Cristine Rojas
Article 6: “The Omnivores Delusion: Against Agri-intellectuals”
Blake Hurst
April 23, 2017
Authors Note:
Blake Hurst
Hurst is a third-generation Missouri farmer who also is the president of the board of directors of
The Missouri Farm Bureau.
1
His online profile is vague in stating any other facts about his
experience other than his membership of 32 years. I would think that he has a bias favoring
industrial farming because it affects his pocketbook. Further I would question his statements due
to his lack of scientific credentials.
1 Source:
Article #6 “The Omnivores Delusion: Against Agri-intellectuals”
Notes:
Farming has always been messy painful, and bloody and dirty
People nowadays wouldn’t go see a doctor that uses a stethoscope instead of an MRI
machine, yet expect farmers to use 1930’s tech.
He has been a farmer for over 30 years, and tells the person on the plane that they
shouldn’t believe everything they read.
Young turkeys will not come out of the rain, and will stand in the pouring rain, with their
beaks open, eyes to the sky until they drown.
He is dissenting when he says: “He hasn’t used a slide rule in his career and wouldn’t
make projections with tea leaves or soothsayers.”
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Or blames witchcraft for a bad sales quarter
Says the lecturer thinks farmers are too stupid to farm sustainable
Critics spend their time concerned with the process of how food is raised.
With the removal of the pesticides and herbicides, mold, fungus and bugs increase
Large farms in the country are organic and are dependent on “stoop labor” doing the hard
work to save the sensitive pesticide contamination
Corn farmers are almost all owned and managed by small families
They also love innovations, they want to produce more with less energy
No till farming helps keep the top soil in place instead of sending all the herbicides and
pesticides down the river to the Gulf of Mexico
This practice has reduced the environmental harm done by the farmer
Food animals are also mostly produced on family farms, but have contracts with industry
giants
Farming is more complex than a moral dilemma
Farmers are often seen as tools for corporate greed, and seen as forced into the
circumstance by the market and corporate greed
GMO’s reduce pollution sent down river
Consumers get cheap food, in 2007 & 2008 the UN reported 50 million people going
hungry because of increased food prices.
Arizona, California, and Florida outlawed pig gestation crates where sows are held up so
that they do not smash or eat their babies
FFA kids raise, show, and send their animals to slaughter. They get an early start on
dulling the separation we experience due to grocery stores
