Former Ag Teacher’s Recent Comments

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  Dr. Cate Dewey with the Ontario Veterinary College discusses "Zoonotics-How Safe Are Hog Farms?" Feature runs 7:10 Link: http://www.farmscape.ca/2009/11/dewey-091118.mp3 Cut and paste the url.On Time for the mainstream media to face the factory farm-swine flu link posted 2 days, 18 hours ago 22 Responses

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  Well said MOFARMFAMILY and JohnnyAppleseed. It is nice to see some clear thinkers on here.On For swine flu, forget origins and start thinking about practices posted 2 weeks, 1 day ago 6 Responses

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  Javaman, where did you find a local farmer that can get a steer to produce milk? That is a pretty radical concept.On Warning: This product may cause sickness, paralysis, and death posted 1 month, 2 weeks ago 51 Responses

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   Michelle Obama reminds me of Marie Antoinette.  When told that the children don't have good food, she replies ...... let them eat organic.  The she has her personal chef, prepare what was grown by her  gardeners as she flits off to anotter meeting with her advisors who tell her what people should be eating.

  The end of your first paragraph is very telling Laskawy.  If she wants to influence the American diet, she needs shed some of her priviledged life style and try living for a while the way lower income and  middle class working people do. 

  The American food delima is much to complicated and entrenched to be solved by easy answers such as planting a garden in your yard or window box.  The causes are many.  Desire for convenience, desire for two income families, the decline of the nuclear family model, on and on and on.

  Now as much as in the past, eating is as much about social issues as it is about nutrition.  75 years ago, moms fixed dinner, dad in from farming or home from work and families ate dinner togehter. The WWII came along and things started changing.  Moms started moving into the world of work so they needed convience foods.  Dads started putting in more hours and kids started round the clock activities, so meals are eaten in shifts, often at places other than home.  All those changes brought about changes in what we eat.

  Now, food activists want to place the blame on "Big Agribusiness" and "Factory Farms."  Well, that just aint how it happened.  Americans food consumption habits weren't changed much by what was available.  Americans consumption habits changed what was demanded and the food processors and farmers met that demand.

  If Mrs. Obama and her foodie friends want to change what Americans eat, they are going to have to make much deeper societal changes to be effective.

  On Plotting Michelle Obama's next food move posted 4 months ago 2 Responses

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  You can tell how bloggers feed off each other when you try to find corobarating information for various points in a story.  You get lots of hits for the word or phrase. But when you go there, you find the exact same sketchy information, rumors and half truths that were in the article you started with.

  Lots of articles report a MRSA outbreak at an AR hatchery two years ago.  But none name the hatchery, nor the town where it occurred.  Did the event really happen?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But we'll never know for sure if lazy writers like Philpott are all we have for information.

  Ever notice how people like philpott keep squawking about a link between livestock\poultry and MRSA, but the poeple who get get sick with it have almost always contracted the disease in a facility where large numbers of people congregate?

  How about somebody posts some links to health agency reports and news articles on this Arkansas hatchery outbreak.   

  On As MRSA gets worse, the FDA discovers antibiotic abuse on factory farms [UPDATED] posted 4 months ago 7 Responses