Tag Archives: Wal-Mart

Tomato disease triangle

P7238911 You Say Tomato, I Say Agricultural Disaster, by Dan Barber, NY Times, 8 August 2009.
According to plant pathologists, this killer round of blight began with a widespread infiltration of the disease in tomato starter plants. Large retailers like Home Depot, Kmart, Lowe’s and Wal-Mart bought starter plants from industrial breeding operations in the South and distributed them throughout the Northeast. (Fungal spores, which can travel up to 40 miles, may also have been dispersed in transit.) Once those infected starter plants arrived at the stores, they were purchased and planted, transferring their pathogens like tiny Trojan horses into backyard and community gardens.
Sounds like industrial agricultural distribution strikes again.

The tomatoes pictured grew in sougth Georgia and have no blight, unless you count hornworms, which we do most mornings, picking them off the plants.

Chip Your Chicken?

Shannon Hayes writes in an op-ed in the New York Times:
AT first glance, the plan by the federal Department of Agriculture to battle disease among farm animals is a technological marvel: we farmers tag every head of livestock in the country with ID chips and the department electronically tracks the animals’ whereabouts. If disease breaks out, the department can identify within 48 hours which animals are ill, where they are, and what other animals have been exposed.

At a time when diseases like mad cow and bird flu have made consumers worried about food safety, being able to quickly track down the cause of an outbreak seems like a good idea. Unfortunately, the plan, which is called the National Animal Identification System and is the subject of a House subcommittee hearing today, would end up rewarding the factory farms whose practices encourage disease while crippling small farms and the local food movement.

NAIS has been around awhile, but now Congress is proposing to make it mandatory. Hayes goes on to detail how much it would cost small farmers to chip every cow and chicken, calf and pullet.

Besides, NAIS is about controling disease by quarantine, which is locking the barn after the horses are out. Hayes gets to the root of the matter: Continue reading