Links The Truth About Factory Farms http://wp.me/p5Cqpo-ffR 6 Reasons Local Food Systems Will Replace our Industrial Model BY http://wp.me/p5Cqpo-fgH Ridiculous! “EU declared Monsanto weed killer safe after intervention from controversial US official” | The Guardian http://wp.me/p5Cqpo-fjt Luscious grass http://wp.me/p5Cqpo-fjq **** This is the World Organic News for the week ending 29th of May 2017. Jon Moore reporting! This we begin with an infographic from the blog The Internet Post entitled: The Truth About Factory Farms. What can I say? The horrors of factory farming should be well known by now yet as a form of food, and I use that word loosely, production continues. The business sense of bringing every component to one place, performing a production activity and then sending out a finished product makes some sense if you’re building a car or mass producing widgets. When it comes to food, living things, then it makes far less sense. Plants do not fit into this system and animals less so. Let me explain. Even in a given population of corn seeds each seed is similar but not identical. The great advantage of industrial production is consistency of inputs. So the steel going into each car is of the same standard but factory farming cannot rely upon this. The variation in maize seeds may not matter but the different growth rates of chickens, pigs, cattle or sheep makes for some unpleasant outcomes. “It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.” is a quote which is cruel enough when applied to people, when it’s applied to chicken production it leads to dead chickens littering the shed floor. The non-standard, so to speak, are discarded. Not only are the meat chickens living with their dead, they are also standing in their own faeces. And waste is an issue. According to the infographic at least 2 billion pounds of nitrogen rich manure is created as a waste, that’s over 1 billion kgs or over 1 million tonnes of nitrogen rich manures each year, just in the US. Manures that are distributed across pastures by field raised animals end up where they are needed. The manures are not concentrated to the extent they pollute waterways nor aquifers. Free range animals that collect their own food from those same fields do so in rotation. This allows the manures to be biologically assimilated into the soils, the animals to be on fresh ground and the pastures to re-grow. Yes this takes a little longer than the factory system but it benefits the soil by assisting in growing soil carbon, allowing fungal networks to thrive in undisturbed soils and reduces the risks from flooding as the soil actually holds more water. Compare this to a flood event at a factory farm. Loss of livestock, massive concentrations of manure flowing through the landscape and the loss of the fertilising elements in those manures. All of this is just a part of the unpaid for cost in a 99 cent hamburger. The environmental services organic, free range operations provide are not always included in their cost to the consumer either. The difference being, factory farms unpaid costs have a negative effect on the biosphere and organic production’s unpaid costs have a beneficial effect. In essence the two systems are competing for our dollars. Any system which forces an animal into conditions where it cannot express its innate animal-ness is something to be avoided. It will cause suffering. That a chicken’s brain is not as large as a cow’s is irrelevant. Suffering is suffering. As custodians of other animals we have a responsibility to them. Jamming them together for the sake of efficiency or Return On Investment is no excuse. What we can do we must. But simply refusing to purchase factory farmed meat is not enough. The taxpayer subsidies involved in every step of the factory process from land acquisition to cheap corn feedstock give the system an inertia which can only, in my opinion, be overcome by political actions. That being said our second post of interest this week is from the