The editors of Scientific American recently encouraged U.S. hog farmers to “follow Denmark and stop giving farm animals low-dose antibiotics.” Sixteen years ago, in order to reduce the threat of increased development of antibiotic resistant bacteria in their food system and the environment, Denmark phased in an antibiotic growth promotant ban in food animal production. Guess what? According to Denmark’s Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries the ban is working and the industry has continued to thrive. The government agency found that Danish livestock and poultry farmers used 37 percent less antibiotics in 2009 than in 1994, leading to overall reductions of antimicrobial resistance countrywide.

Except for a few early hiccups regarding the methods used in weaning piglets, production levels of livestock and poultry have either stayed the same or increased. So how did Danish producers make this transition and why isn’t the U.S. jumping to follow suit? Like many things in industrial agriculture, the answer is not clear.

If any country knows how to intensively produce food animals, particularly pigs, it is Denmark. In 2008, farmers produced about 27 million hogs. In fact, the Scandinavian country claims to be the world’s largest exporter [PDF] of pork. Thus Scientific American editors argue that the Danish pork production system should serve as a suitable model to compare to ours. U.S. agriculture economists from Iowa State University agree. In a 2003 report, Drs. Helen Jensen and Dermot Hayes stated that Denmark’s pork industry is “… at least as sophisticated as that of the United States … and is therefore a suitable market for evaluating a ban on antibiotic growth promotants (AGPs).”

Based on Denmark’s experience, concerns that an AGP ban in the U.S. would cripple the industry appear to be overblown. A study published last year in the American Journal of Veterinary Medicine by Danish researchers suggested that Denmark’s AGP ban in food animals reduced overall antibiotic use and did not significantly impact production. In fact, recent numbers from Denmark show production levels of hogs increased by roughly 50 percent between 1992 and 2008.

So what additional changes did Danish hog producers make in their methods of production to ensure that the AGP ban did not negatively affect their bottom line to a significant degree? Robert Martin, senior officer of the Pew Environment Group and former executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, visited several Danish hog farms in 2009 to see first hand what producers were doing to compensate for not being able to use antibiotics as growth promoters. Martin listed some of what he describes as the most important changes:

• Switching to lower density models of housing pigs
• The use of open pen and deep bedding systems
• Cleaning barns more frequently and systematically
• Improved ventilation systems
• Improved quality of feed
• Extending weaning period for piglets

Martin explains that many of these changes were phased in as farmers adopted a set of new best practices. Martin says immediately following the ban, Danish producers did see an increase in mortality of young pigs. “But instead of reverting to using antibiotics as a crutch,” Martin continued, “They initiated changes in their system.” For example, Martin learned that many producers extended the piglet weaning times by about 10 days, allowing maternal antibodies in milk to provide increased immunity. Martin also pointed out that reducing the crowded conditions and switching to a dry, deep bedding system, “allowed them to manage waste more effectively.” He said the changes are also “more humane for the pigs.” Moreover, Martin says, “They also paid more attention to feed mixtures instead of relying on antibiotics for weight gain.”

Dr. Jensen and Hayes’s report, published in the Iowa Ag Review, determined a ban similar to Denmark’s could cost the U.S. industry more than $700 million over 10 years and increase the price of pork by about 2 percent at the grocery store. Hayes noted, in recent email exchanges with the Center for a Livable Future, that in the long run, a ban would not keep producers from making money. He also wrote, “Hog farmers would reduce production until prices recovered, so there is no profit impact.” When it comes to the study’s findings, Hayes believes the economics are secondary:

The key take away for me from our studies was that the ban at the finishing stage worked as planned and reduced antibiotic use by a lot. However, when they extended the ban to the weaning state they ended up using more antibiotics and these were stronger human-use antibiotics. So a ban at the weaning stage did not work in terms of its original intent.

It is worth noting that recent Denmark data shows weaner mortality is significantly lower since the ISU study was published in 2003. Despite that fact, Hayes is correct. The therapeutic use of antibiotics has increased since the ban was instituted. According to the latest Danish Integrated Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring and Research Program (DANMAP) report [PDF], therapeutic antibiotic use rose by almost 13 percent from 2008 to 2009. DANMAP also found the occurrence of resistance in Danish pork increased during that time period, “and is not significantly lower than in imported pork.” However, resistance to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin, an important antibiotic in human medicine, was very low in E. coli from Danish pork in contrast to imported pork. It is important to point out that therapeutic use poses much less antibiotic resistance risk than low-dose application. Don’t forget, Denmark’s overall antibiotic use in all food animal production remains nearly 40 percent lower then when the ban was first initiated.

If the AGP ban is, at the very least, reducing overall antibiotic use and Danish pork production levels are increasing, why wouldn’t U.S. producers follow suit? The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) lobbyists publicly maintain they still don’t believe antibiotic use in food animals poses a risk to human health. In a presentation [PDF] prepared for the World Pork Expo 2010, Chelsea Redalen, the NPPC’s director of government relations, maintained that there is “little to no evidence that restricting or eliminating the use of antimicrobials in food-producing animals would improve human health or reduce the risk of antimicrobial resistance to humans.”

Statements like these, repeatedly made by hog industry representatives, leave many public health experts exasperated. Numerous peer reviewed research studies [PDF], including in the U.S. and the Netherlands, clearly demonstrate the transmission of antibiotic resistant bacteria from food animals to people. Studies out of the Netherlands published in the Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases and the Annals of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials, demonstrate that MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) was transmitted from pigs to a farmer and between pig farmers and their family.

Despite industry claims, U.S. government health officials have concluded there are direct links between antibiotic use in food animal production and the risk of antibiotic resistant infections in people. Responding to a letter from Drs. Robert Lawrence and Keeve Nachman of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF), the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Thomas Frieden, confirmed that the CDC, “Feels there is strong scientific evidence of a link between antibiotic use in food animals and antibiotic resistance in humans.”

CLF helped bring to light recently released FDA data showing that 80 percent of the antibiotics produced for human and animal use in the U.S. are sold for use in food animals. Even if significant portions of those antibiotics are used to treat disease, Dr. David Love, a CLF scientist, says he finds that statistic, “astounding.” Love believes, “If producers are reliant on the use of antibiotics to produce animals in a highly concentrated way, it means that the design of these farms makes them breeding grounds for diseases.” “Even more troubling to me,” Love says, “Is the unwise use of antibiotics for growth promotion in animal production, which compromises antibiotics, a precious resource used to protect the public’s health.”

Currently, there is proposed federal legislation that would greatly limit antibiotic use in U.S. food animal production. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) recently reintroduced the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, better known as PAMTA. The bill would ban the routine use of antibiotics “deemed” critical in human medicine to promote growth in healthy animals.

So, should the U.S. follow Denmark’s lead and stop all food animal producers from dishing out low dose-antibiotics? Public health experts say it appears that those with a higher priority on limiting health risks are at loggerheads with those unwilling to change or corporations more concerned about the risks of increased costs. One thing is clear–most large pork producers do not plan on instituting a ban voluntarily.

Originally published on Grist

I have personally written three pieces on the flu (here, here, and here).  My newspaper article in particular received a tsunami of feedback.  While I might normally receive a handful or two of emails after each of my EcoChef columns, in this case I received nearly four times that amount.  What was particularly interesting about the feedback was that is was so clearly bifurcated:  praising me for exploring these issues and asking for more clarification or lambasting me for my ignorance and stupidity for writing such nonsense.

In my defense, I want to clearly point out that I have never claimed there was a direct link between the H1N1 and CAFOs, from the Mexican Smithfield plant or any other.

That said, the ecologist in me is fairly certain that CAFOs have a role to play.  Why?  Because in host / parasite interactions, the parasite (influenza variant) needs high densities of its host (in this case pigs, humans, and birds) to thrive.  At low host densities, the parasite can’t spread and reproduce, and it slowly diminishes (and/or becomes less harmful to the host).  It is in high density situations that parasites can really do some damage.

