Wyoming Makes Reporting Environmental Disasters Illegal

from the ag-gag-embiggened dept

Techdirt has written several times about so-called "ag-gag" laws, which have the strange effect of making it illegal for members of the public to expose animal abuse on farms. Slate has a fascinating report about how Wyoming is bringing in its own kind of ag-gag law that is so wide in its reach that it could make taking photos in Yellowstone illegal:

photos are a type of data, and the new law makes it a crime to gather data about the condition of the environment across most of the state if you plan to share that data with the state or federal government.

The specificity of that restriction sounds absurd. Why on earth would anyone want to prevent environmental data being gathered? Here's why:

The state wants to conceal the fact that many of its streams are contaminated by E. coli bacteria, strains of which can cause serious health problems, even death.

The reason the state is trying to do that is because the E. coli in question comes from cows, and cows have clout in Wyoming:

Acknowledging that fact could result in rules requiring ranchers who graze their cows on public lands to better manage their herds. The ranching community in Wyoming wields considerable political power and has no interest in such obligations, so the state is trying to stop the flow of information rather than forthrightly address the problem.

The law is framed broadly: it makes it a crime to "preserve information in any form" about "open land" if there is any intention to submit it to a federal or state agency. That means that if you discovered a major environmental disaster in Wyoming, no matter how life-threatening, you had better keep information about it to yourself. As the Slate post points out:

By enacting this law, the Wyoming legislature has expressed its disdain for the freedoms protected by the First Amendment and the environmental protections enshrined in federal statutes. Today, environmentally conscious citizens face a stark choice: They can abandon efforts to protect the lands they love or face potential criminal charges.

Now that's what I call an ag-gag law.

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Filed Under: ag gag, animal rights, cows, environment, free expression, photographs, wyoming, yellowstone

DailyDirt: Eat Less Red Meat. Cows Rejoice!

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Recently, it seems like there are an increasing number of studies supporting the idea that eating too much red meat is bad for our health. Consumption of red meat has been linked to cancer, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cognitive decline, and the list goes on. Here are just a few more studies that will have cows dancing in the pasture.

• Two recent studies in mice and in humans suggest that a high-protein, high-fat diet may shorten our lifespan. Instead, we should probably be eating a high-carbohydrate, low-protein diet (and settle with having more body fat as a result) -- which is the complete opposite of popular diet fads, like the Atkins Diet. [url]
• Phew! Saturated fat and cholesterol may play only a small role in the increased incidence of heart disease in red-meat eaters. However, the bad news is that it turns out that our gut bacteria metabolize the chemical carnitine (which is present in large amounts in red meat and is also added to energy drinks), leading to the production of another chemical called TMAO that enters our blood stream and increases our risk of heart disease. Apparently, TMAO helps cholesterol enter artery walls and prevents the body from getting rid of excess cholesterol. [url]
• A Harvard study found that eating just a single serving of red meat each day could increase a person's risk of death by 13%. While that may not change the minds of die-hard red meat fans who would rather die than give up red meat, it might be worth considering eating alternative (healthier?) protein sources. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: beef, cows, death, diet, food, health, heart disease, lifespan, meat, protein, red meat, vegetarian

Won't Somebody Think Of The Cows? New Zealand On The Brink Of Sacrificing Its Digital Future In TPP Negotiations

from the short-sighted-thinking dept

Even before Wikileaks released the full text of TPP's IP chapter, New Zealand's Creative Freedom Foundation had already been given some hints about what was coming:

Last week the Creative Freedom Foundation participated in a group briefing and Q&A session with David Walker, NZ's Chief Negotiator in the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, and officials Angela Strahl and Yvonne Woutersen.

The meeting made it quite clear that, although the details aren't final, we can expect to lose many remix rights and see a greater 'orphaned works' problem here in New Zealand in exchange for more dairy exports to the U.S. Rather than further protecting artists' rights, this move will prop up a fundamentalist approach to copyright that will drain the pool of works currently accessible to artists who wish to freely build upon them.

…

NZ's Parallel Importing abilities are likely to stay unchanged, as is the ability to set our own limitations and exceptions to our domestic Copyright law. However, it was strongly hinted at that an extension of our Copyright Term is inevitable.

What the country's TPP negotiators are effectively doing here is to surrender key rights that belong to all New Zealanders, for the sake of some minor, and probably temporary, financial gains for a single industry with powerful lobbyists. That's a terrible bargain for the country's future. If these concessions are made, it will not only impoverish artists and the general public, who will suddenly be prevented from using and building on vast swathes of the digital past, it will also make it far harder to set up 21st-century companies that are based on creativity, not cows.

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Filed Under: copyright, cows, fair use, international trade, new zealand, orphan works, remix, tpp, trade

High Tech Cows & Open Source Farm Equipment: Yes, The Economics Of Farming Is Relevant

from the innovation-impacts-lots-of-industries dept

I frequently get asked why I spend so much time talking about the entertainment industry here on Techdirt, and one of the points I make is that I think what's happened to the entertainment industry over the last decade and a half is really a leading indicator of the type of disruptive change that has already started to impact, or will soon be impacting, nearly every industry imaginable. As such, by understanding what's happening and how not to respond, perhaps we can help lots of other industries move more smoothly into the future. So I'm always interested and intrigued by parallels in totally unexpected industries. Just recently, the good folks over at NPR's Planet Money put together a fascinating episode about modern farm economics (and host Adam Davidson also wrote a NY Times piece on the same subject). While it mainly focuses on Claudia, the high-tech cow, it also has some key economic points that will likely sound familiar to regular readers (unfortunately, these key economic points are only in the audio version of the podcast, and were left out of the transcript). Near the beginning, host Adam Davidson lays out his "four clear lessons about how to have a shot at thriving in the current global economy."

