Transplants

Transplants
by Karen Beth Pike, Columnist

"Taking Care"

February 11, 2004

"…Newly turned, deeply worked soil favors transplanting because the roots quickly become established in it…" pg. 258, Five Acres and Independence by M.G. Kains

Mr. Kains was talking about young seedling plants in the above quote, but such a statement really applies to a lot of things in our lives. In our own lives, thoughtful preparation for even the grandest undertaking makes it far easier and smoother to make the transition from thought to action. Or alas, from normalcy to madness in the case of the media hype. Certainly an example of a transplant gone wrong…

Consider for a moment the last agricultural emergency as seen by the city folk and the media. BSE, or Mad Cow disease has been the latest food panic. Even though there has never been a well-documented case of the disease in humans on these shores people are behaving like sheep rather than doing their homework. Again… Remember Alar? How about the Atkins craze? People want the quick, easy way to do, be, and have everything it seems. Take a pill or follow the herd rather than do the work of maintaining one's health and using some common sense about our bodies and lives.

Health has become less of a concern in the farming industry now. It is all about money. Rather than finding other sources of revenue to support themselves, conventional agriculture just screams about the subsidies not being enough to make a go of it on a farm. So the agribusiness folks do what they can to "help" the farmers. Feed supplements have become the norm. To increase protein in a feed ration farmers used to raise and feed better quality hay or supplement with soybean meal in the rations. All from vegetable sources, because ruminants are vegetarian animals. The problem starts when someone in agribusiness decides that animal protein is cheaper because they can use the offal and waste products from meat processing. This stuff is pelleted and blended with alfalfa or sweeteners to make it palatable to the livestock and fed back to them in their rations.

In the golden years of farming, when sustainability was the norm rather than the oddity that it has become now, animals were fed more naturally. They grazed and had access to large open fields to walk or run across. Dairy cows were not pushed to unnatural heights of production by hormones that burned them out in two or three years. Old Bossy would often live to be in her teens or older and was milked by hand and by doing so, the farmer would notice a little oddity in her udder, a limp, or a scratch on her hide since the farmer was in close proximity to her twice a day. Those minor ailments were treated and watched carefully, since Bossy was probably one of a small herd.

In the olden days, meat animals were sent to slaughter in their prime for the best meat. Young animals are more tender cuts of meat. Like it or not, excess males on a farm become food. The females are valuable for milk and reproduction, so they stay around longer. In the end, all animals will either sicken or become feeble and die, or be put down. This is where the problem started. Now on the corporate farms, they want to squeeze the last nickel out of each animal, so they do things that no real farmer in their right mind would consider. Like selling sick or injured (called downer cattle on the farm) into the human food supply. Those animals used to be made into pet food or other products and were certainly not used for human consumption. The corporate mentality seems to think that the public doesn't know or care what is in their hamburgers, so just send the downers to be ground up. They have suddenly discovered, with the help of the media, that this might have been a very poor idea indeed.

I cannot help but wonder if anyone will care long enough to become reacquainted with their food supply. To actually take action and seek out the correct information and better quality, organic or sustainable production methods for their meat products. Perhaps not, since they've listened to the media tell them that everything is okay because all that bad meat was recalled. Believing such a political machine as agribusiness would be whipped back into shape and sensibility over an incident like this seems to be the general consensus.

Of course, that is all so much… well… fertilizer. ***

Photo of Karen Beth Pike courtesy of the author