By John Chisholm

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Once upon a time, there were some family farmers who each had a bit of pasture, and on their pasture they had cows  that grazed and chickens that scratched in the grass.

The cows ate the naturally growing grass and the chickens foraged for bugs and seeds, as they were designed to do. They lived in the fresh air and sunshine, just as cows and chickens had done for millennia, and the healthful grass, sunlight, and fresh air kept them healthy. They soaked in the sunlight and turned it into vitamin-D. They ate their natural diet and absorbed vitamin-A. The cows’ milk was full of beneficial bacterial flora that kept it free of pathogens, and their offspring thrived.

Because the family farmers didn’t have a lot of land, their pastures could only support a few cows and a limited number of chickens, but their animals were healthy, gave healthful milk and eggs and produced healthful meat.

Then some smart guys got the bright idea that they could make a lot more money by not limiting the number of livestock they raised according to the natural carrying capacity of expensive pastureland. Instead of allowing cows to move about the pasture, they’d pack as many cows as could fit into a tiny plot, thereby reducing costs significantly while increasing the number of cows greatly.

But how could a tiny plot of land grow enough grass to feed a large number of cows? For that matter, how could any grass grow at all on a tiny plot of land on which cows were packed shoulder to shoulder? The bright guys had an answer: they wouldn’t allow the cows to eat any grass at all, disregarding the design of the cows’ digestive system. Instead they would feed them cheap inferior grains, like brewery waste, and would even mix in ground up scrap renderings from the bodies of other cows that had already been slaughtered for meat, turning grass eaters into unwitting meat eaters. In places smaller than the pastures on which only dozens of cows could be raised in a year, now tens or even hundreds of thousands of cows could be raised. An agribusinessman could make a fortune, whereas the family farmer could only modestly get by.

But how could they stop the cows from getting sick when eating a diet so different than what they were designed to eat? The unnatural diet disrupts the cows’ entire system so much that it causes lesions through their stomach walls, liver distress and ultimately massive organ failure and premature death. And what about the cows being packed together so tightly that they can’t even walk away from their own feces, as they naturally do in the pasture? Well the bright guys had an answer for that too. They’d feed the cows cheap antibiotics all day long in their cheap feed, to delay the onset of fatal infection and organ failure. And to get the most meat from the animals in the shortest amount of time and with the smallest amount of grain, they’d feed the cows artificial growth hormones to make them grow as fast as possible. And then they’d slaughter their animals just before massive organ stress turned into massive organ failure.

They did a similar thing with chickens, but in compacted spaces so much smaller with density so much greater that they had to cut off the birds’ beaks to keep them from killing each other.

And then they proclaimed that their animals were just like the animals raised in the pasture. …even though the animals were sickly, stressed and deprived. …even though their meat reflected their stress by lacking the healthful levels of vitamin-D and vitamin-A produced by the cows in the pasture. …even though their milk lacked the beneficial bacterial flora that kept pathogens from taking hold.

But just saying something is so didn’t make the laws of nature change, and these unnatural ways of raising cows and chickens resulted in milk and meats and eggs that made people sick. People demanded something be done to make their food safe. Initially the agribusinessmen refused. But the health problems didn’t go away. Eventually the politicians saw in the situation a way to be popular. And the pressure grew to do something.

Then the bright guys got another idea. They’d agree to let the politicians require safety procedures for their operations, even if they just consisted of elaborate ways of catching the most extreme reactions to their extremely unnatural ways of raising food. They’d still be ahead of the game compared to the natural farmers, because they could amortize the cost of those procedures over the millions of cows that flow in and out of their concentrated animal feeding operations. But they’d be even more ahead of the game by insisting that the elaborate procedures (devised to catch the worst results of unnatural agribusiness) must also be applied to all the remaining small family farms that raised their animals in natural ways that did not cause all the problems and sickness.

So the problems that agribusiness caused could be “solved” by making it too expensive for the family farmer to compete against them. Heck, the expense of the new rules may even pay for itself by eliminating competition. And the agribusiness guys have so much more money than do the small family farmers to lavish on politicians. The politicians would get this “good advice” from the leading authorities from the agribusiness industry, and could then take a stance of “safeguarding the people’s food supply”, while at the same time benefiting the smart agribusiness guys who would funnel them money. Their new laws effectively kill the most viable and natural alternative to the agribusiness insanity. The only losers in all of this are the small natural farmers, the people who want to eat healthful natural food instead of contrived depleted foods, and the vast majority who don’t know how their factory-foods are produced and don’t realize what’s giving them the pandemic of modern chronic diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes and cancers.

In other words, a few smart guys rig the game to harm everyone else so that they can make a fortune. If it wasn’t so tragic, it would be funny.

The latest manifestation of this game is the one-size-fits-all FDA Food Safety Modernization Act now before the U.S. Senate in the form of Senate Bill S. 510, which would require elaborate and expensive procedures on small family farms and slaughtering operations as well as on the giant agribusiness and slaughterhouse factories. Read more about this bill what you can do at http://liberationwellnessblog.com/2010/04/09/wall-street-journal-reporting-on-the-s-510-the-senate-food-safety-bill/.

John Chisholm

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Kevin Brown is President of Liberation Wellness and co-author of the Liberation Diet. He serves as a Fellow on the National Board of Fitness Examiners, and is president of Visionary Trainers. Kevin and his wife Tracy are Chapter leaders for the Weston A. Price foundation, a non-profit organization that is helping restore real food to its rightful place in the American diet.