Food and Farm Policy | Center for a Livable Future

Study on Drug-Resistant Staph and Store-Bought Meat: What Most News Reports Are Missing

Staphylococcus aureus, Image Courtesy: CDC

According to a recently published nationwide study of grocery store meats, the next time you handle a piece of meat or poultry bought at your local supermarket there is nearly a 50 percent chance that it will be carrying drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (Staph). The Translational Genomics Research Institute study determined that the majority of those bacteria are likely resistant to several classes of antibiotics. Antibiotic-resistant strains of Staph are to blame for a host of illnesses, ranging from simple skin infections to life-threatening diseases, such as pneumonia and sepsis. Staph infects an estimated 500,000 patients in U.S. hospitals annually and more deathsdeaths are blamed on Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)infections every year than HIV/AIDS. Infectious disease experts warn the consequences of rendering antibiotics useless would be disastrous to modern medicine, which depends on antibiotics for everything from organ transplant surgeries and cancer therapies to the care of patients with trauma or battlefield injuries.

The frequency of detection of resistant bacteria on meat purchased in grocery stores is alarming. Despite this, most of the news coverage we’ve seen this week misses a key message that can be gleaned from the conclusions of the study. The study does not point directly to new or heightened food-safety risks to the consumer, rather, it serves as verification that one of human medicine’s strongest safeguards against disease is quickly losing its efficacy, in part due to inappropriate use of antibiotics in the industrial food animal production system. Read More >

U.S. Dept. of the Interior among 2,000 Sodexo clients offered Meatless Monday

The Meatless Monday campaign just gained America’s protector of natural resources and heritage as one of its latest supporters. The U.S. Department of the Interior is one of Sodexo’s more than 2,000 corporate and government clients, which the food service giant encouraged to adopt its Meatless Monday initiative.

Sodexo announced today that it is all part of the company’s ongoing efforts to boost health and wellness and promote sustainability in the North American communities where it serves as many as 10 million meals a day. The Department of Interior joins several of Sodexo’s well-known clients, such as Toyota and Northern Trust Bank in adopting Meatless Monday.

The non-profit Meatless Monday campaign, which is operated out of New York City, was launched in 2003 with the help of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Center for a Livable Future. The public health campaign was first started simply to reduce America’s saturated fat consumption by 15%, following the recommendations of the Healthy People 2010 report issued by then U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher in 2000.

While reducing potential negative health effects, such as cardiovascular disease, remains a key goal, a few years ago the initiative expanded its focus to environmental impacts of intensive meat production. Those impacts can be quite substantial. Research suggests that it takes 20 times the amount of fossil-fuel energy to produce conventional beef protein than plant-based protein. According to a study out of California, it takes about 2,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. That’s almost ten times more than the 220 gallons water needed to produce a pound of tofu.

A Sodexo spokesperson says the Department of Interior reports that, “the population of customers at DOI is very health and environmentally conscience, so that Meatless Monday is a welcome addition to our program.” In a Sodexo news release, Toyota executive Will Nicklas was quoted as saying, “Meatless Monday has been successful here primarily because Sodexo helps our customers understand that it is not at all about becoming vegetarians or even weight loss, it’s about taking easy steps to guard our health and be good stewards of our environment.” Read More >

Corn Panic

By Dr. Dennis Keeney, Visiting Scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future

The USDA 2011 Prospective Plantings Report was one of the most anticipated planting reports in several years. It came on the heels of a shocking Grain Stocks Report issued last month, which showed that corn stocks have come down 15% since March 2010. Ending stocks are projected to be only 675 million bushels, about 5% of the projected marketing year consumption, while consumption of the current marketing year corn was higher than in 2009 and well above projected consumption. Lowered stocks were also caused by a smaller than expected corn crop due to cold and rainy weather in the Corn Belt in 2010. Corn prices almost immediately increased by another $1 per bushel on the heels of a doubling of price during the past year. This dramatic price jump portends another round of world-wide food price increases, similar to those in 2008-2009. Already, some political uprisings in the Middle East have been blamed to some extent on rapid food price increases. In 2008-2009, yields bounced back to normal and the ethanol demand was much lower.

Why has this happened? Will it be alleviated by a bumper crop on more acres in 2011? Or has the grain commodity price structure started a trend towards a “new normal” of steadily increasing prices and more shortages?

The March 31 crop report indicated that farmers “intend” to plant 5% more acreage in corn, 8% more in wheat and 15% more in cotton while cutting soybean planting by only 1%. This adds up to 4 million more acres of cropland than there were in 2010. One wonders where that extra land is coming from. Most likely, it is land being retired from the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), and includes more fragile meadow and grassland. That is not good news for the environment. Just recently, a number of congressional members called for the immediate release of some of the 31.2 million acres of CRP for cropland.

I would like to explore what corn is used for and why the sudden drop in ending stocks surprised so many people, before presenting some scenarios that may play out in the near future. Read More >

Will the U.S. Hog Industry Ever Kick Its Reliance on Low-Dose Antibiotics?

The editors of Scientific American recently encouraged U.S. hog farmers to “follow Denmark and stop giving farm animals low-dose antibiotics.” Sixteen years ago, in order to reduce the threat of increased development of antibiotic resistant bacteria in their food system and the environment, Denmark phased in an antibiotic growth promotant ban in food animal production. Guess what? According to Denmark’s Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries the ban is working and the industry has continued to thrive. The government agency found that Danish livestock and poultry farmers used 37% less antibiotics in 2009 than in 1994, leading to overall reductions of antimicrobial resistance countrywide.

: Courtesy: Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, Danish Veterinary and Food Administration, July, 2010

Except for a few early hiccups regarding the methods used in weaning piglets, production levels of livestock and poultry have either stayed the same or increased. So how did Danish producers make this transition, and why isn’t the U.S. jumping to follow suit? Like many things in industrial agriculture, the answer is not clear.

If any country knows how to intensively produce food animals, particularly pigs, it is Denmark. In 2008, farmers produced about 27 million hogs. In fact, the Scandinavian country claims to be the world’s largest exporter of pork. Thus Scientific American editors argue that the Danish pork production system should serve as a suitable model to compare to ours. U.S. agriculture economists from Iowa State University agree. In a 2003 report, Drs. Helen Jensen and Dermot Hayes stated that Denmark’s pork industry is “…at least as sophisticated as that of the United States… and is therefore a suitable market for evaluating a ban on antibiotic growth promotants (AGPs).” Read More >

A Blow to Industrial Dairy Farming in the U.K.

linnea-laestadius-guest-blogger2

Just over a week ago, I received a phone call from Katharine Mansell, the Media Relations Manager for the U.K. World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA). What she told me was without doubt excellent news for both sustainable agriculture and public health in Western Europe. The proposal to build the Nocton Dairy, which was to be the first U.S.-style industrialized dairy in Western Europe, is officially no longer under consideration. On February 16, 2011, the farmers withdrew their application, ostensibly after continued objections from the Environmental Agency of England and Wales. However, it is clear that the advocacy campaigns undertaken by groups such as the WSPA also played a critical role in the ultimate withdrawal of the application.

As part of the Not in My Cuppa campaign, volunteers dressed up as cows in orange prison jumpsuits

While the Nocton Dairy debate received relatively little attention here in the U.S., it was a consistent topic of media coverage inthe U.K. since its initial proposal to the North Kesteven District Council in December 2009. The initial plan for the facility, formally known as the Nocton Dairy Ltd., included over 8,000 cattle almost entirely confined to large barns and featured two 24-hour milking parlors. In a statement that ended up giving ample fodder to groups opposing the dairy, one of the farmers behind the dairy noted that “cows do not belong in fields.” Soon after the proposal was made, both neighbors of the proposed facility and environmental and animal welfare groups began to express serious misgivings about the project. By April 2010, 150 MPs had signed an Early Day Motion (the equivalent of a resolution in the U.S. Congress) declaring their opposition to the construction of the dairy and stating that the House “…believes that the proposed unit is taking U.K. dairy farming in the wrong direction…” While the proposed number of cattle was eventually reduced to 3,770, serious concerns about the dairy remained.

