Comments on: Alert: Family Farm Pork Producers, Take Action Today

by: Kevrell

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:22:39 +0000

And I thought I was the sensible one. Thanks for setting me satright.

by: Jerry

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:00:43 +0000

He won’t come back. He doesn’t want to keep the discussion alive. He wants us to forget to send in our request for a vote.

Besides, he sees he needs more than boilerplate responses now that he’s got knowledgeable critics to address. Maybe his silence is a way of conceding that they are right.

It’s worth it to him to get egg on his face if he can let this topic die and keep the checkoff flowing.

by: crabtree

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 01:34:02 +0000

damn, i was hoping Dave would come back

by: John Crabtree

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 06:39:17 +0000

Just to add another fact to Dan’s statistics, the Pork Act, which created the mandatory checkoff and the National Pork Board passed in 1986 - so a vast majority of those 591,000 hog farmers went out of business after the checkoff arrived on the scene to save them all.

by: Steph Larsen

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 05:05:23 +0000

I was going to weigh in here with the failure of the Pork Board and NPPC to protect the interests of any but the very largest mega-confinement operations that spew noxious fumes and poison the water, pay pitiful wages, decimate rural communities, and generally make a mess of things. But I see that Dan has beat me to it.

The numbers speak for themselves. NPPC does not “protects the livelihoods of ALL of the country’s 67,000 pork producers”, because it didn’t protect the interest of ALL the country’s 600,000 pork producers.

Dave Warner has convinced himself of his organizations own false propaganda. Good thing we have facts to believe instead.

by: Dan

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:25:24 +0000

“NPPC opposes legislation and regulation that would lead to the demise of any pork producer.”
Dave Warner, 2008

Given the statistics on the numbers of hog farms listed below, I would respectfully submit that perhaps the NPPC, the Pork Board, and any other organization claiming to represent hog producers should shut up and go home. All of the “mainstream” organizations, like NPPC, are failing miserably. In fact, you are failing so miserably that I fail to see the point of even debating the true definition of “production agriculture” or any other hog industry point. Clearly, your organization is simply awful at achieving its goal of helping farmers or producers or whatever you want to call them. The numbers speak for themselves.

So get rid of the checkoff, the NPPC, the Pork Board, the whatevers. These organizations that have accepted and propagated the free market no-regulation-at-all form of agriculture for the past 3 decades have presided over the staggering destruction of family farming and rural communities. And for what? So you can administer checkoff dollars and INVENT THE GODDAMN MCRIB. Y’all should be proud.

From National Hog Farmer, 2005:
http://nationalhogfarmer.com/ar/numbers-fall/
The number of U.S. hog farms declined last year for the 24th consecutive year, according to University of Missouri agricultural economist Ron Plain.

There were 69,420 hog operations in the United States in 2004, based on data from the Agriculture Department’s National Agricultural Statistics Service.

That number is 4,300 fewer than in 2003 and 591,130 fewer than in 1980, the last year in which the number of hog farms increased, says Plain.

by: John Crabtree

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 02:53:07 +0000

Dave, to be more specific, when NPPC and their for profit subsidiary Validus billed America’s Clean Water Foundation approximately $1.25 million in licensing fees for the use of an environmental assessment programs that was developed with checkoff funds and rights to which were granted to NPPC and Validus at no charge, wouldn’t that be something of value that NPPC got from the checkoff?