The American Meat Institute’s Curious ‘Scorched Earth’ Strategy

By Rick Tolman

CEO, National Corn Growers Association

 An old saying states that you can tell the measure of someone by the company they keep.  In that regard, the American Meat Institute is keeping some rather curious company these days as it wages war on an imagined enemy, the corn ethanol industry.  AMI recently signed onto political letters and advertisements with environmental extremists like Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group that they should avoid at all costs. These three organizations have all attacked animal agriculture with the same level of rhetoric as PETA or the Humane Society.

 As the self-proclaimed representative of the “companies that process 95 percent of red meat and 70 percent of turkey in the U.S. and their suppliers throughout America,” AMI really should avoid such curious connections.

I recently asked someone very familiar with the membership of AMI – companies like Tyson’s, Smithfield and Hormel – to help me understand the logic that would persuade AMI to take these actions.  He laughed and said, “You have to realize, these are companies whose business is ‘blood on the floor,’ and all that they can see is short-term.”

Fortunately, most of the rest of agriculture is trying to take a long-term view and has realized that it is high time to put petty differences aside and agree to disagree on certain issues – like ethanol policy, with the realization that we all have much greater battles to fight with those outside of agriculture who are threatening to undermine the very fabric and structure that has made us the most successful and productive sector in the U.S. economy.

Among the challenges common to row-crop and animal agriculture are the following:

• The Humane Society of the United States, whose goal is to completely change the structure of animal agriculture in the United States. If successful, it would result in a significant increase in the cost of meat produced here, drive much of our meat production out of the U.S. and undermine much of the demand base for row crop agriculture.  AMI should be solidly opposed to HSUS and be an active part of the groups that are working to oppose HSUS.  Instead, they are embracing Friends of the Earth, a solid ally of HSUS and a cohort in HSUS efforts.
• Indirect land use change. AMI signed on to letters supporting the application of this mythological impact of biofuels.  In EPA and California Air Resource Board modeling, that single theory changed domestic ethanol and biodiesel from being advanced biofuels to being worse in greenhouse gas measures than gasoline.  If that sticks, where will that put the carbon footprint of the domestic livestock industry – the single-largest user of U.S. corn and soybeans?
• Commodity prices. Seemingly the reason AMI has formed its unholy coalition is to make more corn and soybeans available and at a cheaper price, for the livestock industry and eliminate the competition for such by the ethanol industry.  Yet AMI’s “allies” in this fight roundly condemn corn and soybean production as environmentally unfriendly.  An NRDC representative, in recent Congressional testimony, suggested that we grow “too much” corn in the United States and we ought to be growing less.  NRDC also has promoted eating “grass-fed” over “corn-fed” beef.
• House Ag Committee Chairman Collin Peterson. Regardless of political affiliation, few of us in agriculture can help but be grateful for congressional leadership like that of Rep. Peterson.  Apparently AMI is one of those few. Their friend and ally, Friends of Earth, last month named Chairman Peterson their 2010 “Biofool of the Year.”

 AMI’s high-profile, expensive media and ad campaign is nothing but classic short-term thinking and “blood on the floor” mentality.  What is to gain in the short-run by embracing the very people who are out to put you out of business?  Their recent ad spawned an editorial in the Washington Times this week titled “Stop Big Corn.”  Just as emotional labels like “factory farming” and “corporate farms” are unfortunate, inaccurate and misleading, with more than nine out of 10 farms being family-run, so are labels like “Big Corn.”

The American Meat Institute is doing itself and its industry and all of agriculture a major disservice by engaging in these scorched-earth tactics and being a part of this unholy alliance.  It’s time for some long-term thinking and for all of us in agriculture to work together and not split ourselves apart. There are plenty of folks doing a pretty good job of that – they don’t need any help from AMI.

Activists Should Foot the Bill For Wasting Our Time and Tax $$

Personally, I need to diet, but I would rather not starve….I don’t mean cutting calories by choice either. If the anti-chemical crowd has their way the safest and most often studied chemical of all time called Atrazine will be relegated to history.

Perhaps the only thing more disturbing than this pit bull approach to attacking Atrazine (ok, it’s really more like a whiney 2^nd grader – albiet with a lawyer –  who didn’t get their way) is that the Environmental Protection Agency is risking their credibility by giving these activists yet another audience.

Forbes columnist Jeff Stier, bemoans the craziness in his most recent piece, which he says is transparent from the start because of the filing of the case in Madison County, IL. The shear mention of this locale will make a lawyer chuckle. A friend once told anyone pleading a case here should be required to wear Mickey Mouse ears.

