In an editorial on 26 April 2011, the New York Times opined:

A supermarket shopper buying hamburger, eggs or milk has every reason, and every right, to wonder how they were produced. The answer, in industrial agriculture, is “behind closed doors,” and that’s how the industry wants to keep it. In at least three states — Iowa, Florida, and Minnesota — legislation is moving ahead that would make undercover investigations in factory farms, especially filming and photography, a crime. The legislation has only one purpose: to hide factory-farming conditions from a public that is beginning to think seriously about animal rights and the way food is produced.

Would people really want to eat CAFO chicken, beef, or pork if they knew it came from animals that are kept in pens so small they can’t move and fed antibiotics constantly to keep them from dying of diseases they give each other from standing in their own feces?

Also, I’m a Farm Bureau members, but this makes me ill:

And they are supported by the big guns of industrial agriculture: Monsanto, the Farm Bureau, the associations that represent pork producers, dairy farmers and cattlemen, as well as poultry, soybean, and corn growers.

Farming used to be something to be proud of, not something to hide.

-jsq