A common, uncontroversial example:  Human hospitals. They have recently come under fire for being breeding grounds for extremely virulent and harmful pathogen strains.  Hospitals have high densities of sick and often immobile patients, who are regularly given antibiotics and other microbials to fend off these infections.  Over time, unfortunately, these only make the pathogens stronger.

In the animal world, the closest thing to a human hospital that I can think of is a CAFO – a confined animal feeding operation.  They, like hospitals, have high densities of often relatively immobile animals.  These animals are often so “sensitive to disease” (read: sick) that they need regular administrations of antibiotics to keep them alive.  Over time, unfortunately, these antibiotics only make the pathogens stronger.

Compare this with the small fraction of free range pigs that are given antibiotics. Dan Bagley of Clark Summit Farm says he’s given one pig antibiotics in five years – that’s 0.4% of his pigs / year vs. frequent antibiotics administration to 100% of the pigs in a CAFO herd.

So far, everything I’ve written is scientifically true but also abstract.  So, let’s get to the meat of the matter:  what do we know now about the origin of this last worldwide virus outbreak?

The unfortunate fact is that we are probably never going to know the whole truth.  But we do, fortunately, know this:  the H1N1 swine flu did come from pigs, although they were probably not the most recent host.

Jason Gale reported on Bloomberg that the first genetic analysis of the virus has recently been completed by Richard Webby and his team at the World Health Organization Collaborating Center in Memphis,

According to Gale’s article:

By analyzing the sequence of hundreds of amino acids coded by each of the flu virus’s eight genes, Webby found the virus’s closest relatives are an H1N1 flu strain that has circulated widely among North American pigs since the late 1990s, and one from Europe that’s been in swine for at least three decades.

The article does point out that there are also recent avian links (perhaps from duck ponds being used to wash pig houses?).

The bottom line is this:  there is a direct pig link in the genetics.  This is science, not speculation.

That doesn’t point a smoking gun at CAFOs specifically.  They may or may not have been involved.  But, if you look at the numbers of pigs in CAFOs (huge) vs. free range animals (a very small percent), the probabilities point in the factory farm direction.

Which brings me back to an email response I received to my Oakland Tribune article.  Jeremy Russell of the National Meat Association, wrote:

Dear Mr. French,

Your column today ‘Know where your pork comes from’ shows that you
have been keeping up with neither the news nor the science about H1N1
and pig production.

Public health officials in Mexico have found no evidence of a link
between the outbreak and the swine herds in Veracruz. Furthermore,
part of the purpose of a confined feeding operation is to protect
swine herds from viral infections which come from the outside and
contain them inside if and when they do occur. I would expect an
ecologist to understand this.

There is a reason the operation in Mexico is not unique — it is built
on a model that is effective, efficient and biosecure. And with sound
management practices waste discharge can be avoided entirely. In
fact, EPA last year set a zero-discharge standard for CAFOs in the
United States. (EPA has all the info posted at

http://cfpub.epa.gov/npdes/afo/cafofinalrule.cfm)

It’s your responsibility as a columnist to get the facts right, and
your linkage between H1N1 and modern pork production practices is
ignorant at best.

Sincerely,
Jeremy Russell
Director of Communications and Government Relations
National Meat Association

I think it is clear that the science proves Russell to be wrong on all accounts.  To respond to his last point first – we now do have a clear link between H1N1 and modern pork production.  Done.

But more importantly, there is a significant body of evidence that pig CAFOs are not even remotely biosecure.  For example, Rachel Ehrenberg reported in Science News:

The manure generated by thousands of cows or pigs doesn’t just stink — it may seriously affect human health.

New research examining two decades’ worth of livestock production data finds a positive relationship between increased production at industrial farms and infant death rates in the counties where the farms reside.  The study reported in the February American Journal of Agricultural Economics implicates air pollution and suggests that Clean Air Act regulations need to be revamped to address livestock production of noxious gases.

Infant death from noxious gases?  This is just part of the CAFO problem.  These reports from the pig-loving University of Iowa discuss other serious health, economic, and environmental issues – including the effects of manure spills, fish kills, impaired watersheds, and decreased recreational opportunities: Study 1, Study 2.

There are numerous points in each of these reports that directly contradict Russell’s claim of biological containment. Still not convinced? What about an extensive 2½-year examination conducted by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production (PCIFAP), which says:

Air quality degradation is also a problem in and around IFAP facilities because of the localized release of significant quantities of toxic gases, odorous substances, and particulates and bioaerosols that contain a variety of microorganisms including human pathogens. Some of the most objectionable compounds are the organic acids, which include acetic acid, butyric acids, valeric acids, caproic acids, and propanoic acid; sulfur containing compounds such as hydrogen sulfide and dimethyl sulfide; and nitrogen-containing compounds including ammonia, methyl amines, methyl pyrazines, skatoles and indoles.

The H1H1 swine flu outbreak has been devastating, even fatal, for many.  One “silver lining” of this worldwide problem is the attention it has placed on modern pig farming practices.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: why do we have these CAFOs in the first place? The pork industry tells us it’s to protect the pigs. This is an obvious red herring, as pigs have coexisted with humans for thousands of years. And ironically, it is this partial separation and concentration of pigs and humans that makes strains of bacteria like the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA for short) so virulent (a separate and possibly more serious phenomenon).

Successful free-range pig farmers are making a strong comeback, spurred along no doubt by the success of Willis Farm’s collaboration with Niman Ranch. CAFOs are a failed experiment in farming that survives on subsidies and legal protectionism. If CAFO farmers were required to pay the full social, economic, and environmental cost for their practices, we would surely see a decline in this destructive practice.

–

A final personal note: I am not “against” the meat industry. I spent part of my childhood on a farm where I learned to raise, slaughter, and butcher the animals that we grew. I am not squeamish about meat production, and I personally eat meat and cook it professionally. However, we need to return to a method of raising animals that is productive for the environment, not harmful to it.

The food policy wonks leaped, quickly exposing the holes in McWilliams’ alarmist piece.  (My two-cents is here) It seemed that leaving out the important details above left the author without a leg to stand on, yet The Atlantic was quick to give McWilliams a platform. He weakly defended his position, calling the National Pork Board funding matter a distraction, and half-heartedly admitted that he may have been wrong to leave out the details of seropositivity.  His limp-wristed retort included an admission that he was in fact a sustainable food supporter, playing devil’s advocate.

The only problem is, as McWilliams admits, this was a piece for lay readers, who without further information, could stop buying sustainable pork after reading such claims (and they won’t just be going vegetarian, as the author might have hoped).

Its worth congratulating the food writers who gave a retort to this piece, and it speaks to an important fact McWilliams seems not to have gotten: established sustainable food advocates and newbies alike can handle transparency.

This got me thinking about what a more considered and productive devil’s advocate would have done in this situation.  Instead of seeking only to shock the public with misleading information, a more nuanced critique (I’ll admit, it might not have made it into the Times, but thats another matter) could have presented the possibility that free-range pork is not all it’s cracked up to be, and balanced out this one-sided slam.

The root of the story, and the one I’d like to understand better, is the role of antibiotics in pig husbandry, and by extension, whether antibiotics are necessary or positive in any way.  An honest contrarian would have also disclosed the role of other serious pathogens like MRSA, which have been found in industrial pig operations where antibiotics are being used liberally to fatten up pigs. This would have served to give a better picture of hog confinement in general –  otherwise, McWilliams is only hurting the cause he claims to care about.

A well-rounded critique of the work sustainable food advocates are doing in all arenas is valid. However in misleading the general public, and laying the contrarianism on thick, McWilliams didn’t start a conversation, but instead just threw in a rotten tomato.

The issues our food system faces are very serious, and one thing we can safely say is that industrial-scale animal operations have seen their day in the sun. Consumers are becoming more conscious of the treatment of the animals they eat, and from a food safety perspective, we can pretty confidently say that industrially raised meat is less safe. (Fortunately, there is more than one study to back this up). That being said, we have a lot of work to do, and everything we do will not be perfect.

Unfortunately, it seems that McWilliams has fallen prey to the wiles of marketing.  In seeking to market himself as a contrarian, he has even penned a book called Just Food: How Locavores are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly.  Now honestly, did he pick out that title to scare the trichonosis out of people, or what? If he were a true sustainable food advocate, perhaps he would have written a book titled, A Closer Look at Locavorism: What’s Not Working and How We Can Fix It.  I might have been more excited to read that.

Today, a free-range dissenter ended up in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, seemingly to defend factory farmed pork. (One wonders if the NYT was attempting to temper the excellent coverage Nicholas Kristof has had of pigs and MRSA of late)

John McWilliams’ argument — that the exposure to disease which brought pigs into the factory farm setting in the first place still exists, and therefore in re-implementing free-range we are no better than we started — has little to base in reality. This is a classic shill, as the study that he cites (Foodborne Pathogens and Disease) was funded by the National Pork Board, a group that defends the interests of industrial pig operations.  If the New York Times had bothered to fact-check, they might have seen that the parasite trichinia found “present” in two of the free-range pigs was actually only antibodies (The Center for a Livable Future goes into more detail), which leaves us uncertain whether they carried the disease or not, and renders McWilliams’ argument moot.

Aside from this, though, McWilliams is missing the point. Locavorism isn’t about free-range, its about getting closer to the source; shaking the hand that feeds you and thereby knowing, even seeing, where your food comes from.  The reason there are no worthy studies cited in McWilliams’ piece is because grass-fed farmers often run size-manageable and responsible operations.  They don’t cut corners precisely because they are held accountable by the community.

I’m thinking about two things here. First, where are the media in this story? And second, can these contrarian attacks help us build the movement, or are they purely a distraction?

In this instance it seems that the New York Times, in its desperation to sell papers, fell into the trap of story building over truth-finding. On Grist, Tom Laskawy wrote a great piece on the counter-productive and even dangerous world of FUD — the corporate tactic of creating Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the consumer so as to sell the status quo. As Laskawy points out, this Times op-ed falls right in line with the tenets of FUD — a result of the Times’ use of false equivalency. In other words, in the interest of creating drama, many newspapers of note have failed to vet stories properly — creating the false appearance that the arguments on both sides of a story are equal and leaving it up to the reader to make sense of it.  What we get then is always a confused and nihilist public, uttering things like, “but didn’t you see that piece in the New York Times, free-range is not necessarily better.” The question is, then, how do we reclaim the media, and disseminate real information to consumers?

I think its a tough one to answer.  What I do know, is that at the farmer’s market, the answer lies with the beginning and the end of the food chain. Government needs to step in and lead on food issues with a better food policy agenda.  We’ve seen the beginnings of such a plan, with the White House garden and Kathleen Merrigan’s appointment as Under-Secretary of Agriculture — but these could end up being distractions. We must focus on the decentralization and diversification of the food system — starting with rethinking farm subsidies and hospital, school and military procurement — and insist that scientists get public sector funding and freedom to do real scientific studies (For the hell of it, lets start by really testing GMOs). The media also needs to press the reset button (Maybe this will happen on its own with the closure of so many papers) — this is our press, for goodness sake, not the voice box of industry. In the meantime, every eater has a responsibility to ask where their food is coming from, and when confused, to dig deeper and ask more questions.  These changes at the top and bottom are interdependent, and will not occur unless simultaneous.

Finally, I do think it is possible for opposition to make us stronger, and more able to articulate what it is we stand for and why.  In his recent book, Getting Green Done, Auden Schendler writes that we must take a long hard look at the bumpy road to implementing sustainability — and learn from our mistakes — something that at times we are afraid to do for fear of backlash. In the food movement, for example, we’d ignored food justice issues for a long time.  But through criticism that our movement was elitist, and that better food was only for the rich, we have begun to unravel this thinking and work towards building a more inclusive and fair food system.

Of course, we don’t always get a fair debate with our detractors. But it is still my hope that we can emerge from these arguments a more steadfast movement.