As Stier says, “A lawsuit in the “judicial hellhole” that is Madison County, IL., against the makers of the world’s most widely used herbicide threatens to undermine our way of evaluating risks in this country. If the lawyers–and the anti-chemical, anti-business activists–get their way, American agriculture will be forced back to practices of the pre-industrial age. And that will be only the first step in the “environmentalist” agenda to roll back progress.”

“The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), unfortunately, has now loaned its weight to the activists’ Luddite effort to restrict or ban a number of safe and useful agricultural chemicals in common use–with Atrazine, the most effective weed-killer available, only one of the targets.”

Considering we will have 9 billion people to feed in the near future we might want to be careful about putting the golden goose agriculture represents on the legal barbeque. Personally, I have had enough of this over fed and overindulged crowd that are willing to make millions suffer so they can have a risk free life.

Perhaps the most salient truth in the article is that everything is toxic at some level but harmless in small enough amounts, including things like coffee. Since scientists can now detect substances at parts per trillion, an amount smaller than a drop in an Olympic-sized pool. It is time to stop expending this kind of energy and tax resources on a dead issue and move on.

Don’t Take HFCS Attacks Sitting Down

It seems that every new study that comes out involving high fructose corn syrup, no matter how flawed, makes huge headlines.  The media hype surrounding HFCS would lead the average person to believe that by simply cutting HFCS from their diet they could become the slender, athletic person they have always desired to be.  In a culture that values the quick fix, it is no wonder that this idea is gaining traction.

It is almost indisputable that the U.S. currently faces an obesity epidemic.  With a growing population of people growing in their midsection, our society faces serious repercussions such as decreased life expectancy and increased healthcare spending.  In the face of such a grave situation, it is irresponsible to blithely suggest that simply removing one ingredient from American diets will reverse this trend.

As most responsible, respectable academics concur, obesity results from a combination of factors and not the ingestion of one insidious ingredient.  Instead, sedentary lifestyles and an abundance of affordable food together create a situation where uncontrolled weight gain comes easily.

Don’t buy into the media hype.  Think for yourself.  If the chemical make-up, caloric content and sweetness of sugar and HFCS are nearly identical, why would one product cause more significant weight gain?  If only five percent of the corn crop is used to make HFCS, why would detractors act as if it is a conspiracy to use this safe, affordable product to ensure foods meet market demands?

Taxing and demonizing HFCS will not benefit the obese, the average consumer or our country.  Curing obesity requires positive lifestyle changes that embrace caloric moderation and physical activity.

So show the HFCS detractors that you are smarter than they think.  Examine and analyze information, take responsibility for your own health and do not allow them to demonize our quintessential American crop.   Here’s one great resource.

Fibs, Faux Pas, and Science According to the Beatles

Is it too much to ask for some integrityand just plain honesty in the world? Growing up I probably came across as totally naïve to many of those around me because I believed authority figures like government officials and scientists and most any adult in my life. And you could have convinced me my parents carried the second tablet down the mountain for Moses. The reason was simple…I had no reason not to.

Today, I share trust and dole out faith in the smallest of measures because we seem to be surrounded by fibs, manufactured “facts,” bogus science, and politicians and businessmen that would have been whacked back to the stone age with a ruler by Sister Mary Margaret in third grade.

A quick look at the news this week easily surfaced examples of this kind of fast and loose use of incorrect information, handy subterfuge, and dare I say it…lies.

The first is news from the London Telegraph which notes the venerable United Nations has admitted a report linking livestock to global warming exaggerated the impact of eating meat on climate change or global warming.

The 2006 study, Livestock’s Long Shadow, claimed meat production was responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions – more than transportation.

“Its conclusions were heralded by campaigners urging consumers to eat less meat to save the planet. Among those calling for a reduction in global meat consumption is Sir Paul McCartney.”

Now Sir Paul doesn’t strike me as the scientist type so perhaps that should have been a clue. If Dr. Ringo had made the claim that would have been different. The point is for three years many people have been assured eating meat would leading to global Armageddon brought on by nothing less than cow flatulence. Oh, the indignity.

All the time the truth is that “meat and milk production generates less greenhouse gas than most environmentalists claim and that the emissions figures were calculated differently to the transport figures, resulting in an “apples-and-oranges analogy that truly confused the issue.”

If your jaded self is still with me it’s on to example 2. While we have been blissfully driving about in our trucks and SUVs it seems the oil magnates of the world have been manipulating oil supply numbers for financial gain and to curry political favor. (Insert sound effects of heavy and shocked intake of breath here). (more…)

Flipper & NCGA 1, Food Elitists Nothing!

