Mike Rowe – the star of the Discovery Channel's TV show "Dirty Jobs" – has become a powerful advocate for agriculture.

Rowe came to be an advocate for agriculture after he received letters from the Humane Society of the United States, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and others.

When Rowe he helped a farmer near Las Vegas, Nev., gather leftover food from casinos, cooked food and feed the food to hogs PETA wrote that warm food was harming the animals. EPA feared gas escaping from a hose under a truck hood might be toxic, when in fact it was steam.

Mike Rowe

When Rowe worked in a aying hen operation in Buckeye, Ariz., the OSHA wrote him he had come perilously close to endangering the health of workers when he used a skidsteer loader to clean up chicken manure.

Before a visit to a Craig, Colo., sheep ranch to assist with castrating lambs, Rowe asked the Humane Society about the preferred method for the procedure and was told how to use a rubber band to accomplish the task. However, on the ranch he learned the lambs would be in pain for up to two days if the rubber bands were used. The lambs they recovered more quickly after the rancher's method of clipping and extracting the genitals. "I saw with my own eyes that it was a kinder, gentler way to do it for the lamb," he says.

Those experiences got Rowe to thinking: "If these experts and agencies were wrong about what they saw on Dirty Jobs, what else were they wrong about?"

As a result, Rowe created a website, www.mikeroweworks.com, where visitors can learn more about dirty jobs and started a series of specials called "Brown Before Green."

Scrape the dirt off a farmer and you'll find one of the greenest people on the planet, he says.

Sources: American Farm Bureau, Southern Farmer and www.mikerowe.com.