[Northern Light]

The Star posted an article today which outlines how 'Big Agra' (see Maple Leaf Foods) is squeezing organic turkey farmers out of existence through asinine regulations.

See the Article below for details: And feel free to write the premier or the Minister of Agriculture (Ontario) about this!!

If you're eating organic turkey this weekend, savour it, because by next Thanksgiving it may be easier to buy crack cocaine in Ontario than a drug-free bird.

Here's why: While the turkey industry marketing board tells growers to confine their turkeys indoors to reduce the chance of transmission of viruses from wild birds, new organics standards administered by the Canadian Food and Inspection Agency mandate raising organic birds outdoors.

Caught in this Catch-22 are turkey farmers Matthew and Janice Dick – organic farmers who wanted their birds to roam free outside. They recently took on the Turkey Farmers of Ontario at an appeals tribunal in what amounted to a battle between antibiotic-free, open-air, small-scale farming and drug-intensive, confinement, factory farming. The organic farmers lost.

The Dicks raise birds on an 80-hectare certified organic farm in Markdale, about two hours northwest of Toronto, along with pigs, cattle, chickens and about a half-dozen organic crops. Their farm looks, well, a lot like the way farms used to look in Ontario.

Organic turkeys get about 25 per cent more space than in the industrial system and take 14 weeks to grow to about 10 or 12 pounds, compared with 10 weeks in a factory barn. They're also fed an organic vegetarian diet, with no genetically modified crops, antibiotics or animal by-products such as pig fat, blood or bone meal. Many organic livestock farmers also try to raise heritage breeds to increase genetic diversity, hardiness and flavour.

Perhaps most important, the birds have full access to pasture so they can live a relatively natural life basking in fresh air and sunlight.

"You'll get a more natural taste with a bird on grass," Matthew says of the birds. "There's certainly more flavour to it."

He also argues access to outdoors is crucial for the health of the birds. "You give the turkey everything it requires: fresh air, outdoor exercise and no stress. If they run into a problem, they're going to have the immune system to deal with it. You just have to look at human flus. When you're in a confined situation, you're under more stress and things spread easier."

The Turkey Farmers of Ontario – an industry marketing board of 192 Ontario producers who control nearly half of Canada's annual quota production – introduced a rule last year that forces all quota holders to confine turkeys indoors, under a solid roof.

Turkey marketing boards, issuing quota to individual producers, were created to protect domestic farmers from imports. With this system, producers can also negotiate a fair price with processors.

Members of Turkey Farmers of Ontario produce more than 60 million kilograms of turkeys a year. The smallest of these confinement barns produce about 35,000 turkeys a year. The sector links an entire supply chain from Maple Leaf Foods, which processes 49 per cent of turkeys in Ontario, to Ontario-based Hybrid Turkeys, the only primary breeder in Canada and one of two major breeding companies worldwide.

The marketing board says raising turkeys indoors is one biosecure measure that prevents the transmission of avian influenza between turkeys and wild birds.

Ingrid DeVisser, chair of the board, said: "I don't think there is any foolproof method" of preventing transmission of avian flu. "But we're doing what we can to protect the industry." She pointed out that the Canadian Food and Inspection Agency is in conflict with itself: It advises, as a cautionary measure, raising birds indoors, but the agency-administered national organics standards, introduced in June, mandate raising organic birds outdoors.

The marketing board rule places organic turkey farmers in an impossible situation: To raise more than a backyard flock of 50 birds, farmers must hold board-regulated quota; but farmers cannot adhere to the regulations and keep organic certification. The rule change affects the Dicks and just one other organic turkey farmer in Ontario but it severely restricts the supply of certified organic birds, one reason they cost about twice as much as industrially raised turkeys.

The Organic Council of Ontario supported the Dicks' appeal at a tribunal of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, concerned that the turkey board ruling would set a precedent for provincial marketing boards across Canada to introduce regulations for milk, egg and poultry production that would curtail organic production.

Already, the Canadian Poultry and Egg Processors Council has requested that all quota poultry be confined.

Ted Zettel, chair of the Organic Council, called the appeal hearing a "pathetic fiasco." Zettel said the Turkey Farmers of Ontario failed to present evidence of avian flu as a public health threat. "It's really clear that the problem that they have (with organics) is it's presented as a superior alternative and it makes them very vulnerable. They see no problem with trampling on the rights of a few farmers. It will be a pattern if they get away with it."

David Waltner-Toews, a professor at the University of Guelph's veterinary college, appeared as the only scientific witness at the hearing. The author of Food, Sex and Salmonella: Why Our Food is Making Us Sick is an international expert on food-borne diseases as well as diseases that can be transmitted between animals and humans, such as avian influenza and swine flu.

