Minnesota Farmers Union

(March 4, 2011) - In June of 2010, the US Food and Drug Administration, Center for Veterinary Medicine, issued draft guidance #209 on “The Judicious Use of Medically Important Antimicrobial Drugs in Food-Producing Animals” According to the FDA, the “draft guidance is intended to inform the public of FDA’s current thinking on the use of medically important antimicrobial drugs in food-producing animals” and was “distributed for comment purposes only.”

While the term antimicrobial can be used in a generic sense to refer to “broadly to drugs with activity against a variety of microorganisms including bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites,” in the FDA draft guidance #209, the word antimicrobial is used in a more restricted sense referring only to drugs that are antibiotic or antibacterial.

According to the FDA, “Antimicrobial resistance, and the resulting failure of antimicrobial therapies in humans, is a mounting public health problem of global significance. This phenomenon is driven by many factors including the use of antimicrobial drugs in both humans and animals.

(December 5, 2010) - As Christmas approaches, some seasonal elves will shop, some will bake, some will string a couple of megawatts of colorful lights from the front porch to the barn.

I hope to avoid most of this season-pushing by burrowing into my den of paper to wait the out all this buying, baking and beautifying. Three weeks from now I plan to emerge from my reading with some of my energy, humor and wallet intact.

Initially, however, this season’s reading seems more for Halloween than Christmas.

For example, the week after Thanksgiving, DTN livestock analyst John Harrington filed a well-written, clever analysis of how Big Meat is now squeezing the stuffing out hog producers.

According to U.S. Department of Agriculture data on the October pork trade, writes Harrington, “Processors commanded 16.3 percent of the retail dollar last month, a piece of pie 10 percent larger than 2009 and 11 percent greater than the three-year average.”

Wasn’t it Pythagoras who postulated that if someone is gonna’ take a bigger share of the pie, somebody else is gonna’ get less pie?

“Last month’s farm share of retail spending dropped to 27 percent,” explains the Nebraska-based analyst-writer, “down sharply from the spring high of 36 percent.”

(July 31, 2009) - The July 21, 2009 romaine lettuce recall by Tanimura & Antle puts another exclamation point on the issue of food safety. The lettuce was being recalled because of a positive result for Salmonella on a random test conducted by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture. As of Sunday, July 26, 2009, the recall had not been posted on the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) "2009 Recalls, Market Withdrawals, & Safety Alerts" website even though Tanimura & Antle posted it on their site on July 21.

When President Obama established the Food Safety Working Group in the White House, he said, "We are a nation built on the strength of individual initiative. But there are certain things that we can't do on our own. There are certain things that only a government can do. And one of those things is ensuring that the foods we eat...are safe and don't cause us harm."

(February 11, 2009) - One of the weekly features broadcast by a local Knoxville, TN television station announces the names of the restaurants that achieved the highest scores on recent health department inspections, They also announce the names, scores, and reasons for those scores of the restaurants that were given the lowest scores by the health department. In addition, the law requires that all restaurants post the latest inspection reports in plain view of the eating public.

While our health department and others around the country have a system in place that makes the results of their inspections of restaurants that serve 100s of people available to the public, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has no such system in place for firms that serve hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

When the Georgia Agriculture Department, under contract from the FDA, found serious sanitation problems on one of their inspections of the Peanut Corporation of America facility-the one later found to be responsible for the recent Salmonella outbreak-the plant was not shut down and required to correct the deficiencies. In addition, no word went out to the purchasers of the product from that plant.