Obama & Future Factory Farms of America

Despite a massive public outcry, including over 20,000 emails from the Organic Consumers Association, President-Elect Obama has chosen former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to be the next Secretary of Agriculture. The Department of Agriculture is a huge agency with a $90 billion annual budget, including the National Organic Program, food stamp and nutrition programs, and agriculture subsidies. It oversees rural development, forests and grasslands, and overseas aid.

During his time as governor Vilsack aided and abetted factory farms; he oversaw the largest proliferation of hog confinements in the state's history. Factory hog farms are horrible, inhumane places. (A new report calling for action on hidden costs of factory farming has been issued by the World Society for the Protection of Animals.*) Described in a piece in The Rolling Stone, "...pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond."

Besides the obvious moral and ethical questions around subjecting animals to such abhorrent conditions, those farms put tens of thousands of independent family hog farmers out of business in the state. The end result was a decimation of rural Iowa and serious degradation of the state's drinking water.

Vilsack has also been a strong supporter of genetically engineered crops including bio- pharmaceutical corn. The largest biotechnology industry group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, named Vilsack Governor of the Year. He was also the founder and former chair of the Governor's Biotechnology Partnership.The undemocratic and highly unpopular 2005 seed pre-emption bill was Vilsack's brainchild. The law strips local government¹s right to regulate genetically engineered seed.

Vilsack's ardent support of unsustainable industrial ethanol production (corn and soy-based biofuels) is equally troubling, which use as much or more fossil energy to produce them as they generate and has caused global corn and grain prices to skyrocket. Food is literally taken off the table for a billion people in the developing world.

The Organic Consumers Association is calling on organic consumers and all concerned citizens to join their call to action and block Vilsack's confirmation as the next Secretary of Agriculture.