BIG FARMS MAKE BIG FLU

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Thank you all for your support. To you and yours a wonderful new year!

"What makes Wallace’s book a must-read for those concerned with emerging infectious diseases, and many other issues emerging from modern food systems, is the breadth of interrelated themes and the richness and thought-provoking nature of the assemblage. Readers will put down this book thinking of emerging infectious diseases in a different light; cognisant of their multiple and intertwined root causes in the context of our rapidly changing agro-ecological environment."

Big Poultry is doing its very worst trying to stick wild waterfowl for the outbreaks of all those new H5Nx influenzas: H5N1, H5N2, H5N3, H5N6, H5N8, and H5N9. But science the industry didn't buy--which like winter in an age of climate change is taking on a melancholic beauty--is showing by disparate analyses that the new flus are adapting to industrial production. My latest post.

"Everything–if you dare to read Rob Wallace’s new book on infectious disease and agribusiness, Big Farms Make Big Flu...The emergence and evolution of influenza is clearly intertwined with neoliberal economic practices that put surplus value over use value. After reading Wallace’s book, one cannot be surprised any longer... Big Farms Make Big Flu is one crucial step forward in disclosing what is happening in the factories that used to be our barns and deserves a wide readership from all backgrounds."

"Policies aimed at re-engineering local economics for the benefit of multinationals have had a drastic impact on landscapes and ecosystems, and thus upon the fortunes of infectious disease. As epidemiological history attests, context is more than just a stage upon which pathogens and immunity clash. The regional agro-economic impacts of global neoliberalism can be felt across the levels of biocultural organization, down as far as the virion and molecule...A growing public- and animal-health literature suggests that current patterns of agro-economic exploitation raise the risk of a new pandemic...Ecosystems in which ‘wild’ viruses are controlled by the rough-and-tumble of environmental stochasticity are being drastically streamlined by deforestation and plantation monoculture. Pathogen spillovers that once died out relatively quickly are now discovering chains of vulnerability, creating outbreaks of greater extent, duration and momentum."

"Turkeys are to Minnesota what water is to Los Angeles. Any disruption in its model of development and the bodies to be paid for are more than in poultry. More than merely a united face, one caught the whiff here of government, academia, and industry in the business of defending the indefensible together whatever the facts. The room was heady with a mix of the corruption and the fear of those who knew better. Many a bright mind talking about an outbreak without talking about it."

My new piece on the revolutionary biology of Christopher Caudwell is now available in full for free at the Monthly Review website.   Caudwell's thinking eighty years ago has much to offer twenty-first century biology.

Australia tour 2016. I spoke at the University of Sydney as part of the Human Animal Research Network seminar series. I gave a short tour of capitalist animal production, the pathogens it industrializes, and alternate agricultures.

Australia tour 2016. Some stops in Melbourne.

Australia tour 2016. I gave the keynote at the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance annual unconference. Australia is as much on the neoliberal cutting edge as the U.S., save, much for the better, it can’t quite operate at the latter’s scale. And while the food sector is undergoing consolidation--they’re down to two supermarket chains--the meat commodity lines aren’t totally vertically integrated. Still there’s a lot of nasty stuff going on, including hard-ass regulation of smallholder operations. AFSA has established a legal defense fund for wrongly charged farmers, funded in part by illicit #youcantbuywhatieat potlucks around the country. Illegal? Yummy! But you can’t buy it until government priorities are realigned in real food’s favor. The unconference itself was simultaneously a relaxed and serious exploration of multiple issues in food production--from how to bring good food to the poorest, making restaurants regenerative-farm-friendly, integrating the aboriginal struggle into food sovereignty, and fostering ecosystem services at the regional food landscape level.

Australia tour 2016. On Jonai Farms outside of Melbourne. Jonai raises pastured rare-breed pigs and cattle on 69 acres, with 80% paddock coverage.

“The origin of the black cat symbol is unclear, but according to one story it came from an IWW strike that was going badly. Several members had been beaten up and were put in a hospital. At that time a skinny, black cat walked into the striker's camp. The cat was fed by the striking workers and as the cat regained its health the strike took a turn for the better. Eventually the striking workers got some of their demands and they adopted the cat as their mascot.”

Beers with farmer George Naylor, who Michael Pollan made famous in Omnivore's Dilemma. We had a spirited debate over whether subsidies could be used to promote alternate agricultures in the face of free trade, finally agreeing the world is fucked up and shit.

Grant Wood, the painter of American Gothic, spearheaded a mural project at Iowa State. As the university's own website frames it: "Wood's farmscapes of this period depict a 'streamlined rural paradise' devoid of sweating hands, market risks, foreclosed mortgages, and the effects of bad weather, crop pests and disease." Just upstairs a corrective mural painted in 1998 not only updates Wood's notion of production but also includes, wow, women and black people.

Carver was buried at the Tuskegee Institute, where he taught for decades, next to Booker T. Washington, with whom he fought for years over the administration of the school's Agriculture Department.

In Big Farms I write of Iowa diary farmer Francis Thicke's 2010 run for Secretary of Agriculture. Other Iowan cameos include H5N2, Hy-Line, the Summit Agricultural Group, Austin DeCoster, and the state’s inability to feed itself.