No, I'm basing it on the theory that farmers want to make money, and you don't do that by abusing the product.
Also, the theory that MOST farmers are in it because they love the animals, because there are WAY easier and more certain ways to make money than abusive ranching.
Of course, there are those freaks that want to abuse the animals, don't care about them, or are too dumb to know better, which is why I won't say 100%.

I would like to also point out that human circumcisions are done without anesthetic. Some level of pain infliction to prevent more pain and injury is acceptable....but by that be clear I'm not excusing the behavior in the video.

Lambasting Pt.2

Human milk, GROSS! Cockroach milk, GROSS! Milk from a cow that's been facing in one direction for 4 years on a concrete floor, pumped with antibiotics, forcibly impregnated on what the industry calls a "rape rack" over and over, and fed bonemeal from it's dead neighboring milking cows, YUM!

I'm trying to raise awareness. This empowers people to make better decisions. And you try your best to beat me on a technicality or to discredit the host so that you can keep pretending none of this is real.



It just hit me. I just realised that your family and friends have farms. Now I understand the hostility. You're taking this as a personal attack on your family and friends, and on as an attack on their livelihoods.

Well my advice is to sell now and invest in new technology, the change is coming regardless of how hard animal farmers fight back.

If, as you wrongly assume, I had only driven by them, you could get away with that statement. Unfortunately for you, I actually went TO the farms, stayed at them (slept there) and watched the workers at their jobs. (EDIT: I also have an angora goat rancher in my family...close enough to the same thing for this discussion.)
I stand by my previous statement 100 percent, with first hand knowledge about the topic.
This video is bullshit. You dragged it out of me. 99.95% of farms would never allow anything they showed to happen, and would report the abuse to the authorities after booting the offender off the farm.

Edit: and yes, fast sheerers can do even more than 30 an hour, but they know exactly how to handle the sheep with tiny pokes that put them into a seated, leaning position that makes it simple to control them painlessly and without any trauma in the least using their legs while sheering. In the two times I watched, over 150 sheep altogether, I saw 2 get slight cuts that were taken care of properly and with care. As was mentioned above, stressed animals make subpar wool, so it's in the rancher/farmers interest to keep them happy, so they do.

Males had their horns on the farms I went to and the one's I drove past....so you're wrong about that too.

The National Farmers Federation says that “mulesing remains the most effective practical way to eliminate the risk of ‘flystrike’ in sheep” and that “without mulesing up to 3,000,000 sheep a year could die a slow and agonising death from flystrike”.

A fiber farmer is heavily invested in the health and well being of their animals for the simple reason that an animal that isn’t happy and healthy can’t produce a sell-able product. An animal going through a period of stress of any kind produces a fiber that breaks.

Wool fiber has properties that make it unequaled by many other natural fibers/ Lanolin is also a critical oil that cannot be replaced with other oils. Lanolin and its many derivatives are used extensively in both the personal care (e.g., high value cosmetics, facial cosmetics, lip products) and health care sectors. Lanolin is also found in “lubricants, rust-preventative coatings, shoe polish, and other commercial products”

In some cases, the products derived from sheep make up a very large portion of a country's GDP. Banning sheep farming could cripple a country like New Zealand economically.

That said, obviously there are some horrible scenes in the video. Obviously there needs to be more oversight to control abuse to the animals. However, I would like to point out that the video did cherry pick a couple of companies that had egregious policies. Also, if the mulesing that was shown was part of the PETA video, it was staged with a fake lamb. PETA even admitted they staged that video for 'educational' purposes. I don't know if it was the same clip, but just putting that out there.

"Genetically engineered" in the same way he was genetically engineered to be an idiot.... by selective breeding, which is not artificial genetic modification as he intends to imply.
Having just come home from visiting Iceland, and after visiting farms there, and also farms in New Zealand, I can say unequivocally that most farms in those countries are what you think of, peaceful sheep in large bucolic fields enjoying their lives and not being injured during once a year sheering of wool that's otherwise a problem for them to shed naturally. I won't speak to Australia, since I've never been there...maybe all sheerers are dicks there.
No farmer would accept the behavior shown, you can't sell wool from a dead or bloody sheep. He needs to get his theory straight...are they only interested in maximum profit, or do they abuse their animals without concern, because it can't be both.
If he really wants to do good for the animals of the world, he should refrain from breeding himself. His kids will probably wear nothing but fur when they leave home just to spite him.

Whistling travels better than shouting, so using it as a warning a bit like Silbo Gomero maybe? Where the farmers have a whistling language that travels round ravines and mountains really well.

Mostly correct, but it is a solution to taking control of your own food production methods without using the time it takes to do so normally (and trust me, it takes a LOT of your time, more than most people have to spare). Also, for those not able to farm because of their physical conditions, this could allow them to have the garden they choose and enjoy fresh vegetables they would otherwise not have access to.

That said, if you start off by spending $3000 (on sale) for your "farmer", on top of the normal costs to put together and farm a garden, it's going to take quite a while to pay for itself. A neighborhood kid working for $10 an hour would probably be a better long term investment, and also probably wouldn't require repairs or replacement in a few years.
If I could build it all myself for 1/3 the cost, or got it as a gift, I could put it together with my existing garden and make it pay off in a year (if I count my time as valuable, which I don't). At full price, I doubt it would last long enough to pay off ever.

They could have used this in the '80s when the US deployed Pershing II missiles around small villages in Germany. I know of one case where they got stuck on a tight corner and couldn't move back or forward. After several days they had to pay a farmer so they could demolish and re-build a corner of his house to get the thing free.

I'm not sure if the nuclear warhead was installed the whole time.

OK, one last reply....
Um...no. They didn't do commentary pieces in the constitution. If it's in there, it's because it's important to understanding the law/right it's attached to.
OK, it's meaningless huh?...."[Because our countrymen having farmers tans and wearing wife beaters is an inalienable right, the] right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Not so meaningless now, is it? ;-)

Bi yearly training/testing was Hamilton's FAR LESS invasive and LESS time wasting idea to counter the idea of a "well regulated militia" which he saw as far too time consuming for the entire populace to live up to. HIS way of seeing it was that twice yearly proficiency and equipment testing was far LESS restrictive than what "well regulated militia" meant...because to live up to "well regulated militia" would require extensive training, and re-training constantly.

Thinking further, the use of chemicals and fertilizers in orchards is more different than I'd first thought too.

If you take an apple orchard, every plant is priceless compared to a grain crop. Killing off insects, keeping exactly the right fertilizer amounts and irrigation are all absolutely required. In grain farming, pests like weeds or insects are measured and the cost/benefit is weighed to see if it's worth the cost of spraying. I'd imagine with a fruit crop, the benefit is almost always keeping your plants as healthy as humanly possible. With grains though guys will often estimate a 5% loss from whatever best is there and decide to leave well enough alone.

A bit of a side note, but the kinds of chemicals guys on the grain side use has changed a lot too. Plenty of chemicals used for killing insects when I was a kid where being replaced then. Farmers here universally remember a laundry list of different pesticides they remember as just nasty and downright scary stuff. The ones available today are far more selective, and for weeds round-up ready has allowed guys to abandon pretty much all other weed killers, and most of those were much more expensive and lingering than round-up.

OK, yes. That's correct. I have no personal experience in grain farming (except corn, but grown to eat on the cob, so that's also different).
I still say the same applies to OVER use of chemical fertilizers and the environment, but perhaps that's much less of an issue with grain crops.

As I said above, I admit that new crop genes paired with new chemicals could produce greater yields on more damaged land. Roundup/roundup ready crops are a prime example of this, as they artificially eliminate competition for the remaining nutrients and root space, leaving it all for the crop. That doesn't eliminate the damage though, it only hides it from the farmer. When they stop working (and they will eventually), we'll have serious trouble.

I think I see part of the problem. The other option you wondered at is you are comparing(literally) apples to grains.

If your lucky enough to live in a climate that can support orchards and vegetables that's an entirely different story. Grain farming is a different beast and you can't farm canola and wheat the same way you'd farm apples or tomatoes.

As for out here on the prairies, the average family owned and operated farm is on the 1k acre mark. Of the 20k farms in my province, more then 90% of them will be under 2k acres and virtually none of them hire more than 2 people outside their immediate sons and daughters to work there.

