Farewell to backyard chickens and beekeepers — outlawing animals on Michigan’s small farms

From Daniel Jennings at Off the Grid News:

Photo via the Inquisitr

“Many Michigan residents will lose their right to keep livestock on their own property due to a new ruling from the state’s Commission of Agriculture and Rural Development.

The Commission ruled April 28 that local governments have the right to ban livestock from any area zoned residential in the state.

The action will “effectively remove Right to Farm Act protection for many urban and suburban backyard farmers raising small numbers of animals,” Gail Philbin of the Michigan Sierra Club told Michigan Live. The Right to Farm Act is a state law designed to protect farmers from nuisance lawsuits and zoning regulations. The Commission ruled that the Right to Farm (RTF) Act does not apply to homeowners who keep small numbers of livestock.

Humankind facing a vegetarian future?

From John Vidal, in The Guardian, via Cryptogon:

Edited screenshot from Cryptogon. Click to go there.

“Leading water scientists have issued one of the sternest warnings yet about global food supplies, saying that the world’s population may have to switch almost completely to a vegetarian diet over the next 40 years to avoid catastrophic shortages.

Humans derive about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to drop to just 5% to feed the extra 2 billion people expected to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of the world’s leading water scientists.

Thoughts on the book “Girl Hunter”

Girl Hunter, the book

I should say firstly that I haven’t read this book, only the Grist.org review of it, which I will be excerpting below. Still there’s something fresh and appealing about hearing how a young woman — whose kind don’t usually go for hunting — has made her way into, and her peace with, that most ancient of human practices — to the point where I definitely want to read the book and am going to order it.

I’ve hunted myself as a teenager, but not that successfully. And no, that’s not why I gravitated to vegetarianism. 

Aajonus Vonderplanitz, the guy who helped found the recently raided Rawsome Foods club in California tells a wild story of how he made the transition from being a strict vegan, to being an eater of meat in his book, “We want to live”.

Food company decides to “go humane” — new business “niche” for farmers?

From Helene York at Civil Eats:

“I manage supply chains for Bon Appétit Management Company, which is another way of saying that my job is to think about chicken and pork. Not just the meat, but the lives of the animals themselves. I suspect there are few other non-meat-eaters whose corporate roles require them to think about farm animals as much as mine does.

But thinking about production systems and negotiating with suppliers can only go so far. Today, we’re saying that we’re fed up. Bon Appétit Management Company today announced that by 2015 all our pork will be sourced from companies that don’t use gestation stalls–the densely packed metal cages that imprison pregnant sows in spaces so tight they can’t even turn around. Imagine hundreds of 200-pound dogs confined that way all day, every day, and it should be easy to understand why this system is so egregious.

English dairy farmer feeds badgers supplements to prevent Bovine TB

From Stuart Winter on the Express.co.uk

Badgers, like the one shown above, are due to be shot in a cull ordered by the Government n an attempt to halt bovine TB. Photo via the Express.co.uk news website

FARMER Dick Roper has vowed not to shoot badgers on his land but to feed them a daily dose of health supplements to prevent the spread of a deadly disease hitting dairy herds.

Badgers are due to be shot in a cull ordered by the Government in an attempt to halt bovine tuberculosis but Mr Roper says his idea of feeding badgers vitamins and essential minerals keeps the disease at bay.

Pig Business + Big Business = ?

Big business sees in the pig business an opportunity to make money and corner the market. So how’s that working out in practice? Watch and see: