To the Editor:
The livestock industry is changing. New technology to reduce pollution and contain particulates on site is being developed. Why is not it being used? Please ask your local pharmacist if the avian flu and swine flu now make up 50 percent of the flu vaccine we take every year. They will confirm that it is.
According to the National Center for Disease Control (CDC), disease spreading between animals and humans is happening. Documentation shows huge issues of pollution, failed contracts, failed infrastructure and producers giving up their family farms based on this failed model of Ag production.
I've been involved in many aspects of agriculture as a crop and livestock producer, CAFO operator, hog buyer and more. I see the changes in farming and the livestock industry firsthand. Profits have shifted from the farmer to the corporate owners at the top of a pyramid type structure. Foreign investors from China, Brazil, Canada etc., reap the benefits while leaving little profit for those at the bottom.
This style of agriculture is already obsolete. It has caused massive taxpayer bailouts with disease outbreaks, massive pollution issues which in too many cases cannot be reversed, human health issues and so it goes.
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I will close with this quote from Robert Kennedy Jr.
"I always saw pollution as theft, and I always thought why should somebody be able to pollute the air, which belongs to all of us, or destroy a river or a waterway, which is supposed to belong to the whole community?"
Frank Kloucek
Scotland
