by Karl North
     Northland Sheep Dairy

Evidence has accumulated rapidly in recent decades that much of our industrial way of food production cannot be sustained,
for it destroys both the environment necessary to human health and quality of life, and the natural resource base which that food production is dependent upon. Our main agricultural export is not a commodity like grain, but topsoil. Modern farming practices produce short-run abundance but long-run damage to essential agroecosystem processes: to water and mineral cycles, to energy sources and flows, and to the eco-community dynamics that requires a critical mass of interacting species.

My first concern is to review the forces shaping our food system, to provide a framework for understanding the stream of troubling news stories that suggest a crisis brewing in it. Outstanding among these forces, in my mind, are a powerful and sophisticated thought control industry, an oligarchic political economy masquerading as a democracy, a knowledge business addicted to reductionist science, and an unrestrained laissez-faire economic system.

Propaganda for Hire

The manufacture of consent is expensive. Who can afford its purchase? Ninety percent of the wealth in this country is now in the hands of 10% of the people. Effective "free speech" is in an important sense not free at all, but expensive. Has modern society has fallen into a trap where an elite minority can perpetuate its interests indefinitely? What hope have our little counterspins against the constant dripfeed of soothing propaganda that parries every unsettling revelation? Will a self-destructive system, by the sheer weight of its failures, will eventually provoke the public understanding needed to change it? Industrial agriculture is causing irreversible losses to the biological resource base civilization needs in order to survive. If we are to use information fruitfully we cannot be naive about the disinformation power now concentrated in few hands.

The Political System

Understanding is not yet effective political action. The unprecedented global concentration of power is daunting and will demand imaginative political strategies. Even the Atlantic Monthly, ordinarily a cautious critic, suggested how coopted representative government has become, in an article that distinguished the "permanent government," which is not elected, from the "provisional government," which is:
 
 

"The permanent government, a secular oligarchy... comprises the
Fortune 500 companies and their attendant lobbyists, the big
media and entertainment syndicates, the civil and military
services, the larger research universities and law firms. It is
this government that hires the country's politicians and sets the

terms and conditions under which the country's citizens can
exercise their right --God-given but increasingly expensive --to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Obedient to the rule
of men, not laws, the permanent government oversees the
production of wealth, builds cities, manufactures goods, raises
capital, fixes prices, shapes the landscape, and reserves the
right to assume debt, poison rivers [and food], cheat the customers, receive
the gifts of federal subsidy, and speak to the American people in
the language of low motive and base emotion."

"The provisional government is the spiritual democracy that comes
and goes on the trend of a political season and oversees the
production of pageants....”

 

The Classical Scientific Paradigm

The holy grail of science up to now has been its predictive power; that is what has given science its virtually sacred status in modern times. But to achieve that predictive power scientists have had to follow a method that reduces their focus to a few variables: add genes A to Cow B and get higher milk yield C, or add heat A to raw milk B and get rid of tuberculosis C. This reductionist science works fine in a controlled laboratory, but when we practice A+B=C in the complex systems that make up the real world there are always many more outcomes than C, a lot of which, we are finding, eventually cause worse problems than the one the scientist solved.

Two examples: Thanks to reductionist science, sheep farmers have the chemical technology to deliver a knockout blow to the intestinal parasites that plague lambs, but well apart from the largely unresearched effects of those chemicals on our food, a short term focus allows the scientist to disregard the fact that routine use eventually builds resistance and renders the technology useless. Similarly, the narrow focus on maximum milk yield in the modern Holstein has produced a now classic constellation of negative outcomes at least three levels: animal health, ecosystem health, and food quality, and promises a repeat performance when applied to the dairy ewe. Thus the ripple effect in all directions of a single change in the relationship of two components of systems as complex as agroecosystems demonstrates the  fundamental limitation of classical science alone to grasp their dynamics.

Our world is a complex system of elements within wholes within wholes. Some of the components are inert, some alive, some themselves whole complex systems, and some are communities of whole systems. It follows that what we must pay attention to, as we operate in this world, is less the seemingly discrete elements and more their interdependency, their relationships, or, in a word, their role in the whole. In general, it has been the assumption of the classical scientific paradigm that if we manage the parts right, the whole will come right. Evidence that this is not the case is now coming from every quarter, yet our systems of knowledge and management are still structured around this assumption.

