I spent 32+ years working for a state department of agriculture in the areas of meat inspection, dairy and animal health. Although I might take minor issue with a couple of JenEllen's points I think, for the most part, she has a good grasp of the issues and has made a very cogent argument for the role of the farmer in our lives.

One fact that hasn't been mentioned in all of this is that, for many years now, the U.S. has had a "cheap food" policy. I haven't kept track since I retired in 1998, but then the average food costs for a U.S. family were slightly less than 16% of income and were falling (in terms of percentage of income). While this is all well and good, it puts the lie to many of the myths we'd like to believe about U.S. farming practices. Although I lament the demise of the "family farm" as much as any the fact is that most family farms cannot effect the efficiencies necessary to produce a product at a low enough cost to fit within the cheap food policy. The profit margin in farming makes it almost impossible for a young person to start a family farm - the cost of the debt incurred to start the farm would probably be too high for a living to be made. Most successful family farms today are those in which the farm has been in the family for several generations thus having no debt load on the land itself. But, as farming couples die childless or children of farm families decide to leave the farm, it's unlikely there will be enough new family farms started to replace them and the trend is ever downward.

Diseases were mentioned above. Fifty years ago, diseases such as brucellosis and tuberculosis - both diseases far more easily transmissible directly from animals and animal products to humans than BSE - were endemic in our livestock. While I recognize that "factory" farming has introduced its own set of disease problems, I'd wager that incidences of both animal diseases and of human diseases caused by ingestion of diseased or tainted animal products are far lower today than ever before.

Ruminant animals (mainly cattle and sheep for purposes of this discussion) are the only animals capable of producing protein from grassland. As such, they are the only meat animals not in direct competition with humans for food. Dairy cows are essentially fed on grass with feed supplements calculated to increase milk production. Beef cattle, for the most part, are grazed for the first part of their lives, then are finished out with grain and supplements geared to meat production. Although we'd be far healthier eating beef from cattle that had spent their life grazing, the average U.S. citizen much prefers the marbled fat in the meat of grain-fed cattle.

I guess the point I'd like to make with all of this is that, to a great extent, it's our desires as a consuming public that bring about many of the ills about which we love to raise such a fuss. As JenEllen mentioned above, few of us would probably be able to afford meat or, for that matter, many other products, if the true environmental and/or social costs were added to their price. We can ask why the meat from downers is not held pending laboratory tests, but to do so would add to the cost of meat in general and would probably not make our meat supply enough safer to justify the added cost. For the most part, it's a policy which causes no problems but occasionally it comes back to haunt us - and it has.