In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries.
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The industrial meat giants have entered a crisis phase.
As I’ve reported before, the world’s biggest chicken packer, Pilgrim’s Pride, is languishing in bankruptcy, squeezed by high feed costs, its own addiction to cheap capital from Wall Street, now dried up, and ruthless competition from rival Tyson. Facing a similar situation, Smithfield Foods, the globe’s biggest pork packer and hog producer, announced it’s shuttering six plants and hacking away 1,800 jobs.
Pilgrim’s Pride has deftly used its bankruptcy to shunt much if the pain onto the backs of its farmer-suppliers, The Wall Street Journal reports (see extremely interesting related video). The article shows the massive risks required of the farmers who supply the nation with meat. Get this:
Today’s chicken houses are bigger and more sophisticated than the
coops of yore. Made from corrugated metal and wooden beams, the
cavernous shacks can be longer than a football field and cost more than
$200,000. To maximize profits, many farmers own at least four, meaning
high-six-figure mortgages are common.
Inside the biggest such coops, more than 20,000 chickens spend their
lives pecking at feeders and water spigots on a dirt floor. Computers
regulate temperature. Most houses are kept dark to minimize activity so
birds pack on more pounds.
Farmers make these massive investments, usually with bank loans, on the basis of promises and contracts with big players like Pilgrim’s Pride. And now, using its bankruptcy as a lever, Pilgrim’s has broken contracts with hundreds of growers in the Southeast, leaving them with huge notes to pay and no market for chickens.
Meanwhile, in Mother Earth News, Laura Sayre looks at a another budding crisis for industrial meat, one I’ve covered before: "The Hidden Link Between Factory Farms and Human Health." She does a great job of exposing the links between confined-animal feedlots and antibiotic-resistant and deadly bacteria strains like MRSA. She also comes up with pithy numbers on the stunning level of concentration and intensity in U.S. meat production. Get this:
In 1965, the total U.S. hog population numbered 53 million, spread
over more than 1 million pig farms in the United States—most of them
small family operations. Today, we have 65 million hogs on just 65,640
farms nationwide. Many of these “farms”—2,538, to be exact—have
upwards of 5,000 hogs on the premises at any given time. Broiler
chicken production rose from 366 million in 1945 to 8,400 million [8.4
billion] in 2001, most of them in facilities housing tens of thousands
of birds.
Before long, federal regulators will have to come to grips with the link between deadly pathogens and factory farms, which they’ve been studiously avoiding for years. When they do—when they, say, ban the use of antibiotics—the whole system could collapse.
When it does, the flight of U.S. meat giants to points south and east of the United States—discussed by Mia McDonald in a recent interview on Grist, as well as by me in a previous Meat Wagon post—will take on truly desperate force.
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Comments
View as Flat
John former Marine Posted 12:19 am
19 Feb 2009
Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
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amazingdrx Posted 12:44 am
19 Feb 2009
The Peanut Corporation of America, for instance, reorganized as the Peanut Corporation of Mexico and/or Brazil, will not need to go chapter 11 to avoid legal action by its victims. As it just did.
Substitute "chicken" or "hog" or pretty much every product we make here now for "peanut".
"Free" trade is in trouble, big trouble. And that rears the dangerous head of the protectionism monster. A behemoth that could prolong global recession long enough for the climate to tip right over the edge into permanent irreversible unstoppable catastrophe.
We are in a "bad, stinkin' spot here", to quote Pesci's character in "Casino".
An inevitable wave of global antibiotic resistant contagion with no national healthcare will make "Night of the Living Dead" look like a picnic.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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BornOnANebraskaFarm Posted 6:41 am
19 Feb 2009
Eating local makes you happy.
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amazingdrx Posted 6:59 am
19 Feb 2009
And then it would be justice to confiscate every asset of the corrupt agribizz execs and their government cronies that operate criminal conspiracies like this.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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cajohncox Posted 12:15 am
20 Feb 2009
Often targeting low income communities, this operation would locate in a depressed rural area where 3 million chickens are already packed in with 740 address points in three miles. Of course, existing facilities would benefit from the new installation. They would be allowed to expand to feed the constant supply of pullets (young laying hens) necessary to replace dying birds. The result, 11 million chickens in a 3 mile area the highest concentration anywhere in the U.S.
The old argument that if you live in a rural community you should expect to live with agriculture does not hold up. You simply could not put 6 million birds on just over 300 acres before. Most of the families impacted are small farmers who will be forced out of business, not because of vertical integration and lack mechanisms that ensure they can bring their crops to market, because know one wants to raise their children where flies swarm in biblical proportions and 160,000 tons of manure can be stored in open buildings for up to 8 months.
We can hope that the new administration will not turn a blind eye to the potential health risks of this type of folly. Unfortunately, Ohio has taken way all local control to regulate such facilities. The state now determines which rural communities will be sacrificed in the name of agricultural progress.
Cheryl
http://www.myspace.com/nomorechickens
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Tom Philpott Posted 1:02 am
20 Feb 2009
Victual Reality
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