Your Opinion: Farming protected from HSUS agenda

Dear Editor:

The motto this year among the 4-H and FFA kids in the livestock barns is - "We farm so you can eat." It couldn't be said any better.

The Right to Farm amendment barely passed and I'm sure that because it was an off-election year the number of voters was down. That helped us.

As a farmer it is scary to think that my fate rested in the hands of the voters of St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield and now Columbia, who know nothing of farming except what groups like HSUS tell them and HSUS has an agenda. They want to tell me how I raise my pigs and yes how many I can have, if any.

Phyllis Greenfield still doesn't see what Prop B had to do with the Right to Farm. The common denominator is HSUS. Prop B was HSUS's foothold into Missouri regulation.

To answer her question about dog breeders being disassociated with the rest of agriculture would there have been a Right to Farm bill? The answer is an emphatic yes. Because we have seen what HSUS has done in other states (in California they went after the dog breed industry and came back to attack the dairy industry and destroy the egg industry). We had to make sure that it would not happen to us.

She was misguided and misled into thinking that Prob B was about the glut of poorly bread animals being dumped on society by dog breeders. It's those backyard breeders she referred to who allowed their unspayed females to run freely who keep the shelters full. Now there is a movement sponsored by ASPCA to discourage future dog owners from buying puppies from pet stores or online. Just where do you think those family-raised dog breeders market their dogs, the Internet for sure.

Actually there are shelters for farm animals that bleeding hearts tried to make pets of and got in over their heads.

Agriculture is the number one industry in Missouri and I am glad that most of our legislators realize that.

I don't know when it became the in thing to bite the hand that feeds you but I can assure you that because we farm we will always eat. But will you?

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