This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 10:10am and is filed under Meat, Media and information, Ranching, Agriculture, Farming, Food Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I love it when I find something that makes my job easier!
There is a new site that addresses many of the issues, myths and misconceptions about animal agriculture. Here’s a sample:
MYTH
Farming in the U.S. is controlled by large corporations, which care about profits and not about animal welfare.
FACT
There are 2.1 million farms in the U.S., and according to a May 2006 report on the structure and finances of U.S. Farms, exactly the same numbers counted by the 1997 Census of Agriculture. The 2006 report found that the vast majority of America?s farms (98%) are family-farms.
The study also discovered that 61% of all farms did not participate in any farm program in 2003. This finding clearly indicates that only a minority of farmers receive agricultural subsidies. For more information on the report, click here.
I’ve added the Animal Agriculture Alliance to our blog roll for future reference
July 15th, 2008 at 12:54pm
Some useful correctives to some myths, but beware the fine print. Using percentages can mask the reality that big commercial farms dominate the production, even though the farms may be owned by a family. And citing “percentage points” for the increase in contract farming is a bit misleading. ERS says: “Marketing and production contracts covered 41 percent of the value of U.S. agricultural production in 2005, up from 39 percent in 2003, 36 percent in 2001, and a substantial increase over 28 percent in 1991 and 11 percent in 1969.” (Economic Information Bulletin EIB35). Another way to say that is that contract farming increased by 14 percent in 4 years:-)
July 15th, 2008 at 1:33pm
Sara — thanks for pointing out this website!
July 16th, 2008 at 9:48pm
Bill:
You make a very valid point. In fact, one of my frustrations in writing for this blog is the lack of good, UNBIASED data. Often, I find the frequently quoted statistics on both sides to be more or less true, but they are presented piecemeal and therefor distort the true picture.
Thanks for the additional numbers. Even as I posted, I was wondering what percent of production was from family farms.