Bitch and Complain

An anonymous person claiming to be a pig farmer, presumably from Canada, complained that the fearless leader of SFPFC complains too much about the chicken Supply Management System.  Is he right?

A complaint about our complaining.  Hypocrisy at its best?

The pig farmer's posting on Better Farming was responded to as follows by yours truly:

In response to "Expert for a Guy Who Raises 1 Chicken" http://betterfarming.com/comment/16257#comment-16257

Three years ago, all I knew about chickens was how to spell it, and eat it.  I had to learn the hard way in a very short period of time.  I still have much more to learn.  I am far from being an expert.

Currently, I have 99 layers and 1 meat bird.  I will be ordering meat bird chicks soon to pasture raise between 100 to 300 meat birds this year, depending on how many farm gate customers I can round up.

Your comment of "Raises 1 chicken" seems to be referring to our previous decision to have just 1 meat bird while our OMAFRA Appeal was active.  Is that issue still relevant for some reason?

I agree with you.  It does seem like I'm continuously  complaining about Supply Management Chicken.

Maybe I have cause to complain.

Perhaps I complain so much because I'm advocating for the rights and freedoms stolen from Small Flock Poultry Farmers all across Canada, myself included.

Perhaps it's because CFO, CFC, and most of the other players in Supply Management keep poking Small Flockers with their sharp regulatory stick.

If someone started poking you with a sharp stick, and they wouldn't stop when you asked them nicely, how many pokes would it take before you start complaining?

The sharp stick of the SM Chicken System isn't just poking Small Flockers.  They also poke every Canadian consumer when they reign over a system that charges 50% to 300% more than what other countries pay for chicken.

The SM Chicken Overlords allow and encourage steady increases in chicken prices, even more than what they are allowed under the law (eg. bogus FCR claims), so that chicken affordability dropped 37% between 1995 to 2005 for someone earning Minimum Wage in Ontario.

The SM Chicken Overlords sleep while 30% to 80% of the retail chicken sold in Ontario are contaminated with E.coli, Salmonella, Heidelberg, listeria, campylobacter, or other deadly pathogens.

The SM Overlords count their gold coins while crazy cocktails of drugs and chemicals are fed to some or most CAFO chickens so that those millionaire SM chicken profiteers maximize their profits.

Health Canada reports that 7.6% of Canadian families can't afford the food they need to feed themselves.  In Nunavut, 75% of pre-school chicken don't eat on any particular day because their is no food in the house.  Poor Canadians go "grocery shopping" by searching for food in the municipal garbage dump.  Between 1989 and 2014, Food Bank usage in Canada is up 220%.  Chicken should be the least expensive meat, and more affordable for all.  Yet the SM Chicken Overlords focus their efforts on moving their members from millionaires to billionaires.

By the death grip with which they hold and protect their precious monopoly, the SM Monopolists prevent 430,000 new jobs from being created all across Ontario, and the prosperity those jobs could bring to hundreds of small communities and remote areas.

So maybe you're right.  Maybe I do complain too much. 

If you (or anybody else who would like to do so) will kindly explain why I should stop complaining about any of the issues listed above, and provide reasonable and sufficient arguments that I can easily understand, I am willing to drop that issue from my list of complaints against Canada's SM Chicken Overlords.

Glenn Black
Small Flock Poultry Farmers of Canada

The posting above was submitted to Better Farming.  The majority of that SFPFC response was published by BF here.  It's interesting that BF censored the following parts with their comment "Editor: comment has been modified by editor in accordance with our guidelines.":

The SM Chicken Overlords sleep while 30% to 80% of the retail chicken sold in Ontario are contaminated with E.coli, Salmonella, Heidelberg, listeria, campylobacter, or other deadly pathogens.

The SM Overlords count their gold coins while crazy cocktails of drugs and chemicals are fed to some or most CAFO chickens so that those millionaire SM chicken profiteers maximize their profits.

The pathogen contamination of Ontario chicken is well documented by researchers at University of Guelph, Canadian Food Inspection Agency ("CFIA"), Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC"), and others (see Blog posting Contaminated Chicken and here).

For the drugs, antibiotics, and chemicals that are injected into and/or fed to CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) chickens, and the resulting consequences, see the following Blog postings:

• Choose: Frankenstein Chicken, or Naturally Raised Chicken? 
• Arsenic Poisoning for Profit
• Bugs & Drugs 
• Black Death and the Chicken Mafia 
• Factory Farm Antibiotics 
• Finally! CFC Bans Ceftiofur Injections in Eggs & Chicks 
• Sickening Chicken 
• The Trouble with Antibiotics 
• Antibiotic Disclosure by CFO & CFC
• Superbugs: CAFO-Induced Infections, and a 10-step solution 
• Antimicrobial Voices Lost in the Wilderness

Based on these and many other well documented and researched incidents, it would seem that there is sufficient prima facia evidence to make the allegations that I have made against the CAFO chicken factory operations that operate under Canada's Supply Management System.

It is therefore curious that BF censored these two issues from my posted response to our disappointed pig farmer.  I hope to hear BF's logic and reasons for the censorship.

One response on BF to the pig farmer's complaint about SFPFC suggested that:

"Evil prevails when good men do nothing",

That appears to be a paraphrasing of a quote widely attributed to Plato, who said:

 "The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."

 or the original movie of Leo Tolstoy's book War and Peace, where the narrator said in Russian:

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing"

or Albert Einstein's quote:

"The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it."

or perhaps from Edmond Burke (1729 - 1797)

In the meantime, what is your opinion?  Do we belly ache and complain too much?  Are our issues mere triflings that we need to forget about, get a life, and move on?  Please leave your comments on this important issue.