Recall Toxic Lawmakers to Prevent Toxic Food

US Recall News
Interview with Joel Salatin
November 26, 2009
http://www.usrecallnews.com/2009/11/interview-with-joel-salatin.html

Food recalls seem out of control these days. We’re not just seeing a few sporadic cases of food poisoning here and there anymore. I regularly publish recall alerts for hundreds of thousands of pounds of beef and poultry. Here’s a recent one for half-a-million pounds of beef possibly contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg if you factor in the pages upon pages of salmonella recalls.
It’s enough to make you scared of eating anything. In fact, it is enough to make us call our legislators and demand action! The problem is – we don’t ask ourselves, or our legislators, if we’re taking the “right” action. What we end up with are misguided attempts at regulation and laws written by academia and corporate agriculture, such as NAIS. Perhaps we need to take a step back and ask ourselves if we’re treating the symptom or the problem. One man who has done just that is Joel Salatin. I have been granted the honor of asking Mr. Salatin a few questions about our nation’s food supply – especially in regard to food safety – and without further digression I’d like to share his responses with you.

Q.
Do you think there are more cases of food-borne illnesses per-capita these days, or are we just hearing about more of them due to the media and better reporting by government agencies?
A.
    I believe we’re having far more per capita. While it’s true we’ve always had food issues, from botulism poisoning to undulant fever, the historic figures are very, very low. If you add obesity and Type II diabetes into the mix – in a way, they are pathogenically caused as well because the food is not real food; it’s pseudo food. Amazingly, we’ve become a culture that considers Twinkies, Cocoa Puffs, and Mountain Dew safe, but raw milk and compost-grown tomatoes unsafe. The fact that we have an entirely new lexicon of salmonella, listeria, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, campylobacter, E. coli, etc. speaks to the new generation and penetration of the current food borne pathogen situation. Furthermore, it’s hard to empirically measure secondary results of tainted food, like the things that occur when people eat genetically modified organisms, irradiated foods, or pasteurized milk. Some of these things take a while to develop into problems, just like infertile frogs, three-legged salamanders, and crippled eagles did not happen immediately when DDT was developed. The long lag between cause and effect is hard to measure, and very hard to quantify in today’s fast-paced data and news system.

Q.
Do you see a legitimate, defensible role for state and federal government agencies to play in protecting American consumers from food-borne illnesses? If so, what would that be?
A.
    No. This side of eternity, a perfect system does not exist. To assume that government agents are more trustworthy than business, or journalists, or farmers, is inherently ridiculous. Unscrupulous people exist in all vocations. That is why we have third-party independent accreditation that works fairly well in many areas, from certified General Motors mechanics to schools to Triple A to Underwriters Laboratories. Every time the government gets involved with these things, rather than being voluntary, they move into the realm of force, and that completely changes the dynamics. When the Sheriff shows up with an arrest warrant and a gun, that’s a very different dynamic than Triple A sending me a letter telling me they will drop my two star hotel status because their inspection found wrinkled sheets in Room 129. And that extra force allows the independent certification status to assume inordinate power, which ultimately attracts more unseemly characters to its model – both the regulators and the regulated. It all boils down to trust. Indeed, on my end I see incredible abuses from regulators, especially toward small operators. When people say we just need to create more honesty in the government program, they are speaking from incredible naïveté, in my opinion. We have more dirty food, more centralized mega-processing facilities, and less nutrition now than we did in 1906 when Teddy Roosevelt railed against the packing industry exposed by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Both Sinclair, and to a great extent Roosevelt, wanted much bigger government and far more intrusion into the marketplace. Within six months after The Jungle hit America’s shelves, meat sales dropped nearly 50 percent. Rather than waiting for this marketplace spanking to have its effect, Roosevelt and the industry created the Food Safety and Inspection Service. That organization and the incredible power it wields have systematically banished the embedded butcher, baker, and candlestick maker from America’s villages. We’ve had three overhauls of the system: 1947, 1967, and 2000 – and each time, within 18 months, the US lost half of its smaller abattoirs. People must realize that giving that power to the government is inherently flawed because it will inevitably attract abuses that more gentle, voluntary, privately-operated systems do not.

Q.
Is there another country in the world that has a safer, more equitable food production system that allows for corporate agribusiness to thrive without putting small farmers out of business and without endangering consumers? If so, what can we learn from them?
A.
    My sense is that most developing countries have far more food freedom. Whether it’s safer or not, I don’t know. But it’s certainly no worse. The point is that you can’t define safety necessarily. I consider pastured livestock and poultry safe; the poultry industry considers me a bioterrorist because the Red-winged Blackbirds commiserate with my chickens and will transport their diseases to the since-based, environmentally- controlled Tyson chicken houses, endangering the entire planet’s food system. We’re seeing studies coming out of land grant colleges now saying that meat laced with antibiotic residues due to subtherapeutic antibiotic feeding in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations is safer for consumers than meat carrying no drug residues. The fact is that those of us promoting a heritage-based food system are under assault by the industrial-governmental fraternity just as surely as Native Americans were nearly annihilated by government policy in earlier times. Largely for the same reasons. They threatened the American way of life (read Wall Street there) or they jeopardized decent western contrivances like Roberts Rules of Order and cobblestone streets. Read what the founders of our country said about the Naive American – “just barbarians”. By whose standard? And read what the government-industrial food complex says about heritage food – it endangers the world food supply because it’s not science-based; it plays to ignorant and duplicitous consumers; it’s a waste of land because we can’t afford these low production numbers, etc.

    Historically, respecting an indigenous view while allowing techno-innovation has not been possible. The technology conquers and subjugates the heritage-based. The European Union is attacking heritage-based Polish sausage and Swiss artisanal cheese with a passion. My friends in China tell me that a thriving local food system exists there that would put America to shame. And people not far removed from the land know the difference between the good local stuff and the junk. They export the junk and eat the good stuff themselves. Oh that Americas would have such discernment.

Q.
What would a “sane” Food Bill look like to you? Or would there even be one?
A.
    We wouldn’t even have a Food Bill if I were in charge. The first response to that is: “But then the big corporations would just take over and it would be worse than today. After all, the free market is why we’re in the mess we’re in.” On the contrary, the U.S. has not had anything resembling a free market for well over a century. You could argue that ever since that big-governmenter Abraham Lincoln created the US Department of Agriculture, we’ve had inappropriate government agents meddling in the food system. The fact is that the terrible food things that have been developed have come at the financing, either directly or through research, of the government. Why does Monsanto get to park their recruitment bus on the campus of Virginia Tech for several days each year – for free? I personally have had numerous professors from Virginia Tech visit our farm and express great interest in researching some of our environmentally-friendly practices, but lament that they can only get seed funding from multi-national corporations so they can’t do this kind of research. Again, the framers of the Constitution very carefully spelled out the duties of the government, and they were extremely minimal. The reason was that as soon as an area of the culture comes under the authority of the government, that area quickly develops cronyism, a big business agenda, and lack of respect for dissenters, which is now what the local food movement represents. I would call it a freedom of food choice movement.

    In my book Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal, I quote at length from the written testimony of government food police who make no secret that they believe consumers cannot be trusted to make their food decisions. If choosing how to feed my internal three-trillion member bacterial community that is responsible for my health and energy doesn’t represent the most basic Malthusian desire for personal autonomy, I don’t know what does. The Constitution guarantees the Right of Contract, and yet the food police routinely waltz between the farmer and consumer, waving thousands of pages of regulations, and bringing along agents carrying big badges and sidearms to interfere with the right of contract. If we truly allowed unfettered right of contract, the entrepreneurial explosion of creative heritage-based food offered to the local marketplace would topple America’s industrial food complex.
    The only reason America’s food is as industrial and non-local as it is, is because government force encourages such a system. Absent that meddling, thousands and thousands of local food entrepreneurs would spin circles around the subsidized, corporate-welfared food system.

Q.
Why don’t small farmers band together to lobby Washington? Could the combined power of thousands of small farmers compete with the centralized power of a few corporate interests?
A.
    Lobbying takes time. Lots of time. And numbers. And money. I’ve been trying all my life to encourage this, but like everyone else, I don’t have the time, money, or numbers to get it done. And too many small farmers still believe the government is a sugar daddy. So more than half the potential supporters are lobbying to get subsidies for small farmers instead of big farmers. Why don’t we forget about subsidies? Period. But we’ve raised a generation acculturated to believe government candy is free, and justified. And then certified organics also split up the small farmer group. That probably more than anything splintered what could have been a significant block. Now much of the time and energy that could be devoted to just creating market freedom are being siphoned off in suits and protests against industrial organics. We just still have way too many people who trust the government and think business is inherently evil.

