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...because of industry and regulatory negligence, callousness or profit-mongering. At least 143 pesticides and drugs--some deliberately injected into animals, others accumulated when livestock are fed pesticide-treated grain--are known to leave residues in meat and poultry. Only 46 of these are now monitored by the USDA, the agency responsible for inspecting meat, even though 40 are suspected of causing cancer and 18 are suspected of causing birth defects. Antibiotic arsenic compounds, sulfa drugs (long ago linked to cancer), and the infamous diethylstilbestrol (DES), which was found to cause cervical cancer way back in 1971 in daughters...
...Though Time counts on its readers to forget that writers (and editors) with opinions bang out its byline-less features, the author(s) of its Nov. 6 cover story, "The New U.S. Farmer," had obviously studied up on his Adam Smith economics and his Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics in preparation for this defense of U.S. agriculture, "the productivity wonder of the world." Couched in Timese idiom, readers might almost be lulled into believing this bland prose. But beware -- it is really a simplistic, inaccurate polemic dressed up as objective journalism. It is Time at its myth-making best...
Time managed to overlook one USDA study conducted by economist Frank R. Baily. He comments that "we are so conditioned to equate bigness with efficiency that nearly everyone assumes that large-scale undertakings are inherently more efficient." But after a survey of farms in different regions of the country, he concluded that most economies of scale "are achieved by the one-man fully mechanized farm. While the most efficient farm size has increased in the last decade, due mainly to tractor improvements, this 1973 report found that most farmers need a much smaller acreage and capital investment than Pat Benedict...
Time dicounts the importance of agribusiness, using USDA figures which indicate that corporations have only 2 per cent of U.S. farm sales. But the USDA does not include the corporate farmers like Del Monte and Tenneco who produce food for their own processors and packagers because they make no farm sales...
...cite found in 1970 that 22 per cent of the U.S. food supply is produced by corporate farmers and by contract. The American Agriculture Marketing Association predicts that by 1985 corporations will control 75 per cent of our food supply in one of these two ways. And even the USDA admitted in a 1973 report that only cash grain and forage crops, and range livestock will be controlled by independent family farmers in 1985. Pat Benedict, a wheat farmer, is the exception, not the rule...