Low stress and thankfulness

So much of my life has been backwards, upside-down, inside-out and out of order this year that it seems almost natural that I should wait until after the fourth Thursday of November to write about thankfulness.

I was under the weather on Thanksgiving and on Black Friday. I felt a lot better on Saturday, and even though as a writer I’m supposed to be able to describe things clearly in written words, I can’t begin to tell you how good feeling better felt.

I was able to spend some feet-in-the-manure time with my cows.

A pen of well conditioned cows calmly await sorting on a ranch south of Kimball. Click for a larger image.

Three weaned spring calves had escaped the confines of their winter pasture gone home to mama. I needed to sort them off and get them back with their peers. I also had a fall calf that had developed a spectacular case of bacterial scours. After the battering near-train wreck we took from bacterial scours this spring, there was no hesitation in my mind. This heifer needed treatment.

Saturday was – for November – warm. It was breezy, too. No, strike that. It was windy. Blowing out of the west at 35 mph, gusting to 50 mph, the wind pummeled me, sucked the air out of my lungs, and lashed out with great clouds of dirt.

But I felt good, and when the temperature is 66 degrees, a little bit of wind isn’t much of a bother.

I brought the cows in on foot. It wasn’t much of a trick; their winter pasture is adjacent to the barn and corrals. I thoroughly enjoyed moving and working the cows using low-stress handling techniques.

Learning those low-stress techniques is one of the best things that ever happened to me. I’m still surprised that my mind was open enough to see the merit of the idea and to give it a try. More than a few skeptics told me I was wasting my time. I took a lot of ribbing from neighbors who’d seen me laying supine in the middle of the pasture, hat shading my eyes, surrounded by curious cattle who, singly or in pairs, would approach and gave me a good sniff. Those cattle became familiar with my presence and my smell, and I came to recognize them individuals. Individual cattle who are not people.

A pair of calm, well conditiond four year-old cows in a pen south of Kimball. Click for a larger image.

I’ve come to realize that low-stress cattle handling is grown-up cattle handling.

I’ve called the application of these techniques pressure dancing, and after so many years of shouting and waving and zipping back and forth all over the place, I’m still amazed at how well it works.

Saturday’s small chore, a job that would have previously taken the three-hour efforts of five hands,  four dogs, two pickups, three four-wheelers, a rented goat and a month’s worth of cussing took me 45 minutes, start to finish.

Watching those cattle calmly stroll through gates and into corrals was a soothing, satisfying experience. Sorting off four calves was simplicity itself. Treating the sick calf was a non-event, even though she liberally splattered me with evil-smelling feces.

Please don’t take my message the wrong way. There’s nothing wrong with traditional methods of working cattle. The job gets done, the hands enjoy their work, and the cattle don’t suffer at all. Different doesn’t have to be better or worse. Most often, different is just different.

It was a good day. A day spent in the real world, and away from the insanity of our drunkenly-stumbling artificial society.

I received a number of e-mails last Thursday which said “Happy Thanksgiving!” While I appreciate the time and effort expended in these missives, none of them cited reasons to be thankful or to (perish the thought!) give thanks. If there had been a “like” button programmed to send out the e-mails, most would have clicked it and moved on to something important. I feel a bit bad about that.

I’d wager that if asked, the vast majority of Americans could only regurgitate pre-programmed platitudes of thankfulness. What do they have to be thankful for? Food? There’s always food at the grocery store. Clothing? There’s always clothing at the department store. Health? There’s always medicine at the medicine store.Warmth? There’s always warmth from the heating system. Light? There’s always light with the flip of a switch. Transportation? Right outside on the driveway. The ability to pay for these things? You either have a job or the government gives you money. Security, roads, school, clean water, climate? Somebody else does that. Few people know who.

In 1863, in the depths of the Civil War, the President of the United States wrote a Proclamation of Thanksgiving to the nation. If you’d like to read the entire proclamation, click here or use a search engine to look it up.

In the midst of a war so terrible that few alive today can even begin to imagine the suffering, grief, carnage and desolation that ravaged our country, the President noted that:

“The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God…

“It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are in foreign lands, to set apart and observe…a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”

I am thankful that at so desperate a time, America had a leader of utmost honor; a man who could pen such thoughtful and healing words.

The world inhabited by most Americans, and by most citizens of the so-called developed world, is not the entirety of experience.

As history and objective observation tell us, it’s simply what it is.

Perspective and context

A friend stopped by the ranch the other day and caught up with me as we were finishing weaning calves.

Weaning calves is part of responsible animal husbandry and food production.

My friend was raised on a ranch, did the usual ranch chores while he was growing up, participated in 4-H, and had, as I did, the stereotypical idyllic farm-kid childhood.

Our paths diverged after high school. My friend went to college, got a degree, then a masters and a doctorate, and became a college professor. I joined the navy, served around the world in peacetime and in war, retired and returned to ranching. He’s still the same old friend, the very same person who I grew up with. I’m pretty much the same person he grew up with.

Unsurprisingly, we have divergent opinions about many things. This is natural, considering the different paths we’ve taken to reach our present stations in life. I feel very fortunate that our friendship transcends our opinions, and that we can honestly discuss and debate without arguing or feeling defensive. My friend has shown me different viewpoints on a wide range of topics and I completely respect his perspective. He’s taught me a few interesting and valuable lessons. I hope I’ve been able to do the same for him.

I showed my friend the pen of calves we had just finished working. They were, to my eye, a big, strapping, vigorous lot. I pointed out several of the calves who’d been plagued with bacterial scours shortly after birth, and explained how demanding their treatment had been and how close to death they had come. Each of these calves weighed 50-70 pounds less than their cohort, but each was alive and vigorous and rapidly catching up. I also showed him a yearling heifer scheduled fo slaughter. She’d been born with some birth defects, had a very shaky start, but had eventually done quite well. She’d never make a feedlot calf or a replacement heifer, an at 18 months she weighed only 400 lbs. With her misshapen jaw, contorted body, and obvious neurological disorders, she was a testament to survival.

My friend shook his head. “It seems so ironic,” he said. “You save their lives only to kill them.”

It’s a valid point, and one that I fear most non-ranching folks would buy into. But it’s more a superficial, emotion based conclusion than one derived from an understanding of reality. Let’s take a look.

Do livestock producers raise animals with the sole intent of killing them? Hardly. We raise food animals. Those animals harvest grass, which harvests sunlight. The livestock convert grass, which people cannot digest, into protein-rich meat, which people can digest. And on which people thrive. It’s probably no accident that the human evolution of cognition came at the same time humans began to consume meat. No livestock producer raises animals simply to kill them.

To turn food animals into food, though, they must be killed. They have to be slaughtered, dismembered, portioned, packaged, and distributed. For most consumers, slaughter takes place so far behind the scenes that they seldom, if ever, consider what it entails or how natural it is. Nearly all of us, livestock producers included, pay others to do the killing and slaughtering. This reduces our personal burden, so that we don’t each have to hunt, kill and process. We do this hard, labor intensive chore by proxy. The livestock producer does the job of the hunter, while the slaughterhouse does the processing chore. Even though consumers pay others to do the hard work, each consumer is directly responsible for the killing and slaughtering. Those who see livestock production only as killing are being intellectually lazy or dishonest. One can understand consumers feeling guilty about killing animals, but only with the deeper understanding that the guilty cannot or will not look at the whole picture, will not consider nature’s reality.

