Newspaper Article

Family farms are the only way to protect U.S. from mad cow disease

Vallianatos, E G

2005

Overview

Despite feeble attempts in the U.S. Senate in the mid-1970s to put a brake in the path of the agribusiness colossus, government policy never ceased lavishing America's large farmers with gold. In 1983, researcher Dean MacCannell, professor of rural sociology at the University of California, Davis, issued a severe warning that complemented the warning of [Walter Goldschmidt]: The size of farms matters in agriculture. Large farms destroy rural America. The most lasting effects of agribusiness include the suppression of the middle class and the decline of democracy, toxins in water and food, high rates of debilitating disease and often death from poisoning, incidence of monstrous malformations of the newborn in or near factory farms, higher rates of cancer among farmers and others living close to farmers, and the drastic decline of the small white family farmers and the near disappearance of the black family farmers. Mad cow disease is the product of these meat factories because industrialized farming treats cattle no differently than it treats any other manufactured product. Cattle no longer graze in the field: They are kept confined and fed, among other food, animal tissues, which exposes them to mad cow disease. mad cow disease never was a disease in the family system of farming.

• Publisher: Postmedia Network Inc
• Subject: Agribusiness / Animal tissues / Cattle / Democracy / Factory farming / Family farms / Farmers / Rural sociology / Toxins