Author David Kirby says cattle eating cattle by-product could risk another outbreak of mad cow disease. The FDA says there’s no measurable risk. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)
The hamburger you put on the grill this weekend could be from cattle raised on feed that includes chicken feces. Lester Graham reports…a year-old Food and Drug Administration rule says it’s safe:
Transcript
The hamburger you put on the grill this weekend could be from cattle raised on feed that includes chicken feces. Lester Graham reports…a year-old Food and Drug Administration rule says it’s safe.
The rule came about after the mad cow disease outbreak. It made some changes, but still allows putting chicken litter – that’s the straw, feathers, chicken manure and scattered food left after raising chickens in a building– into cattle feed.
David Kirby wrote a book entitled “Animal Factory.” He says the government buckled to the chicken industry because the industry didn’t have a place to go with all the chicken litter.
“There’s too much to spread on local farmland, so they very often put it into cattle feed. It contains urea which cows can convert into protein.”
Chickens are messy. They scatter their feed and it gets into the chicken litter that’s put in some cattle feed. Some chicken feed contains beef by-products. Kirby says cattle eating cattle by-product could risk another outbreak of mad cow disease. The FDA says there’s no measurable risk.
Consumer Reports bought whole chickens from 100 different stores to test for their study.
(Photo courtesy of the USDA)
A Consumer Reports study finds
most of the chickens bought at
the grocery store are contaminated
with bacteria that can cause you
to get sick. Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
A Consumer Reports study finds
most of the chickens bought at
the grocery store are contaminated
with bacteria that can cause you
to get sick. Lester Graham reports:
Consumer Reports bought whole chickens from 100 different stores.
Dr. Urvashi Rangan says they tested them for two different strains of bacteria.
“Salmonella and campylobacter infections can give people serious diarhea, abdominal cramping for sometimes days, even weeks at a time.”
Two-thirds of the chickens they tested were tainted.
Rangan says the U.S. government’s guidelines are pretty loose for the chicken processors.
“Each company is basically allowed to script their own hygeine plan. And, clearly, there aren’t enough standards or standardidization among them that has allowed them to achieve a decent rate of cleanliness.”
The chickens that were cleanest were organic air-chilled chickens. The Consumer Report’s study is available online and will be published in the January issue of the magazine.
Economists say locally produced chicken can be pricey because there's not enough competition in the slaughterhouse business.
(Photo courtesy of the USDA)
There’s a trend toward locally-grown
food, but when it comes to locally-raised
chicken, there’s a kink in the supply
chain. Small chicken farmers can’t afford
to process a few birds at big slaughterhouses.
And there aren’t many independent slaughterhouses
around. Shawn Allee reports
there’s an effort to change this:
Transcript
There’s a trend toward locally-grown
food, but when it comes to locally-raised
chicken, there’s a kink in the supply
chain. Small chicken farmers can’t afford
to process a few birds at big slaughterhouses.
And there aren’t many independent slaughterhouses
around. Shawn Allee reports
there’s an effort to change this:
One idea’s to bring the slaughterhouse to the chicken farm.
The Whole Foods grocery chain could try out small, mobile slaughtering units next year. It might help Whole Foods offer more locally-raised chicken at its stores, but no one’s sure whether it will work.
Economists say the slaughterhouse pinch is a problem for consumers.
Wes Jarrell studies farm markets for the University of Illinois. He says locally produced chicken can be pricey because there’s not enough competition in the slaughterhouse business.
“In order for that farmer to stay in business, they have to charge more and we would certainly like to lower that price to make it available to more people.”
Jarrell says Whole Foods is not the only group to consider mobile chicken slaughterhouses. He says a few state governments, like Vermont’s, are revving up their own portable slaughterhouses, too.
The treatment of laying hens is one part of the issue getting a lot of attention in Ohio.
(Photo source: LEAPTOUY at Wikimedia Commons)
Recently, six states have changed their laws to require
better conditions for farm animals. But there’s a battle
brewing in one state that’s putting a new spin on the debate.
Julie Grant reports:
Transcript
Recently, six states have changed their laws to require
better conditions for farm animals. But there’s a battle
brewing in one state that’s putting a new spin on the debate.
Julie Grant reports:
The Humane Society of the United States says it’s shameful
the way animals are treated on many American farms. Paul
Shapiro says veal calves, pregnant pigs, and egg-laying
hens are all kept in cages so small – it’s cruel.
“Hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens in the nation are
confined in tiny battery cages that are so restrictive the birds
are unable even to spread their wings.”
Shapiro says some farms house millions of hens, all
squished into tiny cages, and none of them get the chance to
nest, or act in any way like natural chickens. The Humane
Society has spent millions of dollars pushing for change in
California and other states.
But when the Humane Society hit Ohio with its campaign,
the state Farm Bureau Federation pushed back.
Keith Stimpert is spokesman for the Ohio Farm Bureau. He
says there’s a reason cages are a certain size for hens,
calves, and pigs: the animals’ safety.
“You can expand space, but you’re going to increase
aspects of fighting or cannibalistic behavior, or the chance
for that sow to fall down while she’s pregnant.”
Stimpert says the Humane Society doesn’t understand
livestock.
So instead of negotiating with the Humane Society, the Ohio
Farm Bureau is proposing something new: a state board to
oversee the care of livestock.
“I think we, in this case, can get to a better resolution on
animal care by organizing this board.”
The board would include family farmers, veterinarians, a
food safety expert, and a member of a local chapter of the
Humane Society, among others.
Voters will probably be asked in November to decide
whether to change the state constitution to create this board.
But the Humane Society’s Paul Shapiro says the board will
be stacked by the Farm Bureau. He calls it a power grab by
big agriculture.
“Keep in mind that these are people who have opposed,
tooth and nail, any form of agricultural regulation for years,
and now, all of a sudden, in just a few weeks, they’ve gotten
religion and feel grave urgency to enshrine in the state’ s
constitution their own favored system of oversight.”
Shapiro says this board will only protect the status quo. And
that’s not good for the animals.
Egg producer Mark Whipple runs a small farm in Clinton,
Ohio. He’s got about 1,500 hens. We caught up with him
delivering eggs at a local health food store.
He says his hens are free range.
“There ain’t no cages, really. They go in the box, lay their
egg, and go out and run around with the rest of ‘em, go eat,
drink, I don’t know, just be free.”
Whipple says he was never inclined to cage the hens.
You might expect him to side with the Humane Society on
this debate. But he doesn’t trust them to make decisions for
farmers.
“I don’t know that they really know where their food comes
from – other than they go to the grocery store or they go to
the refrigerator. Unfortunately, that’s a lot the mentality of
the world right now, so far removed from the farm at all,
knowing about livestock.”
Whipple says there are good producers and bad producers
out there – just like any business. He would rather see a
board like the one proposed by the farm bureau than a
mandate on cage sizes from a Washington DC-based
lobbying group.
But the Humane Society says the board proposed by the
Farm Bureau won’t make things better. If it’s approved by
voters this November, the Society plans to place its own
initiative on animal treatment on the ballot next year.
Meanwhile, other farm states are considering the Ohio Farm
Bureau’s approach and might soon have their own advisory
boards on how to treat animals.
There are parts of the country where up to 20% of families are saying ‘no’ to vaccines. (Photo by Bill Branson, courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)
Babies and young children get a lot more vaccines today than they did ten years ago. To most parents, it’s a chance to protect their children from more diseases. But there are pockets of places where lots of people are opting out of vaccines. Julie Grant reports that it has the Centers for Disease Control concerned:
Transcript
Babies and young children get a lot more vaccines today than they did ten years ago. To most parents, it’s a chance to protect their children from more diseases. But there are pockets of places where lots of people are opting out of vaccines. Julie Grant reports that it has the Centers for Disease Control concerned:
Heather Waltz has a five month old daughter. Most Americans her age have already started a series of vaccinations – to prevent everything from Hepatitis B, to Diphtheria, to Polio.
But Waltz’s little girl isn’t going to get those shots. Her mom worries they could cause things like autism, juvenile diabetes and even cancer.
“I think the jury’s still out, as far as what the research says. But there is enough anecdotal sort of stuff to make me aware and decide that, really, right at this point, vaccinating wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
Waltz is among a small, but growing number of parents who are becoming skeptical of vaccines.
Lance Rodewald is director of immunization services at the Centers for Disease Control.
He says more than 90% of American children are vaccinated. But there are parts of the country where up to 20% of families are saying ‘no’ to vaccines.
“And that’s getting to a rate of lack of protection of children that really can be a fertile ground for the spreading of diseases like measles. And we actually saw that last year.”
In one case last year, Rodewald says a child who wasn’t vaccinated caught the measles in Switzerland and brought it back to Arizona.
“The parents didn’t realize that the child had measles – brought him to the pediatricians office where there were babies that were too young to be vaccinated that got measles. And then that particular outbreak went through four generations of spread, from child to child to child to child before it was able to be contained.”
Measles can cause more than just a nasty rash. In rare cases, it can lead to death. Measles still causes 200,000 deaths around the world. But it’s been almost eradicated in the U.S. because of vaccines.
Rodewald says many parents are concerned about vaccines today because of a ten-year old scientific article that linked the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella to autism. Rodewald says the science in that article proved to be wrong.
“The authors withdrew their names from the article. But this particular study set off a whole series of concerns about vaccines and autism that, to this day, is still talked about.”
Rodewald says many studies have been done and found no association, no cause and effect, between vaccines and autism.
It’s tough for parents to wade through all the information that’s out there these days. And there are so many vaccines to try to understand. Back in the mid-1990s, children were given 6 vaccines. Today, they’re supposed to get more than twice that many.
Mother Heather Waltz tries to keep up with it all and says she still plans to avoid vaccines.
Waltz: “For every bit of research and every article I find sort of helping me support my point, there’s a million other bits of research and articles saying that I’m a bad parent, or saying that I’m somehow damaging the health of the entire United States by not vaccinating my child. Just this idea that she could be a measles monster and just running around and infecting her classmates with measles or something like that, and that would be a terrible thing.”
Grant: “What do you think when you see that?”
Waltz: “It doesn’t make logical sense to me. Because to me, if you have 30 kids in a classroom, and my one isn’t vaccinated, wouldn’t my child be the one at risk? Not the public’s.”
But even if Waltz’s daughter doesn’t get vaccinated, she’ll probably be safe from these diseases. With so many other kids getting inoculations, most of the U.S. is not fertile ground for them to regain traction.
Organic steak is hard to find, partly because so few slaughterhouses are certified organic. (Photo by David Benbennick, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Organic farmers would love to have you dig into more of their pork, chicken and beef. It’s not just because they’re proud about how they raise their animals – it’s because certified organic meat fetches high prices. But organic meat is harder to find than you’d expect, and it’s partly because there are few organically-certified slaughterhouses.
Shawn Allee found a farming community that came up with a solution:
Transcript
Organic farmers would love to have you dig into more of their pork, chicken and beef.
It’s not just because they’re proud about how they raise their animals – it’s because certified organic meat fetches high prices.
But organic meat is harder to find than you’d expect, and it’s partly because there are few organically-certified slaughterhouses.
Shawn Allee found a farming community that came up with a solution:
Dennis and Emily Wettstein turned their Illinois farm organic a while ago, mostly because conventional farming wasn’t practical for them.
“All the money seemed to go to pay for the fertilizers and the chemicals. And then I was more or less allergic to the chemicals. And so we were interested in getting away from that, especially if we were going to raise a family out here.”
The Wettsteins didn’t just raise grain organically – they kept chemicals and hormones out of their cattle.
“We started raising meat for ourselves and our families. Then, pretty soon, just word of mouth, friends and neighbors wanted meat.”
And, they found people who’d pay top dollar for their meat.
“We sell at the Oak Park farmers market.”
That’s just west of Chicago.
“Right. The Oak Park market managers, they are working on all the farmers to go towards organic.”
And that worked for the Wettsteins – they had USDA certified organic chicken.
“There’s one other meat vendor there – it’s not organic. So, we have no competition. We feel that, with that label on there, we can set our price to where we can make a profit.”
But Emily Wettstein says that term – organic – gave them trouble when it came to beef and other meat.
“We were getting a little bit pressured from other people, ‘Well, you can’t call your item organic. You don’t have a processing facility with the term of certified organic.'”
Here was the problem: For meat to get labeled USDA certified organic, it’s gotta be certified from the farm to the slaughterhouse.
The Wettsteins had someone to process organic chicken, but they were out of luck with pigs and cows.
There was no certified slaughterhouse for beef or pork in Illinois.
So, the Wettsteins and some relatives prodded meat lockers to get certified.
There was one taker.
“I’m inside a meat locker that’s about a fifteen minute drive from the Wettstein farm. It’s owned by Scott Bittner, and I’m here to understand what organic certification means for his business. How do I put this, there’s a headless, hoofless, skinless cow hanging from your ceiling. Where are we exactly?”
We’re on the kill floor. We had seventeen, eighteen cattle today. Seven of those were organic.
So, walk me through how you have to treat that organic cow differently.
It’s the first thing we did this morning – that’s one thing. Other than that, it’s segregating it in the cooler from the non-organic product and then processing it at a later time, which, again, you have to do first thing in the morning.
So, the basic idea is segregation?
Yeah, it is. The whole way through. Exactly.
Bittner’s simplifying things, but not much.
He has to clean or swap equipment between batches of organic and conventional meat.
There are rules on the kinds of chemicals he can use. And he hires a certification company to monitor his paper work.
Bittner says overall, it’s easy, and he’s surprised more slaughterhouses haven’t done it.
“Here we’re doing all our fabricating – grinding sausage, ground beef. Cutting some chops, ribs.”
“How does it feel to be the only guy who can process an organic side of beef?”
“I want to keep it quiet – I don’t want too many people to get started doing what I’m doing because it’s nice. I get two or three customers every year that I didn’t have before. When you go to bed at night and think about this economy being the way it is, every little bit helps.”
Bittner says farmers drive animals up to four hours to slaughter their animals here.
He says he’s proud of his work but can’t take too much credit; he knows he’s got a local organic slaughtering monopoly going.
That might change some day, but for now it’s reason enough to keep his knives sharp.
Linda Nellet brought a few of her
birds to a backyard-chicken seminar in Chicago. She
and other seasoned urban chicken keepers hope to keep
chicken-raising legal and neighborly in their tight,
urban landscape. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Maybe it’s easy to imagine chickens
cooing and clucking on American farms, but
how about in big-city backyards? Well,
keeping chickens is legal in the nation’s
three largest cities, but in one of them,
chicken-lovers nearly lost that right.
Shawn Allee tells how some urban
chicken-keepers were nearly caught off guard,
and how they plan to keep their chickens in
the coop:
Transcript
Maybe it’s easy to imagine chickens
cooing and clucking on American farms, but
how about in big-city backyards? Well,
keeping chickens is legal in the nation’s
three largest cities, but in one of them,
chicken-lovers nearly lost that right.
Shawn Allee tells how some urban
chicken-keepers were nearly caught off guard,
and how they plan to keep their chickens in
the coop:
No one’s sure how many chickens are in Chicago’s backyards. But honestly, few people
thought about it until last year.
That’s when one woman showed up at a city hearing.
“Hi. My name is Edie Cavanaugh, and I’ve lived in Chicago, since 1968.”
Cavanaugh told aldermen she’d caught messy, noisy chickens clucking around her
neighborhood.
She was stunned the city wouldn’t round them up.
“I was told chickens are permitted as pets in Chicago, and I said that’s impossible,
this is a city.”
Cavanaugh’s story ruffled plenty of feathers.
You see, even some aldermen didn’t know that keeping chickens as pets or for eggs in
Chicago is okay.
“I was riding down the street, and I seen a rooster. I was like, ‘What is this?’”
For a month, it seemed Chicago’s city council would ban chicken-keeping.
People who already had chickens worried their birds were destined for the stew pot.
But Chicago aldermen kept chicken-raising legal.
Chicago’s pro-chicken contingent saw the fight as a wake-up call. Some figured, if they
wanted to keep birds, they’d better police themselves.
“So, welcome everybody for coming to the first-ever Chicago backyard Chicken
workshop.”
Martha Boyd is starting seminars about urban chickens.
She’s part of the Angelic Organics Learning Center, a group that promotes urban
agriculture.
Boyd is confident city-people can raise more of their own food if they’re neighborly
about it.
“So the idea of the backyard chicken workshop is so we can have this thing grow
without creating more problems and potentially, then, having the backlash to the
backyard chickens.”
For this first seminar, Boyd invited chicken-raising veterans to a church basement.
One is Tom Rosenfeld.
His advice to urban chicken lovers? Talk to your neighbors. And, hey, if they cringe, get
creative.
“It also helps to bribe them, because if they think they’re going to get some eggs out
of the deal or they think they’re kids come over and pet them or whatever, then of
course they’ll be a little more understanding when one day you leave the door open
and there’re chickens running around the yard or other issues.”
Rosenfeld says those ‘other issues’ arise pretty quickly. In fact, just a few hours after
chickens eat.
“A lot about chicken keeping is about poop because they do it a lot. They do it in
surprisingly large quantities at a time.”
Rosenfeld says you can literally get ankle deep in the stuff if you’re not vigilant.
But bribery helps here, too. Rosenfeld says chicken poop makes excellent garden
compost.
“Our neighbors love it. They’ll come by with a bucket and that’s their way of
participating.”
Rosenfeld says the last issue that ticks off neighbors is noise.
There’s no such thing as a chicken muzzle, but there’s still a solution – and there’s no
bribe necessary.
You see, male chickens are the noisy bunch, so if you just want eggs…
“You don’t need a rooster. It’s a sad reality as a male chicken keeper to realize that
roosters aren’t necessary. They’re only necessary if you want chicks.”
Rosenfeld says urban chicken-raising could catch on where it’s legal – if people keep a lid
on noise and smells.
As for places where it’s not legal?
You might want to change the law at city hall – just don’t try to bribe your alderman with
fresh eggs.
By 2015, Proposition 2 in California forces farms to make
sure the animals are given enough room to move around.
(Photo by Kinna Ohman)
Voters in California are drawing
a line in the sand when it comes to the
factory farming of animals. They overwhelmingly
approved a ballot measure to ensure that
hens, calves and pigs are treated more
humanely. Julie Grant reports:
Transcript
Voters in California are drawing
a line in the sand when it comes to the
factory farming of animals. They overwhelmingly
approved a ballot measure to ensure that
hens, calves and pigs are treated more
humanely. Julie Grant reports:
Right now, in most states, calves raised for veal, pregnant
pigs, and hens that lay eggs are caged so tight they can
barely move.
By 2015, Proposition 2 in California forces farms to make
sure the animals are given enough room to move around.
Michael Markarian is a vice president with the U.S. Humane
Society, which spent millions to get the issue approved.
“You cram these animals into cages barely larger than their
bodies. They’re practically immobilized their entire lives. I
mean, what could be more basic than giving an animal some
freedom of movement?”
Opponents of the issue say this will cost farmers and
consumers. We’ll see more imports from countries that don’t
have these kinds of laws.
Researchers at the University of Delaware have found that planting trees around poultry farms has many benefits (Photo courtesy of the USDA)
As suburbs are built closer to
farms, there are sometimes complaints
about the odors. Researchers are now
working to smooth things out between
farmers and their new neighbors. Jessi
Ziegler has the story on one
of the simple solutions they found:
Transcript
As suburbs are built closer to
farms, there are sometimes complaints
about the odors. Researchers are now
working to smooth things out between
farmers and their new neighbors. Jessi
Ziegler has the story on one
of the simple solutions they found:
If you’ve ever driven by a chicken farm, you know the
smell can get pretty bad.
So, imagine living by one, and smelling it every single day.
Well, researchers may have come up with a solution –
trees.
Planting a few rows of trees around a farm can do all sorts
of good.
They capture dust and ammonia. And they block noise
and odor.
Also, they make the farm look a lot prettier. Which,
researcher George Malone says, can make a big difference.
“There’s been other studies to indicate that attractive
farms, statistically, have less odor than unattractive farms.
Perception is reality of what we deal with.”
And the perception is, the better you think a farm looks,
the better you think it smells.
For The Environment Report, this is Jessi Ziegler.
Frank Baffi's barn in southern Michigan (photo by Mark Brush)
Today, we continue our series on pollution in the heartland.
There are fewer farmers raising pigs, cows and chickens these days.
But the amount of meat being produced in the U.S. continues to increase.
So livestock farms haven’t exactly disappeared. They’ve just gotten bigger.
In the third part of our week-long series, the GLRC’s Mark Brush reports these big operations have kept food costs down, but those cheap prices come with consequences:
Transcript
Today, we continue our series on pollution in the heartland.
There are fewer farmers raising pigs, cows and chickens these days.
But the amount of meat being produced in the U.S. continues to increase.
So livestock farms haven’t exactly disappeared. They’ve just gotten bigger.
In the third part of our week-long series, the GLRC’s Mark Brush reports these big operations have kept food costs down, but those cheap prices come
with consequences:
When you picture a typical farm, chances are you probably think of a farm just like Frank
Baffi’s.
(Sound of farm)
He grows corn and oats on his land. He’s got chickens, a couple of horses, two ducks,
about 30 beef cows. And in this fading red barn, he’s got pigs:
(Sound of claps)
“Hey Pig! C’mon! Get up!”
(Sound of pigs)
In fact, the pigs have been the most profitable thing he’s raised on this farm. Baffi says
he used to sell more than fifty thousand dollars worth of pigs every year. It was enough
to make a living on.
(Sound of pigs)
But as time went on, selling pigs became less profitable. In the 1980s, his expenses went
up and the price he could get for his pigs went down. Baffi says he was faced with a
decision. It was the same decision that many small livestock farmers faced at the time:
“I think it was a whole trend that if you weren’t big you had to get out. It was if you had
20 cows it was you gotta be milkin’ 30, or if you were milking 30 it was oh, you gotta be
milkin’ 100. The reason they weren’t making any money is that they’re not making
enough money for what they sell.”
Frank Baffi blames the drop in prices on the increase in global trade. He says US
producers started to compete with operations overseas, where expenses can often be
cheaper. To keep up, producers in the US got more efficient, and as they did so, prices
continued to drop. Baffi says he tried to get bigger, but he just didn’t have enough
money.
But just down the road there’s a pig farm that is making a profit. Frank Baffi’s neighbor
is Bruce Barton. His dad started the family in the hog business in the 1950s. Barton says
early on his Dad could see what was coming:
“He pretty much expanded because he could see that small farmers were struggling to
survive and ya know we had buy the feed in larger lots you sell your hogs in larger lots.
There was going to be less margin for each hog. You just had to have more, more of
them.”
The Bartons raised about 11 pigs when the started out. Now they raise about 100,000.
That may seem like a lot, but their operation is small compared to those that raise over a
million hogs a year.
The size of these big farms trouble many environmentalists. These farms are forced to
deal with large volumes of manure. On average one pig can generate close to two tons of
manure a year. Multiply that by one million and you get the picture. Smaller farms can
spread the manure as fertilizer on their land without much problem and large farms can
use the manure too. It’s just that they need a lot of land to spread the manure on. If they
put too much on a field, it can pollute streams and drinking water wells, and researchers
say, these farms are only going to get bigger.
Jim MacDonald researches farming trends for the US Department of Agriculture. He
says small farmers can make a go of it if they’re able to find a niche market, like
producing organic meat and milk. But MacDonald says the demand for these niche
products is still tiny compared to the demand for things like chicken nuggets and hot
dogs:
“The overall trend so far, I think, continues to be towards larger operations producing
what we might call generic or commodity like products and their prices continue to fall.”
Prices are falling because these farms continue to get bigger and more efficient. That
means fewer and fewer people are farming. So the idyllic picture we have of the small
farmer is fading.
(Sound of Frank’s farm up)
Last year, Frank Baffi lost more than a thousand dollars on his farm. He mainly relies on
his social security check for his income. A row of empty metal crates line his barn:
“This is where I’d have pigs and this is where they would have their babies. There
probably all used up but I just haven’t had the heart to tear them out. Because I always
thought that I could at least get back to where I was. And the way it looks, you know, the
profitability of this thing, it don’t look like I’m going to go there.”
So the choices you make at the grocery store influence how farms are changing. It’s only
normal: most of us pick the cheaper product. But some people who live near these large
facilities say consumers don’t know the full cost of their choices.
Author David Kirby says cattle eating cattle by-product could risk another outbreak of mad cow disease. The FDA says there’s no measurable risk. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)
