Three years ago, Alma Hasse walked purposely, head down, toward a red brick building. The Jerome County Courthouse held a mountain of files on the county’s dairy CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations, and Hasse wanted a look at them. She and her agricultural watchdog group, Idaho Concerned Area Residents for the Environment believed...
Read More »
In conversations about agriculture and health, I think the issues raised in the book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA by Maryn Mckenna, need to be front and center, especially as it relates to CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) and the use of antibiotics as a growth enhancer in animals. The book explains: Food animals...
Read More »
“This was formerly the Smith’s Dairy,” says Bill Stoltzfus of the building he bought in 2007, just a block south of Buhl’s town square. “The place had been in the Smith family for 70-some years.” This modest cream-colored bottling plant and the soft-spoken man who now runs it hardly look like players in a...
Read More »
A bird is helping blur the boundary between urban and rural America. A few years ago, a chicken would have been a reliable sign that you’d crossed into farm country. No more. As correspondent Guy Hand reports in this installment of Edible Idaho, chickens are invading many American cities — and helping...
Read More »
It appears that a bill sponsored by Idaho Senator Tim Corder to update Idaho’s animal cruelty laws, which passed the Idaho Senate with a 34 to 1 margin, has been stalled and perhaps killed thanks to House committee leader Representative Tom Loertscher. Idaho’s animal cruelty laws have been ranked by several organizations as some...
Read More »
The ethical treatment of farm animals is a growing concern for many Americans. And that puts states with relatively few animal cruelty laws, like Idaho, in the cross-hairs of animal welfare groups. It also makes those states attractive to livestock operations looking to relocate to less regulated areas. In this installment of Edible Idaho,...
Read More »
Idaho lawmakers are feeling pressure to update Idaho laws concerning animal cruelty in agriculture. According to the ag. weekly Capital Press, the California-based Animal Legal Defense Fund last year named Idaho “one of the worst states in the nation with regard to animal cruelty laws.” Fueled by films like “Food, Inc.” and Jonathan Safran...
Read More »
