Re: [pf]Fw: Foot-and-Mouth crisis - AFP (Agence France Press) article

· A few days ago we had some posts on Positive Futures about the
Foot-and-Mouth epidemic in Britain (there /are/ countries where it's
constantly around), and we were given (URL below) a piece which started
with the northern-England small pig-farm which is apparently the place it
spread from. That article went on to say something I'll summarise as:
"smaller is not necessarily better". Aimed at defending the industrial
agriculture system.   D.

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At 16:19 6/3/2001 +1300, Janine McVeagh wrote to GreenViews-NZ, with
Subject: [GV]F&M :-

Re the Matt Ridley article* -- as a former small-scale pig breeder, I would
say that the answer to not using diseased swill is not to grow grain, but
to cook up all swill for pigs. They are omnivores and do not need to have
things grown especially for them; they do better with a varied diet that
includes fresh greens and cooked scraps. As Susan George says in How the
Other Half Dies, if the Chinese went collectively mad tomorrow and fed
their grain to their pigs as the Americans do, the Chinese would starve.
Pigs are excellent converters of waste to manure and flesh (for other
omnivores,) require little land, but thrive on personal attention which
means that small scale is kindest for them and most sensible in terms of
energy returns and profit ratio. I don't have time to keep them any more,
but they deserve a place in the scheme of things.
 Janine

(* Text copy and Daily Telegraph URL, in David Appell's post to PF:
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pfvs/2001I/msg01095.html )

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At 17:40 6/03/2001 +1300, I asked Janine:
>· Janine, would you let me post the [above] to the Positive Futures list?  

· and she replied:
Yes, that's fine. I'd like to think that common sense could be used
occasionally! These either/or pronouncements by people who haven't actually
got any practical experience annoy me,
 Janine

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sent on to Positive Futures by David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.geocities.com/davdd.geo/index.html#top
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