Q.
Are house bills H.R. 875 (NAIS) and H.R. 759 (FDA Globalization Act) still a threat to small farmers and sustenance farmers or are people overreacting?
A.
    First, let me be clear that the industrial food agenda, along with its complicit government fraternity, is evil. These folks lie, steal, cheat, kill, whatever. It’s an evil agenda, with evil planners, evil strategists, and evil execution. Certainly some sincere-minded and honest folks are caught up in it, but it behooves us to appreciate the evil ambition of these people. When Monsanto purposely used geriatric rats in their GMO feeding trials for the FDA, or cleverly falsified data to receive rBGH approval and infected and afflicted hundreds of thousands of dairy cows with mastitis, and then used crooked judges to agree that placing rBGH-free on milk labels on artisanal milk actually harmed consumers – that bespeaks an evil, deceptive company and agenda. And the rest of their cohorts are just like them. So nobody should think that these outfits have a benign, population-friendly agenda. And nobody should underestimate their connivances to advance their agenda.

    That said, here’s my rule for legislation: if Monsanto is for it, I’m against it. If Monsanto is against it, I’m for it. Ditto large meat packers, the USDA, etc. A person is known by the company he keeps. These outfits aren’t Jesus spending time with sinners to bring them to repentance. They are Devils trying to dupe and destroy ecological, economic, and social wholesomeness. This test for legislation can save you lots of time and consternation trying to figure out all the details. I don’t have enough to time to read it all or understand the legalese. I listen to people I trust and assume the enemy hasn’t suddenly converted.

    Thanks for asking these questions, and I hope my answers aren’t too rambling, but in today’s world, you can’t take these positions without some fleshing out and context.

    Happy Thanksgiving.
    Best regards,
    Joel Salatin
    Polyface Farm

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VIDEOS OF JOEL SALATIN

VIDEOS OF JOEL SALATIN
Here's a whole collection of Joel. Watch and learn.

Regenerative Polyculture Carbon Farming - Joel Salatin

Resilience, Redundancy, Forgiveness

Building Forgiveness into the System

Joel Salatin is the author of Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal, Holy Cows and Hog Heaven, and others. Joel has created a resilient organic farm that is nearly self-sustaining, with minimal inputs and "stage direction" from the farmers themselves. The system is forgiving of spiking energy prices, drought, flood, disease, and the vagaries of industrial capitalism.

CAFOs Are Killing US (NAIS Sucks)

A Consumer Speaks at NAIS Listening Session
By Kimberly Hartke

Susan Blasko is a cancer survivor twice over. She now incorporates local farm fresh foods into her diet in her on-going quest for health. Susan is a member of the Weston A. Price Foundation and the Northern Virginia Whole Foods Nutrition meetup group. She was selected at random to speak at the USDA Listening Session on NAIS (National Animal Idenification System) that took place in Harrisburg, PA this month. Here is the complete text of her remarks.

Good Morning, Secretary Vilsack and USDA/APHIS Hosts. I’m Susan Blasko. I live and work in Falls Church, Virginia. I took a day off to come to Pennsylvania today to attend one of your listening sessions. I consider it a rare opportunity since there are so few of them.

I am a consumer, and I speak for myself. The fact that I am here at all should be an indication to you that the truth is dawning at last on the general population. It has been a gradual awakening, to be sure. For many years your department has been trying to force NAIS on us. What part of “NO” don’t you understand? Yes, the eyes of the public are being pried open by the undeniable, inescapable truth:

• that the aim of the National Animal Identification Scam is to put small farmers out of business so that big-ag can be the sole provider of the world’s food;
• that the food your department approves is making us sick and sterile (For the first time in our history, children are being born with cancer and diabetes. They probably won’t outlive their parents. It is within your power to facilitate the reversal of this trend through regulations that sincerely address the problem. By pushing for NAIS, you contribute further to this condition. I find this unconscionable.);
• that concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), food processing plants, and milk pasteurization facilities are the origins of foodborne illness, not the crops of small farmers, grass-fed meats, and raw dairy;
• that the USDA has no legal authority to implement NAIS, and doing so violates the Constitution;
• that several “food safety” bills have NAIS written into them, often without the knowledge of even the legislators (very sneaky!);
• that the USDA is fully prepared to use force to implement NAIS, despite your claim that the program is voluntary (flap jackets have been issued);
• that genetically modified (GMO) foods are ubiquitous, in fully 80% of the foods in the grocery store that carry your stamp of approval, even though they facilitate the formation of tumors, heightened immune responses, and aggressive behavior in laboratory animals. Feed lot animals are fed GMO grains, candy, byproducts of citrus food processing with all the chemicals on the peel of the fruit, and who knows what else, which makes the animals – and us – sick.