My friend, who decided to become a vegetarian a few years ago, agreed with my basic points, but argued that there is an alternative which doesn’t involve killing animals. I can understand his argument, but I have to counter again with natures reality. Every plant we consume is also killed. Most grain crops, of course, naturally die back at the end of the growing season. Yet we harvest their grain, which are seeds, and in a very real sense, are plant babies. So we’re killing the unborn plants, which an honest broker must consider as little different than killing the offspring of food animals. Both are forms of life, and both have their lives taken from them. But just as carnivores kill and consume herbivores in nature, so do herbivores kill and consume plants in nature. Though we consumers harvest plant material by proxy just as we harvest meat by proxy, we are each directly responsible for killing and consuming living organisms.

Another consideration is that the very nature of cultivating and harvesting plant crops has the unintended consequence of killing non-food animals and plants. In rice production, for example, untold millions of amphibians, fish and crustaceans are killed when paddies are drained and the grain harvested. In other food crop cultivation pesticides and herbicides kill countless insects and plants, and no small number of birds, mammals and reptiles are inadvertently killed during tillage and harvest operations. Yet without the use of herbicides and pesticides and without modern tillage and harvesting operations no adequate supply of food could be produced. And despite arguments to the contrary, a switch to subsistence farming would mean starvation for millions.

So yes, even the strictest vegan is directly responsible for killing untold numbers of living organisms.

In that light, bringing context and perspective to bear, one must conclude that rather than murderers, we humans are all a part of nature. The reality of life is that we can only exist as part of nature. Most of us live in highly artificial environments, but in reality, we each occupy the same place in nature that the frontiersman did two centuries ago. We harvest renewable resources to feed, clothe and shelter our existence. We do this largely by proxy, which is the only way so many of us can survive. But we’re still linked directly to nature and constrained directly by nature.

The cure for feeling guilty about our artificial existence is to learn and understand. Fortunately, most people have the ability to learn and understand. The ongoing challenge for agricultural producers is to help our fellows to do this. We’re most effective in sharing knowledge when we respect our fellows opinions, but insist that they look at the world the way it is. Getting bogged down in an argument about which of us is responsible for murder is a wholesale waste of time and misses the reality of our existence entirely.

We are all farmers

One of the most important problems facing farmers and ranchers today is the disconnect between consumers and producers. This disconnect is potentially dangerous to both consumers and producers, and arguably poses a threat to the very existence of our nation. Unfortunately, the disconnect continues to be set in adversarial tones by the major media and many in government.

It’s a thorny problem, because so few are feeding so many. One might think the problem therefore could lie in the concentration of power in agricultural food production – that a mighty few could control the food supply. In fact, the opposite is the case. The majority control the food supply. The majority have it within their power to unintentionally wreck the agricultural sector by pushing for changes, regulations and policies in a system they don’t understand. Such changes, regulations and policies might be superficially well intended, but if they destroy food production everyone will go hungry.

We are all food consumers. We all have a vested survival interest in food. Consumers pay for, and ultimately control, food production. In that sense, just as we are all consumers, so are we all farmers. Perhaps this is a message that will help ease the disconnect.

The primary disconnect is that most consumers are so far removed from food production that they have little basic understanding of what farmers and ranchers do, and why. Farmers and ranchers, who deal with the how and why every day, struggle to understand a point of view that doesn’t include what, to them, is common wisdom.

Political activists and opportunists, including many in the media and in government, take advantage of the situation by boldly misrepresenting objective facts in order to manipulate public opinion. The media meme is essentially this – farmers and ranchers are intentionally producing unsafe food and harming the environment to make money. Politicians, government officials and bureaucrats often posit government policy and regulation as the only thing preventing out-of-control farmers and ranchers from poisoning both consumers and the environment.

In a nutshell, agriculture has become highly politicized. Like many other topics in the national discourse, agriculture is now an ideological battleground. As has often been said (perhaps first by Samuel Johnson in The Idler, ca. 1758), the first casualty of war is truth.

Producers recognize that very little – if any – of the national discourse on agriculture and agriculture policy has anything to do with the reality of producing food. I suspect that many consumers have a sense that when it comes to agriculture they are being fed a political narrative rather than factual information.

For producers, the political narrative is extremely frustrating. An overwhelming majority of policy makers, bureaucrats, and reporters make assertions which are simply not true, assertions which they are absolutely unqualified to make. I suspect that the majority of consumers are skeptical about such sweeping assertions. A few examples:

GMO’s, or Genetically Modified Organisms. The narrative asserts that GMO crops are a ticking time bomb which will unleash monstrous mutating plagues across the face of the planet. Evidence supporting this assertion can only be found in 1950’s sci-fi movies. The fact that man has been manipulating plant and animal genetics for hundreds of thousands of years, and that nature has been doing so for billions of years – with no sign of mutant plagues, mind you – is ignored.

LFTB. Lean Finely Textured Beef. This product, called “pink slime” in the media, in congress and even by many in the USDA, is said to be rotting, leftover meat, treated with poisonous ammonia and force-fed to helpless school children. Just think about that for a moment and ask yourself whether it seems a reasonable proposition.

Antibiotic resistant superbugs. A recent New York Times editorial, written by a self-proclaimed “foodie”, contained the following phrase. “Indeed, about 80 percent of antibiotics in the United States go to farm animals – leading to the risk of more antibiotic-resistant microbes, which already cause infections that kill some 100,000 Americans annually.” That sentence is a masterful piece of deception, leading one to believe that food animals suffer the same diseases as humans, and that mistreatment of these diseases causes antibiotic resistant superbugs to be transmitted to human beings – somehow – and kill 100,000 consumers each year. Again, ask yourself whether this makes sense.

If these goofy claims are frustrating for producers, imagine how frustrating they must be for consumers. Most consumers, 98-99 percent of Americans, are so far removed from any contact with food production that they have no ability to put such claims into reasonable perspective or context. A great many – perhaps most – probably recognize that there is something fishy in such irrational assertions. But they’re busy people, and lack the time to investigate each claim. They are further hamstringed by the lack of easily accessed, objective data. They expect the media to provide objective truth, but the media does not. Nor does the government.

To understand the frustration of the consumer, try an experiment. Type “antibiotic resistance food animals” into your search engine of choice. Click on a few of the hits. You will find a lot of assertions, such as:

“These drugs can affect the meat, milk, and eggs produced from those animals and can be the source of superbugs. For example, farm animals, particularly pigs, are believed (though not proven) to be able to infect people with MRSA.”

Unfortunately, such assertions are almost exclusively misrepresentations. If you take the time to click on citation links and read the papers, you’ll find that they tell a completely different story. Still, I challenge you to find, in less than a day, a document on the internet which gives a more objective overview such as the following:

“Although antibiotics and antibiotic residues can be found in meat, milk and eggs immediately following drug administration, such residues are quickly metabolized and flushed from the animals system, and federally mandated withdrawal periods prevent food products containing residues from being sold for consumption. Though it is theoretically possible for antibiotic resistant food animal pathogens to genetically transmit resistance to human pathogens, there is no evidence that this has ever occurred and USDA inspectors and researchers are constantly monitoring food streams to ensure safety.”

Try a similar search at the USDA Web-site. There you will find a wealth of data, but no clear answer to basic and fundamental questions.

For the consumer, finding information about agriculture and food production is a serious challenge. While we can argue the cause of this, it’s clear that neither major media nor government are willing or able to provide simple, honest objectivity.

Agricultural producers can and should take the lead in resetting the narrative. Farmers and ranchers should embrace consumers as partners. We should show our fellow consumers how the narrative is crafted to divide us. We should show how such division benefits only the fringe activists and self-proclaimed intellectual elite. We should show the looming consequences of fear mongering and over-regulation. We should show non-ag consumers how they are being abused by those who claim to be protecting and informing them. We should invite them to join us a fellow agriculturalists, and to work together to take back our lives and our futures.

What consumers should know about their food

Firstly, if it's a report about food, and you read it in the newspaper, heard it on the radio, or saw it on television, the report you saw was almost certainly biased, untruthful, propaganda. When a Katie Couric clone tells you that eating meat will destroy your intestines, he or she is lying. Keep that in mind.

In this economy, food is increasingly expensive. There are a number of reasons for this, including monetary inflation, over-regulation, tax policies, and turning food into fuel. There is another, perhaps more important reason. The media have declared war on the food sector. To prosecute this war, they are dealing in misinformation, disinformation, factual manipulation, and – most of all – outright lies. These constant attacks not only undermine your confidence in the food supply, they directly and indirectly drive up retail food prices.

According to the media narrative, our food is unsafe, tainted by toxins and infected with pathogens. Greedy farmers intentionally load their produce with poisonous chemicals and ranchers pump their livestock full of hormones and antibiotics. This is done to maximize profits, regardless of the well-known consequences suffered by consumers.

Most consumers seem to be skeptical of these claims. They continue to eat the presumably deadly foods three – or more – times each day. They realize that the food isn’t making them sick or killing them, nor is it sickening or killing anyone they know. But the narrative is persistent and pervasive, and it’s a cause for concern. We’ve all heard the adage, “where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Given the message, consumers are only right to wonder where the fire is, and whether it’s heading their way.

Consumer confidence is being constantly attacked, and the narrative flies in the face of reality. At some level, consumers who eat well each and every day of their lives, understand that their food supply is the safest, most nutritious, and least expensive of any food supply on earth. Here’s a bit of anecdotal evidence:

At the Kimball Farmers’ Day celebration last September, our ranch donated the ground beef for the free hamburger feed. We provided more than 500 lbs. of tasty, nutritious, grassfed beef to the event. We wanted to be available to answer any questions or concerns about the main course, so we set up an information booth.

Grassfed burgers sizzle on the grill at Kimball’s 86th Annual Farmers’ Day celebration.

Youngsters add condiments to their burgers at Kimball’s 86th Annual Farmers’ Day celebration.

The hungry crowd was all smiles at the free hamburger feed during Kimball’s 86th Annual Farmers’ Day celebration.

Our booth was the John Deere Gator which we’d driven through the parade. We parked it adjacent to the serving lines and attached a few “ask me” posters, inviting questions about antibiotics and hormones, grassfed vs. grain finished beef, nutrition and food safety, and ranching or agriculture in general.

Though we received many thanks and compliments, we heard nary a question about the source of the beef or about any quality or safety concerns. I was slightly surprised at this, considering the preponderance of negative press. How many positive food stories have you seen on television or read in the press over the last decade? (The answer is ZERO.) I drew two general conclusions from the lack of questions. Firstly, the free hamburger consumers were hungry after waiting in line and were more interested in eating than in talking. And most importantly, they were probably not very concerned about the quality and safety of the food.

I suspect that this is the case with the vast majority of American consumers. Despite being constantly bombarded with horror stories about an unsafe and even poisoned food supply, almost no one has ever been sickened by the food they eat, nor do many consumers even know of anyone who has been sickened. They are almost certainly somewhat concerned about the bad food narrative, but their experience tells them there’s never been anything wrong with the food they’ve consumed.

So what should consumers know about their food supply to help them overcome the false narrative spread by the major media? To start with, let’s deconstruct the meat narrative.

The narrative espoused by the major media – network television, major newspapers and magazines, national public radio, etc. – is consistent. The narrative claims that ranchers, seeking profit at all cost, use antibiotics and hormones to force animal growth. As a consequence of this, according to the narrative, the meat you consume is tainted with antibiotics, pathogens such as E. coli and Salmonella, and loaded with hormones. Antibiotics in the “tainted” meat are toxic, the narrative implies, and the added hormones cause obesity, early puberty, cancer and death. Overuse of antibiotics cause the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria which kill 100,000 consumers each year and sicken many more.

If you think my claims about the narrative are overblown, I challenge you to find an objective story on U.S. meat production which has aired or been published in the major media in the last decade. If you provide it, I’ll make an appropriate retraction in this space.

But you’ll have a hard time finding one.

Far more common are hit pieces such as Katie Couric’s “exclusive” on antibiotic use in food animals, ABC and Jamie Oliver’s attacks on Lean Finely Textured Beef (LFTB), and fantastic claims that hormones are causing all manner of health problems.

When it comes to antibiotic use in food animals, the press gets it completely wrong. They’re either fail to understand what antibiotics are and how they work, or they’re intentionally lying. I suspect it’s a combination of both.

In food animals, antibiotics are used to treat or prevent specific bacterial illnesses. The same thing is done in human medicine. But the system is better regulated when it comes to food animals. Veterinarians and ranchers administer only approved and therapeutic doses of antibiotics. Antibiotic withdrawal periods and USDA inspectors ensure that no meat containing antibiotics or antibiotic residues enters the food supply.

Couric (and legions of other so-called journalists) report that overuse of antibiotics in food production causes the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria which kill more than 100,000 Americans each year. She cited the finding of Methicillin-Resistant Staph. aureus (MSRA) in a single Iowa hog operation as proof. Within a week her entire “exclusive report” was completely discredited; livestock are never treated with methicillin, and the bacteria found on the pigs came from farm workers. In the reverse of Couric’s claim, the animals had been infected by humans. For the complete story, visit http://prairieadventure.blogspot.com/2011/03/food-animals-and-antibiotic-resistance.html

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and ABC news have hounded BPI (Beef Products International) over their LFTB product, which they call “pink slime”. ABC is presently subject to a defamation lawsuit over their fantastic claims. Oliver demonstrated his understanding of LFTB to his studio audience when he mixed rotting meat scraps with household ammonia cleaner and ground it in a blender. This was such a fabrication and intentional misrepresentation that it’s hard to believe any but psychotic and deranged person would make such claims. In the actual LFTB process, lean meat is separated from fresh, fatty meat trimmings via a centrifuge. The lean meat is treated with a tiny amount of ammonium hydroxide, which increases the pH of the meat to inhibit bacterial growth. Ammonia is a nitrogen compound which occurs naturally in all foods. In fact, a typical bacon cheeseburger made with LFTB contains a total of  232 milligrams of ammonia. The bun contains 50 mg, the bacon 16 mg, the condiments 50 mg, and the cheese 76 mg. The LFTB contains 40 mg, or about 17 percent of the total.

