Today's consumer has changed from just a few years ago and how will that affect food production.

Feeding the World & Gestation Stall Fall Out plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

In an effort to feed everybody, ag scientists and experts are researching whether sustainable agriculture intensification can feed the world. Jerry Glover with USAID explains there’s no silver bullet to achieving sustainable agriculture intensification. 

GLOVER: What we have in mind, and I think there is growing consensus about this, simply introducing a new seed or crop cultivar to a farmer isn’t going to do the trick. The entire farming system needs to be improved in order to support things like improved seed and livestock varieties. And you have to meet quite a range of needs. Including things like the natural resource management, social appropriateness and so on. So we’re way beyond at this point those simple productivity metrics that guided the green revolution.

Wendy’s has now joined McDonalds and other foodservice businesses in requiring U.S. and Canadian pork producers to phase out gestation sow stalls. They are giving suppliers until May to develop and deliver their plans. Wendy’s believes that confining sows in gestation stalls is not sustainable over the long term, and moving away from this practice is the right thing to do. The Compass Group, which operates 10-thousand dining facilities at schools, hospitals, corporate offices and other venues in the United States, and considered to be the largest foodservice company in the world, recently announced it also will eliminate gestation stalls.

Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.

Interesting that Walter Willett, the primary researcher in the latest study linking red meat and premature mortality, admits to the weakness of his own food related research which relied on surveys. Basically, a more accurate study would not rely on the memory recall of study participants. Basing research data on participants recollections of what they consumed months prior to the actual study date is flawed at best. I can barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday, let alone weeks ago. Willet admits that ‘the ideal study would take 100,000 people and randomly assign some to eating several servings of red meat a day and randomize the others to not consume red meat - then follow them for several decades”. But that type of study is impossible due to funding and lack of study participant volunteers. So, if accurate and complete research in the course of a study on consuming red meat is not possible, how can such a conclusion be reached and released to the public? Willett has himself stated that red meat consumption is not the whole picture when comparing mortality rates of the 1950’s and today.

Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.