I know these truths, and so do my friends, my co-workers, my cancer support group, my church, my family, and every stranger I get a chance to tell in the theatre restroom waiting line. I am the tip of an enormous iceberg that you are beginning to discover as more and more of us turn to locally produced foods, raw milk, and grass-fed meats, because they are safer than the food your department approves. We don’t need a trace-back mechanism. We know where our food comes from.

You should be helping us to access this safe food supply instead of trying to eliminate it. Why won’t you help us by outlawing CAFOs instead of protecting them? You’re supposed to protect us. Implement regulations that will put big-ag out of business if their practices are making us sick. Don’t target small farmers whose food is healing us. You asked for my suggestions for a solution to the growing food safety problem. I hope that you are honestly open to them. Here they are:

• Provide capital incentives to farmers to use the land – which is theirs, by the way! – to grow real crops without pesticides and chemical fertilizers instead of GMO’s, raise animals on pasture instead of in crowded buildings, and produce clean, real milk that doesn’t require the assault of pasteurization. Meat, milk and produce that result from such practices contain essential nutrients that we have a basic right to expect are present in our food.
• Test our foods for nutrient content before allowing them on the market, the same way the European Union does, and ban any foods from the grocery shelves that don’t measure up.
• Require school cafeterias, hospitals, hotels, and every other institution or business that cooks for us to serve nutrient-dense foods.
• Stop rewarding big food companies that over-feed and under-nourish us with their GMOs, artificial flavors and colors, chemical preservatives, over-processing, and pasteurization of everything (I recently learned that almonds are now being pasteurized. What next? This is ludicrous!)

I am deeply troubled by what I’ve learned about NAIS. Not only is it expensive, intrusive, discriminatory, and deliberately hostile to small farmers; it is downright unconstitutional. Go back to the drawing board. Stand up to big-ag and industrial food processors. Just imagine what would happen if you do. You could solve the health care crisis, the environmental crisis, and the economic crisis in one fell swoop. For example:

• Heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, autism, allergies, behavioral and neurological disorders, cancer, and a host of other health problems would again become rare occurrences as we reclaim the health our society enjoyed before the birth of food processing, feed lots and GMOs.
• Ruminants of all sorts would graze on acres – no, miles – of pasture while they renew our soil so that it once again sequesters carbon as it did in our country’s infancy. This is already happening at Polyface Farm, and Joel Salatin is teaching other farmers how to do it. I imagine you’ve heard about it. Why not focus more efforts on his proven methods? And what about the marvelous results that many of our Amish brothers and sisters have achieved without artificial means? Why not explore the wisdom of their traditions? CAFOs, GMOs and food processing are destroying this planet, and you are helping them. Don’t let them get away with it.

Trying to convince the American people that CAFO meats, GMO crops, and pasteurized dairy are safe and nutritious when you know the opposite to be true is immoral, to say the least, Mr. Secretary. And foisting NAIS on us as consumers and on our farmers is corruption at its worst.

I am appalled. And you should be ashamed.

Factory Food Feudalism Film

How much do we really know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve to our families?

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that's been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of e coli--the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farm's Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms' Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising -- and often shocking truths -- about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

Review from Variety Magazine

With a constituency limited to anyone who eats, "Food, Inc." is a civilized horror movie for the socially conscious, the nutritionally curious and the hungry. Yes, it has a deceptively cheery palette, but helmer Robert Kenner's doc -- which does for the supermarket what "Jaws" did for the beach -- marches straight into the dark side of cutthroat agri-business, corporatized meat and the greedy manipulation of both genetics and the law. Doc biz may be in the doldrums, but "Food, Inc." is so aesthetically polished and politically urgent, theatrical play seems a no-brainer, though it won't do much for popcorn sales.

