Yeah, but think about how much lower the profit margin on pork would be if the farm owners actually had to clean the shit out of the animal holding areas. Clearly a few cents on every pig carcass is worth killing a few thousand people every couple years, right? "Organic" is just too expensive, and we can just pump the pigs full of drugs anyway.
The problem with the flu virus situation is not the fact that the pigs are fed drugs (that's a different ballgame..) but instead that they are kept housed so closely together that diseases can spread really fast. In the same way that you are more likely to catch a cold if you are sitting in a subway car full of infected people, versus standing in a field.
Whether pigs are raised organically or not doesn't matter at all – the virus can still take hold easily.
What's important is whether you raise the animals free range or factory-style (or in between..), and that sick animals are monitored and isolated ASAP.
The less animals to get infected, the less mutations there will be.
A related problem with CAFOs is that the conditions weaken animals' immune systems such that the animals have to be given prophylactic antibiotics, otherwise they'd all get sick just from the sort of common pathogens that are always around.
I'm not yet convinced organic is more expensive. I mean clearly all the products currently on the market are.
But that's because they're from small production or the very few that aren't can still get away with charging that much, so they'll charge that much.
But I think the large scale ago biz sort of backed into industrialized farming. When pesticides were still new and everything was susceptible to them, they worked like magic.
But over time, pests have become resistant, soils have started to form hard pan, affluent consumers are turning away.
What would happen if you practiced organic farming on a grand scale? Would it still be much more expensive or just marginally more expensive?
On the other hand, I would think that one of the reasons that modern organic products are so inexpensive is because of easy substitution with plentiful, non-organic alternatives. If food production were to become all-organic, I would think the resulting shrinking supply would make food much more expensive.
I'm not an expert, but I would estimate that there's at least one order of magnitude difference in yield per acre between the much maligned "factory farming" and less dense production methods. If there is only one order of magnitude, that's the difference between almost everyone being able to afford meat, and almost nobody.
The grandparent commenter fails to address possible reasonable objections to his strident opinion. I'm assuming it's easier to heap sarcasm upon an already disfavored group - big corporations - and reap the resulting karma.
That's what I used to think but then I read a study, and now I can't track it down, about apple farms in England. The conclusion was that when you do organic right you end up with just marginally higher costs and the same yields.
I think doing organic right involved extensive soil preparation and complex natural pest control, and using the same high yield apple varieties. But that was just one study, about apples in England, and I can't even track it down now.
Actually, a lot of organic produce comes from large farms, run by big companies. Because they saw profit in it, so moved into the market.
The problem is that fruits and vegetables are smaller, they get affected by pests and diseases more frequently, decreasing yields. They take up more time and more space in fields.
This means that the price has to be jacked up, unfortunately.
</very bitter sarcasm>