Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

One of biggest frauds in U.S. farm history

kansascity.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 133 posts

Re: One of biggest frauds in U.S. farm history

#111

Post by AdrianB1 »

horomeme wrote: post #107
75dvtwin wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you as well. I think country-wide, there need to be, usually, 3-bodied system of inspection/certification (whether it is financial organizations, law firms, doctors, educational or food suppliers.. ). one organization should be multi-state collaboration of supervision & certification. The other should be industry collaboration of supervision & certification. And 3rd -- is academia-powered. Any business c…

The industry org will hollow the others into facades. Proxies for public relations in service of the heads of industry. Happens every time. But kudos for going full anti-democracy from the start.

What does this have to do with democracy, pro- or anti-?

Re: One of biggest frauds in U.S. farm history

#112

Post by AdrianB1 »

TwoBit wrote: post #69
tasty_freeze wrote: post #38

It is obvious to everyone that due to the economic advantages of cheating, there needs to be some kind of inspection and certification program. Not that everyone is a cheater, but there will be cheaters, and it will put pressure on the non-cheaters to cheat too. The same people who bitch about big government will strangle inspection programs via budget cuts, and then when something like this story comes out, use it a…

According to libertarian philosophy, the public soon finds out about such cheats and takes their business elsewhere. Thus little oversight is needed.

You have read the wrong book about libertarian philosophy.

Re: One of biggest frauds in U.S. farm history

#113

Post by AdrianB1 »

pintxo wrote: post #110
noonespecial wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the punishment levied by the government costs less than the gain from the crime, I think its just called taxes .

Taxes != punishment

They are more than punishment. You are punished for living in a place, you are punished for earning money, the excuse is that taxes are a payment for services but taxes are the only "service" where you pay a percent of your proerty value or income and not a fixed amount. Just imagine you pay groceries a percentage of income, not a fixed dollar amount per product and you can see why taxes are not what they say they are.

Re: One of biggest frauds in U.S. farm history

#114

Post by ceejayoz »

markdown wrote: post #91
ceejayoz wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's silly, like saying breathing chlorine is safe because it's a component in table salt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper(II)_sulfate#Toxicologic...

No, it's like saying eating trace amounts of copper is safe as proven by the fact humans have been doing that since forever, and by the fact that health authorities endorse it (hospitals have copper piping).

The enormous and simple point you're missing: just like chlorine versus sodium chloride, copper sulfate is not the same thing as plain old copper.

Re: One of biggest frauds in U.S. farm history

#115

Post by Jedd »

whyenot wrote: post #89
Jedd wrote: post #47

> ... is fed to cattle and chickens, whose meat is also sold at a premium [...] because a growing number of consumers are willing to pay more for protein that comes from animals raised on a natural, organic diet. Consumers have been misled - cattle's natural diet is grass, not grains. Chickens will opportunistically eat grains and seeds, but if given the opportunity will eagerly eat a blend of greens and insects & wo…

When I was at UC Davis I took an Animal Science class called “Ruminant Digestion and Nutrition.” We learned you can feed cows grains, hay, even sawdust. They can live and thrive on all those things as long as they also get trace minerals. That is the magic of having a rumen.

Absolutely -- though it's the benefit of all four stomachs that comes into play there. Anything with some lignen in it, along with a salt block (or urea block) gets them pretty much everything they need, because they can manufacture their own amino acids.

This doesn't detract from the fact that feeding them as much grains as they can eat -- not too dissimilar from the pate gooses -- is highly questionable.

Re: One of biggest frauds in U.S. farm history

#116

Post by Jedd »

bumby wrote: post #53
Jedd wrote: post #47

> ... is fed to cattle and chickens, whose meat is also sold at a premium [...] because a growing number of consumers are willing to pay more for protein that comes from animals raised on a natural, organic diet. Consumers have been misled - cattle's natural diet is grass, not grains. Chickens will opportunistically eat grains and seeds, but if given the opportunity will eagerly eat a blend of greens and insects & wo…

Just to add a little clarity, beef cattle all start eating grass and generally continue for a large portion of their life. It’s just whether or not they are “finished” on grass or grain. I’m not aware of farms using an “exclusively grain-based diet”

To clarify your clarity.

Beef cattle historically have started on milk, and then moved to pasture.

In industrialised countries, beef cattle are fed on grains for most or all of their lives. Perhaps for marketing reasons, I'm not sure, in some places, for some percentage of the herd, they're finished on pasture.

Most CAFOs, as others have noted, are primarily started and completed with grain.

Re: One of biggest frauds in U.S. farm history

#117

Post by Jedd »

MiroF wrote: post #56
Jedd wrote: post #47

> ... is fed to cattle and chickens, whose meat is also sold at a premium [...] because a growing number of consumers are willing to pay more for protein that comes from animals raised on a natural, organic diet. Consumers have been misled - cattle's natural diet is grass, not grains. Chickens will opportunistically eat grains and seeds, but if given the opportunity will eagerly eat a blend of greens and insects & wo…

i'm curious what natural means in the context of animal species that are relative newcomers and have always been domesticated

What animal species do you believe are relative newcomers?

I'm assuming here that you mean species that have come into being since humans stopped being hunter gatherers -- let's say 10k ya.

For me, natural means what they evolved to consume. So for cattle, and their genetic ancestors, it'd be grass, with perhaps some shrubby plants and trees.

It certainly wasn't grains, for obvious reasons.

Re: One of biggest frauds in U.S. farm history

#118

Post by pintxo »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #113
pintxo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes != punishment

They are more than punishment. You are punished for living in a place, you are punished for earning money, the excuse is that taxes are a payment for services but taxes are the only "service" where you pay a percent of your proerty value or income and not a fixed amount. Just imagine you pay groceries a percentage of income, not a fixed dollar amount per product and you can see why taxes are not what they say they ar…

I am happy for anyone proposing a better option to finance a modern society than taxes. As long as this is not the case, I find it hard to understand to see anyone, surely enjoying the benefits of a working modern society, describing the means to finance those benefits as a punishment.

Re: One of biggest frauds in U.S. farm history

#119

Post by mrosett »

strainer wrote: post #105
mrosett wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article, there’s no way to distinguish organic grain from standard grain. So if by all accounts “organic” is a marketing ploy, why should the government spend money on an inspection program to facilitate that? Let the farmers pay a private certifying authority.

They do. It is not wise to infer controversial information from ambiguous journalistic language. I typed "us organic certification cost" into google, and it helpfully quoted this at the top of the page [1] : > Certification costs vary depending on the size of your production operation and on the accredited agency you choose to use. In general, organic certification costs run between $200 – $1500. Your costs will incl…

If you're going to be condescending, please actually engage with my point.

I wasn't claiming that nobody pays for certification. I was specifically questioning why it's a government agency that they are paying. "Organic" is clearly a marketing term (as discussed in the first link you provided). It's not a safety-related term as (at least in theory) all produce that's sold should be safe to eat. I don't see the reason for a government agency to be involved there.

Re: One of biggest frauds in U.S. farm history

#120

Post by Jedd »

fouc wrote: post #96
paganel wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about beef but I can guarantee you that there's a ton of difference between the eggs produced by my parents' chicken (they raise them "organically", so to speak, i.e. they do subsistence agriculture) and the eggs that I can purchase from the supermarket closest to me. And the difference is in favour of my parents' chicken. The same discussion is valid for the chicken meat.

It's fairly easy to visually tell if the egg came from a free range chicken, the yolk is a dark orange color.

This isn't necessarily the case.

Free range chickens will produce eggs with varying colour throughout the year.

Some consumers have been told that dark orange equates to healthy / free-range chickens -- so some farmers use colour additives to the feed to adjust the colour of the yolks.

Post reply on HN