Corn is the vegetable-as-villain in "Food, Inc.," which builds on the work of nutritionists, journalists and activists Eric Schlosser ("Fast Food Nation") and Michael Pollan ("The Omnivore's Dilemma") to show how multinationals have taken over the production of food. As the movie tells us, corn -- which today assumes dozens of ubiquitous identities, notably high-fructose corn syrup -- is kept at unrealistically low prices by the government, is fed to animals that haven't evolved to eat it (such as the cow), causes those animals to develop maladies that must be treated with antibiotics (which are passed on to consumers), and has led to the mutation of new strains of the E.coli virus, which sickens tens of thousands each year.

The whole mess is exacerbated by opportunistic politics -- tools of Big Agriculture running the very regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us -- and consumers who have become accustomed to eating whatever they want whenever they want, in quantities they don't need.

Fast food is presented as having turned meat production into a sadistic exercise in animal torture, something that's been seen in documentaries before, and it isn't pretty. But "Food, Inc." delves deeply into the case of Monsanto, which has monopolized the growing of corn by patenting the biology inside it -- and has been allowed to litigate against insurgent farmers through court decisions rendered by the likes of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a onetime Monsanto lawyer. The whole system, "Food, Inc." tells us, is fixed.

That the filmmakers dress up all this information in glossy graphics, splashes of color and Mark Adler's often buoyant (and ironic) score is ingenious, because the artifice of the film's aesthetic is always subtly emphasizing the artificiality of the food. Schlosser and Pollan are eloquent Virgils guiding the viewer into the third circle of food hell. But then Joel Salatin -- a major figure in "Omnivore's Dilemma" who owns and operates a self- sustaining poultry-and-pig farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley -- arrives to throw some natural light onto the proceedings and illuminate just what can be done to salvage agriculture and our digestive systems.

Salatin is an infectiously enthusiastic champion of his own system, and the film needs him, because others in the movie -- such as a working-class Los Angeles family that can't afford fruit but can afford Burger King -- keep showing the insanity of the system.

Disturbing as it is, "Food, Inc." doesn't present some doomsday scenario. People can make a difference, it says: After all, look what happened to Big Tobacco.

— Variety

Pastured Poultry: The Polyface Farm Model

By Joel Salatin

The Pasture Poultry model that we have developed at Polyface Farm offers ecological and nutritional advantages over commercial and "organic." The fundamentals of this system are
(1) portable buildings and yards; (2) fresh forage; (3) birds moved to fresh pasture paddocks daily, or almost daily.

The old free-range models utilized stationary buildings with adjacent pastures, sometimes rotated in a wheel-and-spoke design. While better than cages, this system has several disadvantages. Poultry manure is extremely high in nitrogen and quickly saturates such heavily used areas with nitrogen and pathogens, creating a bitter-tasting forage that is unpalatable to the flock. And their scratching, fluffing and dustbathing destroys much of the sod, leaving the soil exposed and raw.

To combat these weaknesses, pastured poultry producers use light range shelters that can be moved by hand or tractor each day, so that the flock also moves to fresh ground. This keeps the birds away from yesterday's vegetation regrowth and stimulates forage ingestion by the poultry. This system works for both egg layers and meat birds.

Chickens fan out on fresh pasture from their Eggmobile. Note the guard dog in the middle ground.

The critical element in nutritionally superior poultry is the amount of forage the birds ingest. Their sensitivity to pathogens, overly nitrogenous forage and stale paddocks already creamed of their tastiest forage is much higher than the human eye can see. What may look like perfectly good grass can be totally repugnant to the birds. Furthermore, a favorite forage is clover, which cannot grow in overly nitrogenous conditions created by routinely used poultry yards.

The green material of fresh forage provides B vitamins as well as carotenes, some of which the chicken turns into vitamin A. Omega-3 fatty acids in the forage end up in the fat. Exposure to sunlight ensures that the fat will also contain vitamin D. The more yellow the fat, the more nutritious. The same is true for egg production, with the yolk carrying the signature dark orange color characteristic of high forage intake.

Producers around the country have created ingenious portable poultry structures--we call ours the "Egg Mobile." Chicken houses on wheels and skids now dot the countryside as a method of production that finally meets the full social, nutritional and physiological needs of poultry.

These birds actually live on the ground, catching bugs and scratching in the soil. Every day is a new discovery of salad on a fresh paddock so the birds do not get bored and begin eating one another, as they do in typical confinement factory houses. On our farm, the chickens follow the cattle, which are also moved daily to new pasture. This supplies the chickens with plenty of fresh insect life, living in and under the cow patties.