He said the hearing was about the turkey board "protecting its commercial production units" rather than a "discussion about how we manage the system overall."

In its written decision, the tribunal said it recognized "the importance of the organic poultry industry and the high public demand for its product." However, it added: "It is our determination that the added cost of providing a covered structure for turkeys is far outweighed by the additional safety the TFO has put in place for the industry with the implementation of this regulation."

I visited a confinement barn, arranged by the Turkey Farmers of Ontario, to see how turkeys are raised in a biosecure setting. I've been to such biosecure barns before, and my first summer job was in an industrial barn, grading eggs and counting newly hatched chicks.

To protect flocks, biosecure confinement operations attempt to create a barrier between outside pathogens and livestock, or, as is the turkey board's chief concern, between wild birds potentially carrying avian flu and domestic turkeys. Toews told me earlier that there is no evidence such biosecurity works; indeed, the two previous cases of avian flu in Canada both broke out in confinement systems.

He said that once disease gets into densely stocked barns, it can run rampant, and sooner or later something always gets in. "Economies of scale are economies of disaster."

The operation I visited, Clark Poultry Farms, is certainly massive, with farms and cash crops in four counties. This location, west of Hamilton, has eight barns and raises 140,000 turkeys a year. Every eight weeks, 22,000 one-day-old poults arrive, to be pumped up into 16 or 17 kilogram birds destined for deli meat, processed by either Maple Leaf Foods or Sofina Foods.

Inside this barn, everything is impressively high-tech. Water, feeding, heat and ventilation are all computer-controlled, as farm manager Don Cryderman told me, "to simulate Mother Nature."

The turkeys, uncaged, are free to roam around a barn the size of a hockey rink. In practice, the densely packed birds waddle about a few square feet. As they near market weight, it will be a struggle for them to haul their enormous breasts beyond a few steps.

These barns are about production – turkeys gain a pound per week. Cryderman said it would be impossible to raise birds at this density without antibiotics to control disease. The medication is administered in the turkeys' feed for the first 10 weeks of life, though Cryderman said the drugs clear the birds' system well before slaughter.

Perhaps, but they never leave the environment, for one thing that this high-tech system can't biosecure is the manure of livestock. And in barns with thousands of birds, that output is enormous.

We enter the finishing barn, with about seven weeks of manure built up. With another seven weeks to go before these turkeys head to market around Thanksgiving, the smell of ammonia is a sharp stab between my eyes.

Turkeys stand on this dung, and other pathogens, throughout the production cycle. "Salmonella or other organisms are more likely to be shed in the feces, when birds are under stress," said Toews, "and in a confinement system, the birds are fairly stressed. That's spread to other birds in the slaughterhouse where thousands of birds come into contact with birds from hundreds of different farms."

Then, when the birds leave, that stew of manure is cleaned from the barn. And there goes biosecurity. Even if pathogens could be kept out, they can never be kept in.

Continued...

 

[Northern Light]

Article continued from above:

The routine use of antibiotics in confinement barns is also a problem. The World Health Organization reported that 50 per cent of all antimicrobials are used in food-producing animals (due to increased intensity of meat production as well as for growth promotion) and recommended extensive reductions. Researchers at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health are assembling evidence that the practice is cultivating and spreading antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which is finding its way from manure into soil, air, waterways and other organisms, and are widely implicated in creating the antibiotic-resistant superbugs in hospitals. (Every year, an estimated 220,000 people in Canada develop hospital-acquired infections.)

To keep their quota, the Dicks have confined their birds for now. (As a result, they'll lose their organic designation when they are next inspected.) The Organic Council is pressing for the tribunal decision to be overturned. That power rests with Leona Dombrowsky, the minister of agriculture, food and rural affairs, and so far, she has been unwilling to intervene. "I do have faith that the turkey farmers will give them fair consideration and will make the best decision for turkey farmers and consumers," she said.

Then she wondered aloud about a solution that would likely delight the Turkey Farmers of Ontario – that national organic certification standards be changed to accommodate confinement farming.

Attempts by industrial agriculture to erode organic standards is hardly novel. But what about bringing industrial farming up to organic standards? Now wouldn't that give us something to be thankful for?

 

[wonderboy416]

I guess it's getting next to impossible to avoid genetically modified foods (plants or animals) that have been grown with heaps of chemicals. The fact that artificial sweeteners are becoming really difficult to avoid as well (as someone who avoids them at all cost) makes me wonder what the human-cost on all this non-natural food we're consuming daily will be. I guess I could always start up a hobby farm and feed myself...

 

[afransen]

Aren't all domesticated plant and animal species 'genetically modified'?

I agree that the poultry industry is unreasonable in restricting the raising of small numbers of birds outdoors. On the other hand, we should be a little pragmatic about 'organic' food. A lot of the hysteria surrounding it is unsubstantiated hippy mumbo-jumbo.

