Two stories in today’s news:

(1) The Washington Post ran an article on the possible pesticide-child behavior link we examined in a previous post.

(2) CNN also picked up the recent report from the Environmental Working Group (video clip and printed story) on pesticide residues in produce:

The Dirty Dozen (may contain 47-67 pesticides per serving—EWG suggests buying or growing these organically)

• Celery
• Peaches
• Strawberries
• Apples
• Domestic blueberries
• Nectarines
• Sweet bell peppers
• Spinach, kale and collard greens
• Cherries
• Potatoes
• Imported grapes
• Lettuce

The Clean 15 (contain fewer or no pesticides—EWG suggests you can buy these conventionally grown)

• Onions
• Avocados
• Sweet corn
• Pineapples
• Mango
• Sweet peas
• Asparagus
• Kiwi fruit
• Cabbage
• Eggplant
• Cantaloupe
• Watermelon
• Grapefruit
• Sweet potatoes
• Sweet onions

The EWG shopper’s guide.

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MSNBC is reporting today on new research suggesting that some pesticides may double the rate of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) in kids.

Youngsters with high levels of pesticide residue in their urine, particularly from widely used types of insecticide such as malathion, were more likely to have ADHD, the behavior disorder that often disrupts school and social life, scientists in the United States and Canada found.

Kids with higher-than-average levels of one pesticide marker were nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as children who showed no traces of the poison.

The take-home message for parents, according to Bouchard:  “I would say buy organic as much as possible,” she said. “I would also recommend washing fruits and vegetables as much as possible.”

As discussed in a previous post “Do our daily routines put our health at risk?” here’s an easy to use shopping guide of which fruits and vegetables to buy organic.

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The NY Times is running a cover story on how crop weeds are becoming resistant to one of the most ubiquitously used herbicides—Roundup.

This is the herbicide that farmers can spray on genetically modified crops that are resistant to its damage.  It’s widely used on major crops, such as soy, corn, canola, sugar beet, and cotton.

In theory, all weeds other than the GM crop succumb to the chemical.  As the Times story suggests, that’s not the case anymore because weeds are evolving resistance, possibly rendering Roundup and Roundup-ready GM crops ineffective.

Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.

To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.

“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”

Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.

“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.

…If frequent plowing becomes necessary again, “that is certainly a major concern for our environment,” Ken Smith, a weed scientist at the University of Arkansas, said. In addition, some critics of genetically engineered crops say that the use of extra herbicides, including some old ones that are less environmentally tolerable than Roundup, belies the claims made by the biotechnology industry that its crops would be better for the environment.

“The biotech industry is taking us into a more pesticide-dependent agriculture when they’ve always promised, and we need to be going in, the opposite direction,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety in Washington.

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As we saw in a previous post, food aid is a complex issue.   On one hand, it’s critical for acute crisis situations where people are starving because of things like war and natural disasters.  On the other hand, in more chronic situations of malnutrition, food aid and cheap imports have the capacity to undermine local food production, which, in the long run, harms the prospect of people feeding themselves through local production.

A farmer’s worst enemy is free food and cheap imports.

In recent years, we have seen this play out in Africa, as Oxfam acknowledges.  MSNBC is running a story today, “With cheap food imports, Haiti can’t feed itself,” about how the same thing has happened there.  Worth reading.

There is also a larger debate at play here about the implications of free trade and industrialized food production.

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European bee populations are on the decline worldwide.   Who cares?  These bees are major pollinators of crops and therefore perform, for free, a vital ecological service worth about $U.S. 14 billion per year.  Not to mention the many other species of non-crop flowering plants that reproduce with the help of insects like this.

The recent kind of decline is specific—only female worker bees disappear—and has been given the name colony collapse disorder (CCD).  Nobody has figured out why this is happening.  The potential list of culprits includes mites, viruses, synthetic chemicals, and other factors.

In an article this week in PLoS ONE, Christopher Mullin and colleagues explore further the potential link between pesticides and CCD.¹

Excerpts:

One third of honey bee colonies in the US were lost during each of the last three winters between ’06-’09. This alarming overwinter along with other losses of this primary pollinator, Apis mellifera L., as well as those of native pollinators, has been documented in North America and Europe. The most recent manifestation of this decline, Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), has led to a significant collaborative effort involving several land grant universities, Departments of Agriculture and the USDA.

We have found 121 different pesticides and metabolites within 887 wax, pollen, bee and associated hive samples. Almost 60% of the 259 wax and 350 pollen samples contained at least one systemic pesticide, and over 47% had both in-hive acaricides fluvalinate and coumaphos, and chlorothalonil, a widely-used fungicide. In bee pollen were found chlorothalonil at levels up to 99 ppm and the insecticides aldicarb, carbaryl, chlorpyrifos and imidacloprid, fungicides boscalid, captan and myclobutanil, and herbicide pendimethalin at 1 ppm levels. Almost all comb and foundation wax samples (98%) were contaminated with up to 204 and 94 ppm, respectively, of fluvalinate and coumaphos, and lower amounts of amitraz degradates and chlorothalonil, with an average of 6 pesticide detections per sample and a high of 39. There were fewer pesticides found in adults and brood except for those linked with bee kills by permethrin (20 ppm) and fipronil (3.1 ppm).

The 98 pesticides and metabolites detected in mixtures up to 214 ppm in bee pollen alone represents a remarkably high level for toxicants in the brood and adult food of this primary pollinator. This represents over half of the maximum individual pesticide incidences ever reported for apiaries. While exposure to many of these neurotoxicants elicits acute and sublethal reductions in honey bee fitness, the effects of these materials in combinations and their direct association with CCD or declining bee health remains to be determined.

The high frequency of multiple pesticides in bee collected pollen and wax indicates that pesticide interactions need thorough investigation before their roles in decreasing bee health can be either supported or refuted. The large number of studies to date, are limited by being done on mostly one compound at a time, as well as using whole colonies where the timing of contaminated pollen intake and its utilization by the colony are difficult to interpret as a causal relationship. Laboratory studies have clearly indicated sublethal impacts on honey bee learning, immune system functioning, and synergism of insecticide toxicity by fungicides, yet combinations of herbicides with fungicides and insecticides in 3 or more component mixtures have not been studied.

The widespread occurrence of multiple residues, some at toxic levels for single compounds, and the lack of any scientific literature on the biological consequences of combinations of pesticides, argues strongly for urgent changes in regulatory policies regarding pesticide registration and monitoring procedures as they relate to pollinator safety. This further calls for emergency funding to address the myriad holes in our scientific understanding of pesticide consequences for pollinators. The relegation of bee toxicity for registered compounds to impact only label warnings, and the underestimation of systemic pesticide hazards to bees in the registration process may well have contributed to widespread pesticide contamination of pollen, the primary food source of our major pollinator. Is risking the $14 billion contribution of pollinators to our food system really worth lack of action?

¹Christopher A. Mullin, Maryann Frazier, James L. Frazier, Sara Ashcraft, Roger Simonds, Dennis vanEngelsdorp, Jeffery S. Pettis (2010). High Levels of Miticides and Agrochemicals in North American Apiaries: Implications for Honey Bee Health PLoS ONE

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Nicholas Kristof has another column in the Sunday NY Times, The Spread of Superbugs, about bacteria that are increasingly difficult to kill with antibiotics and their links to the way we produce meat in modern agricultural systems.

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In this week’s special issue devoted to food security, Science asks what it will take to feed 9 billion people by mid century.

Food insecurity—the inability of people to feed themselves—may rise if food supply cannot keep pace with population.  This is a concern that goes back over 200 years to Thomas Malthus.

One theme shows up in a few articles:  Can reducing meat consumption help in the battle to feed more people?

Erik Stokstad’s news feature (subscription required)¹ provides a nice lead:

The United States, for instance, has just 4.5% of the world’s population but accounts for about 15% of global meat consumption. Americans consume about 330 grams of meat a day on average—the equivalent of three quarter-pound hamburgers. In contrast, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that most people consume just 142 to 184 grams of meat and beans daily. In the developing world, daily meat consumption averages just 80 grams. Those numbers suggest that people living in the United States and other wealthy nations could increase world grain supplies simply by forgoing that extra burger or chop.

However, he interviews researchers and cites studies that raise a number of issues potentially complicating this story…

• As meat consumption in developed nations decreases, the price of meat should decrease and become more affordable to people in the developing world, which could actually cause increased demand and meat consumption to rise globally by 13%.
• A study by the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Mark Rosegrant suggests that grain consumption would only rise slightly in the developing world.  As Stokstad reports,

Surprisingly, however, when the rich halved their meat habit, the poor didn’t necessarily get that much more grain—their largest source of calories. According to the model, per capita cereal consumption in developing nations rose by just 1.5%. That’s enough grain to ease hunger for 3.6 million malnourished children—but nowhere near the kinds of gains many expect from curbing meat consumption.

Stokstad argues the reason for this is a mismatch in grain fed to cattle vs. people.  In the developed world, for instance, farmers feed soybeans and corn to livestock, whereas people in developing nations in Asia eat more rice and wheat.  The gains in soybeans and corn therefore don’t necessarily translate into more food for people.

• When developed nations replace meat with pasta and bread, wheat prices worldwide rise, possibly threatening food insecurity to Asians who might no longer be able to afford the higher costs of wheat.

Following these assessments, Stokstad suggests

When all the pluses and minuses are added up, Rosegrant is confident that cutting meat consumption could ultimately help improve global food security. But “it’s a small contribution, like changing to fluorescent light bulbs” to fight global warming, he says.

While it’s important to consider unexpected twists and surprises, I’m not completely convinced by these arguments for a number of reasons, many of which Stokstad offers as caveats to the above assessment:

• As another review article by Charles Godfray et al.² in the same Science issue notes, about one third of the global supply of grain is fed to livestock.  That’s A LOT of food energy.  If you consider that you can feed many more people on a hectare of grain crops than livestock,  that’s a significant boost in food energy to the world, especially if the developed world cuts meat consumption significantly further than the 50% reduction Rosegrant assumes.   Some might argue that this is impractical—the world would never go vegetarian en masse.  Maybe so.  However, if the question is can we feed significantly more people by reducing meat consumption, the answer is clearly yes.  Whether we actually chose to reduce meat consumption enough is another (normative) question.
• As Stokstad notes, in many regions of the developing world, like Latin America and Africa, corn is a dietary staple, so diverting these grains from livestock to people will add more crops to the global markets and drop prices, encouraging greater consumption by a sizable fraction of the developing world.
• What about Asians, who eat more rice and wheat?  Stokstad seems to believe that crop substitutions are unlikely:

It’s true that as demand for corn drops, some farmers might start growing wheat instead. In general, however, climate, soil, or water availability often limit a farmer’s ability to switch crops easily. Iowa soybean growers, for instance, can’t start growing rice, which requires heavy irrigation.)

Yeah, that’s true for rice, but Stokstad solves his own dilemma because Iowans and most of the rest of the American Midwest COULD grow wheat in areas where surplus corn is currently grown and fed to livestock (if the relative price of wheat vs corn incentivizes the substitution).   Now we have increased core staples (corn, soybeans, wheat) to all developing regions.

• Note that increased wheat production would also alleviate the purported shortage of wheat experienced by Asians as the developed world substituted more grain for meat.
• As the Godfray article points out, livestock also lead to significant increases in methane emissions.

Godfray also adds a few points why reducing meat consumption may not be a complete salvation:

• Meat types vary in their production efficiency, meaning that some meats like poultry require less energy and water than other meats like beef.  Better breeding might be able to increase efficiency even more.
• A lot for livestock are grass fed on marginal pastures on which we can’t grow grains.
• Livestock are often important for other things, like manure fertilizers, plowing and transportation

There’s something to be said about the first point.  As the last post shows, eating beef is more energy intensive than poultry.  The second point is irrelevant— just because some animals are raised on marginal lands doesn’t change the fact that we still feed one third of global grain supply to the remaining livestock.   Again, the point is not to say that we need to eliminate meat consumption just for the sake of it.  We are saying that we can recoup 33% of the grains fed to livestock not fed on grass.  That’s the issue.

Bottom line: I applaud the search for factors that could potentially complicate simple explanations.  That’s a good thing for anticipating unexpected surprises that could appear during a big shift like dramatically reducing meat consumption.  And to be fair, all of these articles acknowledge that reducing meat can be part of an overall strategy to feed more people.

However, the Science articles err on the side of being too dismissive of the impacts that reducing meat consumption can have.

Is this a dose of reality considering that people won’t reduce meat consumption that much?   Maybe.  But I’d rather see Science address what is possible in addition to what is probable.  What we mainly get is the latter.

¹Stokstad, E. (2010) Could Less Meat Mean More Food? Science 327: 810 – 811.
DOI: 10.1126/science.327.5967.810

²Godfray, H.C. et al. (2010) Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People. Science 327: 812 – 818. DOI: 10.1126/science.1185383

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Science Magazine (subscription required) is running a special issue this week on food security.  There are so many articles, it’s hard to know where to start.

Let’s go with an interesting, visible example from a news article showing that different meals can require vastly different amounts of energy to make (click on this link for a nice downloadable color figure).

(1) Beans: Amount of energy needed to grow, package, transport, and cook (what I assume to be one serving) in Sweden.  Note, a megajoule is one million joules, or about 240 dietary calories—the amount of energy in almost 2 cans of soda:

• Brown beans (8.9 megajoules, 2,127 dietary calories)
• Yellow peas (5 megajoules, 1,195 dietary calories)
• Imported soybeans (7.9 megajoules, 1888 dietary calories)
• Imported brown beans (11 megajoules, 2,629 dietary calories)
• Imported canned beans (20 megajoules, 4,780 dietary calories)

Bottom line: Commercial canning is energy intensive and food miles matter.

(2) A single meat-based dinner

Amounts of energy to grow, package, transport, and cook each meal:

• Dinner 1 (19 megajoules, 4541 dietary calories to make)
  • Beef (9.4)
  • Rice (1.1)
  • Greenhouse tomatoes (4.6)
  • Wine (4.2)
• Dinner 2 (6.1 megajoules, 1457 dietary calories to make)
  • Chicken (4.37)
  • Potatoes (0.91)
  • Carrots (0.5)
  • Cooking oil (0.3)
  • Tap water (0)

Both of these dinners yielded about the same dietary energy to the eater:

• Dinner 1: 2.52 megajoules, 602 dietary calories
• Dinner 2: 2.60 megajoules, 621 dietary calories

This means that dinner 1 yields about 13% of the energy required to make it, whereas dinner 2 yields about 43%.

Bottom line: It takes three times more energy to make dinner 1 than dinner 2.  More energy use with conventional agriculture means more fossil fuel use and more climate warming.

Science 327: 809  DOI: 10.1126/science.327.5967.809

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Little good news is coming out of Haiti these days.   There’s a deep social-environmental history that needs to be explored to understand why crises like poverty, AIDS, mudslides, and this week’s earthquake have been so devastating to the Haitian people.

I have written a bit about this history for one of the book projects I’m working on.  Below are a few excerpts, but before reading further, please consider helping with the humanitarian relief for earthquake victims:

• Doctors Without Borders USA
• AmeriCares
• An additional list of aid agencies can be found at the NY Times.

When hurricane Jeanne swept across the Caribbean, flooding rains killed over 3,000 people in the small nation of Haiti. Only 18 people died in the Dominican Republic on the same island.  Haiti has one of the highest population densities in the Caribbean. Its 8.7 million inhabitants live on less than half the land occupied by 9.4 million Dominicans, so population density is roughly two times greater.  Puerto Rico’s population density is as high as Haiti’s, but only seven people died in the storm.

Why, if Haiti’s population size is similar to the Dominican Republic’s and population density is the same as Puerto Rico’s, did Haiti suffer such a devastating loss of life?  Some argue that the loss of forests, with their capacity to prevent soil erosion, was a main reason why so many people were killed: heavy rains let loose massive mudslides on deforested hillsides.¹

Deforestation of Haiti’s landscape for agriculture and the manufacture of charcoal have left only 3% of the land surface forested.² Charcoal, produced by cutting trees and slow burning them in mud pits, meets about 85% of energy needs as cooking fuel.³ We see a ravaged countryside today and are tempted to blame this on Haiti’s high population density.  What is not as apparent, however, is how environmental degradation stems from a legacy of colonial resource extraction, slavery, corrupt governments, foreign intervention, and choices about energy, agriculture, and industry.

The mudslides and mortality did not occur in surrounding countries, which have less poverty and deforestation.  In fact, forest area is actually increasing in countries like Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic where economic growth is rapid. Puerto Rico’s forest cover, for example, has risen from less than 10% to more than 40% in the last 60 years.¹ These forests are recovering on abandoned farmland with the transition from agriculture to industry.

It is therefore too simplistic to blame Haiti’s high population density and consumption of forest resources for the current state of the environment.  Human population growth drives environmental change but is seldom the sole factor behind environmental problems.  Instead, we need to figure out how population changes go hand-in-hand with social, economic, and technological changes so that we can explain environmental impacts.  Understanding and solving environmental challenges often requires simultaneous attention to demographic, economic, political, technological, and cultural values.

Haiti’s indigenous inhabitants practiced subsistence-based agriculture of corn, yams and cassava until their Columbus-era enslavement and genocide. Later, French colonists planted sugar cane in the well-suited warm, wet climate, and developed large, labor-intensive plantations. Throughout the 1700s, France imported thousands of African slaves to Haiti each year such that there were half a million working in 1789. During the colonial period, Haiti’s population was seven times larger than the Dominican Republic’s, which carried forward in time. Haiti exported tens of thousands of tons of sugar and most of the lumber from its forests back to France. The heavy exploitation of land for timber and sugar took a toll on the environment because of widespread land clearing, but it made Haiti one of the most profitable colonies in the Caribbean.

After Haitian independence in the early 19^th century, the nascent government was unable to support its own people in developing cash crops for export. To re-establish trade and diplomatic relations with France, Haiti’s government was forced to pay reparations for land and slaves lost during the revolution.  As much as 80% of Haiti’s budget went to pay these reparations, driving Haiti into significant debt from which it has not yet fully recovered.⁴

Today, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with the lowest combination of lifespan, education, and standard of living of any country outside Africa.⁵ Demographic, social, and economic changes happening elsewhere in the Caribbean are not happening as rapidly in Haiti. The abject poverty in which 80% of the population exists deteriorates the country’s environmental and political conditions and constrains economic development.  People are forced to choose between life in urban slums and life as poor, small-scale, subsistence farmers.  More than a million Haitians have emigrated to the United States and elsewhere since 1950.

In recent decades, many Haitian farmers have abandoned agriculture in search of greater profits from supplying charcoal to large urban and rural populations. With the collapse of agricultural and industrial exports, an unemployment rate of 33%, and sliding deeper into poverty, Haitians are forced to destroy remaining forests for charcoal fuel production. Consumption of natural resources just to stay alive is contributing to degraded environmental conditions.

Fertility remains high in Haiti because of high rates of mortality. Maternal, infant, and child mortality rates are high:  Sixty-eight infants and 52 mothers die for every 1,000 live births each year, and the under-five child mortality rate is 123 children per 1,000.  Haiti also suffers from the highest incidence of HIV/AIDS in the Western Hemisphere (5.6% of the population). The leading causes of death are diarrhea, respiratory infections, malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS—diseases that are preventable or treatable in more developed countries.  However, 40% of Haitians have no access to health care.⁶ Haiti’s unstable governance, poverty, and environmental degradation exacerbate this need for large families as a social safety net.⁷ This is why simple approaches of reducing fertility, such as government support for contraception, have largely failed in Haiti.

