The Child Nutrition Act is only reauthorized every five years, so now is the time to act. Please join with the chefs and contact your senator to ask for an additional $4 billion per year to improve school nutrition programs. Senators need to hear from you now. To find out how to contact your senator, please visit the U.S. Senate’s directory.

All the heat wasn’t in the kitchen on March 17, when a group of chefs, led by AWA supporter Chef Bill Telepan, wore their traditional white jackets to Capitol Hill to push for increased funding for school lunches. Chef’s Day of Action, coordinated by the NYC Alliance for CNR (Child Nutrition Reauthorization), brought together celebrity chefs and school lunch reform advocates to urge Congress to provide an additional $4 billion in funding per year for school food programs.

The Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act comes up every five years and this year President Obama has asked for an additional $1 billion per year. The Senate, however, is considering only authorizing $500 million per year—half of what the President has requested. Even $1 billion wouldn’t make much of a difference to the 30 million school children who depend on the National School Lunch Program for meals. And when you consider the size of the budget—$3.7 trillion—it’s pocket change. $1 billion only equals 17 ½ cents per day per child. The government reimburses schools $2.68 for fully subsidized lunches.

The chefs say much more is needed to really make a difference. An increase in funding to $4 billion will provide an additional $0.70 per child. “We need school lunches to be about the best food, not the cheapest food,” says Chef Bill Telepan, who is also a board member of NYC’s Wellness in the Schools.  “This is what we practice as chefs and we have a responsibility to bring the best food there is into schools.”

All the chefs work regularly to improve nutrition for children.  Chef Ken Oringer, who owns six restaurants in the Boston area, has worked with Share Our Strength’s Operation Frontline Massachusetts to teach kids about cooking and nutrition. The birth of his daughter, Verveine, strengthened his commitment to ensuring every child’s meal is made with safe, fresh and nutritious food. “When I started cooking for my daughter it really hit home what an awesome responsibility feeding a child is. And that’s when I realized some kids will never get to eat a fresh organic vegetable or pasture-raised egg. It’s our responsibility to help all children learn about food and nutrition and eat the best possible food.”

Former Top Chef contestant Chef Spike Mendelsohn of D.C.’s Good Stuff Eatery came along to support his fellow chefs. As a D.C. resident he has no voting members of Congress, but he also owns a home in Florida and will be contacting Florida’s senators and his local Florida congressperson to urge them to support increased funding.  Chef Spike works with a D.C. KIPP Academy and with Horton’s Kids, an afterschool program that works one-on-one with children from D.C.’s Ward 8 neighborhood. Chef Spike teaches the kids about cooking and nutrition and a trip to Good Stuff Eatery is a popular reward for doing well in school. “School is about learning,” Chef Spike says. “We need to provide the money to schools not just to serve the best food, but to teach kids about great food—what it is, where it comes from, how you prepare it.”

Chef M. Mitchell of Brain Food, an innovative school lunch program providing meals for schools, moved his operation from wealthy northwest D.C. to the more challenging environment of nearby Prince George’s County, MD.  “I wanted to work where good food wasn’t really accessible. People feel that it doesn’t matter what the kids are eating as long as they are eating, so kids eat junk. Adults make decisions for kids and right now they’ve decided that what kids eat at school doesn’t matter. If we aren’t making the right food decisions for our kids, how can we expect them to do it for themselves?”

D.C. Chef Jose Andres’ restaurant Oyamel served as the D.C. headquarters for the chefs and advocates. While Chef Jose was unable to be present, he wanted to provide his support to his colleagues. Between Senate visits, Chef Spike hosted the group at Good Stuff Eatery, just blocks from the Capitol building.

By the end of the day, chefs in their signature white jackets had visited senators and congresspersons from around the nation, including the offices of Senators Kerry, Schumer and Gillibrand. There is still a long fight ahead, but the chefs all agreed—the Hill hasn’t seen the last of them.