In fact some of our best thinkers are saying that the most important scientific advance of the 20th century will be our grudging acceptance of the interdependency of our world, putting the pressure on science to change its very nature. As early as the 17th century,  John Donne’s “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a part of the main.” anticipated the necessity of systems thinking. In our own time people like James Lovelock (the Gaia hypothesis) and Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline) only forced the issue. In practice this means that problems can no longer be addressed only from a disciplinary viewpoint. The complex dynamics of strongly interacting processes will force scientists and decision-makers to think and act in a more holistic manner. This promises to beget nothing short of a new science which, while not entirely rejecting reductionism, realizes its limitations and couches it in a holistic paradigm that radically changes its goals, methods and results. Meanwhile, technology derived from reductionist science is putting our food at risk, in ways that I will describe.

The Unbridled Laissez-Faire Economy: A Moral Loose Canon

Probably even more important than the nature of our science has been the nature of the economic system we have allowed to develop, especially in the United States. When Monsanto developed the Terminator gene, with which it intended to gain control over the bulk of the world seed market, critics called that diabolical; but to Monsanto, Terminator is just devilishly good business. Such predatory behavior is perfectly normal and in fact necessary for long term business survival in an economic system which the French long ago dubbed laissez-faire, or ‘anything goes’, perhaps because at the time it contrasted starkly with their catholic notions of social order. Early predictions that unrestrained market economies contain an inherent drive toward monopoly have come true, and in the agricultural sector this effectively reduces most farmers to serfs at the mercy of farm commodity markets dominated by huge corporations. Since the amoral nature of our chosen economic system is such that it mainly rewards short term gain, and considers only local, immediate costs, it allows us to pass on heavy ecological and social costs of our economic behavior to future generations and other remote peoples. It allows, eventually even forces most farmers, if their farms are to remain profitable within this economic system, to practice intergenerational tyranny.

In sum, both the current scientific paradigm and our current economic system have a similar fundamental flaw in design: a tendency  to ignore delayed or distant consequences,  down the road in time, as on future generations, and down the road in space, as when the agritoxins in the creek running below my farm empty into Chesapeake bay several hundred miles away, where they destroy fisheries and endanger public health.

 Compounding the problem, the concentrated power in our economic system constantly bends the scientific establishment into its service via skewed incentives and rewards:
 

• Over 90% of weed scientists are dependent on funding from pesticide companies.
• When an epidemiologist documented the damage that North Carolina’s hog megafarms inflict on the health of nearby communities, the megafarms took him to court.

 

These are but two examples of common occurrences. Throughout the land grant agricultural education system, research in the corporate interest is rewarded, while research in the public interest, that serves the original mandate of the land grants, offers only risk and sacrifice.

How has this state of affairs affected livestock farming, and directly or indirectly, the food we eat? Many of the impacts ripple out in all directions from the industrial-style animal feeding factories into which the meat industry has concentrated, under the influence of the unbridled market economy and reductionist research establishment previously described. The dairy industry is less concentrated, but only at the milk production level. Even there, dairy farms milking thousands of cows in one location are becoming common. The accompanying diagram begins to show lines of impact; the reader’s homework assignment is to discover many more circles and arrows. A more extensive map would show an outer circle of human health consequences and cumulative effects of their interaction. For example, monopoly control of meat packing = huge plants using economy of scale, unsanitary and dangerous working conditions, and ill-paid and therefore unhealthy workers = meat contamination from several sources spread over huge lots of product.

The  Incubators of Unsafe Food from Livestock

Given adequate capital input, monopoly control of grain markets makes concentrate feeding in large scale, high animal density conditions a most lucrative form of meat and milk production. Animals pumped full of concentrates have constant diarrhea. The resulting excremental quagmire and crowded habitat is an ideal incubator of disease, which the feeders control with antibiotics and other medicines. They mix these medications  routinely with feed, not just to stop disease, but as a preventive and growth promoter as well. Routine use breeds superbugs resistant to available medicines. Dirty animals carry bugs to huge distant processors. Hormones injected to increase meat and milk yield add another health threat to the consumer. Routine use of slaughterhouse waste as animal feed adds yet another health threat. Finally, concentrate feeding degrades the nutritional value of the products themselves.

This industrialized, confinement system of livestock production is a logical consequence of an economy that allows profit at whatever cost to society. It uses the kind of powerful, quick-fix, let-the-chips-fall technology at which reductionist science excels. This technology is symptomatic not of scientific progress but of scientific failure at the level of production system design. This system is the point of origin of a multitude of food safety problems that ripple outward into the food system, often crisscrossing and compounding as they go. The rest of this article will pursue these malignant ripples, describing their damage, the political reactions of consumers to date, and the remedies already in practice among farmers designing healthier livestock systems.