Thus, Haiti’s changes in population and economic welfare, from its subsistence-based land use pattern, to an exploitative resource-extraction system, to a poor society where wealth, industry, and commercial agriculture have pulled out of the country, are not characteristic of the economic pattern—in which increasing economic development begets increased welfare—experienced by much of the developed world over past centuries.

Haiti is battling not only mudslides and earthquakes, but a colonial legacy that has predisposed its people to one devastating crisis after another.

References and Further Reading:

¹Aide, T.M. and H.R. Grau (2004) Globalization, migration, and Latin American ecosystems. Science 305:1915-1916.

²Kaiser, J. (2004) Wounding Earth’s fragile skin. Science 304:1616-1618.

³Collie, T. (2003) We know that this is destroying the land, but charcoal is what keeps us alive. South Florida Sun-Sentinel

⁴Hallward, P. (2004) Option Zero in Haiti. New Left Review 27:23-47

⁵Diamond, J. (2005) Collapse; How Societies Choose to fail or Succeed. Penguin.

⁶Farmer, P. (2004) Political violence and public health in Haiti. New England Journal of Medicine 350:1483-1486.

⁷de Sherbinin, A. (1996)  Human Security and Fertility: The Case of Haiti. Journal of Environment and Development 5(1):28-45.

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MSNBC is giving front page coverage to a potentially serious problem that scientists identified years ago—microbes are becoming drug resistant because of antibiotic use in meat production.

Researchers say the overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals has led to a plague of drug-resistant infections that killed more than 65,000 people in the U.S. last year — more than prostate and breast cancer combined. And in a nation that used about 35 million pounds of antibiotics last year, 70 percent of the drugs — 28 million pounds — went to pigs, chickens and cows. Worldwide, it’s 50 percent.

Governments are starting to realize the urgency of this issue:

The rise in the use of antibiotics is part of a growing problem of soaring drug resistance worldwide, The Associated Press found in a six-month look at the issue. As a result, killer diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and staph are resurging in new and more deadly forms.

In response, the pressure against the use of antibiotics in agriculture is rising. The World Health Organization concluded this year that surging antibiotic resistance is one of the leading threats to human health, and the White House last month said the problem is “urgent.”

….[T]hree federal agencies tasked with protecting public health — the Food and Drug Administration, CDC and U.S. Department of Agriculture — declared drug-resistant diseases stemming from antibiotic use in animals a “serious emerging concern.” And FDA deputy commissioner Dr. Joshua Sharfstein told Congress this summer that farmers need to stop feeding antibiotics to healthy farm animals.

However, entrenched special interests continue to be as resistant as the germs our food system is producing:

Farm groups and pharmaceutical companies argue that drugs keep animals healthy and meat costs low, and have defeated a series of proposed limits on their use.

As Michael Pollan, Peter Singer, Wendell Berry, and others have noted, this is what results from the treadmill of production and the Walmartization of our food system.   When the only thing that matters is producing the most food for the least cost, our modern industrialized food system—and antibiotic resistance—is what we get.

One farmer who buys into antibiotic use echoes this conventional wisdom—that the most fundamental principle of food production is about lowering cost:

“Now the public doesn’t see that,” he said. “They’re only concerned about resistance, and they don’t care about economics because, ‘As long as I can buy a pork chop for a buck 69 a pound, I really don’t care.’ But we live in a world where you have to consider economics in the decision-making process of what we do.”

Another farmer, who eschewed antibiotic use, is one of many who are bucking conventional wisdom:

Kremer sells about 1,200 pigs annually. And a year after “kicking the habit,” he says he saved about $16,000 in vet bills, vaccinations and antibiotics.

“I don’t know why it took me that long to wake up to the fact that what we were doing, it was not the right thing to do and that there were alternatives,” says Kremer, stooping to scratch a pig behind the ear. “We were just basically killing ourselves and society by doing this.”

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