Selfsufficientish.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/fe ... under-fire

i thought it was bad enough abusing poultry as we have done but now to do it to cattle is a step to far.

when are we ever going to stop being so damned greedy and start growing a conscience, i think this has put me off dairy permanently.

I watched a programme once... can't remember what it was called but all the milking was done by a computer and it was based upon the cows coming in when THEY wanted to from the field.

They would come in, enter a milking stall, a dispenser would give them food after reading the tag in their ear (to stop greedy cows just going around all day), a laser guided milking pump would attach itself to the udders and voila!

Thing is they were finding they were getting almost half the milk yield again using this method and the cows were obviously happy as they were going in themselves and relaxed cows apparently produce more milk.

Anyone agreeing with the kind of farming that story is putting forward aught to be shoved in a tiny room with hundreds of people for a year then see if they change their minds!

Human greed makes me sick... I'm not fond of humans at all to be honest these days

too flipping many of them that's why we have factory farming - that and supermarkets

any of you ever see that film "soylent green " ?? - that's what will happen eventually as this planet cant support infinite numbers of people

i dislike humans on the whole too

i think what makes this much worse is the amount we actually throw away, with regards to food AND other goods.

i went skipping once ( salvaging discarded food for those that dont know ) and it was ridiculous just how much food was thrown out that was perfectly edible, would have been much better to allow staff to take it home at the very least.

if we started being abit more concious of what we do, what we eat and how we live i think it would make a real difference.

im just disgusted that american style farming is slowly working its way over here.

i have just read an interesting article and im starting to wonder about food saftey standards, which are really good and im not going to argue with them as some unscrupulous producers will do what they can to make a few quid.

my question is i know raw milk straight from a cow is delicious and perfectly safe if it is done correctly and everything is clean and it wasn't that long ago i was able to buy unpasteurised milk from the milk man, now what i was wondering is does pasteurising milk allow for lower quality of standards as this ultimately destroys any form of bacteria in the milk ?

its just a thought and im constantly questioning everything!

I knew I shouldn't have clicked on that link - it makes me SO angry!

Battery milk production - where the 'health' of the animal is the prime concern. WTF!!??

The world's gone friggin mad. I will however be contacting the council mentioned in the article, it make me feel a little better.

BTW crowsashes it was Jimmy Doherty's farming series with the cow freindly milker, I remember it too. On the face of it it seemed a good idea, but then I read Guy Watson (of Riverford Organic)'s blog and he pointed out that you still have to ship in the corn, and clear out the slurry.

IMHO far better to graze the cow in the field - the 'slurry' fertalizes the land and the food is already there.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I love the green 'tint' the company have put on the plans, you know, to try and stop people looking at it rationally.

Oh, that's OK then, because you have some half-baked eco plan to, I dare say, earn even more money.

Am saddened.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/mid/8551901.stm

I wonder if this is linked? Mmm....let's house cows in sheds to reduce carbon emissions, and we'll grow some trees on the bits the cows don't need anymore. That'll keep the country in cheap milk, and shut them goddamn tree-huggers up.

Of course, the cows will have weaker immune systems, be more likely to contract Bovine TB (yay! now we can kill some badgers!) and be shovelled full of antibiotics and steroids which will pass both into humans and into the land and water table via waste products, and of course we don't actually have an invention to contain methane emissions yet.....but hey, there could be money to be made, so everything in the what-used-to-be-fields is hunky-dory. Hurrah!

it probably is.

i honestly think some of these so called 'green' plans are nothing more than a money making exercise.

the government promotes recycling as the green thing to do, but shouldnt re-use come first? but then if we re-use everything we wouldnt need to buy as much!! (

oh im getting angry thinking about it

i might be wrong, correct me if i am, but i read cows produce less methane eating a natural diet through grazing etc than being fed the imported (probably GM) bean/grains these cows are fed

I don't know, but there IS a Welsh company who have discovered that giving garlic to cows reduces methane by 20%....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/wal ... 395202.stm

(I have discovered that it doesn't, however, work on boyfriends).......