Friends of Rural New York

The Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) has filed suit in the New York Supreme Court to block a $420,000 state grant to the country’s largest foie gras producer, Hudson Valley Foie Gras (see: http://www.farmedanimal.net/faw/faw6-22.htm#4 ). The suit alleges that the state’s use of taxes to underwrite foie gras production violates several state laws and rewards a business with a track record of polluting New York waters. “This company is polluting the state’s rivers, flouting the cruelty law, and getting rich doing it; they don’t need to get a free ride on the backs of taxpayers,” said HSUS attorney Jonathan Lovvorn.
Several local residents are co-plaintiffs. There are also two bills pending in the state legislature to ban foie gras production.

Hudson Valley spokesperson Marcus Henley said the company is upgrading its facilities and expanding from 250,000 to 325,000 ducks. The grant money will be used to improve wastewater treatment, according to Henley. “The idea is to retain and create jobs. To do that, we have to improve our infrastructure,” he said. He dismissed the lawsuit as “baseless.”

HUMANE SOCIETY SUES TO BLOCK NY FOIE GRAS EXPANSION
North Country Gazette, August 24, 2006
http://www.northcountrygazette.org/articles/082406FoieGrasSuit.html

…”but my neighbors are very clear that I’m not a farmer,” he notes. “To them I’m just a gardener. I don’t have cows and a big tractor.” He seems mostly amused by this, but the fact that the New York State Farm Bureau also considers small scale farms like his inconsequential is more perturbing to Christenfeld.

“While the number of real farms in New York State is dropping, the number of little farms is actually increasing,” he notes. “But the head of the Farm Bureau has basically dismissed this saying, ‘That’s nice these people are doing this, but it won’t do anything for the farming economy.’ It’s like we’re a hobby.”
(from Dinnerwhere,Capital District 2006)

(Tom Cristenfeld has 160 CSA shares to fill from his actual farm in Valley Falls, NY.
We have heard from sources all over New York State asking why the Farm Bureau prefers to support livestock factories even going so far as to help defend the Willet CAFO in a lawsuit. We know the Farm Bureau is losing members and credibility. Too bad Farm Bureau President, John Lincoln has forgotten that this nation was built on small business. So sad…. so very, very sad… and so very, very stupid.)

USDA study confirms dramatic changes in U.S. dairy industry - - A study out this week from USDAs Economic Research Service highlights just how much the U.S. dairy industry has changed since 1980. And the study finds many of the trends that have driven those changes are likely to continue in the future, while some other trends may be shifting. Among the study’s more interesting findings is that per-person consumption of dairy products climbed by .4% per year since 1995, that most of that demand growth came from increased cheese consumption, and that most of that cheese consumption takes in restaurants or as part of pre-packaged foods. The study said that may make dairy demand more sensitive to general economic conditions than in the past. And the ERS study finds U.S. dairy farms themselves have also changed a lot since 1980. There are 16.5 percent fewer dairy cows in America now. But the total number of dairy farms has plummeted by almost 75 percent. That means cows-per-farm now is triple what it was in 1980, up from an average of 32 head then to 111 head today. (July 28, 2006 Brownfield Ag News)

From NY Farms News To Share

More Fleecing of the Taxpayer (That’s You!)

Cornell University is grabbing $56 million of your money to build a research lab “with large diagnostic space to handle risky pathogens that cause diseases in animals such as the Asian avian flu and mad cow disease.” Our clueless governor stated that the project is “critical for the health of human beings and the agricultural industry.”

The newspaper did not mention that Cornell University staff are some of the architects that advocate for the industrial livestock factories that are so much a part of spreading animal diseases nor did it mention that the overuse of antibiotics in industrial livestock operations is a huge problem in human health.

The reporter mentions that mad cow and avian flu can take a costly toll on farms. Well, we wouldn’t want any of our livestock factories to have any costly tolls, would we?

Hang on to your wallets. That’s $50 million from the state coffers and $6 million from the federal purse. Along with all the other subsidies CAFO’s receive- like “conservation” money, energy subsidies, crop subsidies, etc we now have research into the diseases that they themselves help to perpetrate.

I suspect that Cornell scientists know that industrial livestock facilities are a huge animal disease risk and that know that the reason is that the animals are vulnerable because of unnatural crowded conditions. If the researchers do some honest work they will admit that the CAFO model is a failed agricultural model and that the best protection for animals and humans is to return to pasturing the animals.