 

[Chinese Jamaican Bloke]

the organic food industry is a scam

 

[wonderboy416]

the organic food industry is a scam

Care to elaborate?
Are you just bitter because it costs slightly more than your typical hormone/pesticide whatever injected foods and you choose not to pay for this difference? At least it gives people a choice, you can always not buy it. This isn't bottled water, I truly believe it's a superior product and exponentially better for ones health in the long-run.

 

[Chinese Jamaican Bloke]

Care to elaborate?
Are you just bitter because it costs slightly more than your typical hormone/pesticide whatever injected foods and you choose not to pay for this difference? At least it gives people a choice, you can always not buy it. This isn't bottled water, I truly believe it's a superior product and exponentially better for ones health in the long-run.

there is no difference in organic and regular food and i am not bitter because i don't follow the latest fads like the rest of the sheeple the same ones that most likely to believe in the 2012 hype

 

[Prometheus The Supremo]

i think in the years to come, food engineered in the laboratory will be alot healthier than food engineered by artificial selection (domestic species brought about by selective breeding & mutation) or by nature its self (natural selection). maybe they can finally make healthy food that currently tastes like shit actually taste good one day.


the problem with food isn't that it's manipulated or industrialized, it's that we have way too much food in our society. our bodies are genetically in the past, when we were always on the move looking for the next meal. it doesn't matter if your steak is organic or "frankenfood". if you eat too much of it all the time, you'll clog your arteries the same way and will eventually die. if you ate less often, high fat and energy packed food would be essential to your survival. why do you think fat and sugar tastes so good? it's because we evolved to crave energy that sustains us.

 

[Northern Light]

Holy Jeeze ...... Shakes head....

A number of you missed the point of the article entirely.

First off the lead point of the article is NOT that the turkey is organic or superior or anything else, that's a separate point.

The issue is that the turkey industry is just that, where the Turkey Farmer's of Ontario, a board set up to protect small farmers from the commodification of the food they rear, is in fact now controlled de facto by Maple Leaf Foods and one or two other companies.

They have used and abused this position (it would seem) to impose a completely absurd and unnecessary rule; (that turkeys must be raised indoors) and in so doing are not only scuttling consumer choice but also small farmers making a different product.

They have constructed a rule set that not only favours; but virtually excludes any model of turkey rearing/production other than ILO (intensive livestock operation) where anywhere from 20,000-200,000 birds and reared in what most of use would describe as poor conditions and treated merely as industrial product.

Let's be clear here, I'm a meat eater, and I eat Bambi and Thumper and other cute little creatures too, I'm no pushover for vegetarian-PETA approved whatever. But I see no reason to raise my future food in a pile of its own dung in the name of efficiency either. Sounds rather unhygienic if anyone's asking, and frivolously cruel without material value or necessity.

The story is focused on anti-competitive, monopolistic practices and abuse of process. Not on health food per se.

*******

As to simple-minded tripe about organic being a scam.

Let's be clear, organic in and of itself does not mean any difference in flavour in meat product or veggie. Further no one has ever really suggested that it does.

Organic simply means without artificial chemical inputs such as pesticides and synthetic fertilizers and in the case of animals refers to no use of antibiotics or growth hormones.

But a carrot is still a carrot.

There are many organic products that taste better than their typical conventional counterparts, though largely for reasons that have nothing to do with organic.

For instance if you like a stronger flavoured steak, then you would probably prefer grass-fed beef. This is common, but not universally the case in organic beef, it is far less often the case with conventional product where the typical cow is grain-fed. The difference in taste is marked, and may or may not be to everyone's liking; but is not itself a function or organic vs conventional.

Produce differs in taste largely for only 2 reasons, the first is freshness, which matters more with some products than others. Also not a function of organic vs conventional; though often organic consumers are prepared to pay more and likely get first dibs on local products at many higher-end stores, or go to farmer's markets where freshness is most pronounced.

The other variation in produce is varietal. Simply put there are thousands varieties of potato, but only 2 dozen in wide spread commercial use in North America. While organic, local farmers are more likely to be experimenting with 'heirloom' varieties, that again is not a function or organic but rather the type of consumer who ALSO tends to buy organic.

The principal argument in favour of organic has nothing to do with taste. Its about environmental responsibility. As pesticides run off into local drinking water and rivers its neither good for people, nor local wildlife. Each pesticide has varying degrees of concern, some are not that harmful to human health, at least in small amounts, while others are much more dubious.

If you have ever seen the Methyl Bromide used on California Strawberries, and the resulting precautions taken by workers in harvesting (wearing protective gear that seems more befitting of a nuclear plant) you would quickly think I'll take the organic ones thanks!

