“Back to the Shire”

I am not so naive as to suggest that we can recapture an idyllic agrarian past. For one thing, I am not sure an idyllic agrarian past ever existed, even in Bag End. Pre-industrial villages were not misery-free. Back-breaking toil, early death, and the plague could be found in Old World communities. What agrarians and [...]

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American Food Industry: A Shortage of Long-Term Perspective

Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients [...]

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A Poultry Farmer Speaks on Factory-Farmed Chickens

People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It’s wrong. They’re packed body to body, and can’t escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It’s wrong. They feel their [...]

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A Poultry Farmer on the Meat We Eat

Why are entire flocks of industrial birds dying at once? And what about the people eating those birds? Just the other day, one of the local pediatricians was telling me he’s seeing all kinds of illnesses that he never used to see. Not only juvenile diabetes, but inflammatory and autoimmune diseases that a lot of [...]

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Frank Reese on the Duties of a Poultry Farmer

If you don’t want that responsibility, don’t become a farmer. Because that’s what it takes to do it right. And if you can’t do it right, don’t do it. It’s that simple. And I’ll tell you another thing: if consumers don’t want to pay the farmer to do it right, they shouldn’t eat meat. Frank [...]

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