Panorama tonight (23/05) Antibiotic Crisis

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Panorama tonight (23/05) Antibiotic Crisis
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Rob R

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 31902
Location: York

Posted: Sun May 29, 16 6:44 pm Post subject:

Nick wrote:

But selling a handful of steaks when it's sunny is not the way to approach that. That's the way to spend a fortune setting up a business and then blaming everyone else when you've two staff burning cash on a rainy bank holiday weekend.

Yep.

Rob R

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 31902
Location: York

Posted: Sun May 29, 16 7:06 pm Post subject:

Tavascarow wrote:

Rob R wrote:

Tavascarow wrote:

Says he who loves to drift into "all we need to do is eat more meat."

Like I said earlier pot & kettle.

I did not say that.

I was generalising about your posts in other threads not this one specifically. & it was said with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

I've never said that though, my position has always been that we need to eat more less intensive meat, and not tar all meat with the same brush.

Tavascarow

Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Posts: 8407
Location: South Cornwall

Posted: Sun May 29, 16 8:05 pm Post subject:

Nick wrote:

If you've a freezer full of chops & sausages you don't need to employ someone to sell them.
How often do farmers take a day off? There's nearly always someone at home.

Hairyloon

Joined: 20 Nov 2008
Posts: 15425
Location: Today I are mostly being in Yorkshire.

Posted: Sun May 29, 16 8:32 pm Post subject:

Nick wrote:

The National Allotment Society are currently pursuing cases on behalf of around 200,000 people on waiting lists. I can't be arsed to look up 'rarely' but then looking stuff up to back up opinions is pretty rare across the board.

Then there's been a massive rise in allotment popularity in the last five years or so: there was only 90,000 or so on waiting lists back in 2011.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/nov/10/allotments-rents-waiting-list

Nick

Joined: 02 Nov 2004
Posts: 34535
Location: Hereford

Posted: Sun May 29, 16 9:33 pm Post subject:
Yep. The first line of your source says demand is soaring. Congratulations.

Nick

Joined: 02 Nov 2004
Posts: 34535
Location: Hereford

Posted: Sun May 29, 16 9:36 pm Post subject:

Tavascarow wrote:

Nick wrote:

If you've a freezer full of chops & sausages you don't need to employ someone to sell them.
How often do farmers take a day off? There's nearly always someone at home.

You think having some chops in the freezer becomes chops on the bbq with no one selling them? There's no organisational, marketing, stock controlling or admin overhead? That frozen chops are useful when you want a hot meal in half an hour? That farmers have nothing better to do than kick about serving randomised visits from customers?

I'd suggest a better way would be to push meat packs to your allotment customers and on hot weekends, actually run a bbq yourself. Control and contain it, and keep all the profit.

We may have digressed.

Tavascarow

Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Posts: 8407
Location: South Cornwall

Posted: Mon May 30, 16 7:06 am Post subject:

Nick wrote:

Tavascarow wrote:

Nick wrote:

If you've a freezer full of chops & sausages you don't need to employ someone to sell them.
How often do farmers take a day off? There's nearly always someone at home.

Whatever. Marketing isn't my thing.
But you can't deny the potential for increasing your customer base.

The demand is there. It's increasing & it would help more people understand the differences between good & not so good food.
& also help bridge the wide cultural gap between farmers & consumers.
Bringing farmers back into the community.
Big retail stops this.

Nick

Joined: 02 Nov 2004
Posts: 34535
Location: Hereford

Posted: Mon May 30, 16 7:17 am Post subject:
No, I'd agree 100%.

Rob R

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 31902
Location: York

Posted: Mon May 30, 16 11:30 am Post subject:
I'm not exactly following your logic here though, why is it not OK to tell people they need to eat more sustainable meat, but it's fine to offer it as street food in a more convenient form that makes it easier for them to eat more? (and still possibly go home and eat Tesco chicken)

Tavascarow

Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Posts: 8407
Location: South Cornwall

Posted: Mon May 30, 16 12:46 pm Post subject:

Rob R wrote:

I'm not exactly following your logic here though, why is it not OK to tell people they need to eat more sustainable meat, but it's fine to offer it as street food in a more convenient form that makes it easier for them to eat more? (and still possibly go home and eat Tesco chicken)

I've always been a supporter of all sustainable food production.
Western society "as a whole" needs to eat less meat for the sake of the planets biodiversity & the climate.
& as this thread proves to reduce the prevalence of antibiotic resistant microbes.
But I've never said your methods are wrong.
Healthy food comes in all forms from your grass reared beef & lamb to the fresh salad on an organic allotment to the wild watercress I'm about to harvest for soup tonight.
Saying eat more sustainable meat whilst ignoring the rest is wrong IMHO.

