I was just in California, visiting my mom, and read an interesting article in a local newspaper, the Point Reyes Light.
The article was about a slaughterhouse in nearby Petaluma that is closing its doors after almost a century in business serving mostly local cattle ranchers and dairy farmers.
(By the way, the property owner will do very well from the sale of the property, as it’s in a high-priced land area, and its development is already well-planned out, so at least he and his family won’t be hurt by the business’s closing.)
Anyway, hopefully the closing of the slaughterhouse will cause local ranchers/farmers to do away with obsolete mid-twentieth-century practices and become more efficient and profitable.
An organization called North Coast Meats has formed since the slaughterhouse's closure was announced. The group "aims not only to preserve existing infrastructure but also to foster the possibilities for livestock growers and meat providers in the local sustainable agriculture movement."
“The task is to create a regional agricultural infrastructure, but not necessarily to recreate what was here before,” stated North Coast Meats' Sam Goldberger. “Right now, food travels on the order of thousands of miles before it reaches you and consumers are demanding for that to change.”
According to the article, "The group is currently doing a feasibility study examining the costs of building and operating an organic, USDA-approved 'Integrated Animal Processing Center' that would serve a wider variety of functions than traditional slaughterhouses do – such as including a cut-and-wrap facility for the meat and direct distribution of the meats to retailers. They also plan to house a commercial kitchen, provide profit sharing, and make their own energy by processing biological waste."
“Local ranchers are increasingly caught between the rising cost of grain and price competition with large-scale producers. As feedlots, slaughterhouses, distributors and retailers each claim a piece of the profits and the price of conventionally grown meat stays the same, ranchers wind up paying the price.”
By combining several of the steps of slaughtering and packaging meat into one location, North Coast Meats plans to remove the profit-consuming middlemen of the meat business. North Coast Meats hopes “to steer the direction of agriculture in an unconventional direction designed to benefit the rancher and the consumer above any middlemen. ‘If the rancher is going to be able to survive they are going to need higher margin products,’ said Goldberger. ‘I see slaughterhouses as just one link in that chain.’”
Cattle ranchers that are raising local meat to serve the local community will be hurt the most by the closure of the slaughterhouse. David Evans of Marin Sun Farms in Point Reyes said that “it is very important to his locally-grown, grass-fed business that to have a processing facility nearby.”
“This will be most devastating to anyone who is trying to get out of the commodity beef market and do more grass-fed, direct marketing, or community supported agriculture,” said Ellie Rilla, the Marin County Farm Advisor for UCCE.
The article stated that “though only a few local ranches are currently exploring those specialty markets, consumer demand for them is making them more profitable. Last year, The UCCE went to every ranch in Marin County and surveyed them about their interest in pursuing those specialty markets. Over half of them said that they are.”
According to an earlier 2003 University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE) survey, out of 186 agricultural producers in Marin County, two percent (or about four) of them were considering leaving the business, even though 63 percent (or about 117 of them) were unprofitable or marginally profitable.
It is absolutely time for a change in farming, ranching, etc.; the government needs to quit subsidizing the largest food producers so as to give the more efficient, more sustainable, and more profitable small-time food producers a chance. The government is always preaching how a market should control itself (basic supply and demand-type stuff), but it still feels compelled to subsidize inefficient business. It’s also time for food producers to quit paying for chemical and poison pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, hormones, and etc., which costs them many thousands of dollars a year, and only profits the companies that produce those chemical and poisons. Post-World War Two, the government and the big chemical companies pushed all that junk onto farmers, and now, several generations later, it’s the only way the large-scale farmers know how to farm.
But, there’s no reason for the smaller farmers to continue to farm the way their fathers or grandfathers did, when they can more profitably and sustainably farm the way their great-grandfathers did.
Sustainability is one major key to keeping family farms going and to obtain profits. The public does want inexpensive food, but it also wants food that tastes like it’s supposed to, and that won’t harm their health in the short AND long term. Produce like genetically-modified tomatoes only help the producer of the tomato; buying a tomato that has a month-long shelf life or a perfect, blemish-free red skin but that internally is unripe and is tasteless is like marrying an attractive person that is ugly on the inside: perhaps gratifying in the short term, but one grows weary of it after awhile.
Need I say more?
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Nano nano
I just saw a show (“Modern Marvels”) on the History Channel on engines, and I must say I am very intrigued by some of the “alternate” engines they profiled, particularly “nano engines.” They also profiled hybrid engines (as found in the Toyota Prius and the Honda Camry Hybrid) and hydrogen engines.