I have always been a fan of dolphins but after last night’s Oscars I am an even bigger fan. That’s because in the best Documentary Feature category Food Inc., the diatribe against American agriculture, got a good old fashioned smack down by The Cove.

The Cove” follows animal activist Richard O’Barry — who once trained dolphins for the television show “Flipper” — alongside a team of filmmakers as they attempt to document dolphin slaughter in the Japanese fishing village of Taiji.

Food Inc. shows filmmaker Robert Kenner attempting to slaughter American ranchers and family farmers and send us all running back to backyard gardens and 1900’s vintage farms. He shows us the worst examples of how livestock is raised in this country and also wants us to question the healthiness of corn in our food supply.

Food Inc. is clearly a piece of “food advocacy work” rather than honest journalism, according to Dan Glickman and he ought to know. The current chairman of the Motion Picture Association of American is a former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under President Bill Clinton. (Maybe someone should do a documentary on how the Ag Secretary makes the pilgrimage from DC to Hollywood. Now that would at least be interesting.)

Family corn farmers represented by the National Corn Growers Association lashed out at Food Inc. in advance of last night’s festive event saying the documentary shouldn’t win the Oscar because it not only grossed out grocery shoppers, but was unfair to the nation’s farmers.

 The dictionary says the noun documentary describes a film or TV program presenting the facts about a person or event. Kenner’s propaganda clearly should have never made it to the red carpet.

 Perhaps now we can relegate Food Inc. to collect dust on the back shelves of video stores where it belongs and farmers can go back to producing the safest and most abundant food supply in the world.

Frogs Hop into the Atrazine War

The latest attack on atrazine was all over the major news outlets today – the weed killer makes boy frogs into girl frogs.

To illustrate this, they had a photo of frog porn – an allegedly normal male frog mating with an atrazine-freakazoid-male-turned-female frog. Don’t feel bad if you can’t tell the difference – neither can they. The picture was provided by study author Tyrone Hayes with the University of California at Berkeley, so we have to take his word for it.

You can’t help but think this is funny. The headlines alone are hilarious. “Common weed killer chemically castrates frogs,” “Weed killer makes male frogs lay eggs,” and my personal favorite “Frogs: Weed killer creates real Mr. Moms.”

Of course, it would be funnier if it did not potentially impact the livelihood of farmers who rely on this important herbicide. According to Alex Avery, Director of Research and Education at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues, the study’s author is an “admitted anti-atrazine activist.”

“Dr. Tyrone Hayes has spent more than a decade allied with eco-activists peddling scare stories due to alleged health effects from atrazine. Yet despite his decade-long search and after more than 50 years of widespread use of this herbicide by farmers to minimize soil erosion while combating weeds, Hayes can offer no compelling real-world evidence that atrazine poses any appreciable risk to amphibian populations anywhere,” Avery stated.

This is not a new issue for atrazine. In fact, EPA has already looked into such previous claims but dismissed the concerns as unfounded. The problem is, this story literally has sex appeal. No one will care if it’s true or not – they have fornicating frogs and great jokes to give the story repeatability. With atrazine currently under review by the EPA, this new study will require another round of review. Better hop to it!

Doing the Right Thing Difficult in Today’s Political Climate

A recent online New York Times editorial praised the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision supporting the expansion of biofuels production however, the praise was too lavish, according to many close to the issue.

As seems to be more and more common in government, EPA’s attempts to mollify all parties involved, resulted in a watered-down decision that missed the mark. The source of the EPA and NY Times gaff is their inability to expose the Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) argument for the red herring it really represents.

For those unfamiliar with the concept a “red herring” is a deliberate attempt to divert or deflects attention away from the real subject at hand, and ILUC proponents deserve a nod for their adept sleight of hand regarding the future of biofuels. Instead of focusing on the documented economic, environmental, and energy contributions of biofuels, we find ourselves debating the tenuous connection between America’s production of corn and land use impacts in sovereign countries elsewhere in the world.

According to the Renewable Fuels Association, these so-called indirect land use impacts have questionable scientific validity. In fact, more than 100 scientists and Ph.D.’s have stated: “The ability to predict this alleged effect depends on using an economic model to predict worldwide carbon effects, and the outcomes are unusually sensitive to the assumptions made by the researchers conducting the model runs. In addition, this field of science is in its nascent stage, is controversial in much of the scientific community, and is only being enforced against biofuels.”

That’s RFA’s way of saying a lot reasonable and reputable folks don’t trust the subjective nature of computer modeling which is in its infancy, let alone using something as important as biofuels as the crash-test dummy for this new assumption rather than fact-based driven methodology.

