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The fog of disinformation keeps winning against the truth about food and real ecology.

R. P. 'Doc' Cooke, Blogger

January 14, 2020

2 Min Read
older food pyramids from USDA
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I’ve been around long enough and stayed active and engaged enough to have made more than my share of bad decisions. Some should be considered foolish. Many were likely hormonal and others were likely due to bad teaching. I now believe my lack of nutritional knowledge had a lot of input, too.

Presently there is some much improved understanding concerning health and the entirety of the soil-plant-animal complex. But the fog of disinformation and the lack interest in truth about health keeps a near impermeable wall blocking this knowledge from the masses, and from any chance of real success for a healthy America. There is also a good part of this country’s annual gross national product locked into the present-day system of bad food and health care.

The EAT-Lancet Commission report recommendations in January 2019 were a really good example of illegitimate science. Walt Davis has said that teaching stupid should be against the law. I whole-heartedly agree with Walt and will add that legislating stupidity should be criminal.

Recently I heard both President Trump and his son, Don Jr., make the statement that the present mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, is the dumbest and worst mayor in the United States. One of his recent decisions proves to me that the Trumps knew what they were talking about.

In April 2019, the ide Blasio announced that he was going to cut schools, hospitals, prisons, and other city facilities in the nation’s largest city by way of limiting red meat purchases and usage by 50%. He said this would save $14 billion annually. The mayor also says that this will reduce the carbon footprint of cattle. By these actions I seriously doubt he knows anything about carbon or ruminant or human nutrition. It’s also obvious his advisors are really short on learning and knowledge. In fact, these fools are dangerous!

In fact, the entire narrative has been pretty well disproven by the good research at Michigan State University and the study of Will Harris’s pastures in Georgia, to name two recent ones.

It would be best if people would wake up and boot these political hacks to the roadside with a sack and a real job of picking up empty bottles and cans.

Further, I have read seemingly valid estimates that termites and New York City garbage produce more greenhouse gas than all the cattle on the East Coast. Put simply, cattle grow the grass that clears the air.

The opinions of this writer are not necessarily those of Farm Progress/Informa.

About the Author(s)

R. P. 'Doc' Cooke

Blogger

R. P. "Doc" Cooke, DVM, is a mostly retired veterinarian from Sparta, Tennessee. Doc has been in the cattle business since the late 1970s and figures he's driven 800,000 miles, mostly at night, while practicing food animal medicine and surgery in five counties in the Upper Cumberland area of middle Tennessee. He says all those miles schooled him well in "man-made mistakes" and that his age and experiences have allowed him to be mentored by the area’s most fruitful and unfruitful "old timers." Doc believes these relationships provided him unfair advantages in thought and the opportunity to steal others’ ideas and tweak them to fit his operations. Today most of his veterinary work is telephone consultation with graziers in five or six states. He also writes and hosts ranching schools. He is a big believer in having fun while ranching but is serious about business and other producers’ questions. Doc’s operation, 499 Cattle Company, now has an annual stocking rate of about 500 pounds beef per acre of pasture and he grazes 12 months each year with no hay or farm equipment and less than two pounds of daily supplement. You can reach him by cell phone at (931) 256-0928 or at [email protected].

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