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Sunday news…:
• Philip Brasher writes in the Des Moines Register about the Food and Drug Administration’s attention to the use of antibiotics on the farm. Obama’s FDA is particularly concerned that farmers are using antibiotics not to prevent disease, but to fatten animals on less feed.
The results are still the same, however — the possible creation of antibiotic resistant bacteria that could cause problems for all animals, human and porcine alike. The FDA is proposing to phase out the use of antibiotics to promote growth.
• Verlyn Klinkenborg of the New York Times writes about the demise of the Tuttle farm near Dover, New Hampshire. The Tuttle farm was the nation’s oldest, staying in the family since it was founded in 1632. Bill Tuttle put the farm up for sale last week. Klinkenborg writes:
It is too simple to say, as the Tuttles have, that the recession killed a farm that had survived for nearly 400 years. What killed it was the economic structure of food production. Each year it has become harder for family farms to compete with industrial scale agriculture — heavily subsidized by the government — underselling them at every turn. In a system committed to the health of farms and their integration with local communities, the result would have been different. In 1632, and for many years after, the Tuttle farm was a necessity. In 2010, it is suddenly superfluous, or so we like to pretend.
• The Boston Globe tells about Project Healing Waters, a program for veterans based in the Maine woods. (Photo above.)
Vets from Iraq and Afghanistan spend a week fishing, talking, sitting around the fire — trying to come to terms with their experiences in the war.
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