Education, consumer advocacy and lifting the veil from the practices of industrialized agriculture are transforming shopping habits. Despite industry efforts, concern for farm animal welfare is gaining significant strength. The study finds that the importance of animals being humanely raised is exceeded only by food safety concerns, and animal welfare scores well above “natural” and “organically produced.” Consumers who have grown up more aware of how food is produced are intensifying the demand for meat, dairy and eggs from humanely raised animals: Forty-four percent of shoppers aged 20 to 34 always look for cage-free eggs.

Americans are also turning to labels like Animal Welfare Approved to help them make purchasing decisions; the report finds that ethical claims help consumers identify high quality, safe and humane foods. When credible and relevant, ethical claims also help consumers form deeper emotional connections with brands. Overall, 58 percent of shoppers are more willing to take the time to learn about ethically produced food brands while 44 percent stopped buying a product when the company producing it acted in an unethical way. Forty-two percent are more loyal to more ethically produced food brands.

The report only tells us what we have seen on the ground for a long time— more and more people care about what they eat and they aren’t willing to compromise. AWA believes that informed consumers are our best allies and we are committed to remaining a label that consumers can trust. Check our database to find meat, dairy and eggs that live up your expectations of being good for animals, people and the planet.

The article is one of an increasing number of investigative pieces which have highlighted the massive pollution problems caused by intensive livestock farming systems – and the fact that we, as taxpayers, are the ones who are currently picking up the bill.

Farming today
Ask the average man or woman in the street to describe a modern farm and it is pretty likely that you’ll still get a rose-tinted description of a traditional family farm, as it was some time ago. Many people still have no idea how the vast majority of their food is produced today. And big farming business wants to keep it that way, believe me.

Before the industrialization of our farming systems in the 1940s-50s, U.S. farming mainly consisted of small family farms working in relative harmony with their surrounding environment. In the spring and summer months, farmers would grow crops and grass to feed their families and livestock, selling the excess to local communities and businesses. The crops would take up nutrients from the soil, which would be utilized by the livestock to produce milk, eggs or meat for human consumption. Over the winter months, the animals would be housed in barns with straw bedding and fed hay. In the spring, the farmers would clear out the straw bedding – now thoroughly mixed with manure – and spread it on the land, thereby returning some of the nutrients that the cattle had consumed back to the soil for the following season’s crops and pasture.

Sustainable family farms do still exist. And, thanks to mounting consumer interest in how food is produced, their number is growing. Animal Welfare Approved farmers across the U.S. seek to work in balance with their environment. They grow grass to feed their livestock, returning manure back to the land. It’s called the natural nutrient cycle.

Spread manure on healthy pastures at the right levels and the worms and micro-organisms that live in the soil will quickly break it down into a more stable form of nutrients, readily available to growing plants. This is a natural process, one that has happened since time immemorial. It’s what the soil critters are designed to do.

Problems with the system
The system described works amazingly well. However, spread too much manure and things quickly start to get out of hand. The soil life cannot cope and the manure is no longer absorbed into the soil. Instead, it sits on the surface, creating increasingly toxic conditions for the friendly soil critters below. Exposed to the weather, the soluble nutrients in the manure – particularly nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous – start to leech away, finding their way into streams and waterways. And this is exactly what is happening on intensive livestock units across the U.S. on a truly massive scale.

The trouble is that these industrial farming units aren’t designed to work with Mother Nature. Gone is the concept of the “natural nutrient cycle”—instead, these industrial units, with their tens of thousands of housed pigs or cattle, or hundreds of thousands of chickens, are now producing so much waste manure that they simply don’t know what to do with it. It’s happening on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend. And we are all paying for it.

According to the National Hog Farmer’s latest State of the Industry Report, over 116 million hogs were slaughtered in the U.S. last year. But even this figure is dwarfed by the total number of chickens raised for meat and egg production: in 2007, U.S. farmers produced 8.9 billion broiler chickens, while the national flock produced over 90 billion eggs.

Smithfield–the world’s largest pork processor–slaughtered and processed over 27 million pigs in 2005 in the U.S. alone. The Washington Post article reports that livestock produce three times more excrement than humans, so just one of Smithfield’s 500,000 pig units will produce more excrement than the 1.5 million humans living in Manhattan. And we are now learning that the way this manure is stored and managed is having a profound effect on the environment.

Most factory farms collect their waste manure in huge nearby open tanks or cesspools. Some of these lagoons are as big as several football fields, each holding hundreds of thousands–if not millions–of gallons of putrefying manure. Being exposed to the elements, they emit toxic gases such as ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, as well as methane, a key greenhouse gas.

As the waste is expensive to store–and even more expensive to transport–some industrial systems periodically pump the waste out of the lagoons and spray it on the surrounding fields. The problem is that it is often sprayed at such high rates–or at such frequencies–that the soil and plants cannot even begin absorb it.

This “over-application” leads to run-off, where the water-soluble nutrients find their way into our waterways and groundwater systems in vast quantities, polluting our drinking water and rivers, leaving our waterways dead–and directly contributing to the 230 recognized oxygen-deprived dead zones along the U.S. coast.

For various reasons, the regulatory system just hasn’t been able to keep up. The industrial farming lobby is very quick to pull out the “financial threat to the family farm” card and run cap in hand to the government whenever they come under pressure to adopt more environmentally friendly techniques. Yet it is clear that most farming today is about as far from the traditional family farm as you can get.

Who’s paying?
With all this fresh in your mind it might infuriate you to hear that the factory farms aren’t the only ones who are paying to clear up the mess. In fact, taxpayers are contributing significant sums of money, too.

For example, Maryland Department of Agriculture’s manure transport program is a government-funded service for intensive livestock farmers. Under the program, “farmers who have inadequate cropland to fully utilize their manure may apply for grants to transport excess waste to other farms or alternative use facilities that can use the product safely.” So although the factory farming system is effectively designed to fail when it comes to its own waste management, the taxpayer is still expected to help subsidize the disposal of waste manure. Go figure…

So what is the industry doing?
One green solution put forward by the intensive poultry industry is to convert the excess waste manure into fertilizer pellets for sale to homeowners. In 2001, Perdue Farms, one of the leading poultry processors in the US, opened the Perdue AgriRecycle plant in Blades, Delaware, after environmental regulations around the Chesapeake Bay were tightened when research showed that phosphorus in agricultural runoff was polluting the waters of the Bay.

This development sounds like a good idea until you find out that this plant–the largest in the region–handles less than 10% of the poultry manure on the Delmarva Peninsula alone.

So why don’t Perdue and other companies just build more plants to deal with the waste problem they have created? Well, the fact is that Perdue isn’t planning on building any further facilities in the very near future because people just aren’t buying the pelleted manure fertilizer. In addition, there is no more taxpayer money available to help pay for the construction. (The kind taxpayers of Delaware contributed a significant portion of the cost to help build Perdue’s flagship manure processing plant.)

Ok, so you might argue that I’m being a little harsh on these multi-million dollar companies and their failure so far to take any real responsibility for the mess they are making of this planet. In a world of diminishing oil reserves and the threat of climate change, you could argue that it is important to see farming move towards better use of its wastes. But while some might regard such poultry manure processing facilities as a step in the right direction, the reality is that it’s a bit like using Scotch tape to patch a crack in a dam.

The fact is that when your farming system involves feeding huge quantities of feed to massive concentrations of animals in a very small area, it’s pretty obvious that you’re going to get a massive output of manure as well as huge animal welfare issues–and all of the other problems associated with factory farming that I’ve mentioned many times before.

My question is this: why are we spending millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to help prop up an unsustainable factory farming industry? We shouldn’t be spending more taxpayers’ money to help these factory farms to dispose of the billions of gallons of putrefying waste manure they are producing each year. Instead, we should be looking at ways of getting rid of the centralized, industrial farming systems which produce it in the first place, and helping the remaining family farms to adopt truly sustainable farming practices.