Darrin Ihnen, president of the National Corn Growers Association, laid bare the biggest argument refuting ILUC in his response to the New York Times. “Upwardly trending corn yields disprove this theory. In 2009, for example, farmers grew enough corn to break 2007’s production record, and we did so harvesting nearly seven million fewer acres.”

In fact, corn growers have developed a new paradigm regarding the future of corn production. Scientists have unlocked the intricate corn genome and in doing so have set the stage for a national yield average of nearly 300 bushels per acre within two decades. Productive capacity is increasing so rapidly that the U.S. corn farmers has grown enough corn to meet the needs of all markets while biofuel production has soared.

Ihnen pointedly says “those who wrote the studies you cite should get out into the fields and talk to the many farmers who are not only beating the Department of Agriculture’s average corn yield, but also doubling it in some circumstances. They will see the great potential the Corn Belt has for feeding and fueling the world.”

Coal from Corn

It could become the next great fuel source from the agricultural community. A Nebraska-based biomass supplier and manufacturer has debuted a product it touts as “Coal from the Farm.”

Next Step Biofuels has launched PowerPellets, a green fuel made from corn stover – all the leaves, cobs and stalks leftover after the corn is harvested – that burns like coal and will help with that state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard laws that require utilities to generate more of their power from renewable sources:

According to Next Step COO Russ Zeeck, PowerPellets solve the logistical and operational problems that have thus far prevented wide-scale use of biomass to generate electricity. “PowerPellets overcome the three major problems that utilities have had with biomass,” said Zeeck. “First, unlike raw biomass, PowerPellets are easy and affordable to ship and store. Second, unlike other pelletized biomass, PowerPellets are hard and friable which means they pulverize and feed just like coal; PowerPellets can be folded into a coal-fired plant’s operations with little or no additional capital. And, third, because Next Step makes PowerPellets from corn stover – America’s most abundant source of renewable biomass – there is a deep, reliable and price-stable supply.”

Next Step Biofuels says the PowerPellets were recently tested and found to do what was claimed of them during rigorous testing conducted at the Energy & Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota. The company is negotiating with several utilities to supply PowerPellets starting next year.

Agricultural Progress Must Be Considered in Climate Talks

In what is being reported to be the busiest day to date at the UN Climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) President Darrin Ihnen had a private meeting with US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. The time was spent discussing NCGA’s perspective on climate change and several other pressing issues.

Key to the visit was NCGA’s reiterating the fact that there are serious concerns among our members with the cap-and-trade proposal in Congress. Ihnen noted that if significant progress for agriculture is not achieved in the legislation, we will come under increased pressure to oppose the bill outright. 

NCGA continues to be a part of the debate and development of climate legislation in order to make it as farmer-friendly as possible but Ihnen, a farmer from South Dakota, pointed out it’s difficult to convince farmers that a new “green” economy will be good for them when the renewable fuel that we already produce comes under such regular attacks from the environmental community. (more…)

Copenhagen Climate Talks an Educational Opportunity

Agriculture in the U.S. represents 7% of the GHG (Greenhouse Gas) problem but 20% of the potential solution, according to US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsak.  National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) President Darrin Ihnen, on hand to hear Sec. Vilsak speak at Agriculture and Rural Development Day at the Copenhagen at the Climate Change Conference, said the Secretary emphasized the linkage between climate change and food security as the most important challenge facing agriculture.  According to Vilsack, our efforts should focus on three areas — research, adaptation and mitigation.  

Vilsak, the keynote speaker at Ag Day at the University of Copehagen, also was heard to remark:

- Farmers should evaluate new business models based on carbon mitigation.

- Governments should drive environmental markets

- Sustainable farming is not just applicable to small operations. Large farms can be sustainable.

- The new research arm at USDA, the National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA), will focus significant resources on climate change adaptation.

- USDA Extension Service will need greater resources to help farmers adapt

- We need to move away from carbon based fertilizers

- Food aid for the developing world should mean more than just providing food but also sharing technologies and modern practices to help growers become more productive

- Post-harvest storage facilities will become increasingly important to limit waste in our production systems

More than 74 percent of the agriculture-based GHG emissions come from developing countries, says Ohio Corn Growers Executive Director Dwayne Siekman in his blog from Copehagen.

“It is obvious that U.S. farmers have been and will continue to do their job, but the rest of the world believes the U.S. should pay to bring everyone to their level, and that developing countries want the U.S. to shoulder much of the load in GHG mitigation,” he said. (more…)