Realizing the importance not only of preventing the construction of this particular industrial dairy, but also of preventing the further encroachment of U.S.-style industrial farm animal production in Western Europe, a number of advocacy groups came together in an unprecedented alliance of environmental, animal welfare, and rural protection groups. Read More >

Jackson touts 50-year plan to ‘perennialize’ landscape

The Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture was celebrating its 20th annual conference Feb. 2-5, but it seems that keynote speaker Wes Jackson wasn’t there to celebrate. Instead, he was on a mission to gather allies for his proposal of a 50-year farm bill, which could supplement the “five-year” farm bills that the U.S. Congress has been passing since the 1930s.

“I’m tired of kicking the 100-foot sponge,” he blared, in explaining his feelings of futility surrounding those short-term farm bills. “What we want is a 50-year farm bill that would use the five-year farm bills as mileposts toward progressively perennializing the landscape.”

Jackson also gave a keynote address at PASA’s first conference in 1992. The event has grown from 500-plus attendees in that first year to 2,000-plus in recent years. In addition to his keynote this year, Jackson also led a workshop entitled “The Necessity for a 50-Year Farm Bill.”

He would like to see the federal government get behind the idea of transforming U.S. agriculture – over the next 50 years – from 80 percent annual crops and 20 percent perennials to an 80:20 ratio that favors perennials. Grains are a vital part of any agricultural sustainability plan because they supply 70 percent of the calories we eat.

This ambitious policy proposal dovetails well with the work that Jackson has been doing at the Land Institute since he founded it in 1976. His mission there has been to reinvent agriculture by replacing annual monoculture grains with perennial polycultures, using the prairie as his guide.

Wes Jackson shows off perennial Kernza, a wheatgrass developed at his Land Institute.

He says we must solve the “10,000-year-old problem of agriculture,” first by acknowledging that it is inherently unsustainable to plow up the land each year. Jackson also noted that while no-till and minimum-till agriculture have had success in curbing soil erosion, their downfall is that they are allowing lots of excess nitrogen to enter waterways, contributing to aquatic dead zones all over the world. The culprit there is annual crops that can’t absorb enough of the nitrogen fertilizer being applied to them.

“Annual systems leak! Those wimpy roots can’t do it!” he exclaimed. “So, consequently we have dead zones. The dead zone didn’t get smaller with minimum till/no-till, it got bigger.”

Jackson showed a satellite image of cropland in the heart of corn and soy country in the U.S. Midwest. The image was taken in early April, when much of that land is bare – just when the spring rains are due.

“That’s the land of the tall-grass prairie,” he opined. “That’s the land that’s providing 70 percent of the calories [that Americans eat]. That’s the land that’s providing the grain for the feedlots. That’s the land that’s providing the grain for the ethanol …”

And the kicker: “That’s the land that has very serious soil erosion … Five-year farm bills don’t speak to that.”

Jackson’s good humor and affability helped him walk a tightrope in addressing a sustainable agriculture audience he called “our natural constituency” for the 50-year farm bill concept. He had both praise for the accomplishments of the movement and criticism about its current state.

“I hate to say this to this group. You’ll probably shoot me,” he began. After a pregnant pause, he offered: “We’re overly concerned about food. Michelle [Obama]’s got a garden. It’s a nice garden. It’s organic. It’s beautiful. We got a Slow Food movement. We got everything that oughta be cookin’. What’s wrong? Because it involves gardens, and organic, and local; meanwhile, the calories feeding us are coming from land that is going downhill fast – literally.”

Jackson gave credit to sustainable farmers for what they’re doing on a small scale, but he harped on the fact that the movement must expand its focus.

“In terms of saving the soil resource and reducing chemical contamination, most of the sustainable has to do with you folks as a ragtag of people who got the story straight. But, you’re small in number, and the kinds of crops you’re growing don’t address that [erosion] problem in Iowa and Illinois, and other places,” he said. Read More >

Understanding foodborne microbial hazards for smarter food policies

One in six Americans contracts a foodborne illness each year (CDC). Such illness can mean an unpleasant day of vomiting, diarrhea, fever, and/or worse— hospitalization or death in rare cases. “There’s something that can be said about the problem of foodborne illness, that can’t be said of many other public health problems of the day” said Elisabeth Hagan, Under Secretary for Food Safety at USDA, who opened a January 25^th foodborne hazards conference convened at the Pew Charitable Trusts offices in Washington DC, “and that is: Foodborne illness is preventable.”

The day-long conference “Managing the Risk of Foodborne Hazards: STECs and Antibiotic-Resistant Pathogens” was organized jointly by Pew and the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). Hagan and other conference speakers focused their attention on antibiotic-resistant pathogens and shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (E. coli). A key message that I heard from several speakers was that we know enough today to develop policies that can enable action in addressing the most pressing foodborne hazards.

Central to the development of smarter food policies is incorporating our understanding the ecology of foodborne microbes. For example, understanding the ecology of toxin-producing E. coli strains can improve our ability to detect the right types of E. coli in tainted foods. In another example, nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in food animal production creates a persistent collection of antibiotic-resistant bacterial genes or a ‘resistome’ on farms that is difficult to dismantle. Antibiotic-resistance genes transferred to pathogenic bacteria creates a health hazards for animal workers, slaughterhouse workers, farm neighbors, and to consumers who handle or prepare raw meat in their kitchens.

Antibiotic-resistant pathogens

The Pew/CSPI conference focused on antibiotics in food animals because in 2009 nearly 80% by weight of all antimicrobials were sold for use in food animal, and the remaining 20% by weight were used in human medicine, as reported last year by Ralph Loglici on the Livable Future Blog.

Resistance is an inevitable result of using antibiotics on food animals or humans. In the words of Quijing Zhang of Iowa State University, “[it is] always going to happen.” Once gut bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, they can trade the blueprints for resistance to other beneficial bacteria or with pathogenic bacteria in a giant microbial swap meet called ‘the resistome.’

The microbial world’s resistome and our own human-centered biome collide more often than we think—just talk to a health care provider about hospital-acquired antibiotic resistant infections or read the latest 2008 report on the quality of retail meats from the U.S. National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System.

When humans take antibiotics or animals are given antibiotics, these are individual decisions—and as Dr. Stuart Levy of Tufts University pointed out, “[these individual decisions have] societal effects when antibiotics are mismanaged, such that every dose of antibiotics has a consequence.” Levy underscores the severity of current practices, saying, “the fact that we are still practicing [the use of antibiotics in animal production] is an embarrassment and a mistake.”

Shovel Ready: Cuban Urban Agriculture as Job Creator

CLF’s Sr. Research Program Coordinators Jesse Kurtz-Nicholl and Sarah Rodman are visiting Cuba as part of a Natural Environmental Ecological Management delegation. Members of the group will see first hand large-scale Cuban infrastructure developed to support its 18-year-old, world-renowned sustainable agricultural system in both the rural and urban sectors.

I’ve just returned from eight days in Cuba studying their sustainable agricultural system — especially their urban agriculture sector — and I have several key take-aways.

One of the biggest insights was the untapped potential of urban agriculture as a creator of good jobs. The Cuban system was reported to have provided over 300,000 employment opportunities and significant community development. (Koont, S. 2009) In a country of 12 million people, that means 2.5% of the Cuban population is employed in urban agriculture and its related industries.

Now, for many reasons, you cannot and should not compare Cuba to the United States with regard to agriculture. The two nations have different economic and political systems, cultures, climate and much more, but that does not mean that Cuban urban agriculture cannot provide lessons to us here in the U.S. I have long been interested in urban agriculture – not only as a way to provide healthy, local produce, but as a community development and youth development tool and, yes, a job creator. This is the mindset I had when I met Miguel Salcines and his Vivero

Kids playing at Vivero Organiponico

Organiponico.