Now it should be said, not all 'conventional' strawberries are grown with Methyl Bromide, its use in Ontario is quite rare; but personally, if someone picking the fruit needs a protective suit, I'll steer clear of it thanks.

I don't say its essential to my health, or that all conventional product is evil; no such sillyness here; on the other hand, i think to the extent I can support a local farming economy, a cleaner environment and more variety on my plate, I'm inclined to do all three. But that's me.

 

[wonderboy416]

there is no difference in organic and regular food and i am not bitter because i don't follow the latest fads like the rest of the sheeple the same ones that most likely to believe in the 2012 hype

I think you need to buy a new keyboard because yours seems to be lacking such keys as comma, period and shift. Anyway, how can you say there's no difference? What are you basing this on exactly? I'm sure in some cases there's no real benefit to organic foods. I like the idea of consuming a product that hasn't been sprayed or injected with chemicals, am I so crazy?

Northern, I got the point of the article the first time round... the implications are that we the consumer get less choice but you did an excellent job clarifying, thanks.

 

[Prometheus The Supremo]

being against contamination of food and land with dangerous/toxic substances is a worthy cause, especially if levels of such substances are in excess of recommended maximum levels.

 

[golodhendil]

The biggest problem with the organics industry is the dishonesty, or at least naïveté, on the part of many organics supporters that "organic" means "natural" (whatever that means), and "natural" means better (for health or environment). The posts by wonderboy perfectly exemplify this attitude.

As afransen pointed out and as I have said somewhere in another thread, all crops and most livestocks are genetically modified (by breeding or engineering) since the dawn of agriculture, so unless you are a strict hunter-gatherer, you are most definitely consuming genetically modified food one way or the other.

The belief that you don't put "chemicals" on organics is equally absurd. Organics don't allow synthetic chemicals, but you still can - and most do - put nonsynthetic chemicals, be it "organic" pesticides or fertilizers or manure (a very imprecise mix of many chemicals plus a healthy dose of pathogens). Some widely used organic pesticides, such as Bt and rotenone, are among the nastiest chemicals that you would never want near your food, and are as / more dangerous than synthetic pesticides if/when they are misused. The use of "organic" pesticides also don't automatically prevent environmental damage; the Bordeaux mixture, a traditional pesticide consisting of a mixture of copper salts, is highly toxic to many animals and highly persistent in the environment, and yet has evaded two bans by the EU and is still commonly used in organic farming. Not that copper-based pesticides necessarily have no merits, but the hypocrisy is obvious.

Most of the other claimed environmental benefits of organic farming are either unsupported or not unique - N and mineral leaching still occur from organic farms, sometimes worse; crop mixing and rotation was and is part of conventional farming; no-till farming has been successfully combined with conventional / GM crops and is better for the soil than the high amount of mechanical tillage often required for organic farming to get rid of weeds and pests. And not to mention the more unsustainable use of land and water resources due to decreased yield and increased pest damage.

More sustainable agriculture is most definitely needed to feed the world while protecting the environment, through a combination of integrated pest management, practices such as crop rotation, better management of soil and water resources, responsible use of pesticides and fertilizers, and judicious application of genetically modified organisms. But it can certainly not be done through blind faith in the "naturalness" of organic farming.

 

[Prometheus The Supremo]

organic food growers & regular industry food growers should be held to the same standards to prove that their end product is safe as possible for human consumption and that their production processes are not destructive to the environment, well, more than they have to be. everything should be held up to the highest scrutiny.

don't trust it just because it says organic, green or natural.

 

[Chinese Jamaican Bloke]

I think you need to buy a new keyboard because yours seems to be lacking such keys as comma, period and shift. Anyway, how can you say there's no difference? What are you basing this on exactly? I'm sure in some cases there's no real benefit to organic foods. I like the idea of consuming a product that hasn't been sprayed or injected with chemicals, am I so crazy?

Northern, I got the point of the article the first time round... the implications are that we the consumer get less choice but you did an excellent job clarifying, thanks.

is this forum a grammar class?

 

[wonderboy416]

is this forum a grammar class?

No it's not, but it speaks volumes for the quality of a post someone can't even include punctuation in their responses. I don't know if it's because you don't know how but it makes this forum seem kind of low-brow to read through posts such as yours IMO.

I'd be the first to admit (as posted) that not all organics are as advertised. However I'd also call you a fool if you think eating a steak at outback (that's been pumped up on hormones and on food designed to make the poor cow's belly explode) is going to have the same impact on your system as say... a steak from Ruth Chris where the cows used are free range, grain fed and hormone free. Crap in, crap out. Organic products eliminate much of the crap and in some cases (such as the one I just mentioned) lead to a better quality of food. Of course you don't need to go to Ruth Chris to have a fabulous steak...