1. Stay on top of technological change.
2. Focus. Specialize on the things you can do best.
3. Find some way to buffer yourself against unexpected changes that are definitely coming.
4. Find something that you can sell that your customers are willing to pay a premium for because you've given them something they want which no one else can give them.

All of those sound familiar to one degree or another, but clearly number one and number four are ones that we hit on frequently. They then use the example of Fulper Farms to show how it can work. They talk about the technological change and innovation not just in process, but in the breeding of better cows, which leads to the "bleeding edge high tech cow." They then talk about specialization, where the Fulper's don't do everything that a farmer used to do, but instead focus on raising and milking cows, and rely on other experts to handle the breeding of cows (to get those high tech cows) and even cow nutrition (letting this other person stay up on the latest in cow nutrition science).

To some extent, it's like the differences we've talked about between gatekeepers and enablers. The gatekeepers wanted to be at the center of things and control all aspects of production, distribution, etc. But in a world of enablers there's much more specialization. So, for example, in the music world, musicians can pick and choose from best-of-breed solutions to help create, distribute, promote and monetize their work, rather than just relying on a single provider.

Not much time is spent on the third point, but there's a brief discussion about financial tools to help buffer the swings in the market -- things like grain futures and such, which are really just forms of insurance to protect in a volatile market. I'm a little less interested in this particular point. I think it can be important in some industries but is less of a key point long term.

But the fourth point was what I found the most interesting, and obviously fits most closely with some of the theories and business models I've espoused for years: sell something scarce which people want to buy. But, in a commoditized world such as farming, how is that even possible? Well, we hear the same thing in the music world all the time, where people insist that there's nothing to sell but the music, but then we see lots of folks get creative and do amazingly creative things. And the same thing is clearly happening on the Fulper Farm as well -- thanks in part to the youngest generation, who attended my own alma mater (Go Big Red!), and is applying some of what she learned about being more entrepreneurial back to the farm.

She's trying out a few things to take some special facets of what the farm has available, for which they can charge a premium:

Breanna realized they kept talking about this "problem" they had. They're really close to New York City. Land is really expensive in Northern New Jersey. There's not an agricultural world there, so they have to travel really far to buy ag equipment. There's all these problems being so close to New York City. And she realized, by using her farm as a case study in college, that being so close to the City might be the best way to make money. It might be their secret to being a successful farm. I looked and I couldn't find any farm closer to New York City. I think this is the closest one to Brooklyn... And people in Brooklyn are kind of obsessed with farming....

Breanna has figured out that there's money in that. She's working with a cheese maker who's going to help them make a premium Fulper-branded cheese. You and I, some time soon, can go to our local shop and buy really, really local... this is "the closest cheese to Brooklyn."...

Breanna had this other idea. Did you know that you could send your two daughters for a week to summer camp at Fulper Farms?.... Families pay a few hundred bucks, their kids have an awesome week experiencing agriculture.... You know what's amazing? A few weeks of summer camp that Breanna did as a college project? Brings in almost as much money as a whole year of milking cows.

Hello alternative revenue streams. I'm sure the purists will insist that just like a musician should only sell music, a dairy farmer should only sell dairy products. But a smart business person finds ways to capitalize on real scarcities, and that's exactly what Breanna appears to have done with the Fulper Farms.

The report concludes with another key point that we've definitely seen in the music business as well. Davidson notes that there's a lot more opportunity, and the average farm is now making more money than in the past, but it's a lot more volatile, and lots of the old guard simply don't make the transition well. Once again, this sounds mighty familiar.

It's kind of neat to see the parallels between such different industries when it comes down to the basic economics of progress and technological change.

Along those lines, perhaps there are even more parallels moving into the future. As I was working on this post, Leigh passed along a TED talk from about a year ago by Marcin Jakubowski, who is taking the concepts of the maker culture and the open source ethos and applying it to farming. It seems like an appropriate thing to end this post with, so check it out:

Filed Under: cows, economics, farming, open source, premiums, scarcities
Companies: fulper farms

DailyDirt: Geekier Than Monkeys Typing

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

According to the "Infinite Monkey Theorem," a monkey hitting keys randomly on a keyboard for an infinite amount of time will eventually type out the complete works of Shakespeare. There have even been efforts to put that theorem to the test by creating virtual typing monkeys that managed to recreate at least one of Shakespeare's works. But those monkeys were digital – here are a few examples of some real, geeky animals.

• Cows in the UK outfitted with "smart collars" can notify farmers when they're sick or in heat. The collars use the same kind of 3D sensor that is found in Wii video game controllers to detect movement. [url]
• A monkey in China with two sensor chips implanted in its brain can control a robot hand with its thoughts. The sensors monitor 200 neurons in the monkey's motor cortex, and its brain signals are translated into real-time robotic finger movements. [url]
• Alex, an African grey parrot, had mathematical abilities that were at least as good as those of chimpanzees. He had been trained to count objects, and could add two numbers up to a total sum of eight, or add two sets of objects up to a total sum of six. [url]
• To discover more interesting biological curiosities, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: animals, biology, cows, intelligence, monkeys, parrots, smart animals