is the title of an episode of The Nature or Things that I watched on DVD from the library. I don't know how old it is and again it was not all new to me but it was very very wonderful to see green, trees, fields, and animals roaming freely in the foothills of the Rockies. Yes, I am feeling very deprived of nature at the moment, especially hearing about daffodils and cherry blossom from Europe. I am currently pressuring my husband into moving somewhere greener where we are not buried under snow and ice for six months and then wade through deep puddles for another month, before finally by mid- or end of May the first bits of green spring up. Sorry, I can't handle this!
Back to the film. First of all, all the good examples of agriculture came from Alberta. There was the farmer with rare breed cattle & pigs, the farmer with organic pigs & chickens, and the farmer way in the Southwest of AB who raises organic cattle in the foothills. He belongs to a Co-op of 5 or 6 farmers that all got certified organic. It's better for the land, the livestock, the people, not only the farmer but also the consumer. This last farmer made the statement that some people make donations to organisations whose goal is to conserve and protect nature but when they go shopping they roll their eyes at the high organic meat prices and buy the cheap (bad) stuff instead. I agree. I do it although not often because we eat meat only once per week. At this point I should buy organic because it's not going to ruin us financially. Leaves me with the problem to get to where the organic meat is ... If you eat lots of meat though I guess buying it organic will leave way bigger holes in your pocket than the occasional donation. At least we don't donate money on a weekly basis, more like every couple of months. But his point is right: With what we buy we make a big statement about what we want and what we will not accept and supply follows demand, right?!
Second, the bad example came again from the US, North Carolina to be exact. Apparently it's THE pig country of the USA and of course the pigs are raised in crowded, feed lot conditions. The sewage generated by the pigs sits in ponds, smelling horrendeously, until it gets sprayed onto fields. The fields receive way more sewage though than they can cope with and the sewage seeps right down into the ground water and waterways. Consequently fishes die and the waterways sooner or later collapse. What's being done about it? Not much because the hog industry denies all accusations and surely being such a big industry they will have politicians "under control". Here's a great article from back in the 1990s: Watch out for killer algae: years of dumping hog wastes into North Carolina rivers has created a monster
Also in the US, around 90% of all antibiotics are fed preventatively to healthy livestock, and more than 3/4 of the grains grown in the US is fed to livestock as well.
Last but not least, I don't like the title of the documentary. Organic farming, or farming in a way where the livestock is respected and kept humanely and eats grass instead of grain and antibiotics should be the only way of farming. Isn't it terrible that our agriculture has gone so far that the natural approach to farming as it had been done for a long time before the industrial revolution is now the "alternative"!?
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