Pastured poultry has two points of vulnerability: predators and weather. Every producer has experienced losses from these and combats them in various ways. Some producers have guard animals who live with or near the flock. Dogs can be bonded to the birds and protect them from foxes and coyotes. Some folks use geese to dissuade aerial predators. Tight shelters help.

Fortunately, high tech infrastructure coupled with good management can yield production and mortality figures equal to or better than the average in the conventional poultry industry (where many chickens die from disease). The main reason this type of poultry and eggs are more expensive than the supermarket counterpart is because it requires a much higher level of management skill. This skill doesn't come cheap.

Outfoxing the foxes and outwitting the hawks take commitment and ingenuity far beyond simply adjusting the medicator controls in an industrial chicken house. Lightweight hoop houses on skids and polyethylene netting containing electrified stainless steel wire threading keeps chickens in and varmints out. Farmscale landscaping to protect riparian areas and forested zones, coupled with perennial prairie polycultures, encourages small mammal proliferation to feed predators in a balanced ecosystem. Success requires superb ingenuity and managements skills.

It also takes skill to protect chickens from the elements-- not every day is 70 degrees with an azure sky and wispy breeze. The shelters must be designed to shut tight for cold days, and have plenty of ventilation for hot days. During flooding, we put out hay bales for the chickens to perch on. In winter, our layers go in hoop houses with thick composting mulch underfoot. We do not raise meat birds during the winter months, but depend on modern technology (our freezers) to have a supply of birds throughout the winter.

Pastured poultry producers routinely try to create healthy whole farm ecosystems in order to maintain balance. Part of the balance is limiting poultry numbers to what the farm's soils can metabolize-- there should be no more than 500 birds per acre per year, or a limit of 10,000 birds per year on a 20-acre farm. One manure application from 500 broilers per acre will saturate the soil's nitrogen capacity. Interestingly, that is exactly the area required to grow the grain to feed the birds.

Modern chickens need more than just pasture. We feed our birds a "free choice" mixture of non-GMO local corn, oats and roasted soybeans, along with a mineral supplement and kelp. Our layers in hoop houses also get dried alfalfa during the winter.

The modern double breasted broiler has a high protein requirement, which is why we must add soybeans to the ration. This year, for the first time, we raised 400 Barred Rock cockerels, an Old World bird we have dubbed the "Marco Polo." The bird is a great forager and requires less protein in the feed. Sales have been brisk. The meat is tougher than the modern bird but has a wonderful flavor that appeals to aficionados. The fat is a beautiful color and the quality of the livers is the best I have seen.

Interestingly, the single biggest impediment to adaptation of this model on a wider scale, giving consumers easier access to these superior birds, is neither predators nor weather extremes, but government food safety and inspection regulations.

A federal law PL90-492 allows producer/growers to dress up to 20,000 birds annually without government inspectors on site, as long as the birds are "unadulterated" and "sanitary." These two subjective terms have been widely construed by bureaucrats. Some states do not allow any open-air processing and some states do not allow even one bird to be processed without massive facilities.

So far, not one case of food-borne pathogens has been reported among the thousands of pastured poultry producers, many of whom have voluntarily had their birds analyzed. Routinely, these home-dressed birds, which have not been treated with chlorine to disinfect them, show numbers far below industry comparisons. At Polyface, we even tested our manure and found that it contained no salmonella.

Pastured poultry farms exhibit trademark lush pastures and healthy chickens with deep-colored egg yolks and fat. As with any movement, some practitioners are excellent and others are charlatans. Knowing your product by putting as much attention on food sourcing as you do on planning your next vacation is the way to insure accountability.

The pastured poultry model can provide true ecological enhancement and nutritional superiority for you and your loved ones. Enjoy pastured poultry and eggs at your next opportunity-- it will be memorable.

Modern conventional chicken production takes places in windowless buildings that house tens of thousands of birds, stacked in cages three high. Feed is taken to the birds on conveyor belts and the eggs brought back the same way. The birds are debeaked so that they do not cannibalize each other. Every few days a human being walks through to remove dead birds.

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Avian Flu

Avian flu is a huge problem in confinement chicken operations. Recently an outbreak among Shenandoah Valley chicken producers resulted in the slaughter of 4.8 million birds--enough to fill 1000 tractor trailers! The industry is asking for your tax dollars to indemnify them for this loss--they want the consumer to pay the price for cheap food. The cause of the outbreak is obvious--too many birds packed in quarters that are too small. But the industry is laying the blame elsewhere. They say that the avian flu epidemic is caused by free-range operations, where chickens are exposed to wild birds which also somehow then spread the disease to chickens in confinement. The avian flu outbreak is a warning that the confinement chicken model is ultimately unsustainable. The future is in small operations like those of Joel Salatin and Steve Warshawer, producing a nutritionally superior, healthy bird that brings good profits to the farmer. (See the YouTube video on Bird Flu that incriminates factory farming.)

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Organic Standards for Chickens

The new USDA organic standards for chickens apply to anyone who labels poultry as organic and whose annual revenue from all types of organic products exceeds $5,000. Certification under the standards involves four elements of production: the origin of the animals, and the health care management, feed ration and living conditions they receive throughout their lives.

The USDA standard allows chickens that have been managed organically beginning no later than the second day of life to be used in organic production. This means that a producer may purchase day-old chicks from a non-organically managed hatchery and eventually sell the meat and eggs as organically produced.

Regarding health care management, the USDA requires that a producer establish preventive health care practices by maintaining breeds that are suited to the ecological conditions of the operation and accommodating the animals' natural behavioral preferences to minimize stress. Prophylactic treatment with vaccines is allowed as it the use of all natural medications and specific synthetic medications that are included on the National List. The determination of whether a medicine is natural or synthetic and, if synthetic, whether it should be allowed, is the responsibility of the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB). The USDA standard states that physically altering an animal's anatomy is allowed if it is done to promote the animal's welfare and in a manner that minimizes pain and stress. There has been no guidance from USDA on whether the partial or complete removal or poultry beaks satisfies these criteria.

The feed ration component of the USDA standard requires that any agricultural product, such as soybeans in the feed ration, must be organically produced-- although some large "organic" producers are actually now requesting a "waiver" to the requirement that the feed by entirely organic. Feeding mammalian or poultry slaughter by-products or animal manure to organically managed poultry is prohibited. However, the standard categorically allows nonagricultural, natural feed ingredients (like oyster shells) as well as synthetic feed ingredients added to the National List. Most importantly, the NOSB has recommended the allowance of synthetic methionine. Methionine is needed because the standards do not allow for animal by-products in the feed. The organic standards have turned the chicken, which is a natural omnivore that needs animal products in its diet, into an herbivore.

The provisions for poultry living conditions under the USDA standards are extremely ambiguous. Producers are required to provide poultry with living conditions which accommodate the health and natural behavior of animals, including access to the outdoors, shade, shelter, exercise areas, fresh air and direct sunlight. However, the USDA has provided no guidance on what specific types of living conditions are allowed or prohibited. The animals are allowed "free-range" but mostly remain in barns. Many large-scale organic producers are resisting the requirement that animals under their care must have a chance to go outdoors, citing their concerns about avian influenza. The USDA standard includes an ongoing allowance for temporarily prohibiting animals' access to the outdoors due to their age, safety or weather conditions that could lead to environmental damages.

When consumers pay extra for "organic" chicken and eggs, they believe that they are getting a product that is substantially different from conventional chicken and eggs. The conventional practice has five objectionable tenets: beak trimming, prophylactic antibiotics, pesticide-laced feed, synthetic methionine and continuous confinement. The organic standards allow beak trimming, synthetic methionine and something close to continuous confinement (although conditions are certainly better than the conventional model). The requirement for all organic feed may soon bite the dust. What's needed is a third, much stricter "pasture-raised" label that stipulates that pasture provide a substantial portion of the feed. Until that happens, consumers must get to know their producer and ask the right questions in order to be sure they are getting healthy chicken and eggs.

About the Author

Joel Salatin is a third generation clean food farmer who has refined techniques for production of pastured animals that improve the quality of the land, provide healthy food for consumers and bring a fair return for farmers He is the author of four books on innovative farming and has been interviewed for numerous radio and television programs. His Shenandoah Valley farm was featured in National Geographic and Smithsonian Magazine. His books , including You Can Farm, Salad Bar Beef, Pastured Poultry Profits and Family Friendly Farming, can be obtained from AcresUSA at (800) 355-5313.