Editorial Observer: Coming to Terms With the Problem of Global Meat:
"Industrial agriculture is indeed industrial. It is designed to move parts along a conveyor belt, no matter where the parts come from. And if one of the parts proves to be fatally defective — a dairy cow with the staggers, for instance — then shutting down the conveyor nearly always comes far too late.

It has been instructive watching American agriculture respond to this minicrisis. The usual players have retreated to their usual corners. Some cattle growers have publicly praised the beef checkoff program, which collects a small percentage of the sales from every producer for advertising, because it creates the illusion of a unified voice in a time of trouble. Supporters of country-of-origin labeling, which would identify the source of every cut of meat, have promoted its potential virtues, while opponents argue that it would make no difference or be too expensive. The real necessity is to provide accurate, detailed tracking of every individual animal, though the United States Department of Agriculture is poorly equipped to make it happen anytime soon. The inherent logic of all these positions is simply to make the status quo safer, so global meat can go about its business uninterrupted."

But what is needed to avert a major crisis is real change, from the bottom up. The global meat system is broken, as a machine and as a philosophy. In America, meatpacking has gone from being a widely distributed, widely owned web of local, independent businesses into a tightly controlled, cruelly concentrated industry whose assumptions are utterly industrial.

Modern meatpacking plants are enormous automated factories, as void of humans as possible. The machinery, like the now-notorious automated meat-recovery system, is very expensive. Profitability requires an uninterrupted flow of carcasses. To packers, that means that they, rather than independent farmers, should own the cattle, hogs and poultry moving through the line. The federal government agrees. Every effort to outlaw packers' ownership of livestock has failed.

The result is a system in which the average drives out the excellent, and the international drives out the local. I know a large-scale rancher in north-central Wyoming who does everything he can to raise beef cattle of the highest quality. That means good genetics, good grass and as few chemical and pharmaceutical inputs as he can possibly manage. But then the cattle are loaded onto trucks, shipped to feedlots and hauled to slaughter, where they merge with the great river of American meat, indistinguishable from all the rest. There is no real alternative to the concentrated meatpacking and distribution system. Any alternative — grass-fed, organic beef, separately slaughtered, separately marketed — is merely a niche so far.

In science fiction movies, there is often a moment when space colonists talk about "terra-forming" a suitable planet. They mean giving it a breathable atmosphere and terrestrial flora and fauna. We are going through a different process on the one planet we have. We are agri-forming it.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/10/opinion/10SAT3.html