Photo courtesy of Reclaiming Food & Farming.

This is especially dangerous for organic farmers, who have no defenses against their organic alfalfa becoming contaminated with Monsanto’s GE seed. It could cost them their organic certification.  It could cost you control over what you eat if contamination decimates organic supplies.

But you still have a say. The USDA must accept comments about the ruling through Wednesday, March 3. A number of organizations will help you make your voice heard, including Food Democracy Now,  Credo Action and the True Food Network . You can also email your comments to the USDA directly.

Monsanto thinks might makes right—but together we can prove otherwise.

For more information, see Naomi Starkman’s Huffington Post piece.

While there are some true wild boars in the U.S., most feral hogs are descendants of escaped domestic pigs that have reverted to a wild state. Feral hogs are therefore not a true native wild animal and many states regard them as an invasive species. Feral hogs breed rapidly and are capable of thriving in a wide range of environments – their numbers and the area they cover in the U.S. are both increasing. This is not helped by the widespread practice of hunters who are smuggling live trapped feral hogs from state to state and releasing them on hunting ranches.

Feral hogs cause all sorts of problems. They can destroy native plants and damage woodland and wetland areas. They compete with native livestock for food and other resources and,  as omnivores, they will eat eggs and insects if they find them, as well as scavenging dead animals they find. They will also kill and eat young or injured animals – either farmed or wild.

In addition to potential for environmental damage, feral hogs also cause concern because they can carry serious diseases that can be transmitted to other farmed livestock – and humans. Some studies show that up to 20% of all feral hogs are infected with brucellosis, a disease that causes abortion and infertility in other pigs and gives humans severe flu-like symptoms. Feral hogs may also spread the pseudorabies virus (PRV) and a range of parasites that could cause significant economic problems for commercial pig farmers.

Animal Welfare Approved applauds the efforts of North Carolina to come to grips with the issue and we are proud to be participating in the North Carolina Feral Swine Study Committee. This group is comprised of 14 stakeholder groups and was formed to discuss the growing concerns about feral swine in the state. The aim of the Study Committee is to work on solutions to the problem of feral hogs that already live in the state, as well as those that are imported.

Experience of the problem in other states tells us that there is no single answer to controlling the feral hog problem in North Carolina. Instead, we are going to need a range of different options involving cooperation between farmers, hunters, wildlife services and others. The study group’s discussions are at an early stage and so far include options to exclude feral hogs from commercial hog operations – for example, using electrified fencing, health testing pigs before they are moved from place to place, and restrictions on importing feral hogs from outside the state or releasing those that are trapped.

As a group, we need to work together to find solutions that will help all farmers – regardless of whether they are large or small, pasture-based or intensive. We also need to ensure that any solutions put forward are not too costly, that they are achievable and, above all, effective. Animal Welfare Approved looks forward to our continued work in this forum – we’ll keep you posted on our progress.

Evidently, at least two more years because in that time there’s been no movement to address the fundamental cause of contamination in the U.S. meat supply: feedlot production.

And I’m worried for our children’s health and lives.

It was two years ago today that the U.S. saw its largest meat recall in history, prompting Harkin’s outrage.  The USDA recalled 143 million pounds of beef distributed by Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company and said that the meat had been used in school lunches and food assistance programs.

On January 18 of this year, Huntington Meat Packing Inc. of Montebello, CA recalled 864,000 lbs of beef because it may have been contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. This past weekend the recall was expanded to more than 5 million lbs of meat. Some of the products made from this meat appear to have been distributed through the USDA National School Lunch Program.

Happy anniversary of the Hallmark recall, America! You were expecting flowers?

E. coli O157:H7 is a bacterium that can cause severe illness, especially in the very young, seniors, or persons with weakened or compromised immune systems. The shattering effects of E. coli O157:H7 were detailed in an October 3, 2009 New York Times article, E. coli Path Show Flaws in Beef Inspection.

The recent recall of 5 million pounds may seem like a drop in the bucket compared with the 143 million pounds recalled two years ago, but when it comes to the health and lives of our children, I must implore, “When is enough, enough? Why are we poisoning our children?”

I applaud any efforts the USDA and other government agencies are making to strengthen the safety of our food system, but to quote an old saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Food safety regulations seem to be focused on throwing pounds of cure at the problem; cures that time and time again don’t work, sometimes make things worse, and leave our families vulnerable to contamination and illness. We feed our farm animals antibiotics, we irradiate meat, we require more testing and increased regulations at processing plants and still meat is recalled.

Therein lies the problem—the government is stubbornly dedicated to, as former FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler put it, “chasing the horse after it’s out of the barn,” while study after study piles up providing evidence that the most effective way to stop the spread of dangerous E. coli contamination starts—and ends— with keeping cattle on pasture and out of feedlots. It’s an issue we’ve regularly covered in the AWA blog, where a click on the food safety link brings up 35 entries. But it bears repeating and I’ll keep at it until government can see its way clear from corporate interests to effect real change in the name of food safety.

Unfortunately, until the country is truly ready to address food safety issues, the primary defense you have against E. coli is your own common sense.

In the meantime, what can you do to keep your children and loved ones as safe as possible? AWA has a few suggestions:

• Every time there’s a recall contact your school district and make sure they are not using those products.
• Ask your school district’s food director to only source from suppliers operating a test-and-hold procedure.

• If you have a parent or other loved one in a hospital or nursing facility that uses a food service company, call them as well, and make sure recalled items aren’t on their menus.

• Follow safe food handling guidelines.

• Check in with your doctor even if you think it’s just the stomach flu. Stomach flu and food poisoning often mimic each other but the only way to discover and trace food poisoning is to know who’s sick to begin with.

• Most importantly, when possible, purchase only pastured meat, dairy and eggs from AWA farmers. Redirecting your food budget to safer, more humane meat, dairy and eggs is the surest way to keep your food and your family safe.

For more than a century, black farmers have experienced discrimination and racism by the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) farm lending programs, which exhibited favoritism to larger corporate agriculture interests.  President Obama vowed to continue the  fight for justice in his State of the Union address last month and in previous statements. “My hope is that the farmers and their families who were denied access to USDA loans and programs will be made whole and will have the chance to rebuild their lives and their businesses,” he announced in a May 6, 2009 press release.  In a 1999 statement regarding the case, then Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman admitted the agency’s guilt in shutting black farmers out of farm loan and farm subsidy opportunities.  NBFA President Dr. John Boyd reiterated his position on the case in a CNN news interview Sunday, February 14, 2009, “Black farmers helped to shape agriculture in the U.S. and deserve to take part in the American fabric and take part in federal programs.”

“We are pleased that President Obama has made a commitment to bringing justice to our nation’s black farmers. It is high time for Congress and the USDA to work toward equality by finally ending the illogical practice of awarding federal funds based on a farmer’s ethnicity,” said Christine Sequenzia , federal policy advisor  for AWI.  AWA and AWI strongly support equality for family farmers and urge Congress to uphold funds set aside by President Obama.

While scientists have now shown that cattle from feedlots are much more likely to carry the deadly E. coli O157:H7 (along with other unsavory food poisoning bugs), they have also conducted studies which found that cattle fed forage and grass diets did not carry E. coli pathogens that are known to be harmful to humans. So supporting grassfed beef operations – as championed by Animal Welfare Approved – is a great way to help ensure that America’s beef supply is better for the environment, as well as safer and healthier for you.

But here at AWA we are often asked if other naturally farmed products, such as pasture-raised eggs, are also better for our health. The good news is that scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports our argument that pasture-raised is better for you.

Salmonella: the scourge of the industrially raised egg

Chickens are one of the most familiar intensively farmed animals. It is estimated that more than 60% of the world’s eggs are currently produced in industrial systems, mostly using battery cages [source: CIWF]. It is a biological fact that if you keep animals in large numbers in a confined environment then pests and diseases will inevitably spread more easily – and this is certainly the case for intensive chicken production, where overcrowded and unhygienic conditions only heighten the risks of disease outbreaks.

