A rambling search for an underlying principle
 

My parents were raised on small farms growing vegetables to meet the family needs, selling tobacco, cotton, and a few eggs locally for hard cash.
They met, married and moved to Detroit to work for General Motors. WW II ended and along came the Interstate Highway, and K-POW, the world changed.

My first computer in 1975 cost $3k, had 8K of memory and at each startup the DOS system software had to be loaded from a 3 inch floppy disc.
IBM was the opposite culture with the "big computer in the sky". Along came ethernet, the internet, and K-POW, the world changed.

Many businesses were small, set up as sole proprietorships and partnerships and small corporations that supported our nation's workforce.
Along came the multinational, mega-corporations, and K-POW, the world changed.

So now, we have episodes of contaminations of the entire nation's food chain (e.g., meat, eggs, spinach)
or a single oil spill threatens "just-in-time" inventories and manufacturing, and the polarizing politics brings economic hardships of immense proportions.
Along comes a US Supreme Court decision giving all businesses complete freedom of speech, and K-POW, the world will change.

So what... maybe it all works it's way out in the long run.
But I keep feeling there's a need for better thinking up front.

Isn't there an alternative or an underlying principle hidden in all this "learning by disaster" ?

It is like they think we can have a country without people.

By coincidence, this NY Times article appeared today.

It has a similar tone... great minds run in the same rut

It wasn’t simply that the operation is out of scale with the Iowa landscape. It is out of scale with any landscape, except perhaps the industrial districts of Los Angeles County. What shocked me most was the thought that this is where the logic of industrial farming gets us. Instead of people on the land, committed to the welfare of the agricultural enterprise and the resources that make it possible, there was this horror — a place where millions of chickens are crowded in tiny cages and hundreds of laborers work in dire conditions.

Out of scale with reality. Food prices are insanely low, which is cool if you're on the edge financially or some drone they're feeding... if you're paying a dollar a dozen for eggs though you are begging to be poisoned. Take control of what you can, garden, backyard flocks... let's be humans living in our landscape.

Griff, I think you are very close to where I was headed with this.

There needs to be a balance between "survival-ism" and "corporation-ism".
My wife tries to "buy local" but we get into arguments about whether the label means small and responsible, or is just conglomerate advertising.

I just heard on the news that a feed mill that sells chicken feed has been implicated with the salmonella outbreak. Their feed was infected.

He should be, he's living it.

I just had home grown cantaloupe and eggs for breakfast.

really Griff? That sounds nice. I'm thinking of planting eggs in next years garden. :p:

Keep it up and I'll plant you... :)

I don't think that'll work...I planted bird seed last spring...Not a peep.

Really? My eggplant did pretty well this year.

It was fertilized by chicken poo!

Yes, really. :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/bu..._r=1&th&emc=th

The inspections, conducted over the last three weeks, were the first to check compliance by large egg-producing companies with new federal egg safety rules that were written well before the current outbreak, but went into effect only last month.

“Clearly the observations here reflect significant deviations from what’s expected,” said Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for food for the F.D.A.

Mr. Taylor said that in response to the outbreak and recall, F.D.A. inspectors would visit all of the 600 major egg-producing facilities in the country over the next 15 months. Those farms, with 50,000 or more hens each, represent about 80 percent of nationwide egg production.

If you have any poultry you have rodents. If you have 50,000 + birds I imagine you'd need a pretty clean operation to minimize mice and rats.

The report on Wright County Egg also described pits beneath laying houses where chicken manure was piled four to eight feet high. It also described hens that had escaped from laying cages tracking through the manure.

Officials last week said that they were taking a close look at a feed mill operated by Wright County Egg, after tests found salmonella in bone meal, a feed ingredient, and in feed given to young birds, known as pullets. The young birds were raised to become laying hens at both Wright County Egg and Hillandale.

The inspection report helped fill in the picture of the feed mill as a potential source of contamination, saying that birds were seen roosting and flying about the facility. (Officials said both wild birds and escaped hens were found at the mill.)

Nesting material was seen in parts of the mill, including the ingredient storage area and an area where trucks were loaded. The report also said that there were numerous holes in bins or other structures open to the outdoors. That included the bin containing meat and bone meal that provided the feed ingredient sample in which salmonella was found.

Officials said last week that they had found traces of salmonella similar to the strain associated with the outbreak in a total of six test samples taken from Wright County Egg facilities. That included the two feed tests and four tests taken from walkways or other areas.

My chickens get cracked corn and whole oats with free access to crushed shells for calcium. Being free-range most of their diet is grass, insects, and berries this time of year. Choose well consumer.

Chickens graze?:eek: