. Namely pig and chicken farms. These farms use electricity for ventilation, distributing feed, and monitoring the operation. These buildings need constant ventilation to keep methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and other toxins from building up. If the fans stop running for even a few minutes, the pigs or chickens will start suffocating.[1]

A few years back, a wind storm blew through northern Virginia. Most of the region was out of power for over a week. Many confinement operations lost thousands of pigs and millions of chickens. Meanwhile at polyface farm, a pasture based sustainable farm, most of the animals had no idea the power was out. The only real damage was from the wind storm itself. Many pasture shelters were blown away, leaving the chickens to wonder what happened to their shade. These chickens were quickly herded up in temporary shelters until their individual shelters could be rebuilt. Very few chickens died at polyface, because they did not depend on electricity.

What if the Water Runs Out?

Conventional farming uses a lot of water. You may have heard about the struggle between Los Angeles and the farmers upstream on the Colorado river. Los Angeles claims that the farmers are using too much water leaving them with a water shortage. The farmers claim that they need the water or they’ll go out of business.

High yield corn does not mean that a corn plant produces more corn per plant. What it really means is that you can plant more plants per acre. More plants need more water. Whereas an acre of corn decades ago might have been able to survive on rainwater, a high yield acre of corn needs to be irrigated. Either from groundwater or rivers.

You’ve likely seen the round fields of the Midwest. Many round plots next to each other. You might wonder why they don’t make them square to use all of the land. The reason they are round is that they are using a center pivots to water the crops. A long arm rotates around a center which provides water to sprinklers. Most of these center pivots use groundwater. And they use a lot.

“Corn production in the U.S. erodes soil about 12 times faster than the soil can be reformed, and irrigating corn mines groundwater 25 percent faster than the natural recharge rate of groundwater.”[2]

David Pimentel, professor at Cornell University.

Cropland is Eroding Away

It may not surprise you, but bare ground is very susceptible to erosion. Without dense cover, rain and wind can easily break soil apart and carry it away. Think of grass like clothing. Grass is essentially clothing for soil. You wouldn’t go outside without clothes on, why should the Earth have to go without its clothes?

“Row crops are highly susceptible to erosion because the vegetation does not cover the entire soil surface.”

Food, Energy, and Society by David and Marcia Pimentel[7]

A project conducted by the Land Stewardship Project showed that pasture used for grazing can have up to 80% less erosion than cropland.[8] This is not a small problem. The estimated acreage for the four major crops, corn, soybean, wheat, and cotton is approximately 240 million acres.[10] This type of farming, which leaves its soil exposed for much of the year has caused the United States to lose as much as 30% of its topsoil in the last 200 years.[7, 9] Remember the dust bowl?

The saddest part about this, is that a majority of the corn and soybeans grown in the US are not necessary. Corn ethanol production is hopelessly inefficient. It takes more than a gallon of fossil fuel to make a gallon of ethanol. Feeding grain to cows is another waste. Cows are perfectly capable of living off nothing but grass, yet we burn millions of gallons of fossil fuel every year to grow and transport grain to feed them.

As disappointing as this is, it’s not surprising. After all, there are no subsides to raise cattle and conserve grasslands. All federal farm subsidies go toward grains, which require plowing.

Farmers are Getting Old

As of 2012, the average age of farmers in America is 58 years old.[6] This number has only been going up, and will probably continue to go up. Why? Because getting into conventional farming is expensive. To be a chicken farmer, you have to spend $200,000 to $400,000 up front to build the specialized buildings required by the poultry companies. Hog farmers face a similar situation.

Independence is being wrung out of modern farmers. Open markets have all but been eliminated. A hog farmer who doesn’t have a contract with a pork company will find himself getting even less money for his hogs at auction. Chicken farmers don’t even own their birds, so losing a contract means their expensive buildings sit empty, losing money with every mortgage payment.

Crop farmers have also faced the consequences of the USDA’s “get big, or get out” doctrine. With grain prices lower than the cost to grow the grains, farmers rely on subsidies to survive. Even with subsidies, many farmers still have to take on jobs to pay the bills.

Needless to say, many children of farmers are moving to the city to get higher paying jobs. And their parents aren’t necessarily upset. They would rather their children make a good living than struggle like they do every day.

