Tag: duck

Livestock Farms Get Big

  • 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.


For the GLRC, I’m Mark Brush.

Related Links

Conflicts Between People and Wildlife

  • People sometimes move to the outer suburbs to be a little closer to nature. But when nature turns out to be a squirrel storing nuts in your attic or a raccoon looking for a free meal in your garbage can, there's conflict. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Throughout the Midwest, it’s becoming more and more common
to see wild animals living in the city and the suburbs. The number of coyotes, deer and Canada geese is growing. And suburbs keep sprawling… but the animals there stay put, and adapt to the new surroundings. That can cause conflicts between the animals… and people. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Ann-Elise Henzl reports:

Transcript

Throughout the Midwest, it’s becoming more and more common
to see wild animals living in the city and the suburbs. The number of
coyotes, deer and Canada geese is growing. And suburbs keep sprawling…
but the animals there stay put, and adapt to the new surroundings. That
can cause conflicts between the animals… and people. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Ann-Elise Henzl reports:


It can get busy at wildlife rehabilitation centers. At this center, five thousand animals are treated and released each year. There’s a big variety, ranging from raccoons to sandhill cranes.


(Sound of birds chirping)


In spring and early summer, it’s very crowded in the nursery.


“We’ve got a young grackle in here, and he’s really on about the one-hour feeding stage learning the transition between us feeding him and feeding himself…”


Scott Diehl is the manager of the wildlife rehabilitation center at the Wisconsin humane society in Milwaukee. Dozens of young animals are being nursed back to health here in incubators and cages.


“Here’s little teenage gray squirrels in here playing around and goofing off and their play activity actually teaches them how to – it helps build their muscles, and teaches them how to climb…”


Many of the babies are here because their parents were run over by cars. That’s what happened to a female mallard who’s being examined by a wildlife rehabilitator, in the “triage” room.


“He’s just outstretching the wings, he’s feeling over the bones to see if he feels fractures and I can see from here that the left wing that he is examining looks like it has fractured metacarpals, so that’s the outer wing, kind of analogous to our fingers, we’ve got actually a little blood showing there. And so Mike is just going to flush that wound out with a little saline now he’s going to examine things, and quite frankly it doesn’t look like she’s using her legs well either.”


It turns out the duck has numerous broken bones and other serious health problems, so she’s euthanized. Mallards are often hit by cars in cities. That’s because they nest in grassy areas, then walk their babies to the water. That can mean crossing a number of streets.


Ricky Lein is the urban wildlife specialist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
He says people and animals are always getting into some kind of conflict in urban areas.


“Recently I had a person come in who owned twenty acres in a suburban area and talked about how they enjoyed the coyotes as long as they stayed on their territory but the coyote had made the decision to come into their backyard and eat a family cat, and I tried in a very polite way to point out that was the coyote’s territory.”


Lein says urban sprawl also causes problems by creating places that attract some wild animals
like white-tailed deer. They like areas where the woods meet wide-open lawns. That describes many suburban neighborhoods.


As a result, there are now more deer across the Midwest then ever before,
and the population of Canada geese is exploding in the same area. Lein says the geese have found their version of “heaven.”


“A lot of urban parks, condo complexes, whatnot, where you have a pond or storm water run-off pond and they keep five to ten acres of grass mowed around it, and they’ve eliminated hunting… that is heaven to a Canada goose.”


But some communities are considering killing urban geese in order to reduce the population.
Other cities have hired sharpshooters to kill urban deer. So the Humane Society of the United States has created a program called “Wild Neighbors.” Maggie Brasted is the organization’s director for urban wildlife conflicts.


“One of our goals is to help people find solutions so that they can coexist with these wild neighbors, with the wildlife around them, ’cause you know sometimes there are real problems. There are real concerns. It’s not that every time someone is upset about wild animals around them that they should just be told, “Oh just live with it,” there are real issues so we want to be able to offer them real practical solutions other than killing the animals.”


Brasted says there’s a complex relationship between humans and wild animals in urban areas.


“It’s not real simple to just say that you know they were here first or they shouldn’t be here. Or why are they around people? They’re adapting to what we do, they’re adapting to the changes we make. They’re taking advantage of whatever habitat niche that they find.”


Brasted says the wild animals that live in the city and suburbs are there to stay. So people will either have to find ways to live with them or to control their population.


For the GLRC, I’m Ann-Elise Henzl.

Related Links

Computing Better Fuel Efficiency

Automotive researchers say a newly developed computer-controlled fuel system could help make SUVs more fuel efficient. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tom Borgerding has more:

Mallard Ducks on the Decline

  • In a narrow swath of grass in a roadside ditch, a mallard hen nests her second brood of the season, a rare event for these ducks. Her first ducklings were killed by a predator.

In the last decade or so, ducks in the Great Lakes region have not been reproducing as well as they have in the past. The number of ducklings hatching out and surviving to adults has dropped by about 25 percent. Researchers are trying to figure out why this is happening and what can be done about it. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham went into the field with researchers and has this report:

Transcript

In the last decade of so, ducks in the Great Lakes region have not been reproducing as well as they have in the past. The number of ducklings hatching out and surviving to adults has dropped by about twenty-five percent. Researchers are trying to figure out why this is happening, and what can be done about it. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham went into the field with researchers and has this report.


(sound of quack, quack overhead / cross fade to truck doors and engine startup/ bed of gravel sounds)


Mallard ducks are the most common duck found throughout the Great Lakes states. You’ll see them on farm ponds, college lagoons, and even in big city parks. But recently the mallard’s population hasn’t been growing as fast. The duck’s rate of reproduction has been falling off in the region since the mid-1980’s. Researchers with the sportsman’s conservation group, Ducks Unlimited, are involved in a three year study of mallards to find out why the ducks are not surviving in as great of numbers.


Tina Yerkes heads up the project. In a truck with something that looks like a TV antenna on top, fellow researcher John Simpson and she are in northwest Ohio, near Lake Erie, headed out to find some of the mallard hens. Tiny transmitters were surgically implanted in the ducks earlier this year and the antenna tracks the signals.


“So, this is the whole gizmo setup here. Everyday these guys go out and they track the birds. Each bird has a unique beep, if you will, uhm, a frequency. And that’s basically how we figure out what they’re doing. We started with 57 and you’re down to 38?
JS: Thirty-eight, roughly. And, eleven? JS: Twelve. Twelve have actually been killed, either by predators or farming operations on this site.”


(Truck sound under)


As the truck gets close to the last sighting of one of the mallard hens they’re tracking. John Simpson flips on the tracker and turns the antenna.


(beep beep sound)


He’s pulled over along a fairly busy road, and starts looking around in the roadside grass.


“So, she’s actually nesting in the ditch?”
“Yeah. I’m not entirely sure where her nest is here, so we’ve got to be careful.”


(sound of grass rustling)


It’s hard to believe a duck could find a place for a nest here. Most of the roadside is mowed except for a little strip of grass where we’re looking. She’s one lucky duck. A mower would kill her and destroy her nest.


“There she is right there. See her sitting on her nest?”


The mallard hen is three feet away and she’s still hard to see. John
Simpson has to flush her so that he can take a look at the eggs in the nest.


(Sound of flapping wings)


“There she goes.”
“She’s got a pile of eggs too. That’s her second nest.”
“That’s her second nest?”
“Yeah. She had a pile in her first nest.”
“Twelve eggs? Is that right?”
“Eleven.”
“Eleven?”
“Yep.”


(Ambience remains under)


The duck lost her first brood to a predator. Since she had nested close to a subdivision, it could have been a dog or cat. But the researchers say in this case it was probably a wild predator, maybe a raccoon.


“And, once we’re finished, we’ll just cover the nest so the predators don’t see it and we leave.”


It’s very rare that a mallard hen tries twice to raise a brood, But in this area the ducks are adopting a lot of unusual behaviors. Since there’s almost no grassland to nest in, hens have nested in hay fields where they’re usually killed at mowing time. One hen made a nest in a large flowerpot. At our next stop we found a duck in the backyard of a mobile home, and her eggs had just hatched.


(Peep, peep, peep of the ducklings)


The owner mowed around the duck’s nest, giving the mother and her eggs a chance to survive. Now that they’ve hatched, they’ll head to the water nearby. Tina Yerkes says development pressures have hurt the ducks here.


“In Ohio, we’re looking at pretty bad brood survival which tells us that probably we need to alter the landscape by putting wetlands back—by restoring wetlands and managed marshes for the broods. And then, probably also coupling that with some grassland habitat, ’cause as you can see, there’s not a lot of grassland habitat for them to nest in here. We need to improve that.”


The Ducks Unlimited researchers are getting some indications about what kinds of things are hurting the ducks ability to reproduce. Besides the loss of wetlands the researchers are finding that farming practices such as frequently mowing ditches and urban sprawl taking up grasslands are all contributing to a high mortality rate among ducklings and sitting hens. But the researchers haven’t collected enough information yet to make any solid conclusions. It’ll be two more years and many more sites before the Ducks Unlimited researchers have enough hard data.


