Wednesday, March 11, 2009

growing the small farm

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/opinion/11hayes.html

Here is a opinion piece about that piece of legislation my friend Robbin was telling me about. It's a national ID program for livestock. Which I suppose would include our goats and sheep, even though they are just pets. This would aid in locating any food posioning outbreaks. at least that is their justification.

I don't like it, It smells funny. I mean, my compost pile doesn't smell that bad, and it's full of manure. Ed and I are really liking our compost pile, since reading about it and turning it, we go look at it everyday, but that is not the point.

It's right up there with patenting fruit trees. It's wrong. One of the basic rights of being a human on this planet, is the ability, if one has the inclination, to produce thier own food, and barter their extra production with their neighborhood. The nice couple down the street, who are trying to supplement their income by selling firewood and baking pies, would have to register their cow.

Again, I'm still processing all of this information, and I'm not sure what to do with it.

4 comments:

  1. they were talking about compost on martha stewert (<3)yesterday. you should look it up!

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  2. At first glance, this sounds like a great idea; where I live (mid-west Michigan) we had a deer found with CDW (Chronic Wasting Disease) on one of the deer farms, which has resulted in the entire county being essentially on “lock down” and hunting season was fraught with all kinds of new rules and regulations. Now, the potential to track disease would have been beneficial, but in this case, it’s deer, which are abundant in this area and tracking those being raised on farms would have meant nothing when the concern was centered more on the wild deer. And the cost that many of the local neighbors who keep a few chickens, a small herd of sheep and what-not would be insane when most of these animals are contained, not being traded and sold and the products that they produce are generally used for the family or sold at a road side stand. There’s little chance that the farmer with a roadside stand is ever going to put out a recall on the eggs he sold last week. Additionally, the idea of tracking livestock smacks a little too close to tracking humans for my taste. Call me extreme, but I figure the more the government does to track the things around us, the closer they can come to tracking the humans.

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  3. Wait until they start charging you when your animals fart....

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