Consumers are key to building a better food and farming system. You can help by supporting farmers and ranchers who produce meat using practices that protect your health, the rights of food & farm workers, animal welfare, the environment, and climate stability. You’ll find these producers online, at your local farmers markets, through CSAs, and in your local organic retail stores.Here are 13 reasons to #BoycottBigMeat and build a better food & farming system:
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The Health and Human Services Department has agreed to an industry-backed plan to effectively strip the FDA of oversight of certain genetically modified animals — the latest instance of Trump political appointees overriding the agency's scientists.
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In the video above, American cattle rancher Shad Sullivan from North Texas is interviewed by host Patrick Bet-David about the future of the cattle and meat industry. In April 2020, Sullivan posted a YouTube video discussing how U.S. farmers are being forced to dump the food supply — plowing under vegetable crops, euthanizing millions of chickens, aborting sows and burying feeder pigs, and dumping milk by the hundreds of thousands of gallons.
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Nearly all soya is used by the farming sector as a livestock feed for chickens, pigs and other animals. The biggest users are chicken producers; soya makes up around a quarter of the diet of birds. It has been the cheapest source of protein poultry available to farmers since the ban on meat and bonemeal after BSE. Soya remains key to producing fast-growing, low-priced chickens.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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