"Isabella Woodhouse" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote:
"Billy" wrote in message

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In article ,
"Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote:
[...]
They do not want to go out and separately negotiate
orders of corn of this magnitude from 100 separate small
farmers who can each only supply a ton of corn.

You didn't read the chapter. Chem ferts kill top soil. The less top
soil, the more chem ferts, and more pollution of ground water and
fishing areas. Who pays to remediate the land and the water? The tax
payer does. It is called "privatize the profits and socialize
the costs". The price of the box is only part of the price.

You don't actually have to remediate the land and water, you
know. At one time we didn't. People would just use the
resources until they were all gone, then move to a new place.

What? When the Earth's population was only a few million? Surely you
are not defending this practice in the current timeframe?


I never was.

However, nowadays people are valuing clean water and
clean land more than they used to. So now there is a cost
for those things that we didn't have before, which is now being
factored in. That is why you have to file environmental
impact statements nowadays when you want to build a factory.
They didn't require environmental impact statements when
those large farms were created years ago. So the real question
is, are we going to apply current laws retroactively?

No, I don't think that is the real question at all. Environmental laws
have been on the books for decades. Nowadays? The Clean Water Act goes
back to at least the 1960s, no? That's nearly 50 years FCOL. Since
when has it been legal to pollute and contaminate your neighbor's
property with a stinking mountain of pig or cow shit (pardon my French)
like those created by factory "farms"?

You should ask Billy. He is the one that is asserting that such behavior
is legal. From his list post:

"...the more chem ferts, and more pollution of ground water and
fishing areas. Who pays to remediate the land and the water? The tax
payer does..."

YOU just said here that pollution of ground water from chem ferts is
against the Clean Water Act. If so, then Billy is full of baloney.

What are you talking about and
how is that possibly a meaningful defense for destruction of other
people's property?


You can't have it both ways. Either what the factory farms are doing
is legal or it isn't. If it is then what I said stands and your out of
order -
as I said, when the farms got going, people didn't value the environment
the way they do today. If what they are doing is -illegal- then Billy is
out of order when he rants against them, implying there's nothing we can
do.

So, make up your mind.

If not, then how are you going to justify taking current
environmental requirements for creating a large farm and
apply it to large farms that were created years ago?

What "environmental requirements for creating a large farm" are you
talking about? How is this even relevant? What are you talking about
when you refer to "large farms" created years ago? How many years ago?
I'm just trying to understand what you mean here. Keep in mind that the
average size farm in the 1950s was around 200 acres.

It has only been in the last 10 years that ranting against agribusinesses
has become fashionable due to environmental concerns. Now, farm
subsidies, that's a different matter - people have been complaining about
farmers being propped up by the government since the 70's. But before
the advent of the large agribusinesses, nobody was ranting against large
farms because, as you pointed out, they didn't exist.

Billy's problem is that he sees that large agribusinesses are bad, which
so far is true. However he is unwilling to grasp the simple fact that it
is not the agribusinesses fault that they are bad. It is the CONSUMER'S
fault.

Every time someone walks into the supermarket and picks up a box
of Frosted Flakes for their kids, instead of getting the bulk sugar corn
flakes from the bulk food bin which cost half of Frosted Flakes, they
are contributing to the problem.

If people didn't buy all of the processed food they do, then the large
food manufacturers like General Mills wouldn't be setting up large
production runs of Frosted Flakes and demanding 100 tons of
corn at a time. (or whatever it is) There would be no need for the
agribusineses and they wouldn't exist. Billy needs to be ranting and
railing against the dumb consumers not the agribusinesses.


Ted