Industrial Farming Needs Cheap Energy

Energy is cheap. In fact, energy is the cheapest it has ever been in the history of the world. Never before has it been so cheap to ship products across the country or the world.

It’s never been so cheap to farm. Tractors running on cheap fuel have revolutionized farming. An acre was originally defined as the amount of land a farmer with oxen could till in one day. One acre a day. Now a farmer can till many dozens of acres a day. All from the comfort of his climate controlled tractor.

This is only one small part of the whole system. The entire conventional food system relies on cheap energy. It needs cheap fuel to transport components thousands of miles. It needs cheap energy to run the factories. It needs cheap mining and cheap refining to provide cheap fertilizers.

If energy becomes expensive, several things happen. It suddenly becomes very expensive to transport food thousands of miles. Manufacturing of chemical fertilizer becomes expensive. Transportation costs turn cheap grain into not-so-cheap grain. All of this would lead to food prices going up, way up. The more processed a food is, the more cheap energy it needs.

We all know how volatile the price of oil can be. All it takes is a hurricane in Louisiana and the price of oil goes up by nearly $70 a barrel.[11] The more oil we pump out of the ground, the harder it becomes to find new sources. We’ve gone from finding oil literally spewing out of the ground to searching miles offshore in the ocean. Many experts worry that we will eventually run out of oil. If that is true, then say goodbye to cheap energy.

Sustainable Farming is Inherently More Resilient

When the electricity goes out on a pasture based farm, most of the animals wouldn’t even know. They’re all outside, or in shelters that don’t need electricity to operate. The small amount of electricity required to run certain parts of the farm can be supplied by generators until the power comes back on.

While cheap energy benefits sustainable farms like it does industrial farms, they don’t require it. Sustainable farms don’t need massive machines to operate. Many small sustainable farms don’t even have small tractors. With fuel usage so low, even a doubling in the price of oil would not significantly impact a sustainable farm. At Polyface farm, a sustainable farm in Virginia, Joel Salatin estimated that fuel cost only accounted for about 5% of their expenses. They could afford to pay 2 to 3 times as much for fuel and still be okay. Try paying twice as much for gas with a conventional farm.

Pests and disease cannot thrive in a diverse environment. When a chicken pathogen hatches out in chicken manure, it needs to find a chicken to infest. In a confinement farm this is easy. But on a sustainable farm, the chickens are moved everyday to new ground, leaving those newly hatched pathogens behind before they can infest a new host.

Water is another resource that sustainable farms do not need as much of, especially per acre. This is mainly because sustainable farms raise less animals per acre. Proponents of industrial farming would claim that this is less efficient, and that’s true. But is also easier on the environment. Nature is not designed to have thousands or millions of animals living on an acre in perpetuity.

Conventional farming may be facing a lack of new talent, sustainable farming is attracting a lot of folks who want to get out of the cubicle and help the environment. It isn’t even about the money for some, it’s about communing with nature. That’s the beauty of sustainable farming, not only is it good for the environment, it’s good for the farmers as well.



  1. Righteous Porkchop, Nicolette Hahn Niman, 2010
  7. Food, Energy, and Society, David Pimentel and Marcia Pimentel, 2007
  8. Defending Beef, Nicolette Hahn Niman, 2014
  9. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, David R. Montgomery, 2012

Why Grass Fed Beef is Better

Posted in Food for Thought




100% Grass Fed Beef is Healthier





100% Grass Fed Beef is Safer




Ammonia in Your Beef?





100% Grass Fed Beef is More Sustainable





Corn-Fed Beef is not Sustainable






100% Grass Fed Beef is More Humane








Feedlot Beef is Not Humane







Choose Local Beef





  8. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan, 2016

More Regulation is not the Answer

Posted in Food for Thought

Does the government know what’s best for you? Are government officials smarter than you? The answers to those questions should determine whether the government has the right to dictate what food you eat. The more regulations we place on the food industry, the harder it becomes for small producers to compete. Government regulation always favors the big guys, they’re the ones with the money.

Foster Farms Sold Contaminated Meat Under Inspection

March 2013, doctors along the west coast begin seeing patients with cases of food poisoning. For awhile they simply treat them, not thinking much about it. What they don’t realize is that one by one, an outbreak is forming. By June, PulseNet reports an unusual number of salmonella infections on the west coast, primarily California.1

In July another four reports of salmonella come in. Several strains show antibiotic resistance. An investigation reveals that 80% of patients reported eating chicken, 48 of which bought chicken produced by Foster Farms, a California based firm. Foster farms product is found in a patient’s home and tests positive for Salmonella Heidelberg.1

After investigating Foster Farms, the USDA sends a letter. It states that the positive samples coupled with the illnesses suggest that the sanitary conditions at the facility could pose a serious ongoing threat to public health. Foster Farms promises to increase food safety controls.2

Two days later, Consumer Reports announced that it had found a dangerous strain of salmonella in foster farms chicken it bought in July. Consumer Reports called on Foster Farms and the retail outlets that sell Foster Farms chicken to recall the contaminated chicken. No recall was made by foster farms. Kroger and Costco issue their own recalls. The outbreak now totals 338 individuals in 20 states.1

Despite Foster Farm’s promise to food safety, their plant in Livingston, CA is cited 154 times between October 2013 and March 2014. The plant is only closed once by the USDA due to  “an infestation of live cockroaches” and “egregious insanitary conditions.” 2

In early 2014 the outbreak was thought to be over, but in March, the CDC added another 51 persons to the list of infected individuals, bringing the total to 481 across 25 states.1 The numbers continue to rise, and the CDC announced in May that the outbreak was still ongoing. Foster farms replied that they we’re committed to “leadership in food safety”

Finally, on July 3, 2014 Foster Farms recalls an “undetermined amount” of chicken products produced between March 7 through March 13.1, 2 The announcement was made on the afternoon before a holiday weekend and fourteen months after the initial outbreak was detected.

On July 31, 2014, the CDC announced that the outbreak was over. A total of 634 people were infected across 29 states and Puerto Rico. 38% of the people affected had to be hospitalized.1 Luckily, no deaths were reported.

The Weakness in Government Regulation

The Foster Farms outbreak was not an isolated incident. Every year there are outbreaks linked to a food company or restaurant. The public has become used to it. They expect it. But should they?

Whenever a food recall takes place or some animal abuse is exposed, the public decides that the government should take care of it. We can’t be bothered. We have much more important things to worry about. Like what the Kardashians are up to. Let the government take care of industry problems. They should make those business behave themselves.

The government has only one real way to control business, regulation. They create regulations, then send out inspectors and other government agents to enforce these regulations. I agree that there is a need for some government regulation, but in many cases, we have too much. I agree, it’s important that we make sure companies do not dump dangerous chemicals and waste into the environment. Unfortunately, many regulations that work for big companies, do not work for small ones.

The reason for this is that many of the officials that run government agencies used to work for the large companies they regulate. This is necessary to a point. The government needs regulators who know the industry they are regulating. However, this can also harbor conflicts of interest. These regulators only know big business, they’ve never worked for a small company or a small farm. This leads to regulations written to serve the big business model. Little guys are never considered.

Many administrations clam to be for small business. That small business is the backbone of our country. But in reality, they don’t understand small business. How many government officials come from small businesses? Not many.

Food Inspection Saved the Big Meat Packers

Food inspection did not exist until the the meat packing industry began consolidating into huge processing plants. These huge processing plants were dirty and dangerous. The industry was exposed in Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle. He described the a long list of despicable practices: the slaughter of diseased animals, using borax or glycerine to remove the smell of spoiled meat, workers urinating and defecating on the kill floor and many others.

The public became outraged and took their business elsewhere. They went back to the small butcher shops processed animals in small batches which sold directly to the customer. Every customer could see how clean the butcher was. If he wasn’t, they could go someplace else. These butchers were customer inspected. No government inspection was necessary. This meant a huge decline in revenue for the big meat packers.

The official story is that Teddy Roosevelt stood up to the big meat packers and controlled them with government inspection. The meat packers fought back, but ultimately lost. Government inspection became law. The public bought in because they assumed that the government knew what they were doing.

But what would have happened if Roosevelt had decided to follow the constitution and do nothing? After all, the public was already implementing their own solution. The answer is that many of these meat packers would have gone out of business. The remainders would have come up with some sort of industry certification, much like Underwriters Laboratory. They may have even had to, wait for it, open up their meat packing plants so that the public could come and see how clean they were.

The Government does not have a good track record.

Expecting the government to fix everything that’s wrong with the world is not realistic. Imposing top down solutions is tricky business. They frequently fail. The projects, prohibition, the war on drugs. None of these top down solutions can be called successes.