Dairy Farm to Pay $2.2 Million for Manure Spill

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - An upstate New York dairy farm has agreed to pay a $2.2 million settlement for spilling three million gallons of liquid manure into the Black River and killing up to 375,000 fish over a 20-mile stretch, the Department of Environmental Conservation said Thursday.

Under a consent order with the DEC, Marks Dairy Farm agreed to spend $1.5 million on environmental benefit projects along the Black River and adjoining Whetstone Creek, said DEC Commissioner Denise Sheehan.

The Lowville, N.Y., dairy farm also will pay $700,000 in penalties to the DEC. Those payments will be made over a six-year period.

David Peck, one of the farm owners, was not immediately available for comment, said an assistant.

The spill occurred Aug. 10, 2005 when the earthen wall of a lagoon holding the liquid manure blew out, sending it into a drainage ditch and then into the river.

Marks Dairy Farm is one of the largest dairy operations in the Northeast, with more than 5,000 cows and thousands of acres of crop fields.

WSYR

In dollar terms, the implicit subsidy to the corporate broiler industry from U.S. agricultural policy averaged $1.25 billion a year between 1997 and 2005, up nearly $1 billion from the period before the 1996 Farm Bill. 

Implicit Subsidies to the Broiler Chicken Industry

GDAE Working Paper No. 06-03

By Elanor Starmer, Aimee Witteman, and Timothy A. Wise

Since the passage of the 1996 Farm Bill, the market prices of corn and soybeans have dropped 32% and 21%, respectively. These commodities are now sold on the U.S. market at a price below what they cost to produce. Recent congressional debates over farm policy have focused narrowly on the issue of subsidies, overlooking other policy changes that provoked this price drop and led in turn to a rise in subsidy support for farmers. Lost in the subsidy debate is a clear understanding of the winners and losers from current agricultural policies, and from the price trends these policies provoke.

In a new paper from the Global Development and Environment Institute, Elanor Starmer, Aimee Witteman, and Timothy A. Wise focus on one group of winners industrial, corporate-owned livestock production facilities. The researchers calculate the implicit subsidy to the broiler chicken industry from policies that drive down the prices of corn and soybean meal, the main components of industrial poultry feed.  They find:
In the post-1996 Farm Bill period of 1997 to 2005, the market price of corn averaged 23% below production cost, compared to an already high 17% between 1986 and 1996.
For soybeans, the margin between production cost and market price tripled between the two periods, from 5% to 15%.
If the broiler industry had paid full cost for the corn and soybean meal in its feed, industry feed costs in the post-Farm Bill period would have been 21% higher on average than they were.
Because feed costs account for 60% of broiler production costs, the implicit subsidy kept total costs 13% lower than they would have been if corn and soybean meal had been priced at full costs of production.
In dollar terms, the implicit subsidy to the corporate broiler industry from U.S. agricultural policy averaged $1.25 billion a year between 1997 and 2005, up nearly $1 billion from the period before the 1996 Farm Bill.
Initial calculations suggest similar gains to industrial hog operations. With diversified family farmers still trying to compete with factory hog farms, the estimated 13% reduction in operating costs from purchased feed is an incentive to industrialization and gives factory farms the appearance of greater economic efficiency than farms that grow their own feed crops.
While demand for ethanol may raise corn prices somewhat in coming years, reducing the implicit subsidy to factory farms, future gains to the broiler industry are still projected to exceed $400 million per year.
The policy implications of these findings are dramatic.  To the extent U.S. agricultural policies encourage overproduction and depress prices below production costs, those policies are benefiting industrial users of agricultural commodities, not family farmers.  As policymakers turn their attention to the 2007 Farm Bill, they would do well to examine the ways in which agribusiness firms in general, and industrial livestock operations in particular, benefit from policies ostensibly designed to support family farmers.

The paper can be downloaded at:
http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/wp/06-03BroilerGains.pdf

Other resources on the subject:
Identifying the Real Winners from U.S. Agricultural Policies,by Timothy A. Wise,
http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/wp/05-07RealWinnersUSAg.pdf

Below-Cost Feed Crops: An Indirect Subsidy for Industrial Animal Factories,a fact sheet based on the above GDAE paper from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy:
http://www.agobservatory.org/library.cfm?refid=88122

For more on GDAEs Globalization and Sustainable Development Program:
http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/policy_research/globalization.html