Righteous Blog
Congress Should Restrict Antibiotics in Animal Agriculture
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
For years Congress has annually considered legislation that would restrict the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture. This year’s House version is called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. On Monday, Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (NY) held hearings on the act. We submitted a statement in favor of the bill’s passage. Here’s why.
First, every major public health organization has recognized the critical and urgent need to reduce the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture. It is estimated that 70 percent of the antibiotics and other antimicrobial drugs used in the United States are fed to farm animals for non-therapeutic purposes, mostly for triggering rapid growth and to compensate for crowded, unsanitary, and stressful farming and transportation conditions. In a March 2003 report, the National Academy of Sciences stated that a decrease in antimicrobial use in human medicine alone will have little effect on the current situation and that substantial efforts must be made to decrease inappropriate overuse in animals and agriculture. The World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the American Medical Association, among others, have all urged such action as necessary to protect the effectiveness of antibiotics to treat both human and animal illnesses. The continual feeding of antibiotics to farm animals is already outlawed in the European Union.
Second, from our experience on our own farm and the hundreds of farms we’ve worked with over the years, the feeding of antibiotics is unnecessary. Animals provided healthy environments – fresh air, exercise, normal interactions with their peers, and wholesome feed — rarely fall ill. Antibiotics are an important tool for livestock farmers and ranchers when an animal does get sick. But the wholesale use of them in animal feed is making those drugs less effective, meaning that when an animal gets sick its illness is becoming harder to effectively treat and can be dangerous to humans. So antibiotics overuse is damaging for farmers and ranchers. It’s also hurting the farming community by lowering consumer confidence in animal-based foods.
The Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Production (of which Bill was a member) already recommended banning the feeding of antibiotic to livestock. We think it’s time for Congress to take action on this important issue.
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Chickens on the White House Lawn?
Monday, March 23rd, 2009
Last week, Michelle Obama broke ground on a new White House vegetable garden. I suggest that the next step be adding a colorful flock of egg laying hens. What could be a better way to bring healthy, fresh and delicious food into the White House kitchen while adding beauty and interest to the otherwise boring White House Lawn?
4 Comments | Permalink | Posted in Farming
Porcine Drug Problems
Monday, March 16th, 2009
Righteous Porkchop describes in some detail industrial animal production’s serious drug addiction. The book traces the origin of the problem to the 1950s when it became commonplace to add antibiotics and other drugs to the daily feed of poultry. This was done both to stimulate faster animal growth and to control diseases, which were an increasingly daunting problem in ever-more crowded, unsanitary poultry operations.
However, as Righteous Porkchop explains, there are serious negative consequences to over-using antibiotics on farm animals. Over the past week, famed New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has written two pieces about the results of over-using antibiotics in pork production. Kristof describes his visit to a Midwest farming town with industrial pork operations in which a high percentage of residents have a particularly scary antibiotic resistant infection known as “MRSA.” The most recent of these pieces was in the Sunday times, called Pathogens in our Pork. Sunday evening Kristof posted a blog supplementing his columns, in which he recommends several additional resources on this subject. The first of these is Righteous Porkchop.
The good news in all of this is that, as with so many other problems connected with industrial animal production, antibiotic feeding can be stopped. On good animal farms, in which animals are provided a healthy environment and access to exercise and the outdoors, antibiotics are almost unneeded. The pig farmers who make up Niman Ranch, the natural meat company founded by my husband, Bill Niman, has never allowed the feeding of antibiotics. Of course, we have also never engaged in the practice here on our own ranch. Healthy animal farming simply does not require antibiotics in daily feed or water. Antibiotic resistant diseases are just one more reason America must move away from industrial animal production.
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Hope for Farming’s Future
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
For a nice change, there’s some good news about agriculture. The most recent Census of Agriculture, released a few weeks back, shows that the number of farmers in the United States is actually on the rise. From 2002 to 2007, the number increased by 4 percent. This is welcome news for everyone who cares about sustainable food production. The Census also shows that the new farmers tend to be younger, less white, and more female than the farming population of recent decades. For example, the number of female farmers grew by almost 30 percent. The downside of this growth is that many of these farms are tiny—hobby farms of people with other jobs. In my view, in order to create a truly sustainable food system, we need to make farming a sustainable profession. So, much work remains to be done. But this is certainly a glimmer of hope for the future.
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Pork & Peanut Butter
Monday, March 2nd, 2009
I’ve been mulling over the pork and peanut butter connection these past few days. Both contain a lot of fat, that’s true. But a much more troubling link is the lack of regulation by our government, you know the body that’s supposed to make sure food is safe and wholesome. Tainted peanut butter from a plant in Georgia has caused one of the Food and Drug Administration’s largest recalls in history. The contaminated paste has caused at least eight deaths and 500 cases of human illness. (It’s also believed to be in pet food, though I’ve seen no figures on the number of pet deaths). Numerous reports in the past two years, such as by the Government Accounting Office, have pointed out that the Bush administration had failed to fulfill its duties with respect to protecting our food supply. The peanut butter scare is just the latest in a series of incidents that make that all too clear. In pork, the issues have been meat tainted by the bacteria Listeria, various other antibiotic-resistant pathogens, and drug residues including ractopamine, a steroid-like drug that promotes muscle growth. The latter was the basis for China rejecting huge shipments of U.S. pork in July 2007. On January 30, the New York Times editorials opined that, “Consumers have faced far too many food-supply emergencies in the last few years… The FDA, an important agency charged with protecting the food supply, was one of many hobbled by the Bush Administration’s antiregulatory efforts.” I join with the Times’ editorial board in hoping that the Obama administration will swiftly remedy this failure.
1 Comment | Permalink | Posted in Food Safety, Pork