Recently Galen Weston made a comment that (and I paraphrase) “farmer’s markets won’t last because the food being sold there is sometimes contaminated.” However, even though as he commented, this is an exaggeration, I would like to present an excerpt from the “Ripple Effect, the fate of freshwater in the 21st century” by Alex Prud’homme regarding poultry farming in the Shenandoah Valley.
“The Shenandoah Valley has nine hundred poultry farms, and in 2000 they held 265 million broiler chickens, 25.5 million turkeys and 824 million eggs…five large, fully integrated poultry companies, or integrators, process and market poultry in the Shenandoah Valley on a giant scale…the chickens are raised on feed and medications mandated by the integrators. The birds are housed by the tens of thousands-roughly one chicken per three-quarter square foot-in poultry sheds. Each integrator has its own feed recipe, which is fiercely protected as a trade secret and subject to little government oversight. The farms don”t know what’s in the feed, consumers don’t know what’s in the chicken they eat and hydrologists don’t know what kinds of chemicals are being washed from chicken manure into waterways.” Now what would you prefer to eat, a chicken from the above mentioned farming operations or a locally raised chicken where you can visit the farm, meet the farmer and find out what it’s being fed?
