Industrial farming is a disaster. The 'green' revolution is now undergoing a reactionary surge brought on by Mother Nature who uses her handy tool, 'natural selection.' Corporations think they have outwitted Her Majesty but instead, they play the Fool. Today's news is about a super-powerful anti-bacterial medicine for cows. This will make things much, much worse.
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 4, 2007; Page A01
The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous for people.
The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine's last defenses against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals.
The American Medical Association and about a dozen other health groups warned the Food and Drug Administration that giving cefquinome to animals would probably speed the emergence of microbes resistant to that important class of antibiotics, as has happened with other drugs. Those super-microbes could then spread to people.
Army camps and concentration camps both foster epidemics. Many people crammed into small spaces, sleeping in bunks, under tremendous stress, this breeds diseases. Slums breed diseases for the same reasons which is why we don't see epidemics so often anymore until recently: sanitary living coupled with access to good air, sunshine and security inhibits plagues.
Farming is now beset by an urgent need to make a profit while prices collapse. Indeed, the dynamics of industrialization of farming drives itself forwards: the more you do it the more you have to continue doing it. In other words, to keep taxes low, to concentrate wealth and to cut down on labor, animals and plants must be collected into smaller and smaller area units or monocultural mass units of total uniformity.
From the earliest times, the man with the most cows was considered 'rich' and so humans strove to always have as many cows as possible. This always leads to overgrazing unless one moves one's own cow herd around a lot. To do this, humans tamed horses instead of eating them and figured out how to ride these beasts and then would move the herds around with the horses and dogs assisting. Humans on the great Steppes of Asia invented the wheel so they could move their entire clan about as they foraged with their cattle.
Mother Nature evolved cattle like all her herd animals, with this very strong impulse to keep moving. Restlessly, herds of grazing animals who evolved alongside the grasses they eat, move from place to place.
I know from my own herd animals, when they are fenced in, horses will go to a corner to defecate because they can't graze where they leave manure. Even if the grass is greener and taller than non-defecated areas, the grazers will refuse to touch it unless they are starving to death. I suppose that grazers who didn't check for smells or tastes that indicate putridness, died. Picky grazers lived.
The early domesticators of the cow in Africa and Asia created a culture that took into account the need to keep cows moving along. This clashes with farmers who grow grass-based foods. The battle between these two forces continues today. The fights going on in Darfur, for example, are classic cow-herders vs farmers. Since wealth is number of cows, the need to make a bigger herd presses against the inability of controlling a super-sized herd. The Mongols, for example, fixed this by killing all farmers they met at all times. Only by corrupting them with the joys of civilization's lusts and pretentions, could the farmers save themselves by being taxable.
The restless herders who invaded the Roman Empire, when they ran out of herding ranges, became a complex sort of farmer/herder entity. This is true of many great civilizations: the herder and the farmer become one. They raise horses and cows but only a few each. The sheep still must be herded because they graze all the way down to the roots whereas cattle like to crop only the top of the grass, the horses, in between sheep and cows. Having all three animals myself, I can attest to this. The sheep grazed the fields while the larger animals ate hay.
If one grazes only horses or cows, the fields rapidly turn to weeds because both are very picky eaters. So to maintain a stable grazing field, it pays to move a herd of sheep over it twice a year. They eat all the weeds and after they pass through, the grass grows better. So all communities allow shepherding.
The other thing is milking herds: the early people of Europe can't digest milk too well because they were hunter/gatherers and then became farmers while the herders of the Steppes lived off of the milk and blood of their beasts so they evolved the ability to digest milk. Children who couldn't digest it were smaller and weaker than the ones who could.
Milking sheep, goats, cows and horses is simple yet difficult: no mother animal will give milk unless she is happy. If she is angry or upset, she won't lactate. To milk an animal, you pretend to be a baby. The hand should 'butt' the breast every couple of pulls. The fingers squeeze the udder's teats and using two hands, the milkmaid pretends she is really twin calves or lambs. I learned at a young age, if you sing to the mothers, they give you milk.
All milking cultures figured this out. Thus, soothing lullabys join the mothers and babies of several species into one family. Because of this, the herd listens to the humans herding them. Once, a scientist was visiting me. I told him I could get all the sheep to come to me. He didn't believe me. So I began to sing the 'Lambies, come to me' song. All head in the fields shot up at once. Baaing happily, the herd began to pull together and then, in a mob, ran towards me. They then millled around me, baaaing for attention.
So it is with cows: once, a herd of milk cows were chased out of their pastures by coyotes. They ran along the mountain's ridge to my farm where they found my cattle. Lowing happily, they gathered around Chip and Dale who were huge beasts.
When the herd's owners came, they sang to the cows about milking and the cows all lined up and began their trek home, anxious to get milked as evening was darkening the East.
Industrialized farming kills all natural forces. All the naturalist dairy farms out here are gone. There are virtually none left at all! Only huge industrialized farms that feed their captives chemicals and harmones to force them to milk. And instead of the gentle hand caressing the teats, machines ruthlessly suction it out and this causes diseases for the cows are in pain. They produce much more milk and this sucks the life out of them!
Bred increasingly for producing only gigantic amounts of milk, they are genetically weaker and weaker. This impossible situation can't go on forever. No longer do we see contented cows chewing cuds while resting in sweet flower-filled fields, the pastures now lie empty. Many were degraded the last 50 years anyway because shepherds disappeared and no longer kept the weeds down twice a year. And farmers, who for 3 thousand years, put sheep and cows into harvested fields to eat the weeds and clean up the remains of the stalks of wheat or barely, now use chemicals instead.
In medieval times, the herd animals were penned into gardens to fertilize them. I did this too. My sheep had a winter house in the middle of the gardens. They left so much fertilizer from their urine, it was amazing how green the summer was! Giant vegetables!
The complex farm that has a pond, ducks, sheep, two horses, an ox team, three milk cows, a garden and some fields that are rotated...remember rotating crops? Does that happen at all anymore? This ecologically-sound method of using sustainable resources is dying a terrible death and we are too. This creation of a stable farming system has sprung into being repeatedly throughout history. Places that figure out how to do this combination of grazing/farming leads to great civilizations: Egypt and China being the prime examples.
The ancient Egyptians worshipped the milk-giving cow as their top goddess. The Golden Calf. Locking Her Majesty into a fetid barn flushed hourly with water, unable to lay down comfortably in the warm sun, Ra, unable to swim in the stream, roll in the dust to protect from pests, standing tail to head to keep off flies from the face...my oxen loved to stand shoulder to rump for hours, doing this.
Cows are like cats: they wash each other with spikey, huge pillowy tongues. When they wash each other, their fur becomes curly and shiny. This mutual grooming is eliminated in modern slave farms. I know that cattle get great pleasure out of doing this. In medieval times, to get a cow to release her milk, the dairymaid would set the calf before her and as she washes it with her tongue, the milk would flow.
Greed is driving us to destroy all this wonder. Dehumanizing cows, we dehumanize ourselves. We owe them a joyous life in return for their life-giving sustainance. Instead of worshipping angry, invisible gods calling for war, we should be worshipping cows, cats, vultures and crocodiles. This might make us better humans.