Vivero Organiponico is a 10-hectare (24-acre) urban farm within Alamar, a neighborhood of Havana. It is surrounded by apartments, houses, parks and the normal activities of a Havana neighborhood. The farm produces 12 to 15 crops for market, from eggplant to tomatoes, to lettuce, cabbage and onions. It sends produce to market 365 days a year. The farm grows intensively, turning over beds at a blistering rate, sometimes getting eleven cycles of greens out of a bed in a single year. It uses no chemical pesticides and no artificial fertilizers, but can draw fertility from its cattle and its large vermicomposting and mycorrhizae systems.

This organiponico is called a UBPC (basic unit of cooperative production) which is a sector of Cuban agriculture where farms are run on a cooperative basis, managed independently by individuals not employed by the Cuban government. The farms’ managers pay salaries and taxes, make profits and set prices. While in certain situations UBPC’s have levels of production that they must meet for the state (often sold to the state below the cost of production), even in those situations they can sell much of their surplus produce into local farmers markets and keep the profit for their cooperatives. Read More >

Cuban Pesos: A Farmer’s Market Experience

CLF’s Sr. Research Program Coordinators Jesse Kurtz-Nicholl and Sarah Rodman are visiting Cuba as part of a Natural Environmental Ecological Management delegation. Members of the group will see first hand large-scale Cuban infrastructure developed to support its 18-year-old, world-renowned sustainable agricultural system in both the rural and urban sectors.

One highly anticipated activity on our trip to Cuba was a trip to the 19 and B farmers’ market in Habana. We had read that the farmers’ markets were a great example of the “opening” of the Cuban economic system, a true market of supply and demand where the economic incentives of profit drive increased efficiencies and productivity of the newly privatized agricultural cooperatives in Cuba. The large state farms of the last 50 years were decentralized during the 1990′s and 2000′s and now, while many farms still have production quotas that they must fulfill for the state, any surplus production can be sold in these farmers’ markets. For the last country in the world with a ration card, “la libreta,” these markets may offer a glimpse into the future of how food will be distributed in Cuba.

We met the manager of the market, Miguel Angel, who explained how his market worked. Whereas, at a local farmers’ market in the United States, a consumer is often meeting the farmer themselves at the market who can explain their growing techniques and establish that important relationship that attracts so many to the experience; in the Cuban market, the sellers are in fact middle-men who purchase produce directly from the farmers a few times a week in large quantities and then sell to the consumer everyday.

In this market, the sellers set a contract price with the market before the opening every single day. The price is not controlled by the state or the market, the individual sellers set the price. Obviously, there is some sort of profit margin set into place between the purchase from the farmers and the selling to the consumers. In addition, the sellers pay a 10% tax on their total sales at the end of the day. The market accepts produce from all kinds of farms imaginable, from urban organiponicos to various cooperatives to individual private farmers from the countryside. Anyone can bring produce to market and there seems to be no fee for acquiring space at the market. Read More >

Conference Envisions a Very Different Future Harvest

Thirty years ago, Bruce Springsteen wrote the lyric “from small things, mama, big things one day come.” In a sense, that was part of the message of Fred Kirschenmann’s keynote address at the 12th annual conference of Future Harvest-Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture, although his address had more of a positive twist than the song.

By way of encouraging the small-scale farmers who made up about 75 percent of his Jan. 15 audience, Kirschenmann alluded to their farms as incubators for ideas that could become mainstreamed in the not-so-distant future.

“We are going to be moving toward a food system that looks like what a lot of you are doing on a small scale now,” said Kirschenmann, himself an organic farmer and rancher in North Dakota.

In making the point that innovation can be a collective endeavor, rather than the solitary pursuit of a rare genius, Kirschenmann referenced a book by Richard Ogle entitled “Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas“. The book introduces the notion of “idea spaces” as a launching pad for innovation. The author, Richard Ogle, describes an idea space as:

“A domain or world viewed from the perspective of the intelligence embedded in it, intelligence that we can use – consciously or not – both to solve our everyday problems and to make the creative leaps that lead to breakthrough.” Read More >

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