From Reason TV, a look at how a tradition of rules and regulation is killing the French wine industry, while the more agile California continues to take market share.

We’ve heard of Food Inc., (which I have a review of coming soon) well how about Food Gov? It turns out that the USDA has less stringent testing standards for the food sent to school lunch programs than do the private testing regimens of most fast food chains.

In the past three years, the government has provided the nation’s schools with millions of pounds of beef and chicken that wouldn’t meet the quality or safety standards of many fast-food restaurants, from Jack in the Box and other burger places to chicken chains such as KFC, a USA TODAY investigation found.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the meat it buys for the National School Lunch Program “meets or exceeds standards in commercial products.”

That isn’t always the case. McDonald’s, Burger King and Costco, for instance, are far more rigorous in checking for bacteria and dangerous pathogens. They test the ground beef they buy five to 10 times more often than the USDA tests beef made for schools during a typical production day.

And the limits Jack in the Box and other big retailers set for certain bacteria in their burgers are up to 10 times more stringent than what the USDA sets for school beef.

“We simply are not giving our kids in schools the same level of quality and safety as you get when you go to many fast-food restaurants,” says J. Glenn Morris, professor of medicine and director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. “We are not using those same standards.”

Whole article here.

Sounds like the “fast food nation” is a bit safer than the nation’s children. So much for Eric Schlosser’s default view that more government is the best answer to combat food borne illnesses.

It’s been more than a month since I left for Virginia, since then I’ve toured Polyface, shook hands with Joel Salatin, and saw what sorts of agriculture are possible when you jump off the commodity rails and strike out in your own direction. But once I got home I found myself with a broken computer, a broken truck, and 1500 acres of wheat to be sown. So now after getting a shiny new netbook, a shiny old truck, and knuckling down on the wheat, I find myself with time to start blogging. It’s not that issues haven’t come up that pertained, but prying my fingers from the DVR remote has proven more difficult than one would think.

So now I spend my days maintaining cattle, raising up 50 Rhode Island Red layers, and getting to work on renovating the school house. I plan to blog about that quite a bit, so the posts may take a This Old House Feel. I also recently watched Food Inc., so I’ve got some thoughts about that, as well as pitfalls of fraudulent science, ie Climategate.

It’s cold and dreary here. The rain has held up the wheat sowing, but there’s still time to get it in. In fact being a bit late gives you an edge when it comes to avoiding pest problems, and the ever threatening April freeze. But that’s not my big news, the big news is that in one week I board a plane for Virgina, to attend a conference on grass fed finishing and marketing. I’m pretty stoked about it, because I’m going to get to tour Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm. I will be in the presence of the libertarian lone wolf of agriculture, and I can’t wait. Plus I haven’t flown in about ten years, so I’ll get to experience all of the wonderful things the TSA has to offer.

So it turns out I may be meeting the Secretary of Agriculture and attending a town hall style meeting which he’s giving this Wednesday, and it begs the question, “What would you ask the Secretary given the chance?”

… more Salatin!

The fact is, when the government gets between my mouth and my stomach, that’s a pretty intrusive government. The only reason our founding fathers did not give us the right to food freedom, is because they could not have foreseen the day when a neighbor could not get a t-bone steak or a glass of raw milk from a neighbor.

It can, but you’ll have to buck and take some initiative, as well as some personal responsibility. Oh, and the bureaucrats are going to have to get out of the way, all according to Joel Salatin.

Eating well does not require you to eat organic
tomatoes shipped air freight from Peru in January. You can eat better
by canning, drying, or freezing local seasonal bounty
and enjoying it in the off season. But that means getting busy,
refusing to be a victim, and being responsible. Unfortunately,
these good character qualities are not encouraged in the modern
American welfare class. When I see food stamps used
for TV dinners so that personal money can purchase beer and cigarettes,
I admit to being a bit dubious about the alleged
plight of poor people. And if everyone who didn’t need to be weren’t,
the numbers would be so small that some philanthropy
would solve the genuine problem–just like it used to.

BTW, I’m scheduled to tour Polyface Farms this October. *insert schoolgirl squee here*

Excuse my tired fingers, I’m taking a shift break from my annual evening of hand grape crush/watching Firefly DVD’s.

The latest issue of Wired has a great piece on the success of craigslist, and it’s supposed deficiencies, despite being the leading job search site, and the leading real estate site, among others. The author can’t seem to fathom such a free wheeling attitude, as Craig Newmark takes a largely hands off approach to regulating his invention. The belief that “people are generally good” seems to rub supposed enlightened souls the wrong way.

God damn my hands are tired, I can’t do this, besides I have another shift crushing juice from Riesling. I have things to add, maybe in the morning.

Read it.

We harvested and crushed our first crop from the Syrah grapes we planted three years ago. You’ll see our vineyard, plus the teaching vineyard where we took the grapes to be crushed. The university pics are the ones with the old church in the background. This is really the wife’s project, so most of the credit goes to her. The grapes are now crushed and fermenting in the basement, filling the house with a lovely sulfur aroma.

The other day a friend and I had a quick email discussion of the Blake Hurst piece that I pointed out in my last posting. His position was in line with Hurst’s, that organic food is crap, and that modern conventional farming practices are the optimal use of agricultural resources. That has been the steady chorus from most of the commentary I’ve seen on the article, from Reason to radio host Neal Boortz. The irony in that is that modern farming is notably not a libertarian venture. Few other industries rely on, and are effected by government policy as much as commodity agriculture.
This has become more and more evident to me within the last year or more as I have gotten very interested in the trendy foodie movement, most notably grass fed meats. Yeah, Michael Pollan may be a stereotypical Berkley liberal, but underneath the movement he has helped inspire is a libertarian mindset, motivated not so much by philosophy as it is the almighty dollar. The proponents and practitioners of alternative agriculture and grassfed livestock are true capitalists in comparison to their conventional subsidy chasing brethren.
Nowhere has this been more evident than at two seminars I attended recently. Last April I attended the Stockman Grass Farmer’s Grassfed conference in Dallas. The group was a diverse meeting of farmer/ranchers, mostly from the surrounding region. And I mean diverse, represented were Canadians, tweed jacketed Jewish cowboys, and even a heart surgeon. But to a man most of the participants in the discussions were not interested in subsidies or programs. They were a lot more concerned about production, direct marketing, and if they had concerns about government it was regarding any hurdles that would be put in their way by well meaning bureaucrats.
Contrast that to the tone of a small no till farming seminar I attended just last Thursday. At this meeting was a group of conventional farmers interested in adopting chemically intensive no till methods. Now if I had called the people present welfare whores, I doubt I would have made it out with my life. But to hear them talk, government money was the be all and end all of farming. As payment structures switch away from outright production, and towards a more European conservation mentality, it will be no till methods that will be promoted via policy. Twenty dollars an acre for no till, and the promise of more on the way made quite an impression. Couple this with new revenue assurance programs like ACRE, and we’ll insure that production of basic commodities stays strong, no matter what food fads and policy pop up along the way.
This benefits more than farmers, it keeps subsidy money flowing to all of those necessary parts of the chain. Chemical companies, fertilizer sellers, and equipment manufacturers, on one end, and the users of cheap grain on the other end, like ethanol distillers, animal feeders, meat processors, and sweetener manufacturers on the other end. All of those parties need to keep the production going, and they lobby Washington policy makers accordingly.
Admittedly that’s what draws me to alternative agriculture, grassfed and the like is that most of it seems in line with my politics. Because organic and grassfed don’t rely on as many inputs, you can literally create production out of sunshine and rain. Yes, that production may cost more to the end user, but isn’t charging more my right as a producer? Conventional ag folks will tell you that they’re ‘feeding the world!’ as if failure to subsidize their over production of commodities will leave the world to starve. Does that sound like an extortion racket to anyone else? I wonder what Mr. Hurst would say, if I accused him of holding starving children hostage in order to justify his lifestyle?
In the interests of full disclosure, I’m still a pretty conventional farmer, growing wheat and cattle for the commodity market. I’m looking to use no till to free up my time for more lucrative, read capitalist, ventures. But as my wife and I look more and more into direct marketing, I find myself veering away from a mindest that talks a good capitalist game, but still has it’s hand out at the end of the day.