The trouble is that some of these poultry diseases can also cause illness in humans; perhaps the most well-known is salmonella, a leading cause of food poisoning in the western world. Indeed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) currently estimates that 142,000 illnesses each year are caused by consuming raw or undercooked eggs contaminated with Salmonella enteritidis, a particularly nasty bug which can be very serious, even life-threatening, for the very young, the elderly, and those with poor health.

Intensive eggs: a risky business

Eggs are contaminated with the salmonella bug from infected laying hens, which pass the salmonella bacteria into their eggs before they are laid. On the farm, the disease generally passes from bird to bird through infected fecal matter and dust. As laying hens are so closely confined in intensive farming systems the risk of cross-contamination is very high. And despite claims of high biosecurity and hygiene practices, scientists have also found extensive salmonella contamination on walls, feeders, drinkers, floors, and feed on intensive poultry farms.

Numerous studies have shown that eggs from intensive systems are more likely to contain salmonella than eggs from free-range systems. For example, a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2002 found that people who ate raw or undercooked eggs from caged hens were twice more likely to contract salmonella food poisoning as those who did not eat eggs from caged hens. A study of over 5,000 commercial large-scale egg laying units in Europe in 2004–2005 clearly shows a greater risk of salmonella in caged hens when compared with barn, free-range and organic hens. Similarly, a study in 2007 showed that 23.4% of farms with caged hens tested positive for salmonella, compared to 6.5% in free-range flocks. This research also showed that the highest prevalence of salmonella occurred in the biggest industrial type farms.

We are what we eat

Every year, absurd sums of money are spent on the never-ending war to eliminate diseases like salmonella and E. coli from intensive livestock farms. Across the U.S., increasing numbers of farms now utilize complex vaccination programs, antibiotic regimes and high biosecurity systems which would put many of our hospitals to shame. Yet a growing body of scientific evidence now suggests that the problem is actually much closer to home. The reality is that, by their very nature, intensive farming systems are actually more likely to make animals sick.

There’s an old farming saying that pests and diseases should be seen as Mother Nature’s indicators of something having gone wrong in the farming system; they are a symptom, rather than a cause. Intensive farming is a case of fixing a system that wasn’t broken to begin with and now we are all paying the price.

The key message is that there is no doubt about the direct links between the overuse of antibiotics in intensive farming and the rise of bacteria that are resistant to common antibiotics. The major culprit at the moment is Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus – more commonly known as MRSA.

What happened?

So what’s the problem with MRSA and how has it developed? There are many different MRSA strains but, as the name suggests, all MRSA bacteria are resistant to certain important antibiotics. The effect of this is that if you are infected with MRSA it is much more difficult for your doctor to find an antibiotic that will help you. Some estimates put the number of Americans suffering from MRSA infections at 90,000 per year – leading to nearly 20,000 deaths. As you can see, this is a serious problem.

So how has MRSA developed?  Staphylococcus aureus is a very common bacteria in humans, often found on the skin, in the nose, or in the mouth. But how did it get to be so deadly? To understand that we have to look at what has been going on in some of the largest and most intensive farms in the U.S. since the 1950s.

As farming became more intensive and animals were kept in ever greater numbers, farmers inevitably found that pests and diseases began to spread more easily. In effect, the intensive system made the animals sick. When animals are sick they don’t grow as fast – and may even die. But rather than changing the system to one that was better for the animals, the industry realized that it could “solve” the problem more inexpensively by routinely adding low doses of antibiotics to the animals’ feed and water. This medication worked very well at keeping the animals alive and growing. However, as more and more bacteria were being exposed to antibiotics – especially at low doses – the risk that they might develop resistance also grew.

Scientists have known for many years that bacteria can mutate to become resistant to antibiotics or pick up genetic material from other bacteria that have survived the antibiotic use, and then further spread this within the bacterial population. And this is exactly what has been happening on intensive farms across the U.S. over the last few decades.

Part of the problem with this overuse of low-dose antibiotics is the fact that while the low dose kills off the more susceptible bacteria first, it leaves behind those bacteria that aren’t susceptible – in other words, the ones that show resistance. And because the farmers generally use the same antibiotics over and over again, in the end the only bacteria left are those that are resistant. Without anything to control them, these resistant bacteria can multiply and easily spread from animal to animal, and then from farm to farm.

However, the real problems occur when antibiotic resistance spreads to bacteria that can make humans sick. This is why we are now seeing the emergence of antibiotic resistant diseases like MRSA in humans – and we are fast running out of options to treat these new diseases.

But it’s not too late!

Let’s make one thing clear: we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and ban all antibiotics in animal agriculture. Antibiotics are a vital weapon against serious diseases in both animals and humans, and we know that the treatment of individual sick animals does not contribute to the rise of resistant bacteria, such as MRSA. We’ve know this for almost as long as antibiotics have been used as “growth promoters” in agriculture. As early as 1948, the British journal the Veterinary Record reported concerns about the potential development of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria:

The present enormous consumption of the drug (penicillin) can be accounted for only by a good deal of indiscriminate use and it is generally considered that widespread use particularly of inadequate doses is a potent factor in breeding resistant strains of bacteria.

The good news is that countries like Denmark that have recently banned the indiscriminate use of antibiotics for growth promotion and other non-therapeutic reasons are now reporting a sharp fall in the incidence of resistant bacteria. So it’s not too late! We can do something about not just stopping the development of new strains of resistant bacteria, but also reducing the incidence of the ones that are already out there.

The key to stopping all non-therapeutic use of antibiotics – and reducing the need for therapeutic doses – is not to blindly carry on with farming systems in which we are simply trying to prevent exposure to disease. What we need to do is to encourage farming systems in which we are actively managing animals so they can develop strong natural immune systems – a concept sometimes called “positive health. “

I’m sure it won’t surprise you to know that the kind of farms we are talking about are the kind of farms that are Animal Welfare Approved. Research shows that animals that are under stress have reduced immunity. And if animals are kept on farms where they are not overcrowded, where they have access to pasture and space to move around, where they are fed a diet that matches their natural needs, and where they are managed to promote health and well-being, then the levels of stress and the incidence of disease – and the need for antibiotics – is much, much lower. In many cases AWA farmers cannot recall the last time they had to use antibiotics. It is that simple.

Making the right choice

The CBS report ended by saying that if consumers want to make sure that they don’t buy products with a risk of MRSA, then they should look for meat which is labeled “no antibiotics ever.”  But while this seems like a straightforward way to ensure that consumers  aren’t at risk, I am afraid it isn’t quite as simple as that.

The MRSA found on meat gets there during the slaughter and butchery process. As mentioned above, MRSA normally lives on the skin, so an animal that carries MRSA doesn’t automatically have the bug in its meat – but the bug could be transferred to the meat during processing. The problem is that the slaughterplant worker or butcher could then transfer it to any other meat they touch. So while it may be true that meat from animals reared without the use of antibiotics might have a lower risk of carrying MRSA, just saying “I’ll buy meat from animals raised without antibiotics” doesn’t actually do anything to help solve the problem.

The solution lies in looking at the causes of MRSA – intensive farming that relies on excessive amounts of low-dose antibiotics – and putting a stop to the continued non-therapeutic use of these vital medicines on which these farming systems are so dependent.

Just like guns, antibiotics themselves are not the problem. The irresponsible use of antibiotics is the problem. And it’s not the farmers that are at fault; it is the farming systems which result in the need for indiscriminate antibiotic use.

Animal Welfare Approved seeking AWA pasture-based farm(s) to supply eggs in Washington, DC area.  If not currently certified, must be willing to pursue free certification. Immediate need.  Please contact Julie Munk at info@animalwelfareapproved.org or at 202.546.5292.  Please pass along.  Thanks.