The Patriots

by Nick Hodge 

Lamar Carter is a cattle farmer. He feeds his cows shit. He's cited in a report as buying 745 tons of chicken scat and stacking it 12 feet high on his farm. After it sits for seven to 10 days, it's mixed with a small amount of soy bran... and fed to his hundreds of cows. He's quoted as saying: “My cows are fat as butterballs. If I didn't have chicken litter, I'd have to sell half my herd. Other feed's too expensive.”

Is it any surprise 80 million Americans contract a foodborne illness annually (over a quarter of the population), 9,000 of them meeting their maker because of it? Have you noticed there were no warnings for eating undercooked meat or eggs 20 years ago?

But like drugs, where does the regulator's hammer come down? Surely not on the Hormels, Cargills, Tysons, and Perdues who are so profit-hungry they feed the animals you eat feces... but on the small mom-and-pop farmers trying to make it on their own selling all-natural beef, chicken, and vegetables. In many states, it's illegal to sell raw milk. In others, small farms have been raided at gunpoint. (By whom? By those lovely militarized police we talked about earlier.)