Nano-technology engines are so small, they’re mind boggling. I’d really like to research them more. They get an official “hmmm” from me …
Another engine they profiled (that was easier to comprehend, for me at least) was the Stirling Engine. It uses no fuel except heat or cold!
Perhaps one of these “alternate” engines will be one of the future answers to our energy “dilemma.”
Nano-technology engines are so small, they’re mind boggling. I’d really like to research them more. They get an official “hmmm” from me …
Another engine they profiled (that was easier to comprehend, for me at least) was the Stirling Engine. It uses no fuel except heat or cold!
Perhaps one of these “alternate” engines will be one of the future answers to our energy “dilemma.”
I'd rather have a bottle [of purified water] in front of me, than have to have a frontal lobotomy [from cancerous tap water] ...
PepsiCo just got "busted" for bottling treated/purified tap water and selling it for more money than you would pay for it directly out of your own faucet.
Well, normally I am all for the consumer's right for truth in labelling of food and food-type products, but this one is a bit ridiculous. I mean, they (Aquafina and Dasani, for example) already pretty much said that they were obtaining their water from the tap, only they used an acronym ("P.W.S." or public water source). Now, if they had said they got their water from some special spring somewhere, THAT would be misleading.
Groups such as "Think Outside the Bottle" obviously do not understand the problems with tap water, however. Public tap water can be very good and contaminant free at its source, but once it goes through all those miles of leaky public water pipes (that can be contaminated from adjacent sewer pipes or by contaminated ground water that seeps into the pipes), then into your house through some corroded (and likely lead, if it's an old house or building) pipes, it isn't as clean as when it's tested directly at the public water source. Every time I drink tap water, I tend to drink it as fast as I can and drink as little as possible, and while grimacing. A restaurant serving tap water to me is the same as if that restaurant served food that has pesticides, herbicides, and hormones in it. I generally only drink tap water at a restaurant when I'm feeling too cheap to pay $3+ for a bottle of water.
I understand that many, many thousands of used plastic water bottles litter cities, highways, and etc. across the globe, but the two things about that are: that it's better to have guaranteed clean water than potentially contaminated tap water, and the general consumer wants convenience, even at the cost of the environment and/or how much they have to pay for it, money wise.
If nothing else comes out of this "truth in labelling" occurrence, perhaps we will one day have our food labelled with country of origin, poisons used during production, whether it's a GM product, etc. Or, maybe what we should take away from Aquafina example is that PepsiCo doesn't have as many special-interest congressional lobbyists as Monsanto does!
On the amusing side, here's an extreme of 'truth in labelling': http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/enterprise/article640266.ece
Well, normally I am all for the consumer's right for truth in labelling of food and food-type products, but this one is a bit ridiculous. I mean, they (Aquafina and Dasani, for example) already pretty much said that they were obtaining their water from the tap, only they used an acronym ("P.W.S." or public water source). Now, if they had said they got their water from some special spring somewhere, THAT would be misleading.
Groups such as "Think Outside the Bottle" obviously do not understand the problems with tap water, however. Public tap water can be very good and contaminant free at its source, but once it goes through all those miles of leaky public water pipes (that can be contaminated from adjacent sewer pipes or by contaminated ground water that seeps into the pipes), then into your house through some corroded (and likely lead, if it's an old house or building) pipes, it isn't as clean as when it's tested directly at the public water source. Every time I drink tap water, I tend to drink it as fast as I can and drink as little as possible, and while grimacing. A restaurant serving tap water to me is the same as if that restaurant served food that has pesticides, herbicides, and hormones in it. I generally only drink tap water at a restaurant when I'm feeling too cheap to pay $3+ for a bottle of water.
I understand that many, many thousands of used plastic water bottles litter cities, highways, and etc. across the globe, but the two things about that are: that it's better to have guaranteed clean water than potentially contaminated tap water, and the general consumer wants convenience, even at the cost of the environment and/or how much they have to pay for it, money wise.
If nothing else comes out of this "truth in labelling" occurrence, perhaps we will one day have our food labelled with country of origin, poisons used during production, whether it's a GM product, etc. Or, maybe what we should take away from Aquafina example is that PepsiCo doesn't have as many special-interest congressional lobbyists as Monsanto does!
On the amusing side, here's an extreme of 'truth in labelling': http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/enterprise/article640266.ece
..........
Here's some updates (8-20-2007) regarding bottled water issues:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/how-do-you-take-your-water
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/how-do-you-take-your-water
and on the plastic bottles themselves:
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