Short Takes

Criticize the American chicken industry and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is quick to jump on the bandwagon. And jump on is exactly what the animal rights organization did when scientists at John Hopkins University asserted that chicken trucks can spread disease. (See “Who’s playing chicken here?,” Short Takes, Better Farming, January 2009).

PETA suggested that the Maryland Department of Transportation place yellow health hazard signs along roads used by chicken haulers and on the trucks themselves. And then PETA made the following pronouncement: “Most people have heard that the chicken in the freezer case is teeming with bacteria, but now it appears that even driving behind a chicken truck can be hazardous to your health.”

Retail pricing increases are greatly exaggerated, writes Kevin Grier, senior market analyst at the George Morris Centre in Guelph in a report published in November.   

Year over year, September prices jumped seven per cent, according to Statistics Canada’s Consumer Price Index. It’s the biggest increase in 10 years. The average over 10 years is two per cent and decreases were common.

Grier charted price increases and decreases and pointed out that, in September 2007, prices were actually dropping from the year before, accentuating the gain in the subsequent year. The increase in food was largely due to the impact of the Canadian dollar on the value of imports such as fruits and vegetables. Bakery prices also rose by 14 per cent, buoyed up by higher commodity prices.

The Consumers Union of the United States says that Secretary of Agriculture designate Tom Vilsack needs a new job title, Secretary of Food.

“More than 65 per cent of the Department of Agriculture’s budget relates to food consumption, not production,” stated a consumers union press release issued in December after President-elect Barack Obama named former Iowa governor Vilsack to the top ag job in the United States.

Record high feed prices have not been kind to American meat integrators, but some have done better than others.

Focusing on the bottom line, Smithfield Foods squeezed out net income of $4.2 million for its second quarter in fiscal 2008, down from $17.4 million the year before. Hog production losses continued due to high feed costs.

Since announcing a breeding stock kill-down in February, the company has liquidated seven per cent of its U.S. sow herd, with more stock scheduled for culling. Corn costs were cited as being 65 per cent higher than the year before, and cash costs of raising pigs was $63 per hundredweight, compared to $49. However, live hog market prices were $53 per hundredweight, compared to $46 in the same quarter last year.  

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Growers are using the federal Orchards and Vineyards Transition program to clean up obsolete orchards, says Len Troup, chair of the Ontario Tender Fruit Producers’ Marketing Board.

The vegans at People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) must find it hard to stomach spending more money to buy shares in companies that they detest – pork producer Smithfield and chicken-raising Tyson Foods. But buy is what they must do if they are to continue to submit controversial resolutions at annual shareholder meetings of the food giants.

The tremendous increase in the productivity of poultry over 50 years has come at a cost: genetic diversity. That may come back to haunt an industry susceptible to avian influenza, says a study published in November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The study, conducted by an international group of scientists, including those at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Avian Disease and Oncology Laboratory in East Lansing, Mich., and the Department of Animals Sciences, Purdue, West Lafayette, Ind., compared thousands of genetic markers in standard bird flocks and those from commercial breeders.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is getting excited about using Canadian-developed canola as a multi-tasking crop on a farm in a drought-prone part of California.

At a return of a scant $300 an acre, canola is no competition for almond orchards worth 20 times that. But, planted where nothing else will grow anyway, canola may solve some environmental problems.

Foodlink Waterloo is funded by Waterloo Region to encourage the public to buy locally grown food.

The Region also has a health unit which inspects food-selling establishments of various sorts. But now the two are at odds, with Winterbourne farmer Jesse Gingrich caught in the middle.