Our World and Everything in It

The Farm Bill is on the senate floor this morning getting its final going over. The Farm Bill has some very good changes compared to all the years it went on as is. The following is a summary of the new changes to the S2419 Farm Bill I found on gov.track. I highlighted the items that many people and organizations like The Sierra Club pushed to get through.

·  The following summary was for the Passage With Amendment for this bill on 2007-12-14. The bill may have changed since then. It hasn’t.

·  -Creates a tax penalty for transactions designed exclusively to avoid federal tax (Sec. 12522).

·  -Lowers an income tax credit for ethanol blenders from 51 cents to 46 cents after the sale of 7.50 billion gallons (Sec. 12315).

·  -Establishes the Agriculture Disaster Relief Trust Fund to provide disaster assistance for crop losses (Sec. 12101).

·  -Ends assistance by the year 2010 for persons who have an average adjusted gross income of $750,000 or more and earn less than two-thirds of their average adjusted gross income from farming, ranching, or foresting (Sec. 1704).

·  -Reauthorizes the Federal Food and Nutrition Program, the Commodity Distribution Program, and the Nutrition Information and Awareness Pilot Program (Secs. 4801, 4802, 4803).

·  -Extends the Conservation Reserve Program and the Wetlands Reserve Program through 2012 (Sec. 2311, 2321).

·  -Establishes programs to provide assistance for improving land for wildlife and forests (Sec. 2313, 2331).

·  -Establishes a mandatory labeling of country of origin on meats (Sec. 10003).

·  -Increases loan rates for sugar producers (Sec. 1501).

·  -Requires the Department of Agriculture to purchase certain dairy products to support their prices, extends the Dairy Export Incentive Program and the Dairy Indemnity Program, and extends the Dairy Promotion and Research Program (Sec. 1601, 1603).

·  -Provides a tax credit for energy generated from wind (Sec. 12301).

·  -Expands and extends programs that provide credits for renewable fuel production (Sec. 12311, 12312, 12313, 12314).

This Farm Bill doesn’t appear to have any changes since December 2007.  The only thing I see missing that is really important is tax incentives for good stewardship of the land, which gives farmers more freedom to rotate the crops of their choice. Our country pretty much locks farmers into 5 crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and hay. As a result of all the corn, we end up with high fructose corn syrup in practically everything that’s packaged. One would think the HFCS would have a high enough caloric value to use as fuel instead of dumping it into our food. I bet some farmers in the Tennessee hills know how to make that stuff into high octane.

Look up the different sections in more detail @ http://www.nationalaglawcenter.org/assets/crs/RL34060.pdf

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?tab=summary&bill=h110-2419

While channel surfing on Sunday, I happened to catch 60 Minutes with Andy Rooney. He claimed no one drinks real milk anymore. He wondered if it still came from cows. He thought he would read the label and show it on TV. There it was, high fructose corn syrup. Andy wanted to know what that was doing in his milk, along with the usual preservatives. It seems a lot of people are reading food labels these days and there is high fructose corn syrup in absolutely everything.

Our food supply was doused with the stuff in the early 1980s, and now virtually everything has HFCS in it. But how did it get into everything?  In the 70’s, American farmers started losing profits to imports. Our government needed to come up with something that would use up the corn surplus because Americans didn’t want to pay more for their groceries. The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture allowed the development of HFCS, a new kind of sweetener, that would keep corn from American farmers in demand and drive the price up. And, the HFCS in foods had a super long shelf life. Perfect. We’re eating the overload from corn production. Too much corn; so why not just switch crops? Farmers can’t very well switch to the crop of their choosing when subsidies are involved.

The environment suffered recently when the budget was cut and subsidies to farmers to use part of their land for alternative energy sources like solar and wind power fell to the wayside. This is one of the problems that arises when we don’t pay enough attention to the Farm Bill. The Farm Bill is about all of us, not just farmers, or just about what we eat. No one would have to worry about the surplus of corn, if the time, effort, and subsidies relative to corn went toward something new, something green. Instead we have had a huge rise of Type II Diabetes in this country that’s pointing toward the overuse and abuse of HFCS.

New studies are beginning to show that our body processes HFCS differently than real cane or beet sugar. The fructose is processed in the liver and the liver turns around and dumps more fat into the bloodstream. The brain doesn’t register the feeling of being full because of fructose. There are nay sayers about this of course, just like the debate on global warming. They can debate all they want. Something is causing people to eat out of control so much that our whole system is set to swamp us with food. Order fries and get a plateful, not a handful. I think frozen french fries have HFCS on them. Canned chili has it also. I was surprised about milk.
There are more studies with male rats where large amounts of HFCS halted the full development of testicles. Hmmm? And the hearts of female rats swelled until they burst. This is disgusting to begin with. I’m against animal testing, even rats (another story). But there are many, many things we are just now finding out about. Lets see, it’s been almost 30 years since someone decided it’s OK to power load high fructose corn syrup in all of our food and look at the statistics. What? Everyone in the last 30 years just went berserk and lost control? Combine HFCS with a gadget for anything and everything that keeps us sitting all the time, and we’ve got a lethal mix.
 

So there is a beef and seafood recall in Michigan and everyone is up in arms about imported food from China. Their catfish is full of antibiotics. This is laughable because ours is full of PCB’s from its food source. That was on the news years ago. I know. I love farm raised catfish and remember well my options: farm raised equal PCB’s, ocean caught equals mercury. Now I have a third choice. With China’s catfish I get antibiotics. I guess our concern is what quantity of harmful substance is in our food. Is this not a pitiful situation? It never occurs to anyone that these things shouldn’t be there at all? I’m waiting for a national expose on our industrialized farms. I feel like a hypocrite so many times when I watch the media get in a dither over substandard imports while ignoring our own shortcomings. We’re throwing stones a lot lately.

As far as China’s use of antibiotics, our industrial farm raised meat is full of it along with hormones. You don’t honestly think a baby cow or pig ripped from their mother as soon as possible and confined for the rest of their life in a bin where they can’t turn around or scratch themselves, while standing above fumes from the cesspools below where all the droppings, afterbirth, babies that have fallen through the slats, and pesticides that have doused the animals are drawn upward by large exhaust fans, isn’t sick? Heck, they are traumatized and many are barely alive before they become our food. They have to be shot up with antibiotics in this environment. And we think Korean’s are barbaric for traumatizing dogs as meat before eating them. We do it all the time.

Our poor food animals chew on the metal of their bins out of frustration. This is a hell we allow animals to live in; the same lovely farmyard animals we like to introduce our kids to on petting farms. If those kids only knew the hell sweet little “Charlotte the Pig” endured before being slaughtered … This is not right. It’s very hypocritical especially when on the other end of the media it’s been reported that pigs are up on the intelligence scale with dolphins and elephants. They are beyond the intelligence of the Korean dog evidently but are next weeks sickly pork chops anyway. But then again we shouldn’t expect much, we don’t treat each other well either, another whole spectrum of hypocrisy.

If you think, I’ll just eat chicken and turkey; think again. Poultry doesn’t fare any better. Many birds are crammed into one little cage, where they can’t stand or spread their wings, and peck each other horribly out of sheer frustration. The cages above pollute the cages below. The visions we have of farms where animals are in a yard, a pen, or pasture to roam have all but disappeared. The petting farm is a facade of what America’s farms used to be. It will take a monumental movement by people to stop the way our food is raised or should I say tortured to death. Industrialized farming is so wide spread the idea of reversing it is daunting. We’ve used up quite a lot of farmland at a rapid rate with urban sprawl and congress of late has decided bio fuel should be the front-runner for alternatives to gasoline. So available land will go to corn and we will deal with imports.

Pay attention to the new Farm Bill. Call our congress people often. The movement for change must start somewhere. Congress is presently involved with this bill so it will be a timely e-mail or phone call if you do so now. Act out, for a change or nothing will improve. The farming conditions we have in this country are deplorable, immoral against living things, harmful to our environment and us, and shameful for this nation.