"But it’s all different now, of course. Vegans can afford to criticise current farming systems on the back of the modern lifestyle, which they enjoy. But they should remember that all of the great industrial and technological breakthroughs achieved by mankind have their origins in the agricultural revolution that started some 10,000 years ago.
Had it not been for the intensification of farming practices, the opportunities to achieve all of these other wonderful breakthroughs would never have happened.
Or let me put it another way. Our forefathers only got the chance to think about the bigger picture once they, no longer, had to spend all day hunting and foraging for food. In essence, farmers took over this responsibility on their behalf."
"Unless your heart is forged of titanium, you cannot be in favor of cruelty to animals. It’s encouraging to know that Western society no longer tolerates the routine abuse of animals, wild or domestic — and such abuse was, until fairly recently, all too routine at circuses and elsewhere. But the crusade against Ringling, SeaWorld and other animal entertainment purveyors is something more. PETA, after all, holds that drinking milk and wearing leather shoes amount to animal exploitation. This movement doesn’t simply have animal welfare as its goal; it has an ideological component: the idea that human beings have no special moral standing in the universe and cannot claim dominion over other living creatures, no matter how well they treat them.
The PETA motto sums it up: “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way.” For the truest believers, the idea is, any use of an animal by a human is abuse.
PETA wants people to go not just vegetarian (cows feel fear) but vegan (eating eggs exploits chickens). It opposes not just experiments on living animals in labs but the dissection of already dead animals in school biology classes. The ASPCA and the Humane Society have campaigned to ban horse-drawn carriages in New York City. Some activists want to prevent the buying and selling of dogs (only “companion animals” rescued from shelters are OK). Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer, a self-professed opponent of “speciesism,” wrote in 1979 that “the life of a newborn [human] is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.”
The implications of this position are sweeping. It might be OK to teach Fido to fetch (as long as you use positive reinforcement), but PETA and others maintain that using dogs to guide the blind is morally problematic (service dogs have to “work day after day”). Among true believers, it’s morally wrong to ride a horse or show a dog at Westminster. The movement’s blanket opposition to animal testing of drugs discounts the desperation of parents whose baby might be saved. And don’t even think about buying a sweater (sheep exploitation), let alone that fur coat."
"Researchers in a New York cabbage patch are planning the first release on American soil of insects genetically engineered to die before they can reproduce. It’s a pesticide-free attempt to control invasive diamondback moths, a voracious consumer of cabbage, broccoli and other cruciferous crops that’s notorious for its ability to shrug off every new poison in the agricultural arsenal."
"Shelton is doing field tests of gene-altered moths at Cornell’s Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, 160 miles west of Albany. Those experiments began in 2015, but until now were restricted to net-covered plots to keep the moths from straying. Now, he’s awaiting a permit from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to release the moths freely in a 10-acre cabbage patch at the research center. He hopes to do that this summer."
"That pipe is close to the ground. When a tractor pulls this planter across a field, dust will get sucked into this opening, along with air. Inside the planting mechanism, "the air is rushing past that seed, it's laden with dirt, and it's acting like a sandblaster," Schaafsma says. That dirt grinds a little bit of the neonicotinoid coating from the seed, and then carries the pesticide dust with it as it exhausts from the planter, straight up into the air.
That's normally how the planter works. But Schaafsma has made some changes on this one, outfitting it with special dust traps, similar to high-quality vacuum cleaner filters. "We're probably filtering 99 percent of what comes out of the exhaust," he says.
Schaafsma thinks that this equipment, if installed on all seed planters, would eliminate most of the risk to bees from neonicotinoid-treated seeds."
""The evidence is clear that organic farming on any meaningful scale is significantly less land efficient than conventional farming. That may, in fact, be part of the motivation for organic opposition to GMOs – they know they can’t compete. With increased use of GMO technology, the production difference is likely to increase. Imagine if scientists are successful in tweaking photosynthesis or making varieties that fix their own nitrogen. The organic lobby needs to stop our scientific advance in agriculture if they are to remain viable."
"The ACA has been a mixed bag for agriculture. While many large farms balked at the requirement to ensure their employees (experts say it cost farm employers in California about $1 per hour per employee working in the field), most small-scale farmers often opted out of insurance all together before the ACA, or sought off-farm employment in order to get coverage through an employer’s plan. A 2015 USDA blog post notes that prior to the ACA, rural families struggled to find affordable healthcare, “paying an average of nearly half of their costs out of their own pockets” and that “one in five farmers is in debt because of medical bills.”