When it comes to hormones, the narrative consensus is that beef is so loaded with growth promoting estrogen compounds that children become obese and suffer an early onset of puberty, and that the high levels of hormones cause cancer and other diseases. Just how high are these levels? Estrogen is measured in nanograms (ng) per 500 grams (g) of food product. A nanogram is one-billionth of a gram. Beef from a non-implanted steer contains five nanograms of estrogen in 500 grams of meat. That number rises in an implanted steer to seven nanograms, an increase of two-billionths of a gram in roughly a pound of beef. That’s not so bad, is it? But let’s compare the estrogen content in implanted beef (7ng/500g) to milk (32ng), butter (310ng), eggs (555ng), peanuts (100,000ng), white bread (300,000ng), pinto beans (900,000ng), and tofu (113.5 million nanograms).

Do my claims still seem overblown? I can’t speak to why the press is attacking the food industry. I have my suspicions. More important though is what they are doing. They are lying to you, and playing on your fears. This is a despicable thing to do, and is a direct attack on the first amendment and freedom of speech.

The media is supposed to report factual, objective news. They claim they do so. Do you believe them?

Running man: was it Pheidippides or Eucles?

The weather in the Panhandle was cool and rainy on Saturday, October 13. The rain was scattered, light, and intermittent, but welcome all the same. Temperatures hovered in the 50’s and the winds were gusty at times, but all in all, it was a very pleasant day for mid-October in this part of the country.

As I sat in the warm comfort of my automobile, I occasionally flicked the windshield wipers into action, clearing my view enough to see the gravelly field in front of me, practically in the shadow of Dome Rock.

When the wipers did their work, what had been a blur of color resolved into parallel lines of colorful pennants and a young woman, dressed in a red hooded jacket and grasping a small cow bell. She looked wet and miserable.

Every few minutes a human form would lurch out of the mist a few hundred yards away, churning ever closer to my observation point, grim and weary determination written in their gait and, as they came closer, clearly written in their facial expression as well. As they neared, the cold and wet young woman transformed from huddled misery into a smiling, cheering dervish of activity, loudly clanging her cow bell and shouting encouragement.

This was the scene near the finish line of the inaugural Monument Marathon.

I was there, along with my Mom and a nephew, to cheer on our sister/daughter/mom.

This was the third marathon for my sister, Jenny Jennings of Lincoln, Neb. Her goal was to finish in under four hours. She turned 42 on October 14, the day after the marathon.

As the rain cleared we left the car behind and strolled up to the crowd gathered near the finish line. The half-marathon participants – those running a 13.1 mile course – were finishing, and at just a few minutes before 11 a.m., so was the first full marathon finisher. The full marathon had started at 8 a.m. at the nature center in the Wildcat Hills. The course ran 26.2 miles along Highway 71, meandering along the county roads south of Gering, through Gering itself, along a big loop around Scotts Bluff National Monument, and finishing at Five Rocks Amphitheater.

We joined a small group at the finish line. We were all armed with cameras and hoping to get a shot of “our” runner as he or she finished. Many of those waiting were local and attending their first marathon. “I can’t imagine why anyone would run 26 miles,” was a common statement. At one point someone asked, “Why do they call it a marathon?” The small group seemed genuinely puzzled, and no one offered up the answer. Dredging through the sludge of memory, I offered up what I remembered from high school and college history.

“During the Peloponnesian War between Greece, and, um, Persia? Well, anyway, at the Battle of Marathon in what, about 700 B.C.? Somewhere in there. Anyway, when the battle ended a Greek soldier ran from the battlefield to, um, wherever the generals were, to report. Maybe it was Thermopylae to Marathon. Anyway, he had to run about 26.2 miles. So that’s why it’s called a marathon, and why it’s 26.2 miles.” Or words to that effect.

My high school and college history teachers would have shaken their heads at my recap, and it wouldn’t have passed muster in a history exam. I dug out my Western Civ textbook when I got home (anyone else hold on to their enormously expensive college textbooks?) and found that I’d mangled some of the details.

But I was close.

The battle did take place at Marathon, the Greeks were fighting the Persians, and the soldier did run approximately 26.2 miles.

But the battle took place in September, 490 B.C. About 210 years later than I thought. The runner was either a fellow named Pheidippides or a different soldier named Eucles. The history is a bit confused because no primary documents remain. The tale, which is very likely true in at least some respects, comes to us from the historians Plutarch and Lucian of Samosata, who wrote in the first and second centuries A.D. respectively. That’s more than a half-millennium after the events took place.

Herodotus, said to be the Father of History and who lived at the time of Marathon, wrote that Pheidippides ran from Athens to Sparta and back – a distance of 300 miles – to call the Spartans to battle against the Persian invasion. This is certainly possible, but because Herodotus relied on verbal accounts as sources, cited no confirming documents, and often reported fanciful tales, his version is considered questionable.

Plutarch and Lucian report that the soldier ran from Marathon to Athens. So much for my faulty recollection of a Thermopylae-Marathon route. The distance between those two cities is 135 miles. To add salt to my wounded historical pride, the Battle of Thermopylae, though also fought between the Greeks and Persians, took place ten years later than the Battle of Marathon.

I guess that 100 miles and 10 years is reasonably close for a top-of-the-head recollection from a broken-down cow puncher.

So there’s a bit of the history. I find the Greco-Persian wars quite interesting, and think the history is worth reading. Though 2,500 years have passed, ancient Greece was the birthplace of our Western Civilization; the birthplace of our American Republic as well.

As to why people run marathons, I suspect there are as many reasons as runners. But the 26.2 mile marathon is perhaps the oldest physical benchmark of all time. Those who know a bit of the history must wonder, as I do, whether they could match the feat of this long-dead Greek soldier. I never ran a marathon, and I doubt I ever will. So I’ll never know. But my sister knows, and my heart nearly burst with pride as I watched her cross the finish line.

How did Sis do? She finished 27th overall, and third in her age group. Her time was 4:03:13, with a mile-pace of 9:16.

Jenny Jennings, a marathoner from Lincoln, Neb., crosses the finish line at Five rocks Amphitheater in Gering Oct. 13. Jennings was competing in the inaugural Monument Marathon and finished the 26.2 mile course in just over four hours. Jennings grew up on a Kimball County ranch. Click for a larger image.

She was a bit disappointed in her performance, having hoped to finish in under four hours. She would have done so at a mile-pace of 9:09. Think of that. Seven seconds per mile. Over 26 miles. Marathoners compete primarily against themselves, of course, but my goodness – what a performance!

I salute all of the participants. They’ve done it, I haven’t. Those are some pretty awesome athletes in my book.

Why are grumpy old men so grumpy?*

My Niece recently asked me if I was becoming a grumpy old man, and if so, why? I was too grumpy to give a cogent answer.

