Still More Melamine in Chinese Products

This is pretty frightening. Our family is buying less and less prepared food these day...not that we bought a lot anyhow, but I am reading labels more carefully all the time.

I honestly started feeling (and writing about) concern about the Chinese dairy industry years ago, when they were buying up registered Holstein cows locally. I remember reading the editor of a certain dairy magazine that serves our area crowing joyfully about exporting heifers and thinking that what might have looked good at the time would come to roost later. China's exported apples have virtually devastated the apple industry in some states. They have no quality standards, but cheap prices are a strong lure. At the time of the Chinese cattle buying expedition I expected that nation to flood the world market with cheap dairy products hurting US dairymen. I had no idea that instead they would export poison in dairy food form.

In this article the Chinese government admits that melamine adulteration of feeds and food products is commonplace there. I suspect that we have only just begun to see the scope of the problem.

Still more on food saftey and inspections

This morning I found the update below in one of my inboxes. It originated with the Meating Place, which offers an industry newsletter to which I subscribe.

"Only a week after taking the reins as FDA's food czar, and in the midst of a melamine outbreak, Dr. David Acheson has had plenty of explaining to do.
More of it came Wednesday, when Acheson found himself before the U.S. House Agriculture Committee, trying to assure its members that the U.S. food supply is safe despite widespread contamination of chicken, hog and fish feed.
However, some committee members contended that melamine is indicative of a bigger problem.

"The explanations from the USDA and FDA leave me with the uncomfortable feeling that maybe we just got lucky this time," said Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.). "The next time tainted food or feed products slip through the very large crack in our import inspection system, we may be forced to confront a much more serious situation in terms of animal or human health."

Acheson conceded that FDA, which inspects just a small percentage of the $60 billion in food imported annually, is due for an overhaul. He says plans to request additional funding and manpower to fuel such efforts."

Um, yeah, I do believe that might be a plan.

Last Year's Weather

Northstar, a name the calf graduate, all grown up

Is still hanging around biting everybody right...well you know where. Even though we are enjoying this long spell of warmer than normal weather, what happened last summer is having lasting ramifications for farmers and ranchers from the southern borderlands to the far, far north.


Nobody has feed...well, some folks do, but there are a lot of shortages and staggeringly high prices for what is out there. We are about out of haylage, maybe a couple of days worth left, and buying round bales...spring and green grass can't come soon enough for me!


The guy we buy our crop seeds from called the other night...talked to the boss for quite a while. He wanted to give us a heads up that the seed we buy from him will nearly double in price for this year...drought in Texas wiped out most of the seed crop. He is big, successful farmer but he will be out of feed soon and told of dozens of customers who are feeding out their last bits. He thinks a lot of folks who have bought from him for a long while won't be in business this summer.


And yet, the big players are still manipulating the CME, while the milk to feed ratio drops like a rock. I am sure somebody will still be making milk come spring...the Chinese are buying dairies in New Zealand so their farmers can be trained how to do it right (first clue...leave out the melamine...it tends to kill people.) 


China has also become the world's number one nation for feed grain and oil seed production and yet they are still huge importers of food products and feeds....and ammunition or so they say.....


***Dad update. It has been a really tough haul for Dad and for Mom, who has been an amazing trouper through it all, but yesterday she reported solid progress. He is in rehab now and is doing stairs and getting around without the walker. Your prayers have been appreciated more than you could possibly imagine...thank you!

Pretty Soon we be Eatin' Chinese Chicken

While they be eaten' US pork. 

USDA just approved chicken from China for use in our dinners. 

Sorry, but this is downright scary. Over the past year we have been getting take out less and less, partly for financial reasons, but mostly because the quality of the food has become abysmal....fake cheese being an important factor....

Looks as if it is about to get worse. I do not want to eat any food product that originated in China, but especially not chicken.EVER.

Chinese farmers were caught selling chickens sick or dead from disease to be made into chicken nuggets and other tasty treats, which they exported to Japan. 

Now they can send them to us. 

These are the same folks who peddled chicken feet that had been in storage for over 40 years, and do you remember melamine? Contaminated baby formula? Deadly dog food?

Yum.

They are also in the process of purchasing the largest pork producer in the world, Smithfield, and the government has just approved the sale. Along with bricks and mortar plants they will be buying safety know-how, and a heck of a lot of pork.

Who do you think is coming out on the better end of these deals?

Not so many years ago, small meat growers and processors abounded in the US. Within twenty miles of here there were at least two small, family-owned turkey farms that provided the best fresh turkey you could imagine. We bought products from one of them to fill the freezer every fall. They were fantastic!

The original mortgage on this very farm was in part paid off by raising chickens for the little grocery market in town.

Then the very same government that is allowing our food production to be sold overseas, while inflicting inferior products on us, came up with regulations that made it virtually impossible for small operations to function in an economically reasonable manner. They went out of business.

It was bad enough to lose the special quality of locally-grown and processed foods in favor of the uniformity and "safety" of the giant corporations that serve us now. But for our government to fly in the face of common sense to allow chicken from a country with perhaps the most utterly appalling food safety record in existence is obscene.

Bring back the little guy! Ease some of the stupid restrictions on local food processors so people can buy chickens grown by their neighbors. *We were told by the owner, years and years ago, that one of the local turkey growers sold their birds because they were required to provide a separate set of stainless steel pans for every set of entrails from every single bird. I wasn't there at the time but......*

And, boy, am I kicking myself! I keep a bookmarks folder of Farm Side research, week-by-week. A few months ago I wrote about the dead chickens going into chicken nuggets business and had a nice set of links to Asian newspaper stories with the details. Since the folder gets really cumbersome, I deleted them when I went on to the next week's work.

Funny thing.....none of those stories are appearing anywhere, no matter what search terms I combine to find them.....hmmm........

More on the pet food recall

Here is a story that reveals all too clearly that some plumb shady practices have been going on in the pet food industry. Obviously no one has been very careful about what went into what dogs and cats eat, where it came from, or even honest ingredient labeling.
Sadly, there is nothing stopping contamination in the dog food dish from showing up at the dinner table too. Another story yesterday indicated that the contaminated rice and wheat gluten (that actually turned out to be wheat flour) was made into fish food in Canada and fed to fish in the USA, which were certainly eaten by unsuspecting Americans.

We were discussing the issue in the barn this morning (politics and national issues are topics that turn up there every bit as often as how many bales of hay to feed.) We decided that if the US inspected foreign foods and their suppliers anywhere near as thoroughly as we do American farms and factories, the likliehood of such adulteration would diminish immensely. Here at Northview we have an inspector from Producers Cooperative, where we sell our milk, who routinely checks our premises. From seeing that medicine for dry cows is on a different shelf than that for lactating cows, to making sure there are no holes in the milk house screens, no dirt where it shouldn't be, and even that the place is tidy, he keeps a close eye on us. Our milk is tested EVERY SINGLE TIME the tanker picks it up, that is every other day, for antibiotics, cleanliness, butterfat, protein, somatic cells and water content. If it is too high in any negative factor it is condemned and we pay for the entire truckload of milk that it was dumped into. We are also under the direct oversight of state and federal inspectors who check for the same things and very thoroughly too.We could be denied a place to ship our milk and fined if we get caught doing naughty things. Certainly if we dumped melamine into our tank to boost our protein price, we would get caught...real fast

Then we are under the observation of the Soil and Water Conservation folks, the EPA, state Ag and Markets, and have so many other government entities watching over how we do what we do that I literally can't bring them all to mind. Building inspectors, Dept of Environmental Conservation, nosy neighbors.... vets inspecting the beef that we ship....we are being watched, and carefully. However, it is pretty darned obvious that while the US government peers at its own navel by layering inspections on its internal food supply like someone dressing a kid for January in Alaska, it has its back turned toward millions of tons of material that is slipping in through the back door. What we need is for imported products to fall under the same scrutiny, and, (since not everybody outside this nation is our best buddy... most favored nation status to the contrary) they should actually fall under MORE scrutiny.

The whole affair makes Pete Hardin, of the Milkweed, look real smart. He has said for years that uninspected and unregulated imports of fractions of milk, such as milk protein concentrate, potentially permit milk from exotic species, such as water buffalo, and unclean locations, such as Chernobyl, to be included in our food. Hmmmmm, ya think?

Remember Melamine?

There's a talking head on my lawn

Another pet threat from China...Pet treats killing dogs....

I Read a Lot of Interesting Things

Sorry about the general messiness in this photo.

Definitely time for spring clean up.

Alan took this with his phone from the top of the grain bin.

I don't know if you would be interested too, but here is a link to a story about dairy colostrum enhancing athletic performance. Heavens! We save some for the calves, but dump a lot of it right out.

And a fifth of Chinese dairies may close. It wasn't too many years ago when a lot of Holsteins from NY were exported to Chinese buyers and there was a lot of hoopla about it. I thought then that we might be shooting ourselves in the foot competition wise, but I never imagined the mess with melamine being mixed with milk to raise protein levels. Sure is nasty. Hydrolyzed leather protein is even worse.

