The Omnivore's Delusion

A recent article in The American, The Journal of the American Enterprise Institute, titled, " The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals," written by Blake Hurst, is a well-balanced piece definitely worth taking a look at. Hurst describes an experience on a plane when he interrupted a broadcast journalist spending the flight telling his radio listeners about the "evils" of agriculture. Hurst, a farmer himself, tackles consumer misconceptions, media's outright lies, sustainability and critics of modern agriculture. Here is an excerpt from this article. It's definitely worth your five minutes to read it in entirety...

I’m dozing, as I often do on airplanes, but the guy behind me has been broadcasting nonstop for nearly three hours. I finally admit defeat and start some serious eavesdropping. He’s talking about food, damning farming, particularly livestock farming, compensating for his lack of knowledge with volume. has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is. This is something the critics of industrial farming never seem to understand.

Most livestock is produced by family farms, and even the poultry industry, with its contracts and vertical integration, relies on family farms to contract for the production of the birds. Despite the obvious change in scale over time, family farms, like ours, still meet around the kitchen table, send their kids to the same small schools, sit in the same church pew, and belong to the same civic organizations our parents and grandparents did. We may be industrial by some definition, but not our own. Reality is messier than it appears in the book my tormentor was reading, and farming more complicated than a simple morality play.

BEEF Daily Quick Fact: Cattle consume less than 2/10ths of 1% of all water used in the United States.