Today, consumers increasingly want food raised in ways that reflect and respect their values: local food production, humane treatment of animals, no antibiotics or hormones, and based on building healthy living soil.
These consumers choices are not a conspiracy, are not wacko acts, but a simple expression of the free market system dictum, “the customer is always right.” It is simply good business for farmers to change the way they farm. Wal-Mart stopped purchasing fluid milk produced with rBGH (a Monsanto developed hormone to boast milk production) simply because their customers demanded it.
Blake also wrote, “[Bill] McKibben is certain that the contracts these (CAFO) farmers sign with companies like Tyson are unfair, and the farmers might agree.” The words, “farmers might agree” is an understatement. Poultry and swine confinement farmers have repeatedly sued their “integrators” (the corporations that vertically control the industrial animal system) over the last decade.
At issue are confiscatory producer contracts that make the small family farmers virtual serfs on their own farms. For instance, small contract poultry producers actually supply over 50 percent of the capital necessary to keep Tysons and Perdue and their like operating – yet have no ownership stake in the corporation and face “blacklisting” if they don’t do as they are told.
I propose we stand with small farmers, now trapped in CAFO industrial contracts, who are fighting back and help them move to sustainable, humane, local food production.
Local seed laws and local animal treatment laws offer one path for consumers and farmers to cooperate in a community-effort to reform the food system. That is why industrial food corporations push so hard for state pre-emption of local control over these issues (the Monsanto laws).
One final point deals with farmer access to alternative information.
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