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Six nonprofits today filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asking the FTC to investigate Cargill, Inc., and enjoin the company from making false and misleading claims about its turkey products sold under the Shady Brook Farms and Honeysuckle White brands.
In the complaint, the groups — Venceremos, Mighty Earth, Animal Equality, Organic Consumers Association, Family Farm Action Alliance and Socially Responsible Agricultural Project — said Cargill uses its “independent family farmers” labeling and marketing claims to falsely imply that the turkey brands have far-reaching benefits for workers, animals and the environment when in fact the turkeys used in the two brands come from large, corporate-controlled factory farms.
“Far from the bucolic family farms portrayed by Cargill’s marketing, Cargill’s actual production methods exploit contract farmers and slaughterhouse workers, systematically abuse animals and cause grave harms to the environment,” the complaint reads.
A growing interest in health and heath food has helped drive consumer demand for fish to an all-time high. A diet rich in fish has grown so popular that global fish consumption jumped 122% from 1990 to 2018, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
A wrongful death lawsuit tied to COVID-19 infections in a Waterloo pork processing plant alleges that during the initial stages of the pandemic, Tyson Foods ordered employees to report for work while supervisors privately wagered money on the number of workers who would be sickened by the deadly virus.
Chen Yun’s pigs stopped eating, then developed a fever. Within a week, all 10,000 on his farm in Jiangxi, in southeast China, had died of African swine fever (ASF). In 2018-19 the virus affected every province and led to the slaughter of half the country’s pigs.
After graduating from high school in 1987, Tim Brandt started raising hogs on his family’s Ohio farm. Housed in barns with straw-bedded pens, hundreds of pigs moved freely inside and outside. “We had no crates, no stalls, nothing,” he said.
This time last year, Tyrone Gustafson’s small Iowa slaughterhouse and butchering facility, Story City Locker, was operating at about 80 percent capacity. Today, he estimates the demand has surged to approximately 120 percent and his slaughter and butchering schedule is booked out through the end of 2021.
In recent months, meatpacking companies in different parts of the world have been associated with large clusters of COVID-19 infections. The Tönnies meat-processing plant in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, was temporarily closed, and U.S.-based pork processor Smithfield became a major focus of the disease in South Dakota, one of the country’s least-populated states. In Brazil, complaints abound about COVID-19 at slaughterhouses: 20% of the industry’s workers have been infected, according to the National Confederation of Workers in Food and Related-Industries (CNTA).
For family farmers like Hans Breitenmoser, the odds of catching COVID-19 on the job are slim. Social distancing is not exactly a challenge when you’re farming more than 1,300 acres in rural Wisconsin. But Breitenmoser is one of many Wisconsin farmers who are showing solidarity with others in the food supply chain who are at the pandemic’s epicenter — meatpackers and food processing plant employees.
Today, Representatives Chellie Pingree (D-ME) and Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) introduced The Strengthening Local Processing Act, a comprehensive bill that addresses acute livestock supply chain issues and supports small meat and poultry processing plants.
Around the end of March, Chris Swenson thought he had a problem with his Web site. Swenson is the head of Swenson ranches, a cattle operation in Elgin and Stamford that’s been in his family since 1882. It was started by his great-great-grandfather Svante Magnus Swenson, Texas’ first immigrant from Sweden.
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