Links post

Dog stuff

• Mandatory spay/neuter laws: Follow the (lack of) money (Pet Connection): Why mandatory spay/neuter laws for pets are a bad idea, even though spaying and neutering is a good goal to have.
• Canine Dominance: Is the Concept of the Alpha Dog Valid? (Psychology Today) Article by Stanley Coren, PhD. He has written some great books about dog behavior and cognition; look him up if you want more on this.

Local food/food safety stuff

• Faeces and flies “found” at US egg farms tied to illness (BBC News): “Officials say chickens’ contact with animal faeces and wildlife are among the main causes of concern as they investigate the source of the salmonella outbreak.” I really hope this story is not spun into “chickens are healthier in cages where they can't come in contact with wildlife.” Infectious disease is a problem when animals live in too-close quarters. Well-managed farms can balance allowing chickens room to move around with disease management. I assert that I am safer eating eggs from backyard chickens (plenty of room to move around, plenty of grass to clean their feet off on, where one sick hen is not going to make all her neighbors sick, because they are not crammed together), even if those chickens interact with wild birds, than eating eggs from factory farms. I don’t have scientific evidence to support this because the studies have not been done (and are hard to do — there are a host of different factors between those two environments to control for).
• ButcherShop (Sugar Mountain Farm): Creative solutions to the lack of slaughter facilities in the Northeast: “We are building our own USDA/State inspected on-farm slaughterhouse and butcher shop... Since banks have not been lending we are bootstrapping the construction from our own cash and selling CSA Pre-Buys where customers get free processing in exchange for buying early.” Lack of local slaughter facilities for small farms is the major impediment to an increase in the number of farmers producing humanely-raised meat in the Northeast. Read more about shortage of slaughterhouses, particularly in the Northeast.

 
Meta-science stuff

• How to make a difference – Responsible vaccine advocacy (Science-Based Medicine): Nice article about how to approach the problem of spreading your viewpoint, recognizing that repeating facts over and over is probably not very effective.
• Good example of a tag cloud for blogs. This is the interface I really want to see on a larger scale.
• Online science blogregator
• Peer Review and the Internet (Science-Based Medicine): “Imagine an alternate process by which an article is published online, either on an open site or a secure site that only experts have access to. Then dozens or hundreds of experts can comment on the paper, providing feedback directly to the authors in addition to the editors, who can also respond to the commenters. The result would be more of a dynamic conversation than you get with the current review process. But most importantly, in my opinion, is that you would get a broader range of opinions, and a far greater chance to detect error or bias. An editor or editors can oversee the process, and once it has played itself out the final version of the paper can be published to the public, and become part of the official literature.” Sounds great. One question I have: how do you know when “it has played itself out”?
• Asking “Who’s a journalist?” is so 2007 (Global Vue): Proposes a list of questions we should be working on now. (It’s nice when posts don’t just explain why a question is a bad one, but constructively offer alternative questions that we should be asking.)
• Supplementary Information: should I stay or should I go? (Martin Fenner): Nice collection of the blog posts about supplemental information and the implications of the Journal of Neuroscience's recent decision to stop accepting it. Fenner comments “This is a perfect example for why we need better systems to track blog posts relating to an article.“ I concur.
  

Miscellany

• (Proposed) World Veterinary Year 2011!

Opening up the local meat bottleneck

There have been some interesting developments recently in local meat processing in New England.

First, some background. I am a proponent of raising food animals on pasture on small farms. Specifics about why I believe in this approach are beyond the scope of this post; I was convinced by The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and the Pew Report, also known as “Putting Meat on the Table: industrial farm animal production in America.” One of the main obstacles to success as a small scale food-animal farmer in New England, where I live, is the lack of processing operations (slaughterhouses) set up to handle small-scale farmers. There are plenty of people who want to raise animals on pasture and there are plenty of people who want to buy the meat or eggs, but there is a real bottleneck between the two, and building new slaughterhouses is expensive.

Mobile poultry processing units (MPPUs) are an inexpensive solution to the problem. MPPUs will actually come to your farm or to one near by to process your chickens. There are currently two MPPUs operating in Massachusetts, and more in surrounding New England states. Regulators are still somewhat wary of these units; they understand the need for them, but are more used to applying regulations to large scale plants than to slaughterhouses run out of flatbed trailers. Jen Hashley is the driving force behind one of the Massachusetts units. She has been working with regulators to make sure they’re happy with the unit, and looking for funding for getting more units built.

Recently, Grist reported that Whole Foods is considering getting into the mobile processing business by building their own fleet of MPPUs. Since Jen Hashley’s recent application for funding for new units was denied, this seems at first like a great solution to the problem. However, Whole Foods would allow use of the units only by farmers who have contracts with Whole Foods to grow chickens according to Whole Foods guidelines. Which is just contrary to the whole point of local food: that the farmer has the power to choose how he raises his animals, given his unique personal circumstances and beliefs. The consumer than has the power to choose which farmer to support, based on whether he agrees with that farmer’s choices. Not enough farmers around to allow the consumer to pick and choose? Well, that’s why it would be nice to have more mobile units, available to anyone who wants to pay to use them, to support the existence of more farmers making more varied choices.

I say:

Dear Whole Foods: Building MPPUs is a wise enterprise for you! However, you have already been criticized by Michael Pollan, the Foodie King, for your lack of support of local production, in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma and then in your open discussion with him. Allowing only limited access to your MPPUs will not be taken well by the locavore community, who will rightly see the move as an attempt to establish control overchicken production in this region. Why not allow open access to them? You’ll have fewer chickens grown exactly the way you want, of course, but aren’t consumers ready to pick and choose the kind of farmer they want to buy their chicken from? Some of these farmers will raise chickens your way, and you can sell those. Some of them won’t, and you don’t have to sell those — but why not give it a shot? Develop a labelling scheme which presents the relevant specifics to the consumer. On pasture? In a barn? Antibiotics? Organic feed? Different people care about different things. Some of us care a lot about choice.

Meanwhile, in Vermont, Walter Jeffries is responding to the lack of processing options by building an on-farm processing unit for his pastured pigs. He writes in great detail about the reasons he's choosing this solution. It’s a ballsy move. Building a slaughterhouse can cost literally millions of dollars. He has to try to balance doing so affordably, and complying with all the regulations necessary to convince the USDA to come inspect his meat. If the USDA refuses to inspect, he can’t sell his meat by the pound or across state lines. While MPPUs are the answer in some places, they aren’t the answer everywhere, and they are definitely not right for farmers who are raising animals of the four-legged variety.

I have no idea how either of these stories will end. Will Whole Foods’ choices, whatever they may be, support or limit local chicken production in New England? Will Jeffries be able to lure a USDA inspector to his plant when it’s done, or will it languish unused? It’s an interesting time to be watching news about local meat.