Dear Editor:
It is with great interest that I read the two articles published in the News Tribune on the Right to Farm amendment "Opponents & Proposed Right to Farm Amendment not as good as it sounds" (June 20) and "Bumper crop of myths, facts, opinions" (June 22) because I am that small family farmer that Wes Shoemyer, Joe Maxwell and Kevin Stamps say they are trying to protect.
Please guys, your kind of help will put us all out of business.
Let's be honest. The Right to Farm Amendment came into being because of HSUSs involvement in Prop B. If Amendment 1 passes, it will hinder their ability to sue the various livestock industries in the name of animal welfare and it would hinder their use of the initiative petition to convince clueless voters that we do not know how to take care of our animals properly, that our production practices violate their idea of animal welfare.
Prop B may have passed but you who voted for it have no idea what you really did and it would be the same when HSUS comes back into Missouri to attack one of the other livestock industries and they will.
Recently an amendment was passed in Connecticut to outlaw gestation crates in the pork industry. Thing is there are no pork producers in Connecticut. So why would HSUS go to the trouble. It's a test case, a stepping stone to pork producing states.
Defining production practices would be almost impossible in the pork industry. If you took 1,000 pork producers you could very well have a 1,000 different ways to raise pigs. Who's to say any practice is better than the rest - the HSUS? It is their goal to drive pork producers out of business by letting the public do their dirty work.
From the smallest to the largest pork farmers we do what works for us. Many small pork producers, family farms, employ the same practices as the corporate farms do. A law passed to outlaw a certain corporate farm practice could very well put family farmers out of business and the corporate farm would survive.
We are not trying to circumvent the laws that exist. We are trying to avoid being forced out of existence.
As far as opinions go, here is a true opinion. Smithfield sold out to the Chinese because they were tired of dealing with the animal welfare lawsuits and they knew the Chinese would just ignore them. So what all those lawsuits are actually doing is encouraging the sale of farm enterprises to foreigners.
Think before you vote.
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