As for over production, the grain vs vegetables thing still hits. Crop rotation matters with grains, over production simply doesn't. Most of the land here has been passed down from parent to child for 100 years and they've always been quick to pick up on the latest innovations from new equipment to man-made fertilizers to round-up ready crops. The only consistent theme has been greater(and more consistent) yields per acre each year and correspondingly better profits for the farmer. Your gloom and doom scenario just isn't the reality for current grain farming techniques.

That is clearly not true. It may be one of the less toxic human made functioning, profitable herbicides, but that's not what you said by far.

Roundup is not a pesticide, it's an herbicide. Conflating it with pesticides is ridiculous and incredibly misleading. Roundup is used to control weeds and remove genetic 'contamination' of specific crops. EDIT: Many of those crops are genetically modified to act as pesticides without spraying chemicals, which is a good reason to want to limit cross contamination in either direction.

Other alternatives are no chemicals at all, or only ecologically safe (usually natural) chemicals. I don't use chemicals on my farm, I weed, I spray horticulture oil, I spread ashes, I grow twice what I can eat so some loss to insects won't matter, and I remove insects, slugs, and snails by hand. It takes more work, but the statement that the only alternative to Roundup is worse chemicals or agriculture collapse is completely and obviously false and indicates a total ignorance of the issue you speak about.

"Modern Agriculture" today means hydroponics, aeroponics, and aquaponics, none of which can benefit a whit from Roundup. You mean to say "Industrial Agriculture". The collapse of industrial agriculture might not be a bad thing, as it's incredibly destructive and produces a sub par product. More people farming on smaller farms puts more people to work, makes better product, and makes the people who work on the land feel responsible for it's upkeep, not consider it a resource to be exploited as efficiently as possible.

Mentioning Monsanto's involvement in the project is not the same as saying "neither Einstein or Openheimer or others were behind the Manhattan project, it was Monsanto all along that plotted to destroy Japanese cities with nuclear weapons". They clearly implied that Monsanto joined the project as a way to 'cozy up to' the political elite, and it worked.

Where did you hear this ridiculous hypothesis about their motive? Do you see and hear things that other people don't see and hear? It's clear that the motive in all cases was profit, either directly, or future profits secured by 'making friends' in government by cooperating with them or by forcing farmers into untenable contracts and positions where, in some cases, farmers that don't use Monsanto crops were sued because Monsanto said the pollen that pollinated the crops came from a neighbors Monsanto crops, so the seed belongs to Monsanto. Monsanto does not set out to cause damage and harm, they simply don't care if it happens as a side effect of their profit making methods, which they will protect with any means possible.

Just wow, a more deliberately misleading description of the video would be hard to create.

"[the] world is actually healthier, wealthier, better educated, more tolerant, less violent than it has ever been."

Not in places like Afghanistan, Libya, Jemen, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, downtown Chicago, Detroit or Cleveland. Not in Greece. And I'm not entirely sure it's a better place for the hundreds of millions of Chinese who left their rural areas to become work nomads. Also not sure about the all the millions of people in Africa whose livelihood gets crushed by subsidised produce/corn from the West. Not sure about all the Indian farmers who are driven into suicide by the monopoly powers of seed suppliers. Not sure about India as a whole, now suffering from the third year in a row of a belated monsoon and horrific drought.

"Democracy means you don't everything you want, when you want it, all the time" ... "and occasionally comprise, and stay principled, but recognise that it's a long march towards progress"

He talks the talk, but even for a center-right guy, he doesn't walk the walk. Principles went out the window in Gitmo. Principles went out the window when the drivers behind the illegal war of aggression in Iraq were not prosecuted in accordance with the Nuremberg Principles. Principles went out the window when carpet surveillance pissed all over the Constitution. Principles went out the window when US military forces aid Al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria just because they oppose Assad. Even mentioning principles in the face of the gruesome, drone-driven terror campaigns in at least half a dozen countries makes me want to vomit.

And don't get me started on compromise. If you ban single-payer and drop the public option before negotiations begin, that's not compromise. That's theatre meant to mislead us plebs while you add an additional layer of "market" to an already dysfunctional market, which ends up profiting the insurance companies yet again.