The Contaminants
 

The four major food poisoning bugs - salmonella, E.coli, campylobacter and enterococci - are directly linked to overuse of antibiotics in agriculture. according to a recent report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Livestock are given anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times the amount of antibiotics as the human population. Routine lacing of animal feed with antibiotics, only 10% of which is to treat infectious disease, creates mutations of these bacteria that are resistant to all classes of antibiotics now in use. The real problem for humans is that scientists have developed no new class of antibiotics in the last 20 years. The US government has legislated no solution despite successful models of livestock production in organic farming needing only rare, emergency antibiotic use and no entry of treated animals or their milk into the food system.

 The heavy concentrate diet imposed on livestock in industrial systems is another incubator of superbugs .  Recent research from Cornell shows  that these nearly 100% grain-based diets cause ruminants to manufacture the acid-tolerant strains of E. coli that are dangerous to humans and are showing up in the food system. Known as E. Coli O157:H7, they are dangerous because, unlike ordinary E. coli, they can survive the acidity of the human stomach and cause intestinal illness that is sometimes fatal. E. coli contamination is responsible for more than 20,000 infections and 200 deaths each year in the United States.

Feedlot agriculture generates a third threat to human health by the practice of feeding offal, or slaughterhouse waste back to livestock. Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs), a family of ‘mad cow’ type diseases, are thought to mutate when they cross from one animal species to another, as in the animal cannibalism practiced in the feedlots. The mutation is now thought to have made animal variants of the disease infectious to humans. At least this is the theory currently accepted in official circles. The true cause has yet to be proven. In Britain 33 young people have died of a TSE, and Europe has banned the feeding practice that they think spread the disease.

In the United States at least two deer hunters have caught the fatal disease, and the disease is as widespread among western deer and elk populations as it was in British cattle at the height of the epidemic there. Sales to game farms have spread the disease from the Western herds across the country, and into adjacent wild populations by fence line contact. Venison and elk consumers are potentially at risk. And plenty of deer offal gets into the factory farm feed pipline along with offal from domestic species. The fact that few people in the United States have developed the disease may be deceptive since it has a virtually invisible incubation period that can last decades. Here in the U.S.A. the dangerous practice of  ‘animal cannibalism’ continues unabated - with government approval. Although the FDA passed a so-called "mammal-to-mammal animal feed ban" in 1997, the regulation is filled with loopholes, and, according to farmers and agricultural experts, is not being enforced.

Factory style livestock production thus creates new strains of pathogens immune to our normal built-in defenses, weakens and eventually destroys the ability of antibiotics to cure these diseases, and maximizes their spread via large-scale feedlot and processing plants serving a far-flung market. An assembly line for food becomes an assembly line for disease, through no diabolical scheme, only the normal evolution of a for-profit-only economy.

The Transmission Belt

Pathogens generated by livestock production factories can infect us by various routes: the beef, pork, lamb and chicken people eat, from farm crops and food fish and shellfish that suck in surface water contaminated with livestock manure escaping from the giant factories, and even from family cats and dogs who eat contaminated pet food.

The very scale of feedlots, meat processing plants, and their far-flung markets insures widespread contamination. Hamburger, a food mass-marketed to children, is one of the most effective carriers. Monopoly power in the meat industry (four corporations - IBP, Conagra, Cargill, and Smithfield - account for about 80% of the cattle and hogs slaughtered in the country) insulates it from effective regulation, both of sanitation, and of working conditions and compensation,  which affect sanitation. Meat packing is now the most dangerous job in the United States. Meat packers suffer injuries in the workplace at about ten times the national average, and poultry processing has an injury and illness incidence nearly twice that of coal mining and construction, reported Acres USA in 1998.

The meat packing industry has become the new employer of cheap Third World labor in the form of illegal aliens in huge plants located in the rural Midwest, far from former strongholds of organized labor in the industry, like Chicago. This allows the monopolies to keep average meatpacking wages at the same level, adjusted for inflation, that they were 20 years ago and $4/hour lower than today’s average manufacturing wage, according to Nation magazine.

Responding to complaints from the Midwestern locals about the influx of illegal immigrants in their communities, the Clinton administration as part of its ‘ethnic cleansing’ program to rid the country of illegals plans to turn them into virtual indentured servants via ‘guestworker’ contracts. Unlike the indentured servitude that gave many Europeans the chance to emigrate to colonial America, this plan dumps workers back in their native lands at the end of the contracts.
Meanwhile, illegal or not, the packing house workers are severely exploited, and their poverty and lack of health care adds to the contamination of the product.

The upshot of this transmission belt of contamination is a regular string of meat recalls. But to giant corporations, recalls of bad food and FDA fines are part of the acceptable cost of doing business. Sara Lee, which makes everything from hotdogs to handbags, made $319 million in profits in a recent quarter despite the $76 million it cost them to recall 15 million pounds of meat suspected of contamination with potentially deadly bacteria.

The Built-In Hazards: Hormones and Nutritional Loss

External food contamination comes and goes, but industrially produced meat and dairy foods also contain internal defects: they are not good food.

Bovine Growth Hormone

After years of attempted cover-up in the United States, news of the health risks in dairy foods due to recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) injected into milk cows spread to a wider public when Canadian scientists went public this year with a report on the hormone. First commissioned by the Canadian government, then suppressed because of findings critical of rBGH use, the report confirmed that:
 
 

• Rats injected with rBGH exhibited cysts of the thyroid, elevated antibody levels, and inflammation of the prostate - all strong warning signals that the hormone need more investigation.
• Contrary to Monsanto’s claims, Monsanto’s own study shows that the hormone is absorbed into the bloodstream. The company’s claim that rBGH could not be absorbed had been the linchpin in their case, which led to US government approval of the transgenic hormone.

The Canadian report confirmed warnings by other scientists that:
 

• Significantly higher levels (400-500% or more) of a potent chemical hormone, Insulin-Like Growth Factor (IGF-1), in the milk and dairy products of injected cows, could pose serious hazards for human breast, prostate, and colon cancer.
• Cows forced by hormonal injection to give abnormal milk yields develop more mastitis and other health problems, which will likely lead to more antibiotics in milk. A Consumers Union test of milk samples in the New York metropolitan area detected the presence of 52 different antibacterials.

Subsequently the government of Canada banned rBGH in early 1999. The European Union has had a ban in place since 1994. Although rBGH continues to be injected into 4-5% of all US dairy cows, no other industrialized country has legalized its use. Even the GATT Codex Alimentarius, a United Nations food standards body, has refused to certify that rBGH is safe. The controversy has exposed corporate lies and bribery, and collusion with Monsanto to suppress critical research data by ‘food safety’ agencies in two governments.

Other Growth Hormones

Factory farming has made the implantation of growth hormones into meat animals a standard practice, and in fact necessary to get the animals up to market weight before they succumb to the unhealthy conditions of that production system. 90% of all feedlot beef is hormone implanted, according to the Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The practice continues to be legal despite studies where lab rats fed the hormones developed cancer, and despite the fact that at least three of the most commonly used beef implants appear on state and federal lists as “known” carcinogens.

A recent 139-page official European Union report reconfirmed opposition to the practice in Europe, which has banned imports of hormone implanted US and Canadian beef since 1989.
The EU's Scientific Committee on Veterinary Measures, consisting of European and US-based endocrinologists, toxicologists, and other scientists, told the Associated Press that the commonly implanted hormone 17 beta-oestradiol "has to be considered as a complete carcinogen." The EU panel stated moreover that all of the banned hormones "may cause a variety of health problems including cancer, developmental problems, harm to immune systems and brain disease... Even exposure to small levels of residues in meat and meat products carries risks..."
 

The law requires that growth hormones, which are planted under the skin, go in the ear to avoid large concentrations in commercial meat cuts.But illegal implantation in muscle tissue is commonplace in US feedlots, causing meat to have much higher hormone levels than even the legal ear implants. A random survey of 32 large feed lots found that as many as half of the cattle had visible "misplaced implants" in muscle, rather than under ear skin.

Nutritional Loss

Meat and dairy products from animals nourished entirely on their own grazing intake contain cancer-resisting nutrients and other qualities that help the human body defend against the degenerative diseases that have overtaken modern civilization. For millennia before modern times, the human body could depend on the presence of these nutrients in meat and milk. But new research shows that one of these, CLA (conjugated linoleic acid), a food component that builds cancer resistance, suppresses pathogens like listeria in milk, and fends off heart disease by aiding lipid metabolism, is 5 times lower in factory-farmed meat and dairy products than in their pasture-grown counterparts. In addition, Vitamins A and D and the “Price Factor” - a fat soluble catalyst that encourages optimum assimilation of vitamins and minerals - are greatly diminished when dairy animals are fed soy or cottonseed meal, which are standard factory farm feeds. These vitamins concentrate in the fat; the yellow color of meat fat and butter from pasture-fed animals indicates their presence. Most commercial butter is yellow only because of yellow dye; the color is put back in, but not the vitamins.

Then there is the question of pasteurization. According to the Campaign for Real Milk: “The practice of heating milk to kill germs was instituted in the 20s to combat TB, infant diarrhea and other diseases caused by dirty production methods. But times have changed and modern stainless steel tanks, milking machines, refrigerated trucks and inspection methods make pasteurization absolutely unnecessary for public protection.... Pasteurization destroys enzymes, diminishes vitamin content, denatures fragile milk proteins, alters vitamin B12, destroys vitamin B6, kills beneficial bacteria, promotes pathogens and is associated with allergies, increased tooth decay, colic in infants, growth problems in children, osteoporosis, arthritis, heart disease and cancer.”

The Campaign’s arguments are energized and underpinned in part by the work of Sally Fallon, who is perhaps the most visible current critic of the nutrition establishment’s myths debunking animal foods. Her arguments, like those presented here, often rest on an exposé of the damage industrial animal production and processing methods have done to what would otherwise be health-giving food. Pasteurization and its twin irradiation, are typical of the use of reductionist science to solve food problems in isolation from the badly designed production systems that are the root cause. Apart from the damage these technologies do to the food itself, they kill off beneficial bacteria that might otherwise keep pathogens out, and create a bacterial void, which nature, abhorring a vacuum, aggressively seeks to fill, often with pathogens.

Alternatives to Feedlot Agriculture
 

The negative impacts on food safety ripple out from feedlot agriculture well beyond their animal food products. This production system has spawned a massive grain monoculture - 70% of US grain production goes into animals - whose pesticidal crutch has put carcinogens, endocrine disrupters, and bioaccumulative toxins into water we drink and fish we eat. Manure from factory animal farming adds potentially lethal Cryptosporidia, Giardia, and Pfiesteria, - “the cell from hell”, killing billions of fish and harming humans in the water - to the super-E.coli it brings to contaminate water supplies and fisheries. Farms have now replaced factories as the biggest polluters of America’s waterways.

Almost every week seems to bring news of a new threat to safe food. The mass media, and government agencies responsible for ensuring the health of our food system advocate superficial remedies like heavy washing and peeling, cooking it to death, pasteurization and irradiation, that actually remove nutrition along with toxins. Or they point the finger of blame at time-tested agricultural practices like manure fertilization and composting, and so indirectly implicate the growing community of farmers for whom such practices are key to a more sustainable agriculture. But finger pointing and technological fixes evade the root of the problem.

It has become obvious that the problem with factory animal farming is the system: we need to redesign the whole. A number of principles of sustainable design emerge from our organic farming experience, and from other efforts around the world:
 

• Use holistic, site-specific designs
• Capture inter-species synergies
• Use current solar gain
• Respect nature’s cycles
• Design to appropriate scale

Applied to animal agriculture they suggest a radically different vision of future role and condition of livestock on farms:

• Animals, as potentially the most efficient carbon recyclers available, will be central to self-sufficient, sustainable fertilization systems on most farms. These systems, using modern, intensive pasture management and manure processing, will virtually eliminate chemical fertilization, its handmaiden - chemical pest control,  and their poisoning of foods and ecosystems.

• Animal nutrition will be grass-based, 100% in ruminants and their close cousins, with grain feeding drastically reduced in poultry and hogs. Pasture-grown animal foods will regain nutrition, avoid toxic contamination, and taste better. Animal breeding will reflect the new dietary reality. And huge acreages now devoted to feed grain monocropping will return to permanent pasture, drastically reducing erosion and chemical pollution.

• In addition to food and fertilizer production, animals will serve multiple functions: traction, transport, composting, pest control, etc.

• Small scale, geographically dispersed farms where animals stay clean and healthy on pasture will eliminate manure pollution of  waterways, meat and milk contamination from pathogens and antibiotics, and by shortening the pipeline from farmer to consumer,  make pasteurization and dangerous chemical meat preservatives unnecessary.
 

We can create this new animal-integrated, animal-friendly agriculture that makes the crisis in food safety disappear, and loosens the corporate stranglehold on dairy and livestock farmers in the process; all it takes is the political will. In livestock and its associated grain industry, monopoly capital has achieved virtually complete, vertically integrated control sooner than in any other sector of agriculture. As the food crisis deepens, the struggle for a healthy new system will have to confront this monopoly power. It will be difficult.