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market-farming - RE: [Market-farming] Agroterrorism

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  • From: "Rick Williams" <mrfarm AT frontiernet.net>
  • To: <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [Market-farming] Agroterrorism
  • Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2003 12:45:32 -0600

Del Williams wrote:
> I was talking about corn and soybean fields. From where I sit in
> this flat
> landscape, I can't see a single fence around those fields.

The trend even in our area (primarily dairy) is to do away with fences and
go to confinement. In fact, terrorism would cause farmers to lean toward
confinment as a protection. No different than what happened to the sheep
graziers in northern MN who are attacked by wolves on a regular basis:(

Fencing is a pain to do and maintain, especially the older barbed wire
fences.

> With all the GMO's grown around here... how come I haven't heard of any of
> this sort of sabotage in this area. Wouldn't it be a prime target?

Its too big of an area. An attempt to sabotage an entire conventional field
is close to impossible. Hundreds or thousands of acres to deal with. Even if
you could get some kind of sprayer or mower or other destructive machinery,
it would take days to do the damage to a big area. And you would be caught.
And very likely killed.

What the terrorists are going to go after is something that can be done
quickly, such as cutting fences and letting livestock loose. In the case of
fur farmers, once that is done, the farmer's lifetime of genetics is
destroyed. So even if you catch the bewildered animals who are not run over
or die in the wild and do return some of them to the farm, you are not able
to ID the individuals.

With dairy and other food production farms, the biggest concern is
contamination of the produced product. Only takes a few seconds to destroy a
bulk tank of milk.

With GMO's, the main attack is to destroy greenhouses or small test plots
which are physically possible to do with a few criminals active for just a
short time.

These are crazed and evil people who have a religious belief that what they
are doing is righteous.

Sincerely,

Rick Williams





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