Banned from the Barn

[amborin]

Banned From The Barn


..... the demise of ag-gag won’t give us a clearer view of food production.....when I visited Iowa in May, I appealed to producers of eggs, chickens, pork and even cooking oil to let me visit their facilities. In general, I was ignored, politely refused or told something like “it’s a bad week.” (I made standing offers to return at any time; no one has taken me up on that.)

When a journalist can’t see how the food we eat is produced, you don’t need ag-gag laws. The system’s already gagged.
The videographers that have made it into closed barns have revealed that eggs are laid and chickens are born and raised in closed barns containing (literally) hundreds of thousands of birds; an outsider wouldn’t even know what those barns were. Pigs are housed cheek-to-jowl, by the many thousands, in what are called concentrated animal feeding operations, where feeding, watering and monitoring are largely mechanized. Pregnant sows are confined in small concrete cells. Iowa is industrial agriculture’s ground zero. But when it comes to producing animals, zero is pretty much what you’re going to see.

snip

....But I’d seen other pig barns during the course of the week because whenever I saw one that appeared unattended (it’s easy enough to tell; there’s no car), I checked it out as best I could. On some roads, there are almost as many pig barns as farmhouses, which may not be a coincidence: If you were an older farmer and your neighbor put 1,200 pigs in a barn, you’d probably move to Florida, too. The smell can be overwhelming.

Most have a small enclosure by the road, usually with a Dumpster. That’s where dead pigs are tossed until the next garbage collection. (Yes, I saw this, several times.) Many of the barns are open on the sides so you can see how crowded the pigs are. (Videos of gestation barns — virtually impossible for an outsider to see — show that the sows can’t even turn around.) The pigs were visibly upset when I approached the outside of the barn.

That was the best I could do, and it wasn’t much. I could’ve been arrested for trespassing; extreme versions of ag-gag would make it illegal for me to write about it, or at least publish pictures.

snip

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/banned-from-the-barn/?scp=1&sq=banned%20from%20the%20barn&st=cse

[Coyote_Bandit]

1. Pigs eat humans

snakes too

just sayin'