Anti-Agribusiness

For an interesting attack on agribusiness, read this.
I found this bit interesting:

When we were growing up, beef was, for the most part, grass fed and local. Family farmers took their sale cattle to either the auction barn or the stockyards, and there were a few in every county. The local stockyard then delivered the livestock to a larger facility in the closest city - St. Joseph and Kansas City, Missouri were cowtowns with bustling stockyards and as a child I climbed the pens in both. As a teenager, my best friend was the daughter of the local stockyard owner, and we frequently hitched rides with her brother who drove the semi to the stockyards in KC. (That's how small-town cheerleaders scored weed without ruining their reputations - to the three members of my high school graduating class of 18 who read this blog, now you know our secret.) Some farmers sold all of their beef to a specific butcher for a niche market. My maternal grandparents were kosher farmers and my Great Uncle was a kosher butcher.

The author covers lots of bases, many of which I disagree with. I'll only cite one point on health: there probably are no statistics available, but my sense is that a concentrated food industry makes screwups more serious and much more visible, but it may still be safer than a decentralized food industry of the past. My comparison would be to the aviation industry--one mistake can kill hundreds of people on a big plane and make headlines all around the world. But the reality seems to be that general aviation, the small planes, are much more likely to have fatal accidents and much more dangerous.