Rob R

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 31902
Location: York

Posted: Mon May 30, 16 2:05 pm Post subject:

Tavascarow wrote:

Rob R wrote:

I don't ignore the rest, and I don't believe we need to eat less as a whole, providing my methods were applied more widely we could produce vastly more. The one limiting factor on producing more this way is the size of the market.

Whether you or I are wrong is irrelevant though, as I don't advocate eating anything other than that which can be sustainably produced so you are in no danger of exceeding that amount. However, if farmers like me aren't encouraged to produce more there is absolutely no incentive for other farmers to follow. In fact I'm more likely to follow them because I need to make a living.

Diversification, if you have all the resources available, may be a good way to make money out of 'spare' assets, but that doesn't help sustainable food production, especially if you don't have those spare resources available. Of course you could set yourself up to buy those assets but then the organic farm becomes a second priority and really unnecessary.

As a farmer the eat less idea is soul destroying when you've gone to all the efforts to do exactly as you are told you should be doing only for your product to be regarded as something we shouldn't be producing at all. Fair enough if you're average joe public don't want to buy it, afterall they don't realise how important it is, but for conservationists and animal welfarists to, basically, say the same thing, only from a different angle, seems counterproductive. The only viable way forward for the farmer is to join the masses, or move away from farming.

Tavascarow

Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Posts: 8407
Location: South Cornwall

Posted: Mon May 30, 16 9:40 pm Post subject:

Sustainability also has to take account of climate impact. The same number of ruminants will still be producing large quantities of methane.
Every industry is having to make concessions & changes. Farming should get some breaks because of food security but it still need to make changes.

Getting back to antibiotic resistance.
With higher producing cows & greater stresses in their lives mastitis incidence has increased.
I know there's a withdrawl period but I'm sure I read somewhere antibiotics are being found in milk samples increasingly.
Pasteurisation should deal with the majority I imagine as will cooking with meat.
But an area of concern.
Treating animals like factories is never going to work.

Rob R

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 31902
Location: York

Posted: Mon May 30, 16 11:03 pm Post subject:

Tavascarow wrote:

Your points are conflicting. Higher producing cows reduces their methane output and has allowed us to produce more with fewer animals.

However, the GHG emissions from livestock have largely been quoted as the overblown estimates and inconsistent calculations from Livestock's Long Shadow. Although we've increased the number of domestic ruminants on the planet, most figures do not take account of wild ruminants. It's a huge and very well presented smokescreen to take the heat off the fossil fuel industry, for which the cultivated landscape relies heavily upon.

Animals don't create or destroy carbon, it's either coming from the atmosphere, soil or fossil fuels. If you're building soils (regen ag) and using only organic growing methods you must be taking the carbon from the atmosphere and putting it into the soil. Given the loss of carbon from our soils, mainly through drainage and cultivation, it's a travesty that animals cop the blame while soil and fossil carbon is ignored. On the plus side our depleted soils represent huge potential for potential carbon storage.

As far as antibiotics in milk goes things have never been better. Back in my family's days of producing milk it took several days to detect antibiotics in the lab and your money was docked if you were found to be over. Now they test the milk before it even goes onto the tanker and refuse to take it if it's over the minimum.

Tavascarow

Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Posts: 8407
Location: South Cornwall

Posted: Tue May 31, 16 11:43 am Post subject:

Rob R wrote:

I know there's research that says corn fed intensive cattle give off less emisions than extensive grass reared but I don't think it takes into account of emmisions from growing their food or the emmisions from their waste management.

You have quoted that wild ruminants aren't being considered but wild ruminant numbers are small due to habitat loss & hunting.
The days of bison as far as the eye can see are long gone.

It's twenty years since I had anything to do with dairy so know little of current rules & practise.
I assume they test each tanker before discharge at the factory as well?
I've been buying organic milk for a couple of years. Antibiotic use on organic dairy farms are a lot more stringent.

Edited to say less not more. It was a long night.

Rob R

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 31902
Location: York

Posted: Tue May 31, 16 8:34 pm Post subject:

Maybe it's different in Yorkshire but I've never known anyone to overuse antibiotics in dairying, most are scared stiff of getting any money docked in fines and having the cost of the antibiotics in the first place. The bigger problem with the bigger dairies is staff who mess up and let antibiotic milk go in the tank and not own up to it.

When I talk about wild ruminants that's exactly what I mean - there used to be loads, and now there are few, so the difference has been made up for by cattle. Instead of measuring just the output of modern cattle, we should be measuring the difference between that and methane produced by the former vast herds of ruminants. And measure we should be doing, relying on estimates doesn't account for basic maths and the rule that you can't destroy or create carbon - all emissions come, originally, from fossil reserves, soils or the atmosphere. We just need to ensure that we're taking as little as possible from the former and taking as much as possible from the latter, and putting a bit back into the soil.

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