Riding Herd Saying things that need to be said. January 15, 2023 • www.aaalivestock.com
Volume 65 • No. 1
The BIG Giveaway LEE PITTS
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don’t know about you but I’m getting sick and tired of all these billionaires like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and the Google guys telling us that everyone needs to start replacing the real meat in our diets with lab and plant based so-called “meat.” So just out of curiosity, I Googled the words ‘billionaire vegetarians’ and guess what one name popped up? Not Gates, not Bezos (founder of Amazon) not the Google Guys but Sam Bankman-Fried. Yes, that guy, the one who has stolen billions of crypto dollars through his FTX exchange, donated 40 million of that money to the Democrats in the last election, and became a media darling despite his scraggly appearance, because he told everyone he was going to give all his money away. Well, he kinda did. In fact, investigators are having a hard time finding all the money he stole. We’re guessing Sam won’t be anywhere near a billionaire by the time the feds get through with him and he may just happen to take home the prize as the biggest fraudster in American history. Sam makes Bernie Madoff, the mastermind of the previous largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history, look like a penny poker player. But Sam says he’s a vegetarian so all is forgiven. But where are all the other billionaire vegetarians who are trying to dictate our diet? Could it be that they have other reasons in telling us all not to eat beef besides cattle’s alleged emissions? It turns out they have billions and billions of other reasons.
The Money Behind The “Meat”
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
Let’s start with Microsoft
co-founder Bill Gates, shall we? Gates released a book in February 2021 called “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need” in which he sang the praises of genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) and said one of the most im-
Gates sees a bright future in farming because we’re going to need a lot of plants to produce what are now being called “alt-proteins,” but you know them as fake meat. (“Alt” being shorthand for alternative.) Gates has fallen all the way down to number three on
Don’t get mad at somebody who knows more than you do. It ain’t their fault. portant actions we could take to prevent a climate disaster is to stop eating meat and start eating plant-based fake meat instead. By my count since 1995 Gates has been named the richest man in America for 19 years. When Bill is not talking with his buddy Anthony Fauci about how to cure COVID, Gates has been buying up 242,000 acres of farmland in 19 states in the U.S. alone to become the largest private owner of farmland in the United States.
Forbes latest list of the richest people in America, after Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and he might have done better had he not been investing in several kooky companies that produce fake meat. One example is Impossible Foods, a company that develops plant-based substitutes for meat. A chunk of the $396 million Patrick Brown collected to start his business came from Gates from 2014 to 2017. In August 2017, Gates kicked in many more millions in addition-
EPA Finalizes New WOTUS Rule SOURCE: NORTHERN AG NETWORK FROM DTN
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PA’s final waters of the U.S. rule released on Friday keeps a controversial “significant-nexus” test in place when determining jurisdictional waters and codifies for the first time a number of long-standing agriculture exemptions to the Clean Water Act. The new rule proposed in November 2021, essentially reverts to pre-2015 WOTUS definitions with a number of tweaks. The final rule includes eight CWA exclusions as part of the text. Most notably, prior-converted croplands are exempt, and EPA adopted USDA’s definition. The EPA said wetlands converted to croplands prior to Dec. 23, 1985, are excluded from regulation. The remaining seven exclusions written in the new rule include waste treatment systems, ditches, artificially irrigated areas, artificial lakes or ponds, artificial reflecting pools, or swimming pools, water-filled depressions and swales and erosional features. The most controversial aspect of the final rule is the use of the significant-nexus standard to make determinations. During the 2015 WOTUS rulemaking, agriculture groups and others made clear their opposition to the standard because, as they continued on page 4
al financing. One wonders if the company would even exist without Gates’ money. Gates didn’t get so rich by being a dummy and when he sings the praises of plant-based meat he’s merely protecting his investment. Gates’ financial interest in fake meat doesn’t end with Impossible. In 2017 Gates was knocked off the top of the money mountain by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. At the time Bezos had an estimated net worth of $90.6 billion compared to Gates’s net worth of $89.9. (In the latest listing, Forbes says Bezos is worth 151 billion and Gates 106 billion.) The one thing you can say about either man is they both have a carbon footprint the size of Montana. Lately Bezos has been heard echoing Gates’ remarks that going green means the world ought to turn to vegetarianism. Besides making a $10 billion dollar investment in non-profits to fight climate change, Bezos bought the health food grocer Whole Foods in 2017. From all his pontificating about the evils of meat one would think Bezos would be a vegetarian. After all, he’s urging you to make the switch. But Bezos still eats the
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Study Examines Costco Poultry Impacts on Nebraska Waterways BY TOM JOHNSTON / MEATINGPLACE.COM
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recently completed study has set the groundwork for continuous examination of how Costco’s Lincoln Premium Poultry (LPP) complex could be affecting waterways in the Fremont, Nebraska, area, and the company disputes its findings. Commissioned by the Nebraska Farmers Union Foundation (NFUF) and conducted by geologist Matt Sutton, the three-year study suggests increased nutrients and pathogens in area waters “may be attributed to the Costco project,” Sutton writes in his executive summary. Costco opened the $400 million, 400,000-square-foot LPP plant in 2019, after a four-year development process that included having to build from scratch a massive grower network of hundreds of broiler farms in a beef-dominant state. Among the concerns of area residents and organizations that fought the project over that period, including NFUF and study collaboracontinued on page 4
by LEE PITTS
Unhappy Hour If you’re a country music fan, like me, you’ve no doubt heard the song, “Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off.” Well, my wife doesn’t like tequila but white wine does make our VISA card run hot. You know how wives are always complaining that their husbands never take them anywhere? Well, for the 40 years I was a road agent I took my wife places even she didn’t want to go, like the cocktail parties I drug her kicking and screaming to the night before big cattle auctions. “Do we really have to go?” she’d plead. “Yes, it’s part of my job and if I didn’t show up it would hurt the host’s feelings who just spent $3,000 advertising his production sale with me.” Usually, these events were harmless but I also took her to happy hours the night before big cattlemen’s conventions that were usually sponsored by a big drug company and featured a no-host bar. I usually found these events to be a big bore because alcohol hasn’t touched my lips for over 30 years and my wife has never been a big drinker either, although she’d have a glass of white wine or two. Such events were also harmless unless they also featured a silent auction. WARNING! DANGER! The combination of alcohol, an angry wife and a silent auction can put you in the poorhouse! I blame the problem on purebred cattle breeders. If you’ve ever taken the time to notice at cocktail parties the men are usually hovering around a purebred breeder who is talking about what bulls a rancher should breed his cows to. (His of course.) I found such discussions stimulating because I learned a lot about what bulls were hot and which ones were not and because I found the subject of animal breeding very interesting. The problem arises because wives would rather have their fingernails ripped off than listen to men talk about EPD’s, sire summaries and DNA. My wife is a really quiet person and she’s the best listener I’ve ever met but even her eyes start to glaze over and roll to the back of her head after listening to ten minutes of EPD numbers. I realize this and so I try to turn the subject around to something the wives would be interested in, but I have
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