A Farmer Takes the New York Times To Task

by: Jill Richardson

Sun Apr 12, 2009 at 17:10:32 PM PDT

And they can talk, but they can't make smart people believe their BS. On this blog, the Center for a Livable Future exposed that the National Pork Board paid for the study referenced in the recent NYT op ed. But another farmer went even further, debunking the NYT piece line by line in her blog post "Good Science or Political Agenda?."

The one on the left, where it spent its short five months of life living in crowded pens with slatted floors, where the stench of manure, the heat, and the high-pitched screeching noise is a fact of its miserable life?  Where the tails are cut off and the eye teeth removed so they can't nibble as effectively on each others behinds, since there is nothing else to do to occupy their days.  The pigs are pumped full of antimicrobials (antibiotics and other drugs) in their feed to prevent disease and enhance growth.  The flavor of the pork from these animals is a cross between dry cardboard and texturized vegetable protein.

But then she goes on to pick apart the NYT op ed line by line. Her premise is that the author made so many mistakes that he has no clue what the hell he's talking about. For example, he says that pigs are raised to 500 lbs before slaughter - but they aren't. He says that consumers of free range pork are looking for a "wild" taste. Again, no. They want a more natural taste from a humanely and sustainably raised animal.

Her best riffs was on the study itself. The article's thesis is that free range pork has more parasites than factory farmed pork and bases that idea on a study. Here's what she says to that:

He talks about the three pathogens the study tested, which were Trichinella, Toxoplasma, and Salmonella.  Even though the study showed that the levels of Trichina were insignificant (2 out of 324 pigs outdoor-raised pigs), Mr. McWilliams tried to portray this level of trichina as very disturbing.  Statistical insignificance is no cause for alarm, but what does one expect from a gentleman without a science background?  He then states, "Natural dangers that motivated farmers to bring animals into tightly controlled settings in the first place haven't gone away."  The confinement of animals into CAFOs has almost nothing to do with environmental factors and has everything to do with land, labor, and capital efficiencies, grain subsidies, tax incentives, global trade, standardization of food, and so much more.  But again, why would he know that?

She continues, describing the poor, unscientific design of the study. I suppose if you're designing your study so that it will give you specific results that you want, scientific accuracy isn't your #1 priority:

Now the study itself is what is called in science as a "Preliminary Study".  The journal article is short and does not contain a lot of references, nor does it go into detail the methodology nor results.  It is surely no statement of scientific fact, and the authors end the article by stating the need for significantly more studies related to this issue to get a better understanding of what might be going on.  In other words, don't draw any conclusions from this study funded by the National Pork Board.  Any quality scientist knows to first look at who funds a study, prior to referencing it.  Therefore, one should question what the motives of the National Pork Board are in the first place.

The title of this article is called, "Seroprevalence of Trichinella, Toxoplasma, and Salmonella in Antimicrobial-Free and Conventional Swine Production Systems", published in the April 2008 edition of the journal Foodborne Pathogens and Disease.  The four authors, all from various schools of Veterinary Medicine, compare two different systems.  The first red flag for me is that in determining the two systems to compare, they did not control for confounding factors.  They study compared intensive, indoor production with the use of antimicrobials to extensive, outdoor production without the use of antimicrobials.  They study should have compared the following to control for confounding factors:

IIWAM- intensive, indoors with antimicrobials

IIWOAM-intensive, indoors without antimicrobials

EOWAM-extensive, outdoors with antimicrobials

EOWOAM-extensive, outdoors without antimicrobials

Do you see what I am getting at here?  We do not know if the increased presence of toxoplasma and salmonella in the outdoor pigs was due to the outdoor conditions or the lack of antimicrobials.  Similarly, are the indoor pigs protected from pathogens due to the living conditions or the daily feeding of antimicrobials?  This distinction is huge in my eyes, as you cannot conclude that outdoor environments increase pathogen exposure.  It could be the lack of antimicrobials and not the environment.  Same for the indoor-raised pigs.  Just see how long a pig would survive in that picture on the left above without antimicrobials.  I'm almost positive that there are actually more pathogens in the cramped, warm quarters of the pig barn than there are outside.

The other huge problem with this study, of course, is the vastly varying degrees of outdoor production.  Some farmers raise their pigs in outdoor dirt lots with no vegetation to help filter out and break down pathogens and excess nutrients and call it "free-range pork".  Other farmers like us, plant and irrigate lush pastures that we rotate the pigs through, paying careful attention to resting the pastures long enough between pig batches so as to break up the parasite or pathogen cycles.  We have no domestic cats around nor much wildlife in the pig fields since our livestock guard dog keeps nearly every other animal far away.  This study mentions almost nothing about the actual management practices of the outdoor production systems they sampled, instead lumping them all together as one, homogeneous system.  I would hope in future studies that these 'scientists' do a better job controlling for all of these variables, perhaps even setting up a controlled study so they can duplicate exact production systems.

Nice job, Rebecca. New York Times, are you listening?