The Teapot Dome scandal shows that people in positions of power can be bribed by large corporations to give them favorable treatment.

Watergate brought down the Nixon Administration.

Fen-Phen, touted as a diet miracle, was approved by the FDA then subsequently unapprooved when it was found to cause heart disease and high blood pressure. Oops.

Olestra was heralded as a new breakthrough to replace fat, calories, and cholesterol. The FDA approved olestra for use as a replacement for fats and oils, claiming that such use “meets the safety standard for food additives, reasonable certainty of no harm”. Olestra fell out of favor when it began  causing abdominal cramping and anal leakage. It is now mostly used as a base for deck stains and a lubricant for small power tools. However, Olestra is still available as a food additive in a certain “light” foods. Industrial chemicals, yum.

OSHA was created to ensure safe work environments, yet workers get hurt on a regular basis at meat packing plants.4

Federal inspection was created to clean up the meat processing industry and eliminate food borne illness. Yet foster farms was permitted to continue selling contaminated and adulterated meat for months.

These are just a few examples. The list could fill this entire article. These are symptoms of a bigger problem.

Business is Smarter than Government

The government is not good at regulating business. Businessmen are smarter than government workers. Any time a government agency forces some regulation on an industry, the businesses find a way around it.

They use their money to curry favors from the regulating agency. They change their operations slightly to take advantage of a loophole. Or if all else fails, they’ll move their operations to somewhere less restrictive.

The public likes to think that the government is there to keep big business in line. To break up monopolies. Just look at the breakup of standard oil. Rockefeller had a monopoly on the oil business. The government came in and broke up his monopoly. That showed him, right?

Not really. The breakup of Standard Oil made Rockefeller even richer. He still owned an equal percentage of all these new companies. Now that there were all separate, each one’s value increased, making Rockefeller the richest man in the world. Take that Rockefeller! All the way to the bank.

Government Regulation is not Consistent

Back when I was a vendor at the Ferguson Farmer’s Market, I had a conversation with another vendor who sold dog treats. She lamented the fact that Ferguson, being in the county of St Louis, could not allow dogs at the market. The county health department forbade it. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps dogs are filthy creatures who spread disease. More likely is that someone at the health department doesn’t like dogs. How do I know?

In the city of St Louis they have a separate health department, the City Health Department. As far as the City Health Department is concerned, dogs at farmer’s markets are fine. You could hold a dog show in front of the food booths, no problem. So what’s the deal? Are dogs dirty or not?

This is the kind of nonsense local farmers and small businesses have to deal with. Rules that don’t make sense. Inspectors who interpret them differently. One month everything is fine, the next month you’re in violation. Why? Everything is the same. Well, it could simply be that your inspector hasn’t been writing enough infractions lately. His boss mentioned it, so he writes you up to look like he’s doing his job. You didn’t do anything, his boss did.

What Can We do?

The first thing you should do is opt-out of the industrial system whenever possible. The more money that goes to local food producers, the more innovation we will see. I believe that customer inspected trumps government inspected. But what about customers who don’t want to inspect the farm they are buying from? Well, the internet has already come up with a solution to that.

Companies like eBay, Uber, and AirBNB have a rating system for their users. You as a customer don’t know the person you’re buying or renting from. You’ve never met them before. How can you possibly know if someone 500 miles away is trustworthy? Will they take your money and run?

That’s where the rating system comes in. It says they have 4.5 stars. Sounds good. If they had one star, you probably wouldn’t buy from them. This system works, but not thanks to the government. These systems are self-imposed. They we’re innovations born out of necessity. Born out of small companies, on an internet with no regulations. Imagine if the founders of google had to build a million dollar server farm before they could release their product? We’d probably still be using Alta-Vista.

The assumption that farmers might be dirty, assumes that bureaucrats are never dirty. Do you seriously believe that all bureaucrats are honest? That is simply ridiculous. Just ask any republican whether the Clintons are honest. Ask any democrat whether the Bush’s are honest. Clearly bureaucrats are not clean.

Yet we assume that these same bureaucrats will have our best interests in mind when it comes to our food. Even when big industry shows up with their campaign contributions and lavish steak dinners. They’re still honest right? I don’t want to think about it. What’s on TV?


  4. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser, 2012