Swine flu – DON’T eat Smithfield Foods pork

Apparently a Smithfield CAFO-type farm in Vera Cruz, Mexico is a likely source (hat tip Grist) for the swine flu outbreak:

Residents [of La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico] believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to ‘flu.’ However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this outbreak.

Oh, this particular farm? According to Smithfield’s website, the Granjas plant “produced” (its words not mine!) 950,000 hogs last year. Holy hog shit, Batman.

Oh, and by the way, the first cases were nearly a month ago and no MSM coverage yet of the Smithfield angle in the U.S.

For your further curiosity, per Los Alamos National Laboratory, 50 days is the vector time for a full-blown outbreak if this isn’t controlled.

Let’s hope President Barack Obama’s public health emergency actually does something, and that it, in the long run, addresses CAFO livestock “production.”

Meanwhile, swine flu is another example of our need for parliamentary government.

The New York Times story explains it succinctly:

The outbreak in the United States comes before President Obama has his full health team in place. His nominee for health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, has not yet been confirmed by the Senate, nor has the woman he selected to Food and Drug Administration, Margaret Hamburg, a former New York City health commissioner. Mr. Obama has not yet named anyone to run the Centers for Disease Control or the National Institutes of Health.

Why do people who should know better continue to defend the horribly antiquated Constitution of the United States?

And, given our two-party duopoly, while people may be quarantined, CAFO hog farms most certainly will not.

Time for Detroit and Big Three to face reality

The Environmental Protection Agency has officially declared greenhouse gases are pollutants.

It will probably also make some sort of carbon cap program easier to pass in Congress, though probably not until this fall, I might guess, unless a watered-down plan gets passed, with the stipulation it’s just a starter bill.

Side benefit?

Since methane is another greenhouse gas, it means EPA can do what USDA hasn’t, and start regulating concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.

Are CAFO hogs making us sick?

Per Nicholas Kristof’s column, it sure looks like it; humans are getting MRSA infections from mass-market,concentrated animal feeding operations hog farms. And, it may at least contribute indirectly to some deaths.

Eleven Westerners present their Obama Christmas wish lists

Too bad at least one of them has already been crapped on by Santa.

Courtney White a rancher who raises grass-fed cattle and leads a group that markets that kind of beef. He wants Obama’s support for the local-food movement.

“We need a radical re-visioning, away from the subsidization of the industrial food system. If we’re going to incentivize solar and wind energy production, why don’t we incentivize local food production as well? It has just as much climate impact.”

Ahh, Mr. White. You must have filled out your wish list to Santa Obama before he named CAFO-loving Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, or Nutsack, as his Secretary of Agriculture.

Change we Need needed at USDA

Nicholas Kristof has an excellent column about how the U.S. Department of Agriculture is so in need of reform that we ought to start by calling it the Department of Food.

And, per his column, you can help push for that reform by signing an online petition to President-elect Obama at Food for Democracy.

Here’s what I wrote to personalize my e-signature:

Anything to reign in Big Ag, control CAFO pollution and give us healthier food!

Don’t wait, go sign.

Farm ‘emissions’ could be on global warming talks

And should be.

You think Big Coal, the Big Three, etc., have squealed about Kyoto and post-Kyoto climate control deals, or potential deals? You ain’t heard nothing yet compared to the sounds that will come out of Big Ag if CAFOs, or whatever they’re called in western European, come under the regulatory microscope:

“It’s an area that’s been largely overlooked,” said Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He says people should eat less meat to control their carbon footprints. “We haven’t come to grips with agricultural emissions.”

he correctly notes this would have more environmental benefit tan driers switching to hybrid cars.

Short of eating less meat, at least, eat more poultry. It takes less plant food to put a pound on a chicken than it does a hog. (A Swedish group estimates the entire process of producing a pound of beef produces 11 times more emissions than does a pound of chicken.) And, if not poultry, then more pork. It takes less plant food to put a pound of new weight on a hog than a cow.

Sweden is going to start labeling meat at the grocer’s for emissions. That could be one part of the solution.

Goodbye and so long J.R. Simplot

High Country News explains well why environmentalists should have a green wake for the demise of Idaho’s “Mr. Spud,” J.R. Simplot, also known as the biggest rancher on public lands in our country. (And one of the worst overgrazers.)

Simplot also owned the nation’s largest concentrated animal feeding operation.

Friday scatblogging – this power plant is not chicken shit

It is just going to burn this widespread power source, pictured at left. Considering that North Carolina has plenty of CAFO-size chicken “farms,” it seems like a good place to build a chickenshit power plant.

Of course, besides skeptical residents raising a stink over the plant, the main question is, how much of a stink the plant itself will raise. And there’s a difference of opinion on that.

Fibrowatt announced plans Wednesday for a 300-acre site, bolstered by $2.5 million in financial incentives, in the heart of Eastern North Carolina's poultry processing region, in Sampson County, where chicken farms will provide the fuel source. …

Fibrowatt announced plans Wednesday for the 300-acre site, bolstered by $2.5 million in financial incentives, in the heart of Eastern North Carolina's poultry processing region, where chicken farms will provide the fuel source.

500,000 tons? That’s almost 1,400 tons a day. How securely, so to speak, will that much “fuel” be stored? I mean, residents in the area already have to breath in the fumes from CAFO-size chicken farms; it’s a rightful worry they don’t get inundated with a second round of chickenshit smell. Or, a third round of chickenshit smoke, which odor, thankfully, I am clueless about. And, I’m not joking:

Fibrowatt’s next step is to apply for a state air-quality permit. Several environmental groups have decried poultry-waste burning as nothing more than waste incineration that emits two major pollutants: sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides. Some emission levels from poultry-waste power plants are comparable to those of a modern coal-burning power plant, Fibrowatt officials acknowledge.

But they say worries are overblown and will, yes… go up in smoke.

According to the company, the poultry droppings are delivered in covered trucks to a fuel storage building, which typically holds five to 10 days of fuel. The building is designed to prevent odors from escaping.

John Swope, executive director for the Sampson County Economic Development Commission, is one of two dozen officials who visited similar plants that Fibrowatt built in Minnesota and the United Kingdom.

“Everything Fibrowatt told us was true,” Swope said. “It was very clean. No odor.”

But, some critics aren’t convinced:

”The air pollution permits for these plants are going to be a horror story,” said Louis Zeller, clean-air campaign coordinator for the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League in Glendale Springs. “We’re going to find out how much pollution these things are actually going to be able to put into the atmosphere.”

Well, whoever’s right, this is only a starting point. Fibrowatt wants to build three more plants, that would burn either chicken or turkey droppings, in the same area.

No shit.

And, there’s enough turkey and chickshit in the area to produce 5,500 tons or more of scat a day? Maybe it is time to eat less meat.

EPA OK with stinky megafarms

The Environmental Protection Agency pulled another fast one Dec. 28, just coming to light. It wants to waive requirements that megafarms, i.e., concentrated animal feeding operations, would have to report high ammonia or hydrogen sulfide releases. Hell, H2S is poisonous.

But the EPA says no big deal.

“(The exemption) is also protective of human health and the environment and consistent with the agency's goal to reduce reporting burden where there would likely be no federal, state or local emergency response to such release reports,” Shradar said.

So, people getting sick from stinky farms with 10,000 hogs, 20,000 cows or 50,000 chickens is no big deal then.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association agrees, claiming cow manure is not a toxic substance. Bullshit — pun intended.