However, an illustration:

No, not this illustration. But go ahead and click for a larger image. More light/shadow images at the end of this post. For the grumpiness illustration, continue reading.

I received a series of e-mails Monday which made me grumpy. Okay, you’re right, they simply increased my grumpiness.

The e-mails came from the Colorado Field Office of the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and told me that because Hurricane Sandy was expected to disrupt Washington D.C., The Weekly Crop Progress and Weather Reports for October 23-29 would be delayed indefinitely.

As the name suggests, the Weekly Crop Progress and Weather Reports give an overview of crop condition and weather events on a weekly and state-by-state basis. Each state in the union has a central field office, and counties and regions within each state submit reports to the field office. The field office collates the data, compares current conditions to long-term statistical norms, notes any unusual conditions, and then submits a short but information-packed overview regarding the particular state’s crop and weather conditions during the previous week.

These reports are one of the many wonders of the twenty-first century, delivered to farmers and other agricultural professionals through the hard work of USDA field employees, field office employees, and the Internet.

Farmers and other agricultural professionals use these reports for medium- to long-term planning, and occasionally for short-term decision making. For many in the Agricultural sector, they have become a valuable tool.

Which is why many of the highlights of the Nebraska, Wyoming and Colorado Weekly Crop Progress and Weather Reports show up in weekly ag publications.

The loss of one or more weekly reports is not a major problem. Ag producers farm and ranch 24/7/365. Any missing report, or two, or three, is unlikely to contain information vital to the success or survival of any farm or ranch.

No, the missing reports aren’t a problem. But they do point to a systematic problem. Stand by for a brief excursion into history.

Contrary to the oft-made claim that Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States and present global warming alarmist, invented the Internet, the Internet was in fact invented by several groups of government, college and university computer researchers, funded in large part and at least initially by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA later became ARPA (dropping “Defense” from the title) and continued funding the nascent Internet. DARPA/ARPA provided most of the start-up capital and operational funding until the Internet was able to stand firmly on it’s own financial feet.

Now why do you suppose DARPA/ARPA wanted to invent an Internet in the first place?

The genesis of the project was back in the days of the Cold War (which we won, right? Ask Vladimir Putin about that if you get the chance). DARPA tasked computer scientists with developing a distributed computer network which could continue working even if several of its nodes were taken out by the enemy. They wanted the distributed network to have the ability to continue plotting missile trajectories, to help the National Command Authority manage the battle, and once the battle had ended, to help the survivors rebuild society.

Well, we never fought a “hot” Cold War, and as DARPA’s distributed computer network grew and matured, it gained new names and uses. DARPANET became the World Wide Web, and the distributed network became cyberspace. Computations done in cyberspace and transmitted along the distributed network of the World Wide Web allowed e-mail to be born, instant messaging, Web-sites, computer gaming, libraries literally at one’s fingertips, streaming and downloadable digital music and film, Skype, Google World, Google Moon, and even the USDA’s Weekly Crop Progress and Weather Reports. Also the millions of other Internet wonders I failed to mention.

So if I start a paragraph with the sentence, ‘No, the missing reports aren’t a problem.’, you might rightly assume that I believe there is in fact  a problem lurking about somewhere.

And this is it.

DARPANET/Internet/World Wide Web/Cyberspace was designed to be a distributed network, one in which the loss of one or more nodes wouldn’t degrade the computational and distributional ability of the system as a whole.

Why, then, are the USDA Weekly Crop Progress and Weather Reports not available, and why might they remain unavailable for some unspecified number of days or weeks?

The explanation (excuse) is Hurricane Sandy, which is impacting Washington D.C. and a number (perhaps eight) of surrounding states. If I use the common understanding of the number of U.S. states (a total of 50, rather than 57), at least 42 states have compiled their reports and, uninterrupted by a nasty ol' hurricane, could in theory submit them via the Internet. I rather suppose they have. I was writing this piece at the height of the awful storm and was fully connected to the Internet. I’d be surprised indeed if Kimball, Nebraska just happened to be the only place in the nation where the Internet is up and functioning during the hurricane.

No, the Internet isn’t the problem. Neither is the hurricane, which was quickly downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone with sustained winds of 45 mph. Yes, the storm caused some damage, some flooding, some power outages, and some deaths. As hurricanes go, however, it was an unimpressive storm.

The federal government, however, declared the storm a “potential disaster” and ordered non-essential employees in the affected area to stay home. This makes sense.

But as to the USDA Weekly Crop Progress and Weather Reports, most of which were generated hundreds if not thousands of miles distant from the storm, said reports were not distributed. All reports are first submitted to Washington D.C., and then forwarded following official bureaucratic approval.

But there were no bureaucrats at work in Washington D.C. yesterday. They had the day off. With pay.

The USDA Weekly Crop Progress and Weather Reports don’t matter much in the scheme of things. But how many important reports fell through the cracks?

And if Big Government can paralyze a distributed information network, one designed to survive a nuclear war, do you suppose that is a good thing? Imagine next year, as you’re trying to schedule your cancer surgery, and someone at H&HS has to take a “personal day.” I’m just sayin’.

On an upbeat note, the play of autumn light and shadow is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful of our Universe’s creations. Keep an eye out for it. Spot it. Stop. Scroll down. Enjoy.

BTW. (In my day you added a "P.S.", which stood for postscript.) The reports were out the next day, released as if nothing had happened. I suggest that this supports my hypothesis that the government workers responsible for (and paid to) sign off on and release the reports were sandbagging it – taking an extra “free” day. Full pay, all benefits, no work, max television.

*But not terminally grumpy

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What goes around comes around

Last year the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) filed suit – and lost – against Feld Entertainment, Inc., the parent company of Ringling Brothers Circus’. The suit claimed mistreatment of circus elephants.

Filing such a suit is par for the course for HSUS, which flies under the banner of an alleged animal protection organization or “humane society.”

Animal welfare. Healthy puppy, healthy cattle. This is not what HSUS does.

The fact that such a high-profile animal rights organization lost a law suit should have been big news. After all, the fact that HSUS convinced Californian voters to kill their poultry industry was huge news, and every single “successful” HSUS operation receives primetime commentary and front page billing. HSUS’s recent failure was greeted with deafening silence across the airwaves and zero ink in the nations most prestigious newspapers.

Nor has it been reported that Feld Entertainment vigorously riposted against the malicious action brought by HSUS, counter-suing and alleging “…a litany of charges ranging from bribery to money laundering to racketeering.” Though the high-powered attorneys for HSUS, whom the organization compensates with an aggregate of more than $3 million annually, moved to have the charges dismissed, District of Columbia Federal judge Emmet G. Sullivan ruled that the case must proceed under the RICO Statutes – statutes designed to combat Mafia gangsters, among others.

There’s a reason why there’s been little or no reporting of this matter. More on that later. First let’s turn over the slimy rock and see what HSUS looks like in the light of day.

