THEY'RE FIGHTING BACK
As consumer awareness about artificial food additives, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), and nutrient deficiency create demand for better food, the industrial chemical complex is fighting back. And of course, it's using science as a basis.
Two studies released on the same day, Sept. 18, are symptomatic of what we'll see as bad farming fights for market share. When more people understand the difference between good farming and bad farming, they reduce patronage of bad farming. Bad farming ain't happy about this perception.
One report published by Sentient Media is headlined "Organic Beef has a Larger Carbon Footprint than Feedlot Beef." The other, published by the American Council on Science and Health is titled "Free-range paradox: The high cost of happy chickens." Let's deal with them one at a time.
The beef article said "calculating emissions mostly comes down to productivity--in other words, the ratio of inputs to outputs, or resources used to food produced. Because conventional farms are more 'productive,' meaning they produce more meat by packing in a greater number of animals in the same amount of space as conventional farms, their emissions are considered less intensive than those of organic farms, who produce less beef altogether."
The problem is that organic beef, by and large, is not finished on pasture. Clearly the study only looked at feedlots; it did not look at the pre-feedlot, or pre-finishing stage of production. The data came from the New Mexico State University Clayton Livestock Research Center, reporting that "organic beef farming is actually more environmentally harmful than conventional methods in terms of four impacts--carbon emissions, water use, reactive nitrogen loss and fossil fuel use."
Compared in a desert environment, the data would inherently be skewed. Further, they didn't notice that healthy pastures have enough methanotrophic bacteria to pull down all the methane burped and farted from cows. This bogus science gets duplicitous folks' pants in a wad over absurd and incomplete data. Oh, they also didn't measure nutrient density and balance in the beef coming out of the two systems. The whole thing is irrigated desert, an absurd place to measure beef production.
Now to the chickens. This study compared five different systems in laying hens: battery cages, furnished cages, barn, free-range non-organic and free-range organic. Here's an example of the conclusion: "The resulting calculations reveal an unexpected trade-off. Housing modifications designed for animal welfare systematically increased resource consumption, emissions, and overall mortality. Could the drive for better chicken lives result in more chicken deaths?"
You can almost hear the "Gee whiz, look what we stumbled on; my goodness, we had no idea it could be this bad." Of course, they did NOT study pastured poultry, which by definition requires a mobile shelter. Stationary free-range is one reason the American Pastured Poultry Producers Association exists: chickens turn grass into dirt. The only way to free range chickens long term is to either have a handful on a very large acreage or use mobile housing. But this study did not include mobile housing.
And tellingly, it did not measure nutrition content of eggs. And again, organic often shows up worse. This was a British study, where square footage per bird in free range set-ups is outrageously large due to non-mobile shelters. I have said forever that non-mobile free-range is worse than stationary confinement, and this study bears that out with pecking and mortality.
The bottom line to consumers is this: happy chickens are not healthy. The consumer, therefore, is left in a conundrum: happiness or health? When that is the only choice, many folks will choose health. The word-crafting and clever-speak in these reports is convincing to the ignorant and uninformed, which is the lion's share of people. It reminds me of the time when Burger King announced it was going to cage-free eggs in 10 years. When I asked why the long horizon, the insider answer was clear: "In 10 years, we expect the scientific community to prove the superiority of caged hens; this gives science time to catch up." Burger King was the darling of the animal welfare crowd for this announcement, which was undercooked and rotten.
If you want to hear an in-depth discussion on these studies, check out my podcast,
Beyond Labels, with Dr. Sina McCullough. We dig into this issue in depth and it was revelatory to hear her conclude the study's main point: "happiness is unhealthy." Isn't that a fine kettle of fish?
Do you think meat and poultry will destroy the planet?
