Day 291 - 31 Oct 96 - Page 26
1 McDonald's. At that time McDonald's had 175 suppliers.
2
3 This is really the environment section, although it does
4 relate to the artificial farming methods used. On his own
5 farm, he said that: "With the chemicals we had used, we had
6 eliminated most of the birds in drifts; from the herbicides
7 we were using, killed most of the trees, the tilth of the
8 soil had changed from a living soil to soil that appeared
9 like asbestos."
10
11 He said that those practices were unusual prior to the
12 1960s but they became more and more usual as we went along,
13 and they were the standard of the industry and they are the
14 standard of the industry today. That was on page 4.
15
16 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Which day is this?
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18 MS. STEEL: This is day 233.
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20 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
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22 MS. STEEL: On page 16, giving evidence about pollution, there
23 is actually a word wrong in the transcript. It should be
24 "factory farm" and it says "factory fit". That is on page
25 16, line 39. He said: "The thing that happens in the
26 factory farm operations today is that there is so much
27 contamination from faeces and run-off that it is almost
28 impossible to contain it in the lot. It does run off; and
29 in the US today, the government will admit that the number
30 one contaminant of our water today is coming from
31 agriculture. It is the pressure that is put on farmers.
32 The only control they have is, basically, to do more
33 production. They do not control their market; they do not
34 control what they are paying for the product; and so the
35 only thing they can do is to produce more units. That is
36 providing a tremendous problem as far as the environment
37 and our water system." And he said that it basically makes
38 the water non-usable by humans.
39
40 We heard other witnesses refer to the environmental effects
41 of modern farming methods, including Dr. Pattison and Dr.
42 Long. He referred on page 9 of the transcript to the use
43 of pesticides and said: "We used herbicides and pesticides
44 on all of the crops that we used for feed for our
45 livestock." He said at the bottom of page 8 -- I am sorry,
46 I did this in the wrong order -- that at the time when the
47 farm was in operation they were buying hundreds of
48 thousands of dollars' worth of herbicides, pesticides,
49 hormones and medication. The herbicides that we were
50 buying were ones that were used on the crops such as 24D,
51 25D, Emrin, and he gave other examples, and he said: "Many
52 of those have now been banned. At that time, they were
53 approved. So far as the pesticides we were using, we were
54 using things like Lindane, which today have also been
55 banned for use."
56
57 I mean, some of this is relevant to the environment
58 section, but it is also relevant to the part about the
59 pesticides and hormones in the food as well. I am just
60 dealing with it because obviously, having read through
