I am Secretary to the District A Farmers Institutes. This represents all the Farmers Institutes on Vancouver Island, The Gulf Islands and Powell River. I am very interested in your background papers and your documentation. I cannot open the links to these in the e-mail I received today. Can you help me with this? This topic is the most crucial piece of the puzzle. We must get the small scale local farm up and running again. All policies of the Canadian and Provincial governments have been pro factory farm (agri-business they call it). These operations must be shown for what they really are. They are a source of cheap food, but the food carries with it so much negative impact our health and the health of the environment.

You can link to the background resources at: http://www.healthandenvironment.org/articles/call_resources/3870.

I also cannot open the files, from the links on the ncifap/org web page, & get an adobe message "the file is damaged and could not be repaired."

I will look into it. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. -Shelby Gonzalez - Administrative Coordinator, Collaborative on Health and the Environment

Have you looked into "Aqua-CAFOs"? Fish, shellfish, etc. farms and problems that might be associated with those?

The NCIFAP PDF downloads are working for me right now - perhaps you could try again. You might also try checking for Adobe updates.

1) I've never heard of small to mid-size farms having any or many of the problems cited by the Pew Report. It is obviously implicit in the title of the Pew report but I don't see a specific recommendation in the report related to recommending certain sizes of farms. It seems to be the elephant in the room, no? How are recommendations to reduce antibiotic use and waste concentration, etc, etc. to be followed if not by reducing the size of farms and increasing their diversity? 2) Is there any discussion of organic food standards requiring explicit amounts of pasture, thereby forcing a reduction of farm size? Part of the problem is that the consumer has a very hard time seeing what they are supporting given the current labeling standards. 3) Lastly, there is a potential or already existing problem of the certifiers (Quality Assurance International being one of the biggest ones) having a conflict of interest in giving big farms a pass who want to produce “organically.” It’s roughly analogous to Arthur Anderson auditing Enron but also having a stake in giving them a good bill of health…. Any comments? Jeff Elder (private citizen)

Thank you for asking the 'Aqua-CAFO' question.

I worry about the push to small, local, farms that have no requirements for minimizing microbial hazards. The public beleives smaller is better and for many of the things mentioned here that is true but with no standards for basic issues like contaminated water, there are risks there too.