Food & Farming

I’ve wanted to write about my website’s Food & Farming Domain for some time, but where to begin? It’s such a complicated and vast topic. Now, however, I’ve found a way in by identifying some of the current issues and in the next post highlighting possible answers.

Industrialization began just 80 years ago, after World War II when the factories were still humming when many big industrial, food, and agriculture companies utilized the existing technology. For example, this is how canola oil entered our food. Now we’re trying to take it out.

Let’s start with a quote from Matt Stoller who keeps an eye on the bigger picture. “I’ve noticed a trend in virtually every industry I’ve looked at, from baby formula to beef to Boeing. It’s an incentive problem that most people in corporate America will recognize; to do things that are good for the individual is bad for the company. Usually what happens is that monopolists or cartels impose bureaucratic hurdles inside an industry, which manifest as endless red tape, junk fees, bullshit certification requirements, exclusive dealing arrangements, kickbacks, and fake pricing.

“America has some of the most fertile land in the world, and has always been a place with cheap food, so much abundance in fact that we were a powerhouse exporter. But today, we don’t actually grow enough food, because the knowledge passed down from generations of farmers is being destroyed. A few months ago, Bloomberg reported that the USDA found that as of 2023, the U.S. is a net food importer rather than an agricultural commodity net exporter.

“For decades, the conversation about trade has been about how our manufacturing sector has been destroyed by foreign imports. The political deal underpinning this arrangement was that America would provide global security through our military, Wall Street would be the center of global finance, and U.S. farmers would export surplus grains. But what we are now seeing is that this deal was a mirage; the same trends that hit our manufacturing sector are hitting our agricultural sector.”

The U.S. cattle inventory is the smallest it has been since the 1950s. The reason for this trend in beef as well as poultry and pork is clear and easy to prove – monopoly power. It’s the same as the current egg production and earlier egg shortages in 2025. From the standpoint of farming, at the start of the 20^th century, farmers comprised 41% of the American workforce. Today, farmers make up about 1% and of this number a tiny percent are farming entirely outside the factory system.

New Trends Require New Definitions – Fake and Fact

• Greenwashing. This refers to misleading corporate marketing practices that claim to be more environmentally friendly or wholesome than they are. It includes misleading statements, puffy language, or irrelevant information to create a false impression of healthier food and sustainable farming/meat processing practices. The packaging often comes with nature-inspired imagery designed to attract consumers.  Examples abound, but here is a good checklist of what is fake and what is fact.
• Cage-free vs. Free Range and Organic  
  • Cage-free means the poultry doesn’t live in cages, but can still be crammed into a barn with 20,00 – 40,000 other poultry, effectively unable to get outdoors.
  • Free Range means poultry may have as little as 2-square feet of outdoor area per bird. Government requirements do not specify the amount of time outdoors or what “outdoors” actually means.
  • Organic. Poultry eats solely organic feed, has outdoor access, and not given hormones or antibiotics.
• Pasture-raised Poultry means free to roam, scratch and peck. (Improving the soil at the same time).
• Country of Origin labeling on beef. Before 2015, “product of the U.S.A.” on a beef label meant that the cow was born, raised, and slaughtered in one of the 50 states. After 2015, “product of the U.S.A.” meant that the animal could be born, raised, and slaughtered in many other countries around the world, but if any value was added (slicing, grinding, or repackaging), it could be legally labeled U.S.A.
• Grassfed Beef. Could mean most anything –grassfed as a calf, then sent to a grain-only feedlot; could be grassfed until being sold, but then fed on grain until slaughtering; or born, grazes, and feeds on grass it’s entire life.

The Introduction of Bovaer

Bovaer is the chemical name for 3-NOP or DSM073738 that is currently being injected into lactating dairy herds in many countries, including the U.S. Listed as an additive, it is being greenwashed as a cow and climate-friendly methane reducer. It was developed by the Dutch-Swiss conglomerate DSM-Firmenich and received funding from Bill Gates.

Denmark’s new law requires dairy farms with more than 50 cows to use Bovaer daily or face fines of up to 10,000 DKK ($1,450 USD). Despite industrial and governmental approval, in late 2024, some dairy farmers in Denmark reported health issues with their cows after using Bovaer. Symptoms included suffering from stomach cramps, fevers, miscarriages, sudden collapses, and drastic drops in milk production. Farmers say symptoms disappear when Bovaer is removed from the feed and return when it’s reintroduced—a pattern that’s prompted calls for a government pause.

Bovaer is now being incorporated into daily feed rations in small quantities, such as a quarter teaspoon per cow/per day in the U.S. and enables farmers to generate carbon credits as an additional income stream. The FDA stated that Bovaer “is a drug” but opted to classify it as a “feed additive” and to bypass the more rigorous animal drug approval process. The USDA awarded $22.8 million to Dairy Farmers of America to promote Bovaer’s use in key dairy-producing states. Just months before the Danish crisis, a BlackRock-owned subsidiary, ABB, constructed the first large-scale global Bovaer production plant in Dalry, Scotland, to “accelerate” adoption of the drug worldwide. According to ABB, Bovaer’s supposed climate benefit—cutting cow methane by 30-45%—would actually reduce total atmospheric methane by roughly 0.0000000822%. This is an imperceptible shift achieved by potentially affecting the milk supply and begs the question – if Bovaer is harming cows, what is it doing to the people drinking their milk?

The Movement Away From the Industrialization of Our Food and Farming

Regenerative Farming is a term worth learning more about. Regenerative grazing is an agricultural practice that uses soil health and adaptive livestock management principles to improve farm profitability, human and ecosystem health, and food system resiliency. Regenerative agriculture emphasizes reduction or elimination of synthetic inputs and tillage; increased diversity of plant, animal, and microbial life; and the generation of sufficient revenue to build viable farm businesses and to fairly compensate farm labor.

This is really returning to the farming practices of several generations past. It includes three principles: Good land management – giving up the use of harmful industrialized pesticides and chemical fertilizers; Good animal welfare – stop treating animals with drugs and cruelty by allowing them to express their instinctive behavior; Good community development – bringing back small farming communities that have been devastated by modern commodity production systems. Regenerative farmers consider the gold standard when animals have 24/7 access to the outdoors in a pasture and weather shelters.

The graphic above is provided by the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation Volume 76, 2021 – Issue 1: Accelerating regenerative grazing to tackle farm, environmental, and societal challenges in the upper MidwestbyElisabeth Spratt, Jane Jordan , Jonathan Winsten. The checkmarks indicate well-established factors; the question marks indicate the need for more evidence.

My next post in late December will feature a six-generation farmer, Will Harris, who turned White Oak Pastures upside down, wrote a book – A Bold Return to Giving A Damn, and restored the impoverished community of Bluffton, Georgia into a thriving small town. I can’t wait to tell you more about him and his regenerative farming practices.

Unlike the industrialized farming that we have today, Harris provides a list of six key natural cycles that will bring back healthy farms, communities, and food. They are: the carbon cycle, the energy cycle, the water cycle, the mineral cycle, the microbial cycle, and the community dynamic that ties these cycles together. As Harris says: “Nature is complex and its cycles can’t be isolated because Mother Nature can’t be broken down into neat categories. What is good for the water cycle is good for the carbon cycle, and so on.” This simple yet astute observation would go right over the heads of the food industrialists who force every aspect of life into silos of technological opportunity. Harris’s story is one of the most interesting and hopeful I’ve read in a long time, and I’m excited to share some of it with you. See you soon.

“The form of the farm must answer to the farmer’s feeling for the place,

its creatures, and its work. It is a never-ending effort of fitting

together many diverse things… It must have within its limits the completeness

of an organism or an ecosystem, or of any other good work of art.”

–Wendell Berry

Featured image: Zyanya Citlalli