Chinese at it again

Melamine, the same stuff alleged to have killed perhaps thousands of American pet dogs and cats, has now been found in baby formula in China. This has led to kidney stones in many babies and at least one death. China is blaming dairy farmers there for adding the chemical to milk, which was also thought to have been adulterated by the addition of water.

Here in the USA you can count on every drop of your milk being thoroughly tested for foreign substances, including water, long before it reaches your table. US authorities are warning people to be wary of infant formula of Chinese origin, which, although not legal for import, may slip into certain ethnic markets.

"

More Melamine in Milk

Yet another reason to keep it local when it comes to buying dairy products.

Goat

This story kinda got mine. 2009 was one of the worst years for dairy farmers.....ever. We all burned through way too much equity trying to somehow stay in business. Many of us have not begun to dig out of that hole even now. I am not sure the author intended to suggest that we should enjoy prices that low if they increase fluid consumption, but I sure hope not.

Also fluid milk is far from all of the milk marketing story. For one thing our price is based on cheese sales on the CME. Cheese consumption has climbed steadily over the past decade, while prices fluctuated all over the place. 

And notice the suggestion of shelf-stable milk there? I see that trend as a way to import a lot more milk, displacing a lot more domestic milk from the market. Components brought in under all sorts of names already displace millions of pounds of domestic fluid milk, contributing in all likelihood to the demise of many family dairy farms. 

Alternately cheap West Coast milk could show up in our markets quite easily too. If your milk will keep for six months without refrigeration you can move it a l-o-o-o-ng way before it spoils. It's already happening down under.

Considering the conditions under which milk is produced in many of the countries from which we import a lot of stuff (remember China and melamine? Their dairy industry is rebounding rapidly right now.) I shudder to think of the future.

Almost but no cigar...thank God!

First there was a bomb threat at the school today...kids had to stand out in twenty degree weather for quite some time, then hunker down in the concrete-walled gym while the bomb-sniffing dogs were brought in to go through the buildings....
no bomb.

Then Old Roy dog biscuits were recalled....and on the fridge are the remains of a great big bag, the rest of which was devoured with great relish by a certain trio of border collies that I know. The Sunshine Mills website listed lots of closely related sizes and flavors of biscuits that contain melamine...
the ones on the fridge weren't on the list...
or at least not yet.

I am most grateful that both of these close calls were just that, on behalf of my favorite boy and the best dogs in the world.....

Foundation for the Future

FFTF-Rainbow Stew for the Dairy Farmer

Is a new dairy pricing program that the National Milk Producer's Federation is foisting on farmers proposing to Congress. It includes monetary assessments on milk checks, some of which will go straight to the Treasury to help lower the deficit, the rest of which will be administered by yet another board. We dairy farmers already have boards reaching into our pockets to fund the Dairy Check Off and CWT among other programs, so of course we should be just delighted to crowd a couple more hands in there. The board will decide what generic milk promotion will get the funds that they take from us. Of course generic milk promotion has been proven not to work...or at least not very well, but why worry about that?

And then there is the whole supply management thing. If the supply management tool kicks in farmers will only be paid for a percentage of their previous three months average milk production. The theory is that they will produce less to avoid that. Since cows don't have on/off switches I wonder how that will be done. Feed less? Kill a few cull some cows? I don't imagine that it will be pretty.

Plus I figure if they lower the amount of milk US farmers are permitted to produce, someone else will step up to the plate...er.....glass...and fill the void. Melamine anyone?

Supposedly farmers are in favor of this new, improved, dairy policy, but really, I have yet to talk to one who is, unless they are on a cooperative board and toeing the company line although I have read a few positive comments on ag media stories. Most folks seem pretty skeptical.

One good thing I can say is that it is planned to decouple prices from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, a move that is long overdue.

However this pup, and it is a pup, will probably fly through Congress because it does away with the dairy support price program and milk marketing orders are "simplified".

Most ag publications are talking about FFTF as if it were Rainbow Stew for dairy farmers. Of course it is obvious that they listen to the pundits at NMPF and not so much to actual producers. I don't really think that many cooperatives ask farmers how they feel about things like this....they are more inclined to tell them what to think instead.

Here is some analysis of what is going to happen if this is passed.

More Melamine in Chinese Dairy Products

Story here

And it appears that suing someone who causes you harm is a bit harder there than here.....