You’ve seen the ads on television, the ones showing a parade of sick and abused puppies and kittens. HSUS, sponsor of the ads, leads you to believe that YOU can make a difference in the lives of those poor, abused creatures. For just $19 per month, or $228 per year. A mere pittance. What’s a few dollars when it comes to saving puppies and kittens? Perhaps you’ve signed up. The slick commercials present a compelling (though substantively empty) emotional argument. And it’s easy to donate. Just a brief phone call or a few mouse clicks, and there you are, a warrior against the abuse of puppies and kitties.

There’s just one slight problem, and if you’ve donated, you probably know what it is. There’s probably a sneaking suspicion in the back or your mind that, as your parents told you, if it’s too good (or cheap, or easy) to be true, then it probably isn’t. Here’s the problem in a nutshell. If you’ve donated, you’ve been scammed.

You see, HSUS isn’t about protecting animals. By their twisted logic, they support animal rights. As in human rights, only for animals. As Ingrid Newkirk, founder of PETA famously said, “…a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” No animal should ever be the property or pet of a human being. That’s slavery. And no animal should ever be eaten. That’s cannibalism.

The other side of the coin, that practiced by 99.999 percent of livestock producers and most pet owners, is animal welfare. From this perspective, humans who own animals are responsible for their wellbeing. I won’t belabor the difference. If you’re an adult, and capable of objective reasoning, you can figure it out for yourself.

To achieve their ends, the HSUS scams people and organizations to generate cash, which it uses to sue, badger and lobby politicians and businesses into adopting a radical animals rights agenda. Any objective observer would have to conclude that it’s a despicable way to behave.

Exhibit one. How much of a $19 monthly donation goes to support shelters for kitties and puppies? Care to guess? Seventeen bucks? No. Fifteen? Uh, nope. Ten dollars? Not even close. Okay, cut to the chase. Seven cents. No, not seven dollars. Seven cents. Seven pennies. In a whole year a whopping 84 cents of the $228 donation to HSUS goes to puppy and kitty shelters. That’s less than couch change.

Exhibit two. The shelters the HSUS supports have the highest euthanasia and lowest adoption rates of all pet shelters. According to Veterinarian Patty Khuly, the shelter euthanasia rate across America is 34 percent. In HSUS supported shelters the euthanasia rate is 97 percent. Why is the HSUS euthanasia rate so high? Because the HSUS position is that animals are better off dead than existing as property or as a pet. Also, most state laws require adopted dogs and cats to be spayed or neutered. This costs money. It costs almost nothing to euthanize a dog or cat.

Exhibit three. What happens with the remaining $227.16 of an annual donation? Here are some numbers, gleaned from 2010 HSUS tax records. HSUS CEO Wayne Pacelle was paid $287,786. HSUS employed 636 people, 29 of whom make more than $100,000. HSUS pumped $2.6 million into it’s pension plan. It spent $3.6 million lobbying state and federal lawmakers. HSUS spent $47 million on fundraising. They spent 0.418 percent on puppy and kitty shelters, most of which went to euthanasia. All the rest went to salaries, promotions, pensions, and lobbying.

And that may be why HSUS is presently facing federal charges of racketeering, obstruction of justice, and malicious prosecution.

Now we return to the lack of media coverage. Why haven’t you heard a peep about this RICO prosecution? Well, honestly, why would you? The major media, including CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, the Associated Press and countless major newspapers gave HSUS more than $34 million in free advertising last year. It’s all there in the tax records.

You see, HSUS doesn’t just run a $19 per month numbers racket. They maliciously threaten American citizens with expensive legal action and violence. They pay top dollar to manipulate the legal system to achieve their unsavory and often criminal ends.

At the end of the day, they want all animals to be free. Even if they have to kill them.

This lawsuit easily could bankrupt HSUS, put it out of business and send some of its top executives to prison.

And it’s about time. These animal rights and environmental extremists have been pushing policy in this country for more than 20 years, through duplicity, malicious threats, strong-arm tactics, and violent criminal behavior. They’ve grown immensely wealthy through their lawsuits and racketeering schemes. They’ve misrepresented their true nature and goals.

There’s no room in this country for such criminal behavior. It needs to be stamped out.

Drought and Food Prices

The drought that much of the nation’s breadbasket is presently mired in provides a good illustration of the lack of understanding most Americans have when it comes to production agriculture.

Hopeful clouds soar above a field of dryland corn in a field south of Kimball, Neb.

News reports concentrate on the effect the drought will have on this year’s crops – particularly corn – and how a short crop will affect food prices. Unfortunately, the great majority of these reports represent a misunderstanding of both food production and market forces.

While it’s true that in a free market, supply and demand drive prices, the temporary reduction of supply as drought reduces yields this year will only really be felt once the harvest is in, and then only for a relatively short while.

Some may argue that ruthless supply-siders are using the excuse of the drought to jack up prices. But markets don't really work that way. To some extent American markets are less elastic or responsive to immediate real world events than they have been in the past. This is the result of government intervention through policy and regulation. Like it or not, when government enters markets, neither producers nor consumers gain. Everyone loses, in every transaction, at least by a tiny bit.

The present drought, as I said, isn't likely to affect food prices significantly or for a long period. I know, the press says otherwise, and they're "real" experts. So who are you going to believe? The press or your lying eyes?

Here's how it works. The bulk of the cost of retail food lies in post-production processing, storage and transportation. In comparison, the cost of food commodities is quite small and represents only a few percent of the overall retail cost of food at the supermarket. So while the drought will affect commodity prices and therefore a small fraction of retail food prices, it will not affect the other 90-plus percent of factors contributing to retail costs.

Corn is a bell-weather food commodity, and increasingly, a bell-weather energy commodity, yet a 50 percent increase in corn price will ultimately yield only about a one percent increase in retail food costs.

Corn is harvested but once a year, so the corn used today in food production comes from previous crops. Though the present drought has no effect on corn produced last year or earlier, the market does appear to anticipate events, and speculation about this year’s crop is, to some extent, driving a spike in the price of corn purchased today. But markets are mostly self-adjusting. They twitched up at the unexpected news of a possible (or probable) drought-caused yield reduction this year, and they will twitch downward when harvest nears and more certainty about the actual yield provides a moderating influence.

Drought is neither monolithic nor binary. In other words, it’s not an either-or proposition, but one which varies from place to place. In the present drought, a very few producers will have total crop failure, a very few will have bumper crops, and most will find themselves between the two extremes, with their crop affected to some extent but still producing a saleable yield.

The present drought isn’t permanent, and will only bear on food prices so long as it persists. We can’t know the future with absolute certainty, of course, but the past shows us that widespread drought is a statistical outlier. For every season of extreme drought, there is also a season of extreme wet, another outlier. The extremes occur only infrequently, while most seasons cluster around the statistical average and produce average yields. When the present drought eases, so will the temporary spike in commodity prices.

The annual cycle of crop production is a tough concept for many consumers to wrap their minds around, because it is so very different from the way they live their lives. Most don’t consciously understand that for the most part, crops are only harvested once each year, albeit in enough quantity to meet consumer demand until next year’s crop is harvested.

When people are told by seemingly reliable sources that their food security is threatened, they become rightly concerned. The fact that they do become concerned should be appreciated by all ag producers. Those we feed in turn feed us when they buy our crops at the retail level. In a perfect world the press would report objectively and completely on this and other issues. We don’t have a perfect world, though, and it’s extremely hard to counter the narrative.

Still, each of us can do some good by helping our non-ag fellows to understand the present drought and to put it in a reasonable context.

Food Prices

We’ve been talking about the disconnect between the realities of food production and the artificial understanding of agriculture held by most Americans. The fact that there’s a disconnect is in part understandable when you consider that fewer than two percent of the population feeds more than 100 percent of the population (don’t forget exports) and the vast majority – more than 98 percent – are two or more generations removed from the farm.

But being physically disconnected from agriculture isn’t the entire story. Education, media and entertainment paint a vastly skewed picture of the basic realities of the physical world, and a population that is increasingly urbanized and “connected” is in fact increasingly disconnected from reality. One might describe this phenomenon – where hundreds of millions of people blandly accept fiction as fact – as a mass delusion.

A few years ago a NASCAR driver attempted to win a race by charging into the final corner much too fast. He flew off the straightaway with excess speed and flashed by the race leader. But then physics took over, and his car slammed into the wall as he tried to corner. After the race he explained that he’d tried the maneuver on a video game and had been successful – the game allowed his virtual car to zip through the corner against the wall without damage and without paying the cost of transferring kinetic energy, or speed, into the heat energy produced by 3,500 lbs. of race car grinding against the Safer Barrier under centripetal force.

This was a reasonably experienced, successful driver. The point isn’t that he didn’t know what would happen – he did – but that he allowed himself to believe that the natural laws of physics just might prove to be malleable.

Unlike the driver, who had plenty of experience in the physical reality of hitting the wall, the majority of Americans have no experience with production agriculture, and increasingly, no experience of nature outside the artificial environment of cities and towns. Without experience – and like it or not, television and video games do not represent experience – these people are vulnerable to believing that reality is what the media, entertainment and education “experts” say it is, rather than what it is.

As I write this on July 17, the Washington Post (among others) is reporting that food prices are increasing because of the present drought across the Midwest and great Plains. The story in the Post is written with the certitude of an author who is describing factual reality.

But the drought is a recent phenomenon, while food prices have been rising since 2008, even though crop production as an aggregate has increased. So why isn’t the law of supply and demand driving food prices?

Firstly, and despite government and administration claims that the nation is “dong fine” economically, increased government spending has been directly driving inflation across the economic spectrum. The administration cherry-picks outlying data points and reports that there is no inflation, yet every food-buyer in the nation knows that food prices have been on the rise for years. The media have been largely silent on the subject until now, when they have a drought to blame it on, and can protect their precious narrative. But the fact remains that commodity prices contribute little to food costs, the bulk of which lie in processing and transportation. Nor do the relatively tiny drought-fueled market increases of today explain away the inflation of the last four-plus years.

Secondly, ever since the Renewable Fuels Standard became law, food prices have been decoupled from the agricultural market and coupled to energy the energy market. The driving force behind corn price increases has been ethanol, which has become the largest single user of corn. As corn goes, so do other food commodity prices.

Food cost inflation is directly linked to increased government spending and regulation. In attempting to force a fantasy ethos on reality, an adverse effect is created in the economy. Nature is unaffected; reality remains stubbornly real. Consumers pay the cost in increasing food prices and wonder why the fantasy of hope and change remains unrealized in the real world.

The narrative is powerful

“A life unexamined is not worth living.”
Socrates, Athens, 469-439 B.C.

For the 98-99 percent of Americans who do not actively participate in production agriculture, farming and ranching and the production of the food they eat is a great unknown. These people, living in largely urban and suburban areas and generally within a few hundred miles of the east and west coasts, are nearly all two or more generations removed from production agriculture. Most have never set foot on a farm or ranch, and only a vanishingly small number have relatives engaged in farming or ranching. What they know of production agriculture is what they learn in school, from entertainment, and from the major media.

For most of these folks, there’s a vast gulf between what they think they know about farming and ranching and what they actually do know.

Why is this?

The answer is fairly simple.

Above all else, they have no direct experience. They have no idea how to set the rpm on a cow to get optimal P.T.O. performance. They don’t know which side of the corn kernel goes “down” when planting. They don’t know how many acres there are in a gallon or how many rods make a remuda.

If you happen to be a farmer or rancher, you know that the above paragraph contains a number of non-sequiturs. But if you’re not a farmer or rancher, how would you know? You certainly wouldn’t be able to rely on experience.

The 98-99 percent of non-farming, non-ranching Americans must find a different way of understanding production agriculture. They do this largely through school, the media, and entertainment. Let’s look at school this time.

Farmers and ranchers who went to school when I did – the 60’s and 70’s – know that the only time our agriculture lessons came reasonably close to reality was during vocational agriculture classes in high school. Other than vo-ag classes, we got Charlotte’s Web and Steinbeck, a few meaningless and out-of-context facts and figures, and “farmers grow the food we eat.” Tractors were mentioned, and sometimes combines, but we were seldom if ever told what tractors and combines are used for. Or, to any kind of close approximation, how farmers grow the food we eat.

Judging from the questions I take from non-farm kids, the most basic concepts of farming and ranching are still not being taught. In fact, most non-farm and non-ranch kids leave school these days with the distinct impression that farmers and ranchers are happy to destroy the planet in order to make a quick buck. They know this is so because the farmer planned to ultimately murder Wilbur, and because the only good farmers that ever existed were forced off their land, which caused the dust bowl, and were then compelled to drive rickety cars to California, and ultimately, into a life of misery in the concentration camps.

If you think this is far fetched, perhaps you should peruse a few K-12 text books and ask a few teachers what they know – and in particular, what they feel – about production agriculture.

Is it really necessary for students to be taught about production agriculture? Many argue that it is not, despite the fact that so very, very few produce all the food that the many take for granted.

A few years ago a state college professor told me that his college owned enough land that it should be able to become organically self-sustaining in a single year. The college, he said, would easily be able to feed every administrator, professor, lecturer and student a completely nutritious, meat-free, pesticide-free diet.

And he was right. The college has plenty of land. But perhaps his proposition is a bit more complex than he imagined. This is a good example of the difference between knowing something and thinking you know something.

Who, for instance, would grow the crops?

We’ll, the professor opined, they’d all have to pitch in.

Okay. And who would harvest and store and preserve and prepare the organically hand-grown food?

Well, he repeated, we’d all have to pitch in.

I asked him if he had any idea why so few subsistence farmers attend college classes. He kind of scratched his head at that one. I asked him to write me a short paper explaining how his plan would work and how much time students and professors would have for class and extracurricular college-type activities when they’d finished with their shared farming duties – duties which had to come first if they were to eat.

Believe it or not, he never got back to me. And the last time I checked, the college didn’t appear to be farming.

Farmers and ranchers know that the fantasy narrative peddled by academia, the media, and entertainment industry falls apart when it meets the realities of the physical world.

The narrative is powerful and never ending. When the insects fail to die and the worldwide famines fail to erupt and when the superbugs fail to materialize, the narrative is never wrong. The day of reckoning is simply postponed. Like the iconic image of the deranged man carrying a sign proclaiming that the world will end on Tuesday, the narrative-singers simply scribble over ‘Tuesday’ and pencil in ‘Wednesday’.

The narrative is not only powerful, it infects, to a greater or lesser extent, the entirety of the non-farming, non-ranching population. Even in the small, rural, ag-centric towns of middle-America. One would hope that the vast, silent majority remain at least somewhat skeptical of the libel spread against farming and ranching. But after watching events unfold and after visiting with the people that one meets, one begins to wonder.

Case in point. Some of my posts appear in a weekly agriculture-oriented newspaper. The previous post did, as did this one. If you read my newspaper column last week you would have seen that the accompanying picture, which someone in the office had pulled off the web, was of dairy cattle at a feedbunk in a confinement setting. Leave aside the fact that they were dairy animals illustrating a column about meat animals. Ranchers know that during the 30-month lifespan of a beef animal, 27 months of that life are spent at pasture, eating grass or hay. Why do you suppose an image of a confinement operation was selected?

The narrative is powerful. And most people who buy into the narrative don’t believe they are doing so. They are quite certain that the narrative simply reflects reality. They, along with their neighbors, lining the route of the royal procession, ignore what their eyes clearly see and agree that the King’s outfit is indeed the finest set of clothing ever worn by mortal man.

Mega media fail on antibiotic use in food animals

“Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory is killed by an ugly fact.” – Thomas Henry Huxley, 1825-1895, English Biologist, contemporary and supporter of Charles Darwin

According to Tim Groseclose, UCLA Professor of Political Science and Economics, a majority of Americans think that the major media shoots it right down the middle when it comes to reporting the news.

But they don’t. This fact is known far and wide and supported by so much evidence it would take thousands of volumes of text to begin to scratch the surface. Just a few rhetorical questions to ponder. Are all the insects dead? Is the world so overpopulated by humanity that scores of millions die of malnutrition each year? Is the earth literally unlivable due to terrific global warming? Did you recently contract and die from SARS, heterosexually transmitted AIDS, BSE (mad cow disease) or of cancer directly caused by alar?

Just to refresh your memory, the major media have trumpeted these and countless other pending apocalyptic disasters for years. Yet insects continue to thrive, humanity’s population curve has peaked and is heading down, and the earth has been cooling for more than a decade. SARS and alar poisoning were flashes in the pan. Heterosexually transmitted AIDS is such a rarity that it’s undetectable in the statistical noise. BSE, which was predicted to depopulate Great Britain by the turn of the last century, has not done so.

There was never a shred of factual evidence to support any of those lurid claims. The media were pushing hypotheses, money-making hypotheses generated by activists.

Today another activist inspired hypothesis has claimed the media’s support, ink and air time. According to Consumer Reports magazine’s public policy and advocacy group:

“We are asking supermarkets to step up to the challenge and tell their suppliers to procure only meat and poultry that has been raised without antibiotics,” said Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives for Consumers Union. “Antibiotics are losing their potency in people, leading to a major national health crisis, and we need to drastically reduce their use in food animals….”

This activist campaign was kicked off with a Consumer Reports March telephone survey of 1,000 U.S. respondents asking – presumably, because the actual survey and survey questions are not available – whether Americans want antibiotic-free meat. According to the executive summary of the report, “key findings” were:

• Eighty-six percent agreed that customers should be able to buy meat and poultry raised without antibiotics at their local supermarkets.
• Fifty-seven percent of respondents reported that meat raised without antibiotics was available to them. Eighty-two percent said they would buy it if it were available.
• More than 60 percent stated that they would be willing to pay at least five cents a pound more for meat raised without antibiotics, while 37 percent would pay a dollar or more extra per pound.
• Sixty-one to 72 percent said they were extremely or very concerned about the use of antibiotics in animal feed, including the potential creation of “superbugs” due to overuse of antibiotics, unsanitary and crowded conditions for livestock, human consumption of antibiotic residue, and environmental effects due to agricultural runoff containing antibiotics.

Let’s deconstruct this report.

Firstly, respondents were asked about their opinions and not about their factual knowledge. Secondly, a cohort of 1,000 is tiny in a nation of more than 310 million. Thirdly, The pejorative phrase, “crowded and unsanitary,” was not defined. In general, human ideas regarding sanitation and crowding have no bearing on animal health.

A cow and calf in their natural environment. Beef food animals spend only 3 of their 30-month lifespan in feedlots.

Fourthly, Agricultural runoff has caused unintended changes in river/ocean interface habitats. Such changes are factually neither good nor bad, they are simply changes. Given relative populations, antibiotics and antibiotic residues found in these interface zones are far more likely to have originated in human waste rather than food animal waste.

Halloran, the mouthpiece for Consumer’s Union on this issue, sets up a false argument by stating that antibiotics are losing effectiveness in humans and therefore antibiotic use in food animals must be drastically reduced.

There’s no doubt that antibiotic resistant pathogens are a problem for those humans infected by them. There is a great deal of factual evidence suggesting that chronic under-dosing, that is, patients not taking the full course of antibiotic prescribed, is highly correlated with the development of antibiotic resistant pathogens. In other words, under-dosing kills the highly susceptible pathogens but leaves the naturally mutated, less susceptible pathogens weakened but alive. Over the course of the last 70 years, under-dosing has contributed greatly to the creation of so-called superbugs.

In addition, superbugs live almost exclusively in hospitals, where disease is concentrated. Most pathogen-caused hospital mortality is caused by nosocomial, or hospital-derived, infection.

There is no factual evidence that antibiotic use in food animals has ever caused a superbug which crossed over and infected a single human.

In most cases, different antibiotics are used therapeutically in animals and humans. When the same antibiotic is used in humans and animals, extraordinary measures are taken to prevent mis- or under-dosing in animals. In all cases, antibiotics can only be administered therapeutically to food animals when prescribed by a licensed veterinarian. Growth-enhancing bacteriostats such as ionophores are not classed as antibiotics. Neither is the topical bacteriostat iodine.

Of the 1,000 respondents, 370 said they would be willing to pay an additional dollar per pound for meat raised without antibiotics. Would those same people be willing to pay extra if they were aware of antibiotic withdrawal periods in food animals and that USDA inspectors prevent meat with antibiotic residues from being sold? If they knew that antibiotic use in food animals has never produced a crossover superbug?

The food animal market is largely fixed, in that the producer can’t really haggle to raise his price. He has to take what is offered or not sell. Therefore, he can’t make up disease death losses by raising prices. He can only combat disease by proper management of his animals. High disease mortality would drive many producers out of business in short order. Fewer livestock producers would mean a smaller supply of food animals, and a consequent increase in demand – and price. A one dollar increase in retail price wouldn’t begin to cover the price in a low-supply/high-demand situation.

At the bottom line, there is no factual evidence supporting the notion that antibiotic use in food animals puts consumers at any level of risk. There are multifaceted checks and balances in place to mitigate such risk. Once again, the major media is selling, yes selling, a lie.

If you’re a food animal producer, I suggest you do what you can to shed a little light on the truths of meat production as well as on the lies propagated by the major media.