Robert Payne is the Curator of Birds at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. He says while to researchers it might seem pretty clear that people are causing the lower rates of production in the duck population. Information like the Ducks Unlimited group is gathering will be helpful.


“Well, it seems to be common sense: the more people, the more development you have, the fewer places there are going to be for birds. But the people in our society who make the decisions like to have some data out there. (They) Like to know how many ducks, how much land, and so on. Otherwise, these people can’t really figure how much land the really should set aside for the ducks. No data, no well informed decisions.”


(sounds of birds and bullfrogs)


But some people might find data that are supposed to help ducks gathered by a group that’s chiefly supported by people who kill ducks for sport might be a bit of a conflict, or at least very self-serving. Ducks Unlimited researcher Tina Yerkes says there’s a larger purpose here than merely making hunters happy.


“The purpose is not necessarily to create more ducks to shoot, but the purpose is to alter and affect the landscape in a positive way for all the species that need the landscape. So, we’re trying to take a step back and determine what the wildlife needs and help put it back on the ground for the wildlife.”


Predictions are that the human population around the Great Lakes will steadily increase for the foreseeable future, and if the researchers’ early indications hold, it’ll likely affect the duck population even more. This study, when it’s complete, might give policy makers the information they need to find a balance between the needs of people and the needs of wildlife as the conflict between the two grows in the Great Lakes region.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

MALLARD DUCKS ON THE DECLINE (Short Version)

Mallards are the most common duck in the Great Lakes region, but their numbers have been declining during the last few years. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Mallards are the most common duck in the Great Lakes region, but their numbers have been declining during the last few years. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Lester Graham reports.


The sportsmen’s conservation group, Ducks Unlimited is involved in a three year study, trying to learn why mallard duck populations are not increasing in the same numbers they once were. Tina Yerkes is a research biologist with the organization. She says starting in the mid-1950’s mallard flocks were growing at a pretty rapid rate.


“In the Great Lakes area, after the mid-80’s until now the production ratio has dropped and it’s dropped pretty sharply. And that for us is a warning bell, if you will, that something is going on in this area that’s causing birds not to do well.”


Yerkes and a team of biologists in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio are tracking mallard hens and their broods. Early indications are that loss of habitat is beginning to affect the duck populations in the region. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

Fed Bill to Allow Cormorant Hunting

In recent years, the double-crested cormorant population has
exploded. And commercial fishermen say their business has suffered as a
result. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports on a
new federal bill intended to reduce the population of this controversial
bird:

Transcript

The numbers fo bass and perch in the Great Lakes have declined. And many say the cormorant is to

blame. Now New York congressman John McHugh and Minnesota representative Collin Peterson are

proposing a solution. McHugh says they want to give states the option of creating a hunting season

for cormorants.


“The cormorant population is at an all-time high and I think most people who are even a

disppassionate, casual observer can understand that the cormorant population is having a

devastating effect on the fisheries and on the general environment.”


However, the National Audubon Society opposes the measure. They say the birds are protected under

the Migratory bird treaty act. The bill has been sent to the House committee on Resources. McHugh

hopes to have public hearings on the issue next spring.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Karen Kelly.

Cormorant Control Begins in Earnest (Part 1)

In many ways, the double-crested cormorant is a wildlife success story. The
birds were almost wiped out by pesticide exposure in the 1960’s. But in
recent years, they’ve returned in large numbers to prime fishing areas in
the Great Lakes and elsewhere. In fact, they’re so good at catching fish,
commercial fishermen have been affected. In the first of a two part series,
the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly found that the biologists who
protect these birds are also looking for ways to get rid of them:

Legacy Left by Cormorant Slaughter (Part 2)

The double-crested cormorant has been an enemy of fishermen for centuries.
They’ve eaten salmon on the Atlantic coast, catfish in Missouri and game
fish in the Great Lakes. Fishermen complain the cormorants are bad for
business. And last summer, fishing guides on Lake Ontario made their point
by killing more than two thousand birds. A year later, they’ve been caught
and arrested. In the second of a two part series, the Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports the effect of those killings is still being
felt:

Cormorant Control

Federal fish and wildlife officials will most likely let New York state
reduce the number of double breasted cormorants on Lake Ontario… but
not by